Realistically imagining a Commerce City without Suncor

A recent article in Westword tells of a RiNo art gallery where a local artist and around 50 high school interns have collaborated on creating pieces centered around the theme of what it would be like if the Suncor refinery was not the Suncor refinery.

We think it’s great that this gallery is giving these kids something to do, and are intrigued by the theme – imagining a Commerce City without Suncor and its jobs, energy products, tax generation, and economic contribution. It’s an interesting thought experiment, and we figured we’d give it a shot!

Just to start, we imagine the pipelines that would have to be built to transport Colorado natural resources to distant refineries. Failing that, we imagine how many more oil tanker cars it would require on the the railroad lines that run through the city and through the state.

Then we imagine how much more expensive gasoline would be, with all those locally produced gallons gone. Seeing as it would have to be shipped in from all those refineries that we shipped our oil out to in the first place, we can easily imagine $5 gasoline in due course. Maybe more than that, if the on-again, off-again tariffs on Canadian oil happen to be on again, and we have to get our gasoline from out of the country.

We imagine flying anywhere would be pretty much out of reach for most people here, since plane tickets out of Denver International Airport would become far more expensive, as they too would have to get their jet fuel from farther away. We imagine that might not be that big a deal, since few of us could afford to drive to the airport anyway.

Oh, and we imagine that you could forget about any kind of transit to the airport, even if you won the lottery and could afford a ticket. The loss of $40 million in annual tax revenue to the state, county and city would probably put a damper on any future public transit plans.

But why would you want to leave anyway!

Well, except maybe to get away from the crime that would increase as the city could not afford to hire more police, no longer having their share of that $40 million tax base, which is a significant part of the city’s tax base. On second thought, we imagine you may want to stick around anyway to guard your things and be on hand if a fire breaks out, since you will probably need to deal with it after the inevitable cuts to local fire protection. On the bright side, not being able to afford to leave will make it less likely that you will be impacted by the steadily deteriorating roads.

And we imagine you will want to protect whatever you have, since replacing them will be more expensive – in fact just about everything we need that we can’t make in our back yards would be more expensive, as higher diesel prices will increase shipping costs.

We imagine it will be quieter … with those 500 laid off workers not here, provided they have somewhere else to go. That doesn’t include the 4,500 Coloradans whose jobs are tied to Suncor.

We try not to imagine too many of them needing public assistance to stay on their feet, as the loss in tax revenue, exacerbated by the loss of $2.5 billion in overall economic contribution by the refinery will mean not much will be available.

It is fun to imagine a Commerce City without Suncor, isn’t it?