‘State of the Rockies’ Report Card Unveiled

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‘State of the Rockies’ Report Card Unveiled

By Jonathan Weber, 4-05-05

If you love numbers, and you love comparing your town or region to your neighbors, and you love serious thinking about the issues facing the West, you'll definitely love the second annual State of the Rockies Report Card from a small but ambitious group at Colorado College. (We love all those things, and in a few days we'll be launching a collaborative online project with the State of the Rockies team -- more on that soon).

The report covers a lot of ground, but we'll start with the rankings -- a subject that always gets people riled up. This year the report card didn't attempt a broad assessment of "best places" and instead offered more targeted "grading" around specific themes. Among the most interesting is the "sprawl index," which rates Pueblo, Albuquerque and Colorado Springs as the most sprawling of the large metro areas in the eight-state region, while Provo-Orem in Utah and Las Vegas and Reno in Nevada are the least sprawling. (Finding Provo and Las Vegas as least sprawling either says something about the methodology, or, more likely, something about the ubiquity of extreme sprawl in the West.) Among smaller metro areas, Great Falls and Missoula in Montana are least sprawling (really?) while Flagstaff, Ariz. and Grand Junction, Colo. top the chart.

Another set of rankings measures cities and regions by their level of "Civic Capacity" (number hospital beds, charitable groups, educational institutions, churches and even newspapers) as well as their "Civic Engagement" (the level at which people actually use the civic institutions and engage with their communities). Together these add up to "Social Capacity" a kind of proxy for the overall health and appeal of a community.

And the winners are: Boulder, Denver and Missoula for overall "Social Capacity" among metro areas; Teton, Wyo., Los Alamos, New Mexico and Lewis & Clark County, Mont. among so-called micropolitan areas; and Hinsdale, Colo., San Juan, Colo., and Rich, Utah among rural areas.

One of the interesting things about the Social Capacity index, though, is that the places that are high on the list for civic capacity are generally not the same ones that excel at civic engagement. Among rural areas, for example, six of the top ten for civic capacity are in Montana, with two in Colorado and two in Idaho. When it comes to civic engagement, though, six of the top ten are Colorado, with three in Utah and one in Wyoming -- and none in Idaho or Montana.

I'll hold off on my pocket analysis of this until I have a chance to ask the report authors about it ...

Update: The conference today featured an interesting discussion of social capital and the related theme of "creative occupations," which some recent research -- notably a book by Richard Florida called The Rise of the Creative Class -- show to be closely correlated to healthy, economically vibrant communities. As noted above, Boulder ranks at the top of the list for "Social Capacity," and though the numbers are compiled a little differently it also ranks very high in creative occupations (everything from artists and musicians to architects, academics, engineers and even athletes.)

These creative communities tend are characterized by social diversity, high education levels, and lots of innovation and they tend to feature pretty settings and vibrant street life. But, as Joseph Garcia, president of Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs pointed out, what if these characteristics are a result of something else entirely -- like money? Ranking criteria that put cities like Boulder simply underscore that "a lot of this is about class," Garcia said. "Everything else is a proxy for that." Wealthy cities have a lot of creative people; it doesn't necessarily follow that encouraging the creative classes will result in more wealth.

Mary Lou Makepeace, a former mayor of Colorado Springs and now the executive director of the Gay & Lesbian Fund for Colorado, says her city could do a lot better in building civic engagement and creating an open dialogue on sensitive issues. She thinks people have become too close-minded and sure of their answers, creating a kind of speech censorship. But even though she noted the ways in which Colorado Springs fell short of Boulder in building community, she readily acknowledges that if you ask people in her town whether they want to be like Boulder, the answer is a resounding "no."

My favorite analysis from Makepeace, though, was on something very different: the West is populated by people with attention deficit disorder, always looking for the next interesting thing. And those people tend to be very creative. Amen.