Open to the Question
Conspiracy theorists see double trouble in Ron Stewart's new job
by Wayne Laugesen
Sir, I knew Carolyn Holmberg. She was a friend of mine. Commissioner, you're no Carolyn Holmberg.
So went my initial reaction to the bizarre surprise the Boulder County Commissioners sprang on us last week by appointing Chairman Ron Stewart to replace Holmberg, who died last September, as director of Boulder County Parks and Open Space.
If all public servants were like Holmberg, "bureaucrat" would be a term of endearment. Carolyn was a jolly, fun-loving, hard-working, knowledgeable person who always made time to discuss minutia about open space decisions. She was accessible and always returned calls. She seemed to love her work and enjoyed the company of her colleagues. She was even nice to adversarial reporters who asked blunt questions.
So it was a bit hard to swallow a statement by County Treasurer Sandy Hume, a former county commissioner, who defended Stewart's appointment in the Longmont Daily Times-Call , Stewart's hometown. Hume said: "Even though the Open Space Department had stellar leadership under Carolyn Holmberg, Ron was really running the program for the last 10 years or so."
Really? Whenever I had questions about county open space, Holmberg had the answers. She was the one who smoothed the deals and sold the public on major acquisitions such as the Heil and Hall ranches. Just ask Land Use Director Graham Billingsly, who worked daily with Holmberg.
"Ron Stewart was involved as a county commissioner who took special interest in open space, but Carolyn ran the department," Billingsly said. "She was creative and dedicated, and she did all of the work. When I had an issue involving open space, I went to Carolyn."
Earning every cent
Holmberg was appointed director of Parks and Open Space in 1983, after serving with Stewart on the county's Parks and Open Space Advisory Committee. At the time the county owned only 4,000 acres of open space land. During her 15-year tenure, Holmberg added about 50,000 more acres. Almost never, in acquiring this land, did anyone feel stepped on or exploited. Unlike the city's Open Space Department, Holmberg's program never bullied anyone out of a home. Unlike the city, she didn't exploit wildlife hysteria to keep people away from their public lands. Holmberg held near and dear the fact the people of Boulder County paid for and owned the open space. Her fundamental respect for folks from all walks of life left sellers feeling good about themselves when parting with land that had been passed down for generations.
Stewart best summed up this trait in an obituary after Holmberg died of kidney failure at age 54. Stewart told the story of a land deal involving "Shorty" Lohr of Longmont. "She knew Shorty had a great interest in kids, and one of the things she suggested to him was that they set up an endowment for a nature center for kids from the St. Vrain School District," Stewart told the Boulder Planet last September. "He not only agreed to sell his land, but donated some of the proceeds to the Lohr Center."
Every time I spoke with Carolyn about a pending open space deal, she spoke with respect for the private owners. She always knew the history of the land we were buying, and never failed to point out how the property would be used in a manner amenable to the sellers. One could routinely reach Carolyn in her office at 8 p.m., long after most other county employees had gone home. She earned every cent of her $80,000 salary.
So here's Ron Stewart, a career politician, waltzing into Carolyn's job without pay, as if it's something to be handled by a bored volunteer. The day after his appointment, local media spin was controlled mostly by those who made the appointment-fellow commissioners Paul Danish and Jana Mendez.
Danish told me nobody on earth could be more qualified for Holmberg's job than Stewart. "We faced the prospect of spending $100,000 trying to find the right person. We would have had hundreds of applications to deal with, and once we hired someone it was going to take months for that person to learn the job. So why not give it to the person who knows more about land use than anyone else?" Danish says.
Mendez told the Daily Times-Call, "Ron knows this county like no one else. He knows every piece of property that we should be looking at to preserve this county for our children and grandchildren."
Qualifications and rotting corpses
The Land Use Coalition, a Boulder-based group that guards private property rights, has little use for Stewart and was outraged by his appointment as open space director. Which only serves as more evidence Stewart will likely be tremendously successful at acquiring land for public use.
"Their concern isn't that Ron Stewart is unqualified to be open space director, but that he is imminently qualified," Danish says, arguing the Land Use Coalition would prefer someone who would be ineffective at the job.
Fair enough. Ron Stewart is arguably the best person for the open space job. In my few encounters with Stewart I've found him to be friendly, personable and accessible to the public. He's immensely competent at carrying out his goals. He seems to possess sincere concern and appreciation for preserving land, just as Holmberg did.
Yet this appointment still reeks like the rotting corpse of a prairie dog in summer heat. It simply doesn't add up. This is a department of 100 employees and a budget of $11.7 million. If the position of open space director is a full-time job worth $80,000 a year, why are we to believe Stewart can do it part-time for free? Either, (A) The public has been conned all along into thinking we need a full-time $80,000-a-year administrator for this program; (B) Stewart can't do justice to this position working part-time, on a voluntary basis; (C) Stewart will skim time from his full-time job as county commissioner; or (D) Stewart is superhuman and can work two full-time jobs for the price of one and do them both justice.
In an e-mail, one Land Use Coalition member asked me if Stewart might seek re-election as a county commissioner in the year 2000, win, then resign immediately in order to work one job for $80,000, rather than two for $50,000. "He could slide neatly into a huge raise and leave the citizens of Boulder county with an unelected appointee from the Democratic Party for a full four years before the next election," the letter states.
Surely not, I pondered. Not Ron Stewart. He would never plot such a thing in order to deprive voters the opportunity to choose his replacement. I'm just certain he has more respect for the electorate than that. So I called Stewart, just to get a formal denial that any such sinister behavior loomed on the horizon. I fully expected him to say, "No way, not me; I would never undermine the right of the electorate to choose my replacement."
Instead, I got a maybe. He might run for re-election, I heard. And the extremist conspiracy theory could be true.
"There have been both Republicans and Democrats in the past who have done that," Stewart said. "It wouldn't be anything that hasn't already been done in this county."
I expected Stewart to qualify his statement, and assure me he had no such plans. No matter how I phrased the question, however, it became clear Commissioner Stewart is fully considering the option of seeking re-election, then stepping down immediately to work full-time as director of open space.
An arrogant maneuver
Maybe we shouldn't be shocked by such contempt for the electoral process. Stewart's appointment as open space director, after all, was a shockingly arrogant maneuver designed to preclude public input. It was done with no prior notice to the public whatsoever, despite repeated efforts by at least one reporter to let people in Longmont know in advance. It was important they be told, because Stewart is the one commissioner who's primarily responsible for their city. Times-Call reporter Eric Frankowski asked Stewart twice, in the days preceding his appointment, whether he was considering the job. On each occasion, Stewart changed the subject.
It's obvious Boulder County commissioners have come to feel so enlightened they sincerely believe only one of their own-and nobody else on earth-could properly administer the Open Space Department. They know so much, in fact, that any input from the public regarding the appointment of this man would have been a mere nuisance.
No matter how successfully Stewart manages open space, his tenure will be tainted by the way it came about. He will reign as a symbol of political contempt for the public-an insult to the memory of Carolyn Holmberg, who respected and loved the people of Boulder County, and the open space legacy she worked so hard to build.
Wayne Laugesen can be reached at Wayne@Laugesen.com or 303-499-4187. Send letters to the editor to: Boulder Weekly Letters, 690 S. Lashley Lane, Boulder, CO 80303; e-mail to bwletters@tesser.com; fax 303-494-2585.
Copyright © 1999 Boulder Weekly.
Reprinted with permission.
For more information contact the Land Use Coalition at info@landusecoalition.org or call 303-666-7903.
Last updated June 04, 2001.
URL: http://landusecoalition.org/stewart_tc_article.htm
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