Our legislature managed to adjourn earlier this month without fulfilling its constitutional duty to draw up our seven congressional districts to reflect the most recent census.
The matter may be resolved by the courts, as was the case after the 2000 Census (despite the “midnight gerrymander” attempted by Republicans in the state Senate), or perhaps an expensive special session of the legislature might be convened this summer.
Now, all I’ve really cared about is getting Chaffee County, where I live, out of the 5th Congressional District, which is dominated by Colorado Springs. To be sure, El Paso County is about as Republican as your average country club, but the problem with being in the 5th isn’t partisan.
It’s that the Springs is so dominant that our representative can happily ignore the rest of the district — the rural areas added on to equalize population. The Springs is a military town, and as long as the representative keeps that defense pork arriving, he’s assured of re-election until he’s caught in bed with a dead girl or live goat.
He can safely ignore the rest of the district. Perhaps the current representative, Doug Lamborn, has visited this county since taking office in 2007, but if so, I’ve missed it. Every so often there’s a robocall promoting a “telephone town meeting” — whatever that might be — with him, but seldom if ever does he actually show his face in the mountains, where at the federal level we worry more about public-lands issues than troop levels at Fort Carson.
This isn’t really partisan. When we were in the 3rd District in the 1990s, our representative was Republican Scott McInnis. He came through with some frequency. Once, after I’d joked that you were more likely to see a UFO than your congressman, he showed up on my porch one night and announced “Hi, Ed, I came down from Mars.”
Though I had my differences with McInnis on matters like the great railroad merger, he did a decent job of representing this area, whereas we’re invisible to Lamborn. Even the Chaffee County Republicans support getting us out of the 5th.
Most of the proposed maps accomplished that, but a couple of them inspired some derisive commentary because they put Boulder and Grand Junction in the same district, and they are so different from each other.
Granted, Grand Junction is Republican and Boulder is Democratic. Boulder’s a beer town and Grand Junction a wine town. But they have quite a bit in common, too, beyond the fact that I find it difficult to find anything when driving in either city.
Both prospered and suffered from the Atomic Energy Commission during the Cold War, with Grand Junction mining and milling uranium and Boulder building nuclear-bomb triggers at Rocky Flats. Both sit amid irrigated agriculture. One sits near a national park, the other by a national monument. Both enjoy recreation on nearby public lands. Both have colleges.
In other words, they have at least as much in common as Grand Junction and Pueblo, which despite sitting 280 miles apart, have been in the same congressional district for at least 20 years without noticeable complaints about a mismatch.
Colorado towns can sit pretty close together and still be quite different from each other. Just about any conceivable congressional map would put Cortez and Durango in the same district — but one’s a mecca for environmentalism while in the other the sheriff threatens to arrest U.S. Forest Service personnel for closing roads to vehicles. In my county, Buena Vista trends Republican while Salida leans Democratic.
Colorado is a diverse place, and our congressional districts should reflect that, rather than be dominated by one population center that isn’t quite big enough to be a district all on its own, as is the case for the current 5th District.
Freelance columnist Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Post.
