< PREVIOUS ] [ 1993 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
What do you want to do? Give Bill Hornby
apoplexy?
So responded a friend back in 1991 when I told him I was
starting a big project for High Country News; I called the
project Is Denver necessary?
Bill did not succumb when I put the question before him; he is, in fact, a good opponent in such an argument because he's informed and tenacious, yet graceful.
Last week, High Country News published the distillation of that discussion and many others, and there's supposed to be a condensation elsewhere in today's Perspective.
(Shameless Promotion Dept.: the full article is $2.50 postpaid from HCN, P.O. Box 1090, Paonia, Colo. 81428. Weather and car permitting, I'll be on Michael Rosen's KOA talk show at 10 a.m. Tuesday. And while we're in parentheses, happy Mother's Day, Mom.)
Thus I've had my say about urban-hinterland relationships in the Mountain West, and I want to hear what others have to say. While figuring out what to say, though, I was struck by how little we know in some areas and how much we know in others.
For instance, the Colorado Department of Agriculture knows, almost to the peck, where crops go and how they're processed and marketed.
But try to determine whether the City and County of
Denver is a burden or a cash cow for the state treasury,
and you'll find that the numbers just aren't there. My
planner friend Randy Russell observed that Nobody knows
because nobody important wants the answer to that question,
and that should tell you something right there.
How much business does metro Denver do with Casper, Vernal, Scottsbluff, Dodge City and Taos now, as compared to 50 and 100 years ago? How many of their retail shelves are stocked from Denver wholesalers' warehouses, and how much comes from Omaha, Salt Lake, Kansas City, Amarillo and Albuquerque, and have those ratios changed?
Do they make more or fewer phone calls to Denver? Where do their banks turn for loan participation and check clearing? Where do they send beef, petroleum, mineral concentrates, wheat and pinto beans for processing and marketing? Where do their tourists come from? What regional airport do they use, and why?
Where's the line that, on one side, you go to a Denver hospital when you're real sick, and on the other, you go to Phoenix? What percentage of metro manufacturers' raw materials come from the region, and has that changed?
You'd think that someone besides me would want to know
these things so that we'd know how this Rocky Mountain
Empire
operates.
But to my knowledge, there isn't any single place that keeps track of such information, and often, nobody seems to bother at all. It's easier to find out how much tin the United States imports from Bolivia than to find out how much hardware Alliance gets from Denver, or where electricity goes when Colorado exports it.
A local merchant knows where her goods come from, and the U.S. Department of Commerce knows international trade. But get between those levels, try to figure out whether it is in Denver's economic interest now to build out the old Stapleton site or to invest in rural development, and you're grasping at interpolations, trends and estimates.
What makes this ignorance most galling, perhaps, is that
every candidate in the past decade has been adamantly in
favor of economic development,
and yet we know so
little of the existing regional economy that no one could
honestly propose an intelligent way to develop it.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1993 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >