REUTEMAN: Report says West suffering from fed apathy

By Rob Reuteman, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Friday, July 25, 2008

The folks from the Brookings Institute were in town this week to unveil their new study on the intermountain West: "Mountain Megas."

Five "megapolitan" areas - the Front Range, Phoenix/Tucson, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and Albuquerque/Santa Fe - are experiencing the fastest growth in the country. The federal government had better start paying more attention to our growing needs, the report says.

"The federal government is largely impervious to the realities of the West," said Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman during a three-hour public discussion Tuesday.

The D.C. think tank's timing is no accident. Its 79-page report comes out a month before the Dem's Denver convention and provides dozens of potential sound bites.

"Let's not kid ourselves, we're trying to insinuate ourselves into the presidential campaign," said Tom Clark, executive vice president of Metro Denver Economic Development Corp.

This is the first presidential election since 1952 without an incumbent president or vice president running, noted Bruce Katz, director of Brookings' Metropolitan Policy Program. Population in the five-state region has increased 19 percent since 2000, he added, prompting the slogan Brookings is promoting: "The new American Heartland."

The West's "explosion of growth warrants a meaningful level of engagement with the federal government" that doesn't currently exist, said Hunstman, chairman of the Western Governors Association.

Contrasting old and new, Huntsman cited Philadelphia, incorporated in 1682. Its population peaked in 1950 at 2.1 million and has been dropping ever since, currently at a 4.5 percent annual rate. Phoenix, which recently overtook Philly as the fifth-biggest U.S. city, was incorporated in 1881. Its population was 100,000 in 1950, four times that 10 years later and its metro area is expected to be 4.15 million by 2010.

In his own state, Huntsman mentioned St. George. It had a population of 10,000 in 1960 - the year he was born - but is projected by 2060 to house just under 1 million people. "I may live to see a million people there," he said.

The Brookings report suggests that staggering amounts of federal aid are needed. The bargaining chip we bring to the table? Energy.

"To our detriment, we lack a national energy policy," said Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter. "We in the West have a major role to play, and not just an extractive one. Colorado is emerging as the world's research center for wind and solar."

Just back from Spain where he met with renewable energy companies considering foreign investment, Ritter said, "In Spain, they are looking to the West to see how we resolve energy issues. The great play, as they see it, is in the West - how we develop energy policy."

Added Huntsman: "We are the most energy-relevant region in the world. We hold the answers and the feds are tone-deaf."

The report estimates the intermountain West's infrastructure needs - roads, sewers and the like - at $648 billion by 2040 - roughly approximate to what the war in Iraq has cost taxpayers so far. "One of the major challenges facing the Intermountain West in the coming decades," the report reads.

Brookings cites the need for more railroads as a transportation solution, as it is on the East Coast: "The seven Amtrak stations in the five Intermountain West megapolitan areas together served 252,000 passengers in 2007, approximately the same number of passengers served by just one station (San Juan Capistrano) in the Los Angeles metropolitan area."

The report says, "The legacy of unanticipated growth haunts the region." The mountain megas "don't have a national partner," Katz said. "There's a vacuum in D.C."

• July 26, 2008

  5:54 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  robbyr2 writes:

  Why should the federal government do anything for us? We don't want to do anything for ourselves. We don't want to invest in renewable energy. We don't want mass transit. We don't want top-notch colleges. We don't want good schools. We don't want to maintain our roads, much less to build new highways to serve our growing numbers.
  Why? Because all of that costs money- taxes. All of that requires us to work together and share with one another. Those who are disabled or old or uneducated- it's all their fault. Anyone who wants to work can make enough money to live well on. Just ask Doug Bruce and Jon Caldara if there is anything taxpayers should pay for...

• July 26, 2008

  9:55 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  athought writes:

  robby: Unfortunately, there is a ton of waste in the federal government compared to the state and local levels. The federal government hands out tons of money for sculpture parks, twine museums, bureaucrats for doing one days work over one months time. The definition of pork needs to be refined however. Montana is the 4th largest geographical state in the union but Sen Baucus won the Pork award for getting 180 million for highways the state one year. My memory of the response was "Why should the Western states drive on poor dilapidated roadways so the people in Connecticut can drive on streets of gold." I generally don't mind spending money on highways and infrastructure which provide the ways and means of free markets to do their work. That is what this meeting was about. The West is often short changed when it comes to highway projects and are labeled pork by institutions who's sightlines end at the Eastern Seaboard and California. If you want things to become even worse, follow the folly of abandoning the Electoral College. I'm generally in favor of having the government leave people alone but interstate highways, railways and airports are really the core reason for the commerce clause of the constitution. Without it, the West would become as backwards as the East Coast thinks we are.