When The Mine Closes
Idaho Springs, Colorado, lies just 32 miles up Clear Creek Canyon from Denver, within easy day trip distance. Nestled in this steep canyon amid the towering Front Range, the city of 2,000 with a long history fits certain romantic conceptions of what Colorado is supposed to be. One of the earliest Rocky Mountain towns in the state, Idaho Springs was the center of an 1859 gold rush.
By the 20th century, though, Idaho Springs's fortunes weren't just from mining. As Denver developed into a major metropolis, Idaho Springs was uniquely positioned to be a mountain getaway, and it became a significant destination for day-trippers and a home base for outdoor recreation.
That all changed when Interstate 70 was built, threading its way up Clear Creek Canyon, according to local developer and preservationist Mary Jane Loevlie. The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) took a quarter of the Idaho Springs historic district to build the freeway, which would allow travelers to bypass the rest of it. Thus was launched the era of what Loevlie calls "whiz-bys": drivers who speed through Idaho Springs with no idea there’s even a town there, let alone one with a storied history. In the years following the 1973 opening of the Eisenhower Tunnel, the locus of recreation and tourism moved west of the Continental Divide to glitzier resort towns, such as Breckenridge and Vail. Idaho Springs languished.
The Henderson Mine. Image via Flickr.
But Clear Creek County, of which Idaho Springs is the largest town (nearby Georgetown is the county seat), hit a stroke of luck at just the right time to compensate for the loss of its recreation and tourism base. There was a rapidly growing world market for molybdenum, a precious metal used in a number of industrial applications, including to harden steel. And this part of Colorado had a crucial supply.
In 1976, the Henderson molybdenum mine opened in Clear Creek County near the town of Empire. Soon it was producing a full one-fourth of the entire world’s molybdenum supply, and employing over 1,000 people on round-the-clock shifts. After the market for molybdenum crashed in the early 1980s, the mine restructured operations, varying production since then relative to shifts in global demand.
The county has since become quite dependent on the mine for its normal operations. As of 2015, the Henderson mine was providing an astonishing 70% of Clear Creek County's property tax base, and 36% of its entire budget. An averaging agreement has sought to smooth the ups and downs in tax revenue the county collects from the mine, but there is still no alternative source of profit capable of covering the loss of revenue, should the mine close entirely.
A value per acre map of taxable property values in Clear Creek County reveals the disproportionate importance of the Henderson Mine. The height of the vertically extruded regions represents their value per acre; the volume represents total property value. The Henderson Mine property in the top left is comparable in taxable value to the entire towns of Idaho Springs and Georgetown. Image via Urban3.
Image via WikiCommons.
Only one problem remained: the molybdenum market is volatile. A downturn in prices caused Henderson mine owner Freeport McMoRan to lay off 210 workers in 2015 and cut back production by two-thirds in 2016, talking of closing the mine entirely by 2020 if prices did not justify opening up additional reserves. When molybdenum prices picked back up, the closing date was postponed—Freeport McMoRan is now saying 2026, and who knows what the future may bring. But regardless, the mine, like all extractive industries, is a limited-time deal for Clear Creek County.
And thus, the region needs to execute a daring reversal. The closure, when it comes, is going to blow a massive hole in the budget, and something else needs to begin to fill it. Loevlie has a good idea of what that "something" is.
History Is the Future
The Henderson Mine is elsewhere in the county, near Empire, but Idaho Springs has its own mining legacy. The Argo Gold Mill and Tunnel, located right on the edge of town, was a technological marvel in its day. The 4.2 mile tunnel, begun in 1893 and finished in 1910, connected Idaho Springs to nearly every gold mine between it and nearby Central City, and was at the heart of an elaborate and technologically groundbreaking operation that, at its height, processed 300 tons of gold per day.
The tunnel closed in 1943 after a disastrous flood, and sat empty for decades. It was declared a Superfund Site in 1983, due to acid and heavy-metal contaminated water that continued to leak out of the tunnel (one of whose original functions was to drain water from the mines it served) into Clear Creek.
Loevlie, though, saw potential. In 2016, she and a group of local developers and preservationists bought the cleaned-up site and began converting it to an ambitious complex that will include not only tours of the Argo Tunnel, but a hotel and convention center, a mixed-use residential community with retail and restaurants, and a cable car ferrying visitors 1300 vertical feet up Rosa Gulch. (The full project is a work in progress, but the hotel is already open.)
One of Loevlie's partners in the Argo project is the legendary Denver developer and historic preservationist Dana Crawford, best known for her role in saving downtown Denver’s Larimer Square and Union Station. "She has a reputation for doing difficult projects," Loevlie says, "And she jokes with me that I'm the one who finally got her to do a Superfund site!"
This wouldn't be the basis to revive a whole town if it were an isolated endeavor. Loevlie, however, doesn't see the Argo as a standalone attraction, but as the gateway drug for people to rediscover Idaho Springs: "I've had people I've known for decades get off the highway for the first time and say, ‘This was wonderful! I had no idea this was here!’”
An early 20th century photo of Miner Street in Idaho Springs, Colorado. Image via Urban3.
And Loevlie is an enthusiastic booster for the town itself. She was part of the successful 1980s effort to get downtown Idaho Springs listed on the National Register of Historic Places, during the years of "whiz-by" traffic on the new freeway, to prevent any further destruction for road widening or auto-oriented projects. "Fighting the evil empire—CDOT" really brought people together in those days, she says. "It helped a lot of people come to appreciate what we have here—being in the middle of all the history, the buildings, the mining and industry.”
The buildings are key to the story. Downtown Idaho Springs is stunning. And as always, property value data confirm that, from a local revenue standpoint, it's downtown that brings the goods. The geoanalytics team from Urban3 visited Idaho Springs in 2016 and mapped the tax productivity of property throughout Clear Creek County, showing how crucial those few blocks of downtown are, not just to the city, but for the whole county's economic fortunes.
Clear Creek County's future, put simply, lies in its past. Its historic towns will be its source of prosperity once the Henderson Mine is gone.
These communities have tremendous lifestyle appeal. They offer proximity to Denver—and not as another Breckenridge-esque resort town, but as a real, honest place to live. Idaho Springs is already attracting self-employed and entrepreneurial residents who are drawn to the mountain lifestyle and charm.
For the county's part, leaders have come around substantially to the notion that the heart of towns like Idaho Springs—not undeveloped areas on the edge—are where to best invest precious resources. Clear Creek County’s 2017 Community Master Plan lists as one of its strategies:
Expand public water and sanitation systems and other infrastructure to meet the needs of growth outside municipal or special district boundaries only where impact analysis has demonstrated a net benefit to the community.
Of course, “impact analysis” can be manipulated to demonstrate a lot of things. But Loevlie sees a real change in mindset taking place: "I think they get now that you need to invest where there are already services, not out where you have to build the infrastructure.”
One saving grace for the county is that there will no longer be a mass unemployment crisis when the Henderson Mine finally closes, because the mine is already a relatively insignificant employer in the area. Much of its operation today is automated; Freeport McMoRan employs 315 people in the region, 215 of them in Clear Creek County.
In fact, the company itself has urged local leaders to diversify away from reliance on it.
The date for closing the mine has been moved once and it may move again—a testament to the volatility of the global commodity market, and the risk of relying on such an industry to support an entire town.
Clear Creek County has some hard work ahead if it wants to pave a new path, but they are slowly taking the steps to diversify their economy and capitalize on the resources that aren’t going anywhere: their neighborhoods and their community.
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