Column by George Sibley
Western Life – June 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
A State of the Rockies Report Card?
We aren’t talking about the baseball team here; we’re talking about the Rocky Mountains — all the way out to the edge of California. The report card is a county-by-county annual report on key regional challenges, including demographic growth and decay, natural resource extraction, tourism and recreation, cultural resources, environmental conditions, and a host of other indicators that define the Rocky Mountain region.
This is the ambitious undertaking of Colorado College economics professor Walt Hecox and his protege F. Patrick Holmes. Participants in Headwaters conferences at Western State College here in Central Colorado will be familiar with Dr. Hecox, who has made a number of presentations on the regional economy over the years.
Hecox has also done considerable research and work on the Colorado Plateau, and for some time has, I think, been working toward what Ed Marston, formerly of High Country News, calls this audacious idea of an annual Report Card for the eight-state interior West.
The first Report Card was unveiled at a State of the Rockies Conference at Colorado College in early May. It is not a small thing: a 63-page, 8″x11″, four-color booklet that begins with several pages of charts and maps showing all manner of interesting info about the eight-state region, from straightforward charts of income and employment profiles, to maps showing all of the Starbucks and Wal-Marts in the region.
But it is the comparative analyses of the regions 280 counties that are going to generate interest, and probably a certain amount of controversy, not to mention some pique. (Hecox noted, in his presentation about the Report Card, that Pueblo County has already expressed displeasure at its D- grade.)
Hecox and Holmes established three basic areas of analysis and evaluation, with fifteen allegedly measurable indicators spread among the three areas. Space here precludes listing everything, but these are the three basic areas and a summary of their indicators:
* Land and Environment — three indicators about recreation hotspots, land-use changes (like ag to rec), and “quality public lands.”
* Social and Cultural Capital — eight indicators include things like native born or cappuccino cowboy populations, civic engagement, organizations indicative of a creative class, number of retirees, and characteristics of a good place to raise kids.
* Income, Employment and Equity — four indicators include information about distribution of employment over various sectors (ag, service, manufacture, etc.), small business vitality, balance of income distribution, and distressed counties.
THE BOOK SHOWS ONLY the top ten counties for each indicator, in the categories of metro and non-metro. So, I hope that they will soon have a website which shows this information for all 280 counties.
But in the final section of the book, there is a grade for every county, based on a composite score derived from nine evaluative indicators that are different from the fifteen used for the above analysis and evaluation.
The 280 counties are divided into three groups: metropolitan; micropolitan (non-metro counties with urban places of 2,500 people or more); and rural (with no concentrations of 2,500 or more). The grades are assigned by a strict bell curve, meaning that for every A+, there is an F-.
It is really easy to be critical of this first effort at a comprehensive Report Card. One could begin by asking whether it is worth doing at all, or whether it is just fueling a bad cultural lust for competitive comparisons in which my apple is judged superior to your orange.
Is El Paso County (A+), the home of Colorado College as well as of one of the nation’s leading accumulations of rightist reactionaries, really that much better than Boulder County (B) or Denver County (C-)?
The methodology by which the indicator statistics are woven together to create the rankings in both sections of the study is neither intuitively obvious nor explicitly described in the book. But I hope that such information will be displayed on a website soon.
There is also lots of room for discussion on the statistical elements that go into each of the indicators. One that interests me, for example, involves “Arts, Culture and Employment in the ‘Creative Class,'” which has an indicator for “Social and Cultural Capital.”
Three sets of statistics go into this analysis: the number of arts, culture and humanities non-profit organizations in the county; those organizations as a percentage of the county’s total non-profits; and the percentage of employment in creative class industries — a relatively new grouping of occupations that includes the information and publishing industries, electronic and otherwise; and scientific and tech service industries including everything from architecture and advertising to zoological consulting; and all of the arts and entertainment industries.
I HOPE TO GET A CHANCE to sit with Walt Hecox over a beer and discuss why I question a correlation between, say, the number of arts, culture and humanities non-profits in a community and the creative spirit of that community. A lot of mountain communities, for instance, have several high-culture organizations whose achievement is to import this or that metropolitan orchestra for a few concerts, to please some local big spenders. This haute culture approach can tend to squelch local creativity in the name of Art.
And where is the correlation that Richard Florida — who first wrote about the idea of a creative class — noted between community creativity and a significant gay presence?
But I expect, or hope, that this kind of discussion is precisely why the State of the Rockies Report Card was created. Most of us don’t even start to think until we get mad, and this Report Card probably has something to make practically everyone mad, or at least thoughtful — except for those smug A+ counties. (And even they might be a little uncomfortable at some of the areas in which they rank highly, like percentage of total housing units built between 1990 and 2000.)
This is the most ambitious and intriguing look at the Rockies yet, and I look forward to its further refinement and continuity.
Oh yeah…. How did we do, here in Central Colorado? Well, in the final grades for livable counties with vibrancy and vitality, Custer County tops the region with an A+ in rural counties. Chaffee and Gunnison counties came in with almost identical grades of A- in the micropolitan counties. Frémont County got a B in that category; Saguache was average with a C in rural counties; and Lake, Park and Alamosa counties all pulled C-.
Copies of the State of the Rockies Report Card are available for $12 from the Colorado College Bookstore (719-389-6391).
George Sibley teaches and writes in Gunnison.