An Evening with Dennis Schrader

Dennis Schrader held a fundraiser last night at the offices of Davis Agnor Rapaport & Skalny in Town Center for his bid to reclaim the District 3 county council seat he last held in 1998. The event was well attended by his GOP colleagues including Senator Allan Kittleman, Delegates Gail Bates and Warren Miller, and County Councilman Greg Fox.

I attended this event because I happen to like Dennis and support his candidacy. It is also a good chance to talk local politics with both incumbents and challengers. I spent some time talking to school board candidate Robert Ballinger about the ongoing soil conservation district dust up and with Greg Fox about the influence of local blogs in the elections. Robert was curious as to what I thought about the ongoing tug of war between the county and the district over funding. I told him that I believed that the soil district has outlived its Depression era mission. Greg says he advises candidates to not get caught up in what is being posted in the blogs because the readership represents a small portion of the electorate.

Alan Kittleman and I also got into a little soil conservation district debate. He supports the district and insists that county needs an “independent voice” in reviewing development plans. I suggested that the county planning department is an independent voice and he suggested otherwise. He told me that he has heard of developers being shaken down by the county executive for campaign contributions in exchange for receiving favorable reviews of their plans. I told him that in my own experience in developing property in HoCo I have never had that happen nor heard of it happening from my development colleagues.

I was also able to revisit the “chicken house” issue with Alan. He believes that the environmental concerns over chicken waste are overstated. I told him I disagreed and suggested that perhaps we could have him back on our podcast to revisit this topic.

There were also people at the event enlisting signatures for the petition drive to put the Taxpayer Protection Initiative on the ballot this fall. The party faithful I spoke with last night were somewhat divided on the wisdom of this effort.

I spoke with some young Republicans who were not happy with Anthony Jordan’s position on Town Center redevelopment. I had always thought that Anthony was lukewarm to GGP’s plan to remake HoCo’s urban center but last night I learned that he might be more opposed to the plans than I thought. Anthony did not attend the event so he didn’t get to hear Dennis give the makeover his wholehearted endorsement.