February 01, 2010 06:14 PM UTC

Colorado Springs Bathtub Drowning Update

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• by: Colorado Pols

The latest report in a long series chronicling the state’s greatest conservative bastion, and the consequences of anti-government ideology run amok. You wanted to know what Grover Norquist meant by “drowning government in a bathtub?” As the Denver Post reports, it’s getting kind of medieval:

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops – dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving…

Colorado Springs and El Paso County have witnessed a swift erosion of basic government services in the last couple of years, a direct consequence of the recession’s impact on what were already some of the lowest tax rates in Colorado. We’ve talked repeatedly about El Paso County’s sheriff patrol cutbacks, cuts to the county’s Health Department leading directly to the highest incidence of food-borne illness in the state, proposals to sell of the parks, cutting suicide prevention in a locale with one of the nation’s highest suicide rates, and all the other ways the city and region are trying to cope with residents’ vision of “small government”–you have to call this where the blame lies, and in the case of Colorado Springs we are talking about ideologically strident conservative voters who watch it happen and still vote down revenue measures every chance they get.

At least they won’t have to see the results of their small-government “vision” as much with a third of the streetlights turned off. Have you seen that nighttime satellite map of the world? The one where everybody can find North Korea easily?