A Letter

Letter to the Editors- asked to be published anonymously.

A Letter From Someone Who Has Been Quietly Watching

I have been watching this fight for quite a while without saying much. I know people on both sides. I read the emails. I read the website. I hear the conversations. And I have watched this little road district become increasingly divided into camps that seem incapable of seeing anything worthwhile in the other.

Here is what I think both sides have missed:

You both think you’re the good guys.

I don’t mean that sarcastically.

I think Dale genuinely believes he is doing good things for Saddleback.

He is retired. He has time, energy and experience, and I think he wants somewhere useful to put those things. He seems to want Saddleback to be a road district that other districts look at as an example. He wants Custer County to recognize that things here are being done well. He wants better roads, better drainage and a district that looks organized and successful.

I suspect there is a legacy component to it, too. He wants to look back someday and see something he helped improve.

And yes, I suspect property values are part of the equation. There are people here who will eventually sell. In fact, there are people here who likely purchased with the sole goal of selling. Better roads and an attractive, well-maintained neighborhood generally make property easier to sell and potentially more valuable.

None of those are inherently bad goals.

The problem is that not everybody who lives here shares those goals.

The Other Side

There is another group of people here who came to Saddleback for almost exactly the opposite reason. They don’t want to build a showcase. They don’t particularly care whether Custer County holds Saddleback aloft as an example of what a road district can become.

They bought property here when land was considerably cheaper. Some of them literally built their homes with their own hands. They knew what the roads looked like when they bought. They knew this was rural property. They accepted the inconveniences that came with that choice.

They weren’t buying an investment they planned to polish for resale.

They were buying home.

Their plan is remarkably unambitious: live here, retire here, mind their own business and eventually die here at a ridiculously old age.

That may not be everybody’s idea of progress.

But it is a perfectly legitimate way to live.

These tend to be live-and-let-live people. They don’t particularly care what their neighbor’s driveway looks like. They aren’t terribly concerned about whether somebody has an old vehicle sitting on their property. They don’t need every ditch sculpted or every rough edge removed.

In fact, they were drawn to Saddleback BECAUSE of those rough edges.

They preferred it that way.

And therein lies the fundamental conflict.

This Was Never Really About Roads

One group sees improvement and thinks:

Why wouldn’t everyone want this?

The other group sees the same thing and thinks:

Why are you spending our money and exercising governmental authority to change something we never asked you to change?

Neither side has to be stupid, malicious or crazy for that disagreement to exist.

But there is one important difference. A private citizen gets to say, “Leave me alone.”

A governmental entity doesn’t get to say, “We know what’s best for you.”

Government has rules.

There are statutes. There are limits on authority. There are public-notice requirements. There are open-meeting requirements. There are procedures for spending public money, levying taxes, imposing assessments, maintaining roads and making governmental decisions.

Those laws weren’t written because every public official is corrupt. They were written because governmental power needs boundaries even when the people exercising it sincerely believe they are doing good.

And Saddleback has operated outside some of those boundaries for so long that bringing it back inside them is clearly not happening overnight. There has been a culture here of this is how we’ve always done it. Unfortunately, “we’ve always done it this way” isn’t a statute.

It is going to take some time for this district to learn to color inside the lines.

They Asked to Leave

This is the part I think the Board has handled particularly badly. The rebellious little group didn’t originally demand control of the Road District. They asked to leave it.

Their position was essentially:

You want something different from what we want. Fine. Go build it. We don’t want to stop you. Just let us out and leave us alone.

They said quite openly that a bigger, better, more active Road District was not in their best interest.

And they also made something else very clear:

If they weren’t permitted to leave, they were going to start paying very close attention to what the Road District was doing.

If the District was going to exercise governmental authority over them against their wishes, then they were going to insist that it exercise that authority lawfully.

Every time.

That wasn’t a secret threat.

They said it.

And now everyone seems surprised that they’re doing exactly what they said they would do.

What a Wasted Opportunity

Here is the part I find almost comical.

That little rebellious group collectively possesses an astonishing amount of useful knowledge.

There is knowledge of roads. Heavy equipment. Construction. Drainage. Government. Public communications. Public notices. Open meetings. Research. Statutes.

And enough stubbornness to research a three-sentence South Dakota law until everyone else in the room regrets having brought it up.

A competent Road District leadership could have looked at that group and thought:

How do we use this?

Instead, somewhere along the way, disagreement became disloyalty.

Questions became attacks.

Critics became enemies.

And people who might have been extraordinarily useful became people who apparently needed to be defeated.

That was a spectacularly bad strategic decision. Because it accomplished exactly the opposite of what anyone seeking peace in this neighborhood should have wanted. When we were asked to vote as to the release of these properties from the district, we had not been provided all the facts. It turns out that even the vote itself was not a legal vote. Had we known all the facts, perhaps the vote would have been different.

In any case, it reignited their desire to get out.

And until they can get out, it has given them a new hobby: Watching, Reading, Researching, Requesting records, Checking statutes, Checking meeting notices, Checking expenditures, Checking authority.

And publishing every questionable action they find for the entire neighborhood to see.

Leadership Would Have Looked Different

Real leadership would have recognized long ago that these two groups don’t have to want the same future. It would have stopped trying to win.

It would have asked:

How do we coexist?

Maybe there was a lawful way to let the people who wanted out leave. Maybe there wasn’t.

Maybe there was a compromise involving services, assessments or boundaries. Maybe there wasn’t.

But somebody should at least have seriously explored it.

And if separation truly proved impossible, leadership should have found a way to say:

You don’t want what we want. We understand that. We aren’t going to punish you for disagreeing with us. We will do what the law requires, stay within our authority, communicate openly, and interfere with your lives as little as reasonably possible.

Imagine where Saddleback would be today if that had happened.

Instead, we have two increasingly entrenched camps. One keeps trying to improve things. The other keeps checking whether they’re legally allowed to. And every time the first group treats the second as an enemy, the second becomes more determined to scrutinize the first.

This cycle isn’t mysterious.

It isn’t even complicated.

And it isn’t going to end because somebody finally writes the perfect email, wins an argument at a meeting, digs the perfect ditch or proves that he knows more about mailboxes than his neighbor.

It ends when somebody in a leadership position understands something remarkably simple:

Not everyone here wants the same thing.

That isn’t insubordination.

That isn’t obstruction.

That isn’t an enemy that needs to be defeated.

It’s a neighborhood.

And good government isn’t measured by how successfully it forces everybody toward one person’s vision of what that neighborhood ought to become.

Sometimes good government is considerably less exciting.

Sometimes it means knowing when to build something.

Sometimes it means knowing when to fix something.

And sometimes it means having enough wisdom to leave people alone.