in search of founded conclusions
The digital information tools for citizen journalists today enable us to effectively pull the covers off the sordid details of public malfeasance, corruption, the self-dealing and aggrandizement of public officials, and the broken state of traditional media.
Conservatives, by the hour, chronicle details of the broken, politically captive and insular mainstream media. Alarming as this is, why do we assume that the mainstream media was ever objective, non-political, or an effective 4th-estate check on government power?
On the contrary, a better case exists for the proposition that the essential nature of mainstream media is unchanged today from in the past. Organizational cultures simply don’t invert their behavior over time. They tend to persist in the characteristic behaviors of their organization.
Rather than get overwrought about how wrong the mainstream media is, and thereby lose focus on solvable mainstream issues, perhaps we should just admit that the mainstream media is as it always was, and that we’re just coming to see it in a more objective light for the first time.
Alternative media showed that traditional media did not live up to the potential the Founders gave it in the Constitution. Now we can move on and consider what the Founder’s were actually trying to accomplish.
The Federalists contemplated a constitutional objective for the country to have a legally protected free press, and this became the 1st Amendment. As we have seen, allowance for it did not guarantee it would be practiced. A free press, apparently, remains an ideal objective today.
The order of freedoms protected in the 1st Amendment – religion, speech, press, assembly, petition government – is significant. Subsequent rights build on preceeding rights. God gives us our fundamental rights, and from there the Constitution guarantees our rights to speak, to publish our speech, to get together publicly to discuss our speech, and then to take our conclusions to the government.
Nothing within the 1st Am., however, guarantees the quality or content of that protected speech. Nothing protects us against ignoble motives of a speaker. Nothing protects us against speech that promotes the interests of one, a few, or a subset of citizens, at the expense of the majority of citizens. Nothing protects us from organizations, whether it’s the press or other groups, who promulgate self-interested speech at the expense of the majority.
Sound speech is the only means we have in America to offset unsound speech. If we don’t practice it, we have only ourselves to blame for the tyranny that will ensue, and has ensued.
Absence of hyperbole, adherence to generally accepted facts, absence of personal attacks and diminutions, adherence to observable causation, language that narrows into rather than leads away from both the intent and form of the subject, these are some indicators of sound speech.
The supported conclusions that come from fairly represented facts fed through the prism of logically sound reasoning, are for us to discover, not dictate. The Left is as subject to founded conclusions as the rest of us, and that’s the reality the Founders intended for Americans to practice. Ultimately, it’s not a politically determined reality, it’s a reality discovered in the nature of all things.
The Founders were essentialists. The Constitution protects the essence of matters, in this case, the essence of public speech. They gave us a legal framework for us to accurately discover and respond to the true nature of reality. They avoided the hubris of determinism. They knew that freedom would serve us much better in our self-government experiment than a futile mechanism for one group to control another. They’d had enough of that sort of government.
Today, however, the Left never stops working to replace the Constitution in America with political action. The Left think that politics can and should determine reality. This unrealistic, reverse causal direction of theirs — that attempts to dictate the nature of things rather than respond to the nature of things — never seems to give them a moments pause as they control, regulate, modulate, temper, fund, defund, and serve the higher masters of their agenda.
But it’s a free country. If the Left want to blind themselves to the true nature of reality with a blizzard of determinism, they are free to do so. Fortunately, the rest of us are free to avoid those pitfalls.
For too long the Left dominated public speech in America. With a complicit media they’ve built massive bureaucratic and regulatory structures at every level of local, county, state and federal government in America. Across the land thousands of pages of new regulations get added to the books every day by a cadre’ of lawyers, bureaucrats, public servants and assorted do-gooders — a happy class of jovial elites ever ready to congratulate each other on their magnificent regulatory creations.
The Founders gave us a tool to change all that, to unwind this enormous Gordian knot, to take back our lives. All we have to do is use it.
B_Imperial
unconditioned love
Elbert County Planning Commission on oil and gas zoning
Some comments
Meeting summary
The room was packed last night [May 23rd] at the Elbert County Planning Commission meeting for approval of the county’s new oil and gas regulatory package. Approval was never in doubt. This was a dog and pony show from start to finish.
Not a single elected representative of the citizens of Elbert County was involved with the drafting, approval, support, or criticism of this substantial body of local law. Citizens empowered by fiat made up a new branch of local government out of whole cloth for this exercise.
No standards exist for evaluating the successful outcome of the oil and gas regulatory package in terms of economic impacts, environmental impacts, health impacts, governmental overhead impacts, public finance impacts from consequential taxing and expenditure, impacts to air and water quality, impacts to traffic and infrastructure, etc.
Oh sure, all of those concepts get subjectively applied to applicants in the intangible touchy feely world of planning. And everyone knows that all of these things, and more, will somehow be impacted by the regulatory regime itself. But no one dares to quantify the status quo of these elements of our local existence prior to enactment of a planning regime that intends to materially change all of them.
To contemplate baseline standards for the county is to risk an objective measurement about outcomes. In government circles, “standards” and “outcomes” amount to four letter words that must never be spoken. Those two words change the entire governmental game from one of promises, emotively seductive language, and the lure of empowerment, to one of measurement against cold hard facts where performance matters more than promises. After all, people can get fired if they don’t perform, and we can’t be subjecting any public servants to the risk of that sort of thing happening.
Only people in the private sector worry about getting fired.
Many comments came forth about all of the sacrifice of participants and spectators alike to create this new local experiment in governance. People seem to think that that’s the end of the analysis. So long as there’s a good effort with good intentions, whether it actually works and delivers on the presumed benefits, that analysis never quite gets done.
Well, almost never. Occasionally a politician needs to be hung out to dry by an opposition candidate and that’s generally when you hear about things that didn’t work as planned. That’s when the standards surface, post hoc, too late for any constructive application, good only to facilitate regime change.
With objective standards in the first place, we could actually measure alternative regulatory regimens to decide which one shows promise of working better. In the present case we actually have a choice between a state regulatory alternative and this newly created local body of law. But no one in the room last night went anywhere near the notion that local government was not the be all and end all of oil and gas regulation.
The massive body of regulatory law already in place at the COGCC, functioning, delivering, working against measurable standards, solving real problems, paid for by state finances, no one wanted to talk about that last night. The political correctness du jour was puffing up the local effort – a mutual back slapping display among local appointees of heraldic magnitude. Anyone who has been to a school board meeting knows the drill.
B_Imperial
oil and gas struggles
In early 2012, Richard Miller was still an Elbert County planner. Miller was consulting with Jerry Dahl, a lawyer who specializes in representing Colorado counties when they conflict with the state of Colorado over land use regulatory law.
Dahl had given Miller advice in writing a new zoning law for Elbert County to regulate oil and gas operations. Dahl believes that Colorado counties should regulate oil and gas operations because the Colorado State Legislature gave Colorado counties land use regulatory authority, and an oil and gas operation is a land use.
The problem with Dahl’s broad interpretation of county land use regulatory authority is that it is unlimited. All human activity occurs on land, in water, or while flying in air. The vast majority of it occurs on land. According to Dahl, any use of land falls within the regulatory scope of a Colorado county. Did the Colorado Legislature really mean to give counties in Colorado absolute control over what happens on Colorado land? Not likely in America.
So Miller and Dahl wrote oil and gas zoning regulations for Elbert County to govern oil and gas land use operations.
Since then, these regulations have morphed into different legal structures, but they’ve retained several key rules that, once enacted, will probably conflict with state regulations. Jake Matter of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and the Attorney General’s Office has repeatedly warned Elbert County planners since January of 2012, by letters and in person, of the potential for several operational conflicts in Elbert County’s regulatory proposals.
Today, two days before the Elbert County Planning Commission is scheduled to conduct a public hearing about their proposed oil and gas regulations, at least two points of expected operational conflict are still in the proposal – a provision to regulate open water pits, and a provision to regulate water produced from an oil well when used for dust mitigation.
Even though Richard Miller has moved on to other employment, the philosophy introduced by Dahl of challenging state regulations with conflicting county regulations, continues in practice by Elbert County planners.
In January of 2012, Dahl explained at a Planning Commission meeting how operational conflicts between county and state regulations get resolved. Basically, a lawsuit between a county and the state provides a forum to hear evidence about a claimed operational conflict. Interestingly, county vs. state lawsuits are what Jerry Dahl does for a living.
Basically, Dahl sent Elbert County planners down a regulatory trail that has generated repeated warnings from the state about potential operational conflicts, with full knowledge that the process to resolve such conflicts is a county vs. state lawsuit in Dahl’s specialty.
Jerry Dahl has every right to do what he can to generate litigation business for himself to advance causes that he believes in. We have 1st Amendment guarantees of that freedom.
But should Elbert County be used in this manner to advance a political agenda held by one man, or by a special interest minority such as an environmentalist lobby, in an “evolving area” of law?
Litigation is very expensive while Elbert County is cash poor. Previous Boards of County Commissioners have been excoriated over litigation that occurred under their terms, regardless of whether or not they had anything to do with starting it.
And now the same vocal minority who screamed most loudly over the expense of past county lawsuits are the ones pushing an oil and gas regulatory proposal that is headed toward some really expensive litigation with the state to ferret out operational conflicts.
A key question people should think about is whether the proponents of the new oil and gas regulations are bona fide. Are they acting in good faith?
Have they pushed us into a tortuous legal path against the state that is expensive, and perhaps most importantly, time consuming, in order to bring Elbert County into some higher state of compliance with their environmentalism objectives?
Or does environmentalism merely provide cover for these folks to exploit any available technicality to buy time to completely frustrate oil and gas development in Elbert County? They play an image for public consumption of being cooperative and working within the system; meanwhile, endless procedural delays make sure nothing ever happens.
But so long as the right people sit on the BOCC, we probably won’t hear much about how much this is costing all of us.
Costs of litigation, costs to energy developers, opportunity costs of lost revenue to mineral owners, none of these will rise to the level of a material concern while an agenda lies on the table.
Tuning out the clamor of agenda pushing usual suspects can be difficult in Elbert County. They control most of the print media in the county, they have a significant web presence, and they virtually run the county at all levels – the BOCC, the Planning Commission, the CDS Department, and a host of subordinate committees and public/private forums.
The silent majority of Elbert County citizens, however, the ones you won’t see published and won’t hear much from at any public meeting, are people who have enough struggle just getting through their daily lives. They do not seek to further burden life in Elbert County with more struggles, no matter what the cause.
This silent majority have every right to expect their public officials to act in a manner to mitigate struggles, to avoid expensive litigations, to act frugally, and to not be legal spendthrifts in service of a minority agenda.
Let the Jerry Dahls go find some other county to milk.
B_Imperial
References:
Jake Matter’s latest warning of Elbert County re dust mitigation
the turning point
“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?
There are some nations in Europe whose inhabitants think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience than anyone else. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license.
When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
“When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness.”
Eric Hoffer
I observe Elbert County governing elites build their fortress of zoning legalese to control the fabric and future of Elbert County. At once, they’re possessed with a superior foresight that transcends the creative efforts of tens of thousands of citizens, but at the same time, they enforce their permits and grafted approvals with all manner of penalty and punishment, just in case a pronouncement should lack persuasive content.
As night follows day, these planning monuments will foreclose a prosperous future for Elbert County. That one is easy to predict. The only possible consequence from impossible law is stagnation. People will move away from stagnation if only to get upwind from the smell of it.
But grandiose planning documents, fêted by their writers, adoring cults, and subversive leadership, will do more than chill Elbert County’s prospects. As a corpus of dead weight over the heads of Elbert County governors, these procedures will crush any administrator, elected or appointed, who presumes to control them.
They’ve built the weakest links that will be their undoing.
B_Imperial
peter pan enviros
www.gazette.com/articles/gas-153054-oil-hickenlooper.html
“Sure, some residential property owners would love to control that which they did not buy. Five-year-olds share their philosophy: “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.”
So they try to stand between minerals and their owners. It is, effectively, attempted theft. Local politicians stand far more to gain by backing the property thieves — local voters who outnumber the mineral owners.
“What planner, what affected neighborhood or elected official is not going to want to get rid of or make it impossibly hard to get to those minerals?” Hickenlooper asked.
Given the temptation for local politicians to aid and abet property deprivation, oil and gas owners have only state government to protect the property rights guaranteed them in the Fourth and Fifth amendments and at least 15 other clauses in the Constitution.”
From: Governor stands up to bullies
“The governor should not waste a lot of energy trying to convince these extremists of anything.”
Neither should anyone else.
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
on Central Planners
“Central Planners Do Not Make Good Prophets”
Investors Business Daily, Thursday, February 7, 2013
by Thomas Sowell
Perhaps Richard Miller finally figured this out.
MOU trouble in paradise
MOU impact excerpt
Full Session
oil & gas planning
Continuation Part 2: here
(Note: A couple minutes of discussion between parts 1 and 2 were lost due to a degraded system that began repetitive disconnects. Not sure if it was the internet link or webcast software, so I re-initiated all elements and that cleared up the problem.)
The misunderstood MOU
“Under Bowen/Edwards, state preemption by reason of operational conflict can arise where the effectuation of a local interest would “materially impede or destroy the state interest.” Bowen/Edwards, supra, 830 P.2d at 1059.” (http://caselaw.findlaw.com/co-court-of-appeals/1394587.html)
At Thursday’s Planning Commission public meeting, in response to a question about the material differences between items in the proposed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and COGCC regulations, Richard Miller said that (paraphrasing), “If it’s in the MOU then it is a higher standard than called for by the COGCC.”
There are at least 22 such items and some of them cost drillers, developers, and mineral rights owners substantial sums of money and lost property.
In addition, Best Management Practices (BMP) references in the proposed MOU have no definition. When asked what authority is responsible for defining these standards, Mr. Miller said that their incorporation into the MOU came about through informal discussions by the editing committee.
Informal discussions? No ISO? No ASTM? No ANSI?
The Bureau of Land Management is one source of definition for these standards. A scan of the Air Resource BMPs pdf shows a wide range of operational practices that may not be congruent with COGCC regulations.
The Natural Resources Law Center at CU Boulder publishes the Intermountain Oil and Gas BMP project. These standards appear to be closely coupled to objectives generally found in the environmentalism rubric.
Elbert County’s proposed MOU incorporates numerous expensive and open ended directives that are undefined by any measurable standard that could provide a means to enforce them. By its own terms, the MOU contract fails for lack of specificity. Moreover, this game of hiding county zoning dictats inside a compulsory agreement in order to sidestep COGCC’s occupation of the field of oil and gas regulation reeks of petty magisterial hubris. “Yeah, that’s the ticket, we’ll call it a contract. . .”
On the proposed setback scheme alone, Ric Morgan’s analysis presented at Thursday’s planning commission illustrated that all drilling would be preempted in most of Elbert County. Moreover, the impact of drilling envelopes on subsequent property development, post oil and gas development, has not even been addressed.
“The mission of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) is to foster the responsible development of Colorado’s oil and gas natural resources.” It is fair to say that Elbert County’s proposed MOU completely frustrates this mission, and this represents an operational conflict in toto.
All of this MOU environmentalism, however, is probably a moot point because, as the COGCC representative indicated after the meeting, “Not a driller in the country would accept these terms.”
This means that the special use review, 6-month long, expensive, planning roadblock is the only ostensible means to get an oil well approved in Elbert County. Compared to approval time frames in other parts of the state and country measured in days rather than months, Elbert County is effectively closed for oil and gas business.
Since, as one planning commission member recently noted, the county has already been closed for business for the past 5 years, this should come as no surprise.
A year ago, Arapahoe County, similarly situated to Elbert County today, made the right decision by shutting down a local oil and gas planning process that had run amok, and affirming COGCC authority.
In Elbert County, it is not enough to end the MOU madness and default to special use review. We already know that special use review is a deal killer too.
Will Elbert County be able to break the stranglehold the environmentalist no-growth movement has on the county and do something economically beneficial for the citizens? Based on the preliminary moves made by the new BOCC majority floated on a tide of regulation seeping through CDS and the Planning Commission, don’t bet on it.
B_Imperial
Proposed Oil and Gas Taking
5th Am. to the U.S. Constitution:
No person shall be. . . .deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Oil and Gas Cover Letter from ElCo Webposting 1-2-2013:
An “Oil and/or Gas Development Permit” may be obtained following one of two Special Permit review Processes:
Major facilities will follow the standard Special Use Review process as provided for in these regulations. (Approximately 5-6 month process)
or
Minor facilities may choose to apply as a standard Special Use Review process or may choose to follow an administrative process, provided a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Elbert County is approved in conjunction. (Approximately 30-45 days)
It shall be Elbert County’s policy to encourage the use of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with individual oil and gas production companies that are active within the County and are proposing a Minor Oil and/or Gas Facility.
OIL & GAS DRAFT REGS – Final for Public Hearings SUR PERMIT ZR PART II SECTIONS 26 1-2-2013:
Section 26.2 – Application Review & Permit Processing
B. POLICY STATEMENT – MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING (for Minor Oil and/or Gas
Facilities only)For those oil and gas production companies that choose not to enter into a MOU with Elbert County; the requirements of Section “E”, below, will apply.
E. PROCESSING OF A SPECIAL USE PERMIT APPLICATION FOR A MINOR OIL AND/OR GAS FACILITY (When the production company does NOT have an executed MOU with Elbert County) & FOR A MAJOR OIL AND/OR GAS FACILITY
The Special Use Permit process for a Minor Oil & Gas Development Permit in Elbert County when the oil/gas production company chooses not to enter into a MOU with Elbert County, or for obtaining a Major Oil & Gas Development Permit is as follows:
MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING O&G 1-2-2013 Final for Public Hearings:
ADDENDUM “A”
1. There shall be a minimum of 1,320 feet between the wellhead and any residential structure, domestic well or platted building envelope.
5 . . . Only closed-loop drilling systems shall be permitted in Elbert County for drilling and completion operations rather than open earthen pits.
Summary:
Terms in Elbert County’s proposed MOU are more restrictive than COGCC regulations.
Nothing prohibits Elbert County from seeking a voluntary agreement between energy developers and the county for more restrictive conditions of development. But this is hardly a voluntary agreement.
The above scheme threatens a longer (5 to 6 months), and much more expensive planning process for companies that do not agree to the more restrictive conditions in the MOU for their minor Oil and Gas facilities–the majority of the facilities. Community and Development Services is proposing treating all minor facilities under the process for major facilities if the developer does not kow tow to the terms of the MOU.
Where is the “just compensation” to developers and mineral interest owners who do not agree with Elbert County’s more restrictive Oil and Gas development conditions? Not only is there no “just compensation,” there are in fact penalties–added procedural costs and the lost time value of potential earnings.
For those developers who accept CDS’s coercive scheme, the MOU appears to have a few weak links–the adhesive forced circumstances constructed by Elbert County government that create a take-it-or-leave-it superior bargaining position, the requirement of the additional expense of closed loop systems, and the opportunity costs from land taken out of production due to the greatly expanded setbacks. Where is the “just compensation” for these takings?
While paying lip service to the governing regulatory laws of the State of Colorado promulgated by the COGCC, this sham MOU contract is clearly intended to subvert state regulatory authority.
This proposed scheme appears ripe for legal challenges from developers, stakeholders and the state. Didn’t Rowland and Ross both campaign on the claim that the (then) current BOCC had a propensity for spawning litigation against the county? It seems they’re rushing headlong into a much deeper quagmire.
B_Imperial
Patriotic luddite statist enviro. . .
. . .Tony Corrado spread his large flag like a blanket over a whole basket of spaghetti-intertwined Leftist mythologies. To rebut;
- Conservatives are not parochial, that is, limited in their scope or outlook.
- No one, and no collection of individuals working together, intend to adversely impact or despoil the environment.
- Conservatives do not define what it means for a Leftist to be patriotic.
- No one wants to deplete our energy reserves. In fact, history has shown that as technology improves, reserves of energy and all minerals, including water, go up.
- Profit, capital formation, innovation, and investment in capital equipment, make the modern world possible: the world where people live longer, happier, safer, more peaceful lives. Without the necessities for a good life in place, few people would see nature as tranquil and beautiful.
- Regulatory planning by non-stakeholders gave us suburban sprawl, expensive mass transits to nowhere, and continues to force expensive economic dislocations throughout the country that materially degrade American capacity in countless enterprises, and quality of life.
- Governments should not intervene in markets. Law appropriately defines the elemental terms for all economic transactions. Beyond that, law used to direct the substance of those transactions is a corruption of our Constitution.
- Trust the outcome of voluntary markets. Don’t trust people who think they know more than the collected wisdom of free people, each acting in their own best interest.
B_Imperial
educated fools
“Hayek, more than anyone else, illuminated the knowledge problem. Simply put: No one person can ever know enough. Planners who think they can process all of the data from disparate sources across vast expanses of geography and culture are, quite simply, educated fools. The planners of the New Deal had convinced themselves that they were smart enough to grind out any problem so long as they had enough data. Worse, in their contempt for the “disorganized” character of capitalism, they were deeply hostile to markets and the informational power of prices. When prices went in the wrong direction the New Dealers took it upon themselves to out think the market. Hence the great pig slaughter of September 1933, when the government ordered the killing of six million pigs in a time of deprivation.”Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny Of Clichés, 2012.
The aggregate opportunity cost of planning since the New Deal — the economic value of what has been foregone in service of the planning myth net of actual economic benefit — we’ll never know. My guess is it’s a staggering number, moreover, in return for this loss, planning benefits have unjustly accrued to non-stakeholders on a largely random basis.
Planning is a game with winners and losers, and a playing field controlled by unvested planners. What could go wrong?
B_Imperial
Planning
Planners don’t have enough information. They never do. It’s the nature of their problem. Looking into the future when all things are known, from the vantage point of the present, has its limitations. Planners don’t have enough information because they can’t have enough information. They can’t have enough information because that information doesn’t exist yet.
This fact of space and the direction of time does not deter them. They envision a harmonious future world with all people and things relating to one another in the most optimally sweet balance of sources and uses, comings and goings, beings and doings, with socially just outcomes, no big losers, and no big winners.
In their future, earned equity is the only value – but only insofar as the equity has no past, no family, and no inheritance. Those things involve capital and capital comes from profit. Profit means that something more was gained by one party in a transaction than was fairly deserved based on cost. Profit can never be earned because it’s essentially unfair. The Marxist theory that labor determines value doesn’t allow for earned value to exceed the cost of sustaining the labor.
So planners posit their sustainable future without profit. Their models have people only needing and receiving enough to sustain them in the lifestyles they’re accustomed to. After all, why should they need more? They’re just going to die in a few years like everyone else. Shouldn’t someone else have a fair chance? It’s only fair.
In their optimally sweet sustainable future, people live in the class they were born into. They don’t profit, they don’t accumulate wealth, they don’t move up in society, because there are no winners and losers when we all balance each other from each according to our abilities, to each according to our needs.
Well that’s all nice enough on paper. It just falls completely apart when you try to shoehorn human nature into the picture. Without motivation, people don’t work. A system that provides a subsistence level of motivation yields a subsistence level of human energy where everyone just subsists…in an optimally sweet harmonious and fair balance…at the level of the least common denominator.
I’m not saying planners are short sighted, at least not more than the nature of their avocation demands. One can see from reading their plans, zones and various diktats that they’re quite thorough. They’re no doubt doing the best they can in trying to solve a problem that, by its nature, can’t be solved.
What confounds, however, is what on earth they must see in their harmonized sustainable least common future to motivate them to try to bring it about? Imagine a sailor who dreams of a flat lake without a breath of air to move his boat. It just makes no sense.
B_Imperial
ElCo usurping property rights
A right is only as valuable as your ability to protect it. I recently wrote about water rights, and I had no plans to revisit the subject so soon.
At the last BOCC meeting, the Director of Community and Development Services [CDS] announced a meeting to be held this evening at 6:30 p.m. in the commissioners chambers to discuss the draft Oil & Gas Regulations [OGR]. The Director indicated the proposed zoning was nearing completion. I stopped at CDS today to pick up a copy of the current draft prior to tonight’s meeting, which they provided for $.25 a page. 56 pages.
I was also informed that the purpose of tonight’s meeting is to discuss a Memorandum Of Understanding [MOU] to be submitted by CDS to the COGCC. I presume that MOU hinges on having the OGR largely resolved. See Followup here.
I found some major problems with the Draft OGR.
I.
The first one is in Section 26.2 A, a. Suitability. This section forms the corpus of planning review criteria to be used to evaluate all OGR development. It says, “factors will be evaluated in accordance with applicable State, County, and Federal standards.” What standards? It doesn’t say. The applicable ones I guess. Which ones are applicable? Who knows.
Next, Section 26.2, A, c. Site Characteristics. “Factors for consideration include: topography, natural hazards (landslides, flooding, wildfire, etc.), cultural and historical uses of the proposed site, and current resource values (open space corridor and wildlife habitat).” Again, what defines these factors? It doesn’t say.
These two sections are meant to guide CDS, the Planning Commission and the BOCC throughout the implementation of these proposed zoning laws. They are a blank check, without an anchor in any specified written law, in the hands of the government.
Zoning that is not founded on published statutes or objective sources of law is a license for government to do as it pleases. There is no property right protection under such a scheme.
II.
Turning to Section 26.2 B, 1. Minor Oil & Gas Facility Defined. “Land use applications for a proposed Minor Oil & Gas Facility shall be processed administratively by [CDS] without a public hearing before the Elbert County Planning Commission or the Board of County Commissioners.”
However Section 26.2 B, 2. Review Process for Minor Oil & Gas Facilities, specifies adjacent property notice procedures and refers to “appearing at the hearing or by submitting a written waiver to the Director prior to the hearing.”
Now, there’s either a public hearing process for Minor O&G facilities, or there’s not, but the Draft OGR is internally inconsistent on the question.
III.
The largest objection I have to these regulations is in Sections 26.3 G. 5 – 9. Water Supply Plan and Surface Water / Aquifer Protection.
Section 5, “Prior to commencement of any drilling operations, the Operator will contact, by certified mail, all surrounding property owners with active domestic, irrigation or livestock wells … and ask permission to conduct water sampling and analysis pre-drilling, post drilling, post completion, and post production every (3) years for a period of fifteen (15) years.”
“The Director of Community and Development Services may require further water well sampling at any time in response to complaints from water well owners.”
“Additional testing, for cause as determined by CDS, will be done at any interval for any resident within the test area. A request for further testing must be submitted in writing and must include reason for request.”
The section continues and even specifies allowable methane levels in your water before CDS will require an Operator to investigate the source of the gas.
So, to summarize, this zoning law gives away your rights to protect your water quality to Elbert County bureaucrats, who may require an Operator to determine the source of gas in your water, if they agree with your written request, and if the test results meet their standard for water pollution.
Perhaps what most offends my sensibility is that this surrendering of your ability to enforce your own water quality comes in the form of asking permission by a non-governmental entity. A prospective operator asks you permission to test your water. If you give it, Elbert County steps in and becomes the arbiter and enforcer of your water quality. The county owns your water quality thereafter, and with that, they might as well own your water.
What if you don’t like the quality of water that the county finds acceptable for you? What if you think .9 mg/L of methane tastes funny in your water and you want a remedy, but the county doesn’t think your water pollution rises to the level it is willing to defend?
Don’t do it Elbert County citizens. Don’t give up your ability to protect your property interest in your water quality to government planners. Their interest in your property is just not as personal as yours.
These Draft OGR zoning laws undermine your property interest in owned mineral wealth by subjecting that process to an arbitrary set of laws. And they undermine your property interest in protecting your water quality directly.
Fail.
B_Imperial
freedom forestalled
Our betters at the Planning Commission were supposed to consider the following last Thursday evening, 8/26/12.
The Site Development Plan process ensures compliance with:
- Conditions of approval (unlimited)
- Planned Unit Development requirements
- Platting restrictions
- Elbert County Zoning Regulations
- Elbert County Subdivision Regulations
- Elbert County 1041 Regulations
- Elbert County Master Plan
- Elbert County Design Standards for Non-Residential and Multifamily Developments
- Elbert County Construction and Specifications Manual
- Circulation and traffic
- Landscaping
- Parking
- Signage
- Lighting
- Sidewalks
- Storm water drainage and detention
- Water and sanitation facilities
This plan, consisting of a myriad of subordinate plans, must be submitted before a permit to construct will be considered for issuance for any use or change in use of a platted or un-platted parcel for:
- Any business
- Any commercial facility
- Any industrial facility
- Any multi-family dwelling
- Any recreational facility
- Any institutional facility
- Any government building
- Any library
- Any fire department facility
- Any law enforcement facility
- Any church
- Any school
- Any major utility facility
- Any cell site
- Any utility service facility larger than 500 square feet
- And facilities contemplated under Planned Unit Development regulations
Plans must be provided by Colorado certified engineers and must include a guarantee bond payable to the County should the plan fail in some way.
Look around you. See all those cows? They’re nice enough, to be sure. But to raise them you have to be either a multi-millionaire looking for a hobby, or a descendent from a pioneer family with inherited land, because there’s not enough profit in the animals to pay for the land on which they feed. That’s a pretty exclusive club, and it’s not growing.
Elbert County’s Community and Development Services Department makes sure this situation stays exactly the same. Of course they’re just a well intentioned bunch of bureaucrats doing their bit to bring about a perfect world, which they’ve apparently decided looks exactly like the world we already have.
They’re giving services all right. Bend over, touch your toes, and make your checks payable to Elbert County.
As for the common people who moved here to build a family and a life? Don’t worry about them. There’s federal TANF welfare funding, Food Stamp credit cards from the Feds, and all sorts of Social Services to deal with their wrecked circumstances after their economic hopes come crashing down. They don’t need jobs. They can look at the pretty cows.
Svetlana Kunin summed it up recently in Perspectives of a Russian Immigrant No. 24
- When more workers joined the federal government’s disability program in June than the number of jobs created by the economy — were we rising or falling?
- When enrollment in the food-stamp program increased by 44% from 2009 to 2011, were we rising or falling.?
- When in a very dangerous world the U.S. military is weakened and the borders are not protected — are we rising or falling?
- When a growing web of government agencies and tsars are taxing, penalizing, mandating, forbidding and limiting citizens’ liberties, and when entrepreneurship is demonized — are we rising or falling?
- For those who study world history, the difference between government planners vs. private entrepreneurs is dramatically apparent.
“You are free to argue that certain government interventions are justified. You just need to acknowledge this truth: Every intervention that erects barriers to starting a business, makes it expensive to hire or fire employees, restricts entry into vocations, prescribes work conditions and facilities, or confiscates profits interferes with economic liberty and usually makes it more difficult for both employers and employees to earn success. You also don’t need to be a libertarian to demand that any new intervention meet this burden of proof: It will accomplish something that tort law and enforcement of basic laws against force, fraud and collusion do not accomplish.” Charles Murray – Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem
B_Imperial
liberty vs. zoning
“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: [Read more…]
to zone or not to zone
ELBERT COUNTY REPUBLICAN PARTY
RESOLUTIONS FOR PLATFORM
2012
(partial list – all passed at Assembly 5/24/2012)
12. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party support and encourage responsible growth, respecting the rights of all county residents consistent with the goal of preserving the unique rural and natural character of Elbert County.
15. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party requests that the elected Board of County Commissioners implement the noxious weed control plan as directed by State Law.
16. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party request that the elected Board of County Commissioners adopt, implement and enforce a 300 year water supply plan based on actual water usage.
17. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party request that the elected Board of County Commissioners adopt responsible planning and development measures to ensure that growth pay its own way and ensure that new infrastructure demanded by new development is not subsidized by the taxpayer without a vote of said taxpayer.
– OR –
21. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party object to the expansion of Elbert County zoning laws.
~
Which will it be? You can’t have it both ways.
This schizophrenic disconnect in the Republican Party Platform, approved yesterday at the 2012 County Assembly, is another symptom of our Elbert County uni-party implementation of the Republican Party.
Now, you could say the Resolutions Committee for the assembly failed in their mission to provide an internally consistent set of resolutions for the platform, however, it’s not really their responsibility to resolve this political question.
And, you could say that the Executive Committee of the Party is responsible because they suspended debate on the resolutions by assembly delegates, and thereby precluded the assembled body of Republicans from reaching a compromise. But after tolerating season after electoral season of mixed-use Republicanism, it would have been highly contentious, perhaps even violent, for a bunch of lefties and conservatives to work their substantive differences out in the space of a few minutes of polite assembly “dialoging.”
Besides, these issues cannot be legitimately resolved by a set of self-selected delegates numbering less than 1 hundredth of 1 percent of the population. Without a causal connection between voters and voting objects, be it candidate or issue, consent of the voters is cut off.
Enfranchised voters are the only interest group who can legitimately resolve this political question.
The Founders labored and argued for years to conceive constitutional methods to enfranchise voters and permit them to be governed legitimately. Sadly, our caucus assembly system which disenfranchises voters at large does not meet that standard. And muddying the preliminary waters by empowering a single party to clear both left and conservative candidates is a giant step further away from voter enfranchisement.
The way to fix this conundrum is to return Elbert County to a two-party system. Would the Democrat Party tolerate a bunch of conservatives diluting their precious social and entitlement agendas? Absolutely not! Why then do conservatives around here allow the left to tromp all over their Republican Party?
The way to fix this problem is to nip it in the bud. Make the change here:
ELBERT COUNTY REPUBLICAN CENTRAL COMMITTEE BYLAWS
Article III. POLICY
Section 4. Endorsements. The ECR acting as an entity, or the ECR elected officers shall not publicly support or endorse any Republican candidate that is involved in a primary who could represent Elbert County residents in a partisan race.
Change it to read something like the following:
ECR elected officers shall substantively analyze all Republican candidates with respect to information publicly available in local history as it relates to each candidates alignment with the Republican Oath and the Elbert County Republican Party Platform. Officers shall report their findings to Precinct Committeepeople in a timely manner as the findings become known.
As things currently stand, ECR elected officers must withhold a relevant body of knowledge from the rest of the caucus and assembly process. While done in the interest of fairness, the left games that good intention and turns it against the Republican Party from the inside.
Playing fair only works in an ethical environment. The left have never played fair and Republicans should stop fooling themselves about it.
Drowning In Rules
Posted 03/19/2012 07:00 PM ET, Investors.com
Regulatory Tyranny: Washington has extended the deadline by 60 days for hotels to install lifts for the disabled in their pools. But nothing changes in two months. The government will still be invading private matters.
The regulation was to take effect last week. But the Justice Department has given hotels an additional 60 days to comply. How generous.
The regulation, written by the Obama administration in 2010 based on the Americans With Disabilities Act, affects nearly every one of the roughly 51,000 hotels in the U.S., since there are few that have no pools.
The impact would actually be wider than that. In many cases, properties have more than one pool, and each pool, or “water feature” — which includes whirlpools — must have a lift.
With each lift costing as much as $6,000, hotels are being required to make significant investments in equipment that will get little use. Hotels could simply refuse to comply, but a lack of compliance through failure or refusal results in fines that can reach $55,000.
Some will say the government’s order is only fair. And while a portion the population will no doubt benefit from the rule, we have to ask: Is it a legitimate function of government to intrude into private affairs?
Regulation supporters will argue that every paying customer has an equal right to hotel pool access. But such a right requires the violation of the hotel owners’ right to the money they have earned in peaceful, voluntary transactions. How can something be a right when to provide another’s right must be violated?
A government that can dictate how businesses are run is no longer merely a government. It is a plundering force operating without constraint.
This isn’t merely an issue of pool lifts at hotels. It’s about a mandate to buy health care insurance; it’s about telling the auto industry it has to meet a bureaucratically concocted fuel-economy standard; it’s about the compulsory participation in the welfare state.
It is, as well, about seizing private property at government whim; it’s about any of the thousands of regulations that clog the Federal Register and the incessant “lawmaking” in capitols, city halls and county chambers that has no regard for our freedom. It’s about government no longer being the protector of God-given rights, but coercively creating “rights” that don’t exist.
If voters don’t soon re-examine their principles, the plundering force will have grown too big to ever be contained.