Removable and Place-Based Economies: Alternative Futures for America’s Deserts - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 296

that these costs are repaid by state severance tax and royalties (to private or government
owners). It is usually counties, however, that bear the externalized costs. New Mexico, for
example, returns tax revenues to the counties, but only at the whim of the state legislature,
which frequently allocates taxes away from producing (“wealthy”) counties to fund
projects in poorer areas. According to Colorado-based Oil and Gas Accountability Project
(OGAP), the actual producing jurisdiction rarely breaks even in the trade-off between
externalized local costs and “trickle-back” state funds.*
Local jurisdictions also suffer indirect losses: property values plummet when extractive
industry arrives. Amenity migrants, farmers, entrepreneurs, and tourists may shun
the area. Established residents flee: unskilled long-term residents can neither get high-
paid jobs nor afford boom time prices, while skilled professionals (e.g., doctors) become
hard to attract or retain. † Out-migration decreases property tax, business start-ups, and
business, income, and sales taxes. Some of the latter are offset by sales and income from
oilfield employees, but once the inevitable bust arrives, those revenue streams are gone,
while the potentially more stable ones based on residential and place-centered values are
weakened or lost.
Because the desert West has such a long history of extractive industry dominance,
these issues are at the core of any attempt to find sustainable ways of living in the arid
regions of this country. Yet resource removal has been pushed into the background of
green building and sustainable development, much as human population control and
regional carrying capacity have become almost unmentionable. This could be fatal
to sustainability. Admirable though water-harvesting, alternative energy, or New-
Urbanist mixed-use planning may be, they cannot create a sustainable future unless the
exportation and importation of resources is harnessed, with great care, to the goal of
sustaining living places.
16.8 Mining, Munificence, and Maintenance
16.8.1 Ajo, Arizona
Ajo, Arizona, provides an example of the complex relationships between extractive and
local economics. ‡ Until 1984, its economy was dominated by a Phelps-Dodge open-pit
copper mine (Figure 16.5). Ajo's town center today is graced by an unusually large arcaded
plaza and an ornate whitewashed church, an oversized school, and a hospital. Clearly,
some mining wealth was carefully invested locally to create these amenities.
In 1984, however, the mine was closed, a victim of international competition and pricing.
An attempt to reopen in 2008 was crushed by another market drop. The results are obvious
behind the fine facades. Today the Ajo hospital is completely boarded up, while the school
and plaza arcade appear to be about half-occupied (Figure 16.6).
Here is a case in which an extractive industry apparently set aside unusually large
percentages of boom time profit for civic buildings. Yet those structures themselves
became a liability when the bust reduced population and removed funds for maintenance.
Adaptive reuse, fundraising and grant-writing, historic preservation assistance, and
* OGAP legal staff, personal communication, November 2007.
† Dr. Jeffrey Neidhart, Farmington Oncology Clinic, personal communication, September 2008.
‡ Personal interview, April 2009, Ajo/ Cornelia Mining Museum staff.