Cocoposts

Rocky Flats Editorial

Flats Secrecy Taken Too Far By The Denver Post

(...) The U.S. Department of Energy's recently announced plans to digitally copy — then destroy — 500 boxes of records pertaining to the plant will only make matters worse. Legitimate arguments can be made about how cutting-edge advances in software and hardware quickly become outdated, making it very possible that future access to the digitally copied records would be difficult.

More important, though, is how the public perceives the trustworthiness of the DOE.  (...)

The now-infamous Rocky Flats special grand jury is a 16-year-old wound that has never healed. The grand jury investigated environmental crimes at the plant for 2-1/2 years, sifting through hundreds of boxes of evidence and testimony from more than 100 witnesses. Grand jurors were discharged in 1992, days before federal prosecutors crafted a plea agreement with Rockwell International Corporation, one of the contractors that operated the plant.

The jurors have been struggling to be heard ever since, filing federal actions in an effort to get permission to release publicly their allegations and beliefs about what went on at the plant.  A decision last week by Senior U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch to keep much of the jury's contentions under wraps only deepens the air of mystery surrounding Rocky Flats.

The Strangelovian concept is:  the less information made public about what went on, the greater the public perception of trustworthiness.  I'd say that is still working pretty well for DOE.  After all, what could possibly go wrong with production at Los Alamos?   Trust them.   

Sprawl Sampler

This San Francisco Chronicle story from April 18, 2008, "Creeping Sprawl",  and the comments that follow it, nearly capture the complete sprawling picture of growth in California and elsewhere.

 "We're losing migration corridors for animals and compromising our watersheds and paving over productive farmland," said Amanda Brown-Stevens, field director for Greenbelt Alliance, a Bay Area land conservation and urban planning organization.

 The challenge, she said, is getting people to value long-term sustainability more than short-term profit. If they won't do it on their own, then land-use laws can be enacted to prevent landowners and builders from developing open space.

It may be a little too little and too late for more land-use laws.  Been there and done that.

What few note is that sprawl is built with borrowed money.   Most blame either developers, planners or government politicians for the last twenty-five years of bad development, we should be blaming Wall Street.   

Senator Scrum

The Albuquerque Journal covers Senator Shannon Robinson's use of tax money for his rugby obsession.

The quest for success hasn't come cheap for University of New Mexico rugby and its politically connected coach, who appears to have free reign over the program even though he isn't a university employee.     Sen. Shannon Robinson, D-Albuquerque, is the unpaid volunteer coach who also prides himself on being one of UNM's patron saints when it comes to legislative appropriations.

APS Building Spree

 Albuquerque Journal notes APS construction. 

The rapid-fire construction of West Side schools continued Wednesday as officials broke ground on a middle school next to Volcano Vista High.  "We're going clear to the Rio Puerco," Albuquerque School Board President Mary Lee Martin said, noting the western expansion of the district in the past several years....

In the next three years, APS plans to open 10 new schools...

Giddy-up for sprawl-enabling schools clear to the Puerco!   Catching up with the west side real estate growth just in time for a slow-down.

This is the Way Cities Die

American Airlines to pull out of Oakland International, headline San Francisco Chronicle. 

05-05) 21:07 PDT Oakland -- American Airlines, citing the high cost of fuel, will pull out of Oakland International Airport in September after six decades operating there, airport officials said Monday.

The airline has been running three daily non-stop flights out of the airport to Dallas-Ft. Worth and has been operating at Oakland since 1947.

Reading and republishing the comments of those with whom you agree saves the trouble of writing and leaves more time for lurking.  Commenter Pulpwood places this news in a much much larger context. 

This is the way that cities die. Incompetent corrupt politicians pandering to howling mobs of special interests with nothing to contribute but votes to reelect the politicians. Gary, Indiana. Cleveland, Ohio. Buffalo, New York. Oakland, California. 80 years ago flourishing downtowns, working electric transit systems, civic pride, beautiful carefully built ornate buildings, gardens, trees. Each generation never knows what preceded it. No one is aware of the decline. Like the environment collapsing. One by one, social customs fade, a species disappears. Another neighborhood goes, what propels it forward is a mere reworking of the past. It's not the place, it's the new people and the people that manipulate them and that profit from them that makes a city die.

Pulpwood sounds like a cynical city planner in need of a double Buckaroo Bonsai. 

And some rail service. 

Smart Grid May Reduce Peak Demand

Reducing peak electric power loads is critical to reducing the possibility that we'll rationalize using nuclear power to meet those demands. 

News from the Denver Post that consumers may get important feedback on home electricity use -  in Canada and Boulder anyway. 

MILTON, Ontario — The glowing amber dot on a light switch in the entryway of George Tsapoitis' house offers a clue about the future of electricity.  A few times this summer, when millions of air conditioners strain the Toronto region's power grid, that pencil-tip-size amber dot will blink. It will be asking Tsapoitis to turn the switch off — unless he's already programmed his house to make that move for him.

This is the beginning of a new way of thinking about electricity, and the biggest change in how we get power since wires began veining the landscape a century ago.  Smart-grid technologies have gotten small tests throughout North America, as utilities and regulators scout how to coax people to reduce their demand for power. But there's little doubt it's coming.

Xcel Energy plans to soon begin a $100 million smart-grid project reaching 100,000 homes in Boulder. The grid will create a two-way communication between Xcel and its customers, allowing them to determine peak usage hours and change rates and consumption habits accordingly.

For example, Xcel would be able to charge higher rates during peak hours and lower rates during off-peak hours. Consumers could lower their monthly bills by performing power-consuming tasks, such as running the dishwasher, during off-peak hours.

Why Do We Need Ethics Commission?

Eli Lee on Clearly New Mexico answers why we need an independent state ethics commission.  Shorter Eli:  Manny Aragon.

Indeed, are we to believe that since 1992 not one member of the Legislature has had a conflict of interest or used influence inappropriately? Must questions of misconduct rise to the level of a state or federal indictment and prosecution before they are addressed?

Consider the case of former Senate President Pro Tem Manny Aragon, who currently awaits trial on corruption charges in the courthouse construction scandal. He, of course, will have his day in court. But given the seriousness of the charges, and the testimony already in the record that suggests this was the manner in which he routinely conducted legislative business, how is it that no one stepped forward to file a prior ethics complaint? The conclusion is obvious: Given Aragon's immense power, his colleagues would never sit in judgment against him for fear of retribution. So why bother?

Cricket Book Signing

Story in Duke City Fix.

Snuffing Asarco

From the El Paso Times staff editorial:

There appears to be new hope that Asarco will not reopen its copper smelter in El Paso, no thanks to our own state agency, but thanks to the federal government. Indications are the Environmental Protection Agency will soon greatly tighten health standards for allowable airborne lead -- cutting back 93 percent. (...)

We've long said that Asarco is an outdated early 20th-century smoke-belching beast that should not be allowed to operate amid populated areas. Medical data show, according to an Associated Press report Thursday, that lead can be inhaled or ingested after it settles out of the air. It's rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream. It adversely affects many human organs.

We received no help from our own state in keeping El Pasoans healthy. We applaud the actions of the EPA, and hope new lead emission standards will allow for permanent closure of Asarco in El Paso.

Development Addict

You gotta read the whole Denver Post story about a man who, in spite being a felon already and  presently indicted awaiting a summer trial, is still engaging in the behavior and profiting from it. 

Drugs?  No.  Land speculator and developer.    

The 60-year-old real estate guru has been twice convicted of felonies over his long career.  But now he faces 67 more counts in the collapse of Mile High Capital, the Denver-based real estate investment firm he founded. Mile High reportedly collected about $44 million from 882 investors across the nation — and then filed bankruptcy.

Out on $250,000 bail, Dryer continues his work as a persuasive real estate guru. He has been working as a consultant to a Charlotte, N.C.-based company called Convergent Acquisitions & Development Inc., which peddles "non-owner occupied" investment properties.

"I can't believe he's still on the street," said Harold Ellerington, a Denver-area resident who claims he lost $250,000 of his retirement savings at Mile High. "I guess the bail was too low. . . . He's like a drug addict. He just can't help himself."

Blaming Smart Growth

In a mighty leap of logic and misdirection, not unusual for the Heritage Foundation, author Wendell Cox blames smart growth for the housing bubble, economic downturn and alopecia.       

These policies, often referred to as "smart growth," create a scarcity of land, artificially raise the price of housing, and, again, have increased the exposure of the market to risky mortgage debt. When more liberal loan policies were implemented, metropolitan areas that had adopted these more restrictive policies lacked the resilient land markets that would have allowed the greater demand to be accommodated without inordinate increases in house prices.

This is simultaneously ridiculous and boring - other typifying traits of  HF material.

There is a glut of housing tied directly to those  liberal loan policies, not a shortage of land caused by excessive land use regulation.  And we should be so lucky.  The sprawl pattern paradigm of the last twenty-five years was constrained by very little and the least of these was "smart growth" regulation.   The term itself was only more recently popularized to describe the largely ineffective and pathetic attempts to rein in the juggernaut - like Albuquerque's Planned Growth Strategy in 1996 - the potential of which was nipped in the bud by sprawlmeisters.   

Albuquerque's most obvious development constraint is land ownership, not regulation.  The edges of our ubiquitous suburbia are defined by federal, Indian or old land grant boundaries, not smart growth boundaries.  The entire idea of effective growth boundaries was kneecapped by the very developer friendly Legislature early in the decade.

Blaming planning or local government regulation seems popular with those who made record breaking profits in the housing boom and on the way down they are grasping at straws. 

Dependent and Obsessed with Real Estate

Dr. Housing Bubble estimates almost $3 trillion in real estate equity is gone and notes Bloomberg on the State of California's $20 billion deficit.   The Dr. says:

Now tell me, what other industries are going to start hiring to boost the so-called phantom housing bottom especially here in California?  Never mind the astounding fact that according to the California Association of Realtors the median price statewide is now off by a stunning 30 percent. It only logically follows that real estate declining will hurt a state that is utterly dependent and obsessed with all things real estate.

Razing Fix

Building demolition is sad.  It is often not about the building.  The destruction of a structure can be an attempt to fix larger problems by scapegoating place.  The place is destroyed but the problems never go far.   

The City attacking a building with a strike force team seems sad and a little scary.  It implies we've learned very little from the past of condemning entire blocks of physical history in the name of eliminating poverty.  Neither can you solve crime and eliminate drugs by killing old motels.

But yeah, American Inn was an eyesore and so it is especially refreshing to see demolition for the purpose of building something new and better.  Oh, but wait.  That was December 2006.  Then is not now.   Now, "owners of the property agreed to pay for the $120,000 demolition. They will sell it as vacant land, perhaps leading to redevelopment".  Perhaps. 

Also demolished - Old Purgy's at Purgatory.  It went the way of the dozer last week.  You can watch them pull it down on the Durango Herald site.

A new vista will greet skiers at Purgatory next winter after the demolition Thursday of Purgy's, which had stood since the ski area's opening in December 1965. 

  Back then, the quirky shingle-covered building was skiers' one-stop shop, housing ski   rentals, ticket sales, restrooms - just two of them - and the only restaurant and bar.

  Though weathered and architecturally dated, the building was heartily eulogized at an   end-of-the-season bash earlier this month. The death blow came Thursday morning, when a crew used a track hoe to claw   away the building's facade, then pulled out the support beams with a heavy truck and cables.

SunCal Defaults

California news of troubles for SunCal. 

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. -- The company behind the McAllister Ranch project is in default on its $235 million loan.  That project southwest of Bakersfield was designed to build 6,000 homes, but the project may now be in peril.  The notice of default was filed on Tuesday at the County Recorder's Office.

The three page document said that as of April 15, Suncal McAllister Ranch, LLC, a partner of Irvine-based Suncal Companies owed more than $4.1 million on the $235 million loan Suncal took out in order to develop the site near South Allen Road and Panama Lane southwest of Bakersfield.  The loan company, Lehman Commericial Paper Incorporated filed the default notice and now Chicago Title Company is responsible for collecting the remainder on that loan or the property could be sold.

Photo from KERO 23 News.   Thanks Hunter.

No Tolls I-70

The Colorado Legislature dumped the idea of congestion pricing, in the form of a $5 toll, for I-70.  Truckers, skiers and ski resorts hated the idea  - the trucking industry, especially.  So the recommendation is now for a rail system.   GLWT.

The Denver-Glenwood Springs I-70 section is on the truck route between Chicago and Los Angeles and  the main artery to Aspen, Vail and old mining towns turned to casinos.  It is also the "steepest longest-steep"  freeway anywhere ever.   

From the Denver Post:

(T)he plan to put tolls on I-70 collapsed into a heap of chuckles.  Senate Minority Leader Andy McElhany, a Colorado Springs Republican who sponsored the plan to charge $5 tolls near the Eisenhower Tunnel, laid over his bill until May 26 — Memorial Day. That effectively killed it because the legislature will be adjourned by then.

"When you're sitting in the traffic jams that day," McElhany said to his colleagues with a mischievous smile, "just think about the $5 you could have paid to be out of it."

From an earlier piece of optimism from Toll Roads News:

Tolls were used in the mid-1950s to build the Denver-Boulder Turnpike, now de-tolled US-36. The traffic crisis on the Denver-Glenwood Springs segment of I-70 is caused principally by high-income vacationers and recreationists, so the equity argument for financing improvements with tolls seems strong.

Image from the I-70 Coalition.