 On Point Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes his On Point column most weekdays. He is also an author and freelance writer. Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com. |
June 2007 | Main | August 2007
“I think we need to work together to minimize sprawl. It’s a desirable end to keep the urbanized area as compact as possible.”
— Lone Tree Mayor Jack O’Boyle, Rocky Mountain News, July 28.
O’Boyle expresses the dominant view among metro political and civic leaders, not to mention planners. Hardly a week goes by without some local luminary making a similar point in the press regarding the evils of sprawl.
“I think we need to work together to minimize sprawl. It’s a desirable end to keep the urbanized area as compact as possible.”
—Lone Tree Mayor Jack O’Boyle, Rocky Mountain News, July 28.
O’Boyle expresses the dominant view among metro political and civic leaders, not to mention planners. Hardly a week goes by without some local luminary making a similar point in the press regarding the evils of sprawl.
One day it will be Mike Komppa, head of the Urban Land Institute Colorado, arguing that “people don’t want sprawl, and if you’re not going to sprawl, you’re going to have to grow vertically” — even if it goes against the wishes of neighborhoods, he goes on to suggest.
Another day it will be Michael Potts, chief of the Rocky Mountain Institute, congratulating himself for having moved from a “big suburban house” to a high-rise.
Or we read a column by the executive directors of the Colorado Environmental Coalition and the Front Range Economic Strategy Center regretting that “urban sprawl in California and our metro region has created an auto-dependent society leaving people no choice but to drive to work, the grocery store, and to pick up their children . ."
For years I’ve made the case that urban expansion is neither good nor bad but a matter of trade-offs — yes, it chews up some farmland, for example, but it also lowers housing prices. Sprawl is also inevitable, I’ve maintained, in any society whose affluence and population are growing.
Until recently, however, I’d missed the best single book written on the topic: Sprawl, a compact history (2005), by Professor Robert Bruegmann of the University of Illinois at Chicago. If our civic leaders would just bother to read it, their comments might not sound so glib and canned.
They would learn, for example, that people have always complained about growing cities. “Queen Elizabeth attempted to try to halt growth around London by issuing an edict prohibiting building at the edges of the city,” Bruegmann writes, while other European monarchs made similar futile efforts.
Nor is sprawl simply a result of the automobile.
In the United States, “The Los Angeles region had become one of the most decentralized, dispersed, multicentered urban places the world had seen already by the time of the First World War, well before the impact of the private automobile was felt in any really significant way. It was the steam railroad, the cable car, the streetcar, and the interurban rail system” — precisely the forms of transit that critics of sprawl love — “that had made this possible.”
It is mobility and prosperity that propel people to pursue their housing dreams outside of the urban core. And while autos obviously help, what’s striking about sprawl is its continuity: density declined “from nearly 60,000 [per square mile in developments on the outskirts of U.S. cities] in the late 19th century to less than 25,000 in the 1920s to less than 10,000 in the 1950s, a remarkably longterm and steady progression.”
A similar process has been at work around the world, including in cities erroneously hailed by critics of sprawl for supposedly bucking the trend. “The population of the central arrondissements of Paris . . . which had reached over 200,000 people per square mile by the mid-19th century, had dropped below 75,000 people per square mile by the year 2000,” Bruegmann notes. Meanwhile, residents of the massive, low-density Parisian suburbs rely on the private car almost as much as their supposedly car-obsessed U.S. counterparts.
Perhaps the biggest irony of the anti-sprawl mantra is how it misses current reality in America. “Today, densities are rising in at least half of the largest urbanized areas,” Bruegmann notes, a statement that clearly applies to parts of Denver. And while planners would like to take credit, the change is driven largely by demand for in-town housing by individuals with a host of motives.
Los Angeles has actually been getting denser for decades. As Bruegmann says, “The density of the Los Angeles urbanized area, as calculated in the 2000 census, was just over 7,000 people per square mile, nearly twice that of the Chicago urbanized area and significantly denser than the New York area.”
Yes, Los Angeles is in fact the high-density model that local proponents of “growing vertically” seem to have in mind for Denver, even as they profess the opposite. In my next column, I’ll tell you what else the anti-sprawl chorus typically gets wrong.
Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
What’s with The Denver Post and Adolf Eichmann?
On Tuesday, the Post explained Ward Churchill’s use of the term “little Eichmanns” as a “reference to Nazi figure Adolf Eichmann, who some historians have speculated wasn’t anti-Semitic but was an ambitious foot soldier for an evil cause.”
On Wednesday, the paper defined “little Eichmanns” as “mindless bureaucrats in a larger campaign like World War II war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who helped manage the logistics of the Nazis’ mass exterminations.”
And on Thursday, yet another article dubbed Eichmann “a World War II Nazi technocrat.”
What’s with The Denver Post and Adolf Eichmann?
On Tuesday, the Post explained Ward Churchill’s use of the term “little Eichmanns” as a “reference to Nazi figure Adolf Eichmann, who some historians have speculated wasn’t anti-Semitic but was an ambitious foot soldier for an evil cause.”
On Wednesday, the paper defined “little Eichmanns” as “mindless bureaucrats in a larger campaign like World War II war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who helped manage the logistics of the Nazis’ mass exterminations.”
And on Thursday, yet another article dubbed Eichmann “a World War II Nazi technocrat.”
Eichmann was no mere foot soldier, mindless bureaucrat or technocrat, although that is what he wished the world to believe at his trial in Israel in 1961. Regrettably, the philosopher Hannah Arendt famously reinforced this interpretation — “the banality of evil” was her memorable phrase — in her writings of the time.
Yet such descriptions trivialize Eichmann’s contribution to the Final Solution, as well as Churchill’s invoking his name. Yes, Eichmann was a superb bureaucrat — tireless, efficient and thorough, keeping his head below the radar — but he was also much more.
Far from being a foot soldier, Eichmann was chief of the Gestapo’s Jewish office in charge of implementing the annihilation of an entire people. He was one of the few privileged Nazi insiders asked to attend the Wannsee Conference in 1942, which formalized the extermination policy and where he functioned as confidante to the vicious Reinhard Heydrich, who chaired the proceedings.
As the war progressed, he hectored his colleagues and subordinates in the death machine toward greater efforts, deploring any lost opportunity to sweep up remaining Jews. Near the war’s end when he was overseeing deportations from Hungary, he even disputed Heinrich Himmler’s attempt to step back from genocide in time to cover the killers’ tracks. This from a man who denied any dislike for Jews!
Here is what the Israeli court that found him guilty of crimes against humanity said of his “just-following-orders” claim:
“We reject absolutely the accused’s version that he was nothing more than a ‘small cog’ in the extermination machinery. We find that in the .. . central authority dealing with the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, the accused was at the head of those engaged in carrying out the Final Solution. In fulfilling this task, the accused acted in accordance with general directives from his superiors, but there still remained to him wide powers of discretion which extended also to the planning of operations on his own initiative. He was not a puppet in the hands of others; his place was among those who pulled the strings.”
Why such a big deal about these distinctions? So that we remain faithful to history, of course. But also so that we understand the meaning of “little Eichmanns.” If someone calls you that, he’s not equating you to a mindless foot soldier in an ugly cause. He’s comparing you to an architect of genocide.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at Carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
My Denver neighborhood has been hit by a few burglaries over the past two summers in which the thief uses the same M.O. He slips into a back yard shortly after dark when he believes no one is home and breaks a window to gain entry.
My Denver neighborhood has been hit by a few burglaries over the past two summers in which the thief uses the same M.O. He slips into a back yard shortly after dark when he believes no one is home and breaks a window to gain entry.
How do I know this? My local homeowners association updates neighbors via e-mail, complete with recommendations on how to protect our homes and a contact at the local district police station to call in case of suspicious activity.
It’s a useful service, which is why I was happy to hear Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper announce, in his State of the City address Tuesday, that “we will continue to expand public access to safety data, so residents can be true partners in working with us to improve the safety of their neighborhoods.”
The city already provides a lot of crime data on its Web site — including neighborhood rankings, a breakdown of offenses, the trend over the past two years and locations of “hot spots” within each community.
Still, Hickenlooper is right that Denver can and should do more — as could every other metro city.
To get an idea of how crime data can be sliced and diced into clear and easy-to-digest tables, check out chicagocrime.org, a private and “freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago.”
Want a list of all crimes on the 1000 block of West Addison Street — or any other block in the city — during any recent period, complete with a day by day log of color-coded offenses? Done.
Want to see all crimes reported within two, four or eight blocks of that location? Or perhaps you seek a breakdown of crimes, say, on a particular date, or a list of their occurrence by the hour?
How about a list of aggravated assaults, attempted robberies, sexual assaults — whatever — with a map pinpointing their location? Chicagocrime.org sorts offenses by police district, ward, ZIP code — you name it — and the presentation is readable and clean.
If Hickenlooper seeks “new and innovative public safety partnerships at the neighborhood level,” one way to start is by giving citizens the data to educate themselves about every aspect of the threat.
Win-win in Piñon Canyon?
Would someone explain how the Army can “go back to the drawing board” on its plans for tripling the size of the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site in southeastern Colorado, “craft a land acquisition approach representing a ‘win-win’ solution” that only deals with “willing sellers,” and still achieve its goals?
Are landowners with the misfortune to live within the footprint of the project simply lying when they talk to reporters or appear at public meetings and vow never to voluntarily sell?
Were those who testified against the expansion earlier this year at the legislature pulling the public’s leg?
If not, how can the acting secretary of the Army talk about a “win-win” solution with “willing sellers,” as he did in a letter to Colorado senators last week, and expect to be taken seriously?
It is true, as The Denver Post noted in an editorial this week, that some people who formally reject condemnation of their property covertly embrace it because of its tax advantages. In other words, the use of eminent domain can be an amicable process benefiting both parties. But surely no such game is being played by vocal landowners in southern Colorado.
If you welcome condemnation, you don’t organize campaigns to stop the very project that guarantees it will occur.
The acting secretary’s pledge “to go back to the drawing board on (the Army’s) land acquisition approach” is being hailed in some quarters, such as Sen. Ken Salazar’s office, and perhaps those celebrating are right. But you have to wonder what possible “win-win” solution exists that can satisfy the one side in this conflict that merely wants to be left alone.
Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Posted by denver-admin at 12:31 AMAndrew Romanoff sounds very much like a man committed to getting the attention of the Chinese government. The Democratic speaker of the Colorado House even uttered the word “jail” Tuesday at a press conference where he promised to raise the Darfur genocide with Chinese officials when he arrives in that country on Saturday.
He’s “willing, not expecting” to be arrested, Romanoff explained.
Andrew Romanoff sounds very much like a man committed to getting the attention of the Chinese government. The Democratic speaker of the Colorado House even uttered the word “jail” Tuesday at a press conference where he promised to raise the Darfur genocide with Chinese officials when he arrives in that country on Saturday.
He’s “willing, not expecting” to be arrested, Romanoff explained.
Was he going to pull some sort of stunt, I inquired afterward, thinking of the Boulder woman who unfurled a banner three months ago at a Mount Everest base camp demanding “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008.” She was arrested and later expelled.
He wasn’t sure what he would do, Romanoff replied. But if you believe that the killing in Darfur is “the central moral crisis of our time,” he insisted, you don’t sit quietly by.
Romanoff is part of a growing international campaign determined to shame China into ending its support for a Sudanese regime responsible for the Darfur slaughter.
The campaign plans to do this in part by highlighting Chinese hypocrisy: At the same time they’re preparing to host the 2008 Olympics with the theme “One World, One Dream,” they’re helping to obliterate the dreams of the people of Darfur.
If China doesn’t change course, Romanoff said, “we will be forced to bring Darfur to the Olympic games.”
Your taxes aren’t at issue here, by the way. Romanoff will be on a private tour, arranged by the Aspen Institute, with elected officials from across the country. Institute officials may have been as surprised as the Chinese when Romanoff tipped them to his agenda and his stated hope of enlisting his fellow travelers in the cause.
How quixotic is this campaign? As with any attempt to embarrass the Chinese government, it’s a long shot — although not nearly as hopeless as the cause of a free Tibet.
Romanoff expects that the Chinese, presented with a choice between having their prized Olympics sullied by international censure and abandoning a vicious ally in Africa, will do the right thing. He may be wrong. Yet as we’ve seen with the recent execution of China’s corrupt former chief food and drug regulator, Beijing does in fact occasionally care about the image it projects abroad.
Wanted: Diverse ideas
There isn’t a great deal of diversity on the Denver City Council — at least not the kind that counts most in politics, which is diversity of competing ideas. But so long as Jeanne Faatz holds a seat, the tradition of dissent will remain alive and well.
Faatz was at it again Monday night, reminding her colleagues that sometimes they need to cut expenditures instead of only hiking them.
“At a time when we are going to be thinking about asking citizens to raise taxes,” Faatz said, referring to a huge infrastructure package headed for this fall’s ballot, “it certainly isn’t the time to give money away for a very low priority.”
Such as? Spending a quarter million dollars for an endowment for public-access TV.
It’s a small outlay as these things go, of course, but instructive. At a time when YouTube, blogs and other technologies give individuals the power to publish and broadcast on their own, subsidizing anything to do with public- access TV should be passé. But just try telling that to the Denver council: Only two other members — Charlie Brown and Michael Hancock — joined Faatz in voting no.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
It’s been so dry up in Montana recently, remarked Brandon Scarborough when I reached him Monday in Bozeman, that the forests there may be emitting as much carbon as they’re storing. If that sounds like an odd thing to say, you need to know that Scarborough just wrote a paper titled “Trading Forest Carbon: A Panacea or Pipe Dream to Address Climate Change?” that was the reason for my phone call.
It’s been so dry up in Montana recently, remarked Brandon Scarborough when I reached him Monday in Bozeman, that the forests there may be emitting as much carbon as they’re storing. If that sounds like an odd thing to say, you need to know that Scarborough just wrote a paper titled “Trading Forest Carbon: A Panacea or Pipe Dream to Address Climate Change?” that was the reason for my phone call.
“Some researchers have concluded that large-scale forestry projects in the United States have the potential to sequester roughly one-third of annual domestic (carbon dioxide) emissions,” Scarborough noted in his report. Yet his analysis of the scientific literature fails to bear this out. Far from it. “Assuming that all 116 million acres of land suitable for forest growth . . . . were planted . . . . the new forests would offset approximately 7.5 percent of annual emissions,” this economist at the Property and Environment Research Center concluded.
Sounds as if planting new forests to offset carbon emissions is neither a panacea nor a pipe dream. Scarborough agrees, up to a point. But he thinks green-minded investors — especially those who casually purchase “carbon offsets” involving forestry plans — need to be aware of the immense uncertainties involved.
A credible market in carbon offsets depends, first of all, on realistic estimates, which are not so easy to come by. Forests in different regions don’t even soak up carbon at the same rate. Meanwhile, the projects have to be closely monitored for decades to ensure that their owners don’t cheat by failing to report fire, disease, logging and other disturbances.
“In the end,” he writes, “given the costs and uncertainties of commodifying forest carbon, future risks of carbon losses, and the unlikely event that forestry will play a significant role in a national emissions reduction program, one has to ask: Is it really worth it?”
It so happens that tropical forests build up carbon stocks at much faster rates than forests in temperate climates. But, of course, the long-term uncertainties for forestry projects in most equatorial nations are even greater than they are here.
Memo to the Times: Huh?
When government researchers asked men convicted of downloading child pornography if they’d ever abused kids sexually, 85 percent said yes, according to an unpublished study revealed last week by The New York Times.
Big news, obviously. Many kiddie porn fans are not just depraved, it turns out, they’re active predators. But wait: Such a conclusion is much too simple for the Times, whose story shifted to what may be the strangest paragraph published anywhere this year.
“Yet others say that the results, while significant, risk tarring some men unfairly,” the article said. “The findings, based on offenders serving prison time who volunteered for the study, do not necessarily apply to the large and diverse group of adults who have at some point downloaded child pornography, and whose behavior is far too variable to be captured by a single survey.”
The “large and diverse group of adults who have at some point downloaded child pornography” are lawbreakers who stoke the demand for a product that can be created only by exploiting, abusing and traumatizing children — but by all means, let’s not “risk tarring” them “unfairly.”
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
If it’s hot and dry, it’s ozone weather.
Know how hard it will be to reduce ozone if metro Denver falls out of compliance with federal standards this summer? Or if the Environmental Protection Agency actually tightens those standards in the near future?
As it happens, both propositions appear likely.
The non-technical answer is that it will be very difficult to reduce ozone — but not necessarily for the reasons you’ve been led to believe.
If it’s hot and dry, it’s ozone weather.
Know how hard it will be to reduce ozone if metro Denver falls out of compliance with federal standards this summer? Or if the Environmental Protection Agency actually tightens those standards in the near future?
As it happens, both propositions appear likely.
The non-technical answer is that it will be very difficult to reduce ozone — but not necessarily for the reasons you’ve been led to believe.
Consider this startling fact: Both across the country and on the Front Range, ozone concentrations appear to be higher generally on weekends than during the week.
According to a study finished just last month by two California researchers and Doug Lawson, a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden who sits on the state Air Quality Control Commission, peak ozone levels at monitors along the Front Range have produced mostly higher readings on Sundays than on Wednesdays.
Think about that. Wouldn’t you expect the opposite? Wouldn’t you expect ozone to be higher on days when our vehicles are spewing lots more pollutants — especially ozone “precursors,” as they’re called — into the atmosphere?
But as Lawson points out (and as he and others have explained in previously published research), the mix of pollutants may be at least as important as their total quantity.
So while there are fewer hydrocarbons polluting the air on Sundays than on Wednesdays, the decline in nitrogen oxides(NOx) is even steeper because so many diesel trucks and buses are off the road.
And because of the way hydrocarbons and NOx react together, ozone tends to form earlier on weekends and grow more concentrated.
Why does this matter? In part because you will often hear that if we just reduced overall driving, it would solve the ozone problem. Yet that’s not necessarily so.
Also, current federal emission rules are projected to reduce NOx emissions proportionally more than hydrocarbons over the next few years.
Oops.
Finally, the Ritter administration is pushing the use of E-85 fuel (85 percent ethanol), which will also add to the ozone problem.
Oops again.
Some suggest we crack down on oil and gas development in and around Weld County. Trouble is, the Air Quality Control Commission has already lowered the boom there; meanwhile, it’s not even clear that such energy production contributes much to ozone.
After all, as Paul Tourangeau, director of the state’s Air Pollution Control Division, confirmed when I spoke with him recently, there is no significant trend in metro Denver ozone levels between 1996 and 2006 — a period, you’ll notice, that includes the energy boom.
Ozone levels have fluctuated “within a band,” Tourangeau said, driven heavily by meteorology. The years 1998 and 2003 were particularly bad, for example.
Alarmingly, Tourangeau observed that ozone at levels of 40 to 50 parts per billion sometimes drifts in from out of state. With the EPA considering a standard of 70 parts per billion, no wonder he says “this is going to be a challenge.”
So what can be done?
California’s experience suggests that state regulators may opt to punish us all. They could mandate expensive “boutique” fuel blends, for example, and tighten tailpipe standards, though neither tactic delivers much punch.
Their other instinct will be to nag: Don’t mow or fill your gas tank until the evening; go easy on the charcoal lighter fluid; keep those paint cans covered. Take the train.
Lawson and others familiar with the data are skeptical of these tactics and have long preferred targeting high-emitting vehicles, a small minority of the total fleet that contributes a large share of the total hydrocarbon pollution from mobile sources.
“A single high emitter is the annual equivalent of dumping 25 gallons of gasoline on your driveway and letting it evaporate,” he told me.
Colorado is beginning a high-emitter program, but it’s a pale shadow of what it could be if we were serious about vehicles that run dirty. Winston Churchill once quipped that “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing .. . . after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”
Let’s hope he’s not right once again.
Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Noticing that hikers and bikers are the only people who enjoy Cherry Creek through an important stretch of downtown, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper had a brainstorm: Why not move Speer Boulevard so that it no longer straddles Cherry Creek?
Noticing that hikers and bikers are the only people who enjoy Cherry Creek through an important stretch of downtown, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper had a brainstorm: Why not move Speer Boulevard so that it no longer straddles Cherry Creek?
Better yet, why not bury it, too, or at least put it below grade? As the mayor told the Rocky Mountain News editorial board Monday, it’s possible that the sale of development rights along the creek could even pay for the re-location.
This fledgling idea had hardly taken wing, however, before a columnist at The Denver Post loaded her birdshot.
“The key to connecting Auraria — isolated from downtown by speeding, eight-lane traffic — is to celebrate the street that’s there,” wrote Susan Barnes- Gelt. “Strategies include reducing the number or width of lanes, widening sidewalks, adding tree canopies and street furniture, enhancing pedestrian intersections and creating adjacencies that engage the public. .. . Improving connections and access begins with recognizing Speer Boulevard as, first and foremost, a public place. This street is more than a linear space designed to move vehicles and goods. Speer Boulevard must be viewed as integral to the civic realm . . . Let us come to praise Speer — not to bury it.”
Since I’m not fluent in New Urban-speak, I have no idea what a lot of that jargon means. But I think the gist is this: If we just strangle traffic, plant more trees and think lovely thoughts, Speer Boulevard can become whatever we want it to be.
Somehow I doubt it. If you’re standing in front of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, for example, there’s a multi-lane road between you and Cherry Creek. Like it or not, that means the park-like expanse of greenery extending from the center will never be a popular destination, as it would be if it were connected to the creek.
Don’t be put off, mayor. Your idea may never fly, but it’s at least worth a closer look.
Absence of nuance
In the debate over health-care reform, nuance is usually the first casualty.
“Since Sept. 11, 2001, approximately 14 million Americans have died,” declared law professor Paul Campos in his July 10 Rocky column. “Some of these people,” he added melodramatically, “died agonizing deaths on emergency room floors because they didn't have health insurance.”
Not so, retorted Mark Griffith in a Speakout rebuttal. “Can Campos name a few persons who died this way? No, because it is nonsense!”
Griffith is surely correct that most ER docs have not abandoned the Hippocratic oath. But every advanced health-care system does have its trade-offs. Campos might have nailed his point if he’d been content to argue that the uninsured occasionally die because they fail to seek treatment in time.
Of course, even the vaunted French system that now seems to be the model of choice among advocates of government-guaranteed health care boasts far-from-perfect outcomes. As in every national system, for example, the French ration treatment (although not as clumsily as the British and Canadians).
Meanwhile, the much maligned U.S. system seems to have superior outcomes for cancer patients, pushes new, lifesaving drugs to market faster than its European counterparts and, as the Manhattan Institute’s Paul Howard pointed out in a recent column in The Washington Post, boasts an unmatched “commitment to the treatment of patients with rare diseases.”
Unfortunately, such nuances will be absent in next year’s political debate over health-care reform, when the rhetoric will all be black and white — when it isn’t simply an angry shade of red.
Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv @RockyMountainNews.com.
Posted by denver-admin at 12:56 AM | Comments (5)Is Mayor John Hickenlooper afraid to mix it up? Does his pursuit of popularity trump his principles?
Does the mayor, in short, like too much to be liked?
Is Mayor John Hickenlooper afraid to mix it up? Does his pursuit of popularity trump his principles?
Does the mayor, in short, like too much to be liked?
Andrew Wallach is not the first person to offer this critique of Hickenlooper, but the former administration consultant who worked as well for the previous two mayors might be uniquely placed to reach this judgment.
“As soon as anybody pushes back, he just goes into default position, which is the status quo,” Wallach told The Denver Post.
Wallach is undoubtedly correct that Hickenlooper prizes his popularity and values political consensus. The mayor even confessed as much in his inaugural address Monday.
“As every good restaurateur learns, there is no margin in having enemies,” he quipped.
You can see how this attitude might occasionally be a handicap, too: in reforming a balky bureaucracy, for example, or getting rid of feckless appointees.
But Wallach chose a lousy example, as it happens, to prove his point: He cited the fact that the mayor had heeded the concerns of the real-estate community and distanced himself from the Greenprint Denver Advisory Council’s recommendation that sellers be forced to retrofit their homes for energy efficiency at the time of sale.
Costly local mandates in the name of slowing global warming are precisely the sort of initiatives for which the mayor should be seeking the widest possible support before marching forward. A task force dedicated to a single goal — “sustainability” — may well overlook the full effects of a seemingly attractive idea. Why rush to judgment when there is plenty of time to reach out and attempt to find an alternative that appeals across the board?
Admittedly, equating political leadership with running a restaurant may not be the best idea. If you’re in the public arena and haven’t managed to cultivate at least a few serious enemies, it sometimes means you don’t stand for much.
Still, I’d rather have a consensus builder as mayor than a bully any day. Former Gov. Roy Romer once pledged to “roll over” and “crush” those who opposed building Denver International Airport — a George Patton moment he had trouble living down.
Voters admire strong leaders, but they also bitterly resent leaders who refuse to listen. As they should.
Higher-ed’s nouveau riche
When Gordon Gee left Ohio State in 1997, he was making $232,000 as its president, according to The Associated Press.
Last week he returned to the same job — for the tidy package of $775,000 in annual salary plus $225,000 a year in deferred compensation if he sticks around for five years.
In other words, the former University of Colorado chief will make $1 million a year. As a public servant, remember.
Yes, the drumbeat of alarm over soaring corporate salaries has been so loud in recent years — sometimes for good reason — it has obscured the fact of ballooning compensation for the elite in other fields, too. Salaries of a half-million dollars are commonplace for the presidents of public research institutions and public-college systems. And salaries at many private universities are even higher. Gee actually took a pay cut to move from Vanderbilt back to Ohio State.
Here in Colorado, fortunately, we’re not quite so extravagant. CU president Hank Brown has a package of $378,000 in salary ($18,000 of which he donates back to the university) and a $49,500 housing allowance, while CU-Boulder Chancellor G.P. “Bud” Peterson earns $356,830.
Chump change, obviously, in the nouveau riche world of higher education.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
Max Karson’s lawyer is pleased, and no wonder. His client is being permitted to return to the University of Colorado campus despite having given his best classroom impression earlier this year of an unstable nut.
Max Karson’s lawyer is pleased, and no wonder. His client is being permitted to return to the University of Colorado campus despite having given his best classroom impression earlier this year of an unstable nut.
“We are extremely pleased that the university recognized that Max never intended to make anyone afraid or uncomfortable and, for that reason, it has decided to hold his summary suspension in abeyance,” said attorney Daniel Williams. “It is critical that when professors ask students questions during class discussions, the students are permitted to express their views and are not hauled off to jail just because those views are unpopular.”
Yes, counselor, students shouldn’t be hauled off to jail just because their views are unpopular, or even universally despised. Karson’s arrest in April on a misdemeanor charge of interfering with staff and students was surprising and should be dropped. But that doesn’t mean CU erred in booting Karson from the campus until it could assess whether he posed a threat.
Karson wasn’t punished merely because the views he expressed in class were unpopular. They were alarming, at least to a few students.
Shortly after the mass murders at Virginia Tech, according to witnesses, Karson declared that “if anyone in here says they’ve never been so angry that you wanted to kill 32 people, you’re lying.” He stormed on in this disturbing vein, at one point saying, according to the Boulder Daily Camera, that “the basement room \[where the class was held\] with fluorescent lights and the unfinished wall make him angry enough to kill people.”
If you’d just been saturated with stories about how the Virginia Tech murderer came across as a weird, menacing presence in class, wouldn’t you find Karson’s comments unnerving?
University officials have no business trying to cull students with unpopular or provocative views from the classroom. But weeding out intimidating or scary weirdos is a different proposition.
After all, it’s possible for a student to express understanding of the rage that might drive a young loner like the Virginia Tech killer to crack without also implying that the speaker himself is teetering on the edge.
After investigating the Karson affair, the university decided to give him another chance. Fine. He probably deserves it. But let’s not try to twist his ordeal into a case of classroom censorship.
No. 1 with a bullet
China obviously believes that the execution of its former chief food and drug regulator this week for taking bribes will shore up its damaged reputation abroad. It will show, in the words of The New York Times, that China is “serious about improving the safety of Chinese products.”
Somebody please tell the Chinese leadership that the swift execution of Zheng Xiaoyu is almost as shocking to most Westerners as the fact that cough syrup and toothpaste imported from China contained diethylene glycol, a prime component of antifreeze.
Zheng may have been as corrupt as they come, but putting a bullet in his head only confirms China’s reputation as a nation that tolerates extremes, whether in the contents of its exports or its criminal justice.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Chester Finn is one of those people whose breadth of accomplishment leaves most of us lesser souls shaking our heads: At one time or another, he’s been a top federal bureaucrat, assistant to the president, professor, educational entrepreneur, author of many books and foundation director.
An all-around smart guy, in other words.
I’ve known Finn for 20 years, but for the first time I must unhappily report that he’s utterly off base. His well-intended defense in these pages last week of Christine Johnson, the ousted president of the Community College of Denver, misses the point.
Chester Finn is one of those people whose breadth of accomplishment leaves most of us lesser souls shaking our heads: At one time or another, he’s been a top federal bureaucrat, assistant to the president, professor, educational entrepreneur, author of many books and foundation director.
An all-around smart guy, in other words.
I’ve known Finn for 20 years, but for the first time I must unhappily report that he’s utterly off base. His well-intended defense in these pages last week of Christine Johnson, the ousted president of the Community College of Denver, misses the point.
Finn, who is currently president of the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, suggests that “change-minded leaders” — that would include his friend Johnson, of course — “invariably do things that auditors and investigators can challenge because such executives are more interested in results than in procedural niceties.”
That may be true, although it sounds a bit pat. Even so, Johnson’s downfall resulted not only from her corner-cutting but from the fact that her boss at the community college system, Nancy McCallin, must have concluded that she couldn’t trust Johnson anymore.
A series of e-mails from November between Johnson and CCD Chief Financial Officer Barbara Casey reveals why:
Casey: “The system office is wanting our reserve calc. (calculation) . . . We are showing over a 10% reserve. I am not comfortable submitting that calc. since it implies that we have ‘extra’ funds.”
Johnson: “Send calculation at some lower level — 3 or 4% and send with comment about your reservation to send information without guidance as newcomer to system and please copy me.”
Casey: “Unfortunately, can’t force it to a certain number now since they already have our financials so I can’t move things around without them knowing. I think we’re probably better off not submitting since they already think we’re much lower (at 1.4%). I was thinking I could just send an e-mail saying we’re not sure how to calculate and are hesitant to make up a method.”
Johnson: “Sounds like good idea to send ‘don’t know how to calculate’ . . . .
From McCallin and her board’s perspective, those e-mails amount to a deliberate attempt to keep them in the dark concerning the financial state of the Community College of Denver. Johnson may well be a crackerjack college leader, but her competence was no longer the issue. It became one of trust.
That pesky free speech
State Rep. Morgan Carroll climbed on her high horse recently when the Supreme Court decided that a small group of Wisconsin right-to-life activists could buy an ad criticizing an incumbent U.S. senator within 60 days of an election, no matter what federal law says.
“Granting special free speech rights to corporate interests” — that Wisconsin group was incorporated, you see — “sends the balance of power between corporations and people into a tailspin,” said the Aurora Democrat. “The Supreme Court is giving greater rights to corporations than to individuals. That can’t be what our Founders intended.”
Well, why don’t we just read the First Amendment to see what the Founders intended?
That’s what the late Justice Hugo Black always urged when challenged on a free speech issue.
“The First Amendment’s language leaves no room for inference that abridgments of speech and press can be made just because they are slight,” Black declared. “That amendment provides, in simple words, that ‘Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.’ I read ‘no law . . . abridging’ to mean no law abridging.”
So what does Carroll think “no law abridging” means?
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at Carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
I’ve got just one beef with the “New 7 Wonders of the World” annointed by 100 million online and telephoned votes from across the planet: The lone winner from the 20th century is a pretender.
Yes, the Christ Redeemer statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro is massive, striking and beautiful. But it simply fails to evoke the speechless awe that a true world wonder should trigger.
I’ve got just one beef with the “New 7 Wonders of the World” annointed by 100 million online and telephoned votes from across the planet: The lone winner from the 20th century is a pretender.
Yes, the Christ Redeemer statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro is massive, striking and beautiful. But it simply fails to evoke the speechless awe that a true world wonder should trigger.
Go see Chichen Itza, the Great Wall of China or Macchu Picchu (the three other winners I’ve visited) and you marvel that humans built them. The same is true of several finalists that didn’t make the cut, such as the Acropolis or even Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany. No such stunned reaction accompanies a visit atop Corcovado mountain.
I’d have the same complaint, by the way, if the Statue of Liberty, another finalist in the balloting, had slipped into the winner’s circle. Lady Liberty is a great statue and an even better symbol, but hardly a world wonder.
A radical department
The Ward Churchill saga, which enters its final phase this month, is like an overwritten novel we thought would never end — 900 pages when it should have been 200, a host of plot lines when a handful would do.
When the University of Colorado Regents finally discuss whether to terminate the wayward professor two weeks from today, it will be 21/2 years since a furor erupted over his essay on 9/11 — prompting the scrutiny that led to his official exposure as an academic fraud.
I say “official,” because anyone who listened to Churchill or read his work before 2005 knew he was no scholar. They knew he was an intellectual bully, even if they were unaware of the extent of his contempt for historical truth. Which is why when Churchill is finally fired, we would do well to remember the most disturbing fact involving his downfall: He was chair of the Ethnic Studies Department, where his perspective was absolutely commonplace.
If your son or daughter is thinking of majoring in ethnic studies, you might want to check out its Web pages on the CU-Boulder site. Much of the content reads as if its authors are winking at us; you couldn’t write a better parody of radical gibberish if you tried.
“The Department of Ethnic Studies encourages participatory, experiential, student-centered learning and empowers students to move beyond existing social, cultural and political paradigms to more inclusive paradigms in which they are the subjects of their own reality. Consequently, all students are encouraged to examine and analyze their own inherited political/economic and social/cultural background and identities.”
Any questions?
“We stress critical thinking, the construction of grounded social theory, data gathering and comparative analysis. . . . We engage emergent epistemologies of racial/ethnic communities to critically question established disciplinary canons by encouraging our students to move beyond being objects of study toward being subjects of their own research.”
Whew!
As for their “primary areas” of research, they include “critical race theory with various strands of critical pedagogy, critical class theory, feminist theory, liberation theology, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory.”
This is a department that was content to have Churchill as its leader. The king is being deposed, but the kingdom looks about the same as always.
Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
We all know about the fellow who sued his cleaners for $65 million over a pair of pants the firm allegedly lost. Thanks to a no-nonsense judge, this high-handed litigant lost his case — even if he did force the family who owned the business into a costly legal grinder.
But what if the judge had been someone less hostile to dubious lawsuits? What if he’d been, let us say, Doug Walker?
We all know about the fellow who sued his cleaners for $65 million over a pair of pants the firm allegedly lost. Thanks to a no-nonsense judge, this high-handed litigant lost his case — even if he did force the family who owned the business into a costly legal grinder.
But what if the judge had been someone less hostile to dubious lawsuits? What if he’d been, let us say, Doug Walker?
Walker is a magistrate in southwest Colorado and one of two candidates selected by a commission to fill a new district court judgeship for Dolores and Montezuma counties. The final choice is up to Gov. Bill Ritter, who has a few more days to mull over his decision. Those musings will no doubt include an incident from two years ago involving the “T and L Club.”
The club came together spontaneously one evening when 17-year-old Taylor Ostergaard — she would be the “T” — and Lindsey Jo Zelitti, 18, decided to bake some cookies and distribute them anonymously to neighbors in a rural area south of Durango. Most of the neighbors appreciated the chocolate chip and sugar cookies left at their doorsteps with a red or pink paper heart and the message “Have a great night,” although their origins were a mystery.
But one neighbor — there’s always one — called police. No crime had been committed, but Wanita Renea Young was so upset that she would check into an emergency room the next day with an anxiety attack. And when she found out who’d left the cookies, she took off the gloves and sued.
“We feel that knocking on a door and leaving cookies is a gesture of kindness and would not create an anxiety attack in the general public,” Ostergaard’s parents told the court. But Walker disagreed and awarded Young $900 to offset her medical bills.
In Walker’s defense, he learned at the hearing that the girls’ families had already offered to pay the medical bills, but had been rebuffed. Still, the plaintiff’s refusal to accept that offer should have been a clue that she was — what’s the word? — overzealous. Indeed, Walker was taken in by someone for whom interpersonal conflict was a way of life.
As The Denver Post reported on Feb. 11, 2005, “The Youngs are no strangers to court proceedings. In addition to the cookie lawsuit, records show the Youngs have sued or been sued at least nine times since 1991. Two more court actions have involved restraining orders.”
It’s possible, of course, that Walker is still the better of the nominees. But Ritter should closely question him about the ruling. After all, the last thing Colorado needs is a judge who believes no good deed should go unpunished.
Abundant oil
More bad news for “peak oil” enthusiasts — those wishful thinkers and doomsday peddlers who say the world is running out of oil. BP’s annual “Statistical Review of World Energy” shows “proved oil reserves continue to exceed 1.2 trillion barrels, equivalent to current production levels for more than 40 years.”
If that’s not long enough for you, consider this: “Global proved oil and natural gas reserves thus have been on an increasing trend since 1980, when our data set begins. . . . there is no global scarcity of hydrocarbon reserves.”
But is that condition likely to endure, given the demands of world economic growth? “The history of our industry is that technology and innovation win out over depletion,” Mark Finley, head of energy analysis for BP, told me last week.
BP is hardly a blinkered industry cheerleader that can’t see the big picture. The big picture and the long view are among its specialties (it has been producing the highly respected statistical review for 56 years). Moreover, the company’s assessment parallels that of experts such as Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, who has been similarly dismissive of the idea that the world is running out of oil.
There is a finite amount of oil, of course. But if the world abandons fossil fuels sometime this century, it is more likely to be the result of deliberate choice as opposed to necessity.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Robert Amos is every prison reformer’s nightmare, a reminder of what can happen when you give felons a chance to redeem themselves with a fresh start in life. Some go out and commit the same sort of crime that got them convicted in the first place.
Robert Amos is every prison reformer’s nightmare, a reminder of what can happen when you give felons a chance to redeem themselves with a fresh start in life. Some go out and commit the same sort of crime that got them convicted in the first place.
In Amos’ case, he’s suspected of strangling a 24-year-old woman to death last week in the San Isabel National Forest. Which is the method he used to help kill a man in Kansas in 1981.
Ironically, last week’s murder occurred at roughly the same time the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics was announcing that the national inmate population had hit a record, with more than 2.2 million people locked up in a federal, state or local cell. That’s about 1 of 133 U.S. residents, in case you’re counting — a far higher lockup rate than exists in any other advanced country.
The reformers consider this a scandal, and they might even have a point. They’re also probably on target when they say we need to explore wider use of alternative sentences for some crimes, particularly nonviolent drug offenses, and that mandatory minimum sentences have sometimes overshot their mark.
But the arrest of Amos is a timely reminder that not all sentences are too harsh and that not all states throw away the key once the prison gate clangs shut. Incredibly, Amos was first up for parole just eight years after helping to strangle an elderly music teacher, and was granted parole after 18 years despite repeated incidents in prison that confirmed him to be dangerously violent.
Amos was originally sentenced to 15 years to life, but it was obvious by the early 1990s which end of that range he belonged on. Now another trial might return Amos to the home he never should have been allowed to leave.
The American ‘gulag’
One of the great advantages of the Internet is the ease with which you can see how journalists in various nations interpret the same news. Take that U.S. prison population story mentioned above. The anti-American writers at The New Zealand Herald put a uniquely ham-handed spin on it with the following headline: “Inside America’s packed gulags.”
The miscue of a lone headline writer? Hardly. The body of the story reinforced the theme: “This grotesquely swollen prison population evokes the Soviet gulags, or even the 18th century British penal system.”
Well, now: At least a couple of million people, and probably many more, died in the Soviet gulag from overwork, lack of food, exposure, or psychotic cruelty. Many inmates were guilty only of “counterrevolutionary” activities, which is to say not guilty at all. Even many children were swept into the various camps with their mothers, or born there; in either case they were brutalized beyond belief.
The gulag was an extensive system of slave labor camps used by the state to terrorize society, consolidate power and force-feed industrial development. It resembles the American penal system only in the same sense that a rabidly biased news story resembles a balanced one.
Which is to say there is no serious resemblance.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
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