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OPINION: The Case for Home Rule, Part One |
Teddy Herzog | 4/28/08
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Why should we care about a County Home Rule charter?
A “County Home Rule Committee” has been giving short talks to a variety of local groups about this very question.
At this juncture, we have three choices:
a) begin circulating a petition to place the County Home Rule question on the November ballot,
b) hold off until the Spring and trust that the new Board of County Commissioners will attend to the Home Rule matter, or
c) forget the whole thing.
 Up until this point, the County Home Rule Committee has tried to maintain a fairly “neutral” stance with regard to Home Rule — functioning primarily as a study group. But it is time to come out of the closet and admit that I and most of our Committee have come to believe, after months of study, that the time is ripe to begin the Home Rule charter-writing process.
The more you study this issue, the more you can step back and let go of your particular opinions about what a new County Charter could offer — and realize that the process itself is a worthy journey, in and of itself. At the end of the journey we may or may not end up with a new County Charter worth ratifying.
Ratifying the charter may not be the most important part, in the long run.
In my personal opinion, the County Home Rule charter-writing process is an opportunity for a spiritual and psychological "cleansing" for us, the citizens, as a whole. This is an opportunity for us, the community, to come together to define who we are and how we want to proceed forward, together. The actual written document is not the most important topic but rather this is a window of opportunity that could move us forward through the process of defining our constitution.
With regard to the three choices above, “Yes” many of us want to move forward with the Home Rule Charter writing process. “No“, we do not want to wait and trust some future, unknown Board of County Commission members to carry us forward at some future date. The time is now.
Currently, the County government follows a set of rules in the State of Colorado Constitution. Our County does not have it own charter or rules. The State tells us how many County Commissioners we must have, that we must elect other officials every four years, and how much we must pay these people.
We have no choice but to follow the State rules unless we create our own rules here at home -- our own Archuleta County Home Rule charter.
Did you know that there are no qualifications and no job description for the County Commissioners, Treasurer, Assessor, County Clerk, Sheriff, Coroner or Surveyor? Any registered voter can get their name on the ballot and run for one of those positions. Under a Home Rule Charter we could set qualifications and standards.
There are several other key topics and many lesser issues that could be addressed by our Home Rule Charter.
More detail about County Home Rule can be found in this recent Post article.
If we vote to start the Home Rule Charter-writing process in November, then we will also be electing an 11 member Charter Writing Commission to create a public forum and to write the proposed new Charter. If the 11 member Charter Writing Commission does an very good job then a public consensus will be built and maintained throughout the entire Charter-writing process.
Then 9 to 10 months later, we the people get a chance to vote on the proposed new Home Rule Charter. “Yes” we accept this as our County Charter, or “No” we do not.
I have personally spoken with all three County Commissioners, some of the current candidates, the Treasurer, the Assessor, the County Clerk and the Sheriff about the Home Rule Charter writing process. Believe it or not, many of these elected officials are afraid to proceed with the process. We’ll discuss “fear” in a moment.
Some of the elected officials running the County at the Hall of Justice have a fatalistic attitude that a new Home Rule charter won’t fix anything. They clearly find the current County system to be a mess and hopeless. I have found that some of the current County elected officials speak the language of “hopelessness”. Basically, the attitude is that nothing can work.
Then there is fear. Certain elected officials do not trust the possibility that “power” might be taken away from their office (their fiefdom) and handed over to another office. Much more insidious is the fear that “the people” won’t take the time to educate themselves about Home Rule and, therefore, the people should not be trusted with the vote regarding the Home Rule process in November.
Commissioner Bob Moomaw has been a vocal advocate for County Home Rule. Mr. Moomaw has urged our Home Rule Committee to not place the question of the Home Rule process on the November ballot because there are too many other questions to answer and because a majority of the voters who turn out to vote may not know anything about the Home Rule process. Commissioner Moomaw has asked the Home Rule Committee to wait until next spring before bringing the Home Rule process question to the people.
But, is there any guarantee that the new County Commissioners after November will be any more effective at working together than the current County Commission? Is there any certainty that a majority of the County Commissioners after November will support Home Rule at all?
More tomorrow... |
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