I was recently chatting with a neighbor who said she didn’t sign the recently-circulated petition for nonpartisan elections because she was working three jobs and taking care of two very ill parents at the time, and didn’t have time to study up on the issues.
In a free country, exactly how much time should citizens spend learning the law? The City of Asheville wants to revise its stormwater ordinance. They are required to by state and federal mandates. Environmentalists want 100-200’ buffers to save endangered species from mud. People with streams on their property say they didn’t buy waterfront property to pollute it, or to have government restrict their responsible use of the property they purchased, and thereby depreciate it.
To help, citizens prepare for the public input session on the matter this Wednesday, the City of Asheville compiled an executive summary of sorts. By going here, one can at a glance review 345 pages of material. One page, the one with the Division of Water Quality’s plan template, contains only 44 hyperlinks.
And this is just for one measly bit of the code of ordinances. The moral of the story: One can always judge a person’s virtue by whether or not they’ve mastered Evelyn Woods’ Reading Dynamics.
