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Climax Molybdenum shut down again this week. The huge mine goes into hibernation so often these days that the latest lay-off announcement came as no more of a surprise than the official confirmation by the Tower Commission that there are a lot of inept, sleazy people on the White House payroll. You don't like that sort of news, but you get used to it.
The recent travails of Climax and the affected communities may not be surprising, but these events may prove instructive to those who have big plans for Denver.
Ten years ago, Climax was running around the clock and hiring 100 men a week. The only thing anybody worried about was 40 years away, when the known ore reserves would be exhausted. Even so, molybdenum production would continue in Colorado, because Climax had just opened the huge Henderson Project in Grand and Clear Creek counties, and development was starting at Mt. Emmons, near Crested Butte.
All anybody could see was years of prosperity because world demand for molybdenum had been increasing steadily and Climax controlled the market. So communities made plans to handle this assured growth.
I was among those making such plans. The Henderson Mill lies in the West Grand school district, whose seat is Kremmling, where I published the weekly newspaper. Climax paid 80 percent of the property taxes in the school district, and when there was talk of building a superb new high school, I wrote strong and favorable editorials.
I sure couldn't see any reason to be concerned that Climax wouldn't keep paying most of the bill; the company had $500 million invested in the Henderson Project, and multinational corporations simply don't make that kind of mistake. There was also that Club of Rome report that the world was running out of everything, especially minerals; thus demand and prices would rise, insuring prosperity for producers.
But the world doesn't run according to projections, no matter how well-founded those projections appear to be. I'm not an economist, so I can't say just where those predictions of continued demand and rising prices went wrong.
But I do know that a lot of places are hurting because they acted on the reasonable assumption that the future had to bring growth.
People in Kremmling are paying for a lot more of their new high school than they planned on paying. Cañon City started on a new junior high with assurances that a uranium-mining company would pay a substantial share; nobody wants to buy uranium these days, though, and Cyprus Minerals' mammoth Hansen Project evaporated. Hayden put in a new water system for a coal boom that was supposed to continue through this century. There's the bust in the oil-shale belt that left permanent residents holding some expensive bags.
Now we see projections that Stapleton International Airport will go from 13 million annual passengers to over 20 million, and it's already such a maze of confusion and congestion that if cattle were treated the way passengers are treated, the Humane Society would launch an immediate investigation.
So the logical course is to build an expensive new airport. But suppose people quit flying so much. It sounds unthinkable, but ten years ago, so did the idea that Climax would ever shut down until it ran out of ore. For instance, improved communications technology might reduce the need for corporate travel, which accounts for most passengers.
There are also projections that the metropolitan area will run out of water in a couple decades unless Two Forks Reservoir is built. But Denverites use more water per capita than the national average; conservation might reduce demand, especially if water were realistically priced. And one estimate showed that the metropolitan area lost 30,000 residents last year, a statistic that certainly doesn't predict the need for an enhanced water supply.
Such facilities aren't built to benefit the people that live here now, who already have an airport and water. These enterprises are for people who are projected to arrive, and we should know just how accurate such projections can be.
One prediction is safe, though. Growth or no growth, you know who will get to pay off the bonds.
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