Shortly after the Boulder County Commissioners voted to ban GMO crops from Boulder County Open Space (in March 2016), it occurred to them that it might be a good idea to do some research on the organic agricultural practices they expected to see used after the ban kicked in.
And to ensure that the research didn’t unearth any inconvenient truths or unpleasant surprises that might undermine the ban, the Commissioners — or more to the point Commissioners Elise Jones and Deb Gardner — decided they would get the pro-organic Rodale Institute to do the research.
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At a Sept. 20 county commissioner candidate forum…Jones and Gardner [called] for “bringing in additional expertise from Colorado State University” and repeatedly saying they wanted to partner with both CSU and Rodale.
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It turned out that the first RFP, and by extension the core parts of the second one, had been written by Adrian Card, the agricultural extension agent for Boulder County. CSU runs the Boulder County Agricultural Extension, and Card is an employee of CSU.
Which means that a CSU employee was involved in writing the RFP that CSU was bidding on. And that, whether by accident or design, is a conflict of interest.
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[Attorney Ted Bendelow] should have … demanded a special counsel to investigate the conduct of Jones and Gardner going back to their original decision to ban GMOs from County open space. Both their e-mails and the public record is shot through with evidence of a pattern of collusion.The GLP aggregated and excerpted this article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: The rigged Rodale Institute deal
