It is always a bit more surprising to hear about a planetarium closing nearby than off in some corner of Tennessee (or wherever) that you've never been, so this one is close enough to be personal.
The small news headline startled me: "Planetarium faces closure after 46 years".
Of course, my thoughts went instantly to the Stimulus Bill, the same bill against which the Republicans and those crazy Blue Dogs have been chipping away, in a sudden wild-eyed frenzy of fiscal conservatism after an 8-year drunken spending binge.
We could have funded operations and repairs without the Stimulus Bill, using local money, if not for this:
Voters in Jefferson County struck down a proposed bond issue and mill levy last November. The district asked for $384 million for building expenses and for operations.
The failed measures are forcing the district to look at tightening belts across the board.
Not told in this story is the one most often missed, even by local reporting, of those up-close, ground-level stories that mean more than a quick, easy statement like "voters struck down" a measure.
Why did voters turn against the bond issue and mil levy in November? Yes, this is Colorado, and the state has tended to vote down tax measures before. But Colorado has not been so reliably anti-tax when supporting schools, so what happened?
Well, at the time of the vote (especially here where most folks voted early), gas prices were spiraling out of control, and it wasn't obvious that an end was in sight.
Add the plummeting stock market to the mix, plus flat-lining bonds and non-existent yields for cash, and you have a retired person's nightmare.
Just to make retired people feel even worse, their home values were plummeting. Well, actually not in Denver and its metro areas, but that's how it sounded on the TeeVee, so to folks who have been counting on being able to sell their homes and take a very much enlarged nest egg with them to their next stop, the feeling of being threatened on all fronts was very real.
Food prices were going up as fast or faster than gas prices, it was costing more and more to run the furnace and pay the TeeVee bills (electricity, cable). To retired people, it appeared that inflation was running rampant, in spite of what the government-rigged numbers came out to be.
Enter the school district, asking for a bigger chunk of change. It wasn't a big, big chunk of change -- the mill levy was probably going to add another $10, maybe as much as $25 dollars a month to the tax bill.
But the school district did an extraordinarily poor job of telling people how to figure out what their share was going to be, and an even worse job of telling people what the money would be used for. Add to this the fact that a sizable number of Jefferson County voters are retired, and the mil levy vote could have been predicted without any of Kos's nice polls.
What we have left is the wistful sadness, our thoughts about what might have been, and a memory or two.
Kathy Miller loves the nighttime. It lets her truly enjoy her passion in astronomy. She shares stories about Pleiades and other constellations with students at the Johnson Planetarium in Jefferson County, an education staple since 1963. "I remember coming here when I was in elementary school," she said. "I think coming here is my reason why I have been interested in the stars and astronomy."