Remember the “6035” project? Remember “Dream City”? And whatever happened to those hundreds of fresh-faced community leaders that the Colorado Springs Leadership Institute has trained, graduated and sent on their way during the last decade?

I have good news for you! Dream City is alive, sort of, kept on life support by the occasional article in the Gazette. 6035 is apparently hibernating, ready to stun the world by announcing that they’ve hired someone to … well, implement some very important recommendations that will vastly improve our spiritless little burg. And as for all those leaders, they’re sooo ready to lead, and they’re especially willing to serve on committees that will consider important issues and produce important reports which will make important recommendations to which most of us will pay no attention.

That’s why there were more than 60 applicants to fill six seats on a city advisory committee which will consider the “ownership structure” of Memorial Health System. Presumably, the committee will meet, gather data, hear from the various players, and summarize its findings in carefully parsed bureaucratese.

The report will then become a part of our ongoing and historically futile debate over whether Memorial ought to remain in public ownership or sold to the highest bidder.

Advocates of selling the hospital system believe that the city has no reason to be in the health care business, or in any other business for that matter, and that such ownership confers few benefits upon city residents. They claim that a sale might net hundreds of millions for the city, and yet have little effect upon Memorial’s ability to provide care.

That’s debatable.

In health care, as in government, business and private life you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Any private entity buying the hospital will see an immediate increase in fixed costs, as the new owners are forced to refinance all of the hospital’s debt at higher rates. Being capitalists, they’ll want a return on their investment - and that can only be realized by raising prices and reducing uncompensated care. And who will pay the bills? That would be us.

But the argument over Memorial will go on, and will serve as one of many issues that distract us, and our hundreds - nay thousands! - of leaders from dealing with our city’s core dilemma, that being …

We love our entitlements! In common with welfare recipients before 1996, UAW members before the collapse of the domestic automobile industry, subprime loan recipients, and Wall Street bankers, we think that we can get something for nothing.

We want a prosperous, vibrant city, a spacious park system, a vital downtown, and an efficient, smoothly functioning city government - but we think that someone else should pay for these things. Our city council was so sure that we wouldn’t fund even essential governmental functions that they backdoored a stormwater fee in a futile attempt to outsmart the tightwad taxpayers.

Absent divine intervention, most city community centers and Rock Ledge Ranch will close in a few weeks. And unless our timid city council forces Colorado Springs Utilities to provide water at greatly reduced rates, our once-verdant city parks will be withered and sere.

Absent an aggressively funded Economic Development Corporation, we’ll fall farther and farther behind our peer cities, as the jobs and companies that would once have come to Colorado Springs are lured to Albuquerque, Omaha, Des Moines, Fort Collins…and even Pueblo!

Absent a focused community effort to diversify our economy and rebuild Downtown, South Nevada, South Academy, and the West Side, we’ll continue our slow decline.

The city doesn’t need leadership - it needs followership. A handful of sincere would-be leaders cannot easily reverse decades of Bruceite propaganda, which has led people to believe that taxes can always be lower, the government always has plenty of money, and that most politicians are lying weasels who just want your money.

What this means in practice is that brilliant governance, such as that provided during the last two years by county executive Jeff Green and our five county commissioners is largely unremarked, while the floundering incompetence of city council during the same period is seen as the norm.

Folks, don’t you think that we’ve wasted enough time? Let’s leave Memorial alone, and concentrate on our immediate problems.

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Posted by John Hazlehurst on January 25th, 2010 :: Filed under Blog
Tags :: 6035, City council county commission, Colorado Springs Leadership institute, Colorado Springs Utilities, dream city, Economic development Corporation, Memorial health systems

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We all want to know who’s in charge, don’t we? And it’s always interesting to speculate about possible candidates for the two most significant job vacancies in our fair city.

Who will the USOC hire as the new CEO of that quarrelsome, dysfunctional organization? And who’s in line to run the nascent 6035 project?

The word on the street (translated: four different people told me at the Chamber dinner) is that the 6035 job has been offered to Rocky Scott, the former CEO of the Economic Development Corp.

Rocky left town a few years back to work on a big real estate project in Larimer County which, like most such projects, is in abeyance due to the recession. It’s a move that might make sense for him, and would certainly give 6035 an instant dose of credibility and gravitas.

Other candidates might include Susan Edmondson, now executive director of the Bee Vradenburg Foundation, Bettina Swigger of COPPeR, or Annie Oatman-Gardner, who now runs Senator Bennet’s regional office. But none of those three formidable individuals are likely to leave their present jobs, so Rocky’s the obvious choice.

Clearly, the 6035 folks will be pilloried if they bring some smarty-pants hotshot from out of town to tell us recalcitrant locals what to do, so we can expect that the search (if there is one) will be confined to folks with deep roots in the community.

Among locals, Scott Blackmun is the only person who has any shot at being considered for the USOC job. Scott’s well-qualified and highly competent, but it’s an impossible position.  The USOC is no ordinary national non-profit, such as, for example, the Ford Foundation. It’s the Afghanistan of nonprofits, a bunch of feudal chieftains fighting over money, power, and territory.

Other than Bill Clinton or Dick Cheney, it’s hard to imagine a new CEO who could crack heads and repurpose the organization, and rebuild the Olympic brand. Both of those gentlemen are otherwise engaged, but I know someone who might be available-and she’ll be right here in town, ready to be interviewed, during Dec. 8. She’s an author, but she has some other relevant experience.

The fierce and formidable point guard herself, Sarah Barracuda!

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Posted by John Hazlehurst on November 25th, 2009 :: Filed under Blog
Tags :: 6035, USOC

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Utopia or dystopia?  What does the future hold for our city?  

How can we, individually and collectively, shape this community?  In endeavors such as Dream City, the 6035 project, and a dozen predecessors, we’ve asked ourselves the same question:  how do cities thrive?

Forty-eight years ago, Jane Jacobs published “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” 

In the book, she attacked the planners, bureaucrats, and urban brutalists whom, she believed, were ripping the heart out of American cities by imposing their own sterile modernist visions upon the complex, messy, unregulated chaos of the city. Her particular target: Robert Moses, who tore down whole neighborhoods in New York City to build freeways to serve suburban commuters.

Jacobs was too late to stop the tidal wave of urban renewal (AKA urban destruction) that swept across the country during the ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s. 

More than almost any city in America, Colorado Springs suffered from the “new brutalism.” 

Entire city blocks were leveled, including most of the city’s major historic structures. The architects of this disaster weren’t trying to rip the heart out Colorado Springs - they just wanted to build a shiny new city that would be convenient and modern, just like a suburban office park. 

Deluded fools, every one - right?  We’ve learned our lesson - right? 

We know now that we need to get the stuff back that we so casually ripped down a few decades back - downtown residential structures, retail density, vibrant street life, thriving small businesses, art galleries, convenient public transportation.

Trouble is, we’ve been trying to revive downtown for nearly three decades, with mixed success. Tejon Street looks good, but most everything else is suffering.

I don’t think we can revive downtown with half-measures. We need to make some big changes - and that doesn’t mean spending tens of millions in taxpayer funds to give a junkily designed renovated building to the USOC.

Here are some suggestions.

• Get rid of the parking lots. There are three enormous lots that are being held by owners sure that, sooner or later, the time will come to build a trophy high-rise. Here’s some news from the reality-based community: that time may never come. 
• Have the city/county act together to create a fat incentive package, deferring all manner of taxes, to encourage property owners to build low-rise commercial/residential structures on their vast sites.  And here’s a stick to go with the carrot: remove flat parking as a principal permitted use.
• Make downtown a special tax-exempt zone for both merchants and residents.  Just suspend the collection of sales/property tax for five years, and offer property owners/ residents the same break.  Do that, and watch the stores open, watch the lofts go up. And try to get the state to suspend the state income tax as well … we’d have a mini-Monaco!

Would it be fair, equitable, and logical policy?  No - but it’d sure work. 

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Posted by John Hazlehurst on November 24th, 2009 :: Filed under Uncategorized
Tags :: 6035, Colorado Springs, downtown parking lots, dream city, dystopia, Jane Jacobs, parking lots, Robert Moses, Tejon Street, the death and life of great american cities, Urban Renewal, utopia

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Our city’s leadership class has, as you may have noticed, a new Best Big Cool Friend - Austin, Texas.

That relationship is not unlike that of Vince and Drama on “Entourage”– the devastatingly cool movie star (Adrian Grenier) who allows the hopeful loser (Kevin Dillon) to hang out with him.

Our city’s power people would like Colorado Springs to be just as cool, just as popular, and just as rich as Austin. That’d be great, not just for regional businesses, but especially for the arts.

As one of the trip participants, the estimable Bettina Swigger of COPPeR, noted in her blog that Austin supports the arts in a big way. Bettina wrote that:

• Live Music contributes $616 million in economic impact and $11 million in local tax revenue
  There are 1,543 music-related businesses in Austin and 1,903 Austin music acts.
• The not-for-profit performing arts and visual arts generate $532 million in economic impact and $6 million in local tax revenue.
• The City of Austin provides nearly $5 million annually of the Hotel Occupancy Tax to contract with non-profit arts and cultural organizations for services rendered.
• Creative industries in Austin generate $2.2 billion in economic activity and create 44,000 permanent jobs.

Can we learn from Austin? The power people think so. They’ve contracted with an Austin firm, Angelou Economics, who charged us a big chunk o’ change to prepare the “6035″ study. And last Friday, the featured speaker at the well-attended annual banquet of the Chamber of Commerce was an Austin lawyer, Pike Powers, who has been a major player in Austin’s economic development efforts for many years.

But maybe the two cities are so dissimilar that we can neither learn from nor profit by Austin’s experiences.

Austin is a city of 760,000, the center of a metropolitan area of 1.7 million.

Like Colorado Springs, it has no major league sports teams-and that’s about where the similarities end.

Imagine a city that takes the best of Boulder, Denver, and Colorado Springs-and none of the bad stuff.

Austin has the state capitol, the best newspaper in Texas, the University of Texas, rational politics, a beautiful setting and an equable climate. Since the 1960s, Austin has had a reputation as a cool place to live-a place like Boston, San Francisco, Boulder, Marin County, Aspen, Miami, Charleston, or Santa Fe.

It’s famously quirky, but not nastily so. We have Focus, New Life, and Doug Bruce; Austin has SXSW, Austin City Limits, and Lance Armstrong. We’re about to ban homeless folks from camping along our polluted streams; Austin is the only city in Texas that has no ordinances forbidding women to appear topless in public.

We come close to matching Austin in a single category-Division I football teams. Our Air Force Falcons had a pretty good season, and they may well be invited to the Armed Forces Bowl. Undefeated and third-ranked Texas, which plays in the 100,000 seat Darryl Royal Stadium, may play for the national championship-and why not? They’ve won it four times.

Conclusion: Austin is a first-tier city, a powerfully vibrant metropolitan area with none of our handicaps. Vince can’t tell Drama how to become a devastatingly handsome chick magnet-he can only be a nice guy and let Drama follow him around like a lost puppy.

We’ll never be Austin.

Music? We couldn’t even keep 32 Bleu in business. Public funding for arts & culture? We’re closing the Pioneers Museum. Downtown skyscrapers springing from the ground? Our downtown parking lots have been vacant long enough to be nominated for the national register of historic places.

We’re not Austin-but we’re still a little bit cool. Maybe we could be some other city’s Best Big Cool Friend … Newark, New Jersey?

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Posted by John Hazlehurst on November 23rd, 2009 :: Filed under Blog
Tags :: 6035, Adrian Grenier, angelou economics, Austin, Bettina Swigger, Chamber of Commerce, COPPeR, Drama, economic development, Entourage, Kevin Dillon, Newark, Pike Powers, University of Texas, Vince

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