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Perhaps to provide a bit of election-year cheer, U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell has announced that the Front Range would be irreparably damaged if Preble's mouse were listed as an endangered species.
Preble's mouse lives in riparian zones, which are getting developed along the Front Range. If it is listed as endangered, then the federal government would have to protect its habitat, which would interfere with the important process of subdividing and paving everything between Cheyenne and Pueblo.
Campbell apparently thinks that slowing this process would cause the irreparable damage.
I hate to be the one to break the news, but somebody must. Attention, Sen. Campbell: the Front Range is already irreparably damaged from what it was when I grew up there, amid open fields, clear views of the mountains and uncrowded back roads.
Just restoring the Front Range to what it was in 1960 --
ripping out shopping malls and restoring downtown
commercial districts, unpaving Interstate 25, restoring to
agriculture those big-lot suburbs that sprout right behind
Smart Growth Award
signs -- could take years.
I can't imagine how listing Preble's mouse could do more damage to the Front Range than the past 40 years of progress has accomplished, but my paucity of imagination, in comparison to Campbell's grand visions of irreparable damage, doubtless explains why some people rise to join the world's greatest deliberative body while others of us languish in rural backwaters.
Just how rural this backwater can remain is a good question, though. The I-70 Sacrifice Zone, a west-trending extension of the Front Strange Blight Strip, sits about 100 miles away, and for further protection, there's the Continental Divide.
But the blight has been oozing southward in recent years. A majority of the working population of Leadville and Lake County toils in the resorts of Eagle and Summit counties. Resorts send employee buses as far south as Buena Vista, perilously close to Salida, and the Vail newspapers have started carrying ads for real estate in this valley.
Many civic-minded residents here hasten to point out that this is not a healthy place, what with toxic heavy metals in the soil of Leadville, acidic metallic water in the Arkansas River and hundreds of enticing old mine tunnels just waiting to maim or kill explorers.
Alas, the Environmental Protection Agency has been
sanitizing Leadville's waste dumps and purifying the
Arkansas. Our own state government has announced plans to
close about 50 hazardous openings
along the river
near Granite.
Why the flurry of safety and hygiene? Probably because Vail wants to expand, and needs more room over here to house more chattels. Vail Resorts comprises not only the Vail ski area, but also nearby Beaver Creek, as well as Breckenridge and Keystone in Summit County.
Last ski season they accommodated 4.5 million skier days, and in the corporate financial quarter ending on Jan. 31, Vail Resorts showed a 22 percent increase in revenue per skier visit from a year ago.
But that's not enough. Vail is pursuing its Category
III
expansion to land just south of the current ski
area. The Forest Service has approved it, and most of the
opposition energy now goes into pointing out the alleged
affects of expansion on lynx habitat.
Apparently, Colorado has no agency that can consider the Vail expansion for its real effects on people and taxes -- the inevitable demand for a bigger I-70, the expansion of its worker commutation zone, the costs of social services in the counties that will house low-paid seasonal resort workers who don't get much in the way of benefits.
Those are the issues that affect taxes, schools, hospitals, roads -- the stuff that our governments are supposed to be dealing with. That's what public bodies should be considering with the proposed Vail expansion.
But instead, the argument will revolve around lynx habitat, just as the Front Range may be forced to endure years of disputes about the habits of Preble's mouse.
That could be the worst aspect of the Endangered Species Act. Often it is the only tool people can find to fight something that threatens them, and thus the real issue, such as how much Colorado should subsidize Vail Resorts as opposed to Patrick Bowlen or Phil Anschutz, gets obscured in the fog of war about habitat.
Can't some things be denied just because they're expensive and destructive to human communities, or must we always hide behind some critter?
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