Adopt-a-Highway sign on US 85 in Brighton.

But what do neo-Nazis and the Orthopedic Physicians of Colorado have in common?

Well, they both have volunteered to pick up litter along stretches of Colorado state highways.

Now what is the difference between neo-Nazis and the Orthopedic Physicians of Colorado?

You’ll never turn on your 10 o’clock news and see a top story on the Orthopedic Physicians volunteering to pick up roadside litter.

That’s a shame. I thought you might like to know about some of the other groups that are toiling along the roadsides in metro Denver picking up trash not for any other reason than making their community better.

In addition to the Orthopedic Physicians, a few of the others are the Littleton Rotary Club, CU’s Theta Xi fraternity, Brentwood United Methodist Church, Daughters of the American Revolution, Mile-Hi Jeep Club, Regis University Youth Corps, Friends of the National Park Service and Parker’s Four Square Mile Neighborhood Group.

Roadside trash is an incredibly frustrating problem for the Colorado Department of Transportation, county road departments and city street crews. Everything from broken glass, soiled diapers and bottles of urine to meth lab debris is tossed onto the shoulders and gutters by motorists. The volunteers and paid crews who go out and pick this stuff up are taking risks. You can read about the Adopt-a-Highway program here.

But it takes a publicity stunt like a half dozen admirers of Adolf Hitler deciding to get noticed for their civic involvement to get a story about it on the news. With all the serious issues facing transportation in Colorado – from the inadequate and shrinking resources to fix our crumbling bridges and roads, to the assault on funding being waged on the remaining resources by anti-government zealots with ballot measures to cut transportation’s budget, what are the reasons I’ve been seeing CDOT spokeswoman Stacey Stegman’s smiling face on the news lately?

She’s been summoned out in front of the Arkansas Avenue headquarters to talk about either the fuss over the neo-Nazis’ highway clean-up or some CDOT employee’s poor decision to forward a tacky email photo of President Obama and Sarah Palin.

Will there be as much effort to track down the so-far reticent backers of Proposition 101 – which would take away money from repair of unsafe bridges and roadways, and reduce annual funding to CDOT, counties and cities for their road maintenance programs by arbitrarily fixing all license fees at $10 a year – to ask them on what basis they chose that number other than that they want to pay less? How does $10 per vehicle relate to what it costs to maintain the roads?

I’m not actually this naïve, of course. I know how media work, and a band of neo-Nazis wanting to pick up litter so they can advertise their presence to potential recruits is, of course, going to make the news. Truth be told, in the 1980s, I extensively covered neo-Nazis for the Rocky Mountain News after the murder of KOA talk show host Alan Berg, and if the paper were still here, as both the transportation writer and the extremist beat veteran in the newsroom, there’s not a men’s room remote enough where I could hide from covering the Adopt-a-Brown Shirt story.

I can almost script where this story will go. The National Socialists will go out to U.S. 85 and do some obligatory litter pick-up; TV crews will come along. The neo-Nazis will discover that for some reason, their one-mile segment north of Bridge Street suddenly has a whole heckuva lot more litter on it than other segments. Some drivers will honk or yell as they go by. Eventually, their sign will be defaced, and their leader will again be on the news to wax indignant about the intolerance shown to them.

And sooner or later, the whole effort will fall apart and the one-mile segment of U.S. 85 will be up for adoption again.

Eventually you come to realize this was not about cleaning up litter along the highways at all.

————————————————–
UPDATE: CDOT has announced that the one-mile section where the National Socialist Movement volunteers will pick up litter has been moved northward on U.S. 85 after officials realized the original segment it was assigned had been secured by another organization, the Elmwood Baptist Church. As a result, the neo-Nazi group will clean up litter on U.S. 85 between Bridge Street and 168th Avenue.