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Whenever someone looks around the Colorado economy for a bright spot that might be made even brighter, the inevitable prescription is to increase tourism.
Common wisdom has it that tourism uses existing resources, doesn't pollute, and contributes mightily to the financial well-being of Colorado residents; the only thing wrong with tourism is that we don't have enough of it, a problem that can be solved by spending more on promotion.
The facts lead to a different conclusion. The Colorado tourist industry recently boasted of an annual payroll of $1 billion, going to 104,000 people who presumably wouldn't have jobs otherwise. This means that the average annual gross income of someone employed in the tourist industry is all of $9,615.38, which comes to about $185 a week.
That's $10 a week less than you can draw on unemployment. If I represented an industry that paid that kind of wages, I wouldn't be bragging about its contributions to the economy. Nor would I claim that tourism offered great opportunities to Coloradans in depressed mountain towns. Making beds and frying hamburgers at a minimal wage is a dead end, not a career with a future.
Tourist towns might be pleasant places to visit, but they're awful places to work.
The men on the kill floor at Monfort's packing plant derive their living from cows, but they aren't told that they ought to love cattle. Nor are miners encouraged to develop an affection for rocks. But when I worked in a resort town, I was often told that my living came from tourists, and I must learn to love them.
But how? Here were herds of people who spent more in a day than I earned in a week. They knew they were superior creatures, and treated every employee in town like an indentured servant. I quickly learned why the French, or any other people who have an iota of personal pride or dignity, despise American tourists.
Further, every time I or anyone I worked with craved some luxury like food or shelter, we had to compete for it -- not against other working folks with $185 a week to spend, but against pleasuure-seekers dumping thousands of dollars for their fortnight of Colorado experience.
Just what sort of experience were they getting? The authentic aspects of mountain life -- shacks, woodpiles, mine dumps, dogfights in the street -- are anathema to the tourist industry, which always displaces the traditional cheap lifestyle with a sanitized expensive culture where only appearances matter.
The result is like living in Disneyland, instead of where people actually live. It's like having company in your house all the time, so that you're never comfortable and you're always on your best behavior. No resident ever gets to relax without leaving town or enlisting the illegal aid of controlled substances.
If you don't believe me, check the mental health statistics for workers in resort communities. They're full of sick people, driven to addiction and madness. Promoting more tourism means more underpaid crazy Colorado residents, governed by a legislature that will spend money to create their problems not to solve their problems. It's a shabby way for a state to treat its own citizens.
As for the myth that tourism has no adverse environmental effects, why are so many tourist towns busy enacting laws to control air pollution? Certainly the views along Highway 91 from Climax to Wheeler Junction are marred by tailings from the mining industry, but that route is serene and beautiful in comparison to the degradation caused by the tourist industry. To see what I mean, just continue for a few miles and try Highway 9 from Frisco to Breckenridge.
But there are garish strips of fast-food franchises everywhere; they're hardly unique to Colorado. We used to have uncrowded mountains where you could wander around. You could even drink the water from creeks. But the more tourists we attract, the less we have to offer them that they couldn't find at home, and the more Colorado looks like everyplace else.
It's a self-defeating spiral, and I haven't seen any answers from the promoters of tourism. Instead, they're saying we should all be happy to see more of those $185-a-week jobs and $800-a-month apartments.
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