"Growth and water are the main things people are concerned about," agrees Johnson, a plainspoken second-generation rancher from Agate. Johnson will be the swing vote between Dunn and McAndrew on the commission, but it's unclear which way he'll swing. He campaigned as a critic of the way things have been handled in the county, but he says he won't take a position on issues until after he's sworn in next January. "I'm new at this political game," he says. "I've been laying low for now."
Besides development, another issue is inadequate county services. According to Sheriff Knous, a single guard at the county jail has to watch the prisoners at night and also handle all 911 calls. If the guard is distracted or has to tend to the prisoners, there's a delay until the call rolls over to dispatchers in Douglas County or the town of Parker.
Lepke shares Dunn's view that Elbert County government has been overwhelmed. He took the job as an administrative aide thinking it would be interesting to work in a rural county trying to deal with rapid growth. What he found, he says, was a county government out of the 1950s trying to cope with an avalanche of new development.
There were huge piles of documents in county offices waiting to be processed, says Lepke. Because of low salaries, Elbert County has a high staff-turnover rate, as employees find better-paying jobs in nearby Douglas County or the Denver area. Lepke found that much vital county business is unattended to. "The county administrator job has turned over a zillion times, because they don't pay anything," he says. "I found people to be clueless. There were all kinds of things with loose ends."
According to Lepke, county government lurches from crisis to crisis, and little planning has been done on how to prepare for the thousands of new residents who will arrive over the next decade. "I told them they need to have some vision other than what's five minutes down the road," he says.
Dunn wants to change the way the county does business, but he knows a tight budget will make that difficult. The incoming commissioner claims that every new home costs the county $7,000 per year, when charges for roads, schools, police and fire protection are factored in. He'd like to see the county build up its tax base with the construction of a new state prison north of Kiowa on the road to Bennett. He says such a facility would provide $1 million a year in tax revenue and claims that many of the employees would live outside Elbert County.
For now, Dunn is eager to jump into the fast-paced life of a county commissioner. He knows the $24,000-a-year job may be more than he's bargained for, yet despite the trend toward pistol-packing at the courthouse, he has no plans to go in armed.
"In a year I may have my wife start a recall on me," says Dunn, laughing. "I've had everybody tell me this is probably the roughest start a commissioner has ever had. I'll have hide like a buffalo before I'm ever sworn in."
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