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Government Secrecy is Tyranny


GRAMA is state law allowing citizens to view documents held by government entities in Utah, but Boulder Town and our Department of Agriculture (UDAF) have refused to provide any documents whatsoever concerning Jacqui Smalley’s 110 seat theater located on her Boulder Creek Canyon Ranch (BCCR) proposed by “project manager Tom Hoyt” of GSENM Partners and The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Our initial September 2020 UDAF request has finally been set for adjudication before the state committee on February 11, 2021 where Attorney General Sean Reyes, along with Smalley’s attorney John Andrews (twenty years with SITLA, etc.) will continue to claim immunity from any disclosures of information while our highly paid, tax-funded lawyers and bureaucrats inside state and federal government offices hide their scheming in secrecy. We also filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the federal Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Washington D.C., where our Congressional Representatives Chris Stewart and Burgess Owens are presently conducting an insurgence to overthrow the federal government, apparently because the majority of Utahns voting for these traitors want control of federal lands although they love getting more than Utah’s share of federal money.

Under FOIA, we know Tom Hoyt (labeling himself as a “local citizen”) submitted the initial request for an amendment to the BCCR Conservation Easement (CE) federal taxpayers paid $400,000 to achieve which would wrongly allow Smalley to use the $2 million she was paid by TNC to not commercially develop her ranch, which also holds a BLM cattle grazing permit, to build a theater to be operated by the Boulder Arts Council (BAC) run by Mayor Cox’s wife, Cheryl. Thousands of similar CE’s across the US have been funded by federal taxpayers to preserve open lands and farming through the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) arm of the USDA, but now UDAF, and apparently TNC, want to override CE deed restrictions to facilitate development projects for non-profit organizations such as BAC to expand their facilities and, importantly, set a national precedent.

Small town Boulder, located along a famous scenic highway between national parks, is under threat of becoming a tourist “hell-hole” like Springdale and Moab with coming traffic issues that will rival them. It is irresponsible for Mayor Steve Cox and his personally appointed administrators, clerks, and planning commissioners acting without any possible appeal to the elected town council, to facilitate land speculator/developers such as Curtis Oberhansly and Hoyt who claims in their newly exposed proposal that: “The Art Council does not have sufficient resources to buy an alternative site, assuming that one could be located within the community.” But there are hundreds of acres around Boulder where Smalley and BAC could expand activities for arts education, including the weed infested town-owned lot adjoining the recently rebuilt town hall, which could easily facilitate agricultural meetings. The buck stops on Mayor Cox’s desk, no less than it does with Trump’s insurrection. Why only secrecy without replies or rebuttals to my facts?

Julian Hatch, Boulder