This letter was sent to Yellow Scene Magazine. As with all Letters to the Editor, the views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the publication. We value providing space for community voices.

The folks trying to stop the City from shutting down the South Boulder Rec Center have attended the last four or so Council meetings in force. Their petition has almost 3,800 signatures.

It’s rare that so many people are paying attention to a local issue, so I took advantage of the moment to help them understand what is going on at City Hall. This was my Open Comment to Council—but mostly to the audience:

It’s amazing that this Council, famous for planning growth for eventually 50,000 new residents, would be reducing rec centers from three to two and Iris Avenue from four lanes to three, etc. Any 10-year-old knows that more people require more rec centers and more transportation. How did things get so whack?

A big reason was that the city manager, city attorney, city clerk, and city IT director were “replaced” some five years ago after all but the clerk lied to Council and the public to obstruct the online petitioning system for ballot initiatives we have, only in Boulder, at petitions.bouldercolorado.gov. If it worked correctly, an initiative to preserve the Rec Center would be easy to get on the ballot. I was on the city’s Campaign Finance and Elections Working Group that got online petitioning on the 2018 ballot, which passed with 71%.

The system is almost unusable. Top politicians in the state had the details butchered. I documented top staff lying and cheating with video and audio, so they had to be replaced. See and hear it at tinyurl.com/petitionstory.

The incompetence due to the replacements is why public relations staff grew from 12 in 2018 to 30-something now. [According to Jan Burton, former council member.]

Confirm this with other members of the city working group, like long-time council members Steve Pomerance and Allyn Feinberg, Planning Board member Mark McIntyre, and attorney Ed Byrne. People should have the power.

Photo by Nathan Nowack, Nathan Nowack Photography LLC

Several Council members, after Open Comments, tried to tell us we can’t criticize city staff at meetings. This was my email to them in response:

Ryan Schuchard: You made it clear to me in person that you were talking about me, not the multitudes tonight who implicitly criticized current staff who consistently misrepresent what the people want in order to force on us what staff—and apparently you—want. You said, “This is not a place to be criticizing individuals, former or current.” We are addressing you, their employers. We are not going to help you hush up these problems by talking with you privately. This is public business.

City Atty Tate: Please cite any law that stops me! You know that truth is an absolute defense against defamation charges. The documents and recordings of the past staff I called out tonight tell the truth and are an absolute defense against City lawfare. Remember, you have your job because I documented in that file the lying and cheating of your predecessor, Tom Carr, and therefore, he was a liability and was “moved on.”

Attorney Matt Simonsen (left) presents Yellow Scene’s argument to Court of Appeals judges (left to right) Stephanie Dunn, Gilbert Román, and Craig Welling. (Credit: John Eisele, Colorado State University)

The City is losing its lawfare cases, including against Yellow Scene Magazine [which sued for the bodycam video of the police killing of Jeanette Allatore and got it without having to pay thousands] and Save CU South [the city sued them for legal expenses in their appealed attempt to stop the city from paying at least $66 million to raise the CU South property out of the floodplain to maximize building space, etc.]. Your vengeful suit against council candidate Aaron Stone for $375 is obviously a waste of far more of our money.

All: If you’re thinking of having the police evict me for telling the truth about past or present staff, let me remind you that the only time there has ever been violence in City Hall in my 48 years here was in 2010, when the mayor had police arrest Seth Brigham, who stripped down to his boxers to call attention to then-councilman George Karakehian leaving out of his financial disclosure that he was partners with Steve Tebo. David Lane took his case, and the city settled by giving Seth $10,000.

Here’s the best context article I could find:

Is City Council above the law?

If you’re “thinking” of passing a law to prevent us from criticizing you and/or your staff, think again. I’ve already started talking to the ACLU about all the limits you’ve put on open comments, by far the most restrictive limits of all large Colorado cities. And David Lane has represented me before.

As you can see from the text of my comment above, I never said the current staff was incompetent. Your defensiveness does say it, though! My sentence in question is: “The incompetence due to the replacements is why public relations staff grew from 12 in 2018 to 30-something now.” It’s unclear how much incompetence is from the ~2020 regime change, how much from current staff, how much from Council, and how much from the money and power people you mostly serve.

I suggest you stop your threatening behavior and get your shit together. Start by instructing staff to be honest—and consider representing those of us who pay your salaries. Three people stopped me on my way home this evening to thank me for explaining why so much coming from your organization is whack, one of them talking with me at length. Imitating Trump’s bullying will backfire on you, too, much faster.

You can contact the Council at:

https://bouldercolorado.gov/contact-city-council-and-staff

You can register to speak in person or virtually at:

https://bouldercolorado.gov/services/participate-city-council-meetings

“Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Evan

The post Letter to the Editor: Open Comments Respond to South Boulder Rec Center Shutdown appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Yup, here’s the quote of the day, from attorney David Lane, representing Seth Brigham, an outspoken critic of the Boulder City Council, who is challenging a restraining order the city has against him:

“I’m willing to stipulate that Boulder City Council members huddle under their beds in the fetal position at night crying and having psychological and social distress because their feelings have been hurt by Seth Brigham,” Lane is quoted as saying in Westword. “But if the First Amendment revolved around Boulder City Council members having hurt feelings, no one would be able to speak in this country.”

Worse, we wouldn’t be able to listen to David Lane speak, which — when he’s talking about defending the First Amendment — is a form of entertainment in itself.

Boulder was given additional time to try to defend its restraining order against Brigham. The two sides are due back in court on Aug. 17.

Read Lane’s interview with YS here.

Tip-o-the-hat to Michael Roberts at Westword.

The post Quote ‘O The Day, thanks to lawyer David Lane appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Consider this list of notorious newsmakers: CU professor Ward Churchill, anti-tax crusader and convicted tax dodger Douglas Bruce, “Balloon Boy” parents Richard and Mayumi Henne, the Hell’s Angels, Boulder critic and City Council stripper Seth Brigham, the Rainbow Family and Nazis.

What do they all have in common? They’ve all been represented in court by attorney David Lane of the law firm Killmer, Lane & Newman, who has developed something of a reputation for being the go-to lawyer for some of the most unsavory clients in Colorado. To be sure, he’s represented plenty of sympathetic ones as well—Tim Masters, for example, who sued Larimer County and the city of Fort Collins, after he was wrongly convicted of murder; and Steven Howards, who was arrested for allegedly touching Vice President Dick Cheney while criticizing the war in Iraq.

But on the whole, Lane is known for representing the most polarizing and the least sympathetic defendants on a courtroom docket. He does it unapologetically—what he’s really defending, he said, are the principles and rights defined in the U.S. Constitution. And when those are at stake, it hardly matters how hated his clients may be.

What do you think it is about you and your firm that you attract clients that aren’t just controversial but also very high profile?

I think our firm takes a position that the real client that we represent is the Constitution of the United States of America. The only people who generally suffer from constitutional depravations at the hands of the government are people who are right on the edge of the envelope. I’ve said repeatedly that the most repressive regimes on Earth allow people to swap chocolate chip cookie recipes with their moms. It’s the people who engage in Constitutionally protected speech of a very controversial nature that need our help, because that’s when the government’s knee-jerk response is to repress.

You got a lot of hate mail during the Churchill case. How does that feel to you? Does that get tiring?

The endless streams of threats and hate mail just sort of roll off me. I take the position that when all is said and done, more will be said than done. You know, it just goes with the turf.

Is there anyone you’ve declined to represent because the client just wasn’t your kind of person?

I’ve declined to represent people based on the strength or weaknesses of their case, but not on their political leanings. I’ve represented Nazis, I’ve represented Klansmen, I’ve represented Communists, I’ve represented atheists, I’ve represented religious zealots because, really, I’m representing the Constitution in every one of those instances.

How did that philosophy become so front and center for you?

My general philosophy is that if they can ignore the Constitutional rights of my most despised clients, then the government will be emboldened to ignore the Constitutional rights of my second most despised clients, then my third most despised clients and so on and so on. Government can do whatever they’re going to do. To me, the most dangerous entity on the planet is government that is unchecked. And my job, as I perceive it, is to control the government. That’s my only job, control the government. If they want to put my client to death, then I’m going to give them the fight of their lives before they can do it. Every Constitutional provision will be litigated. If they want to incarcerate my clients, we’ll fight them every step of the way to make sure that if they’re going to do it, they’re going to respect the Constitution. It’s true in civil rights cases also. I filed a lawsuit that stopped the state of Colorado from mandating that all public school children say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. I got a lot of hate mail for that one. But we won, because the Constitution needs to be vindicated and I don’t care how unpopular my client is.

Do you have a case that stands out to you as one you’re particularly proud of?

I was lead counsel on a case down in Texas, a death penalty case, involving the state of Texas [verus] my mentally retarded client, Johnny Paul Penry. Penry had been taken through three death penalty trials, two of which were reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court. … He then had his third death penalty conviction reversed by the high court in Texas and was brought back for his fourth capital murder trial because Texas had so abysmally abused his Constitutional rights. I was his lawyer for the fourth retrial and I spent a great deal of time and effort to expose the corruption that existed in Polk County, Texas, surrounding his case and it ultimately resulted in a life sentence for Johnny Penry. I am extreme proud of the work I did in exposing all the corruption, or a great deal of corruption, that’s occurring in that little county in Texas.

But at the same time, you still take these less dramatic cases, like the one regarding the City of Boulder’s restraining order against Seth Brigham. You consider the smaller ones to be just as important as the bigger ones.

They are. The Constitution is the Constitution. Seth Brigham is having his Constitutional rights violated and I will do what I can to vindicate him. I just argued a case in the United States Supreme Court in March, a small little case, but it made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. It has big First Amendment principles involved. That was the case where my client walked up to Dick Cheney on the mall in Beaver Creek and said “I think your policies in Iraq are disgusting.” He then went to jail for his trouble. So we’re awaiting a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on that case.

Do you go out of your way to find controversial clients, or do they go out of their way to find you?

Let me just put it this way: My firm’s advertising budget is zero dollars. We don’t go out and solicit clients. They come to us.

The post Legal ease appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.