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They told me it was a normal spring weekend in Gunnison - it snowed only twice, and I lost just one hat to the gentle zephyrs which scoured the basin - but even so, I performed my assigned duties as chairperson of the smokers' caucus at the annual Headwaters gathering at Western State College.
The formal topic indoors was rural education, but outside in the mild spring blizzard where my caucus met, we generally moved to another pressing topic: blight preservation.
Back in 1980, we had some county commissioners who proposed improving Chaffee County by banning wood piles, dung heaps, old cars on blocks and other impediments to elevated real-estate values.
Those commissioners were recalled from office, and the
lesson stuck until quite recently. Now we're being
bombarded with zoning proposals, vision statements and
master plans, all of which contain frightening language
like eliminating substandard housing
and blight
removal.
Such phrases are scary because they really mean
eliminating substandard people.
Further, the city government has gone to war with its own residents. It started with parking. Now that tourists visit downtown Salida, dropping money and thereby contributing sales tax to the city coffers, the folks who live in apartments above the stores are nuisances, and the easiest way to get rid of them is to fine them severely for parking within any convenient distance of their homes.
The city adopted new watering restrictions. We had odd-even, but that wasn't going to save enough water to provide for new houses on two-acre lots, so they forbade watering between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
The idea is to drive out people who can't afford a computer-controlled sprinkling system. Force them to sell out and move on, and there are several benefits:
· We get a better class of people in town.
·The conserved water can go for more developments.
· All those houses being put up for sale mean more business for the real-estate agents and brokers, who had lately been complaining of a shortage of listings. Some of us, desirous of just living somewhere, haven't been performing our American duty of moving every couple of years and providing realty commissions.
And out in the county, the building inspector has gotten so zealous that he slapped a $300-a-day fine on a guy who had put a storage shed within six feet of his house, which somehow made it an attached structure in need of footings, firewalls, etc.
All these improvement campaigns are nothing new, of
course. Many critics observed that urban renewal
in
the 1960s really meant Negro removal,
and several
novels by John Nichols explain the process of raising
real-estate values in northern New Mexico by removing the
people who had the misfortune to own land desired by the
second-home amenity-tourism industry.
This was the depressing tenor of conversation at the smokers' caucus of undesirables, but some hope came from Devon Pena, a sociology professor at Colorado College, now on leave to work in San Luis toward buying the Taylor Ranch and managing it as a community commons.
We've been working on the Costilla County 1041 master
plan,
Pena said, and we've inserted several
provisions that keep real-estate prices down and thereby
deter rich people from moving in and ruining
everything.
We pressed for details. We won't require people to
have privies or clotheslines,
Pena said, but we'll
make sure they're allowed to have them if they want
them.
What about the junkyard?
someone asked. You
need a part for a `54 Jimmy three-quarter-ton, you just
about have to go to San Luis any more. The New People are
trying to get rid of junk yards so that we'll have to buy
new vehicles, which we can't afford, and we'll have to
move.
Pena said they were looking at several approaches. One
was valuable regional resource
designation - if some
multi-national corporation can scar up a mountainside for
gold that nobody in town uses, then why couldn't a local
resident scar up 40 acres of scrubland to provide car parts
that everybody in town uses?
That might be too novel, though, so I suggested fabricating some history.
Couldn't you just put up a plaque, to the effect that
`In April 1853, Armilio Gallegos began storing old Murphy
wagon parts on some land that his ditch wouldn't reach. He
had originally planned to burn the old wagons as firewood,
but his neighbors began to drop by for felloes and tongues,
and over the years this evolved...'
That might work,
Pena said, but historic
designation also comes with restrictions. And you'd have to
go case by case. I think a general Blight Preservation
Ordinance is the best way to go.
We asked him to keep us posted. We were, after all, the blights and nuisances and substandards of other rural Colorado counties, and we wanted to work within the system, if possible.
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