Elections have consequences. Elbert County’s busy liberal-led bureaucracy has been writing up a blizzard of new regulatory laws to govern us good citizens. The liberals appointed by the Republican BOCC members you voted for last November got right on the problem brought to light by the Nyquist affair. But I hope you didn’t think that putting a couple of committed liberals onto the BOCC would bring the platitudes of accountability and transparency they preached into fruition. Those outcomes never had a prayer.
The first Nag to escape the barn is the Special District Regulation with its Addendum A and Addendum B. In the face of one dissenting vote last night, the Planning Commission voted to pass this turkey on to the BOCC – that group with a majority of elected politicians too spineless to actually defend a political position themselves – the group who prefer to hide their more controversial policies at arms length in subordinate off-line committees.
And why not? The strategy of avoiding all contact with controversial decision consequences has worked pretty well for President Obama. Provided you have policy prostitutes willing to lay down for you, why not indeed.
But on the other hand, why would anyone in their right mind risk their capital and time to engage this open ended process? This special district process has no definite time limit, no standards for evaluating a given project, no limits to which third parties can enjoin the process and prolong it, no bar to systemic political intervention in the regulatory scheme, no extent to which a government taking of that private capital and time must be tolerated, and the transparency mechanisms it does contain have no dispositive bearing on an outcome.
Voting stakeholders, the intended beneficiaries of a given special district, are both disenfranchised and fed a dose of inconsequential pablum to assuage their disempowerment at the hands of an anointed cadre’ of enlightened regulators.
In response to the imminent expiration of the County’s moratorium on special district approvals (put in place last January by the new liberal BOCC majority to frustrate the Town of Kiowa’s attempt to exit receivership through the sale of water to oil & gas interests), this new body of regulatory law provides a politically riskless mechanism for a permanent moratorium on all special district approvals, both new ones and modifications to existing special districts. Take that Mr. Nyquist. Touche’ Town of Kiowa.
To say the pendulum’s swung too far the opposite direction is an understatement – it’s gone crashing through the clockworks. And that’s not even the worst of it.
Look to the North. Look to the South. Elbert County is surrounded by Groundwater Management Districts who have regulatory authority over all water issues in their jurisdiction. The North Kiowa Bijou and the Upper Big Sandy GMDs have their own publicly elected directors and their own bureaucracies for implementing each one’s version of water regulatory laws.
Up to now, Elbert County avoided these institutions and their intermediate murky regulatory enterprises over the County’s scarce water resources, preferring instead to remain under the more objective and competent jurisdiction of the Colorado State Engineer.
But that wasn’t enough for the liberals now running things. They took a non-representative advisory water committee of political appointees and inserted them into the special district regulatory scheme, whence they will now flex their regulatory muscle over any substantial project that falls into the web of county planning.
Why go to the voters on the very politically risky question of electing a water management district when you can quietly backdoor one into existence through a regulatory process that, judging by attendance at the meetings, most citizens don’t even know exists? And bonus points – this water regulatory authority isn’t even accountable to the voters!
Transparency and accountability? They’re stealing property rights with one hand while patting you on the head with the other.
B_Imperial