Struggling at a million-dollar horse stable

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile

LITTLETON, Colo. - If you could put karma in the bank, Stan and Christine Penton would have a nice savings account.

As owners of one of the Denver area’s last remaining suburban equestrian stables for the past 13 years, the Pentons have offered programs for disabled riders, rescued wild mustangs and subsidized lessons and horses for the less fortunate among their generally well-to-do clientele. Leaders in their community and their church, they adopted two young children from Russia.

And good karma is mostly what they have to show for it. That and the $7,400 they can count as profit so far this year from the hundreds of thousands in revenue they have collected at their Normandy Farm and Stables.

Steep increases in operating costs, coupled with a whopping property tax bill, have left the Pentons unable to earn a living from their 4-acre spread in unincorporated Jefferson County, tucked neatly amid $500,000 tract homes and million-dollar McMansions.

“This doesn’t even support us and we work all the time,” says Christine, 48. “Enough is enough.”

The situation has the couple clamoring for a shift in the way their local, state and federal elected officials do business.

“Politics has got to change,” says the 49-year-old Stan. “I’m just looking for a level playing field, but politics has been going on as usual while Rome burns.”

In a battleground county in a battleground state in a presidential election that could come down to a handful of electoral votes, Stan and Christine Penton are the embodiment of voters that both parties are trying desperately to woo: unhappy about where they see their country going but uncertain that either candidate will make much difference. And like many other voters, they find that the shrill claims and counterclaims about Barack Obama and John McCain’s experience, age, temperament, friends and flip-flops make it hard to drill down to the substance on issues like the war, immigration, energy or health care, or even know which matters most.

But here in the well-heeled and pristine suburbs south of metropolitan Denver, the city where Democrats will convene on Monday to crown Obama as their standard-bearer, in the immortal words of longtime party operative James Carville, it’s the economy, stupid.

Little obvious turmoil
On the surface, it is hard to sense much economic angst in this area near Littleton, the seat of neighboring Arapahoe County. The town of 45,000 gained worldwide infamy in 1999 after a shooting rampage claimed 15 lives at Columbine High School, a mile from the Pentons’ place, but life has since returned to what passes for normal in these quiet, affluent suburbs. Wide thoroughfares curve gracefully through neighborhoods filled with handsome homes and well-landscaped yards. Open space seems almost as ubiquitous as the strip malls, their parking lots packed with SUVs and minivans. Parks, ball fields and golf courses are too plentiful to count.

With an economy fueled by an expanding high-tech sector and strong retail base, U.S. Census data pegs the median family income of the Littleton area in the high $70,000 range, about $20,000 above the national average. Median home prices are in the $250,000 range, roughly 25 percent higher than the national average. And, like Colorado as a whole, Denver and its suburbs have escaped much of the economic suffering visited upon other U.S. regions. Unemployment has edged up from below 4 percent last year to just over 5 percent, half a point below the national rate. And home prices have fallen only slightly compared with the plunges seen in Florida, California and elsewhere.

John Makely / msnbc.com Despite running a stable that houses up to 50 horses, Christine Penton and her husband are struggling to get by.

Don’t be fooled, Stan and Christine Penton say. Regardless of income, everyone has been hammered by the surge in gas, energy and food prices. They have friends with six-figure incomes whose power has been shut off over late payments. While the state as a whole appears to have turned the corner on home foreclosures — the late-ripening fruit of the nationwide mortgage-lending scandal — they are setting new records in Jefferson County.

Even some of the Pentons’ high-end clients, who own dressage and hunter-jumper horses worth more than $50,000, are downsizing their hobby, skipping riding competitions more than two hours away and looking for stables closer to their homes to save on gas.

That’s helping the Pentons keep their 51-stall barn busy at monthly rates of $625 to $725 per horse for “full care,” which includes twice-daily feedings, stall-cleaning and bedding. The resulting $325,000-plus in annual revenue might sound like a handsome return on the property with its 16,000-square-foot covered arena, small family home and other outbuildings, which the Pentons bought for $400,000 in 1995 after fleeing the smog and congestion of Southern California with eldest son, McKenzie, now 16.

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