Left behind by democracy

Dear Editors,

I was denied the right to vote by no fault of my own. Less than a month ago, I moved to the Reno/Tahoe area from Durango for a job promotion as an operations manager with Amazon.com. Prior to leaving Colorado, I made a formal request for an absentee ballot with La Plata County Clerk and Recorder Linda Daley's office. On multiple attempts, Ms. Daley's office had sent the ballot to a totally incorrect address. The ballot was never sent out correctly, and thus I was not able to vote this year.

My frustration with this situation goes far deeper than simply being peeved with the inability of Ms. Daley's office to type an address correctly. Part of the problem also lies with our secretary of state, Donetta Davidson. I researched the sort of recourse that I had for resolving this issue and have some interesting information I believe is worth sharing.

In prior elections, Colorado used to employ the use of "provisional ballots," which are intended for use when clerical errors related to registration or absentee ballots occur. The idea is that you let a person vote and then later verify that they voted legitimately. Sadly, as CivilRights.org has posted on their web site, Ms. Davidson's office will not allow voters who requested an absentee ballot to cast a provisional ballot. They note, "this means that eligible voters who requested but did not (receive and therefore) cast an absentee ballot will be denied the right to vote." They continue with startling facts: "This is a change from past practice in Colorado. Had this been the law in 2002, at least 13,600 Colorado voters would have been denied the right to vote."

I would ask citizens of La Plata County to please do three things:

A) Contact Secretary Davidson. Ask her to change her policy on provisional ballots.

B) Vote Linda Daley and her staff out of office since I won't have the chance this year due to the failure of her office to send a simple ballot.

C) Vote. You never appreciate the right more than when you don't have the right.

- Gary VanDenBergLake Tahoe, Nev.

Of sprawl and solutions

Dear Editors,

It's unfair to say the RGI's "fatal flaw is its failure to look at the larger picture - La Plata County as a whole." We only wishthe question had been askedearlier. It may be of interest to your readers that

FOAVdid exactly that prior to finalizing the RGI as it currently exists.

According to state law, since La Plata County is not a home rule county, citizens have no ability to beginavoterinitiative processunless that initiative is sales-tax related. Upon receiving that legal determination, FOAV set out to do whatit could -which was to pull the reins in on the city's current penchant for out-of-control growth.

To suggest that FOAV failed to acknowledge "the larger picture" is erroneous and implies that we are either uninformed or politically naive- neither of whichis true.

Unfortunately, FOAV has often been the only organization and/or individuals testifyingbefore the county commissionersregarding sprawl. Mostnotably, when the Southeast Water District was pending before the commission, FOAV representatives spoke loud and clearly about the potential forsprawlonce the Water District was approved. The outcome 4

was that county commissioners did tie their approval toestablishment of a SE Area Plan, which had been needed for some time.Whether that Area Plan willsignificantly address sprawl remains to be seen.

All too frequently, FOAV representatives, along withsome of the neighbors,are the only participants in such public hearings.

We invite the community, especially thoseconcerned about county sprawl, to join us before the County Commission and urge it to adopt the necessary regulations that will control sprawl.

That, after all, is the only wayto stop sprawl,while expanding the city's population to 40,000 will not.

- Renee Parsons,

Friends of the Animas Valley

Scare tactics on public lands

Dear Editors,

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

At least that's what one would have to conclude about recreation impacts on public lands if the Forest Service/BLM spokespersons quoted in your article of

Oct. 21 were to be believed.

There they go again, trotting out that tired old "loved to death" scare, without quoting a single valid statistic to back up their claim that increasing use is "exhausting the recreation resource."

In fact, the Forest Service has very little idea of how many visitors they have and zero idea of long-term trends in visitation.

As late as 1998, the Forest Service was still claiming to have over 800 million annual visitors. This so-called "explosion of use" was a main justification for the Recreational Fee Demonstration Program (Fee Demo) and was cited as a reason for supporting Fee Demo by many members of Congress, including Scott McInnis.

But the 800 million number was totally bogus. At the time, you could be counted once when you stayed at a campground, again when you stopped at a visitor center, and yet again when you used the toilet at a rest area, all on the same visit to the same forest. If you drove through a National Forest on a highway (I-70, say) you were counted as a "view visit" even if you never took an exit ramp!

In 2000, after admitting in the annual Fee Demo Report to Congress that "In the past, visitation estimates have been largely unreliable," the Forest Service initiated a new, more statistically valid method of counting called National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM). The first year of NVUM estimates showed only 209 million visitors, less than one-fourth of what they had been claiming!

As to trends, guess what? Visitation is actually declining! The NVUM estimates peaked at 214 million in 2001 and dropped 4.7 percent, to 204 million in 2003.

In Forest Service Region 2, where the San Juan Forest ranks 10th out of 12 forests in number of visitors, overall visitation has dropped from 38.6 million in 2000 to 32.5 million in 2003.

While it is hard to discern valid trends with only four years of data, this is right in line with public lands managed by the Dept of Interior (National Parks, BLM, Fish & Wildlife), where reliable numbers go back much farther. On DOI lands, visitation peaked in 1998 and has been flat or down ever since, with a whopping 13 percent decline in the BLM alone.

NVUM has published only one year (2000) of detailed data for the San Juan National Forest. That single report is loaded with interesting statistics but cannot be used to bolster the case for any trend, up or down, since it covers only one calendar year. (Read the report at fs.fed.us/recreation/programs/nvum/reports/year1/r2_san_juan_final.htm).

In the report, we learn that 51 percent of visitors are from the local area and that our main activities are relaxation, viewing scenery, hiking/walking, and driving for pleasure on roads. Are these the sinister, high-impact activities that demand "increased management" and "heightened regulation?"

Only 5 percent of visitors on the San Juan used a Wilderness Area. Not a single Wilderness visitor surveyed said that they felt overcrowded. But new rules to reduce crowding are in the works anyway.

The Forest Service's favorite bogeymen, those whose primary activity is OHV use, were only 3 percent of visitors, far behind fishermen (13 percent), and hikers (10 percent), and about even with mountain bikers (4 percent). But it's OHV users that are being used as scapegoats to justify the supposed need for more enforcement dollars.

The local Forest Service has access to all of these statistics and many more but they chose not to quote them for your article because the numbers fail to support their case for ever-increasing visitation and ever-growing damage. Unless things are bad and getting worse, unless the sky is falling, how can they continue to call for ever-increasing budgets, or justify their growing reliance on user fees?

Ah yes, fees. Beware. When a Forest Service spokesperson says "there are a number of areas within the San Juan National Forest that could see increased management in the near future," that is code for mandatory permits for wilderness, OHV, mountain biking, and other uses. And nationally there is no longer any such thing as a free mandatory permit, so get ready for fees.

The San Juan is one of the last few holdouts nationally with no Fee Demo sites. The pressure is on from their regional and national managers to "get with the program." Our age of innocence is about to end, and then the sky really will be falling.

- Sincerely, Kitty Benzar,

Western Slope No-Free Coalition,

Durango

Of sprawl and solutions

Dear Editors,

It's unfair to say the RGI's "fatal flaw is its failure to look at the larger picture - La Plata County as a whole." We only wishthe question had been askedearlier. It may be of interest toyour readers that FOAVdid exactly that prior to finalizing the RGI as it currently exists.

According to state law, since La Plata County is not a home rule county, citizens have no ability to beginavoterinitiative processunless that initiative is sales-tax related. Upon receiving that legal determination, FOAV set out to do whatit could -which was to pull the reins in on the city's current penchant for out-of-control growth.

To suggest that FOAV failed to acknowledge "the larger picture" is erroneous and implies that we are either uninformed or politically naive- neither of whichis true.

Unfortunately, FOAV has often been the only organization and/or individuals testifyingbefore the county commissionersregarding sprawl. Mostnotably, when the Southeast Water District was pending before the commission, FOAV representatives spoke loud and clearly about the potential forsprawlonce the Water District was approved.The outcome was that county commissioners did tie their approval toestablishment of a SE Area Plan, which had been needed for some time.Whether that Area Plan willsignificantly address sprawl remains to be seen.

All too frequently, FOAV representatives, along withsome of the neighbors,are the only participants in such public hearings.

We invite the community, especially thoseconcerned about county sprawl, to join us before the County Commission and urge it to adopt the necessary regulations that will control sprawl.

That, after all, is the only wayto stop sprawl,while expanding the city's population to 40,000 will not.

- Renee Parsons,

Friends of the Animas Valley

A Sump for Campbell?

Dear Editors,

With the power of the pen, President Bush immortalized Senator Campbell by renaming Ridges Basin Reservoir - Lake Nighthorse. There are a couple of things that need to be considered:

1. This lake is a fake. It is a reservoir, an artificial body of water only in existence because of a dam. In many years, the reservoir basin will likely be a mud flat. Is that something you want to be known for?

2. Sen. Domenici rammed through the name change without talking to the people of Durango, the Bodo or Harper families, who made it possible for the land to be used, or, I suspect, the Southern Ute Tribe. Why ask the Colorado locals, they don't matter?

3. The Board on Geographic Names only allows people's names to go on a geographic place after that person has been dead for at least five years. Last I looked Sen. Campbell is very much alive.

4. While he is alive, the senator is also being investigated for alleged kickbacks and other improprieties. Naming a reservoir for him seems more like a political slap in the face rather than a name made in honor.

We appreciate Senator Campbell's years of service to Colorado. With all the hoopla over his retirement and the divisive nature of A-LP, having the reservoir named after the senator is not right. Instead of calming the waters, the name change instead continues to pick at the scab of A-LP.

- Dave Wegner,

Durango

Best wishes from Saginaw, Mo.

Editor Durango Telegraph:

I was in Durango to ride the train to Silverton and picked up a copy of the paper and read a letter by Peter (Misled) Miesler. The letter was full of lies. If you wish to be under the rule of the United Nations and immediately pay a 3 percent per person tax and let them prosecute our president, vote for a liberal.

Go back to Germany. We don't want an inch of property, we free people. The Germans, the Russians, the French. Now, they are against us. We are now trying to free the people of Iraq.

This may be an answer to your predicament.

If you read the Bible, read only one verse: Romans 1:32. If you don't know what this means, ask any minister.

- Charles Yeager,

Saginaw, Mich.

A piece of Republican fan mail

Dear Editors,

You can print one less copy each month and save money. After reading your liberal piece of s--paper, I vow to never even touch one again. How any American can support your favorite candidate is beyond my simple, although rich, Republican mind.

- C.L. McLeod,

Durango