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A bear in our midst, for better or worse, has become a somewhat mundane occurrence. We live at the edge of the neighborhood, and our backyard is the wildland-urban dividing line. Not that creatures from either side of the line abide by it. Humans around these parts, often clad in spandex, swarm the hillsides like ants. Bears, raccoons, deer and coyotes roam the alleys like surly teenagers looking for some nutmeg to smoke. A mama bear and her cub spent a good portion of the summer lounging in our neighbor's backyard, and the alley down the street has a permanent set of greasy bear tracks leading from the fast-food joint's grease bin to trash can to wild plum to trash can.
When we first moved into our house this summer, I noticed a couple of old bags of garbage that had been strewn about in the scrub oak behind our house. I cursed the slovenliness of our previous tenant, then cleaned up the mess. A few weeks later, I noticed a similar pile of garbage in the front yard. It was as if a bear had gotten into our trash, but that was impossible since we keep our garbage in the garage. I inspected the neighbors' curbs for evidence that their trash had been raided. Nothing. Cursing, I cleaned up the garbage, stumbling across an envelope with an address as I went. The trash had come from over a block away, down a hill and through a fenced yard. I was enraged: First, at the people for tempting, and endangering, a bear with their unsecured garbage (a veritable feast, with leftover takeout and organic grapefruit rinds!); and also at the bear, for dragging it so far just to eat it in my yard.
A week later, another pile of trash appeared in our yard. A few days later, another. It became clear that the bears were ordering takeout from all over the neighborhood, dragging it up the hill, and devouring it in our yard as if it were their living room. And we don't even have television! I asked my sister, a wildlife biologist, what the hell was going on. "Ooooh," she said. "That's bad. It thinks your yard is its territory. That can be dangerous."
Prior to this, when the bears showed up, I'd bring the dog -- who has no fear of bear or pit bull or mean cat -- inside, so she didn't terrorize them. Afterward, I let the dog chase them away, or at least try. After all, I know that the bears probably know that each time they bring a bag of trash to my yard, I'm out there soon afterward, crouching down and cleaning up the mess. And I know the bears know that I might be a bit chewy, but -- marinated as I am in years of red wine, coffee, garlic and Cherry Garcia ice cream -- I'm probably a lot tastier than plastic-encased garbage and styrofoam-cartoned leftovers from the crappy joint down the street. This whole territory thing had to go.
So, a few days ago, when Princess was yapping her bear yap, I went out to help her tell those bruins who's boss. I chuckled with some relief when I got outside and found that it was just a deer causing all the commotion. "Awww, c'mon, Princess," I said. "Stop barking at the deer. Geez. It's a nice deer." It was a buck, a young one, I think, with a smooth, shiny coat and a mid-sized rack. It moved through the scrub oak with a certain grace, on long delicate legs that reminded me of a dancer's. Princess kept barking, but the deer wasn't fazed. Instead, it circled around, walking onto the lawn, it's big black eyes unblinking.
I was shocked, but also delighted by its lack of fear. Ahh, to see nature up close! To commune with the wild! To practically be able to reach out and touch this kindred spirit of the woods!
A friend of mine, after reading a book called Teen Psychic, adopted a bear as her spirit guardian -- this sort of thing is considered normal around here. The psychic ursine stands quietly at her side until her boss throws a temper tantrum, at which point the bear bares its claws and tears the boss a new one, psychically, of course. Given Princess' chutzpah and her obstinance, I'm pretty sure her psychic guardian is that short, stout German woman who yelled at us on the U-Bahn for speaking English, but that's another story. As for me, I understood at that moment that the buck -- the noble stag -- would be my spirit's protector.
I looked meaningfully into its shiny eyes, and tried to let it know that I wouldn't harm it, and that far from enemies, we were allies in this chaotic and crazy world. Apparently, Princess' yapping distorted our mind-meld, because the deer didn't return my warm and fuzzy feelings. It just looked at me like it was deciding who to kill first, me or Princess.
I backed up, putting an iron table between the buck and me, then I started screaming at the dog to shut the heck up and run. She didn't listen (aforementioned German Frau/psychic guardian merely gave me a stern look). I changed tack and yelled at the buck, instead, waving my arms and jumping up and down and lunging in its general direction to scare it away. He didn't listen, either. Instead, he calmly took a few steps back, put his head down in full on battering ram position, and battered Princess, pummeling her into the dirt and rolling her along with skull and antlers as though she were no more than a furry sausage. Miraculously, the antlers did not penetrate, and Princess, covered with dust and shaken, was able to jump up and run onto the porch with me (by now I was cowering underneath the table, trying to summon my mountain lion psychic guardian without success).
The deer departed. Princess and I ran inside, alive and mostly unharmed. This time
According to the Intertubes, such attacks are not at all uncommon. Deer have been known to pummel dogs, people and sometimes even skateboarders (less of an attack, than a collision, methinks, but still pretty darned gnarly).
(Warning -- there are expletives towards the end of this clip)
In this crazy -- and kind of brutal -- video, a cat tries to play with a fawn, then the fawn's mom beats the crap out of a dumbfounded dog. During the 2005-06 fawning seasons, Southern Illinois University was terrorized by a rash of doe attacks on students.
As for me, I now have to worry not only about the bears trashing my yard, but also about the deer stomping me or the dog down. For her part, Princess was scared to even go outside, for about five minutes. Then she seemed to get over it -- or forget -- and now appears set on revenge. Her bearing tells me she'd like a name change, too: To "Deerslayer." Next time I hear that barking with the "bear tone," I think I'll just stay inside.
Photos of wildlife in the author's backyard all courtesy of the author.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor for High Country News. He is based in Durango, Colo., and his Twitter handle is @jonnypeace.]]>
This was one of the areas that experienced an uproar in 1906, when, with the West facing a coal famine, President Theodore Roosevelt withdrew 64 million acres of coal-bearing land from homesteading. Even those who had already homesteaded and worked the land couldn't patent it unless they could prove that the coal underneath wasn't valuable. Congress was outraged. Finally, in 1909, the government reached a compromise and passed the Coal Lands Act, which allowed the feds to issue patents on land that reserved the coal underneath for the government. The thorny split estate -- in which the surface and minerals underneath are owned by two separate entities -- was born (and, even more thornily, extended to oil and gas in 1914). In this part of Colorado, the act gained greater significance in 1938 when all the coal under the 1880 Ute Reservation was reserved for the Ute tribe.
GCC is doing well, reporting a 13 percent increase in sales from last year, an indication that the construction industry is, indeed, making some sort of rebound. And as sales increase, so does the need for coal for the cement kilns. That's why King Coal II is hoping the Bureau of Land Management will allow it to expand underneath an additional 952 acres of private land, up yearly production and extend the life of the mine. Most of the land over the mine is part of a sprawling ranch owned by the Ute Mountain Ute tribe. Since it's not part of the reservation, however, the tribe does not own the coal underneath, and doesn't stand to benefit from the mining (that nasty split estate raises its head again).
Neighbors aren't thrilled reports Emery Cowan in the Durango Herald: Already, some 70 to 80 big rigs (all of which are, surprisingly white and spotless) enter or leave the mine each day, most of them bound for a railroad loading area near Gallup, NM, 130 miles to the south, the rest going directly to customers. That could increase to 100 trucks per day under the expansion, and each truck kicks up a thick cloud of dust on the long stretches of gravel road that haven't gotten the anti-dust treatment. The people who live near the mine are also mostly on wells, and they worry about how increased mining might affect the groundwater. Yet the mine also provides 100 regular jobs and that much again to contractors, as well as $475,000 per year in revenue to the county. With the natural gas industry around here in the doldrums, thanks to low prices, those benefits aren't going to be given up easily.
Like utilities, cement manufacturers may start switching to cleaner-burning natural gas or, as is the case in some places, tires. Yes, tires. Here's a cool video, by the Louisville Courier-Journal, of a "tire pitcher," which tosses the tires into the fire at 85 mph, at a Cemex (also Mexican-owned) plant.
In the meantime, cement production seems to be slowly climbing back out of the hole it fell into when the housing boom busted (cement consumption trends mirror housing starts). And despite the cement industry's cries that the EPA rules would just send cement making overseas, 94 percent of cement consumed domestically is also manufactured here (China produces 20 times more cement than the U.S., but the U.S. gets only a tiny percentage of that as imports).
Cement kilns aren't going to save the coal industry. But it's enough demand to inspire a small coal mine to expand, even when the industry is languishing.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor for High Country News. He's based in Durango, Colo., and his Twitter handle is @jonnypeace.
Photos of the King Coal II Mine, and an historic mine structure and modern house nearby, by the author.]]>
The era of huge Western water projects has long been over. We're not going to see another Glen Canyon entombed by stagnant water and silt, nor another convoluted plumbing project on the scale of the Aspinall Unit on the upper reaches of the Black Canyon in Colorado.
But here in southwestern Colorado, the Animas-La Plata project, often called the last big water project in the West, is in its final stage of construction. The dam I am shocked to see is for the Long Hollow Reservoir. It's small, and not officially part of the A-LP -- it's more of a hangover from the bigger project, really. But seeing it makes me feel a bit like this part of the world is trapped in a sort of water project time warp.
The Long Hollow Dam is being built in an area known around here as the Dryside, a vast, mildly undulating mesa that stretches from the foothills of the La Plata Mountains in southwestern Colorado down into New Mexico. Fields and pastures reach out to the horizon here, interspersed with juniper and sage and dotted with oil and gas wells. Neither the big subdivisions and sprawl nor the wealth of surrounding areas have made it here; it can feel more like the Northern Plains than the Southwest. Not much water makes it here, either: Once the cruelly short spring runoff is done, the La Plata River, which runs through the Dryside, ebbs to a trickle or even dries up completely. Whatever is left in the stream is mostly or wholly committed to New Mexico by a 1922 compact. That leaves farmers on the Colorado side of the line high, dry and frustrated (often the New Mexicans don't get much water, either).
Which is why, back in the 1930s, someone dreamed up a scheme to route water from the much more abundant Animas River to the east, over to the La Plata River and the Dryside. In the 1950s and 60s, the Bureau of Reclamation turned the dreams into actual proposals. They were grandiose, Byzantine plans, each of which included several reservoirs, miles and miles of canals, tunnels through mountain ranges and, in at least one case, a coal-fired power plant between Durango and Silverton. Indeed, one alternative would have put the big dam on the Animas River just below Silverton, completely submerging the mining town. The most realistic of the bunch, which would have moved the dam a few miles upstream from Silverton, was nearly realized. But the Vietnam War intervened, money for dams was instead spent on bombs dropped on Southeast Asia, Congressman and water buffalo Wayne Aspinall was voted out of office, and the Animas-La Plata project seemed to stall out completely.
The concept got resuscitated in the late 70s and gained steam in the 1980s, when Indian water rights became a more integral component of the proposal. One can legitimately argue that, under the terms of early treaties that yanked their land out from under them, the Utes of Colorado are entitled to all of the water on the Western Slope of Colorado. So now A-LP wasn't just about helping farmers, but also about giving Indians the water they deserved. The link between farmers and Indians was Sam Maynes, a Durango attorney of Irish and Italian ancestry who was a bit like a pit bull with a bolo tie. He served as counsel not only for the Southern Ute tribe, but also the local water district. To the greens, Maynes was a villain, a label the attorney wore with glee.
Not far to the west, the Dolores River fell victim to a dam in the early '80s. Maynes had been a pusher of that project, too. Environmentalists weren't about to let another dam go through without a fight; they had seen too many valuable places submerged, and too many wild rivers tamed. It didn't matter that proponents had shifted A-LP to an "off-site" reservoir in Ridges Basin, just south of Durango, so it wouldn't actually dam a river. For the next two decades, local and national environmentalists, along with the local rafting industry, brawled with project proponents. Whenever the project seemed poised to go forward, the opposition raised another hurdle (the endangered Colorado pikeminnow and Razorback sucker), and brought things to a halt.
The fight saturated the community of Durango. I was in high school in the late 80s, and remember it well. Virtually everyone was either for the dam or against it. No one sat on the sidelines. My parents were in the opposition. My good friend's dad was Maynes' law-firm partner, and a strong proponent. People from both sides argued their cases in front of the school's student body. T-shirts declaring the A-LP the "billion dollar boondoggle" were printed up, and the "Frankly my dear, I don't want a dam" bumper stickers were ubiquitous (my buddy nearly got in a fight with a former mayor over his). As deep as the conflict went, it was not partisan at all. Maynes, who died in 2003, was a Democrat. So was the lake's namesake, Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, at least until he switched to the GOP. Fiscal conservatives joined the opponents, balking at the absurd cost. And it was the Clinton administration that finally pushed through the project -- vastly scaled down from the original plans.
In 2002 construction began on the $500 million Animas-La Plata project, which includes a plant that draws water out of the Animas River and pumps it through a pipe up a 500-foot vertical climb to Lake Nighthorse (weirdly enough, the dam has no hydropower component, so none of the power used to pump water uphill is being recouped when water is released from the dam). The reservoir reached its 123,000 acre feet capacity last year, though the lake is still deemed a "work zone" and is off-limits to the public. The project may not even be worthy of its name anymore, since it is intended primarily to meet Indian water rights, not to deliver water to the La Plata drainage.
That's where the Long Hollow Reservoir, now under construction along a tiny tributary of the La Plata River, comes in. When the final version of A-LP was revealed, the Drysiders -- some of whom had been lobbying for the A-LP for half a century -- were devastated to find that they were left out, entirely. They figured if they weren't going to get what they wanted from the A-LP, they'd build their own damned dam, using $15 million plus interest that the state had originally set aside for the A-LP (but which wasn't spent because the project ended up being paid for entirely by the feds). When it's completed in two years, the Long Hollow project, costing $22.5 million, will hold up to 5,400 acre feet of water to be released into the La Plata River when it is too low to meet the New Mexico compact. That, in turn, will allow Dryside irrigators to continue to divert water from the La Plata River for irrigation, even during dry spells.
It's hard not to feel as if the new dam was built more because of momentum than because of the benefits it brings. The head of the La Plata Water Conservancy district told the Durango Herald that the dam "will give Colorado ranchers seven to 10 more irrigation days and help satisfy our compact with New Mexico." And reports say that fewer than 100 irrigators will benefit from the reservoir. So a handful of ranchers might get a second or third cutting of hay that they might not have, otherwise. Or maybe not. It hardly seems worth the effort. It's as though proponents had fought for so long for this that they couldn't give up now, even though the original logic behind the plan had faded long ago.
The same, I suppose, could be said about many such projects. The Animas-La Plata stores water for tribes, and that water can be released back into the river and sold downstream. But the project included no way to deliver the water directly to the tribes (a pipeline on and near the Navajo Nation is under the auspices of the project, but it doesn't connect to Lake Nighthorse). Growth has halted in Las Vegas, but the Southern Nevada Water Authority is plowing ahead on plans to suck groundwater from northern, rural parts of that state and send it to Sin City, even though the need for the water is questionable. Ditto down in Utah's Dixie, where a proposed $1-$2 billion pipeline would ferry water from Lake Powell to St. George, Utah, once an area of rapid growth, now a victim of the housing bust.
I walk around looking for the best place to shoot photos, while making sure I stay in the highway right-of-way, so as not to trespass. Nevertheless, I'm deemed a threat. After about five minutes, a big white truck pulls up near me, and a big guy with a hardhat gets out. "I gotta call says someone's up here taking pictures," he says. "Ummm..." I say, holding up my camera gear, "yeah, that would be me. I just figured I'd come see what a dam looks like when it's getting built." He looks me up and down, and I can't help but wonder what he sees. "Uh huh," he says. "I take pictures of it every day, too. It's interesting. But some people don't like us, and you never know who's on your side and who's not."
Photos, from top to bottom: Long Hollow Dam site; Lake Nighthorse; tanks at gas well on the Dryside. All courtesy of the author.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. His Twitter handle is @jonnypeace.]]>
That's because Obama's not behind it. Coal is in trouble thanks to the market's vagaries and the abundance of cheap natural gas from the drilling boom that began a decade ago. If the coal industry wants to tackle the real culprit, it should attack a slogan from a few years back: "Drill, Baby, Drill."
Coal has long been America's favorite energy source: It drove the East's industrialization, powered our Allies during World War II, and has kept the Sunbelt's air conditioners purring cheaply ever since.
It's also a dirty source of electricity, which is why greens have battled coal's impacts for decades, starting with the Nixon-signed Clean Air Act of 1970. It forced utilities to put scrubbers in their stacks to reduce the nastiest emissions, but didn't slow the coal binge. In 1990, the first President Bush amended the law to address acid rain. That encouraged Eastern coal plants to start using low-sulfur coal -- opening a huge market for coal from the West, which is rife with the stuff. That revived the North Fork Valley's mines and eventually made Wyoming's Powder River Basin the world's biggest coal-producing region. In 1973, the U.S. burned 563 million tons of domestic coal in one year. By 2007, we'd doubled that amount.
The anti-coal landmines were planted during Bush II's administration. In the 1990s, natural gas combined cycle turbines -- where combustion spins a jet engine-like turbine, and its waste heat creates steam to spin a conventional turbine -- were improved. Cheaper and more efficient than coal generators, they took off; natural gas-generating capacity grew 96 percent from 2000 to 2010. Beginning in 2005, advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing opened up vast reserves in shale formations across the country, dropping prices from a high of nearly $8 per thousand cubic feet in 2008, to around $3 today. That makes natural gas competitive with coal on a per-megawatt-hour basis –– something to be used all the time, not just during times of peak power demand.
By last April, coal provided just 32 percent of the nation's electricity, down from the 1990-2010 average of 50 percent. Domestic coal mines are on track to produce at least 10 percent less this year than in 2006. (They've cushioned themselves by exporting 100 million tons or so per year to Europe and Asia.) Things will only get worse -- or better, depending on your outlook: In October, the Brattle Group forecast that between 59 and 77 gigawatts, about one-fifth of total U.S. coal power capacity, will go offline by 2016. Whether federal regulations are strict or lenient will make little difference. The primary reason for the retirements, they say, is cheap natural gas.
"I'm happy to take the blame (for the coal industry's decline)," says Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians, a group often praised (or denounced) as the cavalry in the war on coal. "But I don't think it's justified. Green groups like ours understand that these issues are purely about economics, and if we don't strategize around economics, we're going to lose."
That's not to say that other factors aren't involved. Pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency and environmentalists contributed to the planned shutdown of two units at the San Juan Generating Station and three more at the Four Corners Power Plant in northern New Mexico, two of the biggest in the West. This year, the EPA's mercury emissions limits were finally put in place after languishing for a decade, and a proposed carbon dioxide emissions cap would make it virtually impossible to build a new coal plant without carbon capture technology.
But even the libertarian Cato Institute acknowledges that this doesn't amount to war. In a Forbes op-ed this August, Cato's Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren chided their conservative peers for over-reacting to the greenhouse gas rule. "One might think that conservatives would be positively euphoric about these regs ... and environmentalists, likewise, spitting mad," they wrote, because the administration could have enacted much stricter regulations –– ones that would have targeted existing coal plants rather than just new ones –– but did not.
Coal is fighting back, nevertheless. As soon as Obama took office, coal money poured into politics like never before. Since 2008, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal, the two big operators in the Powder River Basin, have spent about $36 million on lobbying. They've also upped campaign contributions, mostly to Republicans. Oxbow Corp., which owns one of the North Fork Valley mines and belongs to Bill "the other brother" Koch, has donated $3.75 million this year to the Restore Our Future super PAC, a major source of funding for Mitt Romney's campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
But Obama's never been all that tough on coal. His Interior Department opened land to leasing in the Powder River Basin, despite protests and lawsuits from WildEarth Guardians and others. It also approved Oxbow's exploratory work for a major expansion in Colorado and exempted some mines from that state's version of the Clinton Roadless Rule. Obama delayed his own EPA's smog rule, which would have dealt another blow to coal, and the EPA continues to stall on coal ash disposal regulations that have been on the table since Clinton was in office. With enemies like these, who needs friends?
Then again, it's hard to see how any administration could end the so-called war on coal. It could block carbon rules and continue to delay coal ash rules, or interfere with the markets à la the 1978 federal law that banned the construction of new gas power plants until its repeal in 1987. Maybe it could increase natural gas prices by upping demand, perhaps pushing methane-powered vehicles or subsidizing exports.
Despite the challenge from natural gas, Western coal is holding its own. The Powder River Basin's two biggest mines have 400 more employees than they did in 2007. In the North Fork Valley, there are more miners entering mines and more coal coming out than five years ago. Meanwhile, the Western natural gas industry is struggling, thanks to all that cheap gas from the East. Oil and gas drilling starts in Colorado are lower than they've been in a decade.]]>
That's potentially bad news for the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, where Peabody owns two massive mines and employs thousands of high-wage workers. At first glance, it appears that maybe the war on coal is taking its toll, and that King Coal may be getting a demotion. But look closer and it turns out that the war, in this case, is being waged against the coal miners by the companies themselves.
Peabody says it hopes to save some $100 million over the next year, in part by slashing 1,000 jobs in the United States and Australia. On its face, that makes sense, given the hard times faced these days by the coal industry, which is getting battered mostly by cheap natural gas but also by upped regulations (and the threat thereof).
But wait. Peabody, it turns out, is not hurting at all. In fact, the same story about the layoffs notes that its earnings during the third quarter of this year were higher than last year. Peabody has thrived during alleged war waged by the Obama administration. It's had higher profits for each of the last four years than it did in 2007. Even during the recession's 2009 trough, when coal demand plummeted, Peabody's operating profit exceeded that of 2007 by a significant margin. We're talking billions of dollars in gross profit, (hundreds of millions after taxes, amortization and other tangential expenses). This company, at least, is doing quite well during the War on Coal.
So how can this beleaguered industry make such big profits or sink so much into political candidates during times when domestic coal demand is fading? Part of it is that the bad times aren't being felt across the entire industry. Peabody has actually upped production and expanded its workforce since 2007 at its North Antelope Rochelle Mine -- the second largest coal mine on the continent and maybe the world (the biggest is Arch Coal's Black Thunder complex, also in the PRB). Western coal, in general, is holding up better than Appalachian coal because it's generally cheaper to mine per Btu and is also cleaner-burning.
Corporate coal, in other words, is still king.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor for High Country News. His Twitter handle is @jonnypeace.]]>
--Brigham Young, 1873
A throng of cars floats down Interstate 15 on an end-of-summer morning, the rising sun wreathed in the orange gauze of distant wildfire smoke. In Lehi, a suburb sandwiched between Salt Lake City and Provo, a massive steel-and-glass shape juts out from the hillside over the interstate, sporting a huge banner that reads "Adobe." It's the 280,000-square-foot first phase of the software giant's new campus, which will house more than 1,000 employees, adding to the 600 already in Utah. Behind the building, rows of new houses are marching up the hillside, watched over by the gleaming white steeples of Mormon meeting houses. A flock of paragliders hangs in the hazy air above the subdivision.
It's a perfect snapshot of Utah's economy, which by nearly all measures is doing quite well. The state has more manufacturing than its neighbors, greater economic diversity, and in August the unemployment rate was 5.8 percent, tied with Wyoming for lowest in the West (Nevada was highest with 12.1). Big businesses like Adobe and Goldman Sachs are expanding their presence here. A lower percentage of people live in poverty in Utah than in most of the nation, and Utah consistently has the best Gini Index score, meaning the wealth is more evenly distributed. In the past year alone, at least a half-dozen media outlets have ranked Utah among the top five places to live or do business, and the Brookings Institution's Metro Monitor consistently gives Ogden, Salt Lake City and Provo top scores in recovery from the recession.
This success has observers asking: What's Utah's secret sauce? Republican Gov. Gary Herbert says that the main ingredient is a laissez-faire, no-government-interference, free-market approach. "This is no surprise to Utah, again confirming that reasonable regulation, low taxes and an unparalleled workforce are the best components to promote economic growth," Herbert told The Salt Lake Tribune in August, after CNBC chose his state as number two for business in the nation. "We achieve this growth by creating the best conditions for the free market to do what it does best."
In other words, Utah -- one of the politically reddest states -- provides an ideal atmosphere for the "We Built It" slogan that the Republican Party has adopted this campaign season. Utah's relatively low corporate tax rate (5 percent) and the Herbert administration's recent effort to streamline regulations have also attracted businesses fleeing states with higher taxes and more onerous rules.
But look a little more closely at Lehi, and a more complex recipe emerges. Adobe may, indeed, have been lured here by low taxes, but $40 million in incentives from the state government, plus millions more in local incentives, also helped. So did the state-funded effort to turn its universities into high-tech incubators of sorts and the taxpayer-funded commuter rail that will be extended to near the company's campus later this year. Adobe employees will overlook the whirling industrial sculpture of state-incentivized wind turbines, along with an even bigger campus of sorts across the valley, a 1 million-square-foot, $2 billion National Security Agency "spy center" funded by federal taxpayers.
We Built It? Sure, as long as the "We" includes a healthy dose of all levels of government involvement, and impressive influence from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, building on a long history of strong centralized planning and rebellion against unfettered capitalism and the Western frontier individualist ethos. "To the very desirable assets of the Western landscape, they've added good policy," says Mark Muro, co-director of the Brookings Mountain West think tank. "It's not a big government, but they're doing smart things. It's a planning-oriented, smart, lean government."
To see this dynamic at work on a smaller, hyped-up scale, follow I-15 past the Adobe campus, through the edge of Salt Lake City and past the Deseret Industries grain elevators at the LDS Welfare Square. Stop in Ogden, a city of about 80,000 nestled against the mountains, where another Republican and self-proclaimed free marketeer, Matt Godfrey, used his power as mayor to push, pull and cajole a transformation in his city, from rundown railroad burg to, in his words, a "cool, hip funky town being reborn as an outdoor mecca."
Godfrey, who has the slight build of a long-distance runner -- he was an all-American track star in college -- and thinning hair that he keeps tightly shorn, wears a friendly grin when I meet him in Ogden's historic Ben Lomond hotel on a hot September day. He doesn't remotely resemble the images evoked by the "Boss Godfrey" nickname pinned on him by his critics. He bounds into the hotel lobby wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and notices a hotel guest who's heading towards the front door with a bicycle and gear in tow. "Awesome!" says Godfrey, in a soft, high-pitched voice. "That's what I love to see, mountain bikes in hotel lobbies."
It's fair to say that that particular mountain bike, pushed by a competitor in the XTerra national championship mountain triathlon and trail-running event taking place in Ogden that weekend, was there thanks to Godfrey. From the moment he took office in 2000 until he left last January after deciding not to run for a fourth term, Godfrey worked vigorously -- some would say autocratically -- to turn downtown Ogden into a place where mountain bikers and runners and skiers would feel at home.
Different industries and government programs shaped Ogden from the time it first boomed back in 1869. Back then, Ogden was one of the two nearest cities to where the Union and Central Pacific branches of the Transcontinental Railroad met. The other was Corinne, a non-Mormon town with a bunch of saloons. Though Latter-day Saints President Brigham Young fretted about the evil outside influences a railroad might bring, he was also pragmatic, and wanted a Mormon community to reap the benefits, too. So he got his Ogden followers to give up pieces of their land, which he then offered to the railroad companies on the condition that they build their major terminal and hub in Ogden. It worked. Corinne, the loser, virtually vanished. Ogden thrived.
Its status as a railroad hub drew manufacturers, distributors, icehouses, banks and stockyards. In 1926, the Denver & Rio Grande Western Magazine called Ogden "one of the leading industrial centers of the great Intermountain West." That legacy can be seen in the downtown area's solid, sometimes grand architecture. The population of Ogden grew from about 1,500 in 1860 to 10 times that in 1890, and growth continued at a rapid clip for decades.
Beginning in the 1950s, air travel and the interstate highway system replaced the rails. With the development of mechanically refrigerated railroad cars and trucks, Ogden's niche as an ice manufacturer and layover stop for perishable goods melted, and the giant ice factory fell idle in 1972. The American Can Company shut down seven years later. Ogden's population stalled out at around 70,000 in 1960, and stayed there for the next four decades. The core of the city was hollowed out, the population aged, and by the 1990s, as sprawl filled up the space between the mountains and the Great Salt Lake, Ogden was in danger of degenerating into a beat-up, crime-ridden suburb of Salt Lake. The Ogden River, which skirts downtown, was so nasty after decades of dumping and neglect that in 2007, celebrity environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called it a "putrid waste conveyance."
It was this city that Godfrey, at the tender age of 29, hoped to lead. He had grown up in Ogden, attended college here at Weber State University, and watched the decline. He had a bit of business experience, but none in politics, though he had already been a bishop in the Mormon Church, an asset in the Utah political arena.
"We were struggling," says Godfrey. "No one stepped in and said: 'We have to transition our economy.' So for 40 years we just kept being the old railroad town. When I ran for mayor, people would say, 'I just want to see the railroad come back.' It was unbelievable."
Godfrey ran on being "aggressive about putting forth a new vision of the community." Within six months of winning office, he and his colleagues firmed up the vision: Ogden would draw on its ready access to skiing, biking, climbing and other outdoor activities and become a "high adventure recreation" mecca. It soon became clear that this vision required a hands-on approach.
"I'm a free-market guy. My philosophy is that the market should drive things," says Godfrey. Yet, rather than lowering taxes, easing regulations or getting government out of the way of market forces, Godfrey used the tools at the city's disposal to pursue his vision. "It's only when the market is broken that the government should get involved. Trying to correct it so that it can thrive on its own again, and that's what we tried to do."
Godfrey, who now works in the private sector as an economic development consultant, begins a before-and-after tour of the downtown just outside the hotel. "That place was a mess," he says, pointing across the street at the park next to City Hall. Today, its gardens are meticulously manicured, the grass brilliant green and freshly trimmed -- a nice place to sit and eat lunch from one of the nearby taco vendors. But back then it was "filled up with whatever the next step up from homeless is," says Godfrey, and its hedged-in playground was littered with syringes. The city government stepped in and, with the help of grants, built an amphitheater and cleaned the place up. It was one of Godfrey's first big initiatives.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the tour is less the transformations that took place, though they are remarkable, than the extent to which the city government pushed them through, whether by increasing regulation, getting greater funding for the cops, spending federal stimulus money, handing out incentives, tax-increment financing, arm-twisting, or simply buying property and developing it itself. Over the past 12 years, the city embarked on its own unique and massive stimulus program.
There's the paved bike path that now winds its way through lush trees alongside the once "putrid" Ogden River and its four kayak parks. This $6 million restoration project, which required removing some 13,000 tons of concrete and thousands of tires from the waterway, was completed this year. A few blocks from the river, the big, brick former American Can Company building bustles as the headquarters of a charter school and Amer Sports' North American headquarters. The interior is airy and light, corporate and modern with giant exposed old beams giving it a rustic edge, a remodel that was incentivized by the city. On historic 25th Street, a once-vacant lot now holds a somewhat posh restaurant, condos and boutiques, another of the city's many public-private partnerships.
Realizing that upscale businesses wouldn't do well without a nearby upscale clientele, the city bought most of the houses -- grand old Victorians divided into apartments that were slowly deteriorating -- on a block of Jefferson Avenue east of downtown. The city then sold them at a low price and subsidized their restoration.
When Godfrey was first elected, it looked like the Ogden City Mall, in the heart of downtown, would either sit empty or become a call center. The city government bought the mall for $6 million, then spent tens of millions more for its demolition, building in its stead the Salomon Center, the anchor of what is now The Junction -- a 48-acre mixed-use development that is surely the flagship of Godfrey's legacy. Though designed to meld with the historic streetscape, The Junction retains a mall-like feel, with piped-in music drowned out by the roar emanating from the Salomon Center's indoor skydiving fan.
On the north end of The Junction, Deseret Books -- owned by the Mormon Church -- occupies a large retail space. The main window display, featuring a book of the teachings of Joseph Smith, faces a huge construction zone, with a crane towering overhead and workers moving about busily on a skeletal structure. "That's the temple," says Godfrey, stopping the SUV for a moment and looking up reverently. "It's going to be awesome."
In 1999, before Godfrey was elected, the church began construction of the 220-apartment complex, Colonial Court, on church-owned land just west of the temple, marking the first major development in downtown in years. After he was elected, Godfrey met with church officials and urged them to keep building to help bolster the city's own efforts. Now they're doing just that: Ogden's temple, one of 16 in the state and 139 worldwide, is getting a major makeover of its old 1970s space-age sheen. On the surrounding land, the church's real estate arm is also doing a major mixed-use development for an estimated $250 million.
The LDS role in the economy and land-use planning of Utah is often downplayed, even by church officials. They insist, for example, that their development efforts are solely to insulate their temples from urban blight. But the significance of their role can't be denied. The state was originally colonized by Mormons, after all, and today more than 60 percent of Utahns are Mormons, according to church counts. A much greater percentage of Utah politicians belong to the church, so LDS culture inevitably seeps into local and state decision-making.
Then there's the church's corporate presence: It owns Utah's second-biggest newspaper, a book publisher, dozens of radio stations, financial companies, a hotel and a handful of restaurants, not to mention a great deal of land. An HCN analysis of property records found that two of the church's real estate subsidiaries, Property Reserve Inc. and Suburban Land Reserves, together own more than 200 parcels in Salt Lake County alone, valued at more than $340 million. Perhaps more surprising are their out-of-state real estate holdings, which include 150 parcels in Maricopa County, Ariz., home of Phoenix, and almost 2,300 acres in neighboring Pinal County, where the church bought an unbuilt subdivision in 2008 for a whopping $72 million. A Reuters story earlier this year estimated the church's net worth at about $40 billion.
"The Church," wrote Rod Decker, now a reporter for a Utah television station, in Sunstone magazine in 1992, "neither exercises nor seeks control of government, yet it remains not only the most powerful single interest in Utah politics, but the most powerful single interest in the politics of any American state."
Concrete symbols of its influence can be seen in Ogden and, on a much grander scale, in the $2 billion redevelopment by the church of a major portion of downtown Salt Lake City. This spring, City Creek, one of the largest mixed-use developments in the nation, with eight high-rises, 90 retail stores and hundreds of condos, opened for business. Even before that, the church dominated the city's core, with Temple Square and various church-owned enterprises stretching out from there, including the imposing Albert Speer-esque LDS Conference Center. City Creek's development also kept the city's building industry afloat during the housing bust, employing at least 1,500 construction workers.
"(The church) did it during a recession and they didn't bat an eyelash," says Mark Knold, chief economist for the Utah Department of Workforce Services. "You could almost go so far as to call them a recession-proof industry." The church also provides a fairly hefty safety net through its welfare program, Deseret Industries -- a network of thrift stores that puts unemployed or disabled people to work -- and major support of the Utah Food Bank; it donated more than $2.5 million to a 2009 capital fundraising campaign. The church won't share its employment figures and the state doesn't track them, so its precise effect on the local economy will always remain a mystery.
The church's cultural influence also spreads far and wide. Most obvious are the state's liquor laws, stemming from the church's prohibition on alcohol. Some of the more arcane ones -- Happy Hour is illegal in Utah -- may have a negative drag on the economy by discouraging tourism. But if you want to buy beer for your river trip in Utah, you need to go to the state-owned liquor store, a bit of socialism in action. In 2011, such sales generated $62 million in profit for the state's General Fund, according to the Utah Department of Alcohol Beverage Control, in addition to millions more in sales and school taxes.
Culture also plays a role in Utah's response to the housing boom and bust, which mirrored the Arizona and Nevada housing markets but to a lesser extreme. "Utah is different than the rest of the nation," says Knold. "We're even different than our neighbors, and I would sink that into the Mormon community. ... What is different is high birth rates. The LDS community promotes big families." Arizona and Nevada, it's now clear, overbuilt housing during the boom, and now that in-migration has slowed and even reversed, there's simply not enough bodies to fill them. Utah grows its population from within, so while overpricing was a problem here, overbuilding was not, leading to a faster housing recovery.
Utah's high birth rate also makes it the youngest state in the nation, with a big, youthful labor force from which the Adobes and Amer Sports can choose new employees. "I know it's not politically correct to say this," says former Sen. Bob Bennett, a Utah Republican, "but Utah's workers show up in the morning, they are not drunk and they speak foreign languages (largely thanks to the Mormon Church's international outreach) and English."
But these youngsters also skew employment figures because if they get laid off or can't find work, they find it easier than middle-aged folks to live with mom or go back to school. As a result, they're not looking for jobs or collecting unemployment, meaning they're not counted in the state's unemployment rate, which remains much lower than the national average.
"There's a cohesive culture out of the LDS that is clearly an element that has tended to dampen conflict -- has sought to find consensus and communitarian values," says Brookings Mountain West's Muro. That has been an important key in getting land-use plans, mass transit and other smart-growth, progressive initiatives done in a state with an often libertarian ideology, says Brenda Case Scheer, dean of the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Utah.
After all, using central planning to accomplish a vision is hardly new in Utah. (See related story, facing page.) When Brigham Young and his followers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, they wanted to make it a home, not just a place to raise cattle or dig for gold. This would take slow, deliberate planning as opposed to the free-for-all land rush that consumed much of the rest of the West. They began with a cooperative effort to build an irrigation system that belonged to everyone, and then laid out the towns. "The towns and villages were not established inadvertently or by individual initiative ... they were a result of very definite plans," wrote Hamilton Gardner in Cooperation Among the Mormons in 1917. Throughout Young's reign and on into that of John Taylor, his successor, such central economic and land-use planning continued.
This history has helped Envision Utah, a non-governmental organization, accomplish a sort of regional land-use planning that has mostly avoided the bitter conflicts that such efforts tend to inspire in much of the West. Robert Grow, its founder and current president, bristled when I called Envision Utah "planning" -- he prefers "visioning." Yet what they came up with by gathering input from 20,000 residents certainly looks like a giant comprehensive plan that lays out a roadmap for how the state should grow, without imposing any regulatory teeth.
The relatively homogenous culture, dominated by Republicans and the Mormon Church, reduces polarization, writes Scheer in a soon-to-be-published Brookings paper called "The Utah Model." It helps the state find consensus, even on issues such as mass transit or land-use regulations that are traditionally anathema to conservatives. "While the western ethic of strong property rights values extends to Utah, competing values of community and cooperation permeate at the local level."
To be sure, this "consensus-building" isn't always as sunny as Scheer makes it sound. This summer, a controversy broke out in Provo over LDS Church plans to replace old classroom buildings at its Missionary Training Center with a nine-story high rise. The leader of the opposition was a practicing Mormon, but he and other opponents backed down, reports The Salt Lake Tribune, after Mormon leaders urged them to support the church in its plans. There was an echo of much earlier efforts to get Mormons to toe the church's line. Mormons who failed to patronize the church-sponsored cooperative enterprises back in the 1870s risked excommunication.
For the half-century after they first settled in Utah, the Mormons were pummeled by oppressive legislation from a U.S. Congress that not only disliked polygamy (a practice the church officially abandoned in the early 1900s), but also resented the religion's collectivist economic ways, which threatened the era's captains of industry. Utah's never really gotten over it. This year, the state Legislature, which is 77 percent Republican, showed its disdain by passing a bill trying to "take back" federally managed land. While the move is seen as largely symbolic, it still rankles those who know how dependent the state is on the federal government. "Excuse me," says Knold, the state economist, in reference to the take-back-the-land bill, "do you realize how big that is in our economy?"
Really big. Federal agencies employ some 36,000 people across the state, the most per capita in the West along with New Mexico and Montana, and those workers get higher wages, on average, than those in most every other industry in Utah. The state received a substantial chunk of American Recovery Act stimulus funds, and Utahns collectively get more revenue from the feds than they pay in taxes, as is the case with most Western states. Communities near the gateways of Utah's national parks would dry up and blow away without the 6 million visits per year to the parks, and having all that federal land -- i.e. open space -- near the urban Wasatch Front boosts "quality of life," that elusive but essential ingredient for a healthy economy.
In Ogden, the federal government provides a cornerstone for the city's downtown revitalization, and its economy as a whole. Since the 1950s, the Internal Revenue Service has had a regional headquarters in Ogden, with thousands of employees. But when Godfrey got into office, the IRS was preparing to move further out into suburbia.
Godfrey fought back. After asking nicely, then invoking administrative orders mandating that the IRS move to downtown historic buildings if feasible, Godfrey finally threatened to take the agency to court. "It got ugly," says Godfrey. Finally, the IRS agreed to become "urban pioneers" with a $20 million project that combined renovation of old structures with construction of new ones. The IRS brought more than 1,000 jobs into downtown Ogden. Today, it remains Ogden's biggest employer, with more than 6,000 workers during peak season, and the impact of the downtown offices (which continue to expand) dwarfs that of any of the city's other redevelopment initiatives.
Those aren't the only federal dollars here. The roar of military jets is common, thanks to Hill Air Force Base just south of Ogden and its more than 10,000 employees. The U.S. Forest Service's Intermountain Region office, based in Ogden, provides more than 200 jobs. Just this summer, the feds gave $1 million to support a mobile phone and tablet app development lab in downtown. And the Ogden River restoration project was bolstered by $1 million in stimulus funds, a fraction of the $100 million the county has received in American Recovery Act funds since 2009.
Federal dollars are also apparent in Utah's public transportation system. In Tea Party-dominated states, governors have refused to accept high-speed rail funding from the feds, and libertarian conspiracy theorists say multimodal transport is one of the land-use planning methods employed by Agenda 21 folks to turn sovereignty over to the United Nations. In a 2011 column, conservative pundit George Will wrote that progressives love trains because it furthers "their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism."
But over the last decade or so, Utah has been able to wage a mass transit revolution with support from the public and a host of local leaders, including Godfrey. The expansion began prior to the 2002 Winter Olympics, when Salt Lake built its TRAX light rail system using federal dollars brought in with the help of then-Sen. Bennett, who ultimately lost his office to the Tea Party revolution. The TRAX system has grown rapidly since, funded in large part by a sales tax increase for which Utahns voted, along with city, state and federal dollars. Then, in 2008, the $600 million FrontRunner line from Salt Lake City to Ogden was completed, with some 80 percent paid for by grants from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
In an op-ed marveling at the strides Utah has made on the transit front, Janet Kavinoky, of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, noted that in her native Wyoming, "people drive; transit is for big city folks and liberals." However, "Folks in the Salt Lake City metro area think differently than the rural Westerners I remember from my childhood. ... They respond to demands of businesses that want their employees to have multiple ways to get to work, and want to locate in a place with a good quality of life."
Indeed, Utah's long-term transit plans would make the George Wills of the world blanch. They include more public transit, not only for the Wasatch Front, but even in places like St. George, in Utah's Dixie. In the nearer-term, the FrontRunner will soon be extended south to Provo, and the TRAX system will reach out to the Salt Lake City airport. Land-use planners, spurred by the Envision Utah process, are urging cities to develop regulations and zoning that would cluster growth around transit stops. (Interestingly, the approach seems to mirror that of Mitt Romney's when he was governor of Massachusetts. In 2005, he said: "By targeting development to areas where there is already infrastructure in place, not only can we revitalize our older communities, but we can also curb sprawl as well.") It's an urbanist view, to be sure, and one that many conservatives would consider a volley in the so-called War on Suburbia, but it's also an echo from the Mormon Church's central-planning past.
"We have a vision of the next American economy, which we think is very different than the real estate-fueled consumption economy that crashed," says Muro, of Brookings. "It's one that's much more oriented to production of things, the export of things, it is driven by strong regional innovation systems and industry clusters, and because it exports, it isn't so determined solely by the U.S. business cycle. Utah epitomizes that."
Muro is especially impressed with the Utah Science Technology and Research Initiative, created in 2006 by Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. The program's goal is to enhance research and innovation at the state's universities, then pair that with businesses, making the universities into high-tech incubators of sorts. Another Huntsman initiative is using incentives to help attract "clusters" of industries of the sorts Muro mentions -- software, aerospace, the outdoor industry.
In the last year alone, the state government has given out more than $100 million in incentives to businesses relocating or expanding in Utah, including eBay, a Family Dollar distribution center in southwestern Utah, and Sephora and Hershey distribution centers. Over the past three years, the state incentivized IM Flash to the tune of $45 million; Goldman Sachs dramatically expanded its Salt Lake City presence with the help of a $47.3 million tax rebate; and Adobe and Morgan Stanley also drew from the state pot. More than $7 million in motion picture incentives were handed out last year, and the state also has strong rural development grants and renewable energy incentives.
Incentives fly in Utah, with support from some of the most conservative legislators, says Jeff Edwards, president of Economic Development Corporation Utah, a public-private partnership, because they aren't paid to the businesses up front. The state writes the check, usually in the form of a tax credit rebate, only after the business has settled in Utah and created a specific number of jobs with higher wages than the average for the area. The approach seems to be working. Utah has gained more than 24,000 jobs since August 2011, with the biggest gains in the manufacturing and "professional and business" sectors.
Ogden has used state incentives -- plus a generous offering of local cash and tax credits -- to help it attract its own branch of the state's outdoor industry gear cluster. Amer Sports, an international conglomerate that owns Salomon, Atomic, Wilson, Mavic and other big names, moved to Ogden in 2007 with about 110 employees. Amer received $2.5 million in state incentives, in addition to some $5 million in local tax credits and incentives, including naming rights to the city-owned Salomon Center. Quality Bicycle Parts, a huge wholesale distributor, received state incentives for locating in Ogden, and ENVE, which builds carbon-fiber bike parts, was offered $1.3 million to "inshore" more than 300 Chinese manufacturing jobs back to Ogden.
Mike Dowse, Amer's Americas general manager, says he was attracted by Ogden's proximity to outdoor amenities (such as federal land), the incentives and the direct flights to Paris from Salt Lake City's airport. There was also cheap housing for his employees, who have bought some 30 homes in the area (the median home price in Ogden is about half that in Portland, Ore.). Dowse was also drawn by the then-fledgling outdoor industry cluster in Ogden, which provides a larger labor pool to draw from, a more collaborative environment and adds energy and bodies to the "high adventure" visions of Godfrey.
Ogden's cluster got its start when Curt Geiger, then vice president of Descente North America, convinced the Japan-based ski-apparel company's higher-ups to move its headquarters from Denver to a downtown location in 2004. They were drawn not by state incentives but by the promise of a gondola, an idea being floated by Godfrey and others at the time, from downtown Ogden to the eastern side of town, with a second leg leading up to the slopes. Goode Skis soon followed Descente, helped along by free access to a lake near downtown, renamed Goode Lake, where it can test its water skis.
On a sunny September day, I slip away from the notebook and the interviews for a run through the streets and hillsides of Ogden. I head east from downtown, past the stately First Security building, which yearns for some ski or software company to come in and ease its emptiness, continuing toward the mountains, along streets lined with brick arts-and-crafts style bungalows in various states of disrepair that would easily fetch a half-million each in Boulder, Colo., but sell for a fifth of that here. I wave to a crowd milling in front of the Al-Anon place, and hear angry screaming from inside a rundown bungalow and wonder if I should call the cops.
Whatever's in Utah's secret sauce, one thing is clear: It hasn't been dolloped out to everyone. As much success as Ogden has had in bringing jobs to downtown, the greater metro area continues to have unemployment and poverty rates higher than its neighbors. Likewise, the Wasatch Front's prosperity has not trickled outward to many other parts of the state, where small isolated communities like Green River struggle chronically and now wait desperately for something, anything, even a nuclear power plant. And even as the state hands out millions of dollars worth of incentives to Wall Street giants, it is the worst in the nation at funding elementary and secondary education, a slap in the face to long-term economic prosperity.
The pavement ends and I head up a steep trail to a place where I can sit and look out at the gob of humanity that sprawls to the edge of the Great Salt Lake. It was not far from here that, 165 years ago, Brigham Young looked out onto this scruffy and treeless valley and saw it as the Promised Land, or at least decided it could be, with enough hard work. He knew that he couldn't simply unleash his minions and expect them to go forth and build a cohesive home in this hostile land. The Western frontier ethos wouldn't work here. They'd need guidance, cooperation and strong central planning to make the "desert blossom as a rose." Young never retreated from that, even when it got ugly: He forbade Mormons from selling wheat to Gentiles (though Gentiles could work for it), and in at least one instance failed to stop violence against Gentiles.
And then there's Matt Godfrey. He wanted Ogden to be the kind of place he would be happy to call home, a bustling downtown with young folks heading out on mountain bikes from not-too-expensive homes after a day at high-paying, professional jobs with outdoor gear companies. It took a lot of hard work, sacrifices and a sometimes-heavy hand from the government.
True, some of his efforts crashed: The gondola remains no more than a dream, as does the $14 million velodrome and the free-standing ice-climbing tower. Descente moved out into the suburbs and fired Geiger, who subsequently started his own downtown gear business. Even Envision Ogden, a nonprofit started by Godfrey and others to provide a non-governmental economic development organization, perished after it got caught up in a campaign finance scandal that's still under investigation.
Still, by nearly everyone's reckoning, Ogden's come a long way in the past decade. There are new jobs, great trails and a pleasant downtown peopled by a vibrant new community of folks drawn by the changes. Some of the credit goes to Godfrey, but mostly it's attributable to the paradoxical politics of Utah, a pragmatic if unlikely blend of free-marketeering and a pro-planning, Keynesian approach. Godfrey embodies that.
"I'm financially very conservative," says Godfrey, responding to those who have compared him to Joseph Stalin more times than he can count, "but I also don't believe in a free lunch. If we're not willing to invest in our own community, why should we have the gall to ask others to invest in our community? People were saying, 'It's a big gamble.' Yeah, it is, but doing nothing is a much larger gamble."
This coverage is supported by contributors to the High Country News Enterprise Journalism Fund
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News.]]>
The greater Phoenix, Ariz., metro area is surely the best example of this. Housing values climbed steadily there from the 1980s until 2003, then they went berserk, doubling between 2003 and 2007. Thousands of acres of desert and farmland were gobbled up by the building frenzy that resulted, and construction jobs were plentiful. Then the collapse hit. The average house lost half its value between 2007 and 2009. Growth ground to a halt, Arizona lost some 40,000 construction jobs and the population of Phoenix actually started shrinking. The pattern was mirrored in Las Vegas and other growth-happy places.
For the next two years, housing markets stagnated or even kept dropping, leading many -- myself included -- to wonder whether the growth machine was permanently broken.
Starting several months ago, however, story after story popped up indicating that the Phoenix housing market, at least, was recovering. I spoke with Phoenicians who were in the market for a new home, but sales were so brisk that the good ones were snatched up as soon as they were listed. In the beginning, there was a caveat: Yes, sales did go up, but they were driven in part by the fact that houses were so cheap, or foreclosed-upon, and purchased en masse by investors and rich Canadians.
Now, however, the Arizona Republic reports that Phoenix is months into a steady climb in housing values. In fact, Phoenix, with a 19 percent jump over the past year, led the nation in home price recovery, according to the Case-Shiller Home Price Index. Even Las Vegas is showing very subtle signs of pulling out of its real estate coma.
Before we all start banging our heads against the walls and lamenting the return of the desert-gobbling growth machine, though, it's worth considering a few things. First off, Phoenix's median home price is currently just $117,000, still far below the 2006 peak of $228,000. Las Vegas' apparent recovery is so slight, and prices remain so far below the peak, that it's hardly worth noting. Also, as this nifty interactive map from the Arizona Republic shows, Phoenix's recovery is being driven not by price jumps out on the fringes, where most of the new building was occurring during the boom, but in the more central zones.
It appears, then, that people are less interested in living way out in the exurbs, with those three hour commutes, than they are in living close to downtown, the light rail, and an actual community. (In fact, prices in parts of Surprise and El Mirage, once fast-growing exurbs, have dropped in the last year). While it's too early to call this a trend, it's certainly an encouraging sign. It raises the possibility that if there is a full-on growth machine recovery, there will be more infill development instead of more sprawl.
At this point, though, more building is not much of an issue. This chart from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows construction employment in Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and Utah. Houses just aren't being built at that mass-production rate they once were, and it appears as if, rising home prices and all, such construction is still years away. (Note: The graph uses a log scale for number of jobs for presentation's sake).
Unlike other pioneers, who sought to strike it rich from the land's natural bounty, Brigham Young led his followers into present-day Utah in 1847 to build a homeland. That would require an approach that rubbed against the Western frontier grain, favoring cooperation and strong central planning over individualism. After 20 years of somewhat haphazard attempts, Young buckled down in the 1860s as the Transcontinental Railroad approached Utah from both sides. At the time, the nation was immersed in an all-out festival of capitalism, led by rampant railroad construction and financed with credit that the banks handed out like lollypops. Young didn't want that soiling the Holy Land.
So he formed the School of Prophets, which, writes Leonard J. Arrington, the late LDS church historian, "countered an energetic and powerful laissez-faire capitalism with a vigorous, well-organized, socially minded and theocratically directed program of economic action."
That program included creating an organization to build the section of railroad that came closest to the capital, to keep out the riffraff that might otherwise do the work. It funded the creation of cooperative furniture and wool manufacturing along with other businesses, to reduce reliance on Eastern imports. The School created the Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution and instituted uniform pricing controls to minimize competition among Mormon merchants.
The Utah Territory successfully resisted becoming a mineral colony for the Eastern industrialists, and the School disbanded in 1872. But Young, whose collectivist leanings grew as he aged, wanted yet more.
A chance for radical change emerged in September of 1873, when the Jay Cooke & Co. bank -- one of the big railroad backers -- collapsed. Other banks toppled like dominos, foreclosures were rampant, and the Panic of 1873 swept the nation and the world, leading to one of the worst depressions in history.
Utah's mining towns were hit hard. But Brigham City, a settlement of about 1,500 people, actually thrived. It had organized a mercantile cooperative in the pre-railroad days, and, by the time the Panic hit, it had expanded into a major manufacturing enterprise mostly owned by the worker/shareholders. It built houses for the poor and widows and provided labor for jobless drifters, and its leaders instituted central economic and land-use planning and zoning, dictating where houses and factories and public transit should be built. Novelist Edward Bellamy, who visited Brigham City after the Panic, reportedly drew inspiration for Looking Backward, his 1888 Utopian novel set in a socialist Boston in the year 2000, when greed and capitalism are no more.
Young didn't need to wait 112 years for Utopia. He set about spreading the Brigham City model, combined with an element of Joseph Smith's Order of Enoch wealth-redistribution plan, across Deseret.
He started in St. George and worked his way northward, converting communities to the Order as he went. Each adopted the Order in its own way, but the core principals were the same: communalism, cooperation and equal distribution of wealth. The language in the St. George United Order Constitution gives a sense of what Young was trying to do, mentioning the struggle between capital and labor, bemoaning the "oppression of monied monopolies" and railing against "a growing ... spirit for extravagant speculation and over-reaching the legitimate bounds of the credit system; resulting in financial panic and bankruptcies. ..."
Call it Occupy Utah.
"It was clear to all that the United Order," writes Arrington, in Great Basin Kingdom, "was an attempt to retard, and, if possible, to prevent the development of a market-oriented economy dependent on extensive importation and exportation." About 200 communities implemented the Order. Some, like Brigham City, took a moderate approach. Others were quite radical.
Take Orderville, which was founded in the spring of 1875 by 25 families who had broken off from the Mount Caramel community a few miles down valley. The Orderville citizens pitched in to build houses surrounding a central plaza and common dining hall. All property was turned over to the community corporation, including land, livestock and machinery. Decision-making was centralized. The population grew to 600, with around 200 acres of communal fields. The citizens built a sawmill, cabinet shop, woolen mill, shoe shop and tannery. Wealth was distributed evenly. Everyone ate together and wore locally made uniforms.
Other communities eventually abandoned the Order, but Orderville thrived in its collective state. At least until the outside world intruded. By the early 1880s, Congress was pressuring Mormons to not only abandon polygamy, but also to stop messing with the free market. In 1885, the feds rounded up and jailed hundreds of suspected polygamists, leaving many communities leaderless. And church higher-ups urged Orderville to abandon its remaining collective ways, so as to avoid even more negative attention.
By the early 1900s, the United Order had died in practice. Still, its spirit lived on, permeating the politics and the economics of the church and the state up to today.
One such re-emergence came in the depths of the Great Depression, when a Utah Mormon banker and conservative Republican named Marriner S. Eccles was one of 46 citizens to address Congress on ways to stop or slow the downward economic spiral. Most witnesses suggested that extravagance, nature or God had caused the crash, and that balancing the federal budget was the only solution. Not Eccles. He told a dumbfounded Senate Finance Committee that the Depression's root cause was the maldistribution of wealth. There was plenty of money out there, it had just all ended up in the hands of a small group of the ultra-rich -- the original 1 percent, if you will -- leaving the other 99 percent broke, and unable to buy anything and fuel the economy.
How to fix the problem? The federal government had to raise taxes on the rich, forget balancing the budget and spend like crazy in order to redistribute the wealth. Eccles' five-point plan included allocating $500 million for unemployment and poverty relief, increasing funding to state and local governments for public works and infrastructure projects and refinancing farm mortgages.
"The orthodox capitalistic system of uncontrolled individualism ... will no longer serve our purpose," Eccles said, echoing Brigham Young and presaging John Maynard Keynes' 1936 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money –– the basis for one of the principal schools of modern economic thought. "We must think in terms of the scientific, technological, interdependent machine age, which can only survive and function under a modified capitalistic system controlled and regulated from the top by government."
Eccles, who was not a church leader but whose family remains powerful in Utah, became the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and his theories provided the seeds of the New Deal.
In 1936, the Mormon Church created its Welfare Program, which today spans the globe, providing food, shelter, medical help and emergency aid to those in need. It had its underpinnings in the United Order. And it can't be coincidence that Utah today is the most philanthropic state, and wealth is more equally distributed here than anywhere else in the nation.
The Church adhered to the collectivist values of Smith, Young and Young's successor, John Taylor, also a strong proponent of wealth redistribution, until McCarthyism infected the nation in the 1950s. Then, maybe fearing more persecution, church leaders started an effort -- perhaps concerted, perhaps not -- to change their public image from borderline theocratic communists to full-on capitalists.
The ideological leader of this new, free-market Mormonism was Ezra Taft Benson, a rabid anti-communist who served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's secretary of Agriculture and was LDS President for 14 years. In 1966, Apostle Marion G. Romney, Mitt's father's cousin, felt compelled to use his entire speech to the annual LDS General Conference to outline the differences between socialism and the United Order (distillation: the United Order has God, socialism doesn't). And in 1999, Phillip J. Bryson, a professor at Brigham Young University, wrote a paper called "In Defense of Capitalism" to counter some LDS scholars' anti-capitalist leanings.
It's the latter, capitalist version of Mormon history that the modern media has glommed onto. And it's not inaccurate -- under Young's leadership, the church had its hands in a number of business enterprises, just like today -- but it's also not complete. There are really two versions of Mormon and Utah history, running side by side, in direct conflict with one another. Those two versions are apparent today in Mitt Romney, who, as governor of Massachusetts implemented "Romneycare," advocated smart-growth policies and supported mass transit, as though channeling Eccles, and yet who is now running for president on an E.T. Benson-style platform that adamantly opposes all of that.]]>
Mitt Romney? Nope. It's Marriner S. Eccles. The year was 1933, and the U.S. Senate Finance Committee had invited 46 citizens from various walks of life to testify about ways to slow the downward economic spiral. Eccles, a business owner and banker from Utah, was one of the witnesses, and he had some pretty provocative ideas. In the Oct. 29 edition of High Country News, I write about Eccles' place in a long history of quasi-socialist collectivism in the Church of Latter-day Saints. But Eccles is more than just a historic figure. His theories resonate just as loudly today as they did eight decades ago.
Eccles, however, shook things up. He had long believed that hard work and thrift were all a person -- and the economy as a whole -- needed to be successful. His father, David Eccles, had built up an empire on those principles, most famously owning the Utah Construction Company, one of six firms that built Hoover Dam and the largest company of its kind in the nation. The senior Eccles died in 1912, leaving everything to his children from two wives, one in Logan, one in Ogden. Though Marriner was in the lesser-endowed Logan branch, he ended up in Ogden, rose to the top of the bunch with his business acumen, and became President of Utah Construction Company, First Security Corporation and several other interests. Then the Depression hit. Though Eccles' wealth insulated him and his businesses, he noticed all around him people who had toiled and saved their whole lives, and who were now ruined, unemployed, even homeless.
"It is a national disgrace that such suffering should be permitted in this, the wealthiest country in the world," he said. "The present condition is not the fault of the unemployed, but that of our business, financial, and political leadership."
Eccles told the lawmakers that it was neither extravagance nor God nor nature that had caused the slump, but maldistribution of wealth. There was plenty of money out there, it had just all ended up in the hands of a small group of the ultra-rich -- the 1 percent, if you will -- leaving the other 99 percent broke. That left the bulk of Americans not only hungry, but also without any of the purchasing power necessary to fuel the economy, and that's what led to the crash.
The numbers back up Eccles' theory. Emmanuel Saez, a Berkeley economist, has done a great deal of work on the topic of income inequality, and is credited with being the inspiration for the 99 vs. 1 percent meme that arose after the 2008 crash. He and Thomas Pikkety charted the amount of the nation's wealth held by the top 1 percent since 1917. Here's their chart, which shows that, indeed, wealth was ridiculously maldistributed just before the 1929 crash, an inequality not matched until, yes, 2008, just before the most recent crash, when the 1 percent had accumulated nearly 25 percent of all the wealth.
The approach was both compassionate and coldly rational. It would feed the hungry with direct handouts. And it would push a little bit of the wealth back into the hands of the working class, restoring the purchasing power of the masses. That, in turn, would revive consumption and jump-start industry, creating more jobs and more wealth. For as Eccles often said, "Labor is our only source of wealth." Meanwhile, it would bolster the infrastructure of the nation, providing a foundation for future economic growth.
Trickle down economics simply wouldn't work. "We now see, after nearly four years of depression, that private capital will not go into public works or self-liquidating projects except through government and that if we leave our 'rugged individual' to follow his own interest under these conditions he does precisely the wrong thing. Each corporation for its own protection discharges men, reduces pay rolls, curtails its orders for raw materials..." The federal government needed to step up, stimulate the economy and keep the "rugged individualist" corporations in line with stronger regulations.
From the transcripts, it's difficult to tell what the senators listening to Eccles thought of his approach. However, his ideas resemble those laid out by John Maynard Keynes in his 1936 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which is the basis for one of the principal schools of modern economic thought (most scholars believe that Keynes and Eccles developed their theories independently of one another). We do know that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was impressed. He appointed Eccles to be an assistant secretary in his Treasury Department, and then Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Eccles' ideas helped form the foundation of the New Deal, which helped redistribute the wealth (along with World War II) and set the United States on a prosperous path that lasted for several decades. In 1931, the top tax rate on the richest Americans was 25 percent. By the time FDR died, it was 94 percent, and millionaires continued to be taxed at a rate of at least 70 percent for another four decades. In the 1980s, Eccles was apparently forgotten, tax rates for the wealthy plummeted so that today, the one percent pays, at the very most, 35 percent (but in most cases its much less than that -- Mitt Romney paid just 14 percent on nearly $14 million in income). Wealth has been redistributed back to the one percent. The working class, and the economy, have suffered.
During these tough times, a voice like Marriner S. Eccles' is sorely needed.
Image credits: Graph by Pikkety and Saez, with historic marker additions by Jonathan Thompson. Photo of Marriner Eccles from the Library of Congress, in the public domain.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor for High Country News. His Twitter handle is @jonnypeace.]]>
Hoping to find out what more the numbers might tell us, I crunched them into a few graphs and partnered them up with some other statistics. This first one, to me, is the most telling. It compares the number of well starts -- the most accurate reflector of the on-the-ground picture -- with natural gas prices.
When presented this way, the correlation between natural gas prices and well starts becomes obvious. When the price goes up, drill rigs go up right alongside. When prices crash, as they did when demand plummeted during the Great Recession and then later when a bonanza of drilling in the East glutted the market with too much supply, the drill rigs come down, too. Which makes me really damned glad that I'm not a politician who must convince voters that I'm going to reduce energy prices and increase domestic drilling at the same time. The only way I can think of doing that is with subsidies. Try selling that to voters.
The only reason the well starts aren't down around zero this year in Colorado is because oil prices have been quite high for some time, and some parts of the state have recoverable crude, most notably Weld County.
As you can see, Weld County's drill rig decline has been relatively minor, and it makes up the bulk of the state's well starts. Garfield County is also hanging in there. Everyone else is struggling (or celebrating, depending on your perspective). Take La Plata County. Consistent levels of drilling over several decades into the abundant San Juan Basin field has made it one of the top producers of natural gas in Colorado. Now drilling has come to a virtual halt there because the geology hasn't proven itself to be oil producing: Last year La Plata produced just 36,000 barrels of oil, to Garfield's 2.5 million and Weld's 26 million.
And finally, my last and, to be honest, most baffling chart. We know that every new rig that goes up creates a bunch of jobs. So, during drilling boom times, unemployment should decline, and during bust times, it should shoot up. But check out this chart of Garfield County's unemployment rate over the years, graphed against its well starts. Garfield is the biggest energy boom county in the state (Weld County is big, too, but has plenty of other industries to dilute the effect of energy in the economy).
What?! I gotta say, this surprised me enough to prompt me to go back and triple-check the figures. Sure, between 2003 and 2007, unemployment dropped in inverse proportion to well-starts, as one would expect. But other than that, there seems to be no correlation at all (even in 2008, a record drilling year, unemployment climbed). What to make of this? One possibility is that all those rig workers come in from the outside, meaning they don't affect the unemployment rosters until they get laid off and decide to hang out in Garfield County and collect unemployment. The 2003-2007 unemployment dip may be an indirect effect of all these new folks in town, buying beer and gas and cars and maybe houses, too -- the drop correlates with the housing boom.
And you, fair readers? Have you thoughts about the phenomenon illustrated in the final graph? If so, please share.
Every town needs something to be proud of. Portland not only has its own television show, Portlandia, but also a toilet. A very special toilet: Portland, if the L.A. Times is to be believed, has revolutionized the public loo, creating a minimalist, solar-powered bathroom that boasts its own Facebook page. It supposedly solves the age-old problems of its kind, which, notes the Times, include "graffiti, trash-can fires, furtive needle activity, commercial lovemaking, emergency baths, laundries for the homeless" and more. "I'm convinced Portland is the only city in the U.S., and maybe the world, that celebrates the opening of bathrooms," said a city commissioner at a toilet dedication ceremony, where students also reportedly sang Skip to my Lou.
It wouldn't be the West without a whimsical story about wildlife and humans snuggling up, would it? On Aug. 25, a crew fighting the Chips Fire, which has burned for more than a month in Northern California, stumbled across a bobcat kitten that had lost its way -- and its mother -- to the fire. The firefighters tried to walk away and let natural selection take over, but the baby cat, about the size of a domestic kitten, followed them, "curling up on (their) boots and snuggling into (their) chaps every time they paused," reports the Sacramento Bee. Firefighters turned the kitten over to Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care for treatment. Meanwhile, in Aspen, Colo., a couple of bears had to be chased away from the finish line of the third stage of the USA Pro Cycling Challenge as the riders climbed the mountains toward the resort town. Aspen police chalked up a whopping 292 bear-related calls in August, a record. While the Aspen bears didn't disrupt the bike race, the same can't be said for Canada's GranFondo Banff cycling event, which had to be rerouted due to bears feeding on the original course.
This edition of Heard around the West was guest-edited by Jonathan Thompson.
Tips and photos of Western oddities are appreciated and often shared in this column. Write firstname.lastname@example.com.


text:
Sales: €188 million
Germany's industrial giants have drawn fire from politicians and labor leaders for failing to create jobs at home and shifting production overseas. At first glance, Rosenberger Hochfrequenztechnik, a thriving member of Germany's Mittelstand, seems to be part of that trend. Headquartered in the same tradition-steeped corner of Bavaria that produced Pope Benedict XVI, this family-owned maker of coaxial and fiber-optic connectors employs some 1,300 people -- more than half its total workforce -- outside of Germany, up from just 60 in 1995.
Yet in a surprising twist, Rosenberger has been moving high-volume production back to Germany over the course of the past two years, where its plants are highly automated. "The advantage is that we have a much better handle of quality," says Hans Rosenberger Jr., one of three brothers who, together with their father, own the company.
Rosenberger stands out for its combination of top-flight engineering and attention to quality -- traits for which German companies are world-renowned -- and a willingness to chase customers wherever they go. Over the past four decades it has evolved from a modest metalworking business into a top global supplier of coaxial connectors for automotive entertainment systems, and of the coaxial surface-mount technology used in telecommunications and testing and measurement.
Its customers include mobile telecom-equipment makers Nokia (NOK ) and Ericsson (ERICY ), along with auto makers BMW and DaimlerChrysler (DCX ). Sales have grown fourfold in the last 10 years, to €188 million last year, and are on course to climb some 7% this year, to €202 million.
The Rosenberger clan credits their success to a willingness to take risks. Without this, Hans Sr. might today be a retired metal-parts supplier rather than the founder of a high-tech company. Hans Sr., now 83, opened a metalworking shop in 1958 and over time began machining metal parts for companies producing commercial vehicles. The turning point came in 1967, when Rosenberger stepped forward to take a contract from a telecom-equipment company that had been left in the lurch by the collapse of one of its suppliers.
Luckily for Hans Sr., his three sons got degrees in precisely the areas needed to help Rosenberger keep growing in its new field. Hans Jr., 53, who heads administration and sales, has an MBA from Union University in Schenectady, while his brothers Bernhard, 51, and Peter, 49, earned degrees in engineering, enabling them to take charge of research and production.
Today, Rosenberger's fastest-growing market is -- you guessed it -- Asia. Last year, sales to Asian customers accounted for 18% of the company's total. Rosenberger founded one of the first wholly owned foreign companies in China, Rosenberger Asia Pacific, in 1998, and opened a production facility in Beijing in 2001. For Rosenberger, the flip side of the Asia boom is fierce price competition from producers there. "We are expected to maintain our level of service and top quality at Asian prices," says Hans Jr.
You would think the pressure would drive the family to sell out. Instead, they're optimizing production lines in Asia, the Americas, and Europe to better serve customers -- and continuing to invest heavily in training their German employees. That's one factor, says Hans Jr., that sets Rosenberger apart from the competition. "We offer continuity and dependability to our employees and customers." He adds: "At many companies, this doesn't count for much anymore. If we give you our word, it will still hold the day after tomorrow, and five years from now."

subset: commoncrawl


text:
My Notes:
This home could reduce your energy costs »
Take I-77 to Exit 36 and head East towards Mooresville. Merge onto NC-150 E/W Plaza Dr. and travel 5.6 miles. Make a right onto Wiggins Rd. and then a right onto NC-152 W. Heritage at Neel Ranch will be ahead on your right.
If using a GPS device please use: 298 Neel Ranch Road, Mooresville, NC 28115, USA
This home is a must see! So look no further than the Davidson. This open ranch style floor plan has a spacious master bedroom, large family room, breakfast area open to the kitchen. The kitchen has beautiful skyline cabinetry with a large granite island built for the cooking expert who likes to spice it up in the kitchen or just hang out and enjoy a brunch style meal. There are two secondary bedrooms that are great for the little ones or special overnight guest visiting for the holidays. All in a warm flowing design on the main floor. Everything in this home is conveniently located on one level. The Davidson has colorful brick accents framing the garage to give the home character and style. Stay warm and toasty in the winters watching your favorite football team by the fireplace. Let's not forget about the extended patio in the spacious backyard when it's that time to fire up the grill for the summer. These are just a few of the fun touches that will make you smile when you come home to the Davidson.
Estimated Completion Date:Ready Now


text:
Agaves Mexican Grill
212 E Washington Center Rd
Fort Wayne,
Phone number:
(260) 482-4282
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text: MorDance, a 501(c)-3 organization, strives to be an innovator in the ballet community. We look to celebrate ballet that is modern and inspires but also maintains the integrity of classical ballet. MorDance aims to broaden the base of support for the art form, foster a greater appreciation for ballet, and develop future audiences through live performances and programs that service schools, families, individuals, and community groups.


text:
Continental Announces Recall for United States
It has come to SimpleTire's attention that Continental has issued a recall on the following tires:
General Grabber 33x12.50R18 LT 118Q
The following statement was released on 1/20/2017:
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- Watch your driving habits. Obviously, if you regularly mash the gas pedal hard enough to break traction and burn rubber, that will take a lot of life off your tires. Besides that, though, be careful about your braking and cornering habits, and go easy over potholes and railroad tracks; they will all take a toll on your tires.
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Checking your engine's oil should be a regular practice and it's something everyone can do quite easily. Just remember to check your dipstick regularly and make sure that the oil level is between the low and high marks.
Too little or too much oil can be harmful to your engine and may potentially lead to expensive trips to a mechanic.
Similarly, most engines generally require an oil change every 3000 miles. Old oil can gunk up engines, slowing your entire car down, and causing some extensive damage and problems. Fresh oil will keep your engine running as good as new.
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Did you know that most tire failure is caused by improper inflation? Irregular wear, tire stress, blowouts, reduced gas mileage, loss of control, and accidents are just a few of the negative effects associated with tires that are not properly inflated.
Many of us simply neglect to check our tire pressure until something goes wrong. In fact, millions of us drive around daily not knowing whether our tires are properly inflated or not.
According to industry recommendations, you should check the pressure in each of your tires and spare once a month or before any long trips. Because recommended inflation pressures are for cold tires, be sure to check them only after they have not been driven for several hours, preferably overnight.
A pressure gauge can easily be used to check tire pressure at home. The recommended pressure for your tires can be found in the vehicle's manual or on the driver door edge, glove box, or fuel door. Remember that you ca ...[more]Read More
Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems Help You Keep the Wheels on the Road
These are all important warnings to receive to help prevent damage to your vehicle and to keep you safe- and then there are your tires. It's not unusual while on the road to see other cars with one or more tires that look low on tire pressure. You may be driving one of those cars. Wouldn't you want to be warned?
Of course you would, and thanks to your car's Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) you can receive immediate feedback on your tire's inflation level. Since too little tire pressure can lead to tire failure, this is a major safety concern. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) every year in road accidents about 533 fatalities are caused by tire defects. Adding TPMS to every vehicle could avoid 120 of the 533 yearly victims and spare as many as 8,400 injuries every year.
Not only does a TPMS help improve your car's safety, but it also has a positive impact on your car's performance ...[more]Read More
A Health Check For Your Car
A regular health check is essential to maintain the safety of your car, and spot any problems that may arise from time to time. It is highly advisable that you run a standard test of various vital mechanical elements of your car periodically. Also, it ensures the best chance of your survival in an accident. Regular health checks can spot problems as soon as they become apparent. They also help you save on the mechanic's bill.
Periodical health checks also ensure that your car is in top roadworthy condition. They minimize the chance of mechanical failure whilst you are driving. The most basic check you should conduct is a break test. Before testing the brakes ensure that you are safely ahead of any cars behind. Then apply relatively firm pressure to the breaks. This would help you get a feel of the responsiveness of the break pads. If you find that breaking is getting slightly sluggish, there can be considerable erosion of the break pads. In this case, it ...[more]
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Check your battery. Cold weather is tough on your car's battery. The chemical reactions required to generate power in a car battery slow down in extremely cold temperatures. At 5 degrees F, a fully charged lead-acid battery has only half its rated amp-hour capacity. On top of that, during cold weather, your engine requires more current from the battery in order to get the engine started. Combine less power output with more power requirements and you get a car that won't start on a cold winter morning. So have a mechanic run a battery load test to see if you need to replace the battery. Even if you don't, he'll check for and clean up any corrosion he finds on your posts and connections. The mechanic might also fill your battery with distilled water if needed.
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