The following is reprinted with permission of a friend, Toby Gannett. He's a local visionary, instigator, and (his term) benevolent capitalist. These are his thoughts on the recent passing of the Southern Delivery System. The entire email I received from him is below, unedited. This is the type of civic interaction, discourse and factual debate I am proud to seeing beginning in our city.
Today marks an interesting day in the History of
the Pikes
Peak Region. I would like to congratulate Colorado Springs
Utilities on successfully getting city approval to begin work on the
Southern
Delivery System. They have worked tirelessly to improve relations
with Pueblo to make the project possible. Under Jerry Forte, Colorado
Springs Utilities has delivered on its duty to prepare for the regions
future
water needs for generations to come. I also applaud CSU for helping to
find a sustainable solution to keeping our parks green.
What is amazing to me, is that our city has not
lived up to
the same level of expectation. The debate on the SDS could have
been a catalyst for strategic long term integrated planning for our
community.
Our community has been growth centered since the second world war and
our city
is synonymous with urban sprawl. Growth for Growths sake is not a
sustainable or financially prudent policy. As our city has expanded,
and
now covers a vast footprint. First Union, then Circle, then Powers,
then…
As the expansion has moved eastward, the big boxes on each successive
beltway
have gone dark. Along with this expansion, we have accumulated more
streets
to maintain, larger utility infrastructure to support, and larger areas
for our
Police and Fire departments to protect.
In effect the expansion of the city has been
subsidized
by the taxpayers with the profits going to private developers. I
believe
that much of our cities current frustration is that we continue to grow,
without a comprehensive growth plan. SDS is a 2.2 Billion dollar
subsidy of this growth. It allows us to continue growing, but without a
strategic
plan and bold leadership we will simply become a larger version of our
current community.
In the end SDS may critical to our long term future, but it should be a
catalyst
to force our city to look at how we can use long term planning to make
our city
more efficient at delivering services and delivering our fiduciary duty
to our
taxpayers. The future debt service of the SDS will be equivalent to a
major percentage of our overall city budget.
The SDS is the largest capital expenditure our
community has
made in decades. Today our city will most probably chose to continue to
follow the policy subsiding growth and increase the Tax/Utility Rate
burden on
our citizens. It is ironic that after the community did not have enough
confidence in our government to pass a modest tax rate increase last
fall, and
have slashed city services, that today we approved a 2.2 billion dollar
tax increase. Next year our city will need to once again slash
additional
millions from our budgets and services. When will we as a city rise
to the challenges before us? It is possible to be financially
conservative, rely on our strong non-profit community to provide social
services, and have a government that has a clear direction of the
regions long
term economic expansion. What is needed is a clearly articulated vision
of how our city government, our hospitals and utilities are working
together to
make Colorado Springs an even better place to live. The current
financial
climate presents our communty with amazing opportunities to create a
better
future.
Toby Gannett
Executive Director

A Dunn & Associates Inc.
Managed Community
Jon: I agree with many of your points on the missed opportunity of a more open, sharing-focused society. My major agreement is your insight on fear.
We are in a beta stage that is moving very quickly with a mass audience of 400 million plus participating. But let's face it: face to face communication remains the highest and best form of communication, followed by over the phone, then email. Take face to face for example: there is what is said, and then how it is said. Eyebrows and facial temples communicate amazing amounts of information. Posture? Chin and nose position? If the majority of our communication is non-verbal, and things like inflections, cadence and tone matter greatly, then email and beyond are lacking. For purposes of discussion,
here is Australian Horse Trainer Bart Cummings... how much emotion and language is being communicated via his eyebrows in a still picture?
Now imagine him in video where you can hear cadence.
Now imagine him face-to-face where you can feel the temperature of his tone, the room, the audience, etc.? I think his horses react and take cues from his eyebrows and gaze... it's a primal form of communication.
Privacy standards and opt-in or opt-outs don't undo 2 million years of human evolution.
In the span of a half decade, we have migrated as new beings who have antiquated email and endorsed these secondary levels of communication as our primary-and-standard. I think so much of the privacy conversation is dishonest because it has nothing to do with privacy; privacy is the cause celebre because it's sexy, but it's the symptom on top of our fear. Most experiment participants have brains that have (surprise!) not evolved to the new primary-standard medium. Count me as one of the many. They/I don't know how to chat, text, or video message as a primary form of communication, and therefore consistently stumble, boggle and offend, and then react to the "privacy" factor which allows all this diffuse connectivity.
Where I agree with you Jon is that the real driver here is fear. But in turn, I think privacy is the easy whipping boy in the media-driven conversation. It isn't privacy at all. It is our inability to evolve at light speed to a new standard form of communication that pretty consistently fails or embarrasses.
What is required of our central processing faculties is pretty astounding, and while there is no restriction on speech per se, there is an evolutionary restriction on being understood. I think that latter part is a portion of the privacy factor: as active players in a mass beta test where the rules get made on the go we are afraid due to our agreements with openness, of being known as failures, broadcasting our indiscretions unknowingly to an increasingly distant, virtual audience we say we know, but really don't.