Time to repeal the Gallagher Amendment
Editor:
This fall, Coloradans will be asked to vote on Amendment B, which calls for the repeal of the Gallagher Amendment. The Gallagher Amendment is a 40-year old amendment to our state constitution, which Coloradans adopted in 1982 and currently threatens our communities’ ability to provide essential fire and medical services, as well as fund schools and libraries.
If the Gallagher Amendment is not repealed, our fire districts, law enforcement agencies, schools and libraries will face drastic budget cuts in 2021 and beyond as well as unfairly shifting the tax burden to local small businesses and farms, and disproportionally impacting rural communities.
Over the course of the past several decades, our state’s residential property value has increased at a significantly greater rate than our business and non-residential property value. Instead of residential and non-residential taxes being adjusted according to the overall value, they have been held artificially out of proportion due to the Gallagher Amendment’s requirement for a fixed ratio of residential property taxes to non-residential property taxes.
Not only is this not fair to small businesses and rural communities, it endangers the long-term viability of many of our communities and the providers of essential services.
Amendment B, repealing the Gallagher Amendment, has broad bi-partisan support and may be one of the most important votes you cast this fall.
Please join me and many others by voting yes on Amendment B to protect our fire departments, law enforcement agencies, schools and libraries while treating our small businesses and rural communities fairly.
Charles Naumer, Evergreen
A matter of semantics
Editor:
When reading “Turning the Page” by Deb Hurley Brobst, it occurred to me that we (the people) may sometimes err in our word usage of anarchist or socialist, but I would say that in our recent lifetime we (Democrat or Republican) are more accustomed to using words like “equal rights,” “democracy,” “republic” and “freedom.”
I understand that “Socialists favor more government control.” I also understand that countries who now have total government control are called Communists and/or Marxists, and they have used “anarchists” to achieve that goal of total control.
Perhaps Mr. Riddell is neither left nor right, but personally I do not want to be a pawn in the attempt of some to soft peddle the transition from our present form of government capitalist/socialist (which is a win-win) to a socialist/Marxist government over the people (which is a lose-lose). To that, we have to say a big, “No, thank you.”
Karen Morrison, Evergreen
Science matters
Editor:
It always has. Even before tigers, fishes, insects. Before all animals and plants, before homo sapiens, indeed before all life and non-life appeared on Earth.
Science has mattered before there was the sun, solar system and beyond — across the entire universe. No happening in this world defies or can defy the dictates of science.
But on Earth, it is homo sapiens along that has gained some understanding of the science that governs our world and that has accomplished so much with that understanding, incomplete and imperfect as it is and always will be.
There’s science as a field of investigation, and there’s science as it operates in the world. Scientists aim to understand and exploit how science operates in its innumerable domains, large and small.
That understanding has allowed mankind to invent and develop the printing press and computers that can communicate broadly over astronomical distances, to go to the moon, to harness nuclear energy, and to unleash its power for massive destruction.
Expansive as that power has been for mankind to date, much of the understanding and exploitation of the science that governs the world (including mankind’s intellectual and emotional response to it) is as yet beyond mankind’s control.
Significantly, that includes understanding and control of the exponential expansion of the wealth and deadly viruses, both those known and those not yet encountered or fully understood, and it includes global climate change so much of which has been governed by mankind’s exploitation of Earth’s energy and other natural resources.
Mankind has been able to create and control so much, but not everything. Some things to date have been beyond our control. From the present and into the foreseeable future, mankind’s well-being, indeed its very existence, will depend on its ability to measurably alter the balance between actions that enhance and those that can irreparably harm or destroy life as we know it.
So science and understanding of it indeed does matter — as if our lives depended on it — as they do. Today and into the future will the leaders of our world have the wisdom and courage to make decisions toward that end?
Ken Larner, Evergreen