Delmarva items – Page 266

Quick link(s)

Well, the first one out of the chute for the Salisbury City Council insofar as the Internet goes is, not surprisingly, the incumbent Gary Comegys. Challenger Terry Cohen is probably going to be second since she’s secured a URL, just hasn’t placed anything on that website yet.

I’ve added Gary’s link to the side, and the 2007 Salisbury race will be on top of the board since my bloglist comes up in alphabetical order. Obviously, if more people have websites I’d love to know about them. I truly don’t have a horse in the race since I can’t vote in this election. But I will say that I know a few of the candidates a little bit, since I spoke at some length to the aforementioned Mrs. Cohen at our last WCRC meeting and know Louise Smith from her service as one of my predecessors on the Republican Central Committee. I also covered Neil Bayne’s County Council efforts last summer, so I’ve spoken to him briefly a time or two.

Soon I would think that the candidate forums and such will get underway and hopefully I’ll be able to devote a bit of coverage to this race to join Debbie Campbell and Shanie Shields on Salisbury City Council. (Speaking of Debbie, she had a quite informative 20 minutes on the radio today.)

I’m going to expect that I’ll end up with 4 or 5 linked sites when all is said and done. My feeling is that each of the three eventual winners will get their votes in part due to having a website. With the blogs in Salisbury becoming home to much of the political discourse, an Internet presence is vital in my opinion.

I have other surprises and events coming up in the next few weeks on monoblogue, so stay tuned.

Weekend of local rock volume 2

I’m a day or two late with these pix, but I did get out on Saturday night to Brew River for the delmarvanightlife.com 2nd Anniversary party. In all nine bands were featured on two stages: Nate Clendenen, Barking Crickets, Lime Green, The Making, Project Sideways, Lower Class Citizens, Falling From Failure, Hot Box, and Hard$ell. For much of the evening I was at the River Stage which had LG, PS, FFF, and Hard$ell. But I did sneak over to the Main Stage to catch a few songs from the other groups and take pictures of them as well. I ended up getting good pictures of five of the nine groups.

Barking Crickets, who I caught a little bit of for the second weekend in a row.

Lime Green opened the River Stage with a good alternative sound.

I only caught a little bit of The Making, just enough to get the picture.

Project Sideways did a great song called 'Wasted Dreams'.

These three guys, Falling From Failure, played some really good hard stuff, too.

Probably the best of the ones I saw was Project Sideways, but most of them I’d see again if I got the opportunity and had a few bucks in my pocket. Most of the bands that were there Saturday night are linked from monoblogue.

Oh, sorry about having the pix screwed up for a bit…server went down (again) for a brief time and I had to remember how to get to my HTML editor, which works much better for me when I post pictures up!

Not sure when the next show I’ll hit will be. I may decide to wait until a week from Sunday when guitarist extraordinaire Gary Hoey plays a concert at Seacrets. (This right after a guitar virtuoso of another stripe, B.B. King, brings Lucille in to play at the Civic Center.) Regardless, the local music scene is now a whole lot hotter than the weather!

Salisbury News wins again…

I figured I’d get people ready because I know Joe Albero will be excited again after he sees this.

On January 26 Joe placed a post on Salisbury News claiming that Doris Schonbrunner was to become the new assistant county administrator.

I was just looking over the Daily Times website and at 5:24 p.m. today Joe Gidjunis posted an article for tomorrow’s paper, “Schonbrunner to become Council Administrator“. However, this selection was only confirmed today by the Wicomico County Council.

So Joe’s going to be pretty pleased about beating the DT by what, 9 days?

As for myself, having supported Doris in the primary election I’m happy she’s staying in the county and I think the naysayers who commented on the Albero article will be won over by the professionalism that I’m sure Doris will handle her new duties with. If not, I guess they’ll just have to stew in it, won’t they?

A 50 year plan: Eminent domain/property rights

I actually wasn’t going to do this particular subject yet, but I received an e-mail at work yesterday that bothered me and I wanted to share my reaction. In turn, since I’d planned on doing a “50 year plan” post on the issue anyway, this was as good of time as any to do so.

Recently, partially at the behest of my company but moreso to keep my continuing education requirements straight (and maintain my architectural license) I rejoined the American Institute of Architects after a hiatus of about 5 years or so. So now I’m a member of AIA Chesapeake Bay instead of AIA Toledo, but the national song seemingly remains the same.

I figured out that my membership had gone through when I started receiving AIA e-mails at work, which I have zero problem with. But yesterday’s e-mail was a newsletter called The Angle, which documents their political lobbying efforts and other related items the AIA pursues. Part of this newsletter was soliciting input for an AIA position statement, as follows:

Proposed Position Statement 46 – Eminent Domain

The American Institute of Architects believes that eminent domain is a critical tool for revitalizing our cities and improving the quality of life in urban and suburban neighborhoods. State and local governments must ensure that eminent domain laws do not curtail smart growth efforts, brownfield cleanup, or otherwise limit new development and improvements to existing development.

Well, since they asked for my input, they got it…

I would feel much better about this if the statement read as follows:

“The American Institute of Architects believes that eminent domain is a critical tool for revitalizing our cities and improving the quality of life in urban and suburban neighborhoods. While the AIA acknowledges and agrees that private property rights are paramount in our free society, we also feel that state and local governments can and should balance the rights of existing property holders with eminent domain laws that do not curtail smart growth efforts, brownfield cleanup, or otherwise limit new development and improvements to existing development.”

As I read it, the AIA is taking a position of property holders be damned, we just want to develop sites regardless of who’s hurt in the process and all these damn libertarians who insist on actually following the “takings clause” in the Fifth Amendment are just meddling with our profession.

Many eminent domain proceedings in the last decade have stretched the term “public use” way beyond its intent. Personally, I do not believe in government using its power and taking one’s private property to benefit another person simply for additional tax revenue.

And so begins this portion of what I’ve come to call my “50 year plan.” It’s pretty simple, really. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution reads, in part, as follows:

(N)or (shall a person) be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. (Emphasis mine.)

In 2005, the United States Supreme Court handed down what’s popularly known as the Kelo decision. In a 5-4 decision (Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer the majority; O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas found for Suzette Kelo) the Court held that, despite the fact that “the city is not planning to open the condemned land – at least not in its entirety – to use by the general public.” They noted, “this…Court long ago rejected any literal requirement that condemned property be put into use for the…public.”

You know, sometimes the Supreme Court gets it wrong. The idea behind eminent domain was to allow the taking of private property for a public use, such as a highway, airport, or a building that would be owned by the taxpayers rather than a private entity. But in the case of Suzette Kelo, her property would be used by a private developer – a developer who was planning on developing the land to boost the city’s tax base.

In the time since, many states have enacted laws to prohibit this practice. According to the Castle Coalition, 34 states either have a prohibition on this practice or strengthened its position on the law in 2006. Maryland is not one of them.

There is a fairly weak reform bill in the hopper in the Maryland Senate this session, SB3. A similar bill last session, also SB3 (along with HB1137), was referred back to committee once it was amended to change from a legislative matter to a Constitutional amendment by an amendment from Senator Allan Kittleman. (The House bill did not make it out of committee at all.)

Interestingly enough, the eminent domain power in Maryland has not been used much recently for “traditional” items such as highways, airports, government buildings, etc. The heaviest user of eminent domain in recent years has been the Maryland Stadium Authority, as they cleared out blocks of homes and businesses to build, among others, M&T Bank Stadium and Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

I like the idea of a Constitutional amendment at the state level, as long as the amendment clearly states that the power of eminent domain is to be used only for the public good and not to enrich one powerful private entity at the expense of a class of lesser entities as happened in New London, Connecticut. Theoretically, the federal level is already taken care of in the Fifth Amendment; all that needs is a Supreme Court which remembers that our laws are based solely on what the Founders wrote, not what they feel is in our best interest at the time or on incorrect precedents.

Because this eminent domain issue has a fairly simple solution and can be settled rather quickly, it’s one of the easiest planks to rectify in my 50 year plan. So I’m going to expand on the subject a little by talking about private property rights and other property issues.

Obviously in our nation one has some restrictions on property rights, which are mostly common-sense sorts of things. For example, it would not be a good idea if I built a rifle range in the midst of a residential area. If I had complete property rights theoretically I could do this, but most areas have some sort of zoning to prevent such incompatible uses from occurring on adjacent plots. Generally things like usage, setbacks, building area as a percentage of a lot, and building height are covered. These can also be waived if the property owner presents a compelling reason to do so in front of an elected or appointed local body.

However, I see a trend where government is restricting land usage by regulation. A recent example was embodied by the number of National Monuments established by President Clinton by his interpretation of the Antiquities Act of 1906. Whereas national parks need Congressional approval, in many cases national monuments do not. Clinton established a total of 19 national monuments, mostly in the final year or so of his term. While much of the land was already federally owned, this action also further restricted its usage. With the strokes of his pen Clinton placed over 5 million acres of land out of reach to mining and development. (That’s about 2/3 of the size of Maryland.) By comparison, President Bush has enacted just one land-based national monument of about 1/3 acre in New York City. A summary of concerns can also be found here.

While local zoning codes are generally fair, the scale of regulation of private property by the federal government is much less so – and much harder to combat. Another area of regulation that concerns me is hypersensitivity by people concerned with environmental issues such as endangered species. A number of projects have been thwarted nationwide because some so-called endangered species MIGHT have a nesting ground or habitat there. While there’s a case for preserving habitat, the balance is currently way too far in favor of militant environmentalism at the expense of economy.

Now I’ll shift my focus to a more local level.

In last year’s state election, Maryland voters unwisely placed the General Assembly in charge of the disposition of state land rather than retaining it under executive authority. This ballot issue arose from the proposed sale of state land in St. Mary’s County to a developer – something I personally had no problem with. Just like the argument in the Kelo case about the economic benefit to the city of New London, the land in question could have possibly benefitted the coffers and overall economy of St. Mary’s County. But in this case government took the opposite side.

Ideally to me governmental entities will own the least amount of land necessary to function. Further, land that is owned by the government should be as free of restrictions to private use as possible. While development would have limits, something where the public good outweighs the risks (such as drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) can be done if managed properly and carefully.

This portion of the 50 year plan will take much longer to implement than the eminent domain issue will because again it’s going to take a sea change in attitude by the powers that be. The more land they have, the more power. It’s going to take a forceful voice from the people to make government give back to the private sector what is rightfully theirs.

Salisbury Mall Archive

I came across an interesting website in the last couple days called Salisbury Mall Archive. It’s actually been around since October and is apparently one of those labors of love from a onetime resident who now lives in Wilmington.

Being in the profession that I am, old buildings hold a fascination to me. It’s interesting to think about a time when the now-decrepit mall was the hot new thing in Salisbury. Makes you wonder if that instantly became the teen hangout back then or if hanging out at the mall was something my generation began to do in the late ’70’s.

Anyway, this blog has a lot of interesting old and new photos of the site and I enjoyed working my way through it. What would really be cool to me though would be to get the set of blueprints the mall and its addition were built from.

But the SMA website got me to thinking about how things become obsolete so quickly. In essence, the Salisbury Mall had a two-decade lifespan from the time it was built to the day the Centre of Salisbury opened. Looking at it as an outsider who didn’t grow up with the mall, I would honestly have to wonder why it was placed in the location it was. To me, a better location would have been in the area that’s now bisected by the Northeast Collector. If the information I’ve gathered is correct, I believe the Ocean Gateway was built just prior to the Salisbury Mall. Instead of getting a large parcel of land along the busy highway, the old mall was placed on what amounts to a side street. Of course, the Ocean Gateway was later supplanted by the U.S. 13/50 bypass that originally terminated where the Centre of Salisbury stands now before the highway was extended to pick up U.S. 50.

The other misfortune befalling the old Salisbury Mall was having a series of uncaring owners. Perhaps the building could have been converted into another non-retail use. Former large retail spaces serve as college campuses, government buildings, call centers – the list goes on. Sadly, the building has gone without even basic repairs for so long that the elements have taken their toll and there’s little choice anymore but to level the structure. With the building being open to the elements, our humid climate, and plenty of material to feed on, the mold alone would render the building unsafe to inhabit. (You wonder if the homeless man recently found dead in the woods near the old mall was a person who regularly slept in that building and was sickened by the extreme mold exposure.)

When I first came to Salisbury, I happened to drive by the old mall as I wandered about town getting my bearings. (Wow – two malls, I thought to myself.) I remember driving by there during the evening and wondering why no one was at the mall, not realizing that it was all but abandoned by then. (This would’ve been about the time the final store that was left there closed up shop.) It was also when it struck me that the mall sure seemed like it was off the beaten path.

Of course, right across the street from the old mall is the Civic Center. Again, this is a case where a building seems to have a short-term useful life as Wicomico County is seeking millions to refurbish the place just to get a few more years out of it. I suppose what makes me feel old is that the Civic Center was built when I was a sophomore in high school and it’s almost functionally obsolete. At some point, there will have to be a decision made whether to pull the plug on the building as a concert and entertainment venue.

Personally I don’t think it’s a bad concert venue at all; however, given the dearth of acts that put Salisbury on their touring schedule it may be time to start planning for a successor arena. Obviously there’s not the capacity necessary to bring large national acts in, but we’re not even getting good second-tier groups. The last rock band I recall being at the WYCC was the Journey show I attended in November of 2005.

Along Civic Avenue we already have one white elephant. Unfortunately, the Civic Center isn’t going to be a top spending priority for the county anytime soon and I have yet to see anyone willing to put private capital into building a new arena here like is possible up in Laurel. So in the years to come we may have two white elephants reminding us of what Salisbury once was.

“So let’s get to work.” (Then we’ll pick your pocket.)

Once again, I probably saved a half-hour in my life by reading over Martin O’Malley’s “State of the State” address. Obviously he’s only been in office two weeks so he has no accomplishments to speak of – hell he doesn’t even have his full cabinet yet.

But of course, he had to get in his gratutitous slams. Moments after noting that Maryland has “good and decent people on both sides of these debates (over the death penalty, slots, etc.)” he then remarked, “We cannot resolve every unsettled issue in just 90 days; nor can we heal in 90 days divisions that were four years in the making.” He also opened the speech by noting, “the drift of recent years.”

On a philosophical level, O’Malley is making mostly proper initiatives insofar as most of these items will be paid for (and paid for, and paid for some more) by Maryland’s taxpayers. The only whining he did about something he wanted from the federal government was asking for an expanded National Capital Region (ostensibly to receive more federal funding.)

But on a practical level, there are many problems that I think Maryland will face because of O’Malley’s so-called solutions. I can just run right through the text of the speech to point out a few of the more egregious ones; it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

I’ll start with where O’Malley states, “we now have an opportunity to put professional regulators back on the job at the Public Service Commission.” Regardless of who he places on the PSC, the fact remains that energy is going to cost more in the near-term future. A sustainable business model cannot be had by going back to the days where utilities have to beg and plead to raise rates. Further, in order to comply with the almost-certain state mandates on pollution control, the utilities need to raise the money from someplace. Putting anti-business hyper-environmentalists on the PSC will do nothing for consumers in the long-term, but by then O’Malley will be on to his next political stop.

“(W)e will also start making regular, measurable strides toward increasing the participation of minority and women-owned businesses in the economy of our state,” continued the governor. To me, that sounds like just more set-asides and other discriminatory programs in state government. I want the best businesses to succeed, regardless of ownership. How many times has it been the case where the money behind the business is from white males, with the token woman or minority owner just to qualify for the set-asides?

Martin then worked through a number of spending programs for both K-12 education and working to freeze the cost of college tuition. The sad fact is that college costs will continue to rise regardless, and the costs passed on through additional fees or a higher cost for room and board. A tuition freeze sounds great, but tuition is only part of the outlay. Meanwhile, I suppose building new facilities for K-12 is a good idea, but I’m not sure at all that bricks and mortar will solve the problems within our public schools.

O’Malley spent a good deal of his effort on proposing his solutions to our health care issue. “Among other things the (Maryland Healthcare A)ct will create a Health Insurance Exchange to help small businesses find more affordable coverage for their employees – on a pretax basis. It will require insurance companies to allow younger adults up to age 25 to be covered under their parents’ policies. And it will also provide healthcare coverage to more children in our state.”

The biggest trouble I see with this concept is that it applies more of a burden on the companies that sell health insurance in the state of Maryland. Unfortunately. O’Malley doesn’t address how this HIE program will promote competition. With the number of coverage mandates Maryland has, it’s like giving the consumer a choice of a Cadillac, Lexus, BMW, or Ferrari when their budget dictates a Chevrolet.

(As an aside, MPPI Senior Fellow Marc Kilmer has a good commentary piece regarding health insurance in today’s Baltimore Examiner. Kilmer also touched on this subject in a recent monoblogue interview.)

You know, Governor O’Malley worries a lot more about “saving the bay” than I do. Believe me, I lived by Lake Erie and if mankind couldn’t kill that body of water, I’m not worried much about Chesapeake Bay. Obviously there are a lot of common-sense solutions and Salisbury getting a good chunk of the $138 million O’Malley pledges toward improving local water and wastewater systems would help a great deal.

However, saying that, “(e)very dollar of Open Space funding this year – an estimated $289 million – will be spent on open space” means that the state will spend huge money buying land to take it off county tax rolls and further burden the counties who need the revenue themselves. And re-establish the Office of Smart Growth? Martin, let’s just call a spade a spade – it’ll be the office of anti-growth. It’s bad enough your party’s established a terrible business climate in Maryland (with the possible exception of one being a woman or minority), now you want to really make things tough by killing residential development.

And of course we come to where Marylanders “accept our responsibility in the fight against global warming.” Leaving aside that we really don’t have a lot to do about global warming, this was the opening for O’Malley to press for passage of the Clean Cars Act.

The biggest problem I see with the CCA is that it’ll raise the price of new cars anywhere from $200 to $1000. It’ll be a boon to car dealers in adjacent states that don’t have similar restrictions, but it also may mean that older, more polluting cars stay on the road longer. Moreover, those polluting heaps will sit in traffic that’s becoming worse.

Martin O’Malley and his allies seem to think that if you throw more money at mass transit, people will take advantage of it. Of the billion-plus dollars devoted to transportation in his budget, over 20% will go toward mass transit projects. The reality is that these modes of transport won’t ever carry more than a small fraction of the workforce and negligible amounts of non-commuter trips. These budgetary dollars simply do not address where the demand is and will be.

These are the monetary issues I have with the “State of the State” address. I also have an issue with some of the attitude.

“This year, together, we are choosing to make progress on the priorities of the people who elected us. Implicit, however, in the choices we make this year is the faith that we have the courage to face up to the fiscal reality before us in the year ahead.”

“If not, we risk going back to a time that we were not particularly proud of — making life less affordable for middle-class families. Cutting funds to local government. Stealing from our children’s future by taking money away from open space, and shifting transportation dollars away from reducing traffic. I don’t believe that is the sort of future we would choose.”

Well, Governor O’Malley, what I chose was to have a fiscally responsible governor who didn’t find every excuse in the book to balloon the size of government. Unfortunately, I was in the minority in the last election. However, I don’t plan on being in the minority in 2010, nor it is likely you’ll earn my vote by advocating the programs you advocate.

Unfortunately, the GOP’s response left me wanting as well. It did a brief job of comparing and contrasting the Ehrlich record with O’Malley’s proposals, but I wanted to see some alternatives given to the people of Maryland as well.

Start by making Maryland more business-friendly by instituting tort reform and allowing more competition in the health insurance industry by reducing or eliminating coverage mandates. Worry less about the school buildings and more about the students. How about allowing state school funding to follow the child regardless of the schooling choice made by the parents?

Rather than re-establishing an “Office of Smart Growth”, let those who know the local situation best in the counties and municipalities decide what is smart growth for them. Instead of more regulations for the auto industry, accept the choice that most Free Staters have made as far as their personal commutes go and build better, safer highways.

The Maryland Republican Party missed an opportunity in their response. Let’s not be like the Democrats in Congress, who won not because they presented a better alternative, but simply because the GOP House and Senate members failed in living up to their promises. We are the party of better ideas, let’s act like it.

Weekend of local rock

The other day I posted about hard decisions because so many good bands were playing the next two weekends. Well, weekend number 1 is history now and I ended up going to two shows.

Originally I wasn’t going to go out on Friday night after bowling but I had two strokes of good fortune happen while I was up in Seaford “heaving the rock.” First of all, we were one bowler short as the lady on my team had to babysit – so my team had only two bowlers and we were finished rather early. The second piece of luck occurred when I finally won our 50/50 drawing…geez, been in at least one bowling league a week for almost two solid years and I finally won once. While I need to win it probably 3 more times the rest of this season just to get to break even, the extra cash in my pocket and being finished so early made me decide to go ahead and check out Barking Crickets on Friday night.

Barking Crickets at the Cactus Club, January 26, 2007

And these guys put on a pretty good show in front of a reasonably packed house. Interestingly enough, I was led to believe by observation that the blonde lady who’s in my shot (lower left, you can’t miss her) is the mother of one of the band members. I think at least a couple sets of their parents were present and that’s pretty cool.

Usually when I know I’m going to go see a band, I’ll go to their Myspace site and listen in on the songs they put up (most bands put up 1-4 songs on Myspace to listen to and occasionally they’ll allow downloads.) While I added the BC link to monoblogue on Friday I didn’t stop to listen to their stuff because I didn’t plan to hit their show that night. So I went to the Cactus Club and got to listen to them live first, which made things a bit different. Their sound is more along the lines of alternative rock, which I can get into.

Because they were the only band playing, BC did need to fill up some of their show with cover songs. The three that I thought were best were their versions of “Superman’s Dead” (Our Lady Peace), “Seven Nation Army” (White Stripes) which was BC’s finale, and the Buffalo Springfield classic “For What It’s Worth”. So I’m sure someplace along the line I’ll check Barking Crickets out again, they put on a pretty good show. Next week they’ll be one of the bands at the delmarvanightlife.com 2nd Anniversary Party at Brew River so it’s a crack at checking these guys out there.

On Saturday night I drove back up to Seaford to see Semiblind again. I’d seen them at the X106.9 Spring Luau last year and liked their set at that show, so I decided to go see them again. Well, this is another good reason:

Michele's the co-lead singer of Semiblind.

This is Michele and she’s the co-lead singer. And boy she can sing. (The pic’s a little fuzzy, since I cropped it from a much larger shot.) It’s especially apparent on their original songs that she has a sort of smoky, sultry voice – not really a pop music style that most female singers would be associated with. One thing I really like about Semiblind is the vocal interplay between her and Jim, the guitarist and other lead vocalist.

Semiblind at Coyote's, January 27, 2007

Here’s the full band shot of Semiblind, the others are no slouches musically either. They really tore it up.

Now Saturday night these guys did quite a few covers, and only a handful of originals. Semiblind put their stamp on everything from The Doors to Janis Joplin to Tom Petty to the Rolling Stones to Nirvana and a lot in between. I really liked the covers, but it was a shame that they didn’t do a couple of their original songs they have on their Myspace site, particularly “Ocean Meets The Sky.”

That omission was one of two things that bummed me out about Saturday night at Coyote’s, with the other being such a small crowd. These guys and gal deserve better! I suppose part of that’s a function of Seaford not being a college town as opposed to Salisbury.

But they’ll keep on playing as Semiblind has plenty of shows lined up for the next couple months. Take the time and check them out!

monoblogue on Myspace

Today I created a Myspace site for monoblogue. I decided to do this because I don’t get to meet everyone who reads my website, but I figured people might want to know a little more about what makes me tick. It’ll be more personal than this website is.

I’ll place the link on my Bloglist, but here’s the URL in the meantime: www.myspace.com/monoblogger

(I couldn’t get “monoblogue”, someone got it before I did. Oh well. I got the next best thing.)

So over the next weeks and months I’ll add content and see how it works from there.

Speaking of my old hometown…

A news item about Salisbury being one of the “100 Best Communities for Young People” came out awhile back and got a little comment on the local blogs. But that was for the 2005 competition. Today it’s been announced that Salisbury and Wicomico County is a repeat winner. What’s funny to me is that another one of the hundred was Toledo, Ohio – for a completely different (and to me more tangible) reason.

Both of these are from the America’s Promise website, with grammatical errors fixed by yours truly:

Wicomico County and Salisbury are being selected as one of the 100 Best Communities for Young People, in part, because of the launch of The Youth Leadership Academy to start…engaging youth more fully in our community as the policy makers, as well as service providers. Seventy youth participated and created lasting foot prints in the community including a 14 ft positive message graffiti mural on display at a local sports center, a public service announcement aired in cable TV promoting healthy habits, and a community poster denoting “Safe Communities.”

Now would it not be ironic if one of these seventy darlings was among those who sprayed graffiti all over downtown? That would certainly be a “lasting foot print.” On the other hand…

Toledo is one of the 100 Best Communities for Young People, in part, because of “Building for Success,” the single largest building project in the history of the Toledo (Public Schools). Through a city-school partnership, Toledo park land was exchanged to rebuild and renovate all district schools, in order to improve educational opportunities for (future) generations.

Aside from the fact that the America’s Promise folks must have butchered up the description, this actually was a very good idea. One of my first posts way back at the beginning of monoblogue talked about the old school I lived by. As it turns out, this particular school is one that will remain standing for some other use but there’s a lot of potential vest-pocket parkland that would be created by this program. Obviously some net parkland would be lost but there’s two benefits I see to this initiative:

First of all, the neighborhood gets a new park with new equipment and one that’s properly planned instead of being haphazardly laid out – in other words, the open space would be utilized better. Secondly, the school system saves a LOT of money on land acquisition and doesn’t have to deal with the costs of demolition or possible brownfield abatement. The money can be plowed into better facilities. (Well, at least I hope that’s what they did!)

Unfortunately, this concept doesn’t translate well to our situation with Bennett High School because there’s no large amount of parkland I’m aware of in Salisbury. Additionally, many feel that a better location for the school would be in the eastern end of the county so a parkland tradeoff would do those residents little good. The concept works in Toledo because schools there are generally “neighborhood” schools.

It’s a nice honor to receive this award, although I can just hear the anti-growth zealots groaning because it’s another draw to our community and another threat for “come-heres” to ruin the Eastern Shore way of life. I’ll say this though. While I’m happy that my old hometown shares this award with Salisbury, there’s a lot more wrong there that has little chance of being fixed. At least here we have an opportunity to make our future better because people do want to move here.

Hard decisions numbers 2 and 3

After a bit of a hiatus over the holidays, the local music scene is cranking up again.

This coming weekend there’s four good bands in three different area venues (that I’m aware of.) In Salisbury, the Cactus Club has Barking Crickets on Friday night and Halflink on Saturday night, plus Island Way features All Down But Nine on Saturday. Up in Seaford at Coyote’s it’s Semiblind playing the tunes. (I’ve linked to all of these bands under “Local band links.” Pretty smart, huh?) I think I know which one I’ll go to, but all would be good choices.

Then the following weekend Halflink is up the road in Delmar at a club called Memories. (That’s one club I haven’t made it to yet, at least I know where it’s at – right on old Route 13.) But Brew River is hosting the DelmarvaNightLife.com 2nd Anniversary party with 10 bands on 2 stages and that starts at 9:00.

At the Main Bar it will be Nate Clendenen, Barking Crickets, The Making, Lower Class Citizens, and Hot Box. On the River side the order goes Lime Green, Another Vicious Circle, Project Sideways, Falling From Failure, and Hard$ell.

I think I’m going to add the local venues to my band links as well, because having a website is a damn good way to get the word out on who’s playing – IF someone keeps up the website! Cactus Club does a good job on that, and the main DNL site is decent.

I do have to commend our local clubs though. For a city the size of Salisbury, they have quite a few places to see good bands. Where I’m from a lot of the bars preferred to have cover bands or DJ’s and not many places hosted original music. That also extends to a couple of the local radio stations that play a lot of local music as well – X106.9 and Ocean 98 both do quite a bit to promote these local bands. It beats the hell out of playing Nickelback for the 3 millionth time. (I like Nickelback as much as the next guy, but they do get overplayed!)

So I’m looking forward to enjoying some of the local talent over the next couple weekends. Hope the monoblogue readers will join me!

WCRC meeting – January 2007

Little did I know that when I walked into our WCRC meeting tonight it would be a local bloggers’ convention of sorts – but, through a strange convergence of events it turned out to be one. Ironically, the main item on our agenda tonight was discussion of a new website for the Wicomico County Republican Party as a whole. But this local blogger subplot will be related a little bit later.

We began the evening with the usual club business (Pledge of Allegiance, a prayer given by Bonnie Luna, then Secretary and Treasurer Reports) and acknowleged the two County Council people who were present (District 2’s Stevie Prettyman and my councilman, Joe Holloway of District 5). It was also revealed that we’d gotten two additional notes of gratitude from last year’s candidates for the help our club provided to them. One was from the aforementioned Prettyman and the other was from Clerk of the Courts candidate James Gillespie.

County chair Dr. John Bartkovich added a few remarks. The bulk of them reminded us of what we were there for, as he brought along a poster-sized rendition of the Republican Principles. He also wanted to inform the club that the Central Committee was getting set to meet with our cohorts in Somerset and Worcester to plan a tri-county Lincoln Day dinner with a springtime date, rather than June like last year. It was hoped we could get a more prominent speaker that way.

We then got the registration rundown from Woody Willing and in the last 2 months of 2006 we gained 128 Republicans in Wicomico County while the Democrats only picked up 40 voters. The margin is now just a shade over 4,000. (4,000 voters in 48 months? I think it’s doable.)

At that point, we had a surprise announcement from club member (and one of the Central Committee people I succeeded) Louise Smith. Today she placed herself on the primary ballot for the Salisbury City Council. In her remarks she stated that she wasn’t necessarily aligning herself with the anti-Dream Team per se, but that she was “aligning (her)self with the taxpayer.” Her main campaign theme is going to be accountability and she was already armed with examples of recent city financial mismanagement. With Louise adding her name to the ballot, it means that if Council President Michael Dunn decides to run again a primary will be required because seven people will have filed.

With that, we also got to hear from two other previously announced candidates who came in just before we got our meeting started. Terry Cohen told us about her main focus, which was responsive government. As part of that she sought to “focus on current resources rather than invest in special interests.” Fellow City Council hopeful Tim Spies also addressed our group, noting that his main focus as a City Councilman would be to adequately fund public safety, and that he was “interested in making Salisbury work for the people.”

Also, we heard briefly from the elected officials present, with Prettyman telling us it was just “business as usual” for the county and Holloway adding that the honeymoon wasn’t over yet. To me, this is a definite advancement over the previous County Council.

We then heard from Chris von Buskirk, who’s proposing to upgrade and maintain our party website. He gave a nice presentation that illustrated what we could do with the site under his tutelage. It would place a good face on the county party and become a one-stop shop for those interested in joining us (like those 4,000 voters I’m shooting to sign up in the next 4 years.)

Also, the club began the process of enacting two pieces of “inside baseball” – one to correct minor errors in and amend the bylaws; the other to nominate new officers. Both will be acted on next month in accordance with these same by-laws. We did place seven people into nomination as new officers, and I’m one of those duly nominated.

That turned out to be pretty much the extent of club business. So, about the bloggers convention…

As it turned out, the planned Salisbury City Council meeting turned out to be a relatively short one because the main zoning law change that was supposed to be discussed magically disappeared from tonight’s agenda, tabled for a future meeting. So several people who started there found their way over to our meeting.

Thus, sometime tonight or tomorrow you should see Louise Smith’s smiling face on Salisbury News because Joe Albero was there snapping away. (I think if he snapped a pic of me, it’s going to be a profile shot.) And I got to meet and talk to “Cato” of Delmarva Dealings (and his lovely wife) for the first time. I’d been looking forward to meeting him someplace since he runs a superb website. They’re a very nice couple, and one who appears to be interested in some further involvement with the club. (Could it be that their interest was whetted by my monthly meeting reports?) Unfortunately, we didn’t get Bill Duvall (Mister Duvafiles himself) away from his compound down in Allen or we would’ve had a real news event.

So next month there’s a good possibilty that I’ll become an “insider” of the club – that is, unless someone wants to tell us why they’d be a better person for the job than I or any of the other nominees who have stepped up to the plate. They’ll have their opportunity in 5 weeks, February 26th. We may get another visit from Salisbury City Council hopefuls as well since that’s the night before the primary (should one be required) – so that looks to be a fun meeting!

A view on health insurance for Maryland

Recent monoblogue Ten Questions subject Marc Kilmer is the author of the Maryland Public Policy Institute’s first 2007 Maryland Policy Report. In it, he makes some common-sense remarks about how the so-called “Massachusetts Plan” may not be a perfect fit for our state and backs that up with some suggestions on how the problem may be solved (hint: it’s probably not something that Martin O’Malley and his Democrat cronies in the General Assembly are thinking of.)

At just a shade over 5 pages, it’s short but well worth the read. With this, Marc has made a great contribution to the debate surrounding the issue.