Salmon-Thirty-Salmons, Cabin Fever, and Bridges to Nowhere

How dare Bush scoff at Oberstar's proposal to raise the gas tax to pay for bridge repair.

Excuse me, but it was a fucking Republican, Don Young (R-AK), who chaired the House Transportation Committee that allowed the most amount of earmarks/pork barrels to be included in the reauthorization of federal transportation bill. For christs sake, Young named the federal bill after his wife, Lulu. The federal bill is called SAFETEA-LU (Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient, Transportation Equity Act, a Legacy for Users). And let's not forget Young's favorite pork barrel project, dubbed "The Bridge to Nowhere." The bridge in Alaska would connect the town of Ketchikan (population 8,900) with its airport on the Island of Gravina (population 50) at a cost to federal taxpayers of $320 million, by way of three separate earmarks in the recent highway bill.

Don ain't done yet. His second favorite project he even named after himself, "Don Young Way", a $223 million span near Anchorage that would connect that city with a nearly deserted port. Art Nelson, Mr. Young's son-in-law, is part owner of 60 acres of what he described as "beautiful property" on land that will be opened up to development by the bridge.


And Don likes to send pork to his friends, even if the community, or state DOT, doesn't want it!

Oh, and remember Ted Stevens, the longest running Republican in the Senate, who just happens to be being investigated by the FBI for corruption (the FBI just raided his ski chalet last week)? Not only is he just as skilled as Don Young in bringing home the pork, but he has a knack for giving taxpayer dollars to his kin. A nonprofit agency, the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, gave Alaska Airlines a $500,000 grant to paint their jets to look like Alaskan salmon. They call 'em Salmon-Thirty-Salmons (pretty cute, dontcha think?)

The money came out of about $29 million in federal funding U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska and his congressional colleagues have appropriated to the marketing board, created in 2003, to promote and enhance the value of Alaska seafood. The senator's son, state Sen. Ben Stevens, is chairman of the agency's board of directors.

Of the $24 billion in earmarked projects in the most recent transportation bill, nearly $1 billion went to Alaska, putting the nation's 47th most populous state just behind California and Illinois. The measure provided $1,597 in earmarked funding for every man, woman and child in the state.

6,371 special projects, or "earmarks," are in the Transportation Equity Act, a six-year $286 billion bill. Roughly $1 out of every $11 in the legislation will be spent on pet projects instead of building roads and reducing congestion, oh, and maintaining the nations bridges. One out of four bridges in this nation are rated "structurally deficient".

Aren't you the pot calling the kettle black, George? My guess is Georgie doesn't give a flying fuck about helping the Republican party's chance at anything significant in 2008 (which is fine by me). It's out of self-interest at this point for this nation's worst lame duck prez. It's the same reason he's keeping Gonzalez in place.

Great News for Sheila

Police union endorses Mitchell

The FOP endorsed Keiffer. Oh my. They've only endorsed the losing candidate in how many races? Erhlich, Bell, Mary Pat Clark. Keiffer should be the one who is worried.

Can we say "L-O-S-E-R"?

This race ain't even exciting anymore.

More Good News for Sheila

If I were a Keiffer supporter, I'd tell his pops to stop digging a grave. Somebody take away the shovel, and the microphone....Oh, wait, I'm a Sheila supporter, here's the bullhorn. Talk away:

Mitchell's father defends spending

"Surfacing for the first time in a campaign finance imbroglio that has surrounded his son's mayoral candidacy, Dr. Keiffer J. Mitchell Sr. said through attorneys yesterday that the $14,000 he spent on a hotel was an appropriate campaign expense because the room was used for fundraising."

The Absolutely Worst Places to Live in America

Big surprise that Baltimore is listed here

• "Cultural Highlights of Baltimore: Auto Theft, STD Clinics, Getting Mugged on the Steps of Your Own Home, Overpriced Crabs ..."


• Dundalk: "White Trash Ghetto at its most terrifying. Shirtless four-year-old children stomp down the sidewalks with the authority of a hardened criminal."


• Inner Harbor: "like Disneyland in the middle of Afghanistan."

FWIW, the asshat meant for the book to be satirical. He even used The Wire as part of his basis. Gilmarten is about as bright as the fuckwads who came up with Baltimore's new branding campaign:

"On the other hand, while planning the city’s new branding campaign last spring, San Francisco-based firm Landor Associates quickly identified the award-winning series as a problem. The advertising agency told city officials that Baltimore had a perception problem and The Wire was, in part, to blame. Baltimore, they seemed to be saying, needed to stop talking about its problems in order to sell itself to the outside world."

BTW, Urbanite is one of my new favorite rags

a brief reprieve....

How Smart Community Developers Work
Among the supporting cast of the great urban revival of the 1990s were community development corporations, nonprofits that bought and rehabilitated housing and encouraged neighborhood business development. Many of these organizations were long on vision but short on strategic and business skills, but some were strikingly effective. There is just such a CDC in Baltimore. In 10 years’ time, it has been so skillful at buying, rehabbing and selling housing that it is running out of opportunities to improve its own neighborhood and is thinking of moving elsewhere.
It was easy to dismiss CDCs in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then, the prevailing image was that they were made up of hippie carpenters, urban homesteaders and assorted do-gooders. And they seemed to be fighting losing battles: For every house bought and rehabilitated on a block, two more were lost to slumlords. But when interest in in-town living suddenly revived in the 1990s, the CDCs were already in place with a welcoming hand, advice about restoration and some success stories to show the newcomers.
What many of them didn’t have was much financial or real estate knowledge — how to buy and sell houses, manage subcontractors or budget properly. The groups were supported by grants from foundations or governments, but at some point they should have generated a fair amount of revenue from sales and rentals — assuming they were doing a good job. Alas, many weren’t.
But Baltimore’s Patterson Park CDC was. The Patterson Park organization did the things other CDCs did, according to a recent profile in the Baltimore Sun; it just did them better. And that can be traced to two things: good leadership, principally its executive director, Ed Rutkowski, and good luck (more on this later).
What the CDC did was buy houses before slumlords could get their hands on them, repair or restored the properties, then sell or rent them. (One of the missions of the CDC was to preserve the neighborhood’s ethnic diversity and provide affordable housing; hence, the CDC charges an average $800 a month in rent.) In the mid-1990s, finding rescue properties was no problem; some were sold for $1. But as Patterson Park’s popularity grew, the bargains dried up. These days, fixer-uppers cost the CDC upwards of $97,000, the Sun said. (Another way of measuring progress: The earliest CDC rehab was sold in 1997 for less than $55,000; recent ones have gone for more than $400,000.)
All of which has Rutkowski and his organization thinking that its work may be ending. “High prices for everything that is available says that there’s really no need for us,” he told the Sun. “We always contended the important thing was to keep houses out of the hands of slumlords.”
So now what? Well, the CDC still owns rental houses (140, to be exact) and supports a charter school in Patterson Park and an organization that helps manage the 137-acre park that gives the neighborhood its name. But the CDC is considering moving its rehab activities to an adjacent neighborhood or lending its expertise to other Baltimore organizations. That would be welcome, others involved in housing said. “Baltimore cannot afford to waste the human capital that Ed has assembled,” an official at another CDC said.
Whatever happens, Patterson Park is clearly a better place than 10 years ago. Crime is way down, housing vacancies are at a tidy 5 percent, and housing prices are way, way up (fivefold, the newspaper reported). All in all, not a bad decade’s work.
Footnote: So what about the luck factor? It gets back to the old real-estate axiom that the three most important factors are location, location, location. Patterson Park is just north of Canton Park, one of those industrial and warehouse districts that became hip early on. As rents in Canton Park soared, couples looked nearby for affordable housing and discovered Patterson Park. Still, neighborhood leaders say, without the CDC’s stabilizing work in the 1990s, few would have taken a chance on the area, affordable or not.

Hey, it's hard to find good things about Body-more. This is one of em.

What were they smoking?

Baltimore's Nickel and Dime Approach to Homelessness

"Question: What do you get when you combine the problem of panhandling, the need for financing long-term strategies for dealing with the homeless and a bunch of old parking meters? Answer: a small but ingenious solution.

Baltimore and its downtown organization, the Downtown Partnership, have been thinking a lot about homelessness and panhandling. As everywhere, these are big impediments to downtown renewal (visitors hate walking a gauntlet of panhandlers; residents hate stepping over people camped on the sidewalks). The good news: Baltimore city government is ready to commit itself to the only strategy that seems to work, an approach called "housing first". Better news: The Downtown Partnership has come up with an idea that may cut down on panhandling while helping pay a portion of the expense of programs for the homeless.

That's where the old parking meters come in. The organization has painted some old-style, headed-for-the-scrap-yard meters (the ones that accept only nickels, dimes and quarters) and installed them along busy streets. Rather than dropping a quarter in a panhandler's cup, residents and visitors are invited to deposit it in a "Make a Change" meter. When they do, the meter briefly changes signs, from "despair" to "hope."

How much money will be collected a nickel or dime at a time? Hard to say, since few places have tried this. Probably not a lot. But the aim isn't as much to collect money as it is to change behaviors that hurt cities (people giving to panhandlers). "The idea here," a Downtown Partnership official told the Baltimore Sun, "is to educate the public that it's OK to give, but we want you to give where you're helping to make a change." All the change collected will go to Baltimore Homeless Services Inc., a non-profit that helps steer people out of homelessness.

Footnote: So what is "housing first"? It's a set of programs based on separating the hard-core homeless from those who are down on their luck and treating them differently. The hard core are people so ravaged by drug or alcohol abuse, poor health or mental illness that they will always be wards of the state. The idea is to move this difficult minority into permanent housing where they are surrounded by services that keep them off the streets. Once the hard core are gone, the temporarily homeless become much easier to deal with, through shelters and conventional counseling. Baltimore is one of many cities trying this approach these days. "

Like a few fucking nickels is going to change someone's outlook from "despair" to "hope"

Get!

fucking!

real!

It's not so much my distate for panhandlers, I just think the cost of administering the program will probably cost more than revenues gained. Think of how much it cost to paint the meters to say "despair" and "hope", let alone the other administrative costs. This is about as dumb as former-Cincinnatti-mayor-turned-trashy-talk-show-host Jerry Springer paying a hooker with a municipal check. Why not have the city pay the homeless to do targeted trash removal. Pay em with food stamp credit cards.

My footnote: I think Housing First policies can be effective if adminstered correctly. The jury is still out on Baltimore's experiment.

Life is cheap in these parts.....

Reason #1 why Body-more sucks ass:

Murders this week: 5
Murders this year: 240

My neighborhood of Pigtown (still referred to by aristocrats and realtors as Washington Village) has had 7 murders in the past 2 months (one of which was an 11 year old boy), and over 65 overdoses since January 1.

And perhaps City Councilman James Kraft (D-1st District) and Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke (D-14th District) should take a course in human behavior before they stand on the stump touting NIMBYisms:

City Council Fact of the Week
"City Councilman James Kraft (D-1st District) joined Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke (D-14th District) this week in voting against Resolution 05-0220, the plan to reclassify substance-abuse clinics as health-care clinics, thereby making zoning restrictions against them illegal. Both Clarke and Kraft expressed concern that too many treatment centers would move into residential areas, as opposed to staying in business districts."

Crackheads and junkies don't like to walk very far, and typically don't stray far from a 7-8 block radius. Treatment centers need to be close to where the patients are if they are to be utilized effectively. This is why needle exchanges are now mounted on Winnebagos. Duh!