Growing up on Grand Junction’s Main Street, I was never the kid with the candy jar.
But between parents and grandparents, there was usually sufficient pocket change for frequent trips down the alley and over to the This Is It Grocery on South 11th Street.
And my dad and granddad had a direct pipeline to the sugary Pepsi Colas that rolled off the bottling line back when Bernie, Ernie and Louie Buescher owned the plant, then located in the buildings just north of the Mesa County Justice Center. There might still be a couple of wooden cases of empty Pepsi bottles down in mom’s basement.
But I know how it feels to be holding that jar now that there are so many hands reaching out for the severance taxes or the federal mineral leasing revenues that are increasing rapidly because of all that energy development going on around us.
Gov. Bill Ritter is the latest in a long line of folks looking longingly at energy revenues, but he’s not the only one. At last count, there were more than a dozen bills moving through the Colorado legislature with some portion of those monies in the bull’s-eye.
Proposals that look to the state’s severance tax or the federal leasing monies returned to Colorado as salvation for statewide financial needs ranging from transportation to education universally ignore three things:
The reason the pot of money is increasing is increasing activity in the field.
That flurry of new activity brings with it escalating impacts.
The intent in creating those severance taxes and leasing revenues was to provide a means of addressing and mitigating those impacts where they happen.
Many of the proposals would cap the amount of money flowing to communities to address those direct impacts and retain at the state level some or all of the funds above the ceiling to address other needs. That would work out just fine if proponents of that new spending could also figure out a way to cap the impacts the funds are supposed to mitigate. That ain’t gonna happen.
One of the disadvantages those of us in the energy patch are facing is that many of those other needs, education and transportation being good examples, are well documented while we’ve done a poor job of adding up all the unmet needs prompted by energy development.
Part of the reason is that they’re so overwhelming in many cases. Witness more than $200 million in costs catalogued in a recent study in Rio Blanco County and nearly $20 million needed just for wastewater treatment upgrades in Rifle. Other factors are the reluctance of the industry itself to study the cumulative impacts of energy activities, coupled with opposition to that by some local officials looking through their rose-colored glasses at only the positive impacts of increased economic growth.
Right now, the Colorado Department of Local Affairs is following up on a suggestion from the Colorado Municipal League and coordinating a survey of energy-impacted cities and counties about unmet needs as well as the positive effects that access to these revenues have had on those communities.
There are a couple of unfortunate consequences of this unseemly rush to raid the candy jar while the goodies are pouring in. It unnecessarily sets up a zero sum battle over the new funds available from the incremental growth of energy activity. None of us in local government doubts the importance of education. Most of us preach the value of an educated workforce in our economic development efforts and go out of our way to support schools, as is evidenced in Grand Junction’s past contributions to Mesa State College and joint efforts with District 51. And most of our citizens could quickly come up with a list of unmet local, regional and statewide transportation needs.
It’s also too bad that all of these measures, including Gov. Ritter’s proposal, didn’t start with collaboration, an opening discussion that could have put all of our unmet needs, local and statewide, on the table and involved us in developing the best overall response.
Instead, local communities reeling from increasing impacts of energy activities are being forced to play defense when they might have been partners in helping create solutions.
That’s why I’ve suggested a timeout, that we save this discussion for a post-session effort that includes all parties. Without immediate legislative and gubernatorial pressures, we could better see how this candy jar and other current and future pots of money might best resolve Colorado’s problems while preserving the ability of local communities to mitigate the very real impacts they face now and in the future.
Jim Spehar (jimspehar@bresnan.net) is president of the Colorado Municipal League as well as a member of the Grand Junction City Council.
