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Showdown in Castle Rock handled by Gunsmoke

Contributed by: Francis Miller on 3/6/2006

I was admiring my own letter to the editor published in the Parker Press when Douglas Gilbert's letter, titled "3 to 5 Not About Us versus Them" caught my eye.

I have been holding off writing about this whole notion of adding two County commissioners, hoping it would just go away.

Over the past five years, Douglas County has had an annual budget in the range of $60 to $80 million dollars. If we used the salaries of Colorado's Governor and Denver's Mayor as a rule of thumb, citizens would be generous in paying a County administrator $100,000 a year,

That's opposed to what I would guess is $500,000 a year to keep the three current commissioners in the trappings of an office and travel budget.

In a rational world, we, the citizenry, would use a governing board to keep an executive focused like a laser on producing strategic outcomes instead of creating a millieu with three people.

Managing the County by a committee is a holdover from the old west days when Parker, Franktown and the other small villages were tired of Castle Rock getting the steak and they kept getting chipped beef on a bun.

In modern times incorporated cities have their own Big Kahuna managers and department heads and the County has little to do but harass the merchants in Franktown and fix potholes. I realize that if you were to ask them the current commissioners think they are spending their time on strategic outcomes.

If you read their minutes, however, it is pretty pedestrian stuff. Our current top-heavy, three amigos is managing a budget and staff the size of a large community hospital. The building of new infrastructure in Douglas County is done by CDOT, outside contractors and much of it is paid for by municipal districts and the cities.

The County is little more than a watch-dog and a maintenance organization for the rural, unincorporated portion of the County.

Someday we will pop back up through the rabbit hole into normal reality and find that job growth in science-based, high-tech export industries should have been the priority, not just retail and residential construction which are cyclical and volatile.

Douglas County is going through an irreversible transformation from agriculture into the 21st century, but it is being managed by a three-headed hydra. I subscribe to the old fashioned notion that"

"All great outcomes are the lengthened shadow of a single person,
not a committee"

Even Washington, Roosevelt, Reagon, Lincoln and other great leaders got their start in some backwater like Douglas County.

We should be identifying young talent with potential and consciously allowing ourself to be used as a stepping stone.

As I read Mr. Gilbert's passionate plea for upping the ante and having 5 commissioners I began to suspect a hidden agenda and implicit motivations.

He didn't succeed in his last run to be a commissioner and he probably figures that by increasing the number of commissioners there might be a better chance for him the second time around. I would suggest his friends kindly let him know it ain't gonna happen.

Then, the rest of us who want to spend the rest of our lives here in Utopia should seriously consider rationalizing the management structure of Douglas County for the 21st Century.


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CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Francis Miller

Parker , CO

Francis Miller has posted 699 stories and 9 comments since joining on 11/17/2005. Francis Miller's average story rating is 4.19.
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