I am thinking this morning about my ex-wife Clarissa, who passed away in 2016.
Clarissa spoke, on rare occasions, about the time she was raped, at age 15, by a girlfriend’s older brother. She didn’t know whether to report the rape to the police. Then she learned that her best friend Vikki had been raped the very same day, by Vikki’s uncle. They agreed to accompany one another to the downtown police station and report the crimes.
Two teenage girls, trying to do what was right. Two teenage girls with Alaskan Native blood, walking into an all-white police station.
When they arrived, Vikki was first to tell her story. According to Clarissa, the police humiliated Vikki so horribly during the interview that Clarissa quickly decided not to report her own rape.
The police never followed up on Vikki’s report.
Violations of all kinds take place every day. Some are exceedingly serious, but never see justice served. My situation as a ‘disgraced’ Town Planning Commissioner cannot hold a candle to the violence Clarissa and Vikki suffered as teenagers. But for some reason, I am thinking about their experiences, and about government corruption.
Corruption in a government unit can sometimes be subtle. No one is taking bribes, no one is being assassinated, but there’s still a subtle problem of corruption. Barely noticeable, perhaps, unless you’re in the midst of it.
Laws and rules being bent to do a special favor for a friend, perhaps. New rules being invented out of the blue to enforce someone’s personal agenda. Citizens treated unfairly, or disrespectfully. Codes misinterpreted.
Sometimes, corruption exists in only certain government departments. During 16 years of writing about Pagosa governments, I have developed great respect for certain departments at Town Hall. The police department for one. The Town Clerk’s department. The streets department. The sanitation department.
Not so much, the Planning Department. But as I said, corruption can sometimes be subtle. Almost unnoticeable.
Back at the end of April, a small group of Town officials — Mayor Don Volger, Town Manager Andrea Phillips, Planning Director James Dickhoff, and Planning Commissioners Peter Adams and Jeff Posey — collaborated on planning an event to take place at a public Planning Commission meeting. The apparent purpose of the event was to publicly castigate a particular Planning Commissioner whom they determined to be — borrowing a word used by Mr. Posey in an email — “dangerous.”
Never in my life did I expect I would be publicly chastised by Planning Director Dickhoff and two fellow commissioners — without warning, and in front of an audience. Never in my life did I expect that such behavior would be endorsed by our Mayor and Town Manager.
Up until that meeting on April 28, I believed (naïvely?) that the Planning Commission was functioning fairly well, and was making fairly good decisions. In fact, as a group, we had determined to help update the Land Use and Development Code (LUDC) in alignment with Town Council goals and the new Comprehensive Plan, with particular attention paid to parking and housing issues. I had never seen the volunteer Town Planning Commission agree take on such an important and potentially time-consuming project.
As a group, we held a meeting with the Town Council to discuss common concerns. I cannot recall the Town Council ever holding that type of meeting with its Planning Commission in all my years as a Daily Post reporter.
Yes, I had some concerns, as a commissioner. I felt Planning Director Dickhoff controlled and dominated the meetings unnecessarily. Based on many years of documenting government boards, I felt it was the Commission Chair’s job to run the meetings, not the paid staff’s job.
I felt that commissioners occasionally exceeded their authority and made demands of developers that could not be justified by the LUDC.
I felt it was part of my job to express these concerns as they arose. But apparently, I had walked into an all-white police station with the wrong color of skin.
Planning Commission member Jeff Posey finds himself in an interesting position. He’s fairly new to our community, but was nevertheless one of the town residents willing to ask hard questions during public meetings about $79 million in tax subsidies proposed by developers Jack Searle and David Dronet last summer. Mr. Posey appeared to be an intelligent person with concerns about corporate welfare. I was pleased when he was appointed to the Planning Commission.
When I was helping circulate the Ballot Question A petition earlier this year, I naturally assumed that Mr. Posey would the happy to sign the petition and support the right of the taxpayers to have some control over, for example, a future $79 million corporate giveaway. The petition aimed to require voter approval whenever the tax giveaway exceeded $1 million.
I was surprised when Mr. Posey refused to sign the petition. He argued that the $1 million trigger was too low. He told me (to my face) that he would sign the petition if the trigger were more reasonable — say, $5 million. It was a sensible argument, but I explained that the petition was the work of six local activists, and as a group we had agreed on a $1 million trigger.
Mr. Posey expressed his disappointment in our group’s decision, and did not sign the petition.
Apparently, I have since become the Devil Incarnate in Mr. Posey’s eyes. He wrote a lengthy public letter to numerous Town officials on June 8 (you can download his entire letter here) that reads in part:
I’m concerned that Bill Hudson, one of the town’s alternate Planning Commission members, has been involved in potentially illegal and unethical activities that violate Planning Commissioner roles as quasi-judicial members of our local government. As directed in our training last December and January, we are prohibited from ‘ex parte’ discussion or decision-making regarding projects that may come before the Planning Commission.
I understand that Mr. Posey is a newcomer to town, and that he may not fully understand the terms “quasi-judicial” and “ex parte”.
But he apparently knows how to stage a verbal attack on an unsuspecting fellow volunteer, out of the blue, during an open public meeting.
How much more pleasant for everyone, if we’d simply sat down together, over coffee, and discussed his concerns.