According to news reports, someone in Estes Park, Colorado assigned themselves the job of leaving printed notes on the windshields of cars with out-of-state license plates.
“Hi! We year-round residents of Estes Park would be so happy to see you here, any other time. As it is, we are a small community with a lot of retired Sr. Citizens. We’ve been being more careful here than some other places. Having folks from all over the country come here, now, feels disrespectful. We would love to see you back, later. For now though, with all due respect, please GO THE HELL BACK TO WHEREVER YOUR OUT OF STATE LICENSE IS FROM.”
Respect is a curious thing. Speaking for myself, it seems disrespectful to address someone with language like “GO THE HELL BACK”. A more respectful message might be, for example, “Please consider returning to your home state until we have a handle on this dangerous pandemic.” It says essentially the same thing, but more respectfully. It’s possible to show respect, even when someone is doing something you dislike.
A more difficult question is whether the tourists themselves are being disrespectful, by possibly risking the health of senior citizens in Estes Park.
We’ve been dealing, over the past few months, with questions of respect and disrespect at the Pagosa Springs Town Hall.
Following my appointment as a volunteer Planning Commissioner, I watched the Town Council reject requests from several of the special districts in Archuleta County. Those districts had asked the Council to include broad representation from all our special districts on the not-yet-formed Urban Renewal Authority (URA) commission. The only special district representative to argue against broad representation, at a November 25 meeting between the Town and the special districts, was former Town Manager Greg Schulte, who was representing the Upper San Juan Health Service District — that is, the Pagosa Springs Medical Center.
According to our analysis of the property tax and sales tax contributions available for Tax Increment Financing (TIF) developer subsidies in the future, it appears that the Town government would be contributing less than 3 percent of the tax subsidies to a typical TIF-funded project.
The Town Council decided to allow only one dedicated special district representative to sit on the URA commission, but Mayor Don Volger also appointed Mr. Schulte to the commission.
Respectful behavior?
Political power is addictive, and can sometimes lead to disrespectful behavior. It can sometimes lead to corruption. We all know this, and we therefore — whenever possible — create political systems that tend to spread out political power, rather than concentrating it into the hands of a small group.
Laws are another tool that can be used to prevent government corruption. Here in Colorado, we have volumes of laws regulating what a government is allowed to do, what they must do, and how they are expected to treat the taxpayers. Absent these laws, we risk government oppression. Absent these laws, we risk unfair taxation.
I was sorely disappointed by the Town Council’s decision to reject broad democratic representation on the newly-formed URA commission, and I and several other town residents wondered if there were a mechanism available to help us share the political power more broadly than Mayor Don Volger and the Town Council wanted it shared. Fortunately, the Colorado Constitution and the Town Home Rule Charter guarantee the voters’ right to create legislation through a petition and election process.
I had recently been appointed to the Planning Commission by the Town Council, and had received ‘board training’ along with my fellow commissioners. Because I’ve been attending and documenting government meetings for 16 years for my job at the Daily Post, much of what was shared in those ‘board trainings’ was familiar, and much of it could be classified under the heading, “How to Show Respect.”
How to respect the taxpayers. How to respect the voters. How to respect your fellow commission members. How to respect the law.
I’ve spent some time studying the laws of Colorado, and the ordinances and policies developed by the Town of Pagosa Springs over the years, and I may have somehow conceived an unusual way of interpreting laws. Some attorneys and government officials seem to view laws as so many individual sentences, without any necessary connection to the other sentences.
But some of us look at a written law as a coherent whole, that means what it says. When I read, for example, the Colorado Urban Renewal Law, and see the following (clearly written?) words:
URBAN RENEWAL
31-25-101. Short title. This part 1 shall be known and may be cited as the “Urban Renewal Law”.
…I understand that this law was created to address “urban renewal”. That is to say, the rehabilitation of slums. That’s what “urban renewal” means.
31-25-102. Legislative declaration. (1) The general assembly finds and declares that there exist in municipalities of this state slum and blighted areas which constitute a serious and growing menace, injurious to the public health, safety, morals, and welfare of the residents of the state in general and of the municipalities thereof; that the existence of such areas contributes substantially to the spread of disease and crime, constitutes an economic and social liability, substantially impairs or arrests the sound growth of municipalities…
This law grants powerful taxing powers to a municipality, to help them address the rehabilitation of slum neighborhoods. But a couple of clever attorneys convinced four of our seven Town Council members to ignore the actual intent of this statute, and instead focus all their attention on a couple of sentences tucked inside the 32-page law, Those four Council members then declared a vacant 27-acre parcel of riverfront property — a parcel that had never been developed in 10,000 years of human history — as ‘dangerous blight.’
In my humble opinion, there is only one word that can properly describe government actions that twist and distort the clear meaning of our adopted laws. “Corruption.”
What’s a community to do, when their leadership begins to ignore the law’s intent, and starts doing whatever they wish, with the blessing of clever attorneys? What’s a community to do, when our leaders begin to embrace the idea that a vacant parcel of land “contributes substantially to the spread of disease and crime…”?
I wondered if I might be able to help address government corruption, in a small way, by volunteering for the Town Planning Commission.
Was I naïve? Apparently, I was.