Cocoposts

Vallecito Lake

From the EPA's Fish Advisory Newsletter:

  Group tackles mercury woes. Cortez, CO -- Earlier this year, a mercury advisory was issued for the Vallecito Reservoir. It warned people about consuming walleye and northern pike from the lake. The source of the mercury has not been pinpointed and it may not be a single factor. Even so, a group of community members, tribes, interest groups, industry and government representatives have formed the Four Corners Air Quality Task Force. The group plans on working on all air quality issues including mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. They are also hoping to track down the cause of the mercury contamination in the Vallecito Reservoir. 

Source: The Durango Herald - August 10, 2006

Hint:  It is the power plants.

 

Chimayo Plaza

Getting Up

Fall and harvest are great, but I do get a little down about the end of summer... and everything else.   It took me over six  hours to write something positive yesterday for DCF.

The self-assigned topic-as-therapy was to be:  Things to Love about Albuquerque and my list started out pretty long.  But as I worked on each paragraph the positive description would descend into a history of what one government or business or person had done to screw that thing up - whether they were successful at it or not.    

I finally had to limit myself to the magnificence of the Sandias - a geologic feature we can't really control.  Even then I had to delete a paragraph about how much I dislike all the towers on top. 

I'll be taking more vacation, thanks. 

View of a Blog Vacation

Heather's Wrong Turn

From the Washington Post editorial about NSA surveillance:

In the House, a proposal by Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.) has acquired an undeserved reputation for moderation. Under her bill, all aliens who are not permanent residents would become subject to warrantless surveillance for up to a year if they are "reasonably expected to transmit or receive foreign intelligence information" -- even if there is no suspicion of wrongdoing on their part.

Even more troubling, the proposal would give the president the ability to conduct warrantless surveillance against anyone he suspects of contact with terrorists after a terrorist attack or, in the latest version, when he deems an attack imminent. Because the key terms in this section go undefined, these provisions could easily be read to permit broad warrantless surveillance domestically even following -- or in anticipation of -- attacks on U.S. troops in combat zones overseas.

Surveillance of anyone for anything, anytime at all.   

Dragging Death in Denver

I saw this news of a woman's murder in the Denver Post yesterday and the San Francisco Chronicle picked it up today.  It happened only a couple hundred miles north of here but I don't see it in the Journal.  (UPDATE:  It was in there.)

There are no suspects.  They can't identify the woman.   (UPDATE:  Her name was Maria Franco- Fierros and police have arrested the man she lived with who was identified from the photo found near her body.  Apparently police believe the man who murdered her left a picture of himself at the scene.) 

Shouldn't newspapers in the region, like ours, cover this?  Even if it is horrible.  It seems more likely that a suspect might be found if more people know it happened.  A photo was found near her body.

Property owners in the subdivision 20 miles south of Denver want to look away fast as well.    

"It's a very safe neighborhood, or it has been, anyway," ...  The blood was cleaned off the paved road, but traces remained, upsetting neighbors.   "We don't want to attract any more attention than what we're already getting. This is our little piece of heaven." ...

One hell of a heaven.   

Rio Puerco is De Nile

Denver Post reports a record volume of homes are on the market nationally - 4.2 million.  Economists predict  this will lead to a fall in value.  Realtors react by putting hands over their ears and going, "nya, nya, nya, nya, I can't hear you!"   

The idea of building new homes in the Rio Puerco valley, 17 miles west of Albuquerque, and even more homes on the tens of thousands of acres of Westland between here and there, seems a little ... optimistic.   And its something to think about - the implications of establishing new remote communities that must be provided with public services whether they ever fully develop or not.   

What are the dangers of being spread too thin in a market downturn or recession?  Just asking.   

 

Whipping the Planners

Cynical Planners - Part Next:

What goes on in the "Planning" departments of most local governments isn't what most people probably imagine - guys standing around maps with markers talking growth statistics and sensitive environmental features.  It isn't even close to what is taught in planning schools - things like urban economics and how to manage planning forums and town halls where alternative futures can be debated and discussed among diverse participants. 

No.  Most public planning offices' chief function is to facilitate land development, not plan land use.  More often that not, those employed as local government planners administer codes and ordinances.  And some silly outdated ones at that. Planning offices are generally a confusing miasma of administrative paper-pushing in service to the building industry.    And practicing public planners are forced into the role of developer-guide for applicants who must get through a regulatory maze of procedures and overlapping jurisdictions and regulations. 

This necessary relationship between planners and developers is frequently viewed as favoritism by those outside this process.   A "fix" for the process leads to a growing role for neighborhood associations in an attempt to represent and balance other interests.   And good luck with that.

On top of it all are real and imagined illegitimate uses of planning powers by elected and appointed officals who may trade project approvals as political movida. 

And best of all -  the part that'll make a planner cry - any poor outcome of development - sprawl, traffic, loss of those sensitive environmental features or farmland -  is then blamed on poor planning instead of on the far more common failure to plan or to implement plans, or on the outdated codes, the process, the movidas or developers themselves.   

It's no wonder people are mad.  And cynical.   

On Growing Houses Instead of Food

From The New Mexican:

(Bosque Farms farmer) Daves sees a looming battle between urban land uses and agriculture as towns continue to grow. He worries town people will forget how precarious it is to rely on a few large corporate farms hundreds of miles away for the majority of New Mexico’s food.

“As you build more houses, as agriculture becomes less and less a part of people’s lives, they don’t appreciate how important the acequias are and the farmers’ need for access to water,” Daves says. “The quality of life is so diminished when you don’t have local farms to feed people.”

He hopes the state’s leaders will do more than give lip service to preserving local agriculture. “It’s a quality of life issue,” he says. “It’s not saving it for the past. It’s saving it for the future.”

A Patriotic Pitch

"The property-rights advocates have exploited Kelo to advance a broader anti-government agenda," says John Echeverria, head of the Environmental Law and Policy Institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C....

The initiatives have titles such as "Protect Our Homes," "The Home Owners Protection Effort" and "People's Initiative to Stop the Taking of Our Land" -- as if the government is about to come in with bulldozers to sweep everyone off their property.

From Sunday Seattle Post Intelligencer.