THE KOCHS SPIT IN THIS LAKE: The billionaires are robocalling to prevent adoption of land use regulations to protect the water supply.

  • THE KOCHS SPIT IN THIS LAKE: The billionaires are robocalling to prevent adoption of land use regulations to protect the water supply.

The Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity isn’t through trying to stand in the way of protection of Central Arkansas’s water supply.

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The Pulaski Quorum Court is to take up a severely watered-down effort to control runoff in the Lake Maumelle watershed by adopting land use rules aimed at guarding against runoff and damaging uses of the acreage that drains into the lake.

The Kochs’ anti-regulation group has been fighting this process from the start, sharing a lobbyist at times with Deltic Timber, the Chenal Valley developer and biggest landowner in the watershed and also a foe of government regulation. A reader reports on a phone call emanating from the area code of the Kochs’ Arkansas mission control in Northwest Arkansas (where they hope do to us what has been done to Beaver Lake):

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Amanda from Americans for Prosperity (479-6684566) just robo called me with a Citizen Alert. She warned that on 1/22 Quorum Court could adopt extreme zoning regulations that would dramatically limit how homeowners like me can remodel our homes, or tell us where we can build on our property.

Amanda went on to caution that no one should be subject to a mandate which causes them to give up their property. She then mentioned that watershed property owners continue to oppose the limitations, or something like that.

She made no connection between the watershed property owners and the horrific laws that may be imposed on property owners like me. So hard to say if that disconnect was deliberate or not. She closed wit an offer to connect me automatically to my Quorum Court rep to encourage a proper vote. I didn’t take Amanda up on her offer.

This is a disingenuous pitch, to be most charitable. Many concessions have been made to landowners. The meeting starts at 7 p.m. You might want to tune in.

UPDATE: AAAAACK. The sound isn’t working on the Comcast broadcast of Quorum Court. I’d appreciate updates from anybody.

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UPDATE II: Kochheads at the meeting haven’t mentioned the Maumelle proposals yet but say County Judge Buddy Villines, in touting his plan to pour $20 million or so into a tarted up Broadway Bridge, said they’d call his red-white-and-blue brainchild, “America’s Bridge,” and trademark the name before some other sharp operator thought of it.

UPDATE III: The broadcast stayed on the fritz, but a JP sent me a note by Blackberry clarifying that, despite the big crowd of Kochheads, the Quorum Court tonight merely heard a second reading of the land use ordnances. The third reading and vote will be next month.

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