Small Colorado Town Sticks It To Obama And The Feds In An Unusual Way…This Is HUGE

 
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A warning to local governments about sinister federal intrusion...

by:Colleen Conley  
For more then seven years, the Obama administration has been relentless in its broad overreach of executive branch powers, particularly in its attempts to push progressive “social justice” causes — such as the president’s transgender bathroom-access edict — on the American people.
What hasn’t gotten enough attention, however, is Obama’s increased use of the Department of Housing and Urban Development to implement its own ideas of racial integration by forcing comfortable, suburban communities across the country to accept vast influxes of low-income housing residents. The club being wielded by Obama and his allies in the bureaucracy is the threat to withhold federal funding — or taking legal action against those communities to force compliance once funds are accepted.
One Colorado town is pushing back, however, telling the feds that they can keep their money — and with it their onerous regulations, which would force local governments to cede sovereign rights.

The local government of Castle Rock — a community of 55,000 located in central Colorado not far from Denver — recognized that federal funding in the form of HUD grants were a Trojan Horse that, once accepted, would allow increased federal intrusion into local affairs.
According to the 10th Amendment Center, “at issue for the town of Castle Rock was a new set of federal regulations, 377 pages in all, which gives the unelected HUD bureaucrats broad powers over grant recipient communities, including the power to reverse electoral decisions by local voters, change local zoning laws and force said communities to join regions against the its wishes.”
Castle Rock Mayor Paul Donahue wrote in a letter to HUD applicants in the town:

“If we continue to accept the HUD grants, we will be forced to prepare detailed taxpayer-financed studies of our schools, retail, housing, and other community aspects to HUD who will decide if our neighborhoods are “furthering fair housing.” HUD on a whim could force us to build low-income, government subsidized housing into our neighborhoods if HUD decides we aren’t racially balanced enough.”

Indeed, the scenario described by Donahue is being played out in other communities across the country — and even one entire state.
Westchester County, New York, learned the hard way that HUD grants came with long strings attached — strings that can be tightened into a virtual noose.

While the feds dangle dollars and sell their plan to naive citizens as funding for “walking communities and bike paths,” what it’s really all about is HUD’s demand that low-income housing — particularly, low-income rental housing — must be implemented side-by-side with existing housing in every neighborhood across America. And HUD means it when they say “every” neighborhood, down to every census block.

Since 2009, Westchester — where Bill and Hillary Clinton make their home — has been fighting in federal court after the county accepted federal funds and HUD then demanded that 750 low-income housing units be constructed in established neighborhoods. After losing to the feds, Westchester is no longer accepting HUD’s Community Development Block Grants to avoid further pressure from the government to dismantle local zoning rules.
Some states have knuckled under to the federal government. Rhode Island adopted the federal strategy, called RhodeMapRI, in 2014, as its official “economic development plan” despite opposition from local citizens and The RI Center for Freedom and Prosperity — a conservative think tank.

In December 2014, the center’s CEO, Mike Stenhouse, laid out the case against the plan:

“That not a single penny was spent on economics experts, economic modeling tools, or any other form of economic policy or jobs forecasting is just more evidence of what we’ve been saying all along; that the RI Division of Planning is perpetrating a ruse on Rhode Islanders by attempting to position RhodeMap RI as a credible economic development plan,” commented Mike Stenhouse, CEO for the Center.

Since then, Stenhouse told Rhode Island legislators in March, RhodeMap RI — now called RI Innovates — has shown it “is about advancing a pre-determined, national ‘urban redevelopment’ or sustainable development philosophy that Brookings and other progressive groups have been advancing for years … .”
In late April, Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, spoke to a standing room only crowd in Rhode Island about his years-long fight with HUD.

“Once HUD gets into your city or town, they will not go away. They want never-ending settlements and mandates, designed by Washington, D.C. central-planners and ideologues, who will try to dictate who can live where,” commented Astorino, who also warned that localities can be deemed by HUD to be “discriminatory” if certain income and racial housing “quotas” are not met … a method he ridiculed as “guilt by statistics, rather than by intent”.

Castle Rock, Colo. saw the writing on the wall based on these — and many other communities’ — experience with the federal government sticking its proverbial camel’s nose under the tent.
All municipalities that value local sovereignty should take note.