The Real Ideal

A professor I had in college once told me he rarely read the front page of a paper because the writer’s agenda was obscured. Instead, he recommended I read the opinion pages and judge the advocacy evocated by those writers. I still followed that advice, which is why I read Karl Isberg’s editorial every week in the Pagosa Sun.

Last week, Karl was advocating for a position I judged as flawed. The title was “A Slice of the Ideal”. The “ideal” he spoke to was the dream of a perfect mountain community people were expecting Pagosa Springs to be, but his is a simplistic assumption. He was pushing a myth lauded by residents who had been here from birth, which demeans new-comers and extols the virtues of the old-timers. It has been tried many times in many mountain towns, and with the same result.

Karl has a folksy style that lulls one into thinking he really is a “salt-of-the-earth” common sense kinda guy. However, after reading his editorial a couple of times, I concluded his argument lacked logic; contained no substantive premise; and his findings/conclusions had no merit. The settlers to Pagosa country lacked appreciation for the amenities many current residents now hold dear, and had nothing but disdain for those who valued those amenities over the pragmatic efforts those people had to scratch out a living. Even today, town and county government pay only lip service to the amenities important to this community’s sustainability. They give away precious hot springs water, allow the destruction of buildings important to the fabric of an historic downtown, place basic services like the airport and sewage facilities on prime developable land, and seek to foster unsustainable sprawl in the face of dwindling resources.

Locals, like Isberg, allowed a bunch of carpet-baggers to come in here, change the dynamics of the local economy, and left local taxpayers with the bill – a bill that remains unpaid because those same locals have yet to recognize reality. Locals, like Isberg, elected unfit officials to office incapable of grasping the gravity of their decisions, much less recognizing why it’s important to be a good stewards of the land. Locals, like Isberg, have ruined a picturesque historic community with multiple assets by failing to define their community; allowing developers from outside the community to define it for them.

Planning is really simple – define your community, then enhance those aspects the community wants to foster, and mitigate those factors the community needs to mitigate. Locals, like Isberg, have spent generation upon generation fostering the bad, and denigrating to the good.

In 1996, Gunnison County first adopted a “Code of the West’, which had made it’s way to many communities in one form or another since the land development boom of the late 1970s. The Code is really notice to new residents of what they can expect in a rural mountain community that relies on open spaces, ranching, and wildlife habitat for a viable economy. There is nothing in the Code to suggest that local authorities have no responsibility to let public roads deteriorate or that low taxes are a right. Karl Isberg may have been born here, but he knows nothing of the west or the responsibilities of good citizenship or responsive government.

One of my favorite movies of all time is “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”. I have probably seen it twenty times. It is an enduring film because it has meaning at so many levels, and is symbolic of so many human foibles. Applying lessons from the film to Mr. Isberg was an easy reach because it is about changing needs in the west that have been taking place before Mr. Isberg’s family found Pagosa Country.

There are two newspaper men portrayed in the film. The first is Mr. Peabody – played by Edmond O’Brien, a very flawed owner of the local paper fiercely opinionated, but a man who recognizes the need for organized government to meet the needs of a growing population. The second is Maxwell Scott played by Carelton Young, who has one of the more memorable lines in the movie “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Mr. Isberg is not the forward-looking Mr. Peabody, but the backward-thinking Maxwell Scott.

This County does not have good roads because leadership, including the editors of the Pagosa Sun, embraced developers to the detriment of the public and then refused to take responsibility for those failings. Developers built sub-standard roads to make more money, then turned those roads over to County Commissioners who never did any due diligence to evaluate those roads or the long-term costs to the public. Once the roads started breaking down, and traffic increased to the point the roads became a hazard, local leadership simply passed the problem along to the point they are now a crisis neither the Town nor County can afford to fix.

The real ideal is and what makes a community genuine is to disregard Karl Isberg and whine louder then set out to really plan for the future of this community majority to rule.

Rather, the problem is Mr. Isberg; a backward-thinking, self-indulgent narrow-mindedness, and a Maxwell Scott character who is more comfortable espousing a myth than using the platform the Pagosa Sun offers him to mold leadership. The only way to get past a problem is to get through it. Obviously, Mr. Isberg has once again shown himself to be incapable of ever aspiring to the qualities of a Dutton Peabody, editor of the Shinbone Star and a leader in the truest sense. The real ideal is for government to provide for it’s residents, present and in the future, not to guarantee the profit margins of a few interlopers like Karl Isberg.