The great growth debate.

• Author: Lewis, Pete
• Position: Includes related article on Denver Regional Council of Government's Metro Vision 2020

After more than 25 years, it's just heating up. And Colorado business had better pay attention.

A house in the suburbs, a big backyard, nice garage, and a car or two to cart around the kids and get you back and forth from work. It's as American as apple pie and, since World War II, the American dream. But the dream may be darkening, a victim of its own attainability.

Across America, unfettered suburban development - sprawl - increasingly is seen as a threat to open space, clean air and water, good schools, a cohesive community and a vibrant economy.

Even state business leaders bemoan the Californication of Colorado.

"Everybody says we no longer have to worry about business cycles. But, nevertheless, we have to look at how California went through this thing of 'pave paradise and put up a parking lot,'" said Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce Chairman David E. Bailey (see Q&A, page 36). "'Let's move here, because it's paradise. So now that we're all here, it isn't any more, so let's leave."'

And they worry about the changing political climate, too.

"I've been here in Colorado banking for 30-plus years," Bailey said. "Every time there's an expansion you start to see an anti-growth movement. Then you cut the water taps and you kill everything, and then it's 1986 again."

Colorado is feeling more than its share of growth pains. State population has grown by more than one-quarter since the 1986 recession, from just over 3.2 million to more than 4.1 million today. That growth rate should slow slightly. But by 2020, 5.55 million people will call Colorado home, according to the Office of State Planning and Budgeting.

Gathering worries about growth have fueled grassroots movements nationwide. Almost 200 open space, land use and development initiatives appeared on local ballots around the U.S. last November. Seventy percent passed.

Colorado's grassroots seem complacent enough. The state had only two local ballot initiatives. Jefferson County passed a $160 million bond open space referendum. In Castle Rock, a six-month growth moratorium failed by a slim margin.

Post-election, a growth debate is being fomented not so much at the grassroots as among state business and political leaders.

The reasons for the ferment lie in the two sides of the debate, one political and one economic. Both pose dangers for Colorado's continuing boom. In the real world, many observers agree the deformations of growth could contribute to economic slowdown. In the realm of political perception, some solutions to sprawl could be worse than the disease.

People may not be able to define sprawl, but they know it when they see it. Larry Bohlen, chairman of the Sierra Club's Washington, D.C.-based Sprawl Campaign, defines it as far-flung development that is segregated by use and...