A literal slush fund of paid teachers being held in reserve … just in case needed.

It’s common in St. Louis?

Is it common everywhere?

Massachusetts Supreme Court thumbs nose at local authorities.

Tells citizens their opinions mean nothing.

Wind farms are coming!

(Full Story)

Think of it as a sign permit?

One man’s plan to abolish government …

Dolphin hunting season opens!

Schools hand out condoms and ban these?

A vote today on Pedicabs!

Make them legal?

Apply for your tailgate permit here?

No swings for the young.

Dog License Doubles in Price!

This will encourage more compliance?

“All great achievements have one thing in common – people with a passion to succeed.”

Pat Cash

Is there a government owned eyesore in your neighborhood?

Fighting over cats and dogs in Dallas …

Oklahoma City Council says “No” to race!

Someone may have unrealistic high hopes…

Lamar County may convert a county building into a inmate work center that will help ease crowding at the jail and possibly aid the county’s budget.

Lamar County Administrator Chuck Bennett said residents’ complaints about litter sparked the plan.

Bennett said the center would house prisoners for work crews, with the first 20 inmates to be in the new center no later than next spring.

“When it’s up and running, it should free up about 50 beds and provide the county with free labor,” Sheriff Danny Rigel said

Bennett said about $200,000 had been set aside in the proposed 2011 budget to cover construction costs and purchase fencing, cameras, bedding and other necessities.

“But that $200,000, that investment, has the potential to do really large things, really big things,” Bennett said.

Currently, inmates work outside the jail on a variety of details.

Two seven-man crews pick litter from county roads. Some are used for projects at county-owned buildings and grounds. Others clean high school football stadiums after games or help during the county’s “white goods” collection on the weekends.

Down the road, inmate labor could supplement county workers in areas such as sanitation and building and grounds.

District 5 Supervisor Dale Lucus said he could envision a day when inmate labor was saving the county hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries, benefits and other costs.

Joe Bounds, president of the Board of Supervisors, said the relatively modest cost to renovate buildings could have a big payoff down the road.

Just wait a minute here. Most people in jail aren’t there because of a high work ethic.

What makes these people think this program is going to be so wildly successful?

I’m dubious about it.

I wrote a few days ago of a meeting to discuss reducing the number of members on governing boards.

Specifically the number of Barron County Supervisors. I have championed  the idea of reducing the number of members to at least keep the discussion alive. An in depth study has never been done in Barron County, but a new committee is going to be looking at the issue.

I decided to do a little research on my own. I chose a random county about our size in every state. I looked up how many Supervisors (or whatever they are called some places) serve on the governing board. Quite frankly I was stunned with the results. I knew there were different size boards in different places but this…

3 member board – 16

5 member board – 11

6 member board- 2

7 member board- 7

8 member board – 1

9 member board – 3

11 member board -1

12 member board – 1

18 member board – 2

19 member board -1

An then there is Barron County, WI at 29!

Oh, and four states didn’t have county government at all, the best I could find.

Somehow I just don’t feel comfortable with the idea that 29 heads are the optimum number to make decisions.

It isn’t very often that I applaud the efforts of the ACLU but they have it right on this one…

The local ACLU today weighed in on the Sacramento City Council’s decision to move the public comment period to the end of its meetings, noting it “undoubtedly will preclude members of the public from having the opportunity to voice their grievances, concerns and comments to their elected representatives.”

The ACLU asked the council rescind its decision.

“The Sacramento County Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union strongly opposes moving the public comment period for issues not on the agenda from the start of meetings to the end of meetings. We assume…public servants would be anxious to hear from as many as possible of your constituents.

“(But) people will not be able to stay to the end of the meeting because they rely upon (public transit) for transportation, have family commitments or for health reasons cannot sit for the long hours meetings often run,” said Jim Updegraff, chair of the ACLU of Sacramento County board of directors.

In his letter to the council, Updegraff urged the City Council to “change the public comment period back to the start of the meeting. Such action would best serve the people of the City of Sacramento.”

Government should always encourage involvement in the political process. It is a drip, drip, drip kind of encouragement.

Instead of drip, drip, drip … the City of Maricopa is turning on faucet.

Attempting to garner more input from the local high school students, the City is forming a youth council to help provide students a voice in their community.

This is the first time the City has formed a youth council, and the reason for its formation, Brown said, was to get the youth in Maricopa more involved in the community, as well as allowing them to have input on where the City goes from here.

Good luck Maricopa.

I don’t know how much success you will have but I give you credit for trying.

If there ever was a case for changing SOMETHING this would be it …

Only 32 people have served on the Detroit City Council in the past 37 years, 19 men and 13 women.

The majority — 21 — have lived in northwest Detroit.

No one from southwest Detroit, the fastest-growing section of the city, has ever been elected to the council. And the last member elected from the embattled and neglected northeast section of the city, above I-94 and east of I-75, was the infamous Alonzo (Lonnie) Bates in 2001. He’s now in prison on theft and bank fraud charges.

But Detroiters will, for the first time in more than 70 years, improve their council’s diversity and accountability by making seven members responsible for specific districts of the city.

Yes, that’s what that vote was last November.

More than 80% of Detroiters skipped the November vote. But those who voted chose change.

This certainly won’t cure all of Detroit’s ills, but let’s hope it becomes a little bit of change for the better.

I just don’t think this idea will catch on.

From the Maumelle Monitor we learn of a different way to pay municipal employees.

Non-elected city employees were given a one-time, 1 percent bonus after the Maumelle City Council approved it during a meeting on Aug. 16.

Last year, city officials were concerned about awarding raises because they were unsure how well revenues would pour into the city treasury.

City Attorney JaNan Davis told the council that if the extra pay were considered a merit increase that it would remain in the employees’ base pay in the future. If the council adopted a bonus, then the additional revenue would be considered a one-time payment of more cash.

How about it?

Do you think your municipal employees would go for this?

The website Backseat Cuddler is reporting …

Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony recently moved into a new home in Hidden Hills, CA, and they’re taking life in this private, gated community near Los Angeles rather a little too seriously.  Jennifer’s decided to try her hand at local politics – she’s running for the local homeowners’ association board.

“Jennifer already wants to make some improvements to the neighborhood, so she’s getting involved in the association.  She’s attending meetings and wants to run for office during the next election.”

It’s a frickin gated community!  What “improvements” could it possibly need?  People aren’t color coordinating their cars with the exterior trim on their houses?  Oh, the humanity!

A Homeowner’s Association is NOT local politics.

Local politics elections and meetings are very public.

Homeowners associations elections and meetings are private.

It may be politics.

It may be close to local politics.

But it ain’t local politics.

(No I don’t read Backseat Cuddler on a regular basis.)

It’s time to get picky.

That’s right I’m going to start off a new week being picky.

From Channel 6 in Tulsa we learn …

The Tulsa City Council will consider writing an ordinance that approves of the Mayor’s spouse having official city business cards.

The proposal is a response to an ethics complaint over the City of Tulsa issuing a $16 dollar box of business cards to Victoria Bartlett, the wife of Mayor Dewey Bartlett. The cards were paid for with taxpayer funds and display the City of Tulsa seal.

Councilors John Eagleton and GT Bynum are co-sponsoring the ordinance, which will be up for discussion for the first time next Tuesday. It would apply to any mayoral spouse, not just Mrs. Bartlett, who Mayor Bartlett frequently refers to as “The First Lady of Tulsa.”

Victoria Bartlett volunteers her time to work on several City initiatives and represents her husband occasionally at public appearances.

NO … NO … NO.

Sure when I was a Mayor I joked about my wife being a ‘First Lady” too. Who cares about that?

But official business cards?

Even if it is only $16.

NO .. NO … NO.

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

Will Rogers

The Daily Caller reports this abuse of eminent domain …

Imagine you come home from work one day to a notice on your front door that you have 45 days to demolish your house, or the city will do it for you.  Oh, and you’re paying for it.

This is happening right now in Montgomery, Ala., and here is how it works: The city decides it doesn’t like your property for one reason or another, so it declares it a “public nuisance.”  It mails you a notice that you have 45 days to demolish your property, at your expense, or the city will do it for you (and, of course, bill you).

Your tab with the city will constitute a lien on your property, and if you don’t pay it within 30 days (or pay your installments on time; if you owe over $10,000, you can work out a deal to pay back the city for destroying your home over a period of time, with interest), the city can sell your now-vacant land to the highest bidder.

Alabama law empowers municipalities to do just this.  Officials can demolish structures that they determine, “due to poor design, obsolescence, or neglect, have become unsafe to the extent of becoming public nuisances…and [are] causing or may cause a blight or blighting influence on the city and the neighborhoods in which [they are] located.”  Keep in mind, so-called standards like “obsolescence” are so vague they can mean anything, so even a well-maintained home that government officials don’t like the look of can be fed to the bulldozers.

The end game in Montgomery, however, is obvious.  The city wants to clear and ultimately sell-off the property of lower-income, mostly black Alabamans to higher-income developers, but it can’t do that through the state’s eminent domain law.  So it found a backdoor, which also incidentally does not require the city to compensate property owners for their loss, but instead charges them.

At least I consider this an abuse.

Maybe you agree with this action?

Time magazine is reporting it so it must be true…

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant.

It is a dangerous decision — one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

Read entire article HERE.

Garbage.

A universal problem.

From Seattlepi.com comes the story of the garbage problems in Honolulu …

HONOLULU — Honolulu on Monday agreed to dispose of 20,000 tons worth of gigantic piles of shrink-wrapped garbage that have been moldering in the heat of a Hawaii industrial park where it had been waiting for more than five months for a possible shipment to Washington state.

Acting Mayor Kirk Caldwell said the on-again, off-again trash shipping plan to a dump near a Washington state Indian reservation no longer appears viable.

Instead, Hawaiian Waste Systems had agreed that the municipal solid waste will mostly be burned in Honolulu’s “H-Power” electricity generating station. What can’t be burned will be taken to the city’s only dump, the 21-year-old Waimanalo Gulch landfill, which is slated to close in 2012.

“We’ve agreed on a reasonable solution that will resolve this issue and remove the opala,” Caldwell said in a statement, using the Hawaiian word for trash.

The lingering trash piles offered a glimpse into the garbage woes that Honolulu faces as the state’s largest city struggles to find a home for all its waste.

With Waimanalo Gulch filling up fast, officials proposed to ship the blue, plastic-wrapped garbage bales to a landfill near the Columbia River in Washington’s Klickitat County.

But the Yakama Indian Nation vehemently objected and won a court ruling last week that put the plan on hold indefinitely.

The baled garbage now sitting in Hawaiian Waste System’s facility in a Kapolei industrial park will be fed into the H-Power furnaces beginning next month, Caldwell said. It will take about 20 weeks to completely dispose of the rubbish.

“The city bent over backwards to try to make this shipping effort work, but it is clear that shipping is not a viable option at this time.”

Honolulu makes up 80 percent of Hawaii’s population and generates nearly 1.6 million tons of garbage a year. More than a third of the trash is incinerated to generate electricity, and the destination for the remaining garbage is landfills.

But the amount of available land and the desire to build garbage dumps on the island of Oahu is limited, with Honolulu leaders reluctant to add landfills in their backyards and near sites known for their breathtaking, pristine beauty.

So … the long range plan of Hawaii is to send their garbage to the state of Washington.

They might have learned that from Minnesota whose long range goal is to transport all their garbage to Wisconsin.

Yes I’m bitter about it and another reason I don’t care for our neighbors to the west.

Rancho Mirage has been trying out new iPads.

Rancho Mirage City Councilman Scott Hines said his effort to become the first “paperless” council member by using an iPad has been “a fantastic success, way beyond what anybody thought it would be.”

And although four of the city’s five council members now have iPads paid for by the city, Hines said the device is saving Rancho Mirage money by eliminating the need to reproduce thousands of pages of documents before each council meeting.

“We’re saving hundreds of dollars not just in paper costs but also in staff time,” he said. “It’s a scurry, each time, to get all of that ready.”

City Manager Patrick Pratt said the four iPads cost $879 apiece, or a total of $3,516.

Mayor Richard Kite has been the lone holdout against the Apple machine, and isn’t in any hurry to join his fellows. “I haven’t really thought about it,” he said. “I get everything in bound volumes and go through it. I’ve done it that way, and it works fine.”

I have no problem with the old fuddy duddy Mayor not wanting to use one. Technology isn’t for anyone.

When you read this column by Dick Sparrer in the Los Gatos Weekly Times …

you would swear to it that he has read “Why Your City Council Makes Dumb Decisions and What You Can Do About It.”

Dick says in part …

We can no longer sit home with Judge Judy, The Simpsons and American Idol while others are making decisions that will affect our lives. We must take an active approach and get involved in politics on all levels, first as voters and then watchdogs. We need to know the issues and know the candidates so that we can make informed decisions in the fall elections based on knowledge, not just on media sound bites and political mailers. Then we need to follow that up by paying attention to what those we elect do once they take office.

You tell’em Dick!

Download “Why Your City Council Makes Dumb Decisions and What You Can Do About It? here.

Local political apathy knows no borders. Apathy abounds everywhere!

Check out this story from Gloucestershire …

WHEN I was elected leader of this council in May, one of the things I wanted to focus on was making politics more accessible to people.

The work of this council affects every single person in Gloucestershire, but I found that it was only the minority that were actually interested in coming along to our meetings and finding out how our decisions are made.

With my cabinet colleagues, I thought long and hard about how we could get people interested in what we do and one of the things that kept cropping up was the location of our meetings.

Gloucester is our base, simply because that’s where Shire Hall is located therefore historically all our meetings were held here.

However, I know this may put many people off from attending the meetings.

I can understand why a 35-mile round trip from Lydney, 20 miles back and forth from Stroud or even a 70 mile journey to and from parts of the Cotswolds isn’t appealing to everyone. That’s why we’ve decided to take our meetings to the people instead.

I think taking cabinet ‘on tour’ is a great idea and it means that we can actually get out into the communities we represent and see the people we serve face to face on their own doorsteps.

Hopefully this will make it easier and more appealing for people to come along and watch our decision-making.

I truly believe this will help people better understand the work we do, and why we make the decisions we make.

I truly believe you will be disappointed in this experiment, but I give you credit for trying something.

He who hesitates is a damned fool.

Mae West