I hope that county commissioners will look more skeptically and responsibly at sources they use to make decisions about initiatives in the county. The News-Herald reports that Commissioner Gamble recently based his rejection of county support for the “complete streets” workshop on the work of Ileana Johnson Paugh.
Paugh is a right-wing conspiracy theorist, Obama-birther, and anti-science mythologist who denies climate science, sees our president as a communist and, in comments during the week of December 2, 2013, posits His Holiness Pope Francis as a KGB stooge.
Paugh’s nonsense leads our elected officials to reject a minor local health initiative as being the long arm of a United Nations takeover. Citizens who put in the hard work to bring forward the “complete streets” proposal deserve more intelligent and respectful consideration by the board.
It’s certainly appropriate for commissioners to ask hard questions about how we spend public funds and what we use the bully pulpit of the county board to promote. But it will be hard for them to do so without being dismissed as a group of fools when they base their questions on such nonsense.
Terry Collins
Grand Marais
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