Dusty Johnson has my vote. No easy answers on property taxes and fire districts. Lastly, a vocab lesson. Let's learn about "biodiversity".
Like Senator Sonnenberg, she has my vote.
When it comes to who I choose to represent me, I do not look for someone to match what I'd want exactly. I'm okay with a difference of opinion on some things as long as we line up on the big ideas and as long as the candidate is someone that bothers to listen in a meaningful way.
I recently heard that my state house district will have a new candidate (Dusty Johnson--see both a Fort Morgan Times article and her candidate page linked below).
I reached out to her (prior to the article and the launch of her site) to see what her philosophy on listening to constituents was and was satisfied that she will be as good as Commissioner Sonnenberg and Senator Pelton.
She, in fact as she pointed out to me, used to handle their communications and worked with them so she likely has the same ethic.
As such, I wish her luck. She has my vote and I encourage you (if you're in the district) to go check out her site and give a vote for her due and thoughtful consideration.
She would be a welcome change from the current rep (who has yet to answer a single communique from me incidentally).
https://www.fortmorgantimes.com/2023/12/13/dusty-johnson-announces-candidacy-for-state-representative-for-house-district-63/
https://www.dustyforcolorado.com/
No easy answers on property taxes and fire districts.
The Sun article below is about how the State Board of Equalization recently met and voted no on DougCo's attempt to lower property taxes by lowering assessed home values. There is some interesting political dynamics here, but I'll attach that as a "related" short post.
What I want to talk about here is something you see attached as screenshot 1. This quote is from Kristy Olme, President of the Colorado State Fire Chiefs.
When you read enough politics, you see patterns, and one of the patterns I see in this state is that every time a discussion of property taxes and a reduction comes up, the Fire Chiefs are against it.
This post started out as a complaint about that. I mean, despite the words from Ms. Olme, the impression I had is that they ALWAYS side with keeping more and more of my (and your) money.
I do try to be fair, however, so I sent the email you see attached as screenshot 2, asking if my impression was right and/or what measures the Colorado State Fire Chiefs have taken to work to LOWER the property tax burden on homeowners.
After talking with Garry Briese (he called in response to my email), I changed the thurst of this post. That is, I still hold some concerns about the Fire Chiefs' position, but I now have a fuller understanding of the issue. Let me explain.
Fire districts both volunteer and paid, as opposed to a fire department which is funded differently, get their funding ENTIRELY from property taxes and nowhere else. They are, in fact, a special type of taxing district (Title 32 if you want to delve deeper) that CANNOT seek other sources of revenue.
Let me try to relay the frustrations that Mr. Briese shared with me. Be aware that these are not exact quotes, but they are summaries from my notes, bolstered by some things he sent to me in an email.
Over the last 10 years, as the Assembly has whittled away at the state's assessment rate, Fire Districts face shrinking budgets. At the same time, the number of calls in many districts has gone up. See the second link below for their position paper on the topic. As you read, keep in mind that this is not a study by an independent organization; it is a document of talking points to share with policymakers. That doesn't negate its truth in whole or part, just bear in mind it's not an unbiased assessment and you're getting one side of the story.
Equipment costs have also risen. See the third link below for (again, note that this is material from the fire service and thus you're getting half the story) their documents on their costs.
In response, The Fire Chiefs did get the Assembly's go ahead to secure other ways to generate revenue from the Assembly. The go ahead, however, required county sign-off, which didn't happen in many counties.
I think by this point you get the theme. The idea being that the fire districts in this state feel squeezed with more work, less money, and no way out. This was driven home by Mr. Briese repeatedly telling me that if things don't change, they will be unable to deliver the same services they do now.
When I said above that fire district funding is not a simple black and white thing, I meant it. Hearing the perspective of the Fire Chiefs gave me pause on many of my original thoughts.
After all, I sympathize with what he's saying. Who lately couldn't? We're all feeling squeezed with more work for the same (or less--especially with inflation eroding our wages). I also know that citizens are (myself included) thoughtless in terms of trading short-term cost savings for long term problems. One look at this country's infrastructure gives you all the evidence you need. I also, like everyone else, want to have functioning fire departments near me.
Penetrating through what are obviously talking points and lobbying materials to get to something that is reasonable, however tells me that besides a healthy dose of scare tactics about loss of services, we have a typical government dynamic at play here.
Government agencies, by and large, see one solution to money woes. Unlike private enterprise, unlike your household finances, when money pressures arise from increased costs or breaking equipment, government doesn't look to ways to make do, they look to getting more money. More of our money leaving us, in turn, with less.
I ask myself (and this notably also goes unanswered by my conversation and in the things Mr. Briese sent me) how the Fire Chiefs see their responsibility to make do and do more with less like we all have to. Do they really need a brand new engine? A brand new ambulance? Do they need to expand their mission to do things like helping morbidly obese people go to the toilet if called? Do they need to donate old equipment to other countries instead of selling it to smaller departments when they get new?
I also am fine with fire districts seeking out new revenue streams, but the devil will be in the details. And the details of what I read were scant. About all I could find is what you see attached as screenshot 3 (which comes from the end of the third link). Absent some detail on the topic, about all we can do is talk generalities.
In response to my question of why Fire Districts can't take the route available to them that already exists to raise more money (asking the voters) and his reply was that doing that would necessitate an "ask" every couple of years and a high price tag to ask. (I'm not sure whether the price tag was for running an election AND winning it or just running it).
What about raising revenue by a sales tax (an idea I have heard bandied about as a way to increase revenue)? I'm okay with it, as long as its voter approved. Hell, I'm even okay with a fee-based approach to funding; that is, let those that use it help pay the cost (provided state law is such that ones insurance pays the fee above a certain dollar amount).
What I wouldn't want would be yet another fee system a la the General Assembly where we create yet another government enterprise and take fees from taxpayers wholly without consent. Had enough of that.
This is not a simple story with a simple villain and a simple good idea. The answers are a little more complicated.
I wish, more than anything else, that when we discussed the issue, however, that the issue were taken up more as a shared struggle--something where we recognize the value of their services and decide to give up some money to pay for them and they recognize that they can make do just like all families and private businesses do.
https://coloradosun.com/2023/12/18/douglas-county-property-tax-relief-rejected/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GhqdQKddoP76wE9Ee1T-84noTSWixv2p/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=105405937749106967542&rtpof=true&sd=true
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BKLezX69Ofp0v95wiWdK9txAniPHkzIQ/view?usp=sharing
Related:
Here are the interesting political dynamics I referenced above.
Return to the Sun article linked below.
I want to note a couple things here. First, the board that told DougCo no are Democrats. Two are from the Assembly (State Senator Chris Hansen and Speaker of the House Julie McCluskie).
The remainder are Polis appointees, one of whom is his office's representative.
Now, I want you to put this "no" vote alongside the letter that Polis sent to local governments after Prop HH failed and the special session came to its unremarkable end telling them to provide relief because the ball was now in their hands.
Right. Got it. So the Democrats failed to do meaningful relief at the state level (and have failed for two years now) and then a local attempt at relief is also voted down by a group of Democrats after the state's leading Democrat tasked them with providing relief.
Yeah, gotta say the Democrats are doing a bang up job at running things here in Colorado.
https://coloradosun.com/2023/12/18/douglas-county-property-tax-relief-rejected/
Vocab lesson: biodiversity
In relation to research I'm doing, and the writing on wolves I've done lately, the word biodiversity has popped up a lot.
When I see convergences like these (for a pictoral representation of the sense in which I use convergence here, see the drawing above), it means it's time to start paying attention.
This could, of course, be an example of the "red car effect" (see the first link below for more context), but I have an intuition that biodiversity will soon be appearing more and more in discussions about the environment and global warming; that is, an uptick in the number of times I'm seeing it tells me that it is becoming (or is already) a talking point.
As such, I think some educating is in order.
I can give you a quick sense of the word and how I've seen it used (along with my thoughts on the matter), but first let me point you to a couple of scholarly sources. Links 2 and 3 are reasonably approachable and give you a good overview of the topic in general and particular to agriculture.
Biodiversity has different meanings in different fields (link 2 covers this in more detail), and it can be viewed in different ways. For example, one way that biodiversity manifests is as a genetic variability among individuals in a certain population in a certain area.
Let's say that we had a bunch of mice in a field. They're all small and mouse colored, little mouse ears, little mouse noses, etc. In other words, all these mice look pretty much the same.
You might not think that there is much biodiversity in this group and in one sense you're right. The mice in this field are all the same species and same kind of mouse. Zooming in to the genetic level might change your conclusion though.
Let's say that something horrible happened in this field. A mouse plague swept through it and killed off all but 2 families who then bred and repopulated it. This, again, would also be a case of low biodiversity at the genetic level because they're all the same mouse and they're all pretty closely related.
If, however, the field were populated by mice from a lot of different families, you would have a whole different spectrum of mice in this field: different immune systems, slightly different physiology on the inside, a great variety of genetic information.
In my readings on this topic to further understand the movement toward increasing biodiversity, I think that the way it's getting used in common conversation is less genetic and more about a diversity of creatures in general. I say this especially because increasing (and legislating) biodiversity on the genetic level would be difficult.
For example, consider the quote I attached as a screenshot. It comes from a Sun article I've posted on before (and which is linked fourth below for convenience).
In agriculture, the word biodiversity (again) has a multitude of meanings and senses and they're not terribly different from the general terms, it just applies specifically to, say, a farmer's field. For example, you might consider how biodiverse a field of corn is by looking in the soil and considering the different types (or not) of organisms you find there.
I'll be posting more as I read more and have more to share, but make no mistake about my thoughts as to the wisdom of biodiversity. It's a good thing. We do want it. Diversity in biological systems, whether that's genetic or at the species level, makes them more robust and adaptable.
I remember a show once where someone was inseminating cattle. They walked around with what looked like a briefcase of semen from various bulls and when they got to a particular heifer, they picked a bull that would "fill in the gaps" of that heifers physiological characteristics.
In my garden, I don't put out the same crops in the same spots year after year because I don't want the bugs in the air or the soil to come to expect them (thus ruining my yield). In the same way, a smart farmer tends to his soil to ensure lots of living things down there.
But ultimately the question isn't whether or not we agree on the fact that biodiversity is a good thing. It's how we handle it.
Are we really and truly, as the quote from the Sun article has it, facing an biodiversity extinction crisis, an era of extinction? Are we facing one that we humans created if so?
Should we in some way enforce biodiversity? If so, how?
How do we balance wanting biodiversity with other constraints such as cost and production in a field?
That is where the discussion needs to be and as you talk with others remember this. Do not allow them to turn it into a discussion of the merits of biodiversity itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK224405/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/agricultural-biodiversity
https://coloradosun.com/2023/12/18/colorado-wolf-reintroduction-grand-county/
Related:
If you want to see part of the push towards regulating biodiversity, the op-ed below is a good start (and example).
Worth a read; remember to read widely if for no other reason than to know what arguments the other side will make.
https://coloradosun.com/2023/12/28/opinion-endangered-species-act-50-colorado