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| EDITORIAL: You Can't Believe Everything You Read |
| Bill Hudson | 3/12/10 |
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| Back to the News Summaries |
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I rarely read the "Public Notices" in the Pagosa Springs SUN, but I purposely went looking in that section yesterday when the March 11 issue showed up at the Daily Post office courtesy of my friend and colleague Robbie Pepper.
And there it was, published on page 17. Second notice from the top.
“Emergency Ordinance No. 751 (Series 2010) was enacted at the Special Town Council Meeting held on March 9, 2010 at 11:00am in the Town Hall…” the notice began, and then explained that some Land Use and Development Code rules had been repealed by the Town Council on March 9, but that the Town voters would be asked to confirm that repeal on April 6, via a referendum, to be entitled “Referendum B.”
The public notice concluded by noting that “Emergency Ordinance No. 751 took effect immediately upon passage on March 9, 2010. The Town of Pagosa Springs general election is scheduled for Tuesday April 6, 2010 from 7:00am to 7:00pm at 551 Hot Springs Blvd. Town Hall.”
In the same issue of the SUN, reporter Jim McQuiggin ran a front page article, entitled, “Council rejects second big box ordinance.”
”In a reversal of support for an ordinance that would have brought additional matters of Big Box regulations to town voters, the Pagosa Springs Town Council allowed a second reading of that ordinance to fail due to lack of support on Tuesday...”
Despite the fact that the Town Council had, in actuality, refused to enact Emergency Ordinance 751 at Tuesday’s 11:00am meeting, and in spite of the fact that an accurate report about that refusal ran on the front page of their paper, the SUN still ran the inaccurate Public Notice anyway.
Town clerk April Hessman had submitted the offending Public Notice to the SUN on the previous Friday, five days prior to the Town Council vote, because the hasty, last-minute Council attempt to place Referendum B on the April 6 ballot had run into election noticing deadlines — deadlines that required Town manager David Mitchem to submit a Public Notice of something that had not yet happened.
In the end, it was a Public Notice about something that never happened at all.
Hessman had phoned the SUN on Tuesday as soon as the Council meeting was adjourned, to ask publisher Terri House to pull the inaccurate notice. Hessman was told that the Public Notices had already been typeset and the notice would have to be printed.
 As they say, you can’t believe everything you read in the SUN.
In this particular situation, I highly recommend Mr. McQuiggin’s much more accurate version of the story. |
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