By SHERRILL COUTS
Los Alamos
As a relatively new Los Alamos County resident, I’m naturally trying to get up to speed as quickly as possible on the local social and political environment. I read with some alarm the letter by Cat Ozment here, which follows up on some positive number of previous articles regarding this issue.
First, I vehemently agree with Ozment’s sentiment. It seems there’s more than just a policy issue here, though, an effect of the cause of an attitude problem, I strongly suspect. To wit:
I suspect that the responsible parties on County Council are trying to play “Big Boys and Girls” and emulate state and federal governments. Roughly, being super-tough without personally going into the fighting ring, so to speak. Tough by proxy. Whoo-hoo! Diluting accountability by being a council rather than a single identifiable person. Specifically, something somewhat analogous to the utterly reprehensible entrenched practice in this country of bringing several, even dozens, of serious charges against someone for a single malfeasance, such that the defendant (and now victim of the thoroughly rotten system) almost always has no rational option than to plea down to one or two serious offenses, with a reduced sentence, rather than face a jury and risk a guilty verdict and have the judge punish the defendant for the temerity of proceeding to a jury trial by imposing the maximum, or near-maximum, penalty for each and all of the overlapping charges, some or all dictated to be served concurrently.
At this point it would be common practice to signal “sarcasm off now” but this isn’t sarcastic.
Incidentally, my two automobiles are currently both operable, but in the past, elsewhere, I’ve been known to have one in some state of repair in my driveway for weeks at a time (that’s why I have two, to have a spare and to have sufficient time to order and fabricate parts and do the work, because you know, like most people I have a demanding day job, too). Lacking a garage in which to house one during such exercises, is this now verboten where I live now?
