LEADVILLE — Edward Jackson stopped to wrestle with a dilemma outside Western Hardware

here as snow piled up on Harrison Avenue and travel was perilous on the roads out of town.

“I’d be a dead man today,” said Johnson, a 71-year-old retired miner from Lake County with a list of health problems.

That point comes up in conversations now in this high-mountain town as St. Vincent Hospital, an institution for 135 years, prepares to close in stages over the next few months, taking its emergency room, ambulance service and the county’s only nursing home with it.

For this town of 2,600 people who are facing 33 slippery, curvy miles to the next nearest hospital in Frisco, time and distance equate to life and death. The town is scheduled to lose its ambulance service in January.

Jackson was one of the county’s residents who opposed a property tax hike to subsidize the publicly owned hospital. He says the price was too high in a community that has been asked for more property taxes for schools in each of the three previous years.

The hospital had not received an increase in its share of the property taxes since 1988. The defeated measure would have jacked up the millage rate from 5.48 mills to 16.44, which would have raised the tax on each $100,000 of value in a home from $43.62 a year to $87.26 and for a business from $158.94 to $476.84.

“We’re getting taxed to death up here,” Jackson said. “You can only ask for so much before it gets old to the same people who have to dig a little deeper in their pockets. This is not a place where people can just keep paying and paying.”

Indeed, more than 60 percent of Lake County’s 7,300 residents depend on Medicaid, and with the local hospital closing they will have to drive to other counties for care.

Meanwhile, a recreation economy built around nationally known endurance bicycle and trail-running races and marathons has emerged in Leadville.

The immediate concern over the hospital, however, is deeper than taxes and the economy. History proves people will die.

A study published in the medical journal Health Affairs in August found that when emergency rooms close, the chances of death for those steered elsewhere rises by 5 percent. In cases of heart attack, stroke and sepsis, deaths rise by 15 percent.

None of the hospitals studied, however, has Leadville’s wintertime challenges of nearly 14 feet of snow annually on steep, twisting roads.

“I can’t imagine dialing 911 and no one coming, and then I have to put my husband in the car in this weather and get down to Frisco,” said St. Vincent CEO Joyce Beck. “I just can’t imagine it.”

The hospital’s closure was forced by a state inspection last year that found critically needed repairs, including a heating system that didn’t work and would require $2 million to replace.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture offered a loan that depended on the property tax hike for repayment. The state also has offered $1 million, but the hospital still has no way to raise the rest.

“Everything was riding on the mill levy,” Beck said. “Now we’re down to hoping somebody out there can just write us a check for a donation.”

Economic pain

The pain of the hospital’s demise also is economic for a mountain town already on the edge. St. Vincent has 107 employees and puts about $8 million into the local economy.

“This will definitely hurt the town budget in a lot of ways,” said Leadville Mayor Jaime Stuever. “People who work here spend here.”

The Leadville City Council already has cut about $130,000 from next year’s roughly $2 million budget, including eliminating two open jobs — one in the police department and one in the street department.

Business has been in a spiral for years. Leadville collected about $648,000 in sales taxes in the last fiscal year, compared with just over $754,000 the year before. Sales-tax collections fell from $352,196 in the first quarter of 2013 to $312,662 for the same period in 2014.

Neighboring Buena Vista, with almost the same population, had more than twice the sales-tax revenue: $1.55 million last year, up from $1.48 million the year before, according to tax records.

Leadville has lost seven restaurants in just the last four years, about 40 percent of its former total. Alco, one of two grocery stores that serve Leadville, is going out of business. The other store, Safeway, is located just outside the corporate limits and doesn’t pay sales tax to the city.

And when a hospital has been around 135 years — with miners passing a hat to pay the Sisters of Charity to keep it going — its loss costs the town a piece of its historical identity.

That identity, like the economy, has been in a slide in Leadville, which once had seven museums, most of which are now closed or operate sporadically.

The landmark Tabor Opera House, built in 1889, the same year as the hospital, closed as a private enterprise in August.

The Colorado Arts Consortium is trying to raise $5 million to renovate the grand theater and its upstairs ballroom, including adding a heating system in the building so it could operate year-round.

This town has been in despair before. When the nearby Climax molybdenum mine closed in the early 1980s, Ken Chlouber, a former Lake County commissioner, state representative and state senator, started the Leadville Trail 100, a trail run that goes 50 miles up Hope Pass and back down.

His goal was to put Leadville on the marathon map and attract competitors and fans. He succeeded.

World-class athletes

Today, the summer Leadville Race Series draws national media and such world-class athletes as cyclist Lance Armstrong. A study two years ago by Colorado Mountain College found the eight-race, three- month series pumped about $15 million into the local economy.

Race director Josh Colley said the series contracts with medical providers to cover its races and doesn’t depend on the hospital.

“We’re hopeful we can be the future of Leadville,” Colley said. “We would never discount the history that’s here in Leadville, and we see that as part of the draw to our events.”

For others, there’s only hope and determination.

“I hope I don’t need it,” Jackson, the retired miner, said of emergency services that are leaving town. “There are a lot of things in this world you can’t control, though.”

Stuever is still determined to find a solution, including the town fire department taking over ambulance services, and he hopes a hospital chain or HMO will take over the hospital and make the repairs.

“This is a tough old community,” he said. “We’re not done fighting yet.”

Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174, jbunch@denverpost.com or twitter.com/joeybunch