Cocoposts

Worry Wine

San Francisco Chronicle reports Napa news:

The worst spring cold snap in more than 30 years is threatening to wreak havoc on the wine industry as three recent days of frost have killed grapevine buds up and down the crucial North Coast vineyard region. ...

The most damage to vines took place March 31 and last Saturday and Sunday, when temperatures dipped below the freezing point of 32 degrees to as low as 27 degrees....

The North Coast growing region is the premier wine land in America, anchored by Sonoma and Napa counties and stretching from Marin to Mendocino and Lake counties. Producing 450,000 tons of grapes every year, it is a $1 billion industry, so even a 10 percent loss would be huge in terms of dollars, growers said.

Rocket Race Tax

Sierra County's spaceport tax passed.  Promoters evoked the magic word, jobs, a lot and there are cool videos of rocket racing and that vagina-shaped terminal.   What's not to love?  Here's Haussamen's coverage.

Promoters didn't talk about the existing facilities and budgets for space research, the huge capital required for space travel, Peak Oil and precepts of a gloomy economy.  This is just the thing for New Mexico - if this is 1960.  Sustainable economic development?   

The touted business plan describes the "commercialization space pyramid" and transports the reader  back to NMSU freshman economics.   

From the study conclusion:

"(The) economic development return on the investment likely will be positive, although subject to risk, under some scenarios, spectacularly so."

There it is in a nutshell (or space capsule for the faithful).  The bar will make more than the runway.  I'll have another Buckaroo Bonzai. 

TIDD Hugs and Understanding

The vote to amend the City of Albuquerque's ordinance regarding tax increment financing failed 5-4 last night.    Proponents for the changes were clear.   In short they said, you should understand consequences before you embrace something wholeheartedly. 

Councilor Cadigan spoke of baseball, failed promises of the railroad builders and the meaning of the  anti-donation clause in the New Mexico Constitution.  Councilor O'Malley described life, planning and TIDDs in all their fractal animal-print complexity.  Along with Benton and Garduno, they demonstrated understanding of the risks and rewards of  TIDD financing.

Opponents didn't say anything that even registered on the common-sense o-meter.  They have unquestioningly embraced the whole idea.  Curiously, Councilor Sally Mayer talked about her intelligence getting insulted and  Councilor Trudy Jones picked up this.  Ken Sanchez talked about how the City might get sued.   Chamber of Commerce, Homebuilders and NAIOP spoke against the bill and evoked the magic word -  jobs. 

A great piece from Planning and Environmental Law by Greg LeRoy about TIF is here.  New Mexico Voices for Children has good stuff here. 

From the LeRoy article:

How much is enough?  The U.S. is arguably well overbuilt in retail space, some of it subsidized by TIF.  The National Trust for Historic Preservation estimates the nation has 38 square feet of store space per capita, compared to other industrialized nations with between 1.5 and eight square feet (and eight square feet in the U.S. 30 years ago).

A 2001 study by the Congress for the New Urbanism and PriceWaterhouseCoopers about "grayfields"--the euphemism for dead malls--found that 7 percent of regional malls were already grayfields and another 12 percent were "potentially moving towards grayfield status in the next five years"; that would be 389 dead malls.

   

Small and Smaller Houses

Update: NewMexiKen says April 19 - 27 is National Park Week. 

At Wilson's Creek National Battlefield, near Springfield Missouri.  On  an excellent sisterly suggestion, I took a side trip to the civil war museum and National Park battlefield site - not a far drive from the airport and of more interest to me than the Bass Pro where everyone else was.   The weather was perfect but recent ice storms and flooding  have been severe and much the trail system is closed.  I visited the Ray House, which served as a hospital during the fighting, and its beautiful stone barrel vault spring house.  Then I walked over Wilson's Creek to a small log cabin where a hawk sat perched.   

Healthy Bees Swarm

From Arizona Central comes good and bad news about bees.

The good news is Arizona bees are healthy.  The bad news is they get mad.

Because Arizona's feral bee population is Africanized the chances are good that swarming bees are of that aggressive variety. "If they find a nest site in the wall of your house or carport overhang, they will be defensive. That nest needs to be removed professionally"

Attacking bees have injured on average three people in Tucson each of the past three years, and have killed three people in rural areas of southeastern Arizona.

But while swarming bees may inconvenience or even endanger humans, it is good for the species, (US Ag bee researcher) BDeGrandi-Hoffman said.  Arizona, as opposed to other parts of the country, has not been affected by a disorder killing off huge numbers of bees. "Only very healthy colonies swarm, and the fact we see swarming bodes well for the health of the colonies."

Experts say run like hell. 

Fair Weather and Housing

Watering, walking the dogs and watching the woodpecker in the walnut tree are bigger priorities than sprawl economics.  My Duke City Fix post today is a fair weather indicator, if only in that regard.   

Dogs on door at Gibson and Broadway SE Albuquerque. 4/17/08

 

Not Foreclosure Prevention Act

The Senate legislation called the Foreclosure Prevention Act is chock full of tax breaks for builders and automakers (oh, and airlines too because their lobbyist was on the ball).   

From the Dallas Morning News:      

In the Senate bill, the nation's biggest homebuilders, some on the verge of bankruptcy, won a provision that would let them claim millions in tax refunds by charging their current losses against the huge profits they made three or four years ago.  Other struggling industries would also benefit.   

Ford and General Motors were especially dogged in securing a tax break that would let them collect up to $40 million each in alternative minimum tax credits that would otherwise be out of reach because they did not pay enough taxes in recent years to claim a rebate.

Admire for a moment the symmetrical twilight zone-like connection here .  Sprawl developers and their enablers and codependents might be viewed as the ones largely to blame for this whole, you know, recession thing. The last 25 years of growth was financed like a house of cards.   

They overbuilt the land scraping, watershed-raping, automobile dependent, air polluting, public resource sucking (but highly profitable) sprawl we know and love today.  The Senate proposes to reward them again for this.

(modified at 10:13am because, so help me,  I don't have an editor.)

In Developers' Best Interests

Two stories  in the Albuquerque Journal demonstrate how devoted some elected officials are to giving incentives to land developers. 

Pat Lyons, our State Land Commissioner, is told by our Attorney General that the Las Cruces land deal he worked with developer Philip Philippou, isn't authorized by State law.  Details, details.  Too late now.  From the Journal:

Not only would it be unfair to developers to try to change lease provisions "midstream," Stranahan (Land Office lawyer) said, doing so would expose the Land Office to lawsuits by developers.  "The idea is: do you cancel them and break the deals you made in good faith, expose the state to huge levels of liability, or do you keep your word and embrace the idea that these were done in the best interests of the trust," Stranahan said.

So, yeah.  Hugs to developer Philippou.   

We also hear that the Albuquerque City Council may designate vacant leapfrogged mesa land as a Metropolitan Redevelopment Area if Councilor Ken Sanchez and the developer get their way.  This would create an incentive the developer says he needs to build a retail shopping center.  If  he doesn't get it, he says he'll walk.   It 's as if the neighborhood is being held hostage for a grocery store.

One big consequence of our sprawl is leapfrogged land and vacant buildings.   The new stucco box houses on Albuquerque's southwest mesa sit "unserved" awaiting new school and park construction and promised shopping.  Meanwhile, land developers even further-out are given incentives, like tax increment financing, for even more new buildings.  And commercial structures further-in sit empty, unleased and unloved.   

 Incentives for more buildings in an overbuilt market.  Big hugs.          

    

Spaceport Bar

Heath Haussaman notes how draft agreements for future "spaceport" tenants are being waved around to stir up excitement in advance of a tax vote in Sierra County.

The Rocket Racing League’s announcement, made today, is one of several in recent days designed to fill the news with positive headlines in advance of next week’s vote in Sierra  County.  State officials did the same just before the Doña Ana County tax vote last year.

From the Rocket Racing League's website:

The NASCAR-style racing league features rocket-powered aircraft that will be flown by top pilots through a 'three-dimensional track way' at venues throughout the world. With millions of fans who enjoy racing and air shows, and an even wider audience enthralled with humanity's next step into space, rocket racing is destined to become the future of racing!

There will be a swank spaceport bar with drinks named after space heros.  But it may be crowded with  those millions of fans and even wider audiences.  It seems pretty darn hard to reconcile rocket racing with peak oil.  But we can talk about it over a Buckaroo Bonzai - Wild Turkey over 1/2 oz. plum wine. 

Bank and Builder Bailout

The Senate proposes to reward builders and the twisted sprawl financing  machine with $6 billion in tax credits to fix their over leveraging "mistakes".  They drag down the entire economy and get to keep their paychecks in the name of building more sprawl housing (Because NAR says to.)   

Common Dreams calls it the Bank and Builder Bailout Act, aka Foreclosure Prevention. 

Alan Farago describes this pathetic attempt to rescue housing in Counterpunch:

It's also a form of quintuple taxation: first you bought the dream, then you paid the taxes on the dream. Now you are subsidizing-a third time-the purveyors who were egged on, relentlessly, by Wall Street financiers and lawyers taking down billions in fees and bonuses for structured finance, CDO's, CMO's, and derivatives on derivatives as the whole house of cards built to gargantuan size, spreading suburbs into ten thousand valleys, wetlands, and watersheds, now imposing the quintuple costs of law enforcement to bring in the fraud and courts swamped by the volume of illegal activities.