Legacy Ranch Subdivision Update 2

"Growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of a cancer cell."     Ed Abbey

How would it be for you if you went to a wealthy oncologist to deal with a potentially-fatal tumor and were told in clipped, obscenely-expensive words, that "growth is inevitable" and that "you can't stop progress"?  

Below is a synopsis of what happens when you strain a recycled teabag into a cup of that curdled milk. A hackneyed bromide, in other words, served in a silver, publicly-funded cup, offered up by Legacy developer Alexandra Morton and the surprisingly well-paid commissioners to the taxpaying serfs of Ravalli County, Montana. 

For those of you not from the Bitterroot, Legacy Ranch subdivision may seem minor and almost trite, given that cynical developers like the Mortons and condescending commissioners like ours have gotten away with this sort of rape and pillage all over the country for many decades. Indeed, we in the Bitterroot can't claim pristine privilege either. We've had carcinogenic government colluding with sociopathic developers before. But we’ve only recently had huge premeditated land-use tumors going for our lymph nodes, and so we’re not quite so ready as the Mortons and the local teabaggers which comprise our current county government would like us to be in accepting the their silver cup of crap.

“Change is inevitable.” Indeed. But who defines “change”? The few silver-tongued pillagers who make a living off of our collective degradation? Yes, degradation equals “change”. But so does putting up your dukes and fightin’ the bastards.

Beware the hackneyed bromide that serves to engorge the already-rich  at everyone else’s expense. We’ve still got something worth fightin’ for, and we’re gonna.

The Letter

Citizens of Ravalli County, you have been dismissed.

Last week, despite overwhelming and substantive opposition from the public to the  thirty-year construction zone in a formerly-rural corner of our valley adjacent to the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge, the Ravalli County Commissioners unanimously approved Legacy Ranch Subdivision.

That’s right. A handful of Ravalli County Republican Central Committee (RCC) operatives—including RCC chair and Planning Office Manager Terry Nelson, RCC precinct captain and Legacy developer Alexandra Morton, and of course the five RCC commissioners who owe their catbird seats to the likes of Nelson, Morton and other developer interests in this valley—not only unanimously approved this inappropriate monstrosity, they unanimously ignored your public comments and concerns one by one, point by point. In fact they hired an extra lawyer, on top of the SIX the county already retains, to do this work for them.

This seventh lawyer repeatedly advised the commissioners to “capture” the multitude and valid concerns you raised, and then dismiss them, one by one, by claiming that all the horrible results that will inevitably follow such a poor land-use decision will be “mitigated” by private, unenforceable covenants and “notices”.  As stated above, each and every one of these cynical condescensions to our democratic process and your concerns was “concurred with” unanimously. There was no debate between the commissioners—and certainly none between the developer and Nelson’s Planning Office--about whether or not the developer has a right to claim that unenforceable “covenants” and “notices” can count as mitigation for such an alien creature as Legacy, or even about the propriety of dismissing citizens’ heartfelt concerns so offhandedly. Remember: public comment was done. The public was not allowed to talk during these final proceedings. In other words, only the Ravalli County Republican Central Committee operatives (the developers, the commissioners, the planning staff) had a place at this table. Not a one of them was disagreeing with the proposal, let alone advocating for anybody except the developer. A more incredible example of abnegation of public responsibility would be hard to find, although this commission has come up with some doozies in that regard ever since the extremist commission took over county government in 2010.

Consider: THIRTY YEARS of construction on that little piece of rural property. In one fell swoop, the Republican Central Committee, euphemistically known as your county government, has declared that you and your children, and even your children’s children have as much right to peace and quiet as any city-dweller.  In other words, if you can’t afford a castle and a spread the size of the Morton’s estate up against the mountains west of Victor--complete with government firefighters ready to protect that castle in the event of inevitable forest fires--then you and yours don’t deserve any peace at all, ever again.

Contrary to news reports, the commissioners did not “ban” woodstoves. Just like so many other blow-offs of the public’s sincere concerns, the commissioners merely requested that a restriction on woodstoves be placed in the notices and covenants. Now ask yourself: who is going to enforce all these “mitigations” and which commissioners are going to do anything about it if they don’t get enforced? Are you aware of ANY  homeowner’s association that isn’t dysfunctional in this valley? Remember the homeowner’s association dispute that ended in a shooting up Little Sleeping Child recently? Is that really the kind of government these commissioners think works best? Put bluntly, homeowner association “covenants and notices” are not restrictions or legal “mitigations” at all. Eventually, and probably soon after “phase one” begins, they will all be ignored, and we who are already here, whose lives will certainly be degraded by this renegade decision, will pick up the tab, while the commissioners’ political benefactors—the developers—whistle to the bank.

The decision to allow Legacy Construction zone into your rural backyard is bad enough. But when you consider the screaming conflict-of-interests issues between the developer and the commissioners, between the “planning board” and the Republican Central Committee, I think most reasonable, agenda-free folks on either side of the political divide will agree that this debacle is not only not the Good Government we expect from our paid help, it’ not anything close to our cherished democratic process, and is therefore un-American.

This is the price You The Taxpayers are paying for the Republican Central Committee’s (euphemistically known as your county government’s) extreme ideological purity.

How’s that feel, folks?

On Rainbow Gatherings and the 70s Thing

After the 1978 apple picking season I drove my hippy van up to Ione, Washington to a relatively new phenomenum called a barter fair. Kind of a twin to the Rainbow Gatherings that sprang from that same era and demographic. Lots of young folks like myself as well as a fair amount of what we called middle-aged folks at the time (mid thirties). Big party out in a wide open meadow surrounded by mountains, is what I remember, which is a good thing, considering. 

The organizers, probably the owners of the land, had set up a few “squat pits” for people to use in place of communing with the surrounding woods, which many people did anyway, and so you had to literally thread through the toilet-paper blossoms if you wanted to take a walk outside of camp. Made the saunters more adventurous, if nothing else.

I of course wanted to do the right thing and when my time drew near I headed for the pit, which as far as I could see from the outside consisted of a makeshift wooden privacy wall with a long co-ed line outside, to which I attached myself and waited as best I could. For twenty minutes I stood in front of a very cute and stoned flower girl in a tie-dyed granny skirt and even though I wanted to think of something witty to say to her, I didn't, because I was single and shy, and she was very cute.

It finally got to be my turn to go “behind the wall” and there I found myself standing on an open-air rough wood platform with two openings in the boards five feet apart. I hadn’t known until this critical moment that it was a “two-squatter” and that if I wanted to do my business in private, which I think most people prefer, I’d better hurry up which, everything being equal, is neither natural nor preferable. Nevertheless, there it was, I had to go, and I fell to in as speedy a fashion as I could, hoping the next person in line was too stoned to move in too quick, which I thought she was.

I was about halfway through when in she came, lifted her skirt, and joined me. This not only didn’t help my flirting skills, it seized me up. I shut down on my appreciation of the scenery. What else could I do? I continued squatting, red-faced, she finished and left with a brush of a tie-dye skirt and a smile, and I was constipated for the next two days. I figured I had been some kind of smitten, but to this day I’m not sure what kind it was, or if I ever recovered from it. I did recover from the constipation after two days of eating one Red Delicious apple from a box I had stashed under the bed of my hippy van every two hours, and this is a cure I would still recommend to alleviate the symptoms of various conditions, such as constipation, stomach pains and precipitous declines in self-confidence associated with Failed Flirting Fatigue (FFF).

Regarding the Rainbow Gathering in the Big Hole this week: I think most young people have experiences that seem incredibly adventurous at the time and that play havoc with their self-esteem and upbringing. I just want to let them know that we all go through that stuff, whether we admit it or not, and that it's generally all right if you keep in mind that the main object is to stay in one piece. We elders should all wish you youngsters the best, and I do.

Have fun, and play safe.

Psalm To My Friend

We don’t really know where we’re going after this, whether we end up where the creek gods play us like a chess game which, I figure, is a good enough reason to be content to have taunted and entertained them all this time. There’d be purpose to that.

If it’s to some god’s castle in the clouds where he processes his anal-retentive issues on us like our homeguard claims he does, then we can just as well go on giving him hell just like he’s been giving it to us, and there’d be purpose to that.
         

If, however, it’s more like we’ve always thought it was, and why we’ve been honoring this place we’ve been allowed to experience the bottomless, blameless beauty of, then you and I are in the right paradise.
            

And then we’ll move on.
   

I know, easy enough for me to say. I don’t have cancer yet. But I’m wondering, after hearing about yours, how it can be otherwise. From our several decades of simple experience we know by now that we can’t choose everything that happens to us but we can choose how we look at those things. So it follows. If that’s the case, we can also choose how we look at what comes next.

I think I've got it figured out. It’s just like watching the rivers and mountains, the very things we choose to love in this lifetime to reinforce our heart’s only real message to that silly brain of ours that gets us in so much trouble. Calm down, the mountains say. You still have a chance.
   

It’s the beautiful wheel after all. Just like we thought it was. Just like I look past my garden full of weeds to the hillside full of trees right now. I can't see how it can be any other way.
  

The next place is beautiful, too.

I Wonder Whose Bones Are Under That Subdivision

Coppell used to be a town in Texas. 

           You know

Davy Crockett under a coonskin cap,

      cowboys and   

           French-German settlers so sure they're right 

Even as their un-air-conditioned dreams 

                   get scalped by Comanches’

own ideas of fair compensation

        for the original bundled real estate derivative.

That kind of Texas 

       Coppell used to be

        Honest enough

But now you can’t hardly catch sight of a lizard 

 skittering across the overpaved road

            of a spanking-new bedroom ruin of the proud and the weary

The workers and the rich, and all those who really want to be.

 A lizard

really

I finally saw one

                                        after five days, 

                                                              skittering home over 

Someone.

Legacy Ranch Subdivision Update

After spending five days in Texas as the guest of a truly nice and generous Texas couple who simultaneously have very different political views than myself and a similar sense of humor, I decided to write a poem to sum up my impressions of the uncontrolled development I'm seeing here in the Dallas area, which I'm visiting for the first time, and my fears of what the Bitterroot will end up being if we as a community don't prevail against such proposals as Legacy Ranch. 

As we all know, Legacy comes from another part of the planet that the Bitterroot, where people are so used to the kind of destruction of habitat etc. proposed by the Legacy developers that they absolutely and honestly see nothing wrong with it. It's normal to them, and they are legion. We know this, because most of us come from similar destroyed environments ourselves. It's the simple truth. That's why we fear it and why enough of us see it for what it is and fight it. We know we simply can't go on like this, and yet we do. Why?

It's nobody's fault in particular that those who of us see nothing wrong with Legacy also see Legacy as inevitable. You spend enough time in subdivision communities that are five, ten, twenty times the size of Legacy and you either go crazy (an option), you reject it thoroughly (as I and many of the folks I hang out with did) or you reconcile it and live with that reconciliation. Maybe, I'm thinking, it's the fault of us who don't get our stories down well enough to convince the Reconciled Ones that we have good enough stories to pay enough attention to visualize other alternatives. We're certainly swimming upstream against the dominant culture, and that's frustrating. The highly-well-funded (Ross) Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, for instance, has an actual ride where you pretend your riding the tip of a drill bit while a nice lady jokingly explains the benefits, virtues and safety features of fracking. I'd guess that tens of thousands of school kids (during class time!) sit through this ten-minute, high-tech indoctrination program. They were there when we were. That's the point, in other words. We who see alternatives have our work cut out for us.

Why don't we do the work then, I guess is all I'm saying. Which is another reason I wrote a poem. It seems to help. We don't have to be passive, and there's a lot of options for defining "active". But don't fool yourself. It's hard and getting' harder. Gird your loins and don't believe in fear as an emotion. It's not. It's a chemical reaction. You can deal with it. Evolve, in other words.

Below is the full text of a letter-to-the-editor printed the Bitterroot Star this week re: Legacy Ranch Subdivision. 

Editor,

Referring to the proposed Legacy Ranch subdivision, Commissioner Foss is quoted thus: “When people decide they are going to sue before the process is even completed, we need to be prepared.” Commissioner Chilcott goes further by publicly apologizing to Ms. Morton (one of the developers) for “insults” she has had to endure from an angry public wondering why this proposed town from outer space has to land in their backyard. This from elected officials who are supposed to be protecting Us the Taxpayers from inappropriate development schemes in exchange for pretty good wages.

Given this lay of the land, I’d like to clarify a few things for our commissioners and for anyone else confused about how things work in our nominally-participatory democracy.

First off, Ms. Foss is correct. We do have to be prepared. After all, this is the same commission that approved another private monstrosity miles out of Hamilton—Flatiron-- on the slimmest of legal justifications and with the clever help of their same Planning Office Manager, Terry Nelson (who as chair of the Ravalli Co. Republican Central Committee helped put three of these commissioners in office), whose department is shepherding this latest monster subdivision through.  Remember? If this commission remains true to their ideological school, they will approve this one, too.

Ms. Foss claims that those who oppose Legacy are acting aggressively “before the process has been completed”. As a reminder, no one beats the aforementioned Nelson Planning Department for pre-emptive arrogance. His team was so certain that the public would have nothing worthwhile to say that they recommended approval for Legacy before the public process ever got started, and the currently-compromised Planning Board agreed with Nelson’s assessment that the public had nothing of value to say and gave Legacy their rubber stamp. So yes, wary citizens have no choice but to prepare for the worst while hoping for the best.

Which brings us to democratic process. Again, Ms. Foss is correct. Nobody can sue before something happens. How obvious is that? Nevertheless, I’ll state that as an active member of Bitterrooters for Planning (BFP)—a group much maligned and unfairly accused of lying by Ms. Morton while the selectively-chivalrous Chilcott stood by and apologized to us not one time--I can say unequivocally that that organization has been making every honest attempt to provide this commission with the accurate, detailed information it needs to deny this subdivision on the various criteria, which it could and should do, given the glaring weight of evidence. If, that is, this commission is working for us and not for developers prone to hurt feelings and personal insults when they don’t get their way. Opposition to this project runs far deeper than BFP, and that opposition showed up on their own legs at the various meetings hoping for the best. They hope the commission denies Legacy and that no citizen group has to sue to force democratic process. There’s nothing undemocratic about assertive optimism. In fact, that’s how, at its best, our system works for the greatest good.

There are a few things the public needs to be reminded of concerning the Legacy Town proposal.

·      Under Montana law, the preliminary plat process—the process we’re now seeing the tail end of--is the only time the public will have any meaningful say, and that’s why the developers are advising the commissioners to “kick the can down the road” to D.E.Q. and D.N.R.C. –and even to themselves!--as far as real details about how this monstrosity can possibly work without damaging your community and your wallet. Whether it can work or not (and again, the preponderance of evidence demonstrates that it simply can’t) the developers know that if the commissioners give them their preliminary approval, the Citizen will be cut out of the procedural loop. No more of this messy democracy aimed at perfectly nice gazillionaires just trying to make a buck. Maybe the D.E.Q., they tell us, or the D.N.R.C., maybe the commissioners without our input or maybe even Santa Claus will unilaterally find something wrong with this proposal after the preliminary plat is approved and “save us”. But without our active concern and involvement you really shouldn’t count on it. Once it passes preliminary plat, the developers win, we lose. Now’s the time for the commissioners to deny this bad boy. That’s how our current process would work best. That’s not name-calling. That’s the right thing to do.

·      All five commissioners are demonstrably compromised in regard to their developer-benefactors and real estate interests and this should rightly concern us, given the magnitude of “inevitable change” these developer-friendly Republicans have already foisted on us with Flatiron. But Commissioners Foss and Stoltz actually accepted significant campaign contributions from the Legacy developers—Donald and Alexandra Morton—and from employees of the Mortons’ engineering firm, Territorial Landworks, including its C.E.O. Jason Rice (http://campaignreport.mt.gov/FindDocuments ). They and their other political benefactor, Republican Central Committee chair and Planning Office Manager Terry Nelson, actually rewrote the county’s subdivision regulations so the Legacy Team wouldn’t have to deal with one of the main hang-ups in their past proposals, the negative effects of Porter Hill road. Of course anybody can donate to the political campaigns of anybody they want (especially after Citizens United speaking of the going price for souls!), but this is just plain basic. Given the magnitude of this project; the profits their political benefactors stand to gain, the public harm likely to occur, they have a clear conflict-of-interest one tenth the amount of which would force any judge to recuse themselves from any given case. Similarly, if Foss and Stoltz want to maintain even the fig leaf of democratic process, they should recuse themselves on Legacy. That’s not name-calling. That’s just plain fair.

It’s easy and sometimes productive for those in power to misrepresent and blame those who criticize them. Scapegoating is part of human nature and indeed is part of our participatory political process. After all, the commissioners and Ms. Morton are bent out of shape because we’re exercising the rights some of us feel we’ve bought and paid for with the bodies and souls of ourselves, our buddies, our family members. We’re not gonna shrink from false accusations or hypocracy. They come with the territory we feel we fought for. In fact, a longing for the Holy Grail of Good Government is a big part of what motivates us, makes us active in the first place. I guess I should say thanks to those who are visiting the Legacy Town proposal upon us. They’re truly challenging us to work for our democracy.

Thanks.