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Anywhere, USA? Or Nowhere, USA? Part One |
Allen Best | 2/3/10
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EDITOR'S NOTE: This article series, written by Colorado commentator Allen Best, focuses on development issues in the community of Eagle, Colorado and is reprinted by permission. Allen Best invites readers to subscribe to his monthly news service by visiting his website, AllenBest.net
By the margin of 54 to 46 percent, Eagle voters in early January rejected a major residential and commercial complex called Eagle River Station.
The rejected complex was to have been a so-called lifestyle center (motto: “Shop. Dine. Play.”) with big numbers: 552,000 square feet of commercial, a 150-room hotel and 581 housing units. Many issues swirled in the heated debate, such as how much the financial agreement governing sales tax revenues would have truly benefited Eagle after returns for infrastructure investments, and also whether well-heeled property owners outside the town unfairly influenced the election.
But the central, visceral issue was whether this lifestyle center, revised but substantially indistinguishable from 21 others done by the company at other locations across the country, was the proper one for a place where many people almost desperately want to avoid homogenization such as could be found in Anyplace USA. Continued...
No more than two blocks long, Eagle's Broadway District is core to community identity, but only a sliver of the town's economic foundation. Photo courtesy Allen Best. |
Less discussed, but also central, was whether the “old normal” of population growth and affluence in the Eagle Valley will return. The proposal assumed that it will, but at least some people suspected that the developer would have been delivered entitlements for a white elephant. Among those who opposed the project was Mike Metcalf, an archaeologist who has lived in Eagle since the 1970s. The debate was not necessarily about small towns, he says, but a concern about the dimensions.
It was just too much, especially for the town’s eastern gateway.
 “What do you want your community to be visualized as?” he asks. It was the second rebuff for developers at the site along Interstate 70 in what is now a hay field and livestock pasture. The first rejection came in 2005, when the town board turned down a similar but different proposal that, according to rumor, would have included a Costco big-box.
In a sense, Eagle got the Costco anyway. The store was built just outside the town limits and adjacent to the Eagle County Regional Airport — both of them within the limits of a neighboring town called Gypsum. Eagle gets most of the traffic from both, while Gypsum gets all but a token share of revenues.
Traditionally more scraggly in appearance and more blue collar in its outlook, Gypsum has prospered in recent years owing mostly to the airport revenues. Costco was the icing on the cake. Town officials vacated offices in an old concrete- block building in 1997 and moved into new headquarters adjacent to a community recreation center — which had a 20-year note that, officials decided, they could afford to pay off in 8 years (but cannot until 10 years without being penalized).
Gypsum officials recently agreed to buy the private Cotton Ranch golf course and make it a public- access course. Had the airport not shut down last year for six months for extension of the runway, say town officials, sales tax collections would have dropped only 2 to 3 percent. The collections were $3.8 million.
Eagle, though, has financial challenges — problems conceded even by a seeming majority of those who opposed Eagle River Station. Commercial growth has lagged growth of population, now at 6,400 people, more than double from 2003. Looming in the minds of town officials is debt on an improved wastewater treatment plant, at $600,000 but projected to grow to $1 million within a few years. Access to and from I-70 has become increasingly difficult. And some older portions of the town badly need replacements of sewer and other infrastructure. Without increased revenue, Eagle will be pinched.
“We’re not going to go broke, by any stretch of the imagination,” says Mayor Ed Woodland. Basic services will continue. But barring a change in sales tax revenues, which provides 90 percent of the general fund revenues, Eagle will have to spend less money on consultants and studies, major road improvements, and marketing efforts, he says. Streetscape improvements might be possible but only if significant development occurs in those areas.
A few opponents have argued for a shift to the property tax, hoping for a conservation easement on the property, but many opponents concede something will eventually get built in the pasture. It’s just a matter of what.
But what will be acceptable? That’s still unclear in this town, which is unremarkable in appearance but exceptional nonetheless in the minds of its own residents. It was also exceptional among towns of Northwest Colorado surveyed several years ago by Linda Venturoni for its sense of community satisfaction. Surveys conducted in 2004 and again in 2007 revealed that people in Eagle very much liked living there. The only other towns in the five counties she surveyed with similarly high scores were Steamboat Springs and Frisco.
“They have been a community that has really pulled together and felt good about who they are,” she says.
What she found remarkable about Eagle was the way high community satisfaction prevailed among many demographic groups.
“I think most people would expect that people who lived there longer would have a higher sense of community than new residents. But that wasn’t true. New residents showed a high sense of community, too. It was pervasive for all different age groups, all different lengths of residencies, all different types of family structures.”
But if Eagle stands out as a place that people like to call home, its issues nonetheless are common in mountain towns of the West as they try to balance their distinctiveness with the homogenization of shopping. Most people, even in remote locations, still spend much of their money with national chains, especially in bigger box stores—even if they have to drive to get there. In recent years, both Steamboat Springs and Carbondale have also struggled with this uncomfortable duality, but with no easy answers.
In Eagle, the election had no clear demographic cleavages, such as among new residents and old-timers. Construction trades, which compose a large number of Eagle’s middle- class residents, may have disproportionately supported it. Occupying homes that had been worth $500,000 to $1 million, many workers have been hit hard by the slow-down in construction at Vail, Beaver Creek and other nearby resort communities.
For-sale signs abound, and housing prices have plummeted.
Looking at the town’s financial problems and the broader community, Roxie Deane, a former mayor and now a town trustee, saw the shopping center as an answer. What opponents don’t understand, says she, is what makes Eagle special.
It has nothing to do with buildings, she believes, and everything to do with its people.
Read Part Two, tomorrow... |
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