I came here for a couple reasons; and determined that this town blew it’s economic opportunities. I don’t have any doubt that your area is declining. If the defense budget impacts Colorado Springs via defense contracting jobs lost, I’ll bet that even Briargate will start decline. The leaders here simply don’t understand or perhaps don’t care that the future will not be like past. Small towns everywhere are struggling, while larger towns thrive. CS is likely going to get much smaller.

But while CS may be declining many other areas of the country are growing and doing well. We will be leaving by March to a state which is poised for strong growth, and it’s not Texas.

I lived in Georgia for awhile… I’ve seen how BRAC losses can literally KILL a town or city that depends too heavily on the military to support their local economy. But if you love something, you fight for it. This area does have its problems, but it’s got a lot going for it. I agree that we need to broaden our economic base, but in the short term, we need to fight as hard as we can to keep what we’ve got. That doesn’t stop us from at the same time looking at other strategies to diversify our economic base to protect us from possible negative BRAC outcomes. The all those old computer tech jobs that used to be here went to Asia, and anybody with half a brain knows that, so we need to look at OTHER areas, maybe consider taking a gamble on innovators and pioneers of new tech instead. Support research of alternative fuels and energy sources… new vehicles… inventors. If you don’t want to have to compete with cheap labor and call centers in Asia for the markets that are already out there, you have to look at the people here that are going to break NEW ground and take tech and innovation to the next level, creating NEW markets. Preferably “greener” ones, that might help break the stranglehold that oil has on our country. We COULD be the center for a new tech revolution. Our economy is already stagnant-to-declining, with a high unemployment rate, and now we have BRAC hanging over our heads… so we really don’t have a lot to lose by trying!

Interesting point about amendment 64, too… especially when I recall how much (and how serious!) violent crime was (allegedly) committed last year by DRUNKEN military servicemen. Cannabis is sooo evil… yeah, right. Alcohol is worse by orders of magnitude. I’ve never heard of someone getting high and then beating the tar out of their wife and kids, or stabbing someone 70+ times unless they were doing something else as well as cannabis. Unfortunately, the government has a nasty track record of heeding the hype and not looking at the actual hard data.

“Relative to other substance use, heavy drinking (i.e., consuming five or more drinks per typical drinking occasion at least once a week) appears to be a particularly persistent problem in the military. Although illicit drug use and cigarette smoking both decreased significantly over the period from 1980 to 2002, heavy alcohol use did not show the same decline. In fact, heavy alcohol use increased significantly from 1998 to 2002 for the first time since 1988 (Bray et al. 2003). In 2002, 27 percent of young adults (i.e., 18- to 25-year-olds) in the military reported heavy drinking, compared with only 8.9 percent of 26- to 55-year-olds (Bray et al. 2003). “