Article Contributed on: 7/26/2007 8:22:18 AM
While it's convenient to believe that the problems the Hoyle family has had to deal with over the past seven years are the doing of folks who are fighting against any kind of development, this argument ignores some of the key issues.
For those of you who have not been following this, the Hoyle Family has been fighting for SEVEN years to sell their land after the death of a family member. They were caught in a Boulder County black hole that kept them going from meeting to meeting, office to office, year after year after year, to do something that should have been simple. But anti-development factions are only a small part of the brain dead system currently in place that caused this unfair situation.
One, we have had County Commissioners who have been completely unwilling to see any kind of worldview other than their own. When the Cities involved in the IGA were willing to let the zoning changes be made, the Commissioners believed they had a higher calling, ignoring the will of the Cities completely. This is part of the problem of keeping ony three Commmissioners in an area with so many constituents; after awhile they feel omnipotent and not accountable to the people. Ironically, the City that tries so hard to keep the County from development has over the years turned itself into a concrete jungle, adding building after building, and somehow East County is supposed to make up the difference.
Two, we voted to have IGAs. Regardless of whatever action is requested, it's been difficult even without IGAs to get the local communities to agree on things. Once it becomes necessary for ALL of them to agree (even when they are not directly affected), bottlenecks are inevitable. The needs of every bureaucrat in every community in the IGA come before the property rights of their constituents. This was predictable but somehow the naive argument that an IGA would "help us all get along" got swallowed hook, line and sinker and Boulder County voters bought it. The total injustice of the way the Hoyles have been treated should show us that IGAs are NOT the answer.
Three, we've got this damaged idea that "the good of the many" outweighs the property rights guaranteed by the Constitution. We, as a community, do NOT have the right to tell folks who to sell their land to, or keep them from doing so because of some fear of development.
And lastly, a great deal of the opposition to development has come, not from those who don't want any development, but from those who do not believe communities should go into debt (in the form of TIF (tax increment financing, where the City issues bonds, which must be paid back, to fund the improvements in a given area) just to make it easier for the developers to get their projects done without major financial investment of their own. As a result of this ill-conceived "tool" for urban renewal, developers are no longer willing to spend their own money, and insist that communities go into debt to help them develop large multi-use warrens, which they claim will bring us tax dollars later, while they get assistance from the taxpayers now.
It is embarrassing to live in a County so willing to abuse the property rights of its citizens, and so willing, in spite of all its rhetoric about open space and nature, to help fund developers who keep driving up land values.
What has happened to the Hoyles is a travesty. We need to have more Commissioners, (5 that are elected from specific areas of the County) make them accountable to the people (get rid of the "at large" voting system that gives undue influence to Boulder City voters), and find a legal way out of the IGA nightmare we have mistakenly voted for, or we will see this kind of unacceptable contempt for the people show up again and again.
We made this mess and we should take responsibility for it, or face the possibility that one day soon our own property rights will be up for grabs when some developer covets our neighborhood for lucrative "urban renewal" or our Commissioners covet it for "public open space".