Colorado’s rural-urban divide revealed: 10 takeaways from the Rural Reckoning series

By Vince Bzdek | The Gazette

How bad is the rural/urban divide in Colorado?

That’s what a team of reporters at Colorado Politics and The Colorado Network, our statewide collective of freelancers, set out to measure and understand.

Through extensive interviews, data analysis and community voices, our journalists have documented the yawning gap between what rural areas contribute to the state through agriculture, energy production, tourism and outdoor recreation, and the attention, money and support they receive in the halls of the Capitol and the governor’s mansion. That gap has resulted in a host of unaddressed problems unique to rural Colorado.

Our reporters also have found that culturally, the polarization between rural and urban has deepened so much that when it comes to political views and social values, rural and urban Coloradans reside in increasingly separate worlds.

Colorado Politics editor Thelma Grimes, the chief architect of the series, is joined by reporters Marianne Goodland, Marissa Ventrelli, Michael Braithwaite and Colorado Network freelancers David O. Williams, Hap Fry and Rachael Wright. Thanks also go to Cat Kammerer for the smart graphics to go with the stories and to editors Luige Del Puerto, Glenn Rabinowitz and Dennis Huspeni.

The 10 articles that resulted from their reporting started publishing last weekend and continue through this weekend and the next two.

Editor Grimes describes the intent of the series this way: “The four-week Rural Reckoning series examines the critical and often overlooked issues facing rural Colorado, where challenges to health care access, affordable housing, agricultural sustainability and population growth are compounded by a growing disconnect with the state’s political and economic power base along the Front Range.

“Despite being a vital contributor to Colorado’s overall prosperity — through energy production, agriculture and rural health care — communities outside the I-25 corridor face disproportionate disadvantages in representation, funding and policy attention. The series explores how the state’s political influence, concentrated in urban counties such as Denver, Boulder and El Paso, monopolizes legislation and resource allocation.”

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