An ersatz democracy gets what it deserves

In the late 1980s, the city and county of Denver chose to look away from a deteriorating public school system, dirty air, traffic jams and inadequate public transportation, to pour $10 billion into 53 square miles of prairie out toward Kansas.

As this special issue shows, the decision to build Denver International Airport was made by "leaders' who ignored clear warnings about weather, geology, the economics of the airline industry, the shortest distance between two points and the history of megaprojects.

The decision was also made against the best interests of Colorado as a whole. DIA was an attempt by Denver's civic and business heads, the city's major media, and by all of Colorado's senators and representatives to blow Denver up into major-city status at the expense of the surrounding region.

The state's leaders deliberately destroyed an airport that served Denver and Colorado and the region well in order to create an airport which would serve the Front Range but not its rural surroundings.

As it turns out, Denver will reap much of the pain resulting from its decision to disregard the rest of Colorado and the surrounding region. Many of the small and medium-sized towns around Denver will develop alternatives to DIA. But Front Range residents are trapped with the monster Denver residents voted for.

In addition to its implications for air travel, DIA reveals Colorado as a backward place, lacking the foundations of a free and progressive society. As such, it deserves to be mocked on television by every cheapshot artist with a few million viewers.

DIA was possible, first and foremost, because Colorado lacks an effective press. Colorado's two major newspapers - The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News - and the Front Range television stations acted as cheerleaders for the project. Only the Denver alternative weekly, Westword, and columnist Gene Amole of the Rocky Mountain News functioned as journalists, asking the questions cheerleaders didn't want to hear.

The press didn't fail because it favored the airport. It failed because it refused to give opponents the same coverage and respect as proponents: thereby, it deprived the public of the chance to understand and debate the need for a new airport.

Second, DIA proves that the public has every reason to be cynical about elected officials. Both the state's fiscal conservatives and its free-spending liberals pushed DIA. Whether you are talking about balanced-budget proponents like Republicans Sen. Hank Brown and Rep. Dan Schaefer, or liberal Democrats like former Sen. Tim Wirth and Rep. Pat Schroeder, or a cowboy like Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, or the unclassfiable Gov. Roy Romer, their muscles were behind the airport.

Although $500 million in federal funds was invested in the airport, none of Colorado's elected national officials made any publicly visible attempt to determine if this money would be spent correctly.

Hand-in-hand with its lack of a bulldog press and more thoughtful elected officials, Colorado also continues to lack an organized collection of individuals and groups that understands and fights for the broad public good. The airport's billions in public pork enabled the development interests to buy off or coerce almost all of those who professionally "represent" the public. With elected officials and most of the media out of the way, there were very few amateurs left to fight the airport.

We sheep, it turns out, are only safe when the wolves are fighting among themselves. Once the wolves achieve consensus, we're lamb chops.

Ed Marston is publisher of HCN.

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