Yesterday, in a review of the recent meeting held by Commissioner Schlegel with representatives from Elbert County water districts, Bill Thomas wrote that “no public comment” was permitted, “even though it was a public meeting.”
He repeated his objection later in the piece where he said, “He [Commissioner Schlegel] did not allow questions or comments from the spectators, even though it was, in his words, ‘a public meeting.'”
Lastly, Thomas referred to the meeting as an “Open/Closed Meeting of the Water Districts,” implying that because local Leftist spectators at the meeting asked to speak and weren’t given the floor, the meeting was “open/closed” – presumably a pejorative characterization.
The Colorado Sunshine Law requires that meetings between public officials be open to the public. No requirements in state law exist for public officials to conduct forums for public speech during their public meetings.
The 1st Am. guarantees the Left a virtually unlimited right to present their ideas to the public through various publication venues, just as it does everyone else. Leftists in Elbert County generally use that right to dump on and disparage everything non-Leftists do. But there is no 1st Am. guarantee for individuals to input their free speech into meetings of public officials.
Characterizing an open meeting of public officials as tainted because Leftists were not given an opportunity to make their opposed positions heard in the meeting is simply gratuitous whining.
If Leftists put more energy into developing and publishing creative solutions to the challenges that public officials are tasked to lead, public officials might welcome their comments at public meetings.
But everyone knows what the Elbert County Left is going to say before they open their mouths. It’ll be mudballs, character assassination, impossible environmentalism, and hyperbolic images of their fantasy fears. Their cases are never realistic, just terribly frightful.
Bill Thomas is a good reporter and I appreciate his diligence. But it’s rare that he doesn’t also include a few tips of the iceberg of his Leftist agenda. Perhaps Mike Phillips requires that everyone he publishes on New Plains must also throw in some feints to the Left, an agenda tax if you will.
But the New Prairie Plains Times crowd is fiddling while Rome burns – and it’s not about the petty stuff they like to complain about – like how many miles get logged to company [county] cars, or which commissioner didn’t use his magical xray vision to foresee a water pipe break at the old courthouse, or how the Colorado Sunshine Law is really supposed to provide an open forum for the Left to hijack every meeting of public officials.
Renewable water is the holy grail of sought-after solutions in Colorado. An awareness of this problem is probably coded into the DNA of everyone born here. And considering how much rain falls throughout the state, the market can solve this problem provided people, acting in commercial organizations, are allowed to aggregate demand into economic units, and buy and sell water properties to satisfy that demand.
That’s exactly what markets do – they efficiently and fairly allocate scarce resources.
But oh wait. The Left doesn’t trust markets. The Left trusts dissent, utopian visions, social justice, and progress toward the agrarian villages of Tolkein’s Shire. The Left distrusts economic growth, technology, production, and capital accumulation. Despite hundreds of years of material advances in the quality of life throughout the world enabled by allowing individuals to accumulate capital and leverage their property in markets, Leftists persist in the erroneous belief that they can plan a better society.
After every one of the Left’s utopian experiments has increased oppression, suffering and even mass death in some cases, you’d think it would give them pause. You’d think.
Evidently the Elbert County Left have decided that renewable water in Elbert County threatens their utopia, just like oil & gas, industry, a job base for local citizens, and non-utopian elected officials do.
But the poverty and lack of opportunity we live with in this planned economic backwater they want to preserve won’t go away under the terms of the status quo. We must embrace progress in the form of real economic growth if we’re to have any chance at long-term viability in Elbert County.
Elbert County commissioners have correctly perceived the challenge and appear to be doing what they can, which involves removing the obstacle of local government and allowing the private sector to grow the economy.
This apparently frightens the Left. It shouldn’t. They stand to benefit despite themselves.