1-14-08, 9:45 am

In March of 2007, hundreds of acres of land owned by the people of Emmet County in Michigan were taken out of the public-use domain and made available to for-profit enterprises. Not all that unusual perhaps, but please raise your hand if you were aware of this action when it happened in March of 2007. Up go the hands of five or ten, maybe fifteen of the 30,000 or so citizens of Emmet County. Please raise your hand if you are aware today, in January of 2008, of this action that was taken in March of 2007. Up go the hands of thirty-five, maybe forty or fifty of the 30,000 or so citizen/owners.

Were the elected officials representing the wishes of these 30,000 citizens when they took this action? Who knows!

I have argued in the past that elected bodies of government are created, in part, as protectors of what may be referred to as our Public Planetary Rights…the rights inherent in our common existence on Earth; the right to breathe clean air and drink clean water; the right to share in the bounty of the earth’s natural resources; the right to enjoy open waters and lands in a communal manner with other living things. I contend that it is the responsibility of our elected representatives to protect these Public Planetary Rights from continual and arbitrary bombardment by the forces inherent within what we have come to know as Private Property Rights.


Conversely I have also argued that elected bodies of government should not become buffering mechanisms whose focus is to find the quickest and easiest means of convincing the public that it must give up some of its Public Planetary Rights in order to make way for an expression of individual or corporate Private Property Rights. So-and-so Incorporated wants to build a gas station and convenience store on its acre of land. The public must give up a meadow. Other animals must give up their habitat. Another acre of land must be covered over with asphalt. Oh, and never you mind that gasoline and cigarettes are already available across the street.

This is most definitely a troublesome interpretation of democracy. It requires that people who occupy elected positions make decisions only after requesting and receiving considerable public input. As I see it, elected representatives are given the authority to make decisions, but they are not given the authority to decide without guidance.

The troublesome aspects of this facet of democracy are several and they include:

1. The process of collecting public input may take what seems like too much time. 2. Getting the attention of the public may be difficult. 3. Taking the initiative to notify the public of the issues at hand often requires taking steps outside of the required norm: publishing informational articles in local newspapers and on local websites, for example, instead of depending entirely on a 2 inch by 2 inch notice in the classified section of the local newspaper or pinning a notice to the door of the meeting room. 4. It may not be much fun being the contrary member of an elected board that may be generally in favor of moving the question to its conclusion as soon as possible…for whatever reason. 5. The elected official may not like the opinion of the public, may not vote as the informed public sees fit, and as a consequence may lose the elected post.



Going back to the incident in Emmet County, Michigan, we find that on the 6th of March 2007, the Emmet County Board of Commissioners held a Special Meeting. Five of the seven board members were present. The minutes contain no mention of public comment or of the presence of anyone from the public at the meeting. The minutes contain no mention of any discussion on the part of the commissioners. It is unclear as to whether and how public notice was made prior to the meeting as is required by law.

At this special meeting, the Board of Commissioners requested that the State of Michigan lift reverted clauses that had been placed by the state on hundreds of acres of land surrounding the present Pellston Regional Airport in Emmet County. The effect would be to change the status of these acres from one that allowed only public use to a new status that would allow development of the property for private for-profit uses.

Four days later, the State of Michigan approved the request of the Emmet County Board of Commissioners and now hundreds of acres of publicly owned lands are no longer protected against the forces within Private Property Rights.

Five citizens made this decision. Did you know that this was happening? I did not. Nor did at least 29,975 other citizen/owners of these hundreds of acres.