Colorado Springs City Councilor Bill Murray and guests discuss local government issues, often focusing on council agenda items, underscoring their importance in our daily lives.
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New graphic 🙂 If you haven’t already, by all means read *Elon Musk: Tesla, Space X and the Quest for a Fantastic Future* by Ashlee Vance. If anyone is to be believed as to what the future holds, it’s Musk. This podcast is awfully good. Can’t you share it with the other councilpersons? NTIWDAG.
Wow, the September 2nd Council Matters was terrible. You have a guest on the show, talking about parks, who admits to not having been in a city park in YEARS. You couldn’t find anyone who has knowledge about parks to talk about them?
Then there was a discussion about public safety communications, and the statement was made that it was all encrypted. False. In fact, other than sensitive communications (SWAT, undercover, etc), almost all communications in Colorado Springs and El Paso County is NOT encrypted. In my (and many others) opinions, normal, day-to-day public safety radio communications should NOT be encrypted. It is how the public can keep tabs on what their public servants are doing.
Then there was talk about “5G” communications, and the statement was made that 5G would be expensive, since it would make your 4G phone obsolete. Also false: https://www.cnet.com/news/no-5g-isnt-going-to-make-your-4g-lte-phone-obsolete/
I expect that a podcast hosted by a city council member would at least have some modicum of expert, factual information. Very disappointing.
So, resolutions …. ordinances. I went to the trouble to ask more than one former city council member, “How much ‘teeth’ does a resolution have”? The answer was the same from both. “Resolutions don’t have any teeth, ordinances have more.” So here I go again, back to the Broadmoor Land Swap. Clearly that resolution had enough “teeth” to transfer ownership of 189.5 acres of God’s green earth (182 acres according to the Palmer Land Trust and NES) from the citizens of Colorado Springs to the Broadmoor Hotel. I don’t know about you, but if my paltry one-half acre of land changed ownership I would consider that a very significant effect. But here’s the rub. Palmer permitted the Broadmoor to change the location of the building envelope on Strawberry – *after* the council’s approval of the resolution – despite very clear language IN THE RESOLUTION disallowing such an action. And nobody so much as bats an eye? I submit that you can’t have it both ways gentlemen. Either your resolutions are toothless or they are not. If they are, you might just as well sit at home and watch Oprah as drive downtown and pretend that you are enacting meaningful legislation. JMHO.
BTW … the changing of the location of the building envelope, in addition to two other surprising and less-the-honorable actions by the heretofore highly respected (in my mind) Palmer Land Trust has prompted a decision on my part to travel to Washington D.C. this fall and have a meeting with the National Land Trust Alliance on the subject of oversight of land trust entities and their actions. I mean to speak specifically of the Palmer Land Trust’s actions with respect to the execution of the conservation easement on Strawberry Fields.
I agree with you. What have we gained with Richard Skorman being the new Council President if we cannot revisit these issues. Not just revisit but reinvestigate any discrepancies in the final product. Please take the time to bring these specific issues to our attention next Tues Aug 22nd at 1pm. The Council needs to be informed and obviously the Mayor would rather us not be. And keep us informed of your discussions with the National Land Trust Alliance. I was distressed to learn that the Colorado Municipal League which we pay large dues to based on our population will be entering the court on the side of the Broadmoor. Most of the public misunderstood the process. The first stage was to help reshape the Council. The second stage was holding the Council to the changes you wanted. I’ve seen neither.