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Despite being called into a special session by the governor recently, our legislature failed to come up with any new and improved laws for the management of growth.
The most persistent idea is to allow towns and cities to designate nearby areas where they would encourage development, while discouraging it in more remote areas. This has the merit of saving tax money, since it costs less to provide governmental services -- streets, police, fire protection, etc. -- to people who are nearby.
But it has the disadvantage of making distant property much more difficult to develop, and that distant property is often owned by speculators who make campaign contributions and complain loudly if their right to subdivide is impaired.
Colorado politicians used to gain office by promising
that the Utes must go.
Then it was the free and
unlimited coinage of silver
that won elections. By the
1970s, it had evolved to controlled growth,
or its
corollary, growth must pay its own way.
And that's about as far as the slogans have progressed. In the past 25 years, nobody's come up with anything that might fit on a bumper sticker or be suitable for chanting at meetings of the local planning-and-zoning commission.
The problem with controlled growth
is that it
assumes that local or state government can exercise much
control over the factors that cause growth.
A few years ago, I observed that after a decade of stagnation, real estate was starting to move around Salida. While a certain amount of this is tolerable and necessary, the trend was a threat to much that we held dear -- easy parking, cheap living, afternoons at the Victoria Tavern, gossiping in the middle of the street, etc.
Some friends and I speculated about what might be done to shift that trend, and we came up with the idea of declaring Chaffee County a cellular-telephone-free-zone.
Our thinking was that if visiting People of Money discovered that their cellular phones didn't work here, and never would, then they'd go somewhere else when they got infected with the desire to buy mountain property. Besides that, Realtors out showing rural property are major users of cellular service, and anything that would complicate their business would also discourage unwanted growths.
Alas, our research revealed that the federal government requires local governments to cooperate with cellular-telephone providers -- tower locations and the like can be regulated, but you can't ban them altogether.
I still think our plan might have worked if it could
have been implemented. But even though we have a
Republican Congress that gives lip service to the idea of
federal devolution and local empowerment, the fact is that
certain industries have Political Action Committees that
give money to congressional campaigns, and the Committee
Save our Children from the Menace of Distracted
Cell-phone-using Motorists
is not one of those
committees.
We tried to think of other things that we could live without -- because we'd already been living without them -- and ran into similar regulatory problems.
For instance, we had managed without ATMs, so it didn't seem that banning them would bother anybody here. Again, I learned that the regulation of banking practices is beyond the province of local authorities, even if ATMs cause more crime. (They do get robbed from time to time, and if they weren't there, they wouldn't get robbed, right?)
We had also managed to live without 911 service. You had to know the real phone number to reach the dispatcher in the sheriff's office.
But we got 911 anyway, since the state and feds thought it was important, and the main result was not an increase in public safety. It just meant more calls to the dispatcher, which meant that the police spent more time responding to barking-dog complaints, which meant they needed more personnel, which meant higher taxes.
If we could have avoided these improvements -- cell phones, ATMs, 911 service -- then we might have been able to avoid some of the growth and its consequent problems. People still could have move here, but they'd have to change the way they lived.
Maybe that isn't fair, but is the reverse any more fair -- they move here, and force me to change the way I live?
But the sad fact is that no local government, even if it wanted to, can really protect its citizens from this kind of invasion, no matter what kind of zoning powers it might be able to exercise.
And I doubt that yet another special session of the legislature will be able to contrive a solution, either.
On another note entirely, happy Father's Day to the other Ed Quillen, who lives in Longmont.
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