The opposition has apparently accomplished very little, January 14 2000 - I’ve spent the last several weeks organizing a campaign to finish our petition drive. I’ve spoken at several meeting and have more on the agenda. Because of unexplained irregularities (!) in our mail out program, we will finish our drive by going door to door; we’ll beat them in the streets.

The opposition has apparently accomplished very little in the last few months. Last August, Mr. Deckert said that underwriters were, “standing in line ” to underwrite the bond issue for the Conference Center. Months later, I doubt if that was the case. The Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) has yet to select an architectural firm, let alone agree on a design and accomplish all of the committee work and approval steps required to proceed with the bond issue. Commissioner Harrison was recently quoted as saying that “nothing has been accomplished.”

There is evidence, if you closely read between the lines of the news reports and TDC minutes, that, given the community resistance to the Conference Center project, the underwriters might require more than just one cent of our bed tax to back such a project. That leaves only the county and us taxpayers to further participate in the required guarantee. That’ll be an even tougher sell than their current blatherings.

The “bottom line” of all of this news is this: we have time to finish our petition collecting, carefully check each name for validity, make and retain a copy all of this information, and present it to the BOCC.

We intend to submit a sizeable cushion of extra names, all validated, before any additional county validation takes place. In this way, it would be very difficult to discredit a large portion of our submission and, in so doing, declare our petition worthless.

You can help us to finish sooner by volunteering to walk a precinct and collect signatures. It’s a lengthy process, and dozens of volunteers are bringing us closer to our goal as I write this piece. We’ll bring petitions to you and collect them when signed; we no longer trust the mail to be tamperproof, and with good reason.

Only I have ever known the number of signed petitions; that's a protective measure. So, if you hear the story one County Commissioner tells about “someone close to me betraying me and telling him our numbers”, you, too, will know that he’s a liar and probably came by his information through illegal means. We’ll see.

Cheers!
Gaylan

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