Say Anything Blog

The Bismarck Tribune has a story up about last night’s Northern Plains Heritage Foundation public meeting about their National Heritage Area land grab (pictures of the crowd at the link), and it’s not very flattering for Potter or Dorgan or their cronies in this.

An excerpt:

Tracy Potter, who headed the campaign to get the designation from Congress and is on the board, opened the meeting by explaining everything the heritage area is not, instead of what it is.

Potter said property cannot be acquired, developed or accessed without the landowner’s permission.

Instead, he said the heritage area is intended to build on the historical strengths along the river.

He said the board will go out to all five counties for input and begin writing a management plan that he expects will take at least a year, though it has three years to do so.

When the microphone was opened up, all heck broke loose.

If there were voices of support in the audience, they were silent.

Instead, people lined up to voice their distrust and out-and-out disapproval of the designation, getting vigorous applause and some amen-like shouts for doing so.

Clint Fleckenstein said he bought a small bit of land and now feels like he has a $15 million “babysitting job” keeping track of how the federal money that’s available because of the designation will be spent.
Bob Wetsch, who lives south of Mandan, kept his comments brief and succinct.

“I want to make this perfectly clear; I don’t want anything to do with this. I don’t want to have to opt out (of being included in the heritage area), or come to more of these meetings,” Wetsch said.

Mr. Wetsch’s and Mr. Fleckenstein’s comments are spot-on.  Potter is quoted later in the article as saying “This is not affecting anyone’s land.”  The problem is that it will affect people’s land.  People like Fleckenstein and Wetsch were forced to show up to this meeting to protect their land interests because they were opted-in to this land grab without anyone telling them about it and they weren’t given an option to opt out.  Now they have to show up at everyone NPHA meeting, every township meeting, every county commission meeting and every city council meeting that Potter and his cronies are at to watch over what they’re going to be doing with their $10 million in federal dollars and their power to develop a “management plan.”  That is entirely unfair.  Why should North Dakota land owners have to be concerned with lobbying against their own tax dollars given to a private foundation (that is essentially a special interest group) in order to ensure that their land doesn’t get managed for them?

The article also points out questioners who called out Potter for deceptively telling Congress that there was public support for the land designation in North Dakota when clearly none of the land owners (or at least most of them) had no idea their land was going to be caught up in this.

At the end of the Tribune article Potter attempts to shrug off the unanimous objection to what he and his cronies are doing saying that the angry meeting “needed to happen. We knew people would be upset because of the misconception.”

Misconception?

There’s no misconception.  Potter and Senator Dorgan attempted to do an end-run around property rights, lying to Congress and engaging in illegal lobbying activities in the process, and now they’ve been called to the mat.  And if Potter thinks this is the last of it, he’s got another thing coming.

One of the crowd participants called for state Senator Potter’s resignation:

Wayne Ruzicka, of Wilton, called for Potter’s resignation, saying the whole project will always be suspect because public support was misrepresented when, in fact, no one was aware until the designation was a done deal.

Potter won’t listen, of course, because he’s arrogant and he has no integrity.  But given the way he’s mistreated the public, lied to Congress and broken laws against the use of taxpayer money for lobbying he should resign.

Nobody but the most partisan of observers would maintain that Senator Tracy Potter maintains the public’s trust.