2023 ballot question 7F:
Shall the Elk Creek Fire Protection District, the Inter-Canyon Fire Protection District, and the North Fork Fire Protection District be consolidated to form the Conifer Fire Protection District as a single consolidated fire protection district, as further set forth in the Pre-Consolidation Intergovernmental Agreement between the Districts effective April 12, 2023, and contingent upon the voters of each District approving the related Mill Levy Increase for each District to permit the Conifer Fire Protection District to collect a mill levy up to 16 mills?
Shall the 3 districts be merged into a single district . . . and the people in the ECFPD said no, it shall not be consolidated, merged, folded into, unified, or in any way joined with the other 2 districts. IF it had been the will of the people to merge the districts, but not to increase the mill levy, then 7F would have been answered yes, let's merge the districts. The unification, merger, consolidation, pick your descriptor, if desired, would have failed because the mill levy increase request failed, not because the question of shall the districts be merged, unified, consolidated, failed.
The people in ECFPD wanted to maintain the independence of their district from the others and the board of their district, after seeking approval from the voters to do so and being told no, did it anyway. No matter how you try to spin the story, that's what the board did . . . they ignored a primary tenet of our form of government, the consent of the governed, and did what they wanted to do anyway.
Look, I'd have no problem with the districts merging, consolidating, unifying, joining, whatever verb you wish to use to describe the action, if the board of ECFPD had gone back to the voters and asked them if they wanted to merge, join, unify, consolidate, with the other 2 districts if they could accomplish the feat without raising the mill levy and been told yes, but that's not what the board did.
They took a "No, we want an independent district" from the voters and decided to find a way to join, merge, unify, consolidate the three districts into one anyway.
