Laura Long gave a timed 3 minute public statement at the meeting:
I just wanna call out, off the back of Oscar, that what we’re seeing here is pretty spectacular.
We’ve got, in this town as far as I can tell…I’m just gonna read my script…In this town as far as I can tell, for every strong opinion, there’s another equally strong, if not stronger, in opposition. And yet here we are, people with varying political backgrounds, economic backgrounds, varying lengths of residency. The overwhelming majority of us are here standing united against this project. And it’s not because we’re all NIMBYs or afraid of development or change. We’re here because we’re aware of economics. We’re aware of the safety. We know this is a failure and we know this process was rigged from the start.
We can go back to HB 22, when the developers were given legal rights to steal control of the special service district for the sewer from local county commissioners to themselves. We can go back when Welfare Weston’s attorney threatened to sue the county for hundreds of millions of dollars if they didn’t up-zone his property from 10 acres of highway commercial land to 180 acres of highway commercial land. We can go back to when Welfare Weston’s nonprofit, that pretty much had zero track record, got a million-dollar government handout subsidized by taxpayers in order to educate us on housing.
We can go back to the record-breaking amount of money that Weston and John Curtis poured into our local elections here in Grand County. The beneficiaries are here tonight, the ones that didn’t raise their hands on the corner of the room in the back there.
We can go back to SB258—which ran through the Utah House and Senate in 10 days with zero public input and barely a question asked— passed unanimously to force this corruption onto us and other communities around the state.
This whole fairytale Kane Creek municipality would be the first preliminary municipality in US history, and it’s built on nothing but lies and billionaire special interests. Most of us would probably agree that this is a broken system, or maybe this is a system that’s working exactly as designed to serve billionaires and their friends.
The wealthiest person in the state of Utah is named Gail Miller, whose family net worth is $141 billion. Her foundation and Craig Weston are two sponsors for the preliminary municipality. These people know how to get laws written for them, and they know exactly what they’re doing. Unfortunately for them, we do too. And we’re not fucking buying it.
<Moderator: 30 seconds.>
I understand that you guys are all trying to do your job and follow the law, but we are asking you guys to please help us fix this law to serve the interests of the people and not billionaires like Gail Miller and wannabes like Welfare Weston, Craig Weston and Gail Miller can go educate somebody else.
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