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If you had told me in 1984 that downtown parking would be a hot issue in Salida ten years later, I'd have asked where you found the stuff you were smoking.
Back then -- according to the Contract With America Republicans, millions of new jobs were being created by noble risk-taking entrepreneurs who were looting federally insured savings-and-loans, and those deficits were entirely the fault of a Congress which in fact appropriated less money than the Reagan regime asked for -- if there was any parking enforcement in downtown Salida, it consisted of ticketing those dogs which had slept on F Street past the two-hour limit.
Downtown Salida boasts several blocks of two-story Victorian brick buildings. Downstairs is a store; upstairs, apartments. Where do the apartment-dwellers park?
On the street. The fine was only $2. To discourage this, the city raised the fine to $25, creating an uproar.
The city treasury relies heavily on sales taxes. Merchants collect those taxes, and they need convenient parking if they're going to get customers. Increasingly, those customers are tourists -- who get a warning ticket, rather than a fine, if they park too long.
But shouldn't the city government serve residents, rather than folks who are just passing through?
There are political forces building that way. Debbie Jaramillo recently got elected mayor of Santa Fe, arguing that the city of Santa Fe should serve the people of Santa Fe, rather than the People of Money who flutter in and out.
When our resource-extraction industries collapsed during the Wonderful Reagan Years and we had soaring unemployment rates combined with plunging real-estate prices, I figured the traditional western boom-and-bust cycle had ended.
The easy stuff had been high-graded out, South Korea instead of Pueblo would make steel and new upscale resorts like Beaver Creek would fleece whatever tourists remained.
We were in permanent bust, and we'd just have to learn to live with it. But that didn't happen. First a welcome trickle began about 1990, and now a torrent with a hot real-estate market and parking problems downtown.
Nobody knows how to handle this. In an excellent book,
Little Town Blues
by Raye Ringholz, an economist
named Thane Robson says Towns are either too successful
or they're not successful enough. If you can find one
anywhere in the West that you think is just right, just
call it to my attention.
My planner friend Randy Russell, now in charge of
economic development in Carbon County, Utah, says the same
thing. It's either a flood or a drought. I don't know of
any way to control the flow.
Didn't our pioneer forebears have the same problem with water? Some years, there were floods, and other years the creeks were dry. Rivers ran high in June, but low in August when crops most needed water.
So they built great dams and diversion structures. The smaller irrigation reservoirs hold spring snow-melt until it's needed in August. The bigger ones hold the surplus from wet years so there will be water in dry years.
Why not apply the same concept to people? We could build small containment facilities to hold seasonal surpluses. Land is still relatively cheap on the high plains, which also miss out on their fair share of tourism and real-estate speculation, so that would be a good place for these reservoirs.
For instance, if there were too many skiers in February, the surplus could be stored in the Woodrow Catchment Facility and then released in April to resorts suffering from shoulder-season droughts. If there weren't enough stored February skiers, our legal system already knows how to assign priority dates and perfected rights. Peak flows in July could be captured, then released to senior rights holders in November, that sort of thing.
That takes care of seasonal variations, but we also have yearly fluctuations: years when it doesn't snow, or there's a boycott, or too many people believed our propaganda. Further, much of this isn't mere tourism, but migration.
We need a big reservoir to handle that, and the cheapest solution might be to close Fort Carson. Most authorities say Colorado Springs would thereby lose 100,000 residents. The reservoir would take their place.
All immigrants to Colorado would be diverted to Pikes Peak Reservoir. A town that needed more population lest its houses be abandoned during some period of Republican prosperity could issue a call, and towns that felt overwhelmed would enjoy flood control because they could close their valve. The 1981 surplus could have balanced the 1987 deficiency.
This may sound bizarre. But more than a century ago, Colorado invented the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation and overturned centuries of English common law.
It was a bold and innovative step, and though it's not perfect, our system of water allocation has served pretty well. It made both floods and droughts somewhat manageable while making the state habitable.
If we had the courage to implement a similar system for the flow of people, Colorado could again lead the way for the Mountain West.
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