Lights Out for the “Printz of Darkness”
Planning Commission Puts the Dimmer Switch On Printz’s Dark Obsession

Planning Commission Workshop
by Jackie Bubis
On June 13th, the Custer County Board of County Commissioners (Mr. Canda was not present) and the Planning Commission met in a workshop to review changes in the Zoning Resolution. The Planning Commission began working on revising this document late in 2016. In January 2017, when there was confusion with the then BOCC (Kattnig, Hood, and Printz) about appointments to the Planning Commission and then in July when the same board referred issues of Dark Skies and shipping containers to them, the work began in earnest.
The workshop began with Commissioner Printz stating that he thought the removal of a definition of “light pollution” was a “self-serving” effort by the Planning Commission to kill Dark Skies. He went on to spend the next nearly forty-five minutes proselytizing for Dark Skies. He believes that the public meetings held by the Planning Commission on the subject were “staged” and “biased,” and was not representative of the opinions of the community. (Editor/llv: Perhaps, as there were many Dark Skies Advocates from out of county.)

Chairman of the Planning Commission, Vic Barnes, stated that his board bent over backwards to work with Dark Skies. They had a total of seven meetings with Jim Bradburn and Clint Smith. Pat Bailey expressed that “we didn’t believe that we should change our regulations for a special interest group.”
Mr. Printz said he’d never thought about it that way (though Bailey said the same thing in a public meeting Printz attended) and agreed. But Dark Skies “is good for this county, in my opinion.” Mr. Printz stated several times that “it’s the designation (of a Dark Skies reserve) that I want.” He suggested that they table the discussion, have another well-publicized meeting and do it again.
Eventually, Mr. Smith spoke up stating that Dark Skies no longer wants to pursue changes to the Zoning Resolution and stated, “we were wrong from the beginning.” Mr. Printz seemed surprised by that statement and said, if Dark Skies has retraced their desire to change the document, then “I’m done.” Mr. Smith wanted it stressed that “the meeting on the 25th is not a Dark Skies meeting.”
Finally, Mr. Flower spoke passionately about the work the Planning Commission had done on the document and was adamant that this had nothing to do with [the] Dark Skies [organization]. He was disappointed that this review has boiled down to arguing about Dark Skies and stated that he would not support another meeting on the subject.
A final public hearing will be held on the 25th of June at 6 p.m. in the courtroom to hear input from the community specifically about the amendments in this draft document (available on the county website.) Again, I was instructed by Mr. Smith to stress that this was NOT a Dark Skies meeting.

Disclaimer: Headlines not written by reporters