Durango is busy trying to jam 100,000 people into a valley that can hold one-tenth that. The Colorado Department of Transportation is aiding and abetting this crime by planning the highways to pull off this insanity.
The result? Camino del Rio and friends. This is a street that you may have to drive a full two miles just to drive to the other side of the street. Want to go to the mall from the Mongolian Grill? You’ll have to drive a half-mile south before driving the half-mile north to the mall. And then there is the exit ramp to nowhere. Maybe someday it will actually go to Farmington.
But the lipstick on the Camino del Rio pig is the “art.” First, drivers have tons of distractions to save them the monotony of having to watch the road. There are smartphones, GPS and others, and each passenger has his own device. So why does the city need to spend $28,000 on an ugly hunk of rock and rust for us not to notice?
Second, public art should be displayed where people can actually stop and look.
Third, calling the vandalized work a “total loss” when 99 people out of 100 wouldn’t have ever noticed that anything had changed is actually the sound of cry-babies who misspent tax dollars trying to shift focus of blame to kids.
The Koch brothers may have $28,000 to spend on fancy abstract art, but the people who pay sales tax in Durango don’t – at least I don’t.
If an elected official does spend $28,000 of our money on art, they had better have an insurance policy to cover it– paid out of their own pockets.
Finally, Colorado government officials have notoriously bad taste in “art.” The evil, fourth-horse-of-the-apocalypse statue, and the mural of a Nazi in a gas mask murdering children in the Denver airport are just the tip of the poor-taste iceberg. We really should consider a constitutional amendment to keep Colorado governments from ever commissioning or purchasing art.
Nels Werner Lopez
Cortez
