Why Home Rule?

The number one compelling reason communities convert to Home Rule status in this day and age is;…….corruption. Yes ladies and gentlemen the big C. With no oversights sooner or later your public employees and elected officials start noticing you do not pay attention. When this happened in Estes Park is not clear but it did evolve and we have a mess on our hands.
Yes this Estes Parkian is willing to come out of the closest and make a public omission: yes I believe Town Hall is corrupt!
Tom Pickering stood in front of the town trustees and vomited an hours worth of pure gibberish at the last trustee meeting Tuesday. With a straight face he was relating current traffic counts and RMNP entrance numbers and a nonrelated report from 2002. The trustees buy off on that hog wash. Regardless what shade of rose colored eye wear you use nothing Tom Pickering and his posse presented made sense let alone resemble a professional advertising and marketing plan. Please at least lie to me that there is a strategy. No town in Colorado, not even the City and County of Denver, has its own advertising–marketing department. There are communities that have formed legal marketing districts and call them CVB’s, but they hire Madison Ave. firms to develop professional campaigns that include built in and ongoing conversion devices, marketing, promotions, advertising and they work. There is no excuse for Mr. Pinkham to not blow a gasket last Tuesday night. Mr. Pinkham claims to have a corporate business back ground. If you allowed that kind of shady work for your corporate employers it would have been a short career, you are the representative of the electorate Mr. Pinkham you did not join the “town team” or did you? You can excuse Sue Doylan because she is a local bred junk yard dog who doesn’t know anything beyond how to bite; being the bully is not representing your electorate Susie. (And what the hell is it with the South east Texas accent of trustee Newsome).
Anyone that spends that much effort hiding their activities has a lot to hide. What are you hiding?
Truthfully Home Rule status is not required to mandate a system where town employees spend monies in a responsible and professional manner, only responsible elected officials. By that I mean competitive public bids with public bid openings not the politically driven ATM cash machine we now use. A competent public employee would not want to be negotiating services in the back room; the personal liabilities are just too great. All the in-breeding that has gone on developing in house administrative personnel is necessary to maintain “the system”.
Is that Tom Pickering’s son, off spring, fruit of his loins, on the town roster too, by golly it is!! Tom’s family were failures in business here in Estes but they have become the masters of the fleecing of its citizens, it’s a family tradition.
People do not trust Town Hall and they should not, how often have you heard this, “the Town has the money and people will gravitate to the gold”. Before it is all said and done there will be some perp-walks. What will they do next to embarrass us all to the rest of the world?