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Never have I felt as good about a local election's
outcome as I did last Wednesday morning. The proposed new
100-bed jail went down by a handsome margin, a new middle
school gained narrow approval, and the Slumlords Against
Progress
candidate for mayor won against the
Continued Gentrification
incumbent.
Naturally, we've been trying to analyze the results, looking for a trend or something that would enable me to become a big-time syndicated pundit.
Just about everybody here was in agreement that we needed a new jail in Chaffee County. The current slammer was built in 1968 to house a dozen prisoners. It's been double-bunked since then, and at last count, it averaged about 22 inmates on a given day.
It's a common problem -- Lake, Gunnison and Saguache counties are all in pretty much the same bind. Population grows, sentences get longer, and one result is crowded jails.
But did we need a new 100-bed jail in Chaffee County? The jail proponents said we would by 2020, and until we did, we could house state prisoners to cover operating costs. I ran numbers, assuming the population-growth and incarceration rates would continue to climb as they have in the past seven years, and came up with 67 inmates per day by 2020.
Did we want to get into the business of hoping there would be enough felons to keep our jail full? And did we want to cope with a use tax, levied on cars and construction materials, whose administration was more than confusing?
I didn't, and apparently a lot of other people felt the same way -- let's figure out a way to handle our own prisoners, and avoid getting sucked into the prison-industrial complex that seems to have replaced the military-industrial complex after the Cold War ended.
The new middle school here illustrates something that the organizers of Guide the Ride in the metro area apparently forgot -- Colorado voters don't sign blank checks.
On several earlier occasions, a middle school came before the public. The plans were vague and the proposed site was way out on the edge of town in what, to my untrained eyes, looked just like a wetland. These always got voted down.
This time around, there were specifics -- how much it
will cost and what we'd get for the money -- and it passed.
If the Guide the Ride proponents had laid out something
precise like We guarantee that you won't need to worry
about whether the city remembers to plow Pena
Boulevard,
then it might have passed.
The mayoral race here had four candidates, but it came down to Nancy Sanger, the incumbent, and Ralph Taylor, the successful challenger.
Until her most recent term, I thought Sanger had been a fine mayor. I didn't agree with everything she did and said, of course, but she was energetic and she had to deal with many constituencies that I can generally avoid.
But things changed the past two years. She supported a proposed master plan that would have changed Salida from a community with all kinds of people into an upscale enclave. She supported an unconstitutional loitering ordinance and when that issue appeared on TV news during the Post's Ride the Rockies visit last summer, she announced that as far as she was concerned, neither the Ride nor KCNC would ever be allowed in Salida again.
And when anybody complained, she assured us that a
silent majority
supported her.
Well, the majority spoke last Tuesday, and elected Ralph
Taylor mayor. His father, also Ralph Taylor, was an editor
at the Pueblo Chieftain for many years. Our new mayor has
lived here since 1972, and may be best known elsewhere for
his Dr. Doom
protests against nuclear bombs and
testing. But he also holds a degree in architecture from
Cal Poly.
He's got his work cut out for him -- Salida has the same problems as many other mountain towns caught up in this growth: housing shortage, aging infrastructure, low wage structure, fading middle class.
No other town, at least to my knowledge, has managed to find answers to these problems. It may be impossible, but I'd feel horrible if our elected officials didn't even try.
And for some punditry -- this campaign demonstrated how
meaningless political labels are. Taylor was the
liberal
candidate and he gets most of his livelihood
as a landlord. Sanger was the conservative,
and
she's a teacher, union member, and active Democrat. It's
about time we gave up on those words and looked for terms
that mean something.
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