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Our ballot offers us a chance to vote on Referendum A, which would allow Great Outdoors Colorado to borrow up to $115 million against anticipated lottery income. GOCO would then use that money to buy land for open space,
This is one of those ideas that sounds good at first --
preserving open space
ranks right up there with
smart growth,
expand I-25 to a dozen lanes
and the free and unlimited coinage of silver
as an
effective Colorado political slogan -- but it doesn't stand
up to examination.
For starters, there's the financing. As it is, GOCO gets lottery money. It then works with local governments and state agencies to improve parks and wildlife habitat, as well as preserve open space.
To a great degree, these are discretionary activities. They may be nice, but they're not essential in the way that sewage treatment is essential.
It's one thing to have a voluntary program, like the
lottery, and to decide that if some lottery money comes
in, then we'll use it for things that we could live
without, but would be nice to have, like parks and
trails.
It's another to borrow against anticipated lottery income to buy those discretionary items. That means there will be payments to make. What happens if, by some miracle, Colorado schoolchildren actually learn math and as a consequence of their knowledge, lottery-ticket sales fall off? Will we be bombarded with lottery ads?
Granted, that's not a likely scenario, since it is based on the prospect that education will improve.
But there are other problems with the assumptions behind Amendment A. Supporters say that there are critical open-space parcels, and their prices are rising. In other words, it's cheaper to borrow money at 6 per cent and buy the land now, than it is to try to save up the purchase price when the land is going up at 12 or 15 per cent annually.
That's true, but it's not necessarily relevant. This may come as a surprise to people who have moved here in the past decade, but real-estate prices in Colorado do not always go up. In much of the state during the 1980s, prices fell. And the current economic omens and auguries are not promising -- I just saw an ad that offered a $500,000 discount on lots near Vail.
So Referendum A could end up as a bail-out for real-estate speculators. Suppose you borrowed and spent $2.5 million on 500 acres at $5,000 an acre, with the idea of subdividing it into upscale half-acre lots that will go for $20,000 apiece.
Then the Dow dives, and your pool of potential customers shrinks like a snowbank in June. The bank is calling you at least daily, if not hourly. To avoid bankruptcy, you've got to unload that land that nobody seems to want at the moment.
No problem. You just arrange to have it promoted as a vital open-space acquisition, an urgent land-preservation opportunity. Your friends at the courthouse, the county commissioners, will start these gears turning, and with Referendum A, the GOCO board will be able to make a substantial contribution to the noble cause of getting this suddenly unprofitable piece of real estate off your hands.
Perhaps that's a far-fetched scenario -- but the more you think about the way things usually work in Colorado, the more possible it seems.
However, the biggest problem with Referendum A is that
it obscures the real problem: We have to worry about
open space
because we're not very good at designing
and operating the closed space
of our suburbs, which
is where we've done most of our development during the past
50 years.
The traditional neighborhood had relatively small lots, say 50x150, and narrow streets, perhaps 40 feet wide. You can put five or six houses on an acre. The modern cul-de-sac suburb with its wide streets and big lots gets perhaps two house an acre. It chews up land, and because the distances keep growing, people are forced to drive to do anything -- work, attend school or church, shop -- so even more land has to be devoted to larger and better highways.
Those highways also make it possible to import cheap
commodities from distant places, and so the nearby farms
and orchards and quarries and dairies and the like which
once served the community -- and provided open space
on the edges of town -- can no longer compete. And with the
great land-eating machine in action, those land-owners can
make more by selling out than they could by selling
apples.
Now, if we built attractive closed spaces,
people
might be happy living and recreating in them. But we don't.
We develop suburbs where it's impossible to walk or bicycle
on one's normal errands, and then we discover that we need
build special hiking and cycling trails.
The real problem is Why do we keep developing in ways
that seem to require buying open space?
and Referendum
A doesn't come within a day's ride of addressing that.
Passing it won't fix that problem, and it could create some
new ones -- and we have problems enough already.
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