Category Archives: Local Issues

Two Nickles to Rub Together

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I picked up an empty Blueberry-Pomegranate Blast by Colt 45 can on walkies this morning.

I walk a couple of miles each morning at a reasonably brisk rate. I’m still not getting my heart rate up high enough but I do get my resps up. Sometimes I talk on the phone while walking which surprises the bridge fishermen I pass. Sometimes Jody Beauregard walks with me. Jody is a couple inches taller than I am, but he doesn’t like to walk as fast. “You ought to slow down and smell the roses,” he keeps telling me.

But this is about beer cans, not Rosaceae. Nor the original lime juice.

roadside emptiesVermont passed its Beverage Container Law to “reduce litter, increase recycling, reduce waste disposal costs, create local jobs and save energy.” Save energy? The legislature enacted the law in 1972 but delayed implementation until 1973.

I’m thinking that was to give our shopping cart people time to get bigger bags and carts.

The Act covers beer, malt, carbonated soft drinks, mixed wine drinks, and liquor in any glass, metal, paper, plastic or combination bottle, can, jar or carton. We pay 15¢ for liquor bottles and a nickle for everything else. The redemption rate overall is 85%. The Baptists should have such good statistics.

Michigan’s 10¢ bottle bill has a 96.9% recycle rate. Florida is studying the idea.

The Blueberry-Pomegranate <shudder> Blast comes 23.5 ounces to the can. 12% alcohol. Still only a nickle deposit back, though.

That doesn’t make up for inflation. Gas prices went up a nickle on Friday alone here in the protected pocket with the highest gas prices in New England. That price hike comes in the face of dropping prices everywhere else in the nation, and in spite of calls for a Congressional investigation.

I found a single 24-ish ounce empty can each morning last week and I figure this is a bad sign.

“We need to start a petition drive,” Jody said. “If people would just drink two 12-ounce cans in their cars instead of these 24-ounce monsters, their beer wouldn’t go flat as fast and we’d make more money.”

I picked up just a nickle each day. I could have been making a dime.

Here We Come, Purged or Not

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Monroe County’s part in the great Florida Voter Purge of 2012 has finished. “We do have a clear understanding of the National Voter Registration Act and we have to conform to it,” Elections Supervisor Harry L. Sawyer, Jr., said. “We are not going to break the law even if the governor thinks we should.”

Florida officials (except Mr. Sawyer, apparently) want to compare thousands of names from the state DMV’s non-citizen roster against the Homeland Security immigration database. Federal officials refused. It’s a simple premise. If you are not a citizen of Florida, you can’t vote in a Florida election; if you’re not a citizen of these United States, you can’t vote in any election here. Not one. Period.

“We can’t let the federal government delay our efforts to uphold the integrity of Florida elections any longer,” Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner said.

To Purge or Not to Purge
The U.S. Department of Justice in the person of Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas E. Perez ordered the state to stop the purge because it could violate federal voting laws.

Florida claims that the DoJ and Homeland Security have deliberately denied Florida access to what Homeland Security calls its “SAVE Program.”

It is indeed true that elections supervisors like Mr. Sawyer have delayed cleaning their checklists until we got too close to a national election. The National Voter Registration Act bans checklist decontamination within 90 days of a federal election; this year, the primary election on August 16 stops the state from purging the rolls after May 16. That ought not stop us from identifying the non-citizens on our voter lists. Or from purging the non-citizens for the general election which does not occur until November 8.

Big Brother knows who you are
I must have been living under a rock because I didn’t realize that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security knows who is in this country illegally. That department operates the “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements” Program, a database known as SAVE, which contains citizenship information on about a gazillion people. Homeland Security. And they have them listed in a special phonebook that is incompatible with all the state DMV databases.

Let me repeat that with emphasis in case anyone missed it. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security knows who is in this country illegally. And they don’t seem willing to do much about it.

“The number of noncitizens who are on the rolls or appear to have cast unlawful ballots grows by the day. And there’s no evidence yet that any lawful voter has been kicked off the rolls,” the Miami Herald reported.

Suppression or Fraud?
The ACLU has accused Florida of “voter suppression.” The Monroe County Tea Party has accused the Obamanation of abetting “voter fraud,” mostly because Homeland Security knows who is in this country illegally and doesn’t seem willing to do much about it.

I don’t know why it’s so tough to prove that a non-citizen actually cast an illegal ballot.

Oh. That’s right. The Feds won’t tell the state who might be illegally in the country which means there’s a whole lot less proof of suppression and a whole lot more appearance of fraud.

No matter whether you fall on the illegal alien or “undocumented guest worker” side of the argument, the government has become harder and harder to trust.


Go Arizona

And that, boys and girls, is why Arizona and other states (except Vermont) figure they need to do in-person immigration status checks. And why Florida needs to purge its voter checklists.

Snow in June

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I went wading this morning.

I walk outdoors most mornings when the weather permits. This morning I could have used my barn boots instead of my sneaks. Yesterday, Jack Parent started trucking the first-cut hay down the road and neighbor Charley Smith’s Cottonwood trees began snowing. It wasn’t quite knee deep at the bottom of the hill but it is piled higher and deeper.

“The trees do that for Father’s Day each year,” Mr. Smith said.

Cottonwood Tree It doesn’t appear that we can spin cottonwood seeds into yarn let alone loom a fabric and the lumber is lousy; it splits poorly, rots quickly, and offers about 12 BTUs per cord of firewood. On the other hand caterpillars love the wood as food.

Mr. Smith’s bigger issue is the chopped grass that sluices off the farm trucks. The Parent farm is divided. His new farm is about three miles north of his home farm and about half a mile north of me. I get to watch a regular parade of 8-wheel tractors and liquid manure trucks and open dump trucks.

CottonwoodWe pick up half a bale of hay for each truck that passes but we have about 500 feet of road frontage. I don’t think Mr. Smith gets quite that much although there is a bump right in front of his land.

“There ought to be a law,” he said. “Farmers have too much power. We should have a regulation to keep the roads free of debris.”

I’m not much for rules. I googled farm bureau regulations and found about 2,230,000 results in 0.21 seconds. Regulation > Policy & Politics > Ohio Farm Bureau Federation. “Farmers fear effects of proposed child labor regulations” at the Iowa Farm Bureau. Arkansas EPA regs. Suarez on Labor Regulations. Texas Farm Bureau Commodities and Regulatory authority. Guide to Lighting Regulations for Farm Implements, Guide to Open Burning, and Women’s Food Check Out Day at the Tennessee Farm Bureau. The Stanislaus County Farm Bureau also administers the ILRP on behalf of the East San Joaquin Water Quality Coalition.

Hay Truck And so on.

Heck, there were about 4,290,000 hits, nearly twice as many, for Vermont farm regulations alone.

Maybe it’s time for someone without a Ph.D. to wade through this mess. There is no way on this green Earth that any farmer could comply with every reg already on the books, let alone the 1,523 new ones under consideration right now.

Meanwhile, Mr. Parent probably should think to cover his dump beds; after all, feed is even more expensive when the road gods get that sacrifice bale every day.

This farm report brought to you by the letter G.

Impressive

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Wally World does not often impress me but they did on Friday.

The Internoodle is rife with estimates of Wal-Mart’s cost to We the Overtaxed People, protests over sprawl, criticism of their labor practices in this country and the labor conditions in supplier factories around the globe, complaints about unfair treatment specifically of the women who work in the stores and Supercenters, shoddy assembly of most consumer goods driven by the way the firm has reshaped manufacturing around the world, and far more.

Opponents of a planned Wal-Mart here in North Puffin have protested for almost two decades.

PBS reported, “Wal-Mart’s [Vermont] opponents argue that the state’s economy and culture would be damaged by the retailer’s presence. In California, opponents say the company has cost taxpayers millions by shortchanging its employees on healthcare.”

Every bit of the superstore v. Main Street argument is absolutely true.

Wal-Mart built their fourth Vermont store, a 150,000 square-foot box, in Williston in 1997. I shopped there on Friday.

So did a lot of other people from North Puffin because we don’t have a department store in this county.

We didn’t need any other shopperamas a decade ago because we still had Ames back then but Ames closed all its retail stores here in 2002. Since then, pretty much everyone in Northwestern Vermont has had only a couple of choices for sox and underwear: buy them at the supermarket or the Dollar store or pay the I-89 tax to drive an hour to the big box center in the next county.

So I spent the $27.50 in gas to drive the truck to Williston on Friday because we don’t have a department store any closer than that. I also had to go to the Sears Auto Center but that’s a story I’ll tell later.

Walmart SignI saw a sign for Wal-Mart Interpreter Services in the pharmacy department. That impressed me and I said so to the pharmacy consultant.

“Surely you don’t have all those interpreters in the store,” I said, “and the tricorder/universal translator isn’t out of Google’s prototype lab yet.”

“Nope,” she told me. “All the customer has to do is point to their language on this card. We call a translator at the home office and Bob’s your uncle.”

The store can handle 12 different languages (13 if you count English) from Arabic to Vietnamese. A mom-and-pop operation can’t afford to keep a dozen U.N. translators on staff.

[Oooo, business opportunity!]

Regular readers know that I will not willingly deal with any company that requires me to “Press 2 for English” in part because immigrants to this great melting pot should help us learn their cultures while they assimilate ours and they need to learn English. Without that, America stops being a melting pot and becomes a nation of tiny, armed, walled, exclusive Arabtowns and Chinatowns and Mexicotowns and Viettowns. That said, Wal-Mart’s system to let them do business in their native tongues means they will do business outside their shell communities and that’s a good thing.

A Crane Point Zip Line?

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At first glance this is a perfect project! 1.1 million dollars of Other People’s Money! Tourists screaming down a wire behind the galloping spiders and raccoons! 21 new full time jobs!

But wait. There’s more.

“A zip-line (also known as a flying fox, foofie slide, zip wire, aerial runway, aerial ropeslide, death slide, or tyrolean crossing) consists of a pulley suspended on a cable mounted on an incline… Zip-lines come in many forms, most often used as a means of entertainment. Longer and higher rides are often used as a means of accessing remote areas, such as a rainforest canopy. Zip-line tours are becoming popular vacation activities, found at outdoor adventure camps or upscale resorts…” 1 

The Florida Keys Land Trust’s mission is to save the tropical woodlands called “hardwood hammocks” in the Florida Keys. The Trust purchased 63 acres at Crane Point to save the unique homestead from development, about five years after we moved to the Keys. I don’t think the two events were related. The tropical forest there is home to rare and endangered species, a series of unique archaeological and historical finds, as well as a large thatch palm hammock, a hardwood hammock, a mangrove forest, tidal lagoons, wetland ponds, and the associated animal life.

Unfortunately, money is tight and conservation doesn’t grow on trees.

Crane PointThe Crane Point board wants to install six zip lines starting at the Cracker House and passing over the historic Adderley House and the Crane family’s 1959 home. Riders would zing over the butterfly meadows, the mangroves, and the Gulf of Mexico.

The Board asked the City of Marathon for a $735,000 state Community Development Block Grant and an additional $85,000 Tourist Development Council grant from the County.

Crane Point Supports the Entire EcosystemThe Monroe County Commission last week found a “significant cost discrepancy and heard residents’ concerns” so they tabled the Tourist Development Council grant.

I’m in the “Let’s not zip over the Hammock” category but I’m also in the “Let’s Bring in Some More Visitor Dollars” category.

I reckon that zip lines do indeed fall outside the Crane Point mission of preserving one little sparkling piece of the natural Keys. And there is that nagging little question of scaring the spiders.

If Crane Point wants zip lines, let’s install them over to Survivor Island instead. We could start from 20th Street (which ends at the now defunct Boot Key bridge) or from Sombrero Country Club. Maybe both, to go downhill out to Boot Key from 20th Street, then back to the golf course. I could see zip lines criss-crossing Boot Key itself and then making the long run up the verdant length of the golf course to cross the Overseas Highway and terminate at the Crane Point parking lot. I volunteer to take the first ride!

Let the Land and Sea Trust install and run the thing as a profit center for Crane Point.

We’ll just need to be careful of the dangly bits going over Boot Key Harbor.

See, a saltwater crocodile jumped a Key Largo dock to snatch a 65-pound dog named Roxie last week. The owners heard Roxie bark once. Then they heard a splash. Witnesses who included Florida FWCC officers, estimated the saltwater croc to be at least 10 feet long. It sprang at least four feet out of the water to snatch the mutt headfirst off the seawall.

Oops.