A small town in south-eastern Colorado was recently declared abandoned after all of its local public leaders resigned amid a drinking water supply crisis.
The office of Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold, announced the fate of Hartman on 29 July, a little more than a month after being advised in writing that the town “had lacked chlorine in its water for [more than] one month and the water was not potable and ‘smells horrible’”, according to public documents.
Hartman resident, landowner and voter Jessie Simmons had also written to Griswold’s office that “the town … had been under an order to boil water for months”, documents said.
The documents added that Hartman “had no board of trustees or town clerk, was unable to hold a [local] election, and owned infrastructure critical for the treatment or delivery of water to residents” that – barring a successful appeal – would become the responsibility of surrounding Prowers county’s government.
Hartman had a population of fewer than 60 at the time of the 2020 US census – before it was declared abandoned under a Colorado state law allowing for the dissolution of incorporated communities which can no longer maintain a government.
Colorado’s Denver Post newspaper described the administrative failure of Hartman as having “no analog in recent state history”.
For some reason this feels distinctly American.
Does wherever you live not have unincorporated areas? Places with no functioning town/ village government, so they are administered by the bbezr level of government, county in this case?
I think this was poorly explained in the article, their other legal mechanism would be to elect a functioning city government. In the absence of this, they can legally declare the city abandoned so that they are administered directly by the county (regional) government.
As long as the city exists, the city is typically responsible for utilities within the city limits. The city government is responsible for requesting aid and coordinating repairs to the water infrastructure. There seem to be some sort of local politics issue where they are unwilling to elect local officials to do this, may be people on the other side who want the city to be declared abandoned. By abandoning the city they can appeal directly to the county government to help repair the water system.
I think it’s Federal Law now to be this way. laws that make this shit happen tend to be enacted during Republican controlled times… it’s a pattern.
Republicans break shit and blame everyone else. Democrats fix shit while assigning no blame. Republicans repeal all of the Democrat policies and then reinstate them with a lot more corruption (and take all the credit) while declaring Democrat policies to be evil. rinse repeat.
I was thinking it sounded more Chinese. Their own government admits less than 25% of the ground water and lakes are drinkable. Which is saying a lot because they’re still trying to say they only had 60,000 covid deaths, which is estimated to be closer to 1 to 1.5 million.
So if THEY’RE saying it’s sub 25%, it’s probably even worse.