The Thin Blue Line is a phrase once used by law enforcement for their role as officers entrusted with maintaining the line separating anarchy from order. It was the title of a 1988 movie on those themes. Local elected officials managing public hearings don’t often consider their actions in similar terms. Reading Killdozer, I think they should.
Patrick Browers’ Killdozer clarifies the following truths about the fateful day in Granby. Marvin Heemeyer had lost his land use objection to a neighboring proposed concrete plant and was thwarted in approval to make some improvements which he sought for his property. The property was without sewer service. After collecting sewage in an illegal cistern, Heemeyer dumped it in a nearby irrigation ditch. After losing his case in Town Hall, on the property on which he operated Mountain View Muffler business he started a complex project which consumed the end of his days. In preparation, he had sold the property to a trash company before encamping there for months to complete the Killdozer.
After buying a bulldozer at auction and having it delivered, he ordered armored plates which were also delivered and welded them to the bulldozer to fortify it. Then he set up cameras so he could navigate. He built turrets to weaponize the bulldozer. The book devotes many chapters to such details.
On June 4, 2004, he drove through the wall of his shop and began his vengeance on the concrete plant and on the town of Granby. With that carefully designed tool, he proceeded to wreck the private property of individuals that he perceived as having done him wrong during the process and proceeded to destroy the buildings of an electric co-op, a library and the Granby Town Hall.
It remains a mystery what motivated Heemeyer to leverage his thwarted requests to town to become a domestic terrorist in his adopted place of business. Heemeyer says in tapes he left behind that God wanted him to do it to show the people of Granby the error of their ways. He claims many Granby locals and officials were conspiring against him because he was a “newcomer.” He invented his plight as a vigilante victim. Yet “domestic terrorist” is a title which no one seems comfortable bestowing on a man whose actions came on the heels of Waco, Texas, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and Columbine High School shooting, not to mention a series of other acts in the years since (the latest being Las Vegas), none of which seem to get any more traction today as attacks on American democracy or way of life. We are uncomfortable labeling our fellow citizens. Some were apologetic for him, noting that he didn’t kill anyone, though he tried. Brower seeks to counter this and other assumptions with the facts. We seek quickly to determine in each case that the perpetrator is somehow insane, not a sign of ominous trends in our culture, not in any way a reflection on ourselves, or our ideas. In the details, this incident remains local to Granby.
Few places have experienced the level of human destruction that the Town of Granby experienced that day. Anyone interested in what we do together to build community, grow, prosper in local government for our community’s future should study and take note of what may be the prime example of what went disastrously wrong in 2004. Killdozer should be a study in that question, but in the reading, it may evoke more questions than answers
When was it acceptable to destroy a town because you disagreed with a community decision in the neighborhood? Does any degree of perceived property rights injury justify such actions? What threshold of a decision might prompt such violence? An approved housing development that blocks what was thought to be your open view of a horizon, a commercial use that brings additional traffic or noise to your mixed-use neighborhood, a house color approved by a Design Review Board that you find annoying, a notice of infraction on your door that you are three months behind on your water payment notifying that it will be shut off tomorrow if you don’t pay today? These all occur regularly in local government and could be perceived as personal slights.
Brower found that many people in Granby and nearby Grand Lake knew, or felt they knew Marvin, either through business or through his passion for snowmobiling. Beyond a few interactions of personal intimidation, he was known as a regular guy, an outdoor loving Westerner. He did not appear mentally imbalanced, though he did keep a list of those who had wronged him which structured his day of destruction. He had no significant interactions with law enforcement. He did not appear to be an ideologue. Though the disagreement with the outcome of the public processes that angered Heemeyer was known, Browers’ impression as one who had sat through years of many such decisions was that they were neither unfair nor the result of corrupt leadership, or out of the ordinary in any way.
Perhaps not everybody involved in public meetings is as sensitive to preserving the thin blue line of civility or even perceives being so near to the line that seems thinner today than in 2004. I read Killdozer with the backdrop of a President in the White House actively campaigning against the institutions protected in our Constitution and rights of citizens written into the Bill of Rights. From the oval office, it is open season on the Judiciary, the Justice Department, the Press, and Congress. It is a verbal violence, backed by ideas, trumpeted by others, and in concert a welcoming of incivility from the very top of government. Most disturbingly, it was hardly invented by Donald Trump.
It already seemed as though the government was under attack. That hostility hardly needs encouragement. For all the warts of being made up of citizens (whose humanity and fallibility is understood) making decisions mostly to the best of their abilities, towns remain “laboratories of democracy” and places where fairness rates much higher than at the federal level. While public opinion tends to be more favorable locally, in many ways they are more vulnerable because of being so close at hand. I have felt that, and I know I am hardly the only community member who is disturbed at the lack of outcry to the various forms of violence against our ideals and institutions.
It is a small, good thing done week in and week out, the commonplace act of ongoing local civil process led by citizens governing their own communities. When it is well run it is a counterbalance to national trends. Yet the perception battle about good-governance is being lost. In my view, well governed towns holding excruciatingly fair and transparent processes seem more important than ever in holding the thin line by reinforcing the core values of our democracy that such acts seek to undermine.
