by Jonathan Hiskes
Courtesy Jasen Miller via FlickrCivic-minded urbanist
types like to experiment with collective projects. Apparently, so do people who don’t
like civic projects, taxes, public parks, pools, police officers, or
firefighters. Famously anti-tax Colorado Springs launched an astounding
experiment this year:
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs
will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The
city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat
cops—dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week,
replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to
local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two
weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by
July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a
handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding
to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay
for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet
only about 10 percent of the need.
Call it place-unmaking.
Towns across the nation are watching, as many of them are facing budget
shortfalls as severe as Colorado Springs’.
The Atlantic Wire has
an interesting
roundup of reactions to the project, though most are fairly ideologically
predictable. Conservative blogger and Colorado Springs resident Michelle Malkin
writes,
“Self-reliance. Privatization. Thrift. Fiscal accountability. The liberals
in Denver and Washington could learn something from our Mountain West spirit if
they could just get over their Colorado Springs Derangement Syndrome.”
Eric Martin writes,
“When one of the two major political parties wages tax jihad and demonizes
government and its appendages … people no longer grasp the extent to which
government services actually ensure a certain standard of living, not to
mention economic opportunity.”
Others note that
Colorado’s second-largest city continues to receive plenty of taxpayer money
through the U.S. Air Force Academy, four other military installations, and
heavyweight defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
It’ll be fascinating (and
disturbing?) to see how this works out in the coming months and years. That will
require Actual Reporting on how the slashed public services affect residents of
all social classes. Here’s hoping there are journalists left to cover it.
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