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After two months of travels that included Smart Growth Summits in Pueblo and Alamosa, a Rio Grande Upper Basin Forum in Alamosa, the Headwaters Conference in Gunnison and the Colorado Society of Landscape Architects convention in Vail (and missing the Arkansas Headwaters Forum in Cañon City on account of a blizzard), I was about to announce that seminars about growth are the real growth industry in Colorado.
Most of the propaganda I picked up at these gatherings
landed in a cardboard box labeled Growth Stuff
(this
is a sophisticated filing system -- if I don't need
anything from the box after about six months, I toss it,
which means that two days later, I will need something from
the box) alongside selected editions of publications from
the San Juans and the North Fork Valley.
In those papers I found some people indulging in what the governor said we should all do -- imagine what sort of community we'd really like to live in.
Naturally there were variations in these visions, but there were some common themes: small towns with a fairly high population density, in order to maintain a pedestrian, rather than automotive, scale. Most intercourse with the outside world would be through fiber optics or rail, rather than highways.
Primary education would take place in well-equipped one-room eight-grade schoolhouses, one per neighborhood. Most food would be grown and processed locally, thereby making the open space around town profitable.
Small mines, quarries and sawmills even appeared in these visions, but search as I might, I could not find 500 channels of cable television, fast-food franchise strips or regional shopping malls.
Such a community sounded appealing, and when I asked around informally at all these gatherings, about four out of five folks said that sounded like a good way to live.
Now, if this country is a democracy, and there's such a majority in favor of something, why doesn't that something happen?
Good question, so I tried a thought experiment. Let's suppose we've got a group of idealists who want to establish Utopia, Colo., along these lines.
It's not a new concept in Colorado. My home town of Greeley was founded as Union Colony in 1870 by a group of temperance advocates, mostly from New England, who planned to cultivate their fields by day and their minds by night.
Scattered about are results of other settlement dreams: Dearfield near Fort Morgan, where black Coloradans planned to develop their own farms in 1914; the 1882 Saltiel promotion in the Wet Mountain Valley, where persecuted Russian Jews might make a safe home; Nucla on the Western Slope, a cooperative sawmill and farm for laid-off silver miners in 1894; Manassa, an 1877 Mormon colony in the San Luis Valley; from the hippie-commune era 25 years ago, places like Libre and Slaughterhouse Gulch; and our oldest town, San Luis, the 1851 result of efforts by seven families from Taos.
Back to the imagined present. Our imaginary modern pioneers establish Utopia, Colo., in some remote valley, and get it operating. What happens next?
Their schools would likely get hammered first. Just how long do you think the Colorado Department of Education would tolerate little neighborhood schools? There would be announcements from Denver that Utopia was short-changing its children, that they weren't getting enough diversity training, that the teachers were spending too much time in the classroom and not enough time filling out reports, etc.
After that, the Utopia land-use plan would come under assault by our state legislature, which would quickly move to strip away any county powers that might prevent shopping malls from being built on the edge of town and sprawling commuter suburbs past the mall.
You can see that process at work now. Twenty years ago, when you could rely on county commissioners to be good ol' boys after the quick buck, our legislature was glad to grant all manner of zoning powers to counties.
Now that there are a few county governments which worry
about things like quality of life, the legislature has
started to consider curtailing their powers. Our state
government believes in local control
only to the
extent that the real-estate developers in the statehouse
can control the locals.
After its schools and downtown are destroyed by the state government, state regulators will move against Utopia's local industries by declaring them unsafe or unsanitary. Watch what happens to Utopia's pedestrian scale when the corporate lobbyists discover that Utopia folks aren't spending nearly enough on new cars, gasoline and insurance.
It would take less than a decade for our state government to turn Utopia into Just About Anywhere.
So all these visions of an ideal community may be a
pleasant exercise. But isn't it a waste of time and energy
for Gov. Roy Romer to travel around the state, encouraging
such visioning,
when the state government would
never allow such communities?
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