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According to an encyclopedia at hand, the Rocky
Mountains are a great chain of rugged mountain ranges in
western North America, extending from central New Mexico to
northeastern British Columbia, a distance of about 2,000
miles.
According to the Scripps-Howard corporation, the Rocky Mountains extend for all of 120 miles -- the recently announced reduced zone of the Rocky Mountain News, which will no longer circulate outside 15 metro counties.
This disinterest in the boondocks isn't exactly a new development at the News. Twenty-five years ago, when I and my friends were all starving journalism students in Greeley, occasionally one of us would try to fund some groceries by proposing a story to one of the Denver papers.
The Post sometimes expressed interest, but never the
Rocky . We just don't cover much outside the metro
area,
an editor there told me, and friends heard the
same thing.
This inspired us to muse that the two Denver papers were
misnamed. This one should have been the Rocky Mountain
Post, since it was interested in the entire Rocky
Mountain Empire.
The other should be called the Denver
News, which limited its energies to a small portion of the
world found south of 104th Avenue, east of Kipling Street,
west of Havana Street and north of Arapahoe Road.
But it isn't just the Rocky which finds rural Colorado to be too much trouble to serve.
USWest, the telephone company based in Englewood, has sold dozens of rural exchanges -- Westcliffe, Guffey and Saguache around here -- in the past couple of years.
And in the areas that USWest kept, such as Salida and Buena Vista, I hear nothing good about the company's service. A couple of years ago, a USWest representative spoke here and explained that the company preferred to invest in urban areas, where it needed to remain competitive, rather than in rural areas, which were captive markets.
I have no desire to see improved rural highways (why further subsidize real-estate developers?), but if I were a farmer east of Pueblo trying to get crops to market, I might wonder at all the attention paid to Interstate 70 while U.S. 50 remains a mere two lanes across the plains. Unless a Colorado highway leads to the big city, it doesn't matter.
Denver capitalists once thought it was vital to build and maintain a connection to Leadville -- the city that provided the resources for those mansions on Capitol Hill, the financing for Denver's first skyscraper and opera house, the capital for the city's first telephone exchange, etc.
But now that most of the rich ore, has been extracted from the Mosquito Range, do you see any Denver leadership opposing the abandonment of the railroad connection to Leadville? Or do you see a Denver capitalist, Phil Anschutz, ready to reap billions if he can merge his Southern Pacific into the Union Pacific, and so what if Colorado further fragments?
On a national level, rural hospitals and independent pharmacies continue to close -- the third-party payment schedules designed for urban zones don't work for the hinterlands. Retail chains like Sears and Woolworth remove themselves from small towns, leaving them to the tender mercies of Wal-Mart.
So, the Rocky Mountain News is hardly alone in deciding that the boondocks aren't good for the bottom line. We can be an expensive nuisance to mainstream America.
And I suspect this disinvestment trend will continue as pressures grow to balance the federal budget. For years, rural areas have been heavily subsidized by the feds: below-cost electrical power from the REA and the Bureau of Reclamation (which also provides cheap water), air service subsidies, national parks (notice how quickly some towns began to hurt during the latest partial government shutdown), national forests (almost all money-losers), agricultural college research and county extension services, soil banks, crop subsidies, Department of Commerce grants for public radio station repeaters, payments in lieu of taxes...the list could extend across pages.
This country is deeply in debt, and about 80 percent of the population dwells in urban areas. How much longer do you think it will continue to pour money into the boondocks?
National priorities once called for policies like
winning the West
and occupying the continent.
But those are expensive undertakings, and populating the
countryside with regular people is no longer in the
national interest.
Instead, the free market
will go to work. The
rich can move to country estates. If they want the road
plowed, they can afford their own plows. If they want
electricity, they can erect solar panels. If they want
telephones, they can afford cellular. If they want law
enforcement, they build a gated enclave.
This loss of common institutions is troubling; sometimes I fear that we have seen the future, and it is Yugoslavia.
So it was good Sunday to see that the Post's publisher reaffirmed a commitment to serving the entire region, urban and rural, rich and poor.
And there's another blessing -- no longer will my dinner hour be disturbed by someone trying to sell me a subscription to the Rocky.
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