What Colorado Should Focus On

What are the big challenges we face?

I started thinking of this after my interview of Senator Simpson. What should the state be focused on improving?

Beautiful Apartment Buildings

First off, there are a number of government responsibilities I think we’re handling well. Yes they could be better. Yes they face funding shortfalls. But I would give them all an A or B. Stay on top of them, keep improving them, but we’re in decent shape. Or better.

• Transportation - We’ve pretty much got all the roads we need. While we could use a light rail extension up to Boulder, the bigger problem is we need more people using it. Which is in large part a zoning issue.

• Higher Ed - We’ve got a good University system from C.U. to the Community Colleges.

• K12 - These could be better but… for all the experiments and trials and studies no one seems to know what needs to be done to significantly improve K12.¹ So I give K12 a C and we should, like the rest of the country, keep trying to improve. But there is nothing we know will help.

• Public Safety - It’s like the dog that didn’t bark - you rarely hear of issues here. And when the police get something wrong, it hits the news.²

• Elections & Redistricting - We get an A on this. I’d prefer we passed the IRV initiative, but it wasn’t the year for that idea.

And again, I’m not saying the above are all perfect. I’m saying life is full of trade-offs and we need to focus on those items that are a big problem and where there are steps we can take to alleviate them. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

So here’s our big, improvable problems, in priority order:

1. Water - This is by far the biggest constraint on our state. We have five major and four smaller river basins in the state.³ And all are oversubscribed. By a lot. We’ve implemented most every thing we can do to reduce usage. And even with free energy, desalinization and piping water has its limits.⁴ At a minimum we’ll see farming & ranching reduced as the cities can pay more for water. This will increase in importance year after year.

2. Power & Decarbonization - We’re are also rapidly approaching power shortages. And the quick fix of more gas generators is not that quick as there is a multi-year backlog for the generators and the giant transformers they need. We also face the possibility of the state going in a brain dead direction making the problem worse.⁵ Unlike water this is very addressable, if we make the right choices.

3. Healthcare - Senator Simpson’s interview was an eye-opener on this. The state used 500M of COVID funds to address behavioral health issues. And it’s not clear it moved the needle. If we can improve this it means happier longer lives for citizens, more productive companies, less crime, … the list goes on and on.
   And like everywhere, we face the standard problems of rural hospitals closing, shortages of medical professionals in the urban core and rural areas, etc.
   On the good news side, this is an industry where A.I. is already providing better care at a reduced cost. We need to make maximum use of this. And we need to get aggressive on figuring out what works (do more) and what does not (stop spending).

4. Housing - If we have fewer bedrooms than we have people in an area - we will have homelessness. That’s simple math. Most cities desperately want to stop increased housing density. If they succeed, we will continue to make homes less and less affordable and both drive people to move elsewhere and increase homelessness.
   The state government, to its credit, has taken steps on this. What we really need is for city governments to, if not embrace, at least accept this need and address it. They don’t need to put a 30 story apartment complex in the middle of a tract of homes. But they do need to thoughtfully figure out where they can zone higher density residential.⁶

5. Safe Public Spaces - We have many public spaces that have been overrun by the homeless and drug addicted. There are many places where moms will no longer take their kids.⁷ This is a giant problem because citizens view the #1 job of the state is to provide safety. Every time someone sees places they no longer feel safe going to, they feel the government is not fulfilling this basic duty.

Think about it. If we significantly addressed the above 5 issues, the people of the state would view this as a giant success. And they would view the government as an entity making their lives significantly better.⁸

In addition, money is not a giant factor here.⁹ This is in some cases implementing what we know will work. In other cases it means we first have to figure out what will improve things, and then try it.

For those that disagree with me, what would you set as the 5 (or fewer) issues the state should focus on? Not add to, but replace because if everything is a priority, nothing is.¹⁰

1. I will likely get a ton of comments disagreeing saying all we have to do is X. The thing is, each comment will have a different X with no proof that it will work on a wide scale.

2. And like my comment on K12, this will likely get some strong disagreements. Although for public safety, they might tend to be items that have a proven track record.

3. Water Education Colorado

4. For the Colorado River we could put a nuclear plant and desalinization plant in Los Angeles, give them that water, and then take more from the Colorado River. But the same trick won’t work for the other rivers because of where they go.

5. On The Highway to Energy Poverty

6. As an example, Boulder could allow higher housing East of 30th and North of Arapahoe.

7. Example - the Boulder Creek path

8. Maybe view government so positively, they’ll vote to eliminate TABOR.

9. For water, significant increases may require a giant spend. But for the rest, money is not the biggest issue.

10. One time I interviewed Governor Ritter and asked him for hist top 3 priorities. He answered “jobs, jobs, jobs.” His point was that with unemployment up, that needed to be the singular focus of the state.