EDITORIAL: Disaster will visit if Colorado doesn’t protect its tourism industry

Colorado has an important job that it’s not very good at, protecting its future.

That future, as a story this week in the Denver Post pointed out, is tourism. A report from the Colorado Tourism office pointed out that an astounding 71.3 million tourists visited the state in 2014, an all-time record. The important point here is that those tourists spent a critical $18.6 billion when they came.

For most people, that certainly sounds like a huge amount of money, because it is. But what it means is that tourism is not only one of the state’s top economic and job generators, it’s as vital as the state’s other leading industries: oil and gas, manufacturing and agriculture. Tourism in Colorado directly provides for about 110,00 jobs, officials estimate.

And while state lawmakers and a veritable herd of lobbyists haunt the Capitol to ensure that each of the state’s historical industries are well-protected in Colorado, tourism often goes wanting for reasons you wouldn’t think.

A recent spate of stories make it clear that Colorado faces serious challenges that aren’t just political or esoteric, but real threats to the economic engine keeping Colorado going: tourism.

Chief among Colorado’s unsolved problems is transportation. Colorado has no plan to alleviate pernicious gridlock, deteriorating roads and bridges and a serious dearth of expansion. As the list and cost of critical needs grows all across the state, shortsighted state lawmakers continue to fight for refunds of “surplus” state tax dollars. There is no such surplus. It’s an invention of disgraced tax protester Douglas Bruce, who tricked state voters more than 20 years ago that his Trojan horse Taxpayer Bill of Rights would make state government lean and efficient. What the measure has done is create a spiraling shell game that won’t end even when major state failures cause major problems.

The ill-effects of TABOR already plague Colorado. Just this year a desperately needed expansion of the Boulder Turnpike finally comes on line. But it’s not only woefully insufficient to manage the current and anticipated traffic, it will cost taxpayers about $25 a day for a round-trip, rush-hour commute between Denver and Boulder to use the new express lanes.

The distance and the rates of those tolls puts Colorado in league with nightmare commuter states such as California and Florida.

It doesn’t mean that tolls can’t be a fair and practical way to fund new highway construction, but with prices like these on top of unsolved gridlock and marginal roads, the state’s excellent reputation for tourism gets sullied fast. Weekend gridlock on the I-70 ski corridor, where skiers can easily spend most of the day in traffic and not on the slopes, makes fellow ski states Utah, Montana and Idaho increasingly attractive.

The state’s problematic trout population, being threatened by development, global warming and various industries, makes other more pristine states a better value for tourists that Colorado can’t afford to lose.

And the biggest threat of all to Colorado’s critical tourism economy, global climate change, could all but end the ski industry and many other parts of the state’s tourism portfolio. Damaged, scarred and charred forests, diminished river flows, brief, dry winters and a bevy of related environmental issues cause by climate change could rob the state of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs.

Colorado must responsibly fund transportation, shore up critical environmental protections and lead the fight her and in Congress to combat global warming before we cheat ourselves out of our future.