Our View - Friday

Stumbling blocks

Reservoir opponents have rocks in their heads

If you thought dealing with Puebloans was tough, you haven’t gotten down in the mud with a paleontologist. Don’t let the pith helmets, rumpled safari shirts and Coke-bottle glasses fool you; with federal environmental laws on their side, they can be tougher than they look.

Tough enough to derail a reservoir project critical to this city’s future? We’ll see.

As if Colorado Springs Utilities didn’t have enough problems building the Southern Delivery System, someone with Denver’s Museum of Nature and Science claims that there’s a “regionally and globally significant” fossil trove where the Jimmy Camp Creek Reservoir is supposed to go. It includes petrified trees and fossils of early mammals.

Kirk Johnson, chief curator and vice president of research and collections at Denver’s Museum of Nature and Science, has sent a letter to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, strongly encouraging “decision makers to consider alternate sites for the proposed reservoir.” And the bureau is required by law to take such requests seriously, given the fetish federal agencies make of the “public process” and of assessing every conceivable environmental impact.

Problem is, Colorado Springs Utilities has spent $6.4 million buying 400 of the 1,874 acres required for the reservoir, and must before long decide whether to spend many millions more acquiring the rest. Colorado Springs needs somewhere to store the water it plans to pipe up from Pueblo. And it’s absurd to have all this jeopardized by the presence of some petrified logs.

CSU’s Gary Bostrum told The Gazette that there’s an alternative site, the Upper Williams Creek Reservoir, if this becomes an insurmountable obstacle. But what “rare” animal or plant species, “globally significant” fossils or “important” archaeological sites might be found along upper Williams Creek if one looks hard enough? And can’t similar issues be raised about any other site one chooses?

The answer isn’t in trying to stay one step ahead of the obstructionists. That’s futile. It’s in confronting them, telling them they must be out of their minds — and in reminding people of all that they have to lose if such absurdities prevail and we don’t get our priorities straight.

For this city, at this point in time — and given how much is riding on this project’s success or failure — a place to store water is much more important than safeguarding a glorified gravel pit. And the needs of the people must in this case trump those of the paleontologists.

If federal law says otherwise, federal law is absurd and should be modified or overturned.

These fossils may or may not be as important as Johnson says. But if they’ve survived 65 million years of geologic upheaval, they’ll survive the relatively short-term presence of a reservoir. The needs of the living must take precedence.

You can’t drink a fossil, wash with a fossil, flush your toilet with a fossil. For this and more, water is critical. And if we don’t show a little more common sense, and a stronger instinct for survival, we’ll be the lost civilization future archeologists will be sifting through, wondering what went wrong.

Don’t minimize wage hike’s impact

The Gazette on Sunday took a closer look at the impact of the state’s new minimum wage mandate, six months after it took effect, and the situation isn’t as gloomy as this page and other critics of the wage hike predicted. Some of what we thought might happen is happening, however, albeit in slow motion.

The $1.70 hourly increase is being passed on by businesses to their customers in the form of higher prices, fueling inflation, and some businesses are cutting back on employee hours or on hiring — which does no favors for workers holding or seeking entry-level positions.

Minimum-wage workers may have more money in their pockets. But their buying power is being quietly watered down by wage hike-related inflation and there are fewer opportunities for those seeking entry-level positions, as a result of staff reductions.

Other belt-tightening measures are helping companies cope with the squeeze. Many will become leaner and more efficient as a result. But eventually, when all the squeezing has been done and the profits evaporate, some businesses will fail, which won’t benefit anyone.

“I don’t mind the wage increase for this year,” the owner and general manager of The North Pole said. “It’s the automatic thing that I don’t like.” He intends to hire as many seasonal workers as before, but he’s cutting back on their hours.

Concept Restaurants, which include Jose Muldoon’s, MacKenzie’s Chop House, Ritz Grill and a partnership in Southside Johnny’s, raised prices between 3 percent and 5 percent in response to the increase. Conway’s Red Top restaurants are cutting back on employee hours and increasing the price of new menu items by 3.25 percent.

Broadmoor President Steve Bartolin says the resort has raised banquet charges 2 percent to make up for $500,000 the wage increase cost this year. And while this may not make the facility’s high-end customers go elsewhere, this could mean the difference between profits and losses, survival and bankruptcy, for businesses catering to more price-sensitive clientele.

And remember, we’re only six months into this misadventure in regulating. The increases — and the impacts — will continue, on autopilot, tied to a cost of living index compiled in the Denver-Boulder area. And just because The Gazette didn’t report any business casualties doesn’t mean they aren’t happening.

Closed companies, like dead men, tell no tales.