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Bill Owens, your state treasurer and mine, is a rather
committed Republican, so it's no surprise that he has
criticized the current efforts of a Democratic governor to
cope with growth in Colorado, most recently with
regional growth summits.
Owens is also a bright guy, so it's worth moving beyond normal partisan politicking to examine his arguments. In essense, Owens says that the economic indicators show that the current growth spate will abate soon. Normal cyclical variations still apply, he argues, so why bother will all these meetings and visions and coping strategies?
Good question, especially when you consider how the regions have been defined. Last week, movers and shakers from Chaffee, Custer and Frémont counties ventured to Pueblo to join its leaders for our regional growth session.
There was a day when Pueblo, with its steel mills and rail connections, was the economic engine that pulled this part of the world. But they don't make much steel in Pueblo these days, and the trains seldom stop here any more.
Pueblo has about 100,000 people; just up the road 40 miles is metroplitan Colorado Springs, with 400,000 people. Both cities are about the same distance from Salida, Cañon City, Wetcliffe, etc. Colorado Springs has an economy increasingly based on tourism and electronics, which is where the world seems to be headed.
Anyone with an IQ higher than Forrest Gump's would have to conclude that Colorado Springs, not Pueblo, is the big dog in this yard.
(Here's an easy way to tell which of two neighboring
cities is dominant. Find a radio or TV station which serves
both. Then note which comes first in the station
promotions. Thus KUNC, a public radio station in Greeley,
serves Fort Collins-Greeley
and KSTC TV, public
television from Pueblo studios, seves Colorado
Springs-Pueblo.
)
Any growth seminar for this region which ignores Colorado Springs is like getting a physical from a doctor who says you're in great shape after tapping your kneecap and looking down your throat, but who never bothers to check your pulse.
Dr. Romer, with his regional boundaries based on the economy of 50 years ago, may not be the only physician who fails to look in the right ways at the right places. Dr. Owens, in announcing the we don't need to be treated for this growth, bases his diagnosis on traditional economic cycles and indicators. Relax, he says, just give it a little time, and this condition will clear up all by itself.
Will it?
The guiding city of the traditional Mountain West was Chicago: rail network, heavy industry supplied by mines and forests and farms and ranches in the hinterland, whose residents furnished customers for the city's goods.
But the Chicago system reached its limits in about 1980. It's still a force to be reckoned with, but the Mountain West is being conquered by a new city, Los Angeles, and LA works differently.
The best explanation of the difference is in City of
Quartz,
a book-length analysis of LA written by Mike
Davis.
In traditional cities like Chicago, he argues, the industrial base came first, and people migrated to the city for the opportunities. But in LA, clever promoters persuaded people to migrate there first. Only afterwards did the city bother to develop industries and employment.
Apply this analysis to the current growth in rural Colorado, and you can see the LA process at work. People move here, not because there are jobs and opportunities, but because they think it's a good place to live, and after they arrive, they'll contrive a way to get a living.
It's the difference between moving to Pueblo in 1950 because CF&I was hiring, and moving to Wetmore in 1995 because the view is inspiring and the climate is tolerable. To put it another way, in a traditional Mountain West economy, Minturn would be a major city (controls two passes with mainline rail and highway access), while Vail (a few frivolous ski lifts) wouldn't even be a player. That's certainly not the case, and you can see that the old rules don't explain things now.
Los Angeles, now the second-largest city in America,
resulted from a century of real-estate promotion, not from
any natural
factors like a harbor (they fabricated
one) or a water supply (they conquered one).
LA is still growing. If we're in an LA world now, where the pereception that a place is attractive means more than traditional factors like resources and industry, then the Mountain West might be in for a century of such growth.
That's scary. Dr. Owens has apparently taken our temperature and announced that the fever is dropping, and so we should be fine. But Dr. Owens, being of the old school, hasn't bothered with an X-ray or a blood test, and so we should take his prognosis with a grain of salt.
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