For or against the June 4 referendums, R-001 and R-002

Dear Friends,

A vote FOR R-001 and FOR R-002 is a vote for your voice to be heard. No out-of-town consultants, special-interest groups, or commissioners telling you they know better than you how you should use your land. Yes; your land not theirs. Did they pay your property tax for you? Certainly not. It’s pretty clear: your land; your decisions.

We have all been getting quite an earful from Mr. Davis, the sponsor of the Vote No of Ref 1 campaign, in newspaper pages on county budget woes and on the wonders of the county growth policy. While I appreciate Mr. Davis’s energy for his subject, I wish, when he seems to think the growth policy has been so instrumental and effective in guiding our future, that he had been coming to county planning board meetings over the last seven years to know the real story.

I wish, too, that he could have been using his considerable business skills to help guide so many of the county commissioner decisions which have resulted in our great budget deficit. Where was he when one and a half million was spent last summer on machinery we didn’t have the man-power or skilled employees to run---so it sat for 6 months at the side of the road while loan payments accrued? Where was he when the county applied for a walking bridge over the Yellowstone from the dog park for a cool $12 million. Thankfully that one failed. But I bet it hurt our reputation as a county when asking for grants for serious and necessary projects.

According to the budget preamble of that time, those roads were in bad shape 11 years ago when our commission chair came on board with the county. Unfortunately, bad budgets are the state of normal here. Many commissioners have stirred this pot over the years with many individual agendas.

I hope Mr. Davis will actually apply his talents to looking into the real causes of budget woes and the possible solutions for our county.

Our 2017, so-called, long-range-plan growth policy that he gushes about has never guided our future. It was guided straight into a closet, onto a shelf to collect dust for the last 7 years. Precisely what the MT Dept of Commerce says not to do. Keep it simple they say. Has a single one of its 198 plus pages ever been turned over? No one knows.

If Mr. Davis had been at past planning board meetings, he would know that people have, over the years, asked to see reports of the goals and objectives in the rhetoric of our growth policy that have actually been completed. People have even requested PIR’s (public information requests). These have all gone unanswered despite a previous commissioner replying to such a request at a candidate forum that the public simply had to post a PIR. Apparently, not so.

Many individuals and special interest groups have made a wide variety of requests over the years about planning aspects of our county. To no avail. Good ideas and bad have flowed under the bridge. The county planning department head replied in a public planning meeting that there didn’t have to be such reports of progress on the goals and objectives. The county planning department was under no obligation to make such reports because the growth policy was not regulatory.

The 2017 growth policy was dead on arrival. We just didn’t know it then. It was written by Missoula consultants with local city-centric over-sight. People who shared neither our strong respect for property rights nor our visions for our families. This was then followed by a commission only decision for adoption--not a vote by the people effected by said growth policy.

Only one growth policy goal in all this time comes to mind as completed. That was the amending of a special-interest group’s housing plan to the growth policy. Unfortunately, this was accomplished under great public protest, both to the plan and to the vote of a commissioner whose membership in that very group was a conflict-of-interest. Not a good day for the county.

Ravalli County has not had a growth policy since repealing theirs sixteen years ago. This has not hampered them in receiving grants from a myriad of Federal and State agencies. They have 41 citizen-initiated zoning districts allowing very local control. Park county has only 5. No new citizen-initiated zone has managed to get through the planning department since 2004. Our application process has been re-written to hog-tie citizens with good intensions. Our planner has called citizen-initiated zones too much work to manage because they are individualized one from the other. (That’s the point.) No local control by the people here; just bureaucracy and a king-of-the-mountain mentality.

This is precisely why the citizens have turned to our truly American solution, the citizen vote. We have learned that, only through a vote by the citizens can we truly have local control. The people we elect and/or employ soon forget they work for the people. So, there are no guarantees of citizen-centric plans.

This is why we have chosen the citizen initiative process, gathered signatures and placed referenda on the ballot for the June 4 election. R-001, to Repeal the current growth policy, and R-002, to adopt a future growth policy only by a vote of the people in the district affected.

It all comes back to responsibility. County government is true only to its self and its unending appetite for expansion. Citizens are responsible for their homes, their lands and their families.

Vote FOR your voice to be heard. Vote FOR R-001 and FOR R-002.