During the Regan era we all experienced the phenomenon of voodoo economics, in Estes Park we have our own version, it’s called zombie politics.
Estes Park politics, sans the mountains surrounding the Valley, minus all the visitors driving the areas economy; we are a community of people. The interactions of the people in the Valley are its politics.
Estes Park citizens interacting and maneuvering amongst each other, manipulating, posturing , vying to improve their status, stature, income or influence; politics. When people use the word politics it’s generally with bile after taste, but there is no getting away, you are all involved.
Every one that lives in the Estes Valley is a player in our political game, there being no cocoon, you may claim a moral high road, you can be an active manipulator, but the common ground is you are all still players. You have a roll and you have civic responsibilities, you may personally choose not to vote by pulling a bag over your head and retreating into a hole, this does not negate your responsibility; politicians simply slot you into the roll of inert placatory zombie. Your silent indifference and avoidance of accountability is translated as affirmation. Saying nothing is translated as you must mean yes. If you do not oppose than you must be supportive. In a small town the common habit is to ignore the goings on and then claim you didn’t know, or you assumed, plausible deniability.
Out of thousands of registered citizen voter’s only eight hundred votes, the difference in the election of your leaders is ten or twenty votes, how is this considered a mandate? Why do the other thousands of people bother to register, you never vote, do you consider registering your civic duty? Is your silent voice saying I didn’t vote so one way or the other I have no ownership, you can’t blame me because I find politics distasteful?
The silent, placating, nonvoting, inert, no opinion, majority is assumed, by the ruling politico, to be an army of support. The utter lack of involvement in a small town is devastating. The odd dynamics of Estes Park make for odd politics, the breeding of zombies.
The local long term zombies having lived here for twenty or thirty years, feel that time on task entitles them to some magic insight or special voice. It does not, whenever you preface your comments with “I have been here for twenty five years and” one has to wonder what type of special zombie you amount to. You have exactly the same problems today that you had thirty years ago, only bigger, zombies chasing their tails. How many times have you voted in those twenty five years?
Town staff has this placating inert majority so dialed in that they know for a fact that they can spend your money for what ever they want in $500,000.00 chunks and no one notices! The total bill may be 2, 3, 4 million, but if it goes out in one half million dollar chunks its okay, no one notices! Your town officials have become so addicted to the zombie populace politics that they ignore state statutes, major laws, town ordinances and common sense.
Just one recent example to magnify our point, we have recently highlighted a program here in the Este Parkian in past articles to track the politics. So we will continue to use it as an example, what do you know, what do you think you know and what is really going on.
Roll back to a recent article in the trail and free press, authored by Hizzonor and all the politics involved with this one release. The article goes on about how successful his mass transit program is. $300,000.00 dollars committed to running buses up and down Elkhorn. Any time of day that you see one of these buses they are empty, but numbers from staff say they carry 5,000 people per day, “better than Denver.” The zombie corps swallows this hook line and sinker, just believable enough to take off the edge, could be, and seems plausible, just trying to reduce traffic by adding buses into the gridlock is the explanation. Let’s all ignore reality and substitute a reality of our own choosing.
You are a zombie and you didn’t require your elected officials to justify the expenditure prior to committing half a million dollars, why would you require anything more than rhetoric and made up numbers concerning the operation? Smoke is smoke; after all you do not have ownership now do you?
You as a zombie inert person assume that the town studied this project in depth, created targets, built in accounting devices, projected cause and effect, identified a major issue, considered a menu of solutions and selected the optimal one, all in the public eye. If you assume this you are wrong it never happened, claims of success are not affirmable just fodder for the zombies.
Hizzonor had the absolute gall to invite you to ride his buses and join the team and view the convenience on the last day of the season, a free ride for the visitor. That’s awful nice of him don’t you think, but Hizzoner understands zombies do not ride buses and you will not. BUT, you were invited. You didn’t say no, so you must mean yes.
This whole bus business was supposedly modeled after systems somewhere in Bum Rush Maine, and Polygamy, Utah, that being the soul justification. It works there so we will do it here.
Well your honor, there are a lot of things that go on in Utah that I would not emulate. A mass transit system developed after an avalanche in an off the beat and path little park made auto travel in that park dangerous, is not the same thing as motoring in RMNP.
Do you think you understand the Mayors bum’s rush to Wilderness designation for RMNP? What about the mayor and town administrator’s vehement opposition to economic studies of their own town? Hold your horses Musgrave you know not who you are dealing with here, do not feed real data to our zombies when smoke up the kazoo will do.
Still think you understand this major expenditure for a bussing experiment and the towns hunger for Wilderness designation for RMNP? Are they related? What about its relationship to the town’s authority to build the visitors center and conduct the marketing functions the CVB assumed by evicting the Chamber of Commerce? Currently this case is being heard by the states appeals court when the Chamber legally questioned the town’s authority to do so as a statutory town. Are these somehow all related?
Zombies do not know - they do not care - they do not stay informed and they do not vote.
P + Z = GD
Politics + Zombies = Goofy Politics
Zombies = Goofy
