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Our legislature convenes tomorrow, and one hot topic will be growth management.
As you may recall, there was a growth-control measure on the ballot last year, Amendment 24, which would have required many Colorado counties to set development boundaries, thereby reducing sprawl while preserving open space.
Polls showed that Amendment 24 enjoyed majority support
early on, but then came the barrage of advertising from a
well-funded opposition, and it was soundly defeated. The
opponents called themselves Citizens for Responsible
Reform,
and if that much of their advertising was true,
then they should be proposing some responsible
reforms
in this session.
Otherwise, they will lose credibility, and in the future we might not trust our public-spirited developers, subdividers, builders and speculators when they tell us what will be good for Colorado.
The backers of Amendment 24 have crafted their own
proposal for the General Assembly to consider. It would
require counties to erect invisible and unbreachable walls,
called growth boundaries.
Development could occur
only within these areas, which counties would have to
define through a plan that would then be approved by local
voters.
I haven't seen any mention of what might be the most sensible way to stop sprawl -- start obeying the state constitution, which forbids using public money to subsidize private endeavors.
Every time a city offers a tax abatement or a utility discount to a big box retailer, thereby encouraging sprawl, that's a subsidy. If it is collecting so much in taxes from existing residents and businesses that it can afford to give discounts to new businesses, then its tax rates are too high. If it isn't collecting enough, and it still wants to give the discounts, then it must raise tax rates.
In either case, it amounts to using public money to subsidize private endeavors, and the General Assembly could save us all some money by establishing a special counsel's office to find and eliminate all these arrangements, with the responsible parties getting five or ten years of hard labor.
Despite all the talk about how growth must pay its
own way,
there are many other ways we subsidize it. We
improve highways so that more land is more accessible thus
creating more subdivisions. We develop new water supplies
and sewage treatment systems and spread the costs to all
customers rather than just the new customers. The same
holds for schools and parks.
Actually requiring growth to pay its own way
would be politically impossible, since it would affect too
many people that make campaign contributions.
Perhaps fortunately, though, the solution to growth in Colorado is not in the hands of the General Assembly. A significant minority of the American people made that decision last year, when they elected a Republican as president.
If recent history is any guide, Colorado's growth problems will vanish within months after Bush the Younger is inaugurated.
The last Republican administrations extended from 1981
to 1993. Now look at the census results from 1990 and
compare them to 1980, and see how Colorado fared with the
growth friendly
GOP in the White House.
During that decade, 26 of the state's 63 counties lost population. They were spread all over the state. Farming counties like Phillips, Washington, Morgan and Logan lost residents. Mining counties like Mineral, San Juan and Lake lost population. Mountain counties like Gunnison and Chaffee shrank. Western Slope counties like Delta and Rio Blanco shriveled. Front Range counties like Pueblo and Denver contracted.
Denver alone lost 25,000 residents, and in 1986, for the first time since the Census Bureau started keeping records, Colorado as a whole lost population.
The Clinton years have been hard on the traditional Colorado lifestyle. Most mornings, I've got to wait for a few minutes to cross D Street on my way to the post office, and I haven't seen a dog sleeping there in years. Back roads are bumper-to-bumper on summer weekends, and I can't remember the last time I walked a mountain trail for more than a mile without encountering a stranger, usually one mounted on a noisy, noxious and expensive toy.
Trophy houses sprout almost overnight in isolated gulches and atop prominent ridgelines; I don't know about you, but I never thought that being forced to look at other people's ostentation was a reason to live in Colorado.
But none of that was happening back in the 80s, when there were Republicans in the White House -- many of them now part of the new Bush administration.
Normally, I'm a big fan of local control. But there are times to be glad that there's a federal government, and this could be one of them -- if the economic policies of Bush the Younger have the same effect on Colorado that his father's did.
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