Colorado feels bite of West Nile

ColoradoBiz, Sept, 2003 by Robert Schwab

THE BUSINESSMAN'S TONE REEKED WITH DISAPPOINTMENT when he mentioned the J.D. Edwards buyout by PeopleSoft. Home-grown J.D. Edwards was being merged with a California rival, and the job losses that usually accompany such consolidations were expected to hit Colorado particularly hard.

But nobody has even tried to stop it, said the participant at the Colorado Innovation Summit held in July on the University of Denver campus. He then shook his head again. It was as if he were already counting the new row of software engineers joining the unemployment line.

I thought about that conversation as we put together this issue of ColoradoBiz. From the cover picture of new Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper to Jeff Rundles' column about DIA and United Airlines on page 66, the issue is largely about leadership. Town leadership in Black Hawk; Gov. Bill Owens' leadership in recruiting Hickenlooper to join him on a business-development mission to California.

But then I thought about the multiplying numbers of West Nile infections that have branded the state as the hardest hit by West Nile in the nation this year. And I wondered where our state leadership was last spring when some people in the state health department were predicting a bad virus this summer. Fighting a budget battle in the legislature no doubt. Hoping for rain so as not to repeat a summer firestorm, hut not perhaps thinking that spring rains would also help grow mosquito populations.

In all the reporting of the deaths and illnesses of Colorado victims of West Nile this year, no one has particularly pointed to the governor's office--or the legislature, for that matter--and asked why the state hadn't done something earlier than June to stop the prolific spread of the virus.

Actually it did. In April, with the help of some county officials, state health department people launched a "Fight the Bite" Web site (www.fightthebitecolorado.com) and started printing and distributing 400,000 wallet-sized cards with lips on how to avoid being infected, which essentially comes down to avoiding mosquito bites.

Those cards, 200,000 brochures and 7,000 posters, have cost Colorado $18,000, scraped together by health officials from various sources for the information campaign. But the effort largely originated in the health department, and it wasn't particularly a product of Owens' leadership.

Of course, there was no state money available to help pay counties or cities for spraying or for spreading larvicide to control mosquito growth.

John Pape, a Colorado public health official who had predicted a bad West Nile season, said that, what with all the budget cutting in the legislature last winter, a West Nile funding discussion never even came up during the session.

Yet Pape knew Colorado could expect a severe second season of the virus, as states like Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Louisiana experienced last year. He couldn't have predicted the break in the drought and "ideal weather for mosquito production" in late spring that also has helped push the state to a dubious category of national leadership this summer.

But the governor did go to California to help save Colorado jobs, even as J.D. Edwards jobs were threatened, and he did speak out against affirmative action after the U.S Supreme Court upheld a program in Michigan. That will put him in the lead of a possible resurrection of the legislature's ongoing anti-affirmative action debate in 2004.

That's not necessarily the kind of leadership the businessman at the Innovation Summit had in mind when he shook his head over the lost Colorado jobs at J.D. Edwards. But our governor's leadership is directed by a political philosophy that holds the least government to be the best government.

It's too bad--especially for those who died--that that's exactly what the state got when it came to swatting the mosquitoes that carry West Nile.