Boulder Chamber urges new city vote on municipalization – Boulder Daily Camera.
Boulder Spokeswoman Sarah Huntley…
“Legally speaking, there is no additional vote necessary,” she said. “We’re doing the due diligence to determine if the criteria can be met and creating a local utility is the best way to achieve our goals.”
My money’s on Sarah.
Yep. The city keeps saying that if another vote was held it would “disenfranchise” city voters, which would be grounds for a lawsuit. The message is that if the city succeeds in its bid to include non-incorporated residents in the muni that those residents outside the city limits are just going to have to abide by the city plan. They have no say in it, and no legal recourse, that is if Xcel is unsuccessful in stopping the city from grabbing them.
As I look at this it seems to be of a piece of a “regionalizing” plan whose goal is to kill suburbs over time. Stanley Kurtz wrote about this in his most recent book, “Redistributing The Wealth.” The book focuses on Obama and his political allies, and their ideas about regionalism, but this idea actually has friends in both political parties. One can also see it in the way unincorporated residents are treated by Boulder County.
The idea is to gradually move everybody into city centers. Even agriculture will be localized around urban centers in this plan.
It seems to be part of a national campaign, nay, international, and I think people make a mistake in pointing a finger at one person, or even both parties, but it’s good that people are talking about it, so that people can become informed about it in some fashion.
From my research, one of the major drivers of regionalism is NGOs. They have informal connections with political orgs. that fund candidates, and do advocacy on their behalf in elections. They train the “sustainability” bureaucracy, and politicians, which implement these policies. They’re a kind of “shadow party.” They’re not that visible (though you can find them on the internet, and materials related to their advocacy, pretty easily if you know where to look). They hardly ever get talked about on the news, but they’re the ones driving the policy. Organizations which George Soros funds generate the broader political support for the policies.
One example of such an NGO as I mentioned earlier is “ICLEI.” Boulder is one of its member cities. ICLEI is now just their name, but it used to be an acronym for International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives. It was founded by the United Nations many years ago. The idea was it would be a movement that would be built from the ground up. It would not be a top-down federal program. The “Smart Growth” and “sustainable” initiatives that Boulder has been talking about for years has come out of orgs like ICLEI.