“Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Park County Manager Lucas Meyer probably doesn’t believe his self-satisfying ploy to muddle the issue on March 31, 2026, at the Board of County Commissioners meeting regarding statutory mandates delineating the authority and responsibility for the creation of strategic master plans for Colorado counties, including Park, and the authority and responsibility for zoning and land use changes was gaslighting. It was. But Meyer’s effrontery goes further.
What Meyer (and, obviously, Wissel, Mitchell, and Gemmer) don’t appear to understand is the state’s statutory mandate for what entity is solely responsible for developing a strategic master plan, and what the commission’s role is once the plan is adopted by the Planning Commission. You’d expect a county manager who receives about $100,000 of taxpayer monies to have the wherewithal to understand a state law that mandates how counties in Colorado are to be run. As I’ve noted before, however, MAGA reads statutes to their ideological benefit, regardless of what the factual, true, legally defensible meaning of the statute is. Not only statutes but also the Constitution itself.
What input, if any, Nate Osterberg, the county’s contract paralegal, may have provided Meyer on statutory language relating to the development of the strategic master plan, its adoption, and its approval is unclear.
The discussion on March 21, 2026, focused on manipulated GIS grids showing parcels in all areas of Park County, with color coding applied to show zoning and proposed economic development areas which were the work product only of the three commissioners, Wissel, Mitchell, and Gemmer, with no input from citizens and, we would later learn during the meeting, there was no involvement from professional staff either.
Commissioners explained what they did and their thinking behind it. County Manager Meyer put his two cents in after citizen David Santo’s comments:
I have written extensively about the creation and adoption of Park County’s 2025 Strategic Master Plan at the links below.
Wissel’s New Paradigm, The 2025 Strategic Master Plan, and the Planning Commission Meeting of March 19, 2025. The state statute most relevant to the discussion is included in “Wissel’s New Paradigm” above.
The Board of Commissioners, and certainly County Manager Meyer, have never understood the statutory separation between the Planning Commission’s authority to create a Strategic Master Plan and to adopt that plan without the political interference of the Board of County Commissioners, or the intrusion of the county administrative staff, the county manager, for instance, into their work product. The video below reveals this seemingly insurmountable issue.
As you watch the video, bear in mind that Meyer smugly recites two Colorado statutes he incorrectly (gaslighting) identifies to support his and the commissioners’ notion that they can modify the Planning Commission’s work product (the Strategic Master Plan) to their liking. The two statutes he cites do not grant the county commissioners any authority other than to approve or disapprove the Planning Commission’s work product. I’ve included the statutory definition of “commission,” which in this case means the Planning Commission.
Here’s where you can view the three commissioners’ and the county manager’s bright ideas about commercial development in and around each parcel in the county by viewing the BOCC agenda, item III of March 31, 2025.
The process of commercial development in the county is a land use and zoning exercise. The Strategic Master Plan is an aspirational document prepared by the Planning Commission, which involved untold hours of meetings with citizens, whose statutory purpose was not to incorporate what the BOCC and the County Manager erroneously claim it should.
One last thing. Speaking truth to power is a courageous act. While Commissioner Wissel mentioned a few times that county staff (planning commission) assisted with the development of the hashtagged parcel maps, one brave member of the staff stepped to the podium and said, “No, staff had no part in this.”
