Reading between the lines

For the background, read this Daily Camera article.

Now for the rant.

Let's see:

- the Boulder police have a bunch of unclaimed bikes (these are mostly abandoned, but some of them are stolen and the original owner is never located).

- to keep from being trapped under the piles of rusted crap (remember, this is a college town), they auction of the more valuable bikes (if you've ever been to these auctions, they sell bikes for as little as $20 or so - so "valuable" is a relative term here) and presumably use the money for something worthwhile.

- after the auction, there is some atrocious, nonfunctional crap left over. It has to go somewhere, so rather than sticking it in the landfill, the police allow Community Cycles to come get it and try to make some of it functional and useful again.

- now somehow the police are worried that some bikes are *ending up outside Boulder*.

This whole situation is absurd. The police are *getting rid of what they consider garbage*. If Community Cycles wants to ship them to Africa, or give them to homeless people in Boulder, or heck, cut them up to make a steam organ, THAT'S THEIR BUSINESS. They are taking something otherwise useless and finding a use for it - how can it possibly matter where the bikes end up?

And for the record, nobody who wants to earn a bike there is ever turned away, to my knowledge. So thanks to CC, I think Boulder is adequately supplied with crappy but functional bikes.

The whole situation screams out "minor bureaucrat on a power trip." I'd love to hear the whole story, but at least now I know that those rascals at CC can't take our hard-earned trash bikes and ship them off for some godless communist in Libya to enjoy. Thank god!