CH Council Outlaws Exotic Flappers

At some point, I suspect, Buddy Waskey will realize that he needs to move out of Colonial Heights.  It’s a shame really, because Buddy is truly a shining star in the city because of his aviary, despite what City Council thinks.
While he does have quite the menagerie of birds, he has shown time and again his willingness to do whatever he needs to do to keep his birds in place.  And, perhaps, they get a bit noisy at times, but where else can you go and see the kinds of macaws that he keeps?  Nowhere in this state, that’s for sure.
When I was a kid, my parents hauled us down to Sarasota, Florida, for what amounted as the biggest vacation boondoggle of my life (I think I was about 8 at the time).  We headed out of Long Island in a beat up old Ford station wagon, with my parents, all four siblings, and my grandmother.  My father sent a picture he drew of us down to my other grandparents, showing all of us kids leaning out windows and my grandmother on my Mom’s side riding shotgun in a rocking chair on the roof. That was in the Spring of 1962, a little ahead of the Beverly Hillbillies, which first aired in September of ’62.
I know, I know, so what’s the point? The point is that while we were in Florida, we went to the Sarasota Jungle Gardens.  While there, my brother and I, both pretty young at the time, got to have a macaw put on our shoulders for a “photo op.”  I laughed, because the one on my brother’s should periodically grabbed some of his hair and pulled.
My point here is that these kinds of birds are intriguing.  Notwithstanding how Buddy’s neighbors feel about the whole thing, imposing the strict rules that council stands up for seems out of place in this case.
Buddy is part of some free flying organization that works with the birds so that they can fly around rather than be stuck in exile in some cage.  Watching his birds in flight is amazing, to say the least. They are well trained and, as far as I know, have never caused any harm to anyone and are less of a nuisance than those other illegal alien Canadian geese that seem to flourish around the mall, Wally World (WalMart), and behind and beside Sam’s Club.  And that’s not to mention the abundance of Ring Billed seagulls that fly overhead in formations looking for something to attack.
At some level, I understand that City Council wants to hold the line on the city’s ordinances. I mean, how else can we get people to put their trash cans behind the front line of their homes, or pick up unsightly objects in their yards?  Still, the point is that City Council has the discretion to override some ordinances via the Conditional Use Permit.
The City may be right to hold the line on this matter. I mean, perhaps the noise that that many birds makes is too much, no matter how hard Buddy has tried to dampen the squawking.  But still, there has to be some other compromise that could have been reached.
When I lived in Italy, a friend of mine had four Doberman’s and a pair of mastiffs.  The City of Milan sent him a letter explaining why he could not have so many dogs.  So he got rid of some of his Dobies.  He then proceeded to buy a lion.  The lion was allowed by the city, but now instead of some occasional barking, his neighbors, who lived in a high rise apartment complex, got to hear the lion roar on occasion.
In this case, I don’t think a lion would be appropriate.  I think the city needs to take a different perspective on things like Buddy’s birds, which don’t really fit into the ordnance as written.  But then, I suppose if the city is stuck on beautifying the area via ordnance it may be time to move out.
The idea of voting out members of council fell flat on its face last November.  The only seat that changed was Diane Yate’s seat, and there only because she chose not to run.  For those who think that is the way to fight back, God bless you, but there isn’t enough support to change Council.
I applaud Council for enforcing the City Code rather than creating other pesky changes that are annoyances because the code hadn’t been enforced.  But there are times when we end up pounding the square peg through the round hole and standing on principles that should be looked at on a case-by-case basis.  Buddy may in fact be the one who free flies from the city.

Homo Simpleton and Huckleberry Finn, et al

Ahh sweet censorship; I know thy stench.

The recent ruling by the Powers of Appropriateness in Accomack County deciding that perhaps they should look again at banning such books as “Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” have now shifted their perspective to non-banning. Of course, they should not be banned.

In most cases, IMO, censorship is at best wrong-headed and at worst the imposition of a few incompetents over the rest of us somewhat sane people. It’s outrageous to me that a book like Huck could get shelved because someone’s sensibilities seizes on a scrap of language, doesn’t take into account how it fits into the theme of the work, and then extrapolates their unease to such an extent that they feel it best to keep everyone away from such a thing.

No doubt, they are saving the world from having to actually think. Huckleberry Finn is a condemnation of racism. Not addressing the very thing that it is condemning is tantamount to not calling the current anti-social activities that drive things like 9- 11, the Orlando shootings, and the incident in California by its true name: radical Islamic Terrorism.

And yet, how many people have actually read the darn thing? People cast about and see a word they don’t like and immediately assume the worst of its use. But how can you write about an evil thing without defining it? In Twain’s case, most of these “inappropriate” comments and language are there to prove a point. They cast Huck’s naiveté in the midst of one of the most horrendous ethical dilemmas of his and our time. Heck, it’s still an ethical dilemma and it likely won’t get “fixed” until we the people expunge it.

 Look how far our country has gotten away from racism to date? How far we have come since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke his “I have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963, and spoke about having his children judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Sadly, I don’t think we have come very far despite the intervening 55 years.

Racism is a multi-headed beast. It is hidden in our society except when dredged up by various circumstance. It is also not a one way street. Racists come in all kinds of varieties. It is also a tool for some who when on the beach see the stone and not the sand it has become.

We all need to do better about race. We all need to be sensitive to others and their feelings when it comes to race. As a white man, it’s impossible for me to understand that kind of oppression.

In discussion with one of my friends a decade ago, he told me that the problem with being an African-American is that every morning when he woke up he’d look at his hands and his skin was still black.​

Race is something that we cannot simply set aside like an old suit. We wear it every day. But ignoring it, or not taking it into account, is fool hardy. Later this week I will turn 62 years old and if there is one thing that I know it’s that people are good and bad and indifferent. What really matters is the content of their character.

And to bring that back around to Huck, we need to see what his character says and does and then we may be able to judge the literature. But if we get caught up in the surface, if we think the suit is too old, then we may as well not try to make things better. We may as well just wallow in our own self-pity and think the sun revolves around the Earth

CH City Council Elections-Now get to work!

And so we come to the close of the 2016 Election Process to find that the three incumbents on the ticket, Mayor Greg Kochuba, Joe Green, and Kenny Frenier all earned their reelections.  The new guy on the block, Mike “Picka” Cherry isn’t as new as some would think.  He has been around, and I think this is his third attempt to get on City Council.

Mike replaces Vice Mayor Diane Yates, who opted to step down from her council seat where she has stood for many years as an effective voice for the people of the city.  While we applaud her for the years she has spent trying to make the City a better place to live for everyone, her loss on council sets up the potential for a new face from within the community in Mike.

Greg, Joe, and Kenny have all been effective administrators to the public.  Greg, due to his financial background, is perhaps the most knowledgeable budget man in the city.  He has shown a steady hand in keeping council on point and working the sometimes squishy ground between the administration and the residents.

Joe Green is the consummate constituent’s candidate.  In my experience, there are few people in government who at heart have more concern for the individual voter.  He is not afraid to voice his opinion on subjects and is more than willing to take the best stance when there are “issues” between a council action and the people it affects—the citizenry.  If you run into a concern, be sure that Joe will be at your door at some point to see what can be done to ameliorate the problem.

Kenny Frenier has a very long relationship with the residents of city that dates back before his earliest days with the fire department.  I would venture to guess that of all council members, not one is more familiar with the lay of the city than Kenny.  He is an honest and straight forward kind of guy; with Kenny you get what you see and that’s a good thing.

We welcome you back and hope that you continue to lead in the same manner as you have in the past.  I am sure you will.

This election was more contentious than almost any I can remember in the near 30 years I have lived in this city.  We had a number of citizens who came out to try to grab one of the four council seats up for grabs.  These people need to be applauded:  Christy Palmer Archileti, David P. Hoopsick, Tricia L. Palmer, and L. P. "Buddy" Waskey IV.

The one thing I know about Colonial Heights politics is that if you really want to be part of the City Council you have to be willing to give it more than one shot.  For most people in the city, they hardly know who all these candidates are.  They wonder, as did many I am sure in this cycle, what these people are really running about?  Is it just one issue that inspired them to run for council, or are they truly concerned about the city and how it serves the community?

These results show very much the conservative nature of the city’s voting bloc.  Things are not bad in the city; there have been a few high-interest issues, but I believe the constituency understands what council is about and approves of how they are handling things.  The proof, as the saying goes, is in the pudding—or in this case the election.

Sometimes things don’t go the way one might want.  Certainly, those issues need to be brought to council’s attention; although I am sure they are already aware of most of the problems.  Come out to a city council meeting and see what goes on.  Take an interest in the community, find an area that concerns you and volunteer to help out.

It’s striking to me that one council matter was behind three of the five new comers coming out for the election.  And the truth of that is that council actually did a good job during the public hearing about City Code changes and parking vehicles in or on personal property.  The citizens spoke and council listened.  That’s how things need to be handled in any democratic process.

To everyone who participated in this election, speaking on behalf of the city’s 17,000 residents, owe you our thanks.  To those who managed to earn a seat on city council, we the people of Colonial Heights say, “Get to work.”

Not my President? Maybe you should vote then.

Here’s one final comment on the Presidential election.  In terms of winners and losers, it would appear that the Democratic Party is somewhat to blame for the outcome. There are many who would like to say otherwise, but the bare fact of the matter is that turnout, or the lack thereof, doomed Hillary Clinton’s attempt to replace President Barack Obama.

Yes, there were other issues, like FBI Director Comey’s reopening of the investigation into Hillary’s email issues. And the constant dripping of information from Wikileaks. But even with them, the truth of the matter is that Hillary was her own worst enemy.  She often stated that “setting up her own email server was a mistake and she would not do it again.”  But that she did so in the first place added to the negative perception that many people have of her. It certainly helped swing those final few undecided voters, but there were many other problems along the way.

For instance, Hillary was unable to get the kind of turnout she needed from the African-American voting block, which in the end killed her in Florida and in Pennsylvania.  Ironically, in both states she held a slight lead going into the final minutes of their respective elections.

In Florida, she had the lead coming out of the I-4 corridor, but it was nowhere near what she needed to secure the victory.  Most of the panhandle and western side of the state vote republican, and as things turned out that was enough to turn the state for President-elect Donald Trump.

In Pennsylvania the results were similar.  Hillary had a small lead with the eastern portion of the state already counted.  She easily won the Philadelphia area, a Democratic stronghold that determined how the state vote went for both President Barack Obama elections in 2008 and 2012.  As the vote tallies progressed toward Pittsburgh and the adjacent counties, where there was a huge turnout for Trump, it was enough to overcome the Philadelphia effect and turn the state to favor the Republicans.

But those two huge states were sort of put in the background as the AP declared Trump the winner in Wisconsin.  At that point, the Democratic party started to sweat a bit.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the whole pre-election stuff was trying to figure out how the polls, which seemed always to favor Hillary, could be so far off?  What was bothersome was the size of the crowds that would come out, and in some instances wait hours, for Trump to make a speech.  In Michigan in particular, the crowd waited for three hours as Trump was delayed in getting to the airport.  How is it that that kind of support didn’t show up in the polls?

Some of the post-election punditry is explaining how perhaps the polls counted too many Democrats or this or that.  It seems that perhaps the applied the wrong data about what made up the voting constituency.  The pollsters were using turnout results from 2012 and applying it to the data from this year.  But in the end, the turnout data for 2016 was a bit different.

Only two polls were even close:  the LA Times tracking poll and the Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) tracking poll. All other polls got it wrong, by varying degrees.

As it turns out, the least likely person in the world nailed it.  Michael Moore called the race for Trump back during the primaries.  He noted that more republicans voted than democrats in the Michigan primaries.  In the end, he said this election amounted to the American people saying they had had enough with the political elites and voted to turn them out.  Of course, he used language to express this which isn’t appropriate for this blog, but you can easily Google it and see for yourself.

In the end, it was the late breaking independents and the lack of turnout for key Democratic voters that “done her in.”  Sure, there may have been other problems, but even so, you have to get the voters to come out.  The people that did turn out were coming to see Bruce Springsteen, Jay Z, and Beyonce.  They really weren’t that interested in voting apparently.

It could have been such a good debate...but Noooooohooo!

It could have been a great debate, but noooo ohoo!

There was precious little that was presidential about the debate at Norwood University, er I mean Longwood University Tuesday night.  In fact, if one of the contestant’s would have shut up a bit, we might even have been able to hear something over the clatter.  In the infamous language of John Belushi, “You could have given us such a great debate, but Noooooooooo ohooo!”

Actually Belushi is a pretty good choice of character. Tim Kaine came off looking a lot like Bluto right even down to the “Take No Prisoners” attack lines.  And to be honest Mike Pence didn’t look much better, nodding his head and then getting drowned out by tiny Tim’s cut-ins.

I was so shocked at how the whole thing went down, I was half expecting Pence to get up and utter Otter’s speech from Animal House: 

But you can't hold a whole party responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole political system? And if the whole political system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our government institutions in general? I put it to you, Barak - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!

The world is full of winners and losers and sometimes you can be one or the other. It’s even happened to me, although we might not want to go into that right now.  But what we have been seeing from the two parties this year reeks more of juvenile behavior than it does the philosophical sentiment we would really like to hear.

Instead of just slamming each other, why not have a solid discourse about the real issues.  At this point in the game, who did what to whom and when is of little consequence.  What really matters is who is the best of the two candidates to lead the country back to something reminiscent of the past.  Certainly, it’s hard to make the case that “It’s 3 a.m. and all is well.”

The actions over the past few months lead me to believe that the homo simpletons of the world are still alive, well, and functioning in the American government.  They live, they breathe, and they die in so called political parties.  And it isn’t one party or the other.  You think I am wrong? Let’s take a second to see what that great editorialist HL Mencken had to say about democracy back in the Roaring ‘20’s:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

                                                                        H. L. Mencken

Mencken had a lot more to say about democracy; here are 10 more of his political platitudes:

  1.      If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.  

  2.      Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

  3.      The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

  4.      Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

  5.      A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

  6.      Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

  7.      I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

  8.      Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

  9.      I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

  10.  A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

Hard to believe how little has changed since Mencken was writing for the Baltimore Sun back in the days of the 29^th President Warren G. Harding.

The World Anti-Doing Agency

Somewhere deep in the hearts of Monty Python they must surely have a skit that looks like this comment from a USA Today story about the latest, that is Sept 13, Guccifer DNC Hack release.

Really, just the fact that this is still going on is sort of hilarious.  For the life of me, I cannot understand why these political entities don’t have their servers and computer stuff locked down.  The cost of not doing so is being written about all over the media.

But in this latest story by William Cummings there is a striking typographical error, or at least I think it’s a typo, that identifies a “the World Anti-Doing Agency."  I suspect that the typist merely slipped when writing the Anti-Doping Agency, but sometimes typos are a slip of the lip, so to speak.  It certainly makes sense when talking about these political bodies, i.e. the RNC and the DNC as anti-doing. Look at the past 30-years of the American political process and it’s not hard to make the jump to anti-doing.

There should be a huge list of bullet points for the Anti-Doing Agency, starting with immigration and ending who knows where.

Immigration-We as a country need to come to grips with this problem.  Back in the old Ellis Island days, people who were “undocumented” were nicknamed WOPs (without papers).  It is the main thing behind the term applied to Italian immigration at the time.  The name continues to stick, although the original sense of the term is lost and the pejorative term remains. Personally, I am not so sure we can deport 11 million people, but I am pretty sure that the American public has had enough of those criminal elements that keep coming into our country creating havoc.

Affordable Care Act-it’s interesting that this behemoth appears to be dying under its own weight.  What is to become of President Obama’s signature effort?  It pretty much looks like it won’t stand the way it was designed.  Personally, I think some kind of national health care plan is in order, but to create national health care and not include the insurance companies, doctors, and hospitals in wringing out a way to do it that makes sense doesn’t make any sense at all.  We can’t expect to dictate how those plans will work without considering the effects it has on those institutions.  In creating this, they need to talk to the subject matter experts who are involved in every facet of healthcare.

Conflicts of Interest-Most people would like to think that our politicians are capable of taking the moral and ethical high ground.  It would be very nice to think that’s possible. But the reality is that power corrupts.  Is anyone really surprised that the high level politicians figure out ways to bilk the American public?  Just take a quick look at what’s happening now.  Even at the local level, we have City Council people who tout that they have a potential conflict of interest and yet are allowed to vote simply because they say they can do so without being biased.  To me, that’s a lie.  There is no way that those people would vote against something that benefits their spouses.  Just imagine what it might be like to do so and then go home?  Yeah, right, I’m going to vote against a raise action that would benefit my wife and therefore me, too.  As the saying went, “Sorry Charlie” but I can’t believe that any politician would do something like that.

Ben Franklin, 230 years ago, told a crowd outside Constitutional Hall in Philadelphia who wanted to know what kind of a government the US would have, said: “A republic, if you can keep it.”  The history of democracies, and republics for that matter, is that they are very difficult to maintain.  Such is the way of these United States.  And when you take into account where our political system rests in this day, it is looking more and more likely that the second part of Franklin’s comment is beginning to look prophetic.

UH OH! Iran is Acting Up...Again!

It’s hard to think that the Iran hostage ordeal was actually 37-years ago.  At the time, I was in the 509^th Airborne, based in Vicenza, Italy.  We were briefly put on alert, but it only lasted a couple days as the powers that be at the time opted to try another route to rescue the hostages.

In the end, it was the change in leadership from then president Jimmy Carter to the newly elected Ronald Regan that ended the “crisis.”  Now it appears we may again be in for some brashness by the Iranian government.

I remember those days pretty well; they are what psychologists call a “flash bulb memory.” Not unlike the “What were you doing the day John Kennedy was shot?” question.  For me on the Kennedy thing, I was in my third grade class and distinctly recall our music teacher running down the hall yelling “The president’s been shot; the president’s been shot.”

And the Iran thing is also pretty clear. We were restricted to the barracks and not allowed to make phone calls or basically do anything for two days except eat meals.  But that soon came to an end as the US decided not to invade Tehran.

But now, the way the Iranians are acting, is sort of like kicking a sleeping dog.  There are a lot of hotspots around the world right now, and just the other day I read an article about being closer to World War III today than at any time during the cold war.  And, sadly, that may be very true.

But here is the thing, the US has often put up with enough of that kind of stuff until it had enough.  Think Pearl Harbor.  What happened there was that the US was pushed beyond the brink.  The result was our entry into World War II and a huge shift in the balance of power between the Allies and the Axis.

Right now, we have problems with:  Iran, China, North Korea, and Guam.  Not to mention a slipping image in Europe and the Far East.  Who’s to say where all of that ends up?

Iran, I believe, is willing to push the US because the powers there don’t believe we will do anything about it.  Remember the line in the sand in Syria?  There’s an old Monty Python movie that has a disagreement between two forces and the one person says, “Don’t cross that line,” and when the more belligerent person steps over the line, the other person says, “Well, don’t cross that line.”  We are pretty much right there as a nation today.

As a country, we used to be respected and to some extent feared.  Machiavelli would say “that it is better to be loved, but that a leader must be able to do evil when constrained.”  Evil when constrained in today’s society is simply having a backbone.

The US today doesn’t seem to have a backbone.  In terms of body type, we much more represent a jelly fish.  The truth of the matter is you don’t have to fight; you just have to make sure that your opponent believes you will.

Right now, nobody believes we, the United States, will.  We are viewed much differently than we were even during the Viet Nam war.  We seem to have set aside Teddy Roosevelt’s suggestion that the US should “speak softly but carry a big stick.” Instead today, we speak loudly and carry a big shtick.  As a country we are no longer either loved or feared. We just are.

Look at how we have treated our friends and allies over the past few years. We have not supported our friends and have been a bit of a paper tiger to our enemies.  I am not suggesting that we go bomb some people, which we are doing anyway.  But there is no “fear” over what the United States might do.  We have effectively been shoved into a closet and left to rot with the moth balls.

End of an Era

Ain't Gonna work on Goddard's Farm No More

No, I ain't gonna work on Goddard's Farm no more

The State hands you a nickel

It hands you a dime

It asks you with a grin

If you're havin' a good time

Then they fine you every time you slam the door

I ain't gonna work on Goddard's Farm no more.

                  ~ apologies to Bob Dylan

In truth no one has been working on Goddard’s Farm for a really long time.  As the “needs of the community” have grown over the years, Goddard’s Dairy Farm became the victim of progress, American style.  Once a burgeoning dairy farm, the silos gave way to the former Richmond – Petersburg Turnpike which opened for business in ’58, before I-95 was constructed.  The 30-mile stretch of superhighway was eventually incorporated into I-95, but maintained its tolls until 1992.

That was the beginning of the end for Goddard’s Farm.  The farm was prime property for the highway and so the Virginia Department of Transportation managed to purchase the property from the Goddard family.  It left the Goddard’s with a sizable chunk of pretty much useless land inside the boundaries of Colonial Heights.

For years, people would pass the property, hardly noticing the tumble-down ante-bellum house with the mysterious lake.  That is until it came time for elections. Dozens of candidates over the years displayed their “Vote for Me” sign at a notch in one of the enormous oak trees just east of the house.  It even had its own light to make the ad more visible at night as travelers took the Temple Avenue entrance ramp to Petersburg.

Sadly, that practice is now history as the oak tree succumbed to progress, along with two or three of its brothers.  The property has a storied history, sitting alongside the old railroad tracks that led from Richmond to Petersburg and was used by Robert E. Lee to support troops along the Howlett Line, which stretched between Swift Creek near its junction with the Appomattox River and the James River, near Chester.

The line in essence was the cork that “bottled up” Union General Benjamin Butler and led to the siege of Petersburg.

Beyond the Civil War, the Goddard family was known to support hobos, who would ride the rails in their journeys.  Lloyd Goddard, the current, and now last, resident of the house explained how his family would make sandwiches for the hobos as they rode the rails up and down the coast line.

Meanwhile, with the house now taken down, the pathway to VDOT’s and Colonial Heights’ soon to be new roundabout has little blocking its way except for the amount of work that needs to be done on the $20 million project.

Goddard’s wasn’t the only property to yield to “eminent domain” laws when VDOT was constructing the turnpike.  The road was designed to go through lower cost properties throughout its length.  VDOT has a series of books that contain pictures of the project.  You can see the areas of Richmond and the properties along Shockoe Bottom that yielded to the need for high-speed transportation.

No matter how you look at it, the times are a changing. Whether such change is good or bad is probably a personal choice.  No doubt there are issues with the way the current interchange is designed, I’m sure that the old powers that be in Colonial Heights hoped to minimize traffic and people coming in their city.

Now, of course, that philosophy has changed.  The city wants more and more people to come to shop or eat or just visit.  This project will mess up the city’s main east-west thoroughfare for more than a year.  Hopefully the Roundabout project will be run better than the Boulevard road project was.

Surviving a Terrorist Attack

Frankly stopping the next terrorist attack in the United States is highly unlikely.  It’s not a function of if there will be an attack, but rather it’s a function of when will the next attack occur.  With the more recent attack in Nice, France, it’s apparent that even due diligence may not be enough to stop or even hinder the next incident of Radical Islamic terror.

In some respects, we have been fortunate.  The World Trade Center attacks are nearly a faded memory for some, and the attacks in California and Florida often seem far away.  But who’s to say when the next attack will occur?

Certainly our current approach is not very effective.  In all three of the attacks mentioned, people knew or had an inkling of suspicion concerning the “operatives.”  In every case, either the people who knew failed to contact anyone of the people who were contacted failed to move on the information.

At this point in the conversation, I think we all have to admit that the current state of the world is here to stay.  It seems like things like the incident at Nice, France, can just as easily happen here, or in Richmond, or in Washington D.C.

Don’t think that will happen?  Then you may be among those who have pushed the 9-11 attacks out of mind.  Alas, it happened a long time ago, so we have learned from our mistakes.

That’s the problem with not identifying the enemy.  The enemy who shall not be named; like some sort of spin off from Harry Potter; but Harry Potter is fiction and this is not.

With the latest attack, does anyone truly believe that such a thing won’t cross the ocean? Already, the people who would attack are here.  What is of concern is how they are triggered, and why those who are aware of them aren’t being listened to.

It’s a simple matter, really.  In the Orlando episode, the FBI had interviewed the killer twice and still gave him a pass.  Why?  Because it wasn’t deemed to be politically correct?

Should all of this scare us?

You bet. And it’s not fear mongering, or hate mongering, or any of that. It’s a matter of fact.

We as a country need to start paying more attention to what is going on around us.  In World War II they had a saying “Loose Lips Sink Ships” which served as a warning about accidentally giving out secure information. Now, it’s more about letting people know if you hear or see something suspicious.

And it doesn’t have to be obvious. Sometimes it can be a little thing that uncovers a much bigger thing.  American citizens often opt not to get involved, but we need to be involved. After all, it’s everyone’s security we are talking about.

Terrorism works because it evokes fear in the people who are being attacked.  We need to bring it out in the open. If you see something that doesn’t look right, report it. Let some officials group check, perhaps it’s nothing. But then again, perhaps it’s everything.  If you see something suspicious and don’t say something about it, you could end up on the receiving end of the next Radical Islamic Terror attack.

Sewage Treatment - A Plan for the Future

At their May work session Colonial Heights City Council expressed concern about Petersburg owing the South Central Wastewater Authority, a joint venture between the two cities and Dinwiddie, Chesterfield, and Prince George counties.  It seemed that Petersburg was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.5 million behind in some of its payments.

Council was concerned because a failure to pay at least part of that debt could cause the other four localities to have to fork over more money on a proportional basis to make up the difference. At least, that’s what they thought might happen.

“Because it is a partnership, some of their costs could be eventually passed on to the city of Colonial Heights and some of the other surrounding communities,” said Colonial Heights Mayor Greg Kochuba said during that meeting.

During the discussion, they also brought up that the federal government wanted the plant to make upgrades to the tune of more than $5 million.  They had narrowly side-stepped that suggestion a few years ago, but the likelihood of it going away is slim and none. At some point, the sewage treatment plant, located on the southern tip of Pocahontas Island, will likely have to undergo some expensive upgrades.

Needless to say, it was a relief to hear that Petersburg was able to make two back payments cutting the amount they owed by $700,000.  But the whole thing is a bit odorous, so to speak.

Sewage treatment plant payments are tied to water bills. The amount of water that goes into a home is considered the same amount that goes out of the home. In other words, you are charged twice for any water you use in your home. Unless you get a meter that shows how much water is used or other purposes, such as a sprinkler system, that’s how the sewage rates are applied. Still, what goes in must come out.

The city council fretted over those potential costs coming on the heels of the new courthouse, the new $6 million radio system, and the “safety” upgrades to the school systems.  If they had to pay the costs to make up for Petersburg’s shortfall it would be a burden put on the citizens, who are already being burdened.

They fretted about what to do, but a seeming answer to the dilemma might just be one community away. Hopewell’s waste water treatment plant, in its day, was the model of efficiency. It was built to handle millions of gallons of wastewater per day, and over the years, they have seen a drop off in use as some of the larger plants shut down. That unused capacity could potentially be an answer to the dilemma.

The Federal Correctional Institute, in Prince George, is served by the Hopewell plant.  While there would in fact be some significant costs involved in sending sewage that way, it bears checking into.  Perhaps the plant could not accept the amount of sewage we’re talking about, but then on the other hand spending millions to update an aged plant might be even more expensive.

If the problems and woes in Petersburg, which appear to increase on a daily basis, are causing such a fret in this city, why not look outside the box?  Why not see if such a deal would be possible and cost effective?  We have engineers on staff, we know the general costs, even coming up with a guess at such a construction project should not be too hard.

Why not just call the Hopewell wastewater treatment plant director to see if they could handle the capacity and whether they would be willing to accept the city’s waste?  It’s not a joke. If we have no place to process wastewater, we have no drinkable water—it’s as simple as that. 

Even though Petersburg has made up part of what it owes, there’s no reason to suspect we may not be in the same situation in two or three months. Why not just make a phone call or two? Maybe the whole idea is a pipe dream, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.a

Colonials lose their biggest fan--RIP Duane Smith

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force.”

                                                                                Obi-Wan Kenobi

For years now my photography friend, Al Goulder, and I have been taking pictures at Colonial Heights High School sporting events, perhaps too many to count. But in the last five years or so, we have made a point of getting at least one picture of the person who may be the Colonials most faithful fan, Duane James.

I don’t remember when I first met Duane, or for that matter, which baseball cap he may have been sporting at the time. He seemed to rotate between Colonials, University of Richmond, and Randolph Macon.  All places he attended and from which he graduated.

Sports fans in general are an odd lot, but those who come out to high school sports venues over time may be the strangest of all.  Duane was tall and lanky with a flash of black hair that seemed only under control due to the constraints of his current ball cap.  I know I have seen him without a ball cap on, but that image lives way back in my mind.

Duane passed away this week and he will be sorely missed by hundreds of current and former Colonials.  He was a fixture at football games, basketball games, and baseball games. And when the Colonials’ took home their State Championship this year in Volleyball, only the third State Championship in school history, Duane was right there in the Siegel Center cheering his Colonials team on.

It was rare for him to miss a game.  And recently, as he was laid up in the hospital for a heart problem, he would keep track of his Colonials Baseball Team as they played through the season.  Despite not being at the game, Duane was aware of what was going on and often posted a “rah rah” comment on his Facebook page.

All of us who attend the games missed him being there. And it isn’t like he was very demonstrative, his support was the kind of support all teams need, a sort of quiet, appreciative, and understanding look at things. He loved it when the teams won, and always seemed to “get it” when they struggled. He was well aware of the uphill battle the Colonials faced as one of the smaller school districts around constantly “playing up” against the likes of Thomas Dale, Meadowbrook, and Matoaca.  Those are the kinds of games that harden a fan.  They turn a fan into a hardcore supporter, which is a perfect description of Duane.

I’m not really certain when Al and I started shooting pictures of Duane.  I do remember getting one that really was not very flattering and which I pulled down shortly after posting it, and realizing it wasn’t exactly what we were trying to convey.  I immediately deleted that image from my files.

At some point, when I have an extra minute or two, or maybe a few hours, I will go out and dig up a bunch of Duane James pictures. I have them taken at the gym, on the football field, and at Shepherd Stadium. I probably have them at many other places, but it will take me some time to dig them out.

It will be different now at a Colonials’ sporting event.  There will still be the same bunch of old reliable fans like Mickey Goulder and Hank Vencil.  But it just won’t be the same without Duane.

How Local Government Ought to Work

At this point in the game it’s hard to determine what, exactly, the City Council is trying to do with this parking ordnance change.  As it came out of the Planning Commission, the rewrite of that segment of the City Code caused a bit of a stir.  More than 60 people packed City Council chambers and more were standing outside listening over a loudspeaker.

The Planning Commission, one would have to think under the direction of City Council, came back with a fairly restrictive plan for parking campers, RVs, trailers, and commercial vehicles.  The plan, as it was first proposed, would have created significant changes, for instance, the planners recommended limiting trailers to 21-feet.  Most trailers used for camping start at 21-feet, and I own one and know it is really a bit on the small side. I mean, as a camper, we like to have our controlled environment as comfy as we can make it.  They also wanted to restrict the number of such vehicles, not to include the commercial vehicles, to one.

Both of those ideas hit the pavement at last week’s work session when council voted against prohibiting the size and the number of such vehicles that a home owner can own and park on their property. In fact, Councilor Betsy Luck said it best when she commented that “Size doesn’t matter.”

The big Magilla left concerning campers, trailers, and RVs appears to be where a resident would be allowed to park them. At first, I thought that Council would stick to the back yard or behind the front plane of the house ruling. It seems, at one level, to be a fair and practical way to handle the issue.  In fact, last week, it seemed readily apparent that council was leaning toward that standard, which exists as is today.

But something happened along the way that may have opened the door to a change in that posture.  Several citizens spoke at the hearing. Two people spoke directly against the commercial vehicle parking regulations, stating that parking large commercial vehicles in their residential neighborhood were, basically, a nuisance. For the most part, they were upset about tow truck drivers parking their vehicles by their homes.

In the parlance of land use planning, these people are often referred to by the acronym NIMBY, or not in my back yard. For the most part, the idea is that such people wouldn’t care about parking a commercial vehicle in a residential neighborhood, except that it is their neighborhood and perhaps their neighbor.

I am certain that having a large roll back style tow truck starting up at all hours of the morning might be cause for concern for a neighbor. It may well be inconvenient or annoying to have someone crank up one of those big diesel engines at 2 a.m. when they are called out to pick up a vehicle. But I think people have a right to park their commercial vehicles on their own property.

It’s a tough discussion.

Council, at the work session, seemed set on limiting the number of commercial vehicles at a residence to one. But the people who spoke Tuesday night at the public hearing made solid points as to why they may need to have more than one parked at their homes.

For what it’s worth, the City is having a hard time coming up with a good definition for a commercial vehicle. Is it a vehicle with a painted on logo? Is it determined by the number of axles the vehicle has? Is it determined by the type of license plate it sports? Is it determined by gross weight?

That’s a lot of questions and a lot of different answers. If I have two tow trucks and I park them in my driveway who exactly am I bothering? Response time seems to be a big part of the equation. When someone needs a tow truck, the sooner it gets there the better. The City is aware of things like response time, response time is a big driver when it comes to analyzing the value of fire and rescue departments. While the tow truck may not be involved directly in life and death issues, there’s something to be said for getting one at the scene as quickly as possible.

Council, showing infinite wisdom, opted to table the final two decisions until they could work through them at their next work session.

By the end of the public hearing, Council seemed no further along than they were before they even started reviewing the code.  If they get out of this by only keeping the front line of the house portion, we will be basically right where we are today, except that the code will have been addressed in 2016 and not in 1980. Some people might scoff at the idea of attending a public hearing. Some might say, “You can’t fight city hall.” But judging from the changes already made, and the sense of things that may be coming, it looks like the citizens who showed up and spoke did have an impact on the code discussion.

It probably didn’t hurt that five council members are up for election this cycle, but it’s still interesting to see how “We the People” can still effect change instead of sitting back and allowing change to affect us.  It’s still possible that City Council will approve a change that is more restrictive than what we have now.  And yet there seems to be some movement toward a more amicable solution.

Had no one showed up at the past two meetings, it would have been simple for Council to summarily approve the changes. Had council chambers been empty, the most restrictive parts of the Planning Commission’s recommendation would likely have passed without a hitch. Instead, citizen stood up to be heard. That’s how local government should work.

Pulling the old Switcheroo!

Perhaps bait and switch is a bit harsh, but near the end of Tuesday night’s City Council work session, after council discussed the situation with the sewage treatment plant in Petersburg, the reworking of City Code to address parking in residential areas for personal use campers, boats, and recreational vehicles, and commercial vehicle parking, City Manager Tom Mattis, said, “And we have one more matter to address and I held it till the end because it only requires a vote.”

By that time, most of the 60-odd people in the audience had already slipped out the door for private discussions.  And so just like that the city introduced a new pay scale for planning requests that run the gamut from signage costs to plan reviews.  In fairness, the cost increase make sense because they are directed at a specific person and the requirement to advertise legal ads can get pretty costly, ranging up to $300 per ad times as many as four printings.  I’m not as concerned about the cost for an employee to do the work, after all that’s why they have a job in the first place.

Still, it’s pretty shocking to see the costs jump by as much as 300 percent or more.  And while it is perfectly understandable that the project should pay at least most of its own way, it makes one wonder why we waited so long to increase the fees.  The costs that are not covered by the fee are paid for by “we the people” and come out of the General Fund, otherwise known as your tax dollars.

Still, it’s hard to swallow having to pay so much for something that could, and probably should, be handled differently today.  To me, the newspaper industry is nearly dead.  This is especially true of smaller papers, but even the big ones have a hard time keeping up.

Papers like the Richmond Times-Dispatch might as well ditch covering International and National news and put the stuff in a roundup column on page 3. By the time you read it in that paper, the news is at least two days old.  If it isn’t time to shed advertising in the papers, it’s so close that municipalities ought to petition to change the “must be advertised” clause that forces them to print legal notices in a “newspaper of record.”

While I realize there are still a few Luddites (people opposed to … new technology) out there who are not “plugged” into the Internet and its various wonders, the number grows shorter with every obituary.  Most people today have access to the news, for whatever it’s worth, either by computer or through a smart phone.  We know almost the instant something happens, think “I-reports.”  Big news events are online the instant they happen.

The ISIS attacks in Paris were out almost before the police knew it had happened.  Posting a video to snapchat or any of the too-many-to-name social media sites happens in the blink of an eye. Someone is there, someone has a video, someone has access, and someone knows how to use it.

Even here in the US, the video of the cop gunning down a man who was running away.  The cop didn’t shoot that video, a passerby did.  And yet, it was out in the public domain faster than fast.

So, if we believe that to be true, then why do we waste our time and our money, and this does cost us mind you, in paying for Legal Ads?  Why not just allow the municipalities to post their own legal ads on their own websites?

Think of the cost savings.  In this day and age when things are getting more and more expensive, why shouldn’t we take advantage of our investment in technology?  Back in the day, back in ancient times, like the 1980s, computers were not so prolific, websites were not so numerous.  There hadn’t been a huge push to get an “Internet presence.”  Today we have it.  Today everyone knows about Google, in fact Google is in jeopardy of losing its brand name because it has become a verb.  Who hasn’t said, “You can just Google it,” I mean other than the few remaining Luddites like my brother, Mike?  Remember Xerox? It took them forever, and a clever Saturday Night Live skit, to get people to call it making copies, instead of saying, “Can you Xerox this for me?”

The fee increases probably will never affect me.  I doubt I am ever going to need it.  I will either move out of the city or be buried in it before I have to have any zoning done.  But doesn’t it just make sense to stop paying the newspapers for Legal Ads when posting the information on the City Website would be just as effective, if not more effective, and would save the city and the residents some money to boot?

Raise the fees if you must, but if it were up to me I would look at getting rid of the fees altogether.  That would be a greater benefit to the community and to the city itself.

Go, Go Gadget, Jackie

It probably wasn’t much of a surprise to my wife, Jackie, when I asked her team of doctors if they would show me the used knee parts that they replaced during her surgery next week as sort of proof that the work was done.  Sure, it may have the ring of some kind of crazy New Yorker attitude, but how will we really know?

Back in the days when I used to actually do all my own car work, I would spend hours trolling places like Circle Auto Parts or any other kind of junk yard I could find.  I would even stop and check out vehicles that had become blackberry thickets, because you never really know where you might find that one part you have been looking for.  And in truth, I found many parts to many of the old cars I owned that way.

This was back in the day when you could use a soda can (ok, it might have been another type of beverage), to fix a broken or wearing thin muffler pipe.  I used to carry pliers and a couple old coat hangers just for that purpose.  And the coat hangers got double duty for the times I had to bend them into all kinds of pretzel shapes to open a car with the keys locked inside.

I remember one time spotting a wrecked Ford that had a four-speed transmission.  It happened to be the same year and model as my car, which had a broken automatic transmission.  The guy sold it to me for $75, including the drive shaft, which I knew would be longer than the one in my car because the transmission was longer.

Did it work? Yes, of course it worked, although I had to cut a hole in the floor board for the shifter.

But parts changes on human beings are a bit different.  So maybe just checking her new scars would be OK and I should not worry too much about the parts being replaced.

And so you have it. I have totally regressed to 1976 and will have my very own Bionic Woman in the matter of about a week.  Sure it won’t be the same as Lindsay Wagner’s character on that ancient sitcom, but heck we all have dreams, don’t we?

I can’t imagine Jackie running at 60 mph, but it will be nice to have her getting around without being hobbled by first one knee and then the other.  Certainly, it’s just a joint and not some kind of leg augmentation.

For what it’s worth, she did ask if she could get compressors and extenders for the knees.  You see, as a Librarian in the Richmond School District, she often has to reach way down to put a book on the bottom shelf and in turn reach way up to put a book on the top shelf.  She’s pretty much set with the in-between stuff.

There’s a lot that these people can do today, but I think “Go, Go, Gadget, Jackie” may still be a few years away.  Still, it will be fun to have a fully functional Jackie back in the house. The past few years, as she withstood the pain and put up with the knee locks and the times she fell down without help from an area rug or Snuggs, our guest Great Dane, has been hard on her.  And, lately, I think things had gotten worse.

She is amazing to me.  To have put up with the pain in her knees as long as she has is incredible.  The only bigger pain in the house is, well, maybe I should plead the fifth right now. Still, it’s a huge turnaround from the person who it seems a short time ago was wrestling with the idea of getting her knees replaced.

The way I hear it is that you’ll know when it’s time to get your knees replaced.  Jackie has had problems with her knees for nearly six years.  Last year, we went to see the doctor, because they told her she probably had some torn cartilage.  They took an X-ray and we showed up to see the doctor.  He said the good news was she did not have torn cartilage.  But the bad news was she didn’t have any cartilage.

Now, a year later, we are on the cusp of getting this taken care of.  Sometimes, you just have to wait for the timing.  And, really, no doctor, I don’t want to see the old parts.

When is a conflict not a conflict: when you announce it just before you vote

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

HL Mencken

As I sat in the audience at the latest Colonial Heights City Council meeting, I listened as five Council members declared possible Conflicts of Interest in several different matters that were being voted on as part of the city’s Consent Agenda.  Before the start of the voting procedure, the council members each in turn declared that a husband or wife was a member of a group that was involved in some action they would be voting on.

There’s an old legal saying about Conflict of Interest that it might behoove council to pay attention to.  It’s said that in matters of Conflict of Interest the parties should “avoid even the perception of a conflict of interest”.  What that means is that if it smells like a potential conflict of interest one ought to avoid it.

Not so with our City Council.  They believe by making a statement in public recognizing the potential conflict of interest that they can then go ahead and vote on matters that involve a potential conflict of interest.  While that statement may satisfy their own qualms and perhaps the letter of the law, it doesn’t really satisfy the ethical fact that they have a conflict of interest.

Why not just bow out of those measures?

Is it such a big deal to hold your vote outside of the one or two agenda items than it is to announce the potential conflict and yet vote anyway?  Not to me.

For the most part, what they were voting for didn’t really matter, if you consider pay raises and other issues minor.  And in the scheme of the city, they are minor.

But, despite the announcement caveat, it would be in their self-interest to simply avoid the conflict.  It’s not like abstaining from that vote would change the outcome.

While I appreciate the candor of those people identifying the conflict, it is incredible to think that they would act without bias.  Do you really think you could vote against something that might include a raise for your spouse?

It’s hard for me to swallow the idea that someone, not just city council, could declare the conflict and then go ahead and vote anyway.  That, in my opinion, does not meet the “avoid even the perception” of a conflict of interest.  A conflict is a conflict and just because you acknowledge it the acknowledgement does not make it go away.  You still have a potential conflict of interest.

What would it mean to simply step aside for the vote?  All of the matters that were on the consent agenda were approved unanimously.  Even if all five council members had a conflict with the same exact item, the matter would still have passed.

It’s a small city.  There are few people out there who have enough interest in city government and for running for council office anyway so there are abound to be some conflicts of interest. I can accept that.

Most political scholars will tell you that a perception of conflict of interest is just as damning as a real conflict of interest.  It may in fact be worse, because it is the kind of kindling that fires the rumor mill.  As the council members, one after the next, declared their potential conflict of interest, I started to wonder why they didn’t just step out of that particular approval.  It’s a simple thing to do really.  And in the end, it presents a very transparent view of the council’s actions.  Deep down inside, I know for me, it would be difficult to vote against something that would benefit my spouse or my children, but then some people have a higher threshold for perception than I do.

Election Season Merry-Go-Round

Our General Election process so far looks like it will have all the fire and fanfare of a cheap who dunnit novel.  Do we really not know who the players are going to be?

None of the so-called pundits thought Donald Trump would end up being the presumptive nominee, but to me it was pretty apparent from early on.  He would complain about the numbers of people involved in the process, I think they started with 17, and grumble that the size of the group stunted his ability to drag in more support.

But to some extent, the numbers may have been helpful, too. After all, as they said, Trump has his 30-35 percent support group that is pretty reliable.  Not so for the others, and the number of choices other than Trump, split the remaining 65 percent up enough to make his portion supreme.

At least, that was the argument until the potential nominees started to drop out.  Again, the pundits announced Trump’s undoing.  Surely, now with only five candidates running, someone can garner enough support to dump Trump.  But it didn’t happen.  And it didn’t happen because all of the “new found” voters didn’t coalesce to one or the other candidate and leave Trump behind.

They call it the winnowing process, and winnow it did.  It winnowed right down to two candidates and a cling on.  The contest, at the point following Wisconsin, truly appeared to be a two-horse race with an old nag running as a pace setter.

For a week after Wisconsin it appeared as if Ted Cruz might actually have a chance to upset Trump.  That is until New York.  Trump, as the papers said, romped in his home state.  Cruz said something to the effect of, well it was his home state.  But the size of the beating was a harbinger of what was to come in the ensuing week, when Trump blasted through the ACELA primary winning Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware by more than 50 percent, and taking every voting district along the way.  Cruz made his last stand in Indiana, but the writing was already on the wall and despite his pulling all stops he lost in catastrophic fashion ending his campaign and John Kasich’s campaign as well.  Thus we end up with the presumptive GOP nominee Donald J. Trump.

On the other hand we have Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee.  The ironic thing here is that her competition, Bernie Sanders, was supposed to be disposed of long ago.  But it now looks like he will stick around to the convention.

Make no mistake about this, Hillary will likely win because the Democrats have about 500 Super Delegates, who actually get to decide who the presumptive nominee is going to be.  All things being equal, those 500 delegates provide more than enough swing to change the vote.  They are pretty much all lined up behind Hillary, which gives her a hard to overcome lead.  But if they lined up instead behind Bernie, guess who would be in the lead?

There are other reasons that Bernie should stay in the process.  While it may be a forgone conclusion that Hillary is the chosen one, there are still a few players out there who might make it a touch more difficult for her.  No matter what you say, Bernie is popular.  He has pulled in a bunch of votes and has touched home with the younger voters.

But Hillary has other issues that may end up determining the nominee, despite garnering more delegates.  There is that FBI investigation into her server and the specter of the whole Benghazi mess continues to linger.  Her extraneous baggage can have a huge effective on electability in the long run.  If she can find some way to drop it or get around it she would likely be a lock for the presidency in the upcoming election.

Either way, I think we can expect to see Hillary vs Donald in November.  And, judging by the primaries, it ought to be one entertaining election.  In the end, as the Merry-Go-Round churns who knows who will end up with the gold ring?

Certainly it won’t be the political pundits.

Believe half of what you see; none of what you read

In a world that is constantly changing we can no longer be sure the news we hear is the “news” and not someone’s version of the news.  Certainly the media has fallen a long way away from “just the facts, Ma’am” to quote Dragnet’s Detective Joe Friday.

It’s not the world of Walter Cronkite any more.  The media has moved from simply providing the unfettered truth to adding in their own spin.  After all, the American public has always been a load of fools, hasn’t it?  Come on now, look at the people to your right and left, surely someone among them, or maybe two, has to be a member of what the infamous Baltimore Sun editorialist H.L. Mencken called the “booboisie”.

A recent Associated Press story by Carole Feldman and Emily Swanson suggests that as many as 94 percent of the population do not have a lot of confidence in the media.  Personally, I think the figures are skewed a bit and the percentage should be somewhat higher, like 99 percent.  But who am I to say?  A part time journalist.

So my thought is for you take a look for yourself.  Read the papers or the news on the Interweb?  Probably the Internet is more honest than a lot of stories in the funny papers, right?

Feldman and Swanson, in their article, say “Trust in the news media is being eroded by perceptions of inaccuracy and bias, fueled in part by Americans' skepticism about what they read on social media.”

In part of this statement, I think they are dead accurate.  The Americans have little trust in the media.  They would like to tie the “why” to social media, to some degree; but I think the problem isn’t that much of an outlier.  I think the problem with the media is the media itself and not any of the so-called social media junk.  Twitter never wrote a front page story in the New York Times, or an article in the Times-Dispatch, The Progress-Index, or the Hopewell News.

I would say an editorial, but then editorials are supposed to be biased and as such really don’t rise to the same level of dishonesty or, as we have learned the term, “misspeaking”.  Misspeaking in my dictionary is a euphemism for lying.  Anyone who steps up to correct a statement they make that turns out to be false, would love to just say “Sorry, I misspoke.”  Who, especially a member of the media or a politician, would ever be able to keep their status if they simply said the truth, “Sorry, I lied”?

Sure admitting the truth is a hard thing to swallow. For a politician, it may hurt for a news cycle or two, until the booboisie or maybe just a general run of homo simpleton’s forget that ever happened.  Maybe it did, and maybe it didn’t.  But the public, in general, has a short memory and is very willing to forgive.  Especially if the perpetrator is your perpetrator. Still, a lie is a lie, right?  It’s not someone “misspeaking”.  Misspeaking implies a sense of accident.  I accidentally said something that was untrue. Sort of like calling a car crash and accident, which implies no one at fault.

Perhaps these people weren’t aware of the fact that they were conjuring up something.  Perhaps, and I know this is a stretch, but maybe it was something from a dream or something that they really, really, really wanted to happen but didn’t but makes the story better.

In truth the media likely hasn’t changed very much.  Mencken, who I quoted earlier, wrote when Warren G. Harding was the president.  He had a lot to say about the American way, and its news vehicles.  For instance, this is how he defined the media of his day “A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

Mencken would have absolutely adored the current political climate.  The battles between the candidates running for office would have provided a person who said, “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance” a field day writing about our politics.

Probably none of this applies to you, dear reader.  After all, we are part of that portion of society that simply sits, points a finger, and giggles, right?  And then again, as the column writer, I guess that makes me a member of the media and we pretty much covered how much faith you can put into something the media publishes.

For the Greater Good--Yeah Right

Alas poor Lloyd, I knew him well.

It seems that the state, by way of the Department of Transportation, has once again come back to nab more land from the Goddard family in order to construct the be-all and end-all Interstate 95 exit at Temple Avenue, otherwise known as “Operation Whirligig.”  We the people would have to be pretty naïve not to think that this wasn’t “in the books” when whoever designed the former Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike back in the early ‘50s drew up the plans for the ridiculous interchange that local citizens have lived with over the ensuing six decades.

Back in those days, the mighty, mighty VDOT wrested control of most of the Goddard dairy farm, knocking down silos and scooping out well-fertilized pastures along the way simply because the property lay in the path of this great innovation for highway traffic.  Yippee, VDOT must have said as they paid a pittance in putting the family business to rest by underpaying for the land. I am sure that it seemed like a good deal at the time, but in reality maybe not so much.

And whoever designed the exit ramp there ought to be ashamed.  Maybe during those days Colonial Heights thought making an exit ramp into the city that was as convoluted as could be would cut down on the riff and the raff trying to stop here. Maybe they thought the horrible, no good, darned dirty interchange would keep the residents safe from the intrusion of real life travelers.  Who knows really, but by today’s standard it was very bad planning.  Tag onto it the way CH has become a shopping mecca, the number of transient vehicles, and the huge work population and it’s easy to see why something has to be done at the interchange.

No one in their right mind denies the inadequacy of the current interchange.  Despite the city’s numerous attempts to make the interchange safe, it still ranks as numero uno in terms of accidents per year, netting more than one a week according to 2014 statistics.  No one, not even Mr. Goddard, would deny that, well, something needs to be done.

So with that backdrop we have the seven acres left of the Goddard family’s original 97 acre dairy farm.  And, like the rest of the farm, the property sits squarely on top of the land VDOT says it needs to build its wondrous whirligig (Google “round about,” no not the song by Yes).

Down to a paltry 7 acres now, the Goddard property is among the largest pieces of land in the city.  And, in all honesty, VDOT doesn’t really want all seven acres. In fact, they are only negotiating for five acres.  Five acres leaves a measly two acres left for the Goddard dairy farm.  The two acres are for all intents and purposes useless because they will back up on the newly extended exit/entrance ramp roads.  Who would want to live there?  And the city has it zoned as commercial property to boot.

VDOT has made an offer for the property, but as one might expect its opening salvo is not necessarily what Mr. Goddard would like them to pay for five acres and his ante-bellum home.  No indeed.  So he is refusing to go quietly into that good night by not taking VDOTs measly offer and slithering out of sight.  But let’s be real.  This is the family property that dates back to the turn of the last century.  When this deal is done, and it will be done mark my words, the specter of the Goddard Dairy Farm will be just that.  A ghost; a remnant of the past, or in current lingo, History.

In order to take control of the property so that they can get their whirligig project on the road, VDOT, or probably more likely some State Attorney, will draw up eminent domain documents to take the land.  Yes, take the land.  Eminent domain, or the taking of a citizens’ property, has been around since biblical times, when King Ahab of Samaria offered Naboth compensation for Naboth's vineyard.  The problem with this is who gets to set the value for the property.  It is likely not the person who owns the property.

And so we go to valuations.  But how can anyone value the Goddard land fairly.  As it stands, it probably isn’t terribly valuable.  Look at the city’s assessment history, notably wrong in almost every respect.  Typically assessments are 10 percent lower than the actual value, since they are developed using data that is at best a year old and often closer to two years old.

So VDOT would like the property valued as low as possible.  And their attorneys and eminent domain workers will do what they can to keep a cap on the total price.  But truth be told, the whirligig won’t happen without that key piece of property.  The extended and widened on and off ramps run smack dab through the Goddard home, and the whirligig itself sits right at the edge of the property.  What kind of value do you think that has?  The Goddard property is the keystone parcel that will make the whirligig go round.

The property should be valued at highest best use.  Highest best use is not what the state would like to pay.  The state is more interested in lowest worst use.  Take into account that without that piece of land the project is dead in the water.

Let me assure you, the state is going to take this land.  No question about that.  The question is an ethical question about how the Goddard family ought to be compensated.

For me, the term “fairly” comes to mind.  Of course, fairly has a different meaning to both parties.  But let’s start with it being the highest best value of the land.  It is THE key piece of real estate for a project that many residents don’t want.  Secondly, why only take the five acres?  Why not just take the rest of the property, the additional two acres, and maybe make a park or something out of it?  It’s really a slap in the face to take all but two acres of land with questionable use once VDOT completes its project.

The main thing, I think, is that we don’t like to see our citizens handled so callously.  The Goddard family likely didn’t want to end their farm back when the state took it for the turnpike, and yet they did.  Call their sacrifice made for the betterment of the people. But here the state is again, knocking down the door to take what’s left.  Maybe it’s just me, but fair compensation ought to take in the value of the property as the key ingredient for the Temple Avenue exit.

Everyone knows the property is going to become the states.  Why not just pay the family and be done with it.  It’s a one-time deal, at least this time, and then it will be over.  Perhaps it will notch the cost of the interchange a bit, but why does the state insist on taking advantage of its citizens?  I’m not sure what is fair concerning the price of the land, but I am sure the state’s initial offering is not going to be very fair.