Letter to editor, 7-08-06
Longmont (CO) Times-Call

OVERSTEPPING BOUNDS

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Pity the unfortunate woman who hoped to better her life by purchasing an established equestrian center on 71 acres of agriculturally-zoned land south of Longmont, only to have Boulder County’s Land Use Department come along and shut the whole operation down. (“Ranch corralled,” T-C 7-4-06). One does have to wonder just where an equestrian center should be appropriately sited, if not out on the prairie.

In Boulder County, the County Commissioners not only control all the land within their jurisdiction but have also positioned themselves dictatorially into micromanaging every square inch of ground and everything on it through a separate bureaucracy called the Land Use Department, which has its own headquarters. Facing of all this raw power, there’s not much hope for this woman and her agriculturally friendly enterprise.

She is most likely just another victim of Boulder County’s overreaching zoning laws, and her options are few. She can either go hat-in-hand to the Board of Commissioners and beg penance (although I have never heard of the commissioners breaking stride with their enforcers), or go lawyer-up big-time and really wreck her financial future if she loses. The County Commissioners and Land Use Department have nothing to lose, of course, since the taxpayers pick up their legal tabs.

But wasn’t this a lot of what the Declaration of Independence was all about, the heavy-handedness of those in power?

Percy Conarroe