Urban Growing Pains

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

It was a slambang political fight, complete with barrages of print and TV ads, one crafted by George Bush's campaign guru Roger Ailes. Colorado Governor Roy Romer and Denver Mayor Federico Pena politicked incessantly around town. When the vote came in, several hundred giddy campaign workers shouted themselves hoarse in a jammed downtown hotel ballroom. The turnout, 41% of registered voters, would have been respectable for a congressional or gubernatorial election. In fact, the balloting was a special election in which Denver residents last Tuesday voted 63% to 37% to build a $2.3 billion new airport -- the first to be constructed in the U.S. since Dallas-Fort Worth airport was finished in 1974.

^ But on the same day, 1,000 miles to the northwest, the spirit of Western boosterism took a fall almost as jarring as the Denver vote was exhilarating. In another special election, Seattle voters approved severe restrictions on the height and size of buildings that can be put up in the downtown area during the next ten years. The limits were contained in a citizens' initiative put forward as an alternative to a less restrictive plan favored by the city council and Mayor Charles Royer. With a turnout of only 23%, the tougher rules were approved 62% to 38%.

Had the two cities traded economies, the results might have been reversed. Denver, once riding high on an energy boom, has been slumping for the past four years. Metropolitan-area employment has shrunk by 55,000 jobs, to a present total of 939,100, and real estate values have shriveled; the average Denver house is priced at $79,900, down 15% in two years. Last year more people moved out of the area than moved in for the first time since the Depression years of the 1930s. In that climate, voters bought the promises of Romer and Pena that a new airport would mean jobs and prosperity. "What you heard today from the voters was the sound of Denver taking off!" shouted Pena on election night. Branding such talk a "psychological aphrodisiac," retired Rear Admiral Richard Young, who led the opposition, declared, "Somehow, by voting for the airport, there is the feeling everybody is going to be jump- started, and everyone is going to be prosperous."

In Seattle the economy is already sparking along. Area joblessness is 4.6%, a 20-year low; major employer Boeing is operating at an all-time high percentage of capacity; and hundreds of thousands of new residents have moved in during the past few years. Downtown, a state convention center, a shopping mall and underground bus tunnels are under construction. The area has been so torn up that some residents refer to it as "little Beirut."

Councilman Jim Street, a proponent of the construction limitations, explains that many citizens "believe the direction of the city has been parting from their values -- open space, reasonable traffic, retaining the characters of the neighborhoods, a downtown that's ((built on)) a more human scale." Says Barbara Dingfield, an opponent of the restrictions: "In 1972, during the Boeing bust, we would have voted to increase building heights, we would have voted for an airport. A lot of that is driven by what the sense of the local economy is."

In Denver, despite the economy's woes, the new airport still faces determined opposition. It will be a mammoth project, far bigger than Chicago's O'Hare and Dallas-Fort Worth combined. Building it will entail shutting down the 60-year-old Stapleton Airport, the nation's fifth busiest.

Romer, Pena and other boosters decried the frequent and long delays that have already become legendary at Stapleton, a point seconded by Transportation Secretary Samuel Skinner on a visit during the campaign. The field's two main runways are too close together for simultaneous instrument landings; in bad weather only one can be used. Airport planners contend that a new field could be financed without any tax money. They expect to receive $500 million from Washington and to raise the rest by selling bonds that would be redeemed by fees charged to airlines and concessionaires.

Opponents warned that the cost might well balloon to $3 billion, and doubted that Washington would fork over anything like $500 million. (Skinner promised that "the Federal Government is going to help in a very substantial way," but he studiously avoided being pinned down to a figure.) Thus, they insisted, the project would force tax increases that Denver residents could not afford. The two main airlines servicing Denver, United and Continental, point out that Stapleton still has 25 unused gates; some expansion of runway capacity, they argued, was all that was needed. But the vote made it obvious that few citizens listened. It is only in the nation's booming Seattles, it seems, that residents can ask, What price growth? In the depressed Denvers, even the hope of growth seems to be worth almost any price.

With reporting by Joni H. Blackman/ Seattle and Edwin M. Reingold/ Denver