“Please reconcile the balance between county zoning laws/ordinances with the Republican Value of Liberty.”
Del Schwab
“County zoning laws/ordinances are for the entire county regardless of party affiliation. My values as an elected official always are conservative, protection of public rights, right for life and as a faithful public employee.”
John Shipper
“Zoning laws and ordinances provide a county and its citizens an organized method of best determining where commercial development should take place so that citizens are served in a convenient and safe manner.”
Robert Rowland
“Liberty is more than a Republican value, it is the foundation of Conservativisim and our nation. Our founders spelled out in great wisdom the role of government by limiting it to those enumerated powers. Government today has grossly exceeded those powers, at all levels. The power is in the people, and as a free people, living in a society structure the people have the right to establish guidelines, including such things as zoning laws. It is when elected officials, without a mandate of the people, take it upon themselves to establish such things as “Rubbish Laws” for reasons not consistent with societal needs, including seeking revenues, fines and taxes not approved by the people, that they too exceed their power and violate their oath.”
Larry Ross
“County zoning laws/ordinances should be respectful to and protect citizen’s private property rights. In a perfect world all people would extend this courtesy and respect to their neighbors. Minimizing government intrusion into individual property rights is the best approach. Health and public safety is where intervention may be appropriate.”
To summarize:
- Commissioner Schwab would conservatively protect public rights.
- Commissioner Shipper would determine where safe and convenient commercial development should occur.
- Challenger Rowland thinks we the people can rightly zone ourselves however we want.
- Challenger Ross says zone for health and public safety while respecting private property rights.
All these men accept the legitimacy of county legal impositions on how private citizens use, situate, and maximize the utility of their private property, albeit sorted out by different objectives and methods depending on who you talk to.
None of them reconcile the liberty interest guaranteed to the people in the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution with their justifications for zoning legitimacy.
- 9th Am. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
- 10th Am. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Respondents did not address the philosophical question of how a collective body of third parties, be they actual governors or a select body of citizens such as a planning commission appointed to consult to the governors, can know or serve what the best interests of all citizens are or should be. None of them justified why governing 3rd parties should be empowered to control our private property. All their answers implied that some unknown number of citizens will have their property rights quashed for good, conservative, safe, healthful, commercial, and majoritarian reasons, in some way through county governance.
Frankly, they all share a very unsettling predisposition on this question.