Carroll: Tribes

By Vincent Carroll, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published March 13, 2007 at midnight

Text size

More Opinion Columns & Blogs

'It's not the proper role of government to recognize one group over another," complained state Sen. Ron Tupa, D-Boulder, regarding a proposal for a special license plate celebrating Italian-American heritage. Why, if the legislature had made a habit of rejecting other ethnic license plates while favoring only Italian-Americans, Tupa might even have a point.

But in fact the legislature would not be pushing "one group over another" in establishing an Italian-American plate. It would merely be pandering to an ethnic lobby. Nothing prevents lawmakers from pandering equally to all ethnic lobbies who line up to wheedle officials for a heritage plate.

It's more than a little odd to hear a progressive-minded lawmaker from Boulder deploring an expression of multiculturalism. Aren't we instructed regularly to celebrate diversity? Isn't that what some Italian-Americans are bent on doing - and soon after them, perhaps, the proud descendants of Ireland, Mexico, China and a host of other countries?

To be sure, there is a good argument against the bill authorizing ethnic heritage license plates, although not one that Tupa may be disposed to make. It goes to a worry expressed by Theodore Roosevelt more than 90 years ago.

"The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all," he said, "would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans . . . each preserving its separate nationality . . ."

It's one thing for Americans to have pride in their roots and to express it occasionally by way of a parade or folk festival. It's quite another - the word "overkill" comes to mind - for them to trumpet their tribal membership literally everywhere they go.

House Bill 1120 has been approved by the full House and a Senate committee. After all, who wants to say no to professional ethnics?

Other than TR, of course, but his kind have passed.

The specter of cost overruns

RTD spokesman Scott Reed assures me that a financial analysis suggesting FasTracks could cost 65 percent more than forecast just 2 1/2 years ago, as reported last week by The Denver Post, is a "rejected worksheet" that amounts to the "scribblings on a cocktail napkin that wind up in the trash."

Let's hope so. Still, Reed freely acknowledges that the RTD brass is concerned about the cost of the planned transit lines escalating well beyond original estimates. He blames the sticker shock on the tight market for concrete, steel and other materials brought about by the Chinese construction boom.

As a FasTracks skeptic in 2004, am I gloating? Not at all. Sure, some will find the cost escalation a tad suspicious, as if RTD low-balled the multiple rail lines in order to please, or pander to, as many voters as possible. But such suspicions ultimately are beside the point. It's in no one's interest now to see FasTracks unravel into a string of broken promises that feed public cynicism.

If there's an upside to the financial crunch, it's that RTD is going to examine the possibility of letting private companies not just design and build the lines but also operate and maintain them as well. Nothing concentrates the minds of public officials on the advantages of private management like the specter of cost overruns.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News