LAS ANIMAS, Colo.—For more than a half century, people in rural southeastern Colorado have depended on the jobs from a sprawling property that functioned as a VA hospital and now a prison. But a $1 billion state budget shortfall has Las Animas residents bracing for the possibility the prison will be closed, eliminating 204 jobs they say are crucial to the city of nearly 2,600 people.
“A lot of these people would not be able to leave here,” said Jackie Wagner, 54, who owns a Las Animas coffee shop called Java Jackie’s. “There’s no money. We’re a very poor population.”
The city’s median household income in 2009 was $27,719, compared with $56,222 for the rest of the state.
The prison’s workers would be offered new corrections jobs elsewhere in the state. But businesses in nearby cities worry the prison’s closing would mean fewer customers from Las Animas.
Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper said Wednesday after taking a tour of the Fort Lyon Correctional Facility that he recognizes closing it will have significant impacts on the community. But he said there’s also a lot of pressure to balance the state budget.
“We have to look under every stone, look over every corner,” Hickenlooper said. The governor’s budget proposal also includes cutting K-12 education funding by $332 million next year, a move that has upset some lawmakers in his own party.
State lawmakers still must decide whether to include the prison closure in their budget. They have to pass a budget and send it to Hickenlooper before adjourning in May.
Roxane White, Hickenlooper’s chief of staff, said the governor is open to suggestions for other uses for the facility or trying to find other cuts that could save the prison for now, but she said its closing is not off the table.
The governor’s office said closing the facility on Aug. 31 would save the state $3 million this year and $6.3 million every following year. Tom Clements, the Department of Corrections’ executive director, said the facility is just too expensive to run compared with other prisons with a similar number of inmates.
With its several buildings and wide spaces in between, the facility was designed as a hospital, not a prison, Clements said.
Hickenlooper went from building to building on his tour, walking through the campus as inmates mingled outside on a warm, bright day. The medium-security facility houses about 500 prisoners, many of them aging and disabled. They would be sent to other prisons if Fort Lyon shuts down.
Hickenlooper was impressed by the complex, saying after the tour, “You almost have the feeling you can be at a college campus.”
The facility is a “very serene, beautiful place,” he said. “But that doesn’t diminish the economics.”
Hickenlooper later met with community leaders to hear their concerns. One of them was Bent County Commissioner Bill Long, who said he hopes the governor will consider delaying the closure by a year or finding other uses for the property.
After the meeting, Long said he got the sense the governor is open to those ideas.
The governor announced his proposal to close the prison last month, and Las Animas residents have been on edge since.
Jerry Brooks, a 72-year-old retired teacher who grew up in Las Animas when it had the VA hospital, said closing the prison would cause a big disruption to the region over what he believes is a small percentage of the state budget. It’s another blow to a city that lost its veterans’ hospital in 2002, when the prison took over, he said.
Sitting at a table at Java Jackie’s, Brooks folded a napkin to demonstrate the loss of the hospital and the jobs that came with it, and then folded a napkin again to show the reduction in the city’s economic vitality.
“But they are so proud down here that I don’t think that in any way they’d want to share that. They’ve learned to do more with less,” Brooks said.
Bent County has a little more than 2,000 jobs and nearly a fourth of those are in agriculture, according to the state’s demography office. The lack of jobs is one reason rural Colorado counties have struggled to attract and keep residents.
At the Las Animas High School, posters showing each graduating class paint the picture of an exodus over the years. When Brooks graduated in 1956, his class had 76 students. In 2009, the graduating class was 22.
The Pueblo City Council wrote a letter to the governor opposing the prison closing. Its president, Ray Aguilera, said it’s important to maintain economic stability in rural towns to prevent them from becoming ghost towns.
“He can’t balance the budget on the backs of poor and small communities. It’s not fair,” Aguilar said of Hickenlooper’s plan.
Al Archuleta, 62, a Las Animas rancher, is among the residents who would be affected by the prison closing. He wife works there as a psychologist.
“And the girls that work under her, it’s going to affect them, too,” he said during breakfast Wednesday at the local “Tank N Tummy.” “I can see one person losing a job, but that many people, 204?”
