The Elbert County Christmas Carol Development Style.

We have been down this road so many times, I know it by heart.  Come January we will have a small, minority Democratic party and we will swear in three brand new Republican commissioners.  The local GOP officials are proud of themselves and slapping themselves on the back for all of the "out-maneuvering" they were able to pull off and once again put the dastardly liberal left back in the closet until the need for a scapegoat in our county presents itself.  That is, when the Dems find themselves in demand out here in Elbert County.  I like to refer to it by the name of one of my favorite party games as a child, "Pin the Tail on the Donkey."  I had friends in the room at Spring Valley the night of the election, and to say that the Grand Old Party bosses were proud of themselves is an understatement.  Trounced, sacked, whipped, shellacked, and even a few more NSFW descriptions of the vanquishing of the Democratic commissioner candidates were trotted out for all to hear.  And you know what? As the former vice-chair of the Elbert County Democrats, I am fine with all of that for a couple of pretty important reasons.

The first reason is that this election was actually the most atypical of its kind in a couple of generations. Rural America, frightened to death that someone was finally going to change America and move it to the extreme left, voted in record numbers to preserve, what I always hear as, the "rural lifestyle."  Secondly, Elbert County ran the table. I worked on the election at the request of our County Clerk and Recorder to represent the Democrats and I actually introduced the County Election Manager, Rhonda Braun to the person who became the lead volunteer for the Republicans.  That is the way it should be.  Our bipartisan election team registered more new voters than we ever have in Elbert County's history.  We bent over backwards to get every person who was eligible to vote, signed up and in line.  The result was predictable and now we are here ready to begin anew.  Uh...erm. Maybe not.

You see, as a person who has been actively working on issues of growth, water preservation, stopping land grabs, and promoting the building of schools for over twenty years, I see a few things that others who are not so active might not.  The late Ray Wells, of the Superslab debacle, once warned me almost twelve years ago that, when big investors finally came to Elbert County, there would be no stopping them. They would take whatever they wanted.  Wells never built a foot of highway or a yard of railroad tracks in his life, but he invested hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to promote a highway and a rail line that did not solve a single transportation problem along the Front Range. What most people forget or never understood was that Wells was a renowned water district specialist.  In the winter of 2005 he was down at the Colorado state legislature trying to change the definition of what a railroad might mean in legal terms, when citizens finally figured out that we were about to get uprooted by a hundred year old wagon law!  He wanted the definition of a railroad to include, but not be limited to, things like coal slurry pipelines, water pipelines, gas pipelines, telecommunications lines, etc.  By the time we learned what he was up to he had made claims for railroad corridors all over the Front Range. But, because of incredible activism by thousands of bipartisan Coloradoans, that plan was foiled. This is a long way around making a simple statement:  Ray Wells was a visionary water speculator who had designs on our water rights and the greedy goal of building water pipelines.

Jump back to today. Here’s what has transpired:

• We now have two commissioners who were not even around when we faced the Superslab issue in 2005. 

• "Big Money" has arrived at the gates of the county and wants to build a very large and very thirsty development just north of County Road 158.  
• Ed Ehmann, Tim Craft and Kurt Schlegel have met more than once together outside of the Elbert County, but surely they did not discuss water (tongue firmly planted in cheek).  

Here’s some more:

• The EC Planning Commission dropped a completely bogus truth oath requirement at their public meeting on November 15, 2016. The planning commission announced, "Speculative opinions and general expressions of fear of potential increases in crime, traffic, or impacts on property values do not constitute competent evidence."  That also is a pile of road apples. 
• Two of the newly elected commissioners are using the oft-used expression, "bring the rooftops," to help our financial woes without once mentioning that the Independence development has not undergone a thorough Costs of Community Services (COCS) analysis and that it is working on the expired Bandera permit from seven years ago. Nothing much has changed since then, they told us, and so we need to trust them. 
• The players behind the elected officials who are all shiny and new have not changed. That is what they are really saying and it might be something to think about.

We are not starting from scratch here.  The same people who have advised the county officials to drive the finances into ground like a tent peg are still with us.  If the voters who showed up and registered in huge numbers at the polls wanted things to be exactly as they were before the election then the changes you will see will be epic, but maybe not very good for those of us who live out here and want that so called "rural" lifestyle.  I have said it many time and you can look it up: Ninety-eight percent of us in Elbert County are on well and septic.  If we do not hold the new Independence development to the highest of standards, we will all pay dearly. 

 

Remember these few facts if you take anything from this article at all:

1  The water beneath our feet has greater value than anything that we can build above ground.  

2    The price of water is growing so high along the Front Range that any builder who can float a development proposal knows that any pipeline they build to service it (said development) has a potential value greater than the homes that they build upon the land.  And that is why the likes of Kurt Schlegel and Diane Miller always show up at these clandestine meetings with county officials.  (Oh, did I mention that Miller has worked with Ray Wells, Robert Lembke, and Karl Nyquist on water deals in Colorado for years?)

3     Pipes carry water out of the county as fast as they carry it back into the county.  No matter at what price you sell your water, it will cost you much more to buy it back after  our aquifers are depleted. 

It does not have to be this way.  Our new Elbert County BOCC could actually open up the process and allow the residents of the county to have a voice in the coming development.  Our county could bring development and still protect our water.  Believe me when I say that the water is our bargaining chip and they need us more than we need them.  Once the water is gone  we will live here on the developers’ terms and their terms only.  

I ask the Republicans, who make up the majority of this county, to step up and do the right thing:  Guide this set of new commissioners.  In every election for the past twenty years   the Republicans voted in a new set of leaders, gave them the keys, and then did not tell them what their expectations were.  It has just been  (R) blind trust and, "See you in four years!"  

The ghost of Ray Wells is speaking to us all now complete with rattling chains and spooky music.  Please heed his warning:  "When big investors finally come to Elbert County, there will be no stopping them."   Make a difference: Speak up, make your presence known, and help protect the only resource in Elbert County that’s worth a damn.  Pun intended.