Water Advisory Cmte 4-3-13
progressive zoning
Don’t shoot the messenger, but Mr. Crisan, you don’t represent the citizens of Elbert County — not even the ones who agree with you who attend your planning commission meetings. In our system of government, representation requires consent, and no citizen consented to your representation, let alone your admittedly progressive urge to put Elbert County at the forefront of litigation between Colorado counties and the State of Colorado over your conception of county rights.
My guess would be that the majority of Elbert County citizens don’t want you picking a fight with the State of Colorado over oil & gas or anything else for that matter. My guess would be that the majority of Elbert County citizens don’t even know you exist, let alone the fact that you’re out crusading on a progressive mission in their name.
The above excerpt can be seen in the original at http://youtu.be/1z-FlAGB2GY?t=1h56m29s
Oil & Gas Edit committee 4-2-13
Sometime prior to this meeting, Ric Morgan sent a copy of the draft Oil & Gas regulations to Jake Matter at the Attorney Generals office for his review. Jake Matter also represents the COGCC. Matter responded to Morgan’s email ex-officio with respect to his COGCC duties. Morgan shared this response with Carolyn Parkinson, who then distributed it to other Oil & Gas Edit Committee members. Matter’s analysis apparently raised the issue of an operational conflict with COGCC regulations on the issue of Elbert County banning open pits.
The edit committee struggled with this new information. Committee members Crisan and Corrado lobbied for the regulation to be written in an adversarial progressive direction, notwithstanding that the majority of edit committee members thought that litigation with the state would likely ensue from that approach. Environmentalists in the audience agreed with the adversarial approach. As Mr. Blotter put it, such an approach might deter him from going on the “attack.”
Carolyn Parkinson spoke to the duty of the edit committee to produce a regulatory document that the BOCC could sign with some assurance that doing so would not open the county to litigation. Several others experimented with language that would preserve a county disposition against open pits without putting in place an outright ban to trigger the operational conflict.
It would be interesting to see this letter from Jake Matter that caused so much kerfuffle in the meeting.
Taking a step back, what was notoriously under-represented on the edit committee, and absent in the environmentalist (all but one person) audience, was a non-presumptive attitude toward the whole business, grounded in objective science. For the majority in the room, conclusions have been made, future negative outcomes are beyond doubt, and the agenda reigns supreme.
dark times
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
Planning Commission 3-28-13
first principles
“The notion of collective rights is wholly the invention of the Progressive founders of the administrative state, who were engaged in a self-conscious effort to supplant the principles of limited government embodied in the Constitution. For these Progressives, what Madison and other Founders called the “rights of human nature” were merely a delusion characteristic of the 18th century. Science, they held, has proven that there is no permanent human nature—that there are only evolving social conditions. As a result, they regarded what the Founders called the “rights of human nature” as an enemy of collective welfare, which should always take precedence over the rights of individuals. For Progressives then and now, the welfare of the people—not liberty—is the primary object of government, and government should always be in the hands of experts. This is the real origin of today’s gun control hysteria—the idea that professional police forces and the military have rendered the armed citizen superfluous; that no individual should be responsible for the defense of himself and his family, but should leave it to the experts. The idea of individual responsibilities, along with that of individual rights, is in fact incompatible with the Progressive vision of the common welfare.
This way of thinking was wholly alien to America’s founding generation, for whom government existed for the purpose of securing individual rights.”
From:
Edward J. Erler, California State University, San Bernardino
The Second Amendment as an Expression of First Principles
the fallacy of apparent proof
“It [Socialism] may be called, for want of a better label, a ‘magnificent faith in incredible evidence.’ At its worst, it leads to ready acceptance of generalizations that are supported by nothing more logical than a wish that they were true. At its best, it seems to infect you Socialists with a willingness to adopt and defend any alleged fact or group of facts, however dubious, so long as it seems to prove your case.”
H.L. Mencken, Men Versus The Man, 1910.
regulators unhinged
- In the first snip we get an f-bomb and a great expression of dogmatic superiority.
- In the second segment, we see a regulator’s frustration and real disappointment over having to accommodate reality.
- In the third segment, we get an outright dismissal of industry knowledge. . .What do they know anyway? – They just do this for a living. – We know what’s best for Elbert County!
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
O & G Edit Committee 3-26-13
Part 2
Part 1
Enabling Democide
special district approval transparency?
The proposed zoning law (General Standards of Approval) duplicates much of the approval criteria contained in state statute. Such duplication would appear to be unnecessary and needlessly expensive to maintain.
In addition, the thrust of CRS 32-1-203 appears to contemplate a service plan decision made at a public hearing by a BOCC where opposed views can be openly discussed.
The proposed zoning law seems to remove the evaluation of new special districts to off-line Review Committees who do not operate in public hearings and whose findings cannot be challenged in public by petitioners. [Read more…]
the Democrat way: Trail of Fears
Politics Under Democracy, H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy, 1926, pp. 41-44.
Fear remains the chiefest of them. The demagogues, i.e., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact and puissant science. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting “Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!” It has been so in the United States since the earliest days. [Read more…]
corruptions of power
Would it be too much to expect an objective administrator who writes laws from founded science, rather than according to his predetermined personal agenda?
“It is time for facts to replace rhetoric; Science to replace faith. . . .Critical thinking needs to become the basis for moving this county forward. Bigotry and ignorance will not change the culture of Elbert and will not lead us to a better future for the next generations. We need to move forward with a coalition of concerned citizens that who are neither ideology nor political party biased.”
- Tony Corrado,
http://www.new-plains.com/Archives/Editorial-GrouchyOldPeople.html,
Monday, November 12, 2012 1:19:38 AM- Hypocrite
All of the Democrat Party leadership turned out for this non-ideological, non-political-party-biased process:
And on Mr. Crisan’s comment, would it be too much to expect more than lip service to private property rights when those rights exist at the “surface” where we all live, rather than a naked assertion that private property at the surface is the county’s to control?
B_Imperial
O & G Edit Committee 3-19-2013
Part 2
Part 1
Hijacking Elbert County
“It is both breath-taking and disheartening to witness the speed with which this has all happened. I refer to the near-total hijacking of Elbert County government by the Democrat party over a relatively short period of time.
This takeover is reflected in several ways but the most evident is the ongoing deliberations by the committees and commissions assembling the new oil and gas regulations, and the county’s new venture into regulating water use. I have listened to several of these meetings and one can easily conclude that the main objective of the groups is to craft the new regulations in a way that their complexity will discourage petroleum exploration firms from ever developing the county’s oil and gas resources. [Read more…]
O & G Edit Committee 3-12-2013
ELBERT COUNTY ZONING REGULATIONS
Oil and/or Gas Operations – Special Use Permit
This is a little confusing. Part 1 was not originally webcast due to technical problems (user error by me), and it’s pretty key. Parts 2 and 3 were webcast.
Part 3
Part 2
Part 1
WAC becomes regulatory
From Ms. Meece,
Agenda:
- Consideration of Draft Regulation for Special Districts
- Mission Statement
- Task Delineation and priorities
- Additional membership
Zoning a Gordian Knot
“Your comments are appreciated in terms of developing a process that protects the health, safety, and welfare of Elbert County citizens.” (from Cover Letter)
The Recommended Financial Plan is all about collecting taxes by and for government. Nothing in here protects the health, safety and welfare of Elbert County citizens.
The Draft Special District Regulation will determine that “The creation of the proposed special district will be in the best interests of the area proposed to be served.” How will a group of government third party non-stakeholders know what is in the best interests of private citizens, let alone what will protect their health, safety and welfare?
The Draft Special District Information Requirements contains a process with no foreseeable end for encumbering applicants, perhaps subjects is a better word, to the whim of county regulators. No standards, no absolutes, nothing in here might commit a bureaucrat to stamp an application approved.
The Staff Report posits that the county shall be the arbiter of economic, financial, and market viability, of proposed special use districts. Government bureaucrats who have never actually made a profit lack qualifications to make such assessments.
In sum, this process is a bundle of socialist clap trap commissioned by Rowland and Ross. It is a make-work recipe for government bureaucrats and their contractors that is intended to stop the private sector in Elbert County from making any changes. It protects the health, safety and welfare of Elbert County planners whom we apparently exist to serve.
B_Imperial
The Regulator
- Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.