What are your rights and responsibilities during a traffic stop? My own take is a bit different from Dale's (see pg. 8), who is, nonetheless, legitimately concerned about the continued erosion of Constitutional rights. One of the paradoxes is that a driver exercising the right to privacy by legally refusing to answer an officer's questions off the subject of the traffic stop - “Where are you going?” “Where did you have dinner?” and, depending on the reason for the traffic stop, “Have you been drinking?” - is unusual in the officer's experience and would probably arouse the officer's suspicion, extending the duration of the stop while he “fishes” for something illegal. Most drivers are going somehwere and don't want the delay to last any longer than necessary, so they universally tend to waive their rights, even if they know what they are. Truly, it becomes a matter of losing our rights because we simply don't exercise them.

That said, my minor military police-style experience and my working the police beat as a newspaper reporter allows me a perspective less idealistic and closer to that of the on-the-ground police officer (pg. 9). Also, I haven't been pulled over by a traffic cop since about 1997 – I tend to play well with others. Or maybe the lack of stickers on my truck doesn't allow for any immediate profiling...

The residents of Dewey-Humboldt are caught in a catch-22.

For at least a decade, they've pointed at Prescott Valley as the bad example of what they don't want to become – a sprawling suburbia highlighted by a succession of strip malls and commercial development along the highway. They wanted to retain their rural atmosphere of ranching, farming and plenty of wide open spaces. When Prescott Valley began annexing property in the Dewey area, they finally resolved to incorporate to avoid being swallowed by PV. But incorporation brings responsibilities for roads, law enforcement, utilities and other public services, which requires money. Incorporated towns get money from taxes – for a large part, sales taxes. That entails a reliance on development.

Young's Farm is already gone, sold to a developer who wants to put hundreds of homes and a commercial area on the old farmstead. The only decision now is, how many homes per acre will D-H permit? How large a commercial area? The highway in D-H already has a sprinkling of strip malls and dealerships, a la Prescott Valley, and it's just a matter of time until the spaces between them fill up with more of the same. Why?

It appears some of the folks designing D-H aren't thinking any differently than those in PV or Prescott or Chino Valley (pg. 6). Dewey-Humboldt is getting caught up in the same feedback loop as the other towns: develop sprawl so that they can pay for infrastructure and services so that they can develop more sprawl to pay for more infrastructure and services so that they can develop more sprawl.

The catch-22 is that, by incorporating, Dewey-Humboldt will now become the very thing it was trying to avoid.

But, it doesn't have to. The Young's Farm parcel doesn't have to sprout hundreds of homes; one resident suggests a condo with underground parking could house hundreds of families and still leave plenty of open space – or even a bit of land for farming (pg. 7). At first blush it sounds odd, but is it feasible? It's worth checking out. It's also a prompt for the D-H town council to think in creative new ways, to break away of the limiting economics of the tri-cities. Without new ideas, there will be nothing to distinguish the sprawl and strip malls of Dewey-Humboldt from the sprawl and strip malls of PV.