BOCC: Big Manna From the Imperial City?
Corona: King Polis Says We Be Blue
Future State BoH Power Grab? Food Charities, New PIO,
Clown Time: Justice Center Confusion Intervention

by George Gramlich,
News and Musings

Some progress is being made: The Custer County Board of County Commissioners had their first, real open meeting (i.e., you can actually go and sit in the same throne room as the three musketeers), AND, you don’t even have to wear a death mask.
The meeting place honors went to the Wetmore Community Center community room. The February 17th 9 a.m. meeting was attended by Board Chair Bill Canda, Board members Tom Flower and Kevin Day, County Attorney Clint Smith and County Clerk Kelly Camper plus a few peasants in the audience.
No bombshells to report (sorry) but there was a 30+ minute Chinese Clown Town fire drill at the end involving the whole ensemble over three related pieces of paper which is illustrative of the problems with down scale group think.

Flower (“Money Bags”) opened with the comment that Beijing Biden’s new $1.9 trillion welfare bribe to Americans contains, now get this, $991,000 for Custer County! Our whole county budget is around $8 million. Flower almost drooled when he said the amount. This graft came up later in the meeting….
Canda noted that Donna Hobby, head of Human Resources is retiring.
It was mentioned that the Under Funded Courthouse committee (for the proposed new Justice Center) had met with each of the county’s three newspapers.
Smith said he worked with local resident Chris Bryson on his proposed Custer County Second Amendment Resolution that is in response to some U.S. Congressional left wing nut jobs attack on our 2nd Amendment rights via a proposed resolution in Congress (House Bill 127). It is on the agenda for February 26th.
Under New Business, the afternoon’s Board of Health meeting was mentioned and the fact that the county has moved from Level Orange (bad) to Level Blue (good). Our local businesses can now, with the blessing of the covid fairies in Denver, operate at 50% capacity. We are so humbly grateful.
Canda started the “fix” on last meeting’s poorly worded motion that was intended to make masks optional for ALL county buildings but the motion only stated the courthouse. This, of course, took a while but the new motion which covered all the buildings passed.
This, for the umpteenth time, triggered The Flowers (Denver is king and we must follow all their whims and orders). He again stated that King Polis’s Royal Order Number 20-36 MANDATES mask wearing in all public buildings in the state, and by golly, if we don’t do that, they will punish us unrepentant redneck sinners here in Happy Valley. (Note that there are a bunch of counties in Colorado that are completely ignoring this whole corona charade out of Denver.) The Flowers continues with we could get punished, we defied the order, it could happen, and then the real reason for the diatribe came out: We could lose that $991K grift grant!!! It could happen! Canda and Day appear to be unmoved by this plea to be bribed.
Canda countered with his usual arguments and Attorney Smith noted, again, that these dictates from King Polis are not law and are not enforceable unless we pass some laws here. (It is like watching a very, very bad werewolf movie – HOWLING 3: THE MARSUPIALS – comes to mind, on eternal looping with no end in sight.)”
The motion to unmask all county buildings passed with all three saying “yea”.
Day then brought up the fact that some left-wing Colorado legislators and at least one RINO legislator have introduced a bill that would prevent county commissioners from being on county Boards of Health boards. (County commissioners are allowed on BoH boards if the county has a population of under 100,000. This makes sense for whole variety of reasons.) These statist monsters want unelected BoH boards because many of the BoH’s of the small counties (like us) which refused to kowtow to Denver during this corona theatre. They want to take away their power and only have appointed (i.e., unaccountable) people on the BoH boards. In other words, take more local control away from us. Typical. So, in response to this outrage, our tough-guy musketeers are going to write a letter to King Polis opposing this. (Think shredder.)
The Recycling Coordinator for the county was then up. (The audio was very poor and I only caught his first name, “Dennis”.) He wanted permission to apply for a grant of around $300k to build a dedicated cardboard recycling building and buy a horizontal cardboard baler. He said the amount of cardboard coming in has increased dramatically in the last few years (think Amazon) and they recycled 255,000 lbs. of the stuff last year.

He was given the okay to proceed.
Citizen Tracy Ballard was up next. She is the new director of Custer County’s My Neighbor’s Cupboard (MNC) free food chapter. Penrose MNC has been bringing a tractor trailer full of food up from the flats every couple of months and distributing it in the school parking lot. It has been very popular with the last one serving over 200 cars. Tracy was asking the musketeers if they could continue to use the basement of the County Annex building (where the Veteran’s Service Office is) to store non-perishable foods until they either buy or find a building to rent. She also stated that there was no “friction” between this new charitable outfit and the existing food charity in town, The Sharing Center. Tracy also asked if they could use the building to distribute food Wednesdays from 4 p.m. to
6 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
“Marcy” from the The Sharing Center then chimed in on Zoom and was very nice about the relationship between them and MNC. She said there was some redundancy but that isn’t really a bad thing. She said The Sharing Center has no problem with The Cupboard and we all need to stop the “friction” talk. Flowers asked her about one Carol Ault and if this person was on the The Sharing Center’s Board. Marcy said no, Carol is their Executive Officer and runs the day-to-day operations there and is really good at it. The commish then gave their blessings to use the Extension Building until August 31, 2021. They will revisit the deal again at that time.
The next inning was about hiring the county’s new Public Information Officer (PIO). They had interviewed the three candidates. Now they had to pick one. Flowers started complaining about how they did the whole hiring process without getting into what exactly was bad. This went on for a while. Finally, Day said he wasn’t happy about the process either, but it is over and let’s vote. Day said he was going to vote for Candidate 2. Canda makes a motion to have the vote and also says Candidate 2 is his person. Then magically, The Flowers says Candidate 2 is also his choice.
Bat-a-bing, Candidate 2 gets the job offer.
Some new Weed Board members were then voted in.
The musketeers then decided to have a workshop on Policies and Procedures on March 26th at 9 a.m. to try to iron out some process issues. (This will require multiple sedatives to watch.)
Next, they talked about getting a job description written up for Dawna Hobby’s H.R position. Flower then said that in talking with Dawna, it became obvious that she was always overloaded with work and that there should be two job positions to do the job in the future: one for finance director and one for payroll and human resources. So they will need two job descriptions. The motion to proceed with a two-job approach passed.
The next 30+ minutes was trying, to say the least, considering it was about three simple contracts, two of which were basically identical. It was all about the proposed Justice Center.
The county had negotiated with a bond company called Piper Sandler to help get the project going and explore financing options. The musketeers also wanted them to poll the county to see if us peasants wanted this massive project.
(Based on what I was told at a nice presentation by the Justice Center Committee folks on Wednesday, the new Justice Center will contain a new Sheriff’s Office, a new male and female jail, a new courtroom, and a ton of county offices. It will be adjacent to the existing courthouse. The committee said they had paired down the original plan to the minimum. They said it would cost SEVENTEEN MILLION DOLLARS! Our county annual budget is around $8 million. They want to finance the cost via a county sales tax increase and stay away from a property mil tax. They hope to get some big grant dollars to cover some of it.
I asked them what the sales tax hike would be and they said they didn’t know yet. Note that they said they could split up the project into the courthouse/offices first and jail later but then it would cost more but they were pretty firm on getting the whole thing done in one gigantic money drop.)
Now back to the three contracts. It appears they signed a contract with Piper and then there was an issue. Or maybe there wasn’t an issue. But they signed a second contract with Piper with essentially the exact same language, but Piper hadn’t signed it and nobody really knew if they did or not, or maybe they lost the contract. Then there is another contract with a consulting firm to “poll” the county to see if the peasants want this big-ticket item or not. One of the musketeers said the company expected a response of about 125 people and another said it will probably be around 700. (These numbers are disturbing. The county has over 4000 citizens and if they think they are only going to get around 125 responses, somebody is not doing their job. Also, watch the questions the poll will ask. They will be positively slanted (classic “push-poll”) to a “yes” position. And, how can you ask us to support it without telling us EXACTLY what it will cost and how big the tax increase will be?)
There was confusion on what was in the contracts. How can we get out of these, funding versus polling. Smith read some contract wording that helped a bit. Everybody was talking. On and on and on and on. At one point Kelly Camper jumped in and said that she is supposed to get copies of contracts and important documents and that is NOT happening and that better get straightened out or we are going to get into trouble down the road. More on and on. We approved the agreements, but they were not signed. Ann Barthrop, Justice Center Committee member was there and tried to unconfuse the musketeers (which can be very difficult and sometimes flat out impossible) and to some degree succeeded. We gotta get this done as we are on tight timeline. Round and round they went. On and on. Over three simple contracts. (Where is the Valium bottle?) Finally, they voted to accept the amended contract. Another Clown Town in the can.
Meeting adjourned.