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Judging by what I've had to read lately, the major-league baseball All-Star Game tonight will pump at least $7.2 quadrillion into the regional economy while providing a showcase for Denver to demonstrate its accomplishments to the world, thereby attracting even more investment and tourism, which Denver sorely needs, given the excess capacity of its freeways and the city's abundance of affordable housing.
This would be much easier to believe if I could even remember where last year's All-Star game was played, just in case I was in the mood for tourism and investment.
You'd think that last year's All-Star host city would be
so prosperous and inviting, after all that expense-account
money poured into its economy and it got showcased on
network television, that the words Cleveland, Ohio
would just leap into one's consciousness.
But instead, I had to consult an almanac for the information -- another of those troubling symptoms of age, I suppose, along with a lack of interest in Windows 98, failure to buy or detonate any illegal fireworks this year, and my difficulty in coming to grips with the destruction of one of my cherished beliefs.
For some years, I have argued for a greater local role in public-lands administration. Not that our county officials are any smarter than the rangers assigned by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, but they're more accessible, and they lack the resources to do anything really stupid on a monumental scale.
That is, counties just don't have the money to build roads for below-cost timber sales, or to subsidize grazing leases, or to practice with ballistic missiles, jet fighters, nerve gas and thermonuclear warheads.
But I'm starting to be a bigger fan of the federales after reading about Mike Lacy, the high sheriff of San Juan County, Utah.
That's where two fugitives, accused of killing a Cortez policeman, along with a host of other felonies, might be hiding out in the deep and serpentine canyons of the San Juan River.
Lacy wanted to set fire to the trees and brush along a six-mile stretch of the river, not to smoke out the fugitives, but to improve visibility for lawmen.
Lacy's department, along with Navajo tribal police, managed to ignite some of the riparian zone last week, but that exhausted their arson capabilities. So they wanted the Forest Service and BLM to assist help out with helicopters that would drop small plastic balls filled with something like napalm along the river banks.
The BLM and Forest Service refused 100 percent,
Lacy said.
Maybe the BLM and Forest Service thought there would be a public-relations problem with mixed messages if they were starting fires in the Four Corners at the same time that the rest of us aren't even supposed to smoke outdoors on account of high fire danger.
Or perhaps they were thinking ahead. If they had come through with the fireballs this time, and the fugitives had remained at large, then Lacy's requests might escalate, and the feds would have to draw the line somewhere.
But where? We might be reading stories like these:
Aug. 7: San Juan County Sheriff Mike Lacy thanked
federal land agencies for their earlier cooperation in
burning vegetation along the river, but said streamside
willows and cottonwoods were still hampering visibility.
He asked that stockpiles of Agent Orange, the defoliant
used in Vietnam, be deployed on the river banks....
Sept. 7: San Juan County Sheriff Mike Lacy praised
the U.S. Department of Energy yesterday for agreeing to
discuss conducting above-ground tests of tactical nuclear
weapons along the San Juan River in Utah.
Several military experts, who asked not to be named,
cautioned that the twisting canyon walls would contain much
of the initial superheated air from the blasts, and that
each bomb might destroy only a mile or two of
vegetation....
Oct. 7: The largest and longest manhunt in Four
Corners history continues in San Juan County, Utah, where
Sheriff Mike Lacy has enlisted the support of his state's
powerful congressional delegation to enlarge Glen Canyon
Dam, making it 300 feet higher.
Lacy said this would extend Powell Reservoir well
into his part of Utah, flooding out and killing streamside
vegetation which has hampered the search for two men
...
The Forest Service and BLM had little choice but to
just say no
to the sheriff last week. The Navajo
elders have the right idea this time around -- patient
tracking by experts, rather than further devastation of a
land that's already rather desolate.
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