At first, Boulder City Councilman Richard Polk hedged.
“Did you have pot in the car?” I asked.
“The record is available,” he answered.
Of course, the record is available. It shows that Polk had a small amount of marijuana in his vehicle when the cops stopped him Sept. 25. But now that the Boulder council has had to reprimand one of its own for having illegal drugs, it’s time for straight answers to simple questions.
The issue was never merely whether Polk was driving under the influence of dope. Tests at the time of his arrest found no detectable drugs or alcohol in Polk’s system. He later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor reckless driving.
“I agree driving under the influence (of drugs or alcohol) is not good,” Polk told me. “It can be damaging and harmful.”
So can possession.
The fact that Polk apparently wasn’t stoned while operating a motor vehicle is good. It just took awhile in our conversation for the councilman to warm up to the real problem.
His colleagues overlooked the matter entirely in his reprimand. The reprimand says, “The Council wants to be absolutely clear with you and with the community we represent, that we condemn in the strongest terms the operation of a motor vehicle while under the influence of drugs and alcohol.”
The sanction makes no mention of Polk’s possession of illegal drugs.
“We didn’t reference possession directly,” Mayor Mark Ruzzin admitted Tuesday. “That was perhaps an oversight.”
You think?
As it stands, the official position of the council in Boulder, a college community struggling with drug and alcohol use by teenagers, can be read as: Don’t drive stoned or drunk. It says nothing about acquiring and using illegal drugs or alcohol.
In Monday’s reprimand, some of Polk’s fellow councilmembers said his sanction should not be taken as a judgment. The don’t-judge notion arose, Ruzzin said, “because the arrest report and final disposition were two very different situations.”
“The analysis of the court is important,” Polk explained. “The press might have looked at that and considered it. But the press’ job is not to protect me.”
No one can protect Polk from himself.
Sure, the police report and the court record paint different pictures about whether Polk was driving stoned.
But there was never any question regarding a city councilman in possession of illegal drugs, even if he now balks at answering the question directly or, when he does, talks initially about how little pot he did have.
Granted, 2 grams is not much. Still, in terms of the council’s sway with the college students who make up so much of the Boulder community, parsing becomes dangerous. Young people get a contact high off the hypocrisy of adult authority figures.
Ruzzin said he knows the council’s credibility has taken “a significant hit” because of Polk’s arrest. The ability to address Polk’s situation was constrained by murky language in the city charter about how to deal with council members who break the law.
The mayor promises a charter fix to resolve the issue in the future.
“Given the constraints,” Ruzzin said, “we did the best we could.”
No, they didn’t.
Polk may not have committed a firing offense, but with a reprimand that entirely ignores what he clearly did wrong, the lesson is officially lost.
That left it to Polk, a 57-year-old child of the ’60s who now undergoes voluntary drug testing and claims to have given up his occasional pot use, to at long last tell me what should have been the first words out of his mouth.
“Whether there ever was a tolerance for drug use, there isn’t a tolerance now,” Polk said. “There are many people who did use drugs and periodically may. I’m not in a position to be one of them.
“I hope the message people receive is how serious even a small amount of an illegal substance can be to a person. Two grams can add up to big problems.”
Now, we’re talking.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1771, jspencer@denverpost.com or blogs.denverpost.com/spencer.
