The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Congressman bets by third quarter, economic tide will turn
Congressman John Salazar made a stop at the Fred Field Western Heritage Center in Gunnison on Friday, February 27 to meet with members of the Gunnison County Stockgrowers Association and representatives from the Bureau of Land Management to address the dwindling number of federal grazing permits available to area ranchers.
“There doesn’t seem to be too much cooperation between the [BLM and the ranchers],” said Salazar. “We’ve got numbers that show from 1988 to today the number of permits has been cut by two-thirds. Ranching is the lifeblood of this community and we want to make sure that their numbers aren’t cut anymore than they already have been.”
Salazar, a potato farmer from the San Luis Valley, supports agriculture and said he would “stand by the Stockgrowers Association and try to figure out how we can create better protocol [for the issuance of grazing permits] and make sure we’re using good scientific data before we cut any additional numbers.”
He is planning on writing his brother and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, who oversees the BLM, to request an increase in the number of available permits.
Salazar said there was also “extreme pressure from the environmental community [to limit permits] but these ranches have been here for years and years and this is their livelihood and the margins are already so slim to begin with that just cutting a few numbers can directly affect their bottom line.”
Salazar has high hopes for stimulus funds
Ranching isn’t Salazar’s only concern, though. Keeping many types of businesses viable through direct or indirect federal intervention is one of the aims the congressman has in the current economy.
As he sees it, successful businesses need employees, and that is the payoff he hopes to see as funds from a massive federal stimulus package start to make their way to local governments.
“Over the last several months we’ve seen incredible job losses in this country and we can’t maintain this kind of an economy. We need to get credit flowing again. We need to put people back to work,” Salazar said.
The $787 billion economic stimulus bill, which Salazar voted for, is intended to maintain or create 3.5 million new jobs throughout the country, some of which would come to the Gunnison Valley with road and bridge and other infrastructure improvement projects.
County director of public works Marlene Crosby said although she doesn’t anticipate the county getting any stimulus funds directly, she hopes some benefit will come “through a trickle-down effect” from local projects being planned by the Colorado Department of Transportation.
“Maybe CDOT will get a boost to its enhancement fund and they will come to us, because they know what projects we have. For instance, if the federal highway administration got a boost in its budget, it might facilitate a project in the area,” she said. According to Salazar, the congressional research service told the congress that for every billion dollars the federal government spends on highway construction, nearly 35,000 new jobs should be created.
Gunnison County is planning some projects of its own this summer, “that we hope will provide some local employment opportunities, but that won’t have as much to do with stimulus funding,” said Crosby.
Although Salazar would have liked to see more money invested in infrastructure projects, he said he understood the president’s rationale for putting the funds into other areas.
“If you put too much money toward one direction, like road and bridge projects, and it doesn’t work, we have no way of pulling it back. And so he wants to do it in increments. So as we get the reports of where job creation is taking place we can actually fund those,” he said.
According to Salazar, there will also be funds from the stimulus bill available for the RE1J school district’s renovation projects. More than $760 million from the stimulus package has been slated for Colorado education, according to the Congressional Research Service.
“As a matter of fact, I know that some of the schools here in Gunnison will receive money for school construction and for Title 1 programs,” he said.
But with $55 million secured by the school district, superintendent Jon Nelson isn’t holding his breath for any additional federal money.
“It’s our understanding in talking with Ted Hughes [Colorado Department of Education’s Director of the Division of Public School Capital Construction Assistance], that the money is coming to the governor’s office and then it will go to education. There is no indication that there would be anything coming to Gunnison,” Nelson said.
If money does go to the school district, it should happen by the end of March, the current schedule for most stimulus funding. Without funding for the capital improvements in the district, however, only the Gunnison elementary school would be eligible for additional funding for their Title 1 program.
“We keep hearing there are additional funds in Title 1, but we’re not in a position to get a whole lot from that,” said Nelson. “I have no idea if money will start coming to us from the stimulus package. I’m not counting on anything until I actually see the funds.”
Between the school district’s renovation plans and the infrastructure projects initiated by the stimulus bill, there should be some work for the unemployed. But Salazar is confident that the money will go far beyond just those fields directly connected to federal money.
Beyond the road crews getting a paycheck, he points to the restaurants that will serve them lunch, the concrete plant that will have additional orders to fill and the retail stores that will see increased sales by catering to people with stable employment.
“The money that is generated by the infrastructure projects should revolve seven to 10 times before it leaves the community, so there is a multiplier effect. The benefit of the stimulus bill will go far beyond just those that are directly put to work by it,” Salazar said.
According to President Obama and other supporters of the legislation, the stimulus bill also offers a tax break to those making less than $250,000 annually, about 98 percent of Americans.
“For the average Joe on Main St., you will actually be getting less of a deduction on your paycheck, as far as federal taxes, starting April 1. Hopefully you will spend that money and that will hopefully spur the economy,” Salazar said.
Salazar was so confident that the stimulus bill would bring real change to people in the Gunnison Valley and around the country that he was willing to bet a meal on it with a reporter.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll meet with you in the third quarter of this year. My prediction is that by then we will have already turned the tide, at least slowed down the job loss in this country. If I’m right, you buy.”
