Washington County's unholy marriage with Trump

Bill Mader | In My Opinion

The proposed Northern Corridor (NC) is not so much about half-baked freeway planning that puts money into the "Good Old Boys Club" but rather a sign of the times — written commitments and pledges that mean nothing and a willingness to jump into political beds if you get to hug cash.

Most don’t remember the commitments (signed in 1996) that the Washington County Commission made to preserve open space, trail systems and threatened or sensitive species. I was there. I co-authored it. It happened.

Of course, these are the things that attracted people to the county in the first place and contributed to economic growth.

And that’s what the Washington County Habitat Conservation Plan was mostly about — preserving open space and animals, and letting thousands of acres of tortoise habitat be developed outside the reserve (across numerous cities) in exchange for not raping the reserve with freeways.

"Trumponians" would call this history “fake news.”

This gets us to the wedding. The Washington County Commission has married the flamboyantly incompetent Trump administration with the hope that the bride’s gift on the honeymoon is a freeway through the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve.

What drives this — aside from the usual greed and a need to get to Walmart 10 minutes sooner — is a brain deficit where congressional bills are sculptured in the dark by the flower girls at the wedding and where public meetings are minimally posted.

Take, for example, Rep. Chris Stewart’s bill H.R. 2423 (which has no co-sponsor) and the poorly announced meeting held on May 23 by the Federal Lands Subcommittee on Natural Resources in Washington, D.C. The mission of the bill: Build the NC, skip the environmental and legal reviews. These things just get in the way in swampland (incidentally, it hasn’t been drained).

Although this is a colorful approach to further corruption, indeed even routine, you still can’t help but smell the hypocrisy and ethical decay from a state and county that despises just about everything Trump personally stands for. Indeed he is the antithesis of all things Christian and once ran a fake university. I won’t tell you what he said about women. Never mind his insatiable appetite to tweet at midnight and make up words that puzzle a dictionary.

Even Mitt Romney ,to his credit, saw through all the Trump disguises and openly called him a “phony” and “a fraud” and (this will shock you) “very, very not smart.” So these are the bedfellows at the wedding who want to rape the reserve.

The final insult is that the U.S government is about $19 trillion in debt, give or take a few billion. Yet we continue to waste money left and right on manipulated bills mutating in the dark halls of congress by shallow people who squander tax payer money and contradict the very commitments we made to open space and species — and whatever future we have left.

Bill Mader was the first administrator of the Washington County Habitat Conservation Plan. He is now an associate professor of environmental science at the Navajo Technical University in New Mexico.