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A Conversation / Interview
Commissioner
Jim Galloway
District 1

• I actually believe in term limits.
  I know that there will be an attempt to derail them after letting the law sit there unchallenged for twelve years. I think that's wrong for someone to do a tactical maneuver like that when they could have brought that issue to court. There is an issue of time limits, but when a law goes that long I think it is just trying to go against the will of the people.
  
  
• The water in this community was kind of based on water rights that had to do with agricultural use. That's how you have water rights. You have had historic use for some purpose. Then as farms get developed into housing, that in itself is not a problem, because housing typically uses less water than a farm. But the only lands that had the water rights were agricultural lands that typically were on slopes of 15% or less because it wasn't practical to farm on really steep slopes.
  
• Once you start going beyond the 15% slope, you are starting to develop land that never had any water rights. The point is that as long as you restricted the development to the slopes that had agricultural, you really weren't out of balance. The minute you open up much more land to development than was ever farmed, now you can be out of balance. And we are.
  
• I've often felt that the elected officials do not have accurate or good information. Although, they were told they did and that they knew better than John Doe. But it wasn't really the case. I've seen the Regional Planning Commission approve a development in a flood way. Not a flood plain, right in a flood way, on the grounds that it met some standards that actually needed to be toughened up. But the standard was, that as long as you let the water flow through build the houses higher and the streets deeper so the water can flow through, you've met that particular standard. But that just allows the flood to move right through. It isolates those people, on islands, in the middle of a flood, which can be hazard.

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