Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Fifth Edition

22. Economic Peaks and Valleys

397 22 Between the 1970s and the early 2000s, Colorado’s economy rose and fell like a roller coaster—soaring in the 1970s, plummeting in the 1980s, booming in the 1990s, faltering as the new millennium began, improving for a few years, and then sinking into a prolonged rut in 2008. Despite the peaks and valleys, the trend was usually upward as tens of thousands of people moved into the state each year, increasing the population from 2.2 million in 1970 to more than 5 million in 2010. Rising oil prices triggered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo triggered the 1970s boom. Energy companies sank money into western Colorado oil shale ventures and built Denver skyscrapers to house their regional headquarters, only to have their hopes dashed in the early 1980s when oil prices crashed. At Parachute on the Western Slope, Exxon gave its workers no notice before shutting down its oil shale operation on May 2, 1982, abandoning an investment of nearly $1 billion. During heady times, some Coloradans took on too much debt. When they lost their jobs, they stopped paying their mortgages and lost their homes. Commercial borrowers also suffered. Referring to the banks that lent him money, shopping center developer Jim Sullivan recalled, “I don’t know who was dumber: them for loaning, or me for borrowing.”2 When Sullivan went bankrupt in 1990, his liabilities exceeded his assets by more than $77 million. His fall, however, was minor Chocolate is a product that people treat themselves to in good times or bad.1 —Bryan MerryMan of the rocky Mountain chocolate factory, august 2001 economic Peaks and Valleys DOI: 10.5876/9781607322276:c22 chapter twenty-two 398 compared with that of lenders such as Key Savings, Columbia Savings, and Silverado Savings and Loan. They failed in the late 1980s, leaving the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC), an arm of the federal government, to pay off their depositors and assume their bad debts. By the early 1990s RTC held the mortgages on such diverse properties as the ten-story Valley Federal Plaza building in Grand Junction, the 21,400-acre Banning-Lewis Ranch on the northeast fringe of Colorado Springs, and the Victorious Living Church in Denver. Although the savings and loan collapse and the oil crash explained much of the rough economic times, lesser debacles—ranging from the bankruptcy of Frontier Airlines in the tailwinds of airline deregulation to the near death of the sugar beet industry—contributed to the downturn. Pueblo, for example, could not blame sliding oil prices for its 1980s woes. Rather, it suffered a triple blow when the Colorado State Hospital, Colorado Fuel and Iron, and the Pueblo Ordnance Depot all shed workers. Public projects, such as the $5 billion Denver International Airport (DIA), prompted economic recovery in the early 1990s. Opened in 1995 after a delay of more than a year while it struggled to get its automated baggage system working , DIA ensured that the Denver metropolitan area would remain attractive to national and international businesses as well as tourists. Well positioned to Denver’s skyline erupted with high-rises during the 1973–82 oil boom. (Photo by Michael Gamer.) economic peaks and valleys 399 take advantage of the communications and high-tech explosion in the 1990s, the Front Range boomed. Many people in rural Colorado, in contrast, found themselves unable to reverse decades of decline. rural colorado The Great Western Sugar Company (GW) threw three parties on January 11, 1955—in Denver; Scottsbluff, Nebraska; and Billings, Montana—to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. GW’s president, Frank A. Kemp, addressed those outside Denver through a special radio hookup: “Workers who built the pyramids ate beets. The Pharaohs would have helped mankind more if they had spent less time building pyramids and more time improving sugar beets.”3 Sweet hubris did not count for much. In the late 1960s William M. White Jr., great-grandson of Mahlon Thatcher, one of GW’s founders, wrested ownership of the company from its old guard. The new entity, Great Western United, ventured into pizza parlors and town development. By the mid-1970s billionaire Texans Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt had won control of GW, only to face price swings and speculation that soured the business. By the late 1980s only two sugar factories from Great Western’s former empire still operated Denver International Airport, which opened twenty-five miles northeast of...