Many of you have called encouraging me to apply for the Council position being vacated by Jerry Heimlicher’s resignation. I’m writing to let you know I considered it carefully and dropped off my application letter this afternoon.  Here are the contents of the letter:

Dear Mayor, Vice Mayor and Councilors:

I wish to be considered for appointment to fill the fill the vacant Colorado Springs City Council seat for District 3. As you know, I ran for that seat last April and received 43% of the vote.

Certainly City Councilors and I share an over-arching goal, to preserve and enhance quality of life for our residents. But it would be dishonest to pretend there are many other points of agreement between the majority on this Council and me. It may appear to be an easier path not to appoint me. I would challenge you, intellectually. And you would challenge me. I believe that honest debate would benefit the city.

The heart of our disagreements has been our approach to growth. Votes and remarks indicate the majority on this Council believes continued expansion of the city is desirable and beneficial - so much so that you’re willing to subsidize growth at the expense of essential city services. I, on the other hand, do not believe growth is the solution to problems it creates.

You seem to believe bigger is better. I believe getting bigger increases the size of our problems and creates new ones. I believe the evidence is clear growth generates costs faster than it increases revenues. I’m concerned perpetual growth will inhibit provision of adequate, affordable water for our city in the future. And I doubt we can stabilize and then reduce our city’s carbon footprint if our prosperity strategy is continued, subsidized growth.

My hope is you’ll welcome the intellectual challenge and the benefits of having diverse viewpoints on Council that represent the range of philosophies shared by our citizens. The issues I’ve raised have resonated with many. Having my voice at the table will generate conversations and debate that will help push our city down the path of progress. Serving together we’d have the chance to become more familiar with each other’s approach and the research, facts and logic behind those approaches.

I read recently you’re hoping to interview candidates on October 6. Unfortunately I have a critical, previously scheduled, business trip from September 30 - October 10. I believe an interview would be appropriate and valuable. I hope we can find a suitable date for this. I will do everything possible to accommodate your schedule.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Dave Gardner

We need the courage to walk away from a bad deal.

Most of us would like to see the USOC (United States Olympic Committee) remain in Colorado Springs. But we cannot afford to do this at any cost. Thanks to Jill Gaebler for permission to share this letter she sent to The Gazette:

The City of Colorado Springs – staff and Council – have invested substantial time, money, reputation into the incentive deal to retain USOC headquarters in Colorado Springs. It will take immense courage and selflessness for them to walk away from what looks like a very risky deal. But walk away they must, for it would be unconscionable for Council to put our City at so much risk.

Council is poised to approve the agreement this Tuesday. Within 45 days of executing the agreement, the City must borrow over $30 million to meet its obligations. The City plans to put up our Police Operations Center and a fire station as collateral. Once these funds are borrowed and the City purchases the proposed USOC headquarters building from Landco (at well above market price), the USOC can still walk away.

Here are the things that can go wrong, potentially resulting in no USOC in town, no tenant for the new City-owned building, and the City left with nothing:

1. If the City cannot successfully raise an additional $1.5 million for Olympic Training Center improvements by year-end, USOC can walk.

2. If for any reason renovation of the old Utilities building for the individual Olympic sports organizations isn’t complete by year-end, USOC can walk.

3. If for any reason interior construction of the headquarters building is not completed by March 31, 2010, USOC can walk.

4. If the City cannot raise another $3 million for OTC improvements within 25 months, we must deed the City-owned land under the OTC to the USOC and USOC could walk, with liquidated damages from USOC reduced by the amount of shortfall in that $3 million.

As we all know, building construction and renovation projects are rarely completed on schedule. Yet we are risking the deal on 1) meeting the above construction deadlines and 2) being able to raise $4.5 million in a sour economy.

I suggest the only responsible course of action is for the City to have the full missing $4.5 million in the bank before executing an agreement with the USOC. And failure to meet construction deadlines should not be deal-breakers. Penalties for missing these deadlines would be more fair and prudent.

Personally, I’d rather see this deal completely aborted.  The USOC is a valuable neighbor, but this shady payoff is not the appropriate way to keep them in town, and it opens the door to future shakedowns from every other sports organization and virtually every business and non-profit entity in town. Bribing the USOC to stay pushes us further down a slippery slope we will regret.

If you share our concerns about this deal, write or call every City Councilor TODAY! You can find email addresses and phone numbers here. 

Thought we’d share with you a few highlights from the campaign.

Final election tally: the incumbent keeps his seat 57% to 43% (2,000 vote margin).
I’m happy to have done this well with a campaign that was only conceived 3 months ago. Thanks to everyone who supported this effort.

Superstition & Spin? or Objective Facts & Analysis?

Whether you’ve voted by now or not, you need to know the truth. And the truth is we are not being told the truth. For our city to make the right decisions going forward it’s essential we citizens recognize when we’re being deceived. The deception from my opponent and the growth industry during this election is very typical of what has been happening in our community for quite some time.

A pro-1A ad in the March 22 Gazette promised 93% of new jobs will go to local residents. Their columns and speeches claim 93% of new jobs in the past have gone to local residents. My council-race opponent, Jerry Heimlicher, has repeated this while claiming I don’t have my facts straight. I’ve cited a national study by the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research which found 1 in 5 new jobs go to local residents. And I’ve asked repeatedly for 1A proponents to produce the study that backs up their claim and their promise.

Six weeks after my first request, I finally got some answers yesterday. It will be educational for you to read the correspondence among myself, my opponent and the EDC about this. Keep in mind the EDC was founded by 3 developers and is dominated by builders and developers today.

In a nutshell, they do not have a study. All they have are the promises made by companies they recruited. They didn’t follow up to see what actually happened. And their definition of local hire includes everyone the firm didn’t pay to transfer. So falling into the definition of local hire could be everyone from out of town who applied, got the job, and paid their own expenses to move here. It would include everyone who moved to town a day, a week or a month before landing the job. And it would even include employees who paid their own relocation costs and followed their job to the Springs.

Here’s another example: My opponent claimed at several election forums and in a TV interview that new developments pay for all the utilities required - including gas lines and electric. That is completely false. I know it because I sat in on several months of meetings of the Utilities Policy Advisory Committee as they investigated who pays the cost of extending utilities to new customers. Utilities policy is very clear on this. If you want details, drop me a line.

Perhaps after 6 years on the Utilities Board Jerry Heimlicher doesn’t know the facts about utilities extension policies. Perhaps he doesn’t want to know the truth because it would not serve the special-interest growth lobby that got him elected. Perhaps he can’t reconcile the truth because it doesn’t square with his 1950s view of the world. I don’t know. But you should know he is not being truthful with you.

Another: Councilor Heimlicher told two different forums we need SDS to provide water supply redundancy because we only have one pipeline bringing water from the Western Slope. The fact is we have three pipelines today bringing us that water.

You have to wonder. Do our elected representatives - like Jerry - believe they are doing the right thing when they vote to subsidize growth, fund the EDC, stress our community, and hamstring our city and utilities budgets to expand our city? If they do, then why do they hide what they’re doing whenever possible? And when it comes out, why do they justify it with deceptions and distortions of fact? Could it be that deep down inside they know there is something unwise about what they’re doing?

If we’re doing the right thing, there will be no need to hide it or spin it.

I do my research and share the facts. The growth boosters state I have no facts and then repeat their completely false “growth pays its way” rhetoric. They do it time and again, and the news media never calls them on it. The City Council doesn’t call them on it, either - because most are busy repeating the same falsehoods. Does anyone want to know the truth? I do! And I want you to know it! The future of our city depends on it.

It’s no secret I’m trying to get our community unhooked from its growth addiction, since growth has become a money-losing investment for our city.

After over a century settling the wild frontier, it’s difficult for many of us to envision a healthy economy that isn’t driven by a growing community. Yet we’re entering an era where growth no longer pays dividends. Those of us who can look ahead more than a few years know we can’t grow forever, based on water supply alone.

Prosperity Without Growth

If you’re interested in cutting-edge thinking about how we can have a healthy community over the next century, you will find this just released report interesting. Coincidentally it includes a 12-step program for communities. Let’s get started!

It’s one thing to pay lip service to the idea of bringing fresh thinking to City Hall. It’s quite another to demonstrate that open-mindedness, the curiosity, the creativity, and the ability to ask tough questions. If you’ve visited my website then you know I have a very clear stand on the issues that is very much NOT status quo. We simply cannot remain stuck in the last century and expect things to be better than they are today.

Here is one exciting example of innovative thinking springing up in our community today:

Thanks to Lon Matejczyk of the Colorado Springs Business Journal for bringing this to our attention. Bernard Sandoval of Sandia Advertising and Marketing has created a logo that local businesses can display as part of a grass roots effort to encourage keeping more of our dollars in our local economy.

That is one of the basic tenets of the localization strategy of economic development I’m promoting. Sandoval apparently has suggested a great tag line: The Buck Stops Here. I misread it and thought it was, The Buck Stays Here. Serendipitous slip, I think. Perhaps I can convince Bernard to use the word “stays,” because that will really communicate the benefits of buying local. The buck doesn’t stop at a local business when you purchase a product or service there. The buck is more likely to be spent here, which is good for our local economy.

Buy Local campaigns are just one example of productive, inexpensive, non-destructive economic development. Check out Boulder’s version here, or the San Francisco Bay area’s here. If you want to dig deeper, look for the discussion and links in my platform on a healthy local economy.

This afternoon City Council will meet behind closed doors to discuss options for salvaging what I believe is the biggest economic development incentive package in our city’s history. The deal to keep the U.S. Olympic Committee in town is falling apart in a patchwork quilt of criminal investigations, lawsuits, construction liens, and schedule failures.

In my view, the city should have done everything possible and reasonable to keep the USOC here, SHORT of financial incentives. The incentives game is a race to the bottom, and here it has turned a good corporate citizen, the USOC, into something less.

While on one level it is hard to blame USOC for the shakedown, we all know this is not a model our world should aspire to. Clearly we cannot afford for everyone to play this game, so the game should not be played. It’s a little like dealing with terrorists or paying kidnappers. If you never pay a ransom, the kidnapping will stop. I expect it won’t be too long before federal law prohibits economic development incentives. All communities lose in that system.

Morally and ethically this was also a questionable deal. Council’s plan to borrow the money to fund this without a vote of the citizens was a breach of trust between Council and citizens. And our City Council should be avoiding getting into business deals with those who provide the lion’s share of funding to their election campaigns.

We got in way over our heads here. There is a valuable lesson to be learned from this. Our city government should play a VERY limited role in economic development. And what role it does play, should be an informed role, not just following the lead of developers and the developer-dominated EDC. We cannot afford amateur-hour economic development.

One of the reasons I don’t favor city investments in traditional (antiquated) economic development methods is that they drive physical expansion and population growth. Our city’s future sustainability depends on our embracing an economic model that doesn’t require perpetual expansion. Read more about this modern, enlightened form of economic development here.

An important debate is playing out this week on the pages of our local daily paper:

Development isn’t economic growth

by Dave Gardner

The Gazette, March 16, 2009

Growth is not a 4-letter word

by Jerry Heimlicher

The Gazette, March 19, 2009

Next installment:

I was glad to see Jerry Heimlicher’s guest column, Growth is not a 4-letter word. This is exactly the dialog our community needs to have. Jerry claims our city budget train wreck is due to the recent lack of growth. He’d like us to believe the outdated, growth-addicted policies he clings to were not responsible for the long, downhill slide we experienced throughout the last growth boom. So of course his solution to the crisis is to increase growth subsidies, in an effort to repeat and even turbo-charge that growth boom. He expects somehow this time we’ll get a different result.
 
His column indicates we should focus on growing revenue, not on eliminating unprofitable behavior that costs our community more than it benefits us. He refuses to consider the most rational solution, because he remains certain that “healthy” growth will solve problems it has never solved. The evidence is clear: growth subsidies are robbing our community of precious resources we could be using to improve our community. And these subsidies accelerate the growth of nearly every problem our community faces.
 
I continue to offer this simple solution: connect the costs of growth with the behavior. Let new subdivisions reimburse the city for all the true costs that for two decades have burdened our entire community. Jerry is afraid to embrace this solution because he fears this would bring growth to a stop. If we have to pick up the costs of growth to perpetuate it, exactly how does that translate into profit and prosperity for our community?

Times have changed. The good news is we don’t have to continue trading away our quality of life in order to have a prosperous, healthy community.

What do you think? Post your comments below.

An interview with Dave Gardner

Q: Our city grew rapidly from 1992 to 2007. Yet today it’s making drastic cuts in essential services. Shouldn’t that growth boom have provided community prosperity?

Gardner: While the recession adds to the severity of our budget crisis, we were actually digging our city into this hole throughout the growth boom. There was ample evidence this was happening, but we were blinded by the long-held belief that growth creates prosperity.  We couldn’t bring ourselves to believe the costs of growth were strangling our community.

Q: Why is growth no longer creating community prosperity?

Gardner: National studies show residential subdivisions rarely provide enough tax revenue to cover the cost of serving them. There used to be economies of scale. The bigger we got, the less it cost per household to provide city services. But we are beyond that now. Each new gallon of water is the most expensive. Costs of mitigating transportation gridlock, declining air quality and stormwater runoff, for example, increase exponentially as our city expands.

And since we cling to the superstition we’ll profit from growth, we also subsidize growth heavily. To name a few, growth subsidies include tax rebates and other incentives, stormwater fee caps, tax-free financing, and utility tap fees and development review fees that don’t cover costs. New developments don’t reimburse the community for costs of increasing regional roadway capacity, new or expanded service facilities, additional snowplows and buses, or for constructing schools and libraries. Subsidizing these costs for new development accelerates the unprofitable growth, and robs our community of resources that could otherwise be spent dealing with growth impacts.

Q: So, how can we have a healthy, vital community?

Gardner: The healthy community of the 21^st century won’t foolishly depend on a Ponzi scheme of constant influx of new people and businesses for its prosperity. We’ll prosper instead by supporting our locally owned businesses. We’ll invest in our community’s assets, our neighborhoods, parks, and children. You’ll be amazed how well we can afford to care for the community we have, once we stop wasting resources on growth subsidies and the increasing costs of growth’s impacts.

Q: Are you suggesting we stop growth?

Gardner: I’m suggesting we require new developments to cover all the true costs that today are shifted to the entire community. This way market forces can work efficiently: if expansion makes economic sense it will pay its own way and not starve our community of precious resources. If continued growth doesn’t make economic sense, then it will stop of its own accord.

Q: Utility rates rise steeply year after year, and we see tax increases on nearly every ballot. Will you do anything to rein this in?

Gardner: Many tax and utility increases are made necessary because growth doesn’t pay its way. Growth has become ridiculously expensive. With your help I’ll eliminate the growth subsidies that create this steady stream of tax increases and double-digit utility rate hikes. Since my opponent clings to the old notion that growth creates prosperity, he favors growth subsidies and other policies to encourage more growth. So if you vote for him, you may as well save up for those utility rate hikes and vote to approve every tax increase going forward.  

Q: Growth seems to come up frequently in this race. Aren’t there other issues?

Gardner: I hear and care about diminishing water supply and drought, carbon emissions and renewable energy, park maintenance, traffic congestion, public transportation, snowplowing, unemployment, homeless, and rising crime rate. We should continue to focus on each of these. But every one of them is either created or worsened by growth, or is starved of resources by growth costs and subsidies. If we don’t get our city unhooked from its addiction to growth, the best we can hope for these issues is to apply band-aids to the wounds. We need to eliminate the sniper inflicting those wounds.