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I’m 100% in the camp of “give a detailed answer once, and copy it later”, so, as people have asked questions, I aim for a detailed first answer, and will stick the whole thing here.

Tell me about your involvement with bringing broadband coverage to Golden that covers Ward 2 #

I’m all for broadband, but don’t think it’s the government’s role to provide it.

In fact, usually, local government makes it harder for good broadband to be rolled out.

So, I’d do the best I could to remove barriers in Golden to someone else building the network.

Are you anti-fracking? Do you think Golden should start recycling? I’d be very compelled to vote for you if you helped green-up Golden. #

Re: fracking - I have a two part answer

First, from a “how would I vote on various matters”, it won’t matter what I think about it. Golden city council has (to my knowledge) not even mentioned the word fracking in any of it’s documentation, agendas, or minutes. (I did a bit of googling, including this query, and came up blank.)

That isn’t very helpful though, I suspect. Because while I ever have a chance to vote on anything related to fracking, you (rightfully) suspect that my answer on this question would relate to my answers on other votes that do relate to environmental issues.

For the second part of that question, assuming I could be dictator-for-a-day, how do I feel about fracking?

I don’t know. I see evidence that it’s horrible, and I see some reports that it’s fine. The reports in the latter category remind me of the reports from the 60’s and 70’s that said lead was fine. (!!!) (this was a good read - even the government aided the big companies in covering up that fact.)

And then we found out lead caused all sorts of problems and killed people. The companies behind that, even after they knew it was harmful, are still in business today. I’d have rather they be sued out of existence and sold piece by piece in bankruptcy, but that’s just me.

I would not be surprised if fracking fell into the exact same boat.

I’ve got a two-part framework when evaluating kinda anything from a “what would a wise approach to this thing look like?”

  1. Stuff that nature has been doing for ever is, in general, a good thing to keep going. It feels wrong to be injecting water deep into the earth to knock some oil free. It might be ok, it might be terrible, but it sounds risky, on the face of it.
  2. Government usually simultaneously allows giant organizations to get off the hook with a slap on the wrist, while also falling susceptible to regulatory capture, and ends up acting as a shield between the misdeeds of a corporation, and the victims of that corporation. (A good example of the latter - HSBC given a tiny fine for laundering billions of dollars from drug cartels.)

So, until companies can be properly on the hook for the damages they do to people and the environment, I don’t trust them to act in the interest of “we the people”. As long as the worst punishment a company will ever face is a few million dollar fine from a regulatory agency (that the company may well control), I don’t trust the government to regulate the company.

I don’t trust companies, and I don’t trust the government. It’s a terrible answer, huh? I’m happy to hear your thoughts and response. If you ask more specific questions re: fracking, I can probably get more specific answers.

Re: recycling:

I 100% support recycling, but not with tax dollars. As I alluded to in my handout - I have crazy ideas. If something is worth doing, I think we should pay for it, but don’t have moral grounds to make someone else pay for it. So, I’d gladly do everything I could to clear the path for a company that wanted to run a recycling business (I bet there’s lots of red tape about who can and cannot have bins in the street at a given time, etc.) but I would not vote in favor of allocating tax dollars to it (or anything else, for that matter.)

Since tax dollars are just dollars taken out of the paychecks of citizens (and taken against their will!) I can’t support… really any expenditure of tax dollars. I suspect if you brought this up to city council, though, I’d be the only one voting against the proposal, so it may well still happen, but that would be my answer.

If I sound a bit insane (and I recognize I very well may!), and are curious if there’s any internal consistency to my arguments, I’d recommend The Problem of Political Authority. It makes some fascinating arguments (and the author teachings at CU Boulder!)

Does this help at all? If you feel like you can’t vote for me, on these grounds, I totally get it. I’d much rather you feel like you have good information for evaluating me, than feel tricked with wishy-washing hand-wavey language.