Colorado Springs thrives by running the city like a business

In nearly 4,000 words, the left-wing magazine Politico attempted to push the old media mantra that Colorado Springs epitomizes the failures of right-wing politics and running the state like a business.

The article, " The Short, Miserable Life of a Libertarian Paradise," examines the city's resilience during the Great Recession and questions whether business principles can be useful in government. The article creates the illusion that tinkering with business practices had disastrous consequences that were eliminated once the practices in question were abandoned.

The article begins by criticizing how voters rejected a proposal to triple property taxes during the recession. Ignoring the fact that city officials want more money in a situation where unemployment is rising, the Pentagon is cutting budgets at local military bases, and people are afraid of losing their homes.

How a left-wing mayor's revenge is leading the city to ruin

One of the biggest advocates of the tax was then-City Manager Penelope Gilbert-Graft. Ironically, she herself could not afford the high taxes in her hometown, but she supported raising them in Springs to levels similar to those in California. In addition, she was sued for failing to repay a $250,000 loan from her former employer's credit union.

Springs voters want to avoid raising property taxes that they not only can’t afford to pay, but could also cause them to struggle with obligations similar to those Gilbert is facing with her mortgage. Politico, however, doesn’t share those details with the reader.

After the tax hike failed, Gilbert launched a passive-aggressive campaign to get back at voters and slash the budget significantly to garner media attention. The Politico article compared these budget cuts to the federal government’s so-called Washington Monument Strategy, which involves threatening to cut some of the most important public services first so that funding for state-run parks, monuments, and other less important activities can be perceived as extremely valuable. Simply put, the idea is to make citizens suffer from the budget cuts and thus abandon the pursuit of austerity.

As a result of Gilbert-Graft's budget cuts, public transportation is shut down, streetlights are removed, trash cans in parks are removed, and even public safety begins to suffer. Gilbert then orders the municipal public relations director to alert the media to the dangers that conservative tax policies have brought to the Springs.

The left-wing media is trying to denigrate the policies that are causing the recovery

Politico correctly describes the resulting press reactions, which focused on reducing public spending in the city, but fails to explain exactly how Graft organized the provision of information to the media and its publication.

The article explains how the local community rejected the city manager system in 2010 and created an executive governing body led by a mayor. The following spring, voters elected Steve Bach as mayor.

"What he promises the people sounds simple: The state's wastefulness is the root of taxpayers' suffering, and if the municipality is run like a good business, the problems will be solved. Easy... people were inclined to believe that he could really transform the way the city is run," the article claims.

Politico confuses the mayor’s attack on Spring with Bach’s experiment. From a story about Bach’s campaign, the article quickly shifts to explaining how “the city’s experiment is intriguing because it offers an opportunity to observe the effects of extreme conservative principles put into practice… The New York Times writes about a woman who lives in a trailer park and pawns her television to buy a shotgun for protection.” All of this is happening because there are no street lights, which Politico insinuates is a result of Bach’s experiment.

There is one problem with this story, however. The New York Times article was published on August 6, 2010. Bach was elected mayor 9 months later, on May 11, 2011, precisely because of the lack of street lighting and dark streets, the dying green space in the city, the lack of public safety and public transportation.

One of the first things Bach did as mayor, guided by his business principles, was to restore transportation, install lighting on the then-unlit streets, and take care of green spaces. According to him, no business could operate well without light, transportation, and a nice landscape.

Fiscal discipline and business principles save the city from the crisis

Politico furthers its attempt to confuse readers by attributing these improvements to “new fiscal policies” that have generated additional revenue. It also claims that much has changed in the past five years — for example, that revenues have risen to a level high enough “to put the lights back on the streets.”

Politico promotes this thesis to readers, ignoring the fact that it was Bach who solemnly lit up every street in the city more than 6 years ago.

In an attempt to denigrate the idea of running a city like a business, the article traces the origins of the “failed libertarian revolution” to an email sent by Steve Bartolin, then CEO of The Broadmoor, to the city council. It describes the wasteful spending and staffing of the city’s bureaucracy at a time when the city could not afford all the additional public spending.

"My intention was more to make people look at the state with different eyes, the way all organizations - private and public - and families are forced to these days," Bartolin explained in a subsequent letter to the Colorado Springs Business Journal.

Far from a failed experiment, the decision to run the city like a business was a huge success. Fiscal restraint during the crisis prevented Springs from becoming another municipal tragedy like Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta and other cities where residents were oppressed by high taxes and reckless municipal spending.

Business principles are saving and breathing new life into the Colorado Springs airport and the city's health care system, both of which were abandoned on the brink of survival under the old bureaucratic system. The city's prudent spending policies have actually kept people's homes, kept them out of bankruptcy, and kept them out of trouble paying their taxes as they try to survive in the face of low employment and frozen wages.

The "short unhappy life" of the experiment leads to long-term prosperity

While falsely promoting the "Short, Miserable Life" of the experiment, the article ends with a twist. Speculation is made about how Bach's Colorado Springs reform may have paved the way for the leadership of seasoned politician John Suthers at a time when the economy was in recovery.

Partly because the city was weathering the recession without squandering money it couldn't really afford, voters agreed when Suthers proposed changes to tax rates and retention of surplus revenue. They could now simply afford it.

The article paraphrases Suthers, who highlights Bach's contributions to fiscal policies that helped the city recover financially. Furthermore, most Springs officials believe that it was the "chaos" of Bach's administration that made the "harmony" of Suthers's administration possible.

Colorado Springs is the envy of many large cities when it comes to achieving key economic metrics. That's precisely because the city has run itself like a business for more than six years under the strong leadership of Bach, Suthers, and the recent city councils.

The lesson from Springs: Businesses and households should not raise their spending during tough times. The same goes for local governments, which should be run like the businesses and households that support them.

Оригинал:  Colorado Springs succeeds by running like a business

Translation: Natalia Chomakova

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