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Our divided legislature failed to do its job of designing new congressional districts to reflect the 2000 census. Thus last week the chore went to District Judge John Coughlin, who produced a map with seven districts.
Democrats profess to be pleased with it, because the new seventh district -- a ring around all except the south border of Denver -- appears to be competitive. The state's congressional delegation might go from 4-2 Republican to 4-3 Republican, and the extra Democrat might help tip the House of Representatives, where Democrats would gain control if Republicans lost only six seats.
Republicans apparently wanted another safe seat, and there's talk they might appeal the judge's decision.
For my part, I don't like the new alignment because it puts us back in the Fifth District, where we were in the 1980s.
The Fifth was created after Colorado gained a new congressional seat in the 1970 census. Political lore has it that William Armstrong of Colorado Springs, then a power in the state legislature, gave the new district some boundaries that would insure his victory when he ran for Congress.
He did and he won. In 1974, I was editing a newspaper
in Kremmling, a long way from Armstrong's Fifth District.
Even though Armstrong was a fervent foe of government
waste,
we were getting all his press releases, sent out
at public expense. I asked a friend who worked for our
Fourth District congressman, Republican Jim Johnson, why we
kept getting all manner of franked stuff from Armstrong,
and not from other Colorado congressmen whose districts we
weren't in.
Simple,
my friend said. He's going to run for
U.S. Senate in 1978, and he wants to build up some
statewide name recognition at taxpayer expense.
Armstrong won a U.S. senate seat in 1978. As for one part of his political legacy, the Colorado Fifth has never elected a Democrat. After all, it is dominated by the Republicans of Colorado Springs and El Paso County.
But even if Colorado Springs were the sort of place that sensibly elected a Libertarian or a Green, it's not a good match for Lake, Chaffee and Park counties -- the mountain counties now in the Third District.
Our major involvement with the feds is public lands -- Uncle Sam is by far the largest landowner in these parts -- so we need a representative on the Resources Committee. El Paso County is home to five military installations and a host of retirees. Its representative should be on the Armed Service Committee.
That's not to say a congressman can't be on both committees, but there are only so many hours in a day, and representatives also need to meet with their campaign contributors, formulate Enron distancing statements and pass laws they haven't read.
Not only are our federal relationships different than El Paso County's, but our water interests are in conflict with theirs. Colorado Springs will always want more of our water, and we may not want to export it. If we're represented by the same congressman, he pretty well has to go along with the interests of his major population center.
For evidence, consider the expansion of Great Sand Dunes
National Monument into a national park two years ago. It
had the support of our current representative, Scott
McInnis of the Third District; as he pointed out one night
in Saguache, park status will protect your water about
as well as it can be protected.
Rep. Joel Hefley of the Fifth District opposed park status and the addition of the Baca Ranch -- the key to the immense confined aquifer in the San Luis Valley. He said he opposed park status because there was nothing so special about the Great Sand Dunes that warranted national park status.
But you have to wonder whether there was another reason: the thirst of the Colorado Springs Water Department. It's Hefley's job to look after his constituents, and that job could certainly include making sure there's water available for new subdivisions in his district.
The point here is not to rag on Hefley. The point is that if he does his job for the vast majority of his district, he'll be working against the interests of other parts of his district. There's no way around that. If he started advocating the interests of his rural constituents, his urban constituents would toss him -- as they should, in a democracy.
Granted, any way of drawing new congressional districts is going to shaft somebody. In a state with 4.3 million people, the 40,000 residents of three mountain counties comprise less than 1 percent of the population.
So we're expendable. We can get tossed into whatever congressional district needs a little more population in order to make the numbers come out even. We got shoved into the Colorado Springs Fifth, which means we will have no real representation for the next decade.
We can rationalize that as a patriotic sacrifice, I suppose, so that other Coloradans might get good representation. But it still doesn't sit well.
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