“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men…”
There were no surprises at the February 20, 2024, meeting of the Park County Board of Commissioners meeting where the asKag LLC (the Shirley family entity formed to establish a solid waste transfer station) PUD (Planned Unit Development) Final Plan and Plat Case #23PUD-04 was approved pending a resolution with nine further conditions added.
The vote, again, no surprises, was 2 to 1. Commissioner Chair Amy Mitchell voted no, citing the lack of plat note minutiae. She also provided a soliloquy about property rights and zoning that ended with the caution before we buy property, we should “go into any purchase eyes wide open on what your reality is going to be where you live. …We want people to have the quality of life that they anticipated when they purchased their home or property.”
Mitchell’s explanation of her no vote is a curiosity. Kudos, of course, for her acknowledgment we should be entitled to the quality of life we anticipated when we purchased our property. Her caution about exercising due diligence before we take the plunge to buy property begs the more pertinent questions: Who could have anticipated a solid waste transfer station being approved for construction in what is essentially a residentially zoned area?
May we assume Mitchell’s campaign for reelection as District 1 Commissioner had no impact on her no vote? I don’t know. Is this quality of life issue the point, and maybe the only point, where she diverges from her ideological doppelganger, Dave Wissel? Again, I don’t know.
Should we reflect on what Mitchell said during her 2020 campaign for Commissioner? She supported creating more dump stations and stated she would work on that as a commissioner. Although she was talking about human waste, she mentioned trash and rubbish, too. She said, “The county has created their own problems by passing regulations and ordinances that are not uniformly enforced. …If they’re not enforced, we got nothin’. Right now, Park County has got nothin’, and landowners know that.”
Question: If Mitchell understood four years ago that “Park County has got nothin’,” what has she done as a commissioner to correct that?
District 3 Commissioner Dave Wissel’s soliloquy was classical Wissel, even repeating twice what he’s said in countless BOCC work sessions and quasi-judicial meetings: “I’m as old as Methuselah,” a homey adage for sure. And, predictably, Wissel went off on a foray into property and zoning history, which clarifies nothing other than Wissel’s love of esoteric litanies. Wissel’s claim that he “really struggled” with the issue can be accepted as truth or not. Interestingly, Wissel cited sections of the Park County Land Use Regulations where he found (raises a finger!) transfer stations cited. Noting that they appear in the agricultural (Section 5-301) and industry (Section 5-310) sections of the regulations, but because he ran out of time, he didn’t study the residential regulations concerning transfer stations. One can only posit that the question at hand would have been more well-served by first examining the residential regulations regarding transfer stations. He said he was amazed to find a provision for a transfer station associated with agricultural use. He didn’t know that. After 38 years as the County Assessor, he didn’t know that. And, by the way, there is no allowance for a transfer station in a commercial zone.
District 2 Commissioner Dick Elsner, who has never wavered in his support for the asKag project, and who, I gather, pissed off many of the affected residents in the process (problems controlling his Type A personality?), provided a soliloquy related to the uncompromising necessity for Commissioners to follow the rules and regulations. “If commissioners…doing laws would say, Well, I don’t like this, and it’s just because I don’t like this, that’s when you start getting into tyranny. When you have hearings like this, where we go through existing rules, so everybody knows pretty much what the rules are. Now, you can always have different opinions of what that rule is, and we’re the ones who decide kind of what that rule is and the way it’s interpreted. …And that’s the way you maintain a society that is free, is you follow rules that are established. You try not to let your personal feelings into it.”
Elsner’s comments are well-taken. Public officials can only do what current laws, rules, and regulations require or allow them to do. So, we can ask where in the law, rules, and land use regulations a predominantly residential community is compatible with a solid waste transfer station, which, as suggested, is a heavy industrial use. Or is it simply an industrial use compatible with the regulations for agriculture and industry-zoned properties?
Commissioners Wissel and Elsner admitted that land use decisions are rarely easy to adjudicate. I suggest one reason for that, as stated by Mike Stowiki in his comments before the board, is that current regulations are incompatible with the reality of what Park County is and is becoming. He said, “We have a serious planning problem in the county. We need to be more forward-looking rather than trying to fit individual proposals within an outdated plan. We seem to be trying to navigate rules in a master plan that doesn’t necessarily work for the residents or the business owners in where we’ve come as a county.”
Approval of the asKag proposal was never in doubt. At least, I never doubted it would be approved, given the personalities who made the decision—the Commissioners. Amy Mitchell’s vote was a tossup, given she seeks another term as District 1 Commissioner. May we assume she, like me, knew the proposal would be approved from the beginning of deliberations but understood there was political expediency in voting against it?
So, it is a done deal. And, as Wissel said, we’ll see if this—a residential community and a solid waste transfer station—can coexist. Maybe all will be well. Perhaps it won’t.
“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!” – “To a Mouse” – Robert Burns, 1785
Translated: “The best-laid schemes of mice and men Go often awry, And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy!”
