Stop the abuse and stop these developments
Re: “Boundary changed, but no new plans yet,” March 15 news story
The residents of the Tri-Lakes area have reached a breaking point. Despite overwhelming and documented opposition, the El Paso County Board of Commissioners continues to facilitate a land-use process that effectively treats the community as an obstacle to be bypassed rather than a stakeholder to be heard.
By allowing developers like to exploit administrative loopholes — such as the recent Boundary Line Adjustment — the county is signaling that deep-pocketed developers dictate the future of Monument Hill, not the people who actually live there. Residents are rightfully furious that their voices are systematically marginalized by a process that grants the applicant extensive time and resources while limiting community input to mere three-minute snippets.
The consequences of this project — ranging from water depletion and traffic congestion to permanent environmental degradation — will be borne by those in the immediate vicinity, yet the current system ignores this reality. The community is tired of the charade. They are demanding structural reforms, including equal presentation time for citizen groups and the integration of prior records, to stop this “reset to zero” cycle that protects corporate interests at the expense of local sovereignty. The message to the Board is clear: citizens versus developers.
Theodore Roosevelt once said, “The government is us; we are the government, you and I.”
A government that prioritizes the convenience of a corporation over the voice of its citizens has forgotten its primary duty. We do not exist to accommodate a developer’s site plan; the developer exists to operate within the community we have built.
Mike Stern, Wakonda Hills, Monument
Social Security must be saved
Re: “Social Security has to slash benefits in 2032 if Congress fails to act,” March 14 commentary
Thank you to Sen. Mark Udall and Rep. Bob Beauprez for their guest editorial on the looming insolvency of Social Security. Yet I challenge them to show what they did to address this problem during their many years in Congress. It would have been much less painful back then. Someone needs to touch the third rail. Perhaps if two touched it together, the shock would not be so great.
Joe Knopinski, Littleton
I was pleased to see Mark Udall and Bob Beauprez breathlessly warn us in an opinion column that Congress needs to do something soon to fix chronic underfunding of the Social Security Trust Fund.
They are absolutely correct. They left out only one thing: They offered not a single concrete suggestion for what Congress ought to do. This is no way to get to a solution.
Let me help out here. Income is taxed at 12.4% for Social Security. Employees have 6.2% withheld from their paychecks; employers pay the other 6.2%. Those who are self-employed pay the whole 12.4%. But only up to $184,500 in income this year. In other words, once your income passes that threshold, a smaller portion of it you pay in Social Security taxes. This is fundamentally unfair.
The Social Security Administration projects that simply removing the cap on Social Security taxes would solve the underfunding problem in a way that is equitable and would lead to benefit increases overall. And some percentage of taxpayers at every income level would see benefit increases, while none would see benefits decrease.
Itap certainly worth a try.
Steve Lang, Denver
Nebraska’s canal project threatens Northeastern Colorado
Re: “Colorado’s water war with Nebraska comes to a head,” Sept. 21 news story
Farming in northeastern Colorado has never been easy, and it is getting harder. Markets are tough, input costs are up, and young people are leaving. What keeps communities in Northeastern Colorado going is agriculture, the water, the ground, and the community that ties everything together, and the proposed Perkins County Canal threatens all of it.
When you take water off farmland, the damage does not stop in crop yields. Equipment dealers, elevators, local banks, and businesses all feel it. Schools and roads will suffer. We have seen what happens to towns that lose their agricultural base, and we cannot let that happen again without a real fight.
That fight needs to be a regional one. I am asking communities across northeastern Colorado to come together and hire an independent economic consultant to assess the true local impact of this project (acres affected, jobs at risk, income lost, tax base eroded.) The Corps of Engineers will do its own analysis, but we need our own numbers. If their conclusions do not match what our communities are actually facing, we need the documentation to say so and demand they take another look.
Rural communities have always figured out how to help each other when it counts. This is one of those times. I urge local officials, water boards, farm bureaus, and civic leaders to set aside any differences and work together on this. The permit process will not wait, and neither can we.
Kimberly L. Kinnison, Ovid
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.
