On the Park County Growth Policy
October 31, 2008 | Filed Under Opinion and Commentary, Election 2008, Credos, Seriously/Real Stuff, Around town, Local Government | 2 Comments
by Ashea Mills October 28, 2008
You don’t know it, but I am looking down at your house right now. I am the bird in the sky, the small plane headed to Chicago and beyond. I get to see the stupendous aerial view of all that surrounds you, and my friends, it is magnificent.
I’m sorry to be leaving. It’s a perfect fall day, mostly blue skies, a few puffball clouds, mid 60’s. Family calls, so I’ll miss this perfect Montana week, but flying out over it, watching the land fall away…what a treat! The dominant features on the landscape are the curvaceous folds, the land rippling below as we bank away from Gallatin Field towards Livingston. The mountains ahead are looming closer, with the Bridgers off our port side.
On my side, looking down and south, I am running parallel to Trail Creek, seeing where it sashays into Paradise Valley. The valley itself is a sweeping sigh, an open space of clustered trees along watercourses, and glimpses of homes here and there. The broad basin of the valley almost seems at odds with the jagged saw toothed Absorokas.
I can see the Tetons piercing the haze to the south, and most of what I love is between them and I: my partner, my home, my friends, my mountains.
Now I am over the 90 degree bend the braided, winding Yellowstone River takes through Livingston. The river is steely and low this fall day. Town looks as sweet from this vantage point as it does while standing on Main Street, looking into the mountainous gloam at dusk, storefronts twinkling like a scene from a movie or a book.
And now, the crinkly folds of Absoroka peaks give way to the broad, flat top mesas of the Beartooth Plateau, already graced with this season’s base layer of snow.
What a view! What a gift to be able to see our home from up here! But my heart is weighing heavy with the impending choice we must make. I am of the opinion that when I fly eastward out of Bozeman in 20 years, when I take my starboard seat on purpose, because I love this quick and rare aerial glimpse of home, I want the mountains, the valley and the river to dominate my view.
Others do not share this opinion. There is a group of so-called “Concerned Citizens” that would very much like to be able to build whenever and however, values, views and history be dammed. They would like to have you believe that new development on the banks of the river and tops of dry canyons is good for us all, and that you and I shouldn’t mind higher taxes to pay for services to remote and scattered home sites.
One of the main reasons I fell in love with this area is that it still feels real. There is an authenticity to Park County that is lacking elsewhere. The working ranches and farms, their toil and struggle and rewards are a part of the fabric of what makes this area unique. Trophy homes in place of them are what ruins it.
Looking out on the landscape and seeing open space, feeling the wind (oh, yes, the wind,) having an unobstructed view of the big sky we all value…watching the calves grow burly in spring, while the alfalfa greens up…hunting for the winter’s food in fall, following the river’s seasonal surges and declines with the ebbs and flows in our own lives…This is what it means to live in Park County.
Maybe you’re from here, or maybe you moved here because you found yourself feeling more at home here than anywhere else in the world. Either way, we can all appreciate why we love it. I suppose then, it follows that we can see why others would too. Development will occur, and others will want to share in this most magnificent place, bordered by a world destination park, and countless opportunities for fishing, hiking, hunting and biking. Okay, so we get it. But does that mean everyone who comes in can build a monstrous house that impacts the view for miles around? Or take water away from agriculture to build a golf course that we aren’t even invited to? I vehemently say no.
Park County will see growth and that can be a very positive and necessary force. We all want opportunities and a sound economy. If current trends continue, Park County will see 2,100 new homes and 5,000 new residents in less than 20 years. We must decide now, as a community, how we want that to look. This isn’t about whether or not you can raise chickens, or if the garage door should be shut on Sundays. A local growth policy ( a non-regulatory guide, no less) can never trump Constitutional law. Your property rights are safe. This is, however, the defining moment for how Park County will look from a plane, or from a peak, or driving down East River Road in ten or twenty years.
We do have choices. A couple months ago, we were coming out of camping in the Crazy Mountains. We stopped in to enjoy a perfect brunch at The Grand Hotel in Big Timber. Lazing in the lobby afterward, I noticed a small pamphlet titled “The Sweet Grass Code of the West”. It was informative and inspiring. It talks about how the homes that have endured and weathered well are the ones tucked down in draws, protected from buffeting wind rather than posted on top of a hill for all to see. It mentions a rich and storied history and how that bonds the community to their past and future. It speaks to traditional agricultural use, the value of clean water and recreation, the value of community. Sweet Grass County comes right out and says, “These are the values we hold true. Our Growth Policy will protect these values.”
I am probably somewhere over the Dakotas now. It is beautiful in its own way, quilted as it is with its own lives and work and histories below. But it ain’t no Park County. There’s no place like home.
Folks, we can do this. Pass the Growth Policy on Nov. 4th. It is not a painful process. It only seeks to enhance what we already know and have decided. It allows for public process. It allows local residents to decide how our future will look, not a small group of opponents to any planning at all.
In the past weeks, you may have heard people say that the County Commissioners have changed the “People’s Plan” into the “Commissioners Plan.” This is an attempt to fool the public into having no plan at all. The Growth Plan has been worked on for many years and truly reflects the will of Park County residents. Opponents to having a plan are focusing on three wording changes that make no practical difference to the overall plan, but simply bring it into state compliance. They want to create a smokescreen that prevents us from moving forward. We simply need to vote yes on the Growth Plan to get it passed and get on with the business of ensuring our way of life for the future.
We will all benefit from forethought and planning. If your goals are to protect and support agriculture, clean water, and a strong economy, vote yes on the Growth Policy. If scenic preservation, history, recreation, wildlife and a sound future in Park County are important to you, please vote YES on the Growth Policy.
And then get out there and enjoy it.
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Ashea Mills has worked as a naturalist and educator for over 15 years, and has been guiding and teaching in Yellowstone National Park since 1998. Ashea is currently an instructor for the Yellowstone Association Institute and a frequent contributor to regional publications of articles relating to geology, flora, fauna, and history of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Maverickety
September 27, 2008 | Filed Under Election 2008, Opinion and Commentary | Leave a Comment
While the pundits dissect last night’s debate and the fact-checkers serve up an all you can eat buffet, I’m thinking about something else. I think the debate will land on the public in a pretty much zero-sum way–the already committed will be more committed, the undecideds will think it’s a tossup. Like all the other Campaign 2008 watchers, I’ll be curious to see how the next few days shake out poll-wise.
For the moment, however, I’m more curious about the contempt that John McCain has for Barack Obama. It reminds me of the contempt the Clintons had for Senator Obama in the primaries. What’s this about? Well, in both camps, the McCain Rich Old White Guy camp and the Clinton Democratic Royalty camp, the guy is an interloper. He’s in line for the throne that both camps thought was rightfully theirs. (Bill Clinton is still harboring a grudge bigger than a Krispy Kreme franchise.)
What’s more, Senator Obama looks at what is at the heart of America’s ills and addresses fundamental change, not just tactical change, he has a scandal-free marriage, and he is graceful under pressure. He is managing one of the best campaigns in modern American political history. In short, he is cool, clean, and he respects the US Constitution, all factors that make him enviably appealing to the grief-stricken voter who thinks and cares about this country. Did I mention that he is smart? Something that John McCain is proving that he is not.
I get the feeling that McCain has wanted payback ever since he returned from those 5 years of pure hell in a Hanoi prison camp. His repetitive adultery, and subsequent divorce from a swimwear model who’d become disfigured in an accident while he was away, looks like the behavior of a guy who was entitled to be reckless and self-absorbed to make up for lost time. His first wife offered a more charitable view– “John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens. . .it just does.” And who am I to say what happened between the two of them in private. I’m just noticing a trend toward having it all, his way. Next up, just a month after the divorce? Marrying a significantly younger beauty with gazillions of dollars, and using her family’s influence and money to fast track a bid for political office. Hanging out with the likes of Charles Keating. It’s pretty tough not to view McCain as someone whose chief motivation was McCain First, not Country First. And now there is this pesky Obama guy, pretender to the throne.
McCain likes the appellation, “maverick,” a term that enjoys multiple meanings. It could be “someone who exhibits great independence in thought and action,” or “an unbranded range animal (especially a stray calf) that belongs to the first person who puts a brand on it.” There was a time, indeed, when we all thought McCain was a good guy, and a tough one in the mold of the first definition. But there is a current shared view–among evangelical leaders (think Richard Cizik) and lefties alike, conservatives (think George Will) and liberals–that McCain has been dishonorable in how he has conducted his campaign, with his cynical selection of Sarah Palin a prime example and his massively debunked campaign ad lies, slanders, and downright smears the smarmy followup. So now he is the “unbranded range animal” with less independence and more brand changes than Coca Cola. It would be nice to have the “Classic McCain” back, but we’re stuck instead with the Slime-flavored McCain, and we get the sense he’ll change that brand in a moment to further that aforementioned payback that he thinks is his due.
Following that first of three debates, all commentators noted McCain’s dislike of or contempt for Senator Obama. It is hard not to think that race plays a part in McCain’s emotions about Obama, not to mention the public’s as displayed in the relative evenness of the polls–ask yourself whether a white guy with Obama’s appeal and growing presidential credibility would be 20 points ahead in the polls after the long string of McCampaign disasters instead of just to 3 to 9 points. But even if we rule out race, I don’t think that McCain’s vitriol is a case of a conservative hating “the most liberal man in Congress” (something that Obama is most definitely not). I don’t think McCain cares enough for ideology, or even thinks in terms that large.
“Maverick” also happens to be the name of a pinball machine based on the Gibson-Foster movie of the same name. As McCain goes careening about, hitting the flipper, being the flipper, changing his brand and trying some very odd maneuvers to achieve his rightful destiny as President, this Obama guy is blocking the shots. This upstart! This young guy who was never a POW! This fellow who has not suffered enough! This community organizer! First it was McCain’s own party, with Rove and Bush II smearing him out of the running in 2000. He has waited impatiently over eight recent years for his due, and even embraced his Republican Chief Torturer, Karl Rove. And now this? No wonder the man is full of outrage and contempt.
The Palin Debate and the 10th Anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death
September 22, 2008 | Filed Under Election 2008, Opinion and Commentary | 1 Comment
UPDATE: Within days of my writing this, Sarah Palin had done her Katie Couric interviews and had demonstrated several times more what a shallow and moronic candidate she is. So the limelight she once enjoyed is finally casting a sickly green pallor, but she has still not been questioned about her Church and it’s extreme views. – September 28.
Governor Sarah Palin is scheduled to debate Senator Joe Biden on October 2. Given the softball interviews that Palin has enjoyed so far, this could be her first and only trial by tough questions. Unlike two of the three presidential debates that will have specific focus–foreign policy and national security, domestic policy and economic issues, the one and only Palin-Biden debate is not set up to be topical. The effort to conceal Governor Palin’s lack of depth extends to a forum that ought to be the place to drill, baby, drill for candidates’ views. Instead, according to the Washington Post, Republicans sought a format that would “limit the amount of time available for their neophyte candidate, Palin, to be questioned on a single topic.”
We have every right to expect, or even demand, that the debate will bring a different sort of attention to the self-proclaimed Hockey Mom who would be VP (or P if you consider the actuarial tables and the extent of her ambitions). Although the Palin idolatry is subsiding, Mrs. Palin has for the most part enjoyed life in the kind of instant and exaggerated celebrity zone usually reserved for the talent-free stars manufactured by record companies and television, in short, a No Time for Questions On A Single Topic Zone. In this zone of silence, she remains a news sensation, and her magazine covers outnumber her answers to serious public questions.
As October approaches, a very different, decade-old news sensation is on my mind. Shortly after midnight on October 7, 1998 Aaron J. McKinney and Russell A. Henderson entered a Laramie, Wyoming bar and offered a young gay man a ride in their pickup truck. As anyone who was awake in 1998 and 1999 knows, that young man was 21-year old Matthew Shepard. The full description of what these men did to Shepard is staggering, but the brief version is that they drove him to an open field outside of town, tied him to a fence, beat him so badly that his skull fractures later proved to be inoperable, and left him for dead in near freezing temperatures. Matthew Shepard died five days later without regaining consciousness.
I bring this up because Mrs. Palin hasn’t really been made to answer questions on her extremist views, including her view that homosexuality is so distasteful and sinful that it should not be explained to young people, and has instead enjoyed chats masquerading as interviews with Charlie, Charlie, Charlie Gibson and Sean Hannity. All the while there are enough controversial Sarah Palin videos and transcripts on the Web to start an archive for a Hate is a Family Value Museum. To the best of my knowledge, Palin has not made any public statement endorsing or supporting the ‘pray away the gay’ seminars and sermons at the Wasilla Assembly of God, the church she has attended and prayed in for the past six years. On the other hand, she has not made any statement to counter her church’s messages. (Think of Barack Obama strongly condemning the views of Reverend Wright in front of millions of viewers.)
Even though it is clear that Sarah Palin makes no effort to separate church and state, she has fortunately done relatively little legislative damage with her views. But it doesn’t take anti-gay legislation or anti-choice legislation or anti-evolution legislation to feed fresh victims to the culture warriors. Palin need only be the pretty wolf-killing, gun-toting, pray-away-the-gay, book-disapproving, anti-choice, church-going poster girl. She doesn’t have to take questions about her positions, sequestered from the real press as she’s been. All she has to do is go to Vice Presidential Study Hall, memorize McCain texts, and show up for the cameras.
Unfortunately, the belief that homosexuality is a sin isn’t a showstopper for McCain-Palin voters. If some of her other nut job assertions aren’t going to do it, this one doesn’t have a chance. Even among more enlightened folks it is still okay to marginalize the rights of gays, or to assert that such matters are trivial when we have “real” problems, like an economy to fix.
The Assembly of God can go on praying away the gay, an effort that is, thank anyone’s God, doomed to failure. Sarah can go on questioning librarians about stocking books that foster an understanding of homosexuality. And come October 2, unless Gwen Ifill asks Mrs. Palin about her own or her church’s extremist views, the Republican base’s newest celebrity can go on implicitly getting out the theo-con vote. Worse still, while the Shepard family remembers a different October night, Sarah Palin will get another free ride into the adoring crowd and the bright lights that she seems to love more than moose burgers, snow machining, and the First Dude combined. And in some town in America–maybe even Wasilla–someone will think it is okay to take a kid out into the night and slay away the gay.
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“Please help your children understand diversity without fearing it. Be an example of acceptance and compassion. The consequences of hate hurt everyone. It hurts not only the victim–it hurts their family and friends. It destroys the families of the perpetrators. Lives are lost, lives are ruined and lives are changed forever.” – Judy Shepard, on the seventh anniversary of her son Matthew’s death, October 12, 2005.