While shopping in the ‘bulk grains and nuts’ aisle at Natural Grocers over the weekend, I had an acquaintance walk up to me, grinning, to pose a presumably rhetorical question.
“Isn’t there some way we can ‘recall’ the entire County government?”
I smiled back, and said, I didn’t think such a thing was likely to happen, even if a suitable political mechanism were available.
Then we each went back to our shopping.
But thinking back on the question now, I would have to argue that such a proposition would have a dreadful outcome. Most of the people working for the County are reasonably competent, know their jobs, and want to be helpful. Some are extremely competent.
A few bad apples don’t spoil the whole bunch.
Nevertheless, the taxpayers can still be squeaky wheels, and we can lodge our complaints, when we are unhappy with this or that County action or policy. In fact, without squeaky wheels helping to define the problems and unaddressed issues, our leaders are pretty much flying blind. We don’t want our elected leaders relying totally and solely on their own bureaucracy for information and advice.
To help give taxpayers access to facts and opinions that government official might not want them to hear, many of the articles published here in the Daily Post have an intentional ‘point of view’. They’re meant to be subjective, and are not intended to be taken as ‘objective news’. That’s why we label those kinds of articles, ‘Opinion’.
This editorial, for example. It’s my opinion, and I represent it as my opinion. It’s intended to be subjective.
Often, the Daily Post is doing our best to share the ‘other side of the story’, when our local governments deliver their own one-sided ‘news’.
On occasion, the news we’re trying to balance comes from the local weekly newspaper, the Pagosa Springs SUN.
When I spoke to the three County Commissioners last week, during public comment, I invited them to sit down with me and discuss my concerns about what appeared (to me) to be a publicly-funded TABOR election notice that violated Colorado law. Commissioner Ronnie Maez later contacted me to make an appointment, and we will hopefully sit down this morning to talk about my issues (and perhaps, his issues as well.)
For that, I am grateful.
I had spoken at public comment two weeks earlier, informing the commissioners that I would be involved in a campaign to defeat their proposed $6.5 million sales tax increase — Ballot Issue 1A. I told the commissioners that I suspected the government-funded Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation — the group enlisted to run the ‘YES on 1A’ campaign — would be telling only one side of the tax increase story, and that the voters deserved to hear both sides.
Commissioner Maez responded, saying that he hoped the 1A opponents to be truthful. I expressed to Commissioner Maez that I hoped the proponents would likewise be truthful.
I am, in fact, a member of an issue committee called Fair Taxes for Archuleta, and our intention is to share ‘the other side of the story’ about the proposed $6.5 million sales tax increase ($6.5 million estimated for 2023, and lasting forever thereafter) that will appear on your mail ballots. The intention of our Fair Taxes committee was to share important ideas that will likely not be addressed by the ‘YES on 1A’ committee.
The same intention — full access to information for the people of Archuleta County — has been the driving force behind the Pagosa Daily Post since its inception in 2004. When we started our online news magazine, we did so partly to address what we viewed as ‘uneven’ news coverage in our local weekly newspaper, especially in the realm of local politics.
That bias was often subtle, but ultimately very important — we felt — in a community with only one regular news source. When people have access to only one point of view, it’s challenging to make the best decisions for the community as a whole.
Back in 2004, the Pagosa Springs SUN seemed to be delivering, as news, only the ‘official government point of view.’ The government point of view is certainly a valid perspective, but not necessarily the most truthful perspective. We’ve experienced a lack of truthfulness during some previous tax-increase elections, coming from local government leaders — including the School District’s ‘mega-campus’ election in 2011, and the County’s 1A election in 2006.
In my humble opinion, the SUN has become somewhat more ‘even’ in its news coverage since 2004. But I’m occasionally disappointed. Or maybe, more than occasionally.
Last week, I shared a quote from the Pagosa Springs SUN, related to an apparent violation of Colorado law in the writing of the required TABOR notice for Ballot Issue 1A. Long-time SUN reporter Randi Pierce had written an article headlined as ‘TABOR Notice set to be mailed: Questions surface about pro and con statements.’
Ber 1,060 word news article begins:
Archuleta County voters will soon receive the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) Notice for the local measures on the ballot for the November 8 election, though some have expressed concerns about the notice.
As a person intimately involved in this controversy, I would say that Ms. Pierce presented the facts in a reasonably straightforward and accurate manner, throughout the first 60% of the article.
It was the last 450 words — the last 40% of her story — that struck me as ‘uneven’. Those 450 words related an interview with Archuleta County Manager Derek Woodman, answering questions posed by Ms. Pierce.
I happen to know that at least two local citizens had filed CORA requests — Colorado Open Records Act requests — hoping to discover what legal “For” and “Against” submissions Mr. Woodman had received prior to the deadline, and to learn where Mr. Woodman had come up with arguments, included in the TABOR notice, that had never been submitted to him.
Here we have a 1,060 word newspaper article — not an opinion piece, but a news article — concerning a controversy involving government officials and public citizens. Ms. Pierce spent 40% of the article interviewing the government official involved, to get his point of view. But where were the interviews with the citizens, who were so concerned about this issue that they took their time to file CORA requests?
Is the perspective of the taxpayers unimportant? Not worth sharing?
I might have been more comfortable, I suppose, if Ms. Pierce had started her article like this:
“I will not be interviewing any taxpayers in this article… for my own reasons… but I did interview the person who as been accused of violating Colorado election law, and allowed him to defend his actions.”
But she didn’t start that way. And that’s part of the reason the Daily Post exists.