Subject: State slams Pasco County's ideas for Sunwest Harbourtowne project Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:23:46 -0400

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Greetings All,

Here is the article regarding the Sunwest project.

Unfortunately we don't have a link to the complan amendment up on our web site and the outlines for comment are not yet complete and posted, hopefully by Monday.

This article and recent events do however provide some insight into what the DCA reviewers are looking at: NEED, DENSITIES, DISASTER PRONE AREAS, COMMON SENSE!

All these things you can count on Pasco to NOT properly address. Hammer NEED as Pasco has already approved enough dwellings to house 6,000,000, that's 6 MILLION people! Never mind they can't provide proper services to existing residents, keep open our "luxury" libraries, balance the budget or provide water to 6 MILLION more people, all points to raise with the DCA on ALL the amendments that you comment to.

Here is the reality, our county leaders, for many years, have tied our future to continuous, endless development as the mechanism to pay for existing services to existing residents ... they rob Peter (new development: impact, permitting, review, building, inspection fees, etc. and property taxes of new homes for the the 1st 2-3 yrs. before they impact services) to pay Paul (services to existing residents) so when there is NO new development they have NO $$$$$!

This is growth for growths sake ... the ideology of a cancer cell. Most importantly it is NOT sustainable.

So make sure to comment to the DCA on these misguided, unwarranted and needless projects in their present form and VOTE in 2010 for Florida's Hometown Democracy so that we the people can decide what is in the public's best interest and overcome the undue influences of the development community on our elected leaders.

Thanks, peace and be well,

Clay

Mud of the Earth!

P.S. Remember Bell Fruit!

“He who dares not offend cannot be honest.” Thomas Paine

State slams Pasco County's ideas for Sunwest Harbourtowne project

By Jodie Tillman, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Tuesday, September 15, 2009

ARIPEKA — State regulators have slammed a controversial county proposal to allow more intense development along Pasco's northern coastline, saying the move would hurt an environmentally sensitive area and put people and property at risk during a natural disaster.

The state's objections center on the 562-acre coastal area — more than half of the proposed Sunwest Harbourtowne site, where developers pla n a mixed-use community that would have 2,500 homes, a golf course and a marina.

"The intrusion of dense residential and mixed land uses … is incompatible with the protection, conservation and enhancement of (environmental) resources," the Department of Community Affairs wrote in a newly released report.

The state's objection does not kill the project, but could force Sunwest developers to revamp their plans.

After negotiating with Sunwest, Pasco County commissioners have proposed changes to the county's land use plan that would help pave the way for the project. Those changes require the blessing of state regulators.

The new state report also raises two other objections to the county's proposed changes. One is that the county did not show specifically how the Sunwest project would protect wildlife habitats, primarily for the Chassahowitzka bear. The other is that Pasco's analysis failed to show whether there is enough school capacity to accommodate students generated by the project.

But the state's most strongly worded objection is to the proposal to change what would be allowed in the 562-acre coastal area — from a very low density designation (one unit per 40 acres) to a "planned development" designation that allows for a variety of uses to occur anywhere on the site.

That coastal area consists of mostly wetlands, lakes and about 215 acres of uplands.

Much of it lies in the "velocity zone," an area know n to be more prone to natural disasters, namely hurricanes.

The report says the proposed land use change runs counter to state law in two ways: It fails to limit development that could damage coastal resources, and it allows development in an area prone to natural disaster, thus failing to "protect human life and limit public expenditures in areas that are subject to destruction by natural disaster."

With the proposed land use changes, the state report says, "The county is shifting more intense development to the most vulnerable portion of the subject site which is inconsistent with state law."

Pasco officials have talked publicly about limiting what Sunwest can do within the velocity zone, saying they want the residential development in that coastal area to be aimed at seasonal residents or vacationers who would not be at risk of losing their primary homes.

But at issue is what potential the proposed designation would give the developer, said Chris Wiglesworth, a senior planner with the Department of Community Affairs.

Honey Rand, a Sunwest spokeswoman, said the owners did not get a copy of the report until late Monday and wanted a chance to review it before commenting. Richard Gehring, Pasco's top planner, did not return a phone call Monday.

In the recommendations, state regulators said the county should back off the plans to change the land use designation in the coastal area and revise its proposal "to disallow the i ntensification of residential and mixed uses" on the coastal portion of the property.

The next step in the process is for the county to respond to the state's objections.

Jodie Tillman can be reached at jtillman@sptimes.com or (727) 869-6247.

Only 29% Of Americans Trust Mainstream Media

Scientific Poll: Only 29% Of Americans Trust Mainstream Media Record numbers say they distrust a media dominated by corporate interests

Steve Watson Infowars.net Monday, Sept 14, 2009

Related Content

A new poll by the Pew Research Center has reveled that almost two thirds of Americans do not trust the mainstream media to deliver the truth, marking a 20+ year low.

63%, the vast majority of the over 1500 respondents to the survey, stated that the news media is dominated by special interests, rendering it biased and inaccurate.

When Pew first asked the question in 1985, the figure was 34%.

Now in 2009, just 29% say they trust the media to deliver straight facts.

The figures also represent a decline in trust in the media by a further 10% from 2007 numbers.

Perhaps this trend has something to do with the fact that all the major networks, essentially owned by just five companies, have become little more than government mouthpieces.

Take ABC for example, the network that completely turned over its news coverage to the government for an Obama healthcare special last June, and excluded any dissenting opinions from airing.

The latest example of corporate media lies came this weekend as up to two million Americans protesting against unchecked federal government power was uniformly reported in the mainstream as a few thousand "teabaggers".

It is not surprising that more people trust "fake" news programs such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report than they do the mainstream media dinosaurs.

Neither is it a coincidence that newspaper sales and broadcasters' audiences are rapidly declining as people turn to the alternative media and the internet.

The 'Wisdom' Of The Clunker Program

The 'Wisdom' Of The Clunker Program...
From A Friend
9-12-9

A bored statistician has been busy again... A vehicle at getting 15 mpg and doing 12,000 miles per year uses 800 gallons a year of gasoline. A vehicle at getting 25 mpg and doing 12,000 miles per year uses 480 gallons a year. So, getting rid of each average clunker will reduce US gasoline consumption by 320 gallons per clunker per year. They claim 700,000 vehicles were taken in during the clunker program - so that's 224 million gallons per year saved. That equates to a bit over 5 million barrels of oil. 5 million barrels of oil is about 1/4 of one day's US consumption. And, 5 million barrels of oil costs about $350 million dollars at $75 a barrel. So, we all contributed to the spending of $3 billion dollars...to save $350 million.

This is a good article, and seems right on the mark. It applies to my local community, and my bet it does to yours. We need to think and act differently. If not, those who are running things will keep us where they want us, which is where we are now, without power.

Put Not Your Faith in Princes

Posted by Kevin Carson on Sep 11, 2009 in Commentary, Feature Articles • 3 comments

A post on “Taking Secession Seriously” at the Front Porch Republic blog, written four months ago, is still sparking vigorous debate in the comment thread. Commenter CJ Foley remarked on the impossibility of managing political and economic affairs on the scale of 300 million people, or of exerting outside democratic control over the political and economic units. It might be necessary, he said, to scale things down to where they can be effectively controlled.

But given my experience with local government, I responded, that might require scaling things down a lot further than he imagined. By the time I got a couple of paragraphs into my rant, I realized I was composing this week’s article for C4SS.

In just about any city with a population in or above the low tens of thousands, the local government is a showcase property of the local real estate industry.

In Fayetteville, Arkansas, three years ago Mayor Dan Coody (who’d been elected by the “green” faction, on a “smart growth” platform, to rein in the real estate interests) proposed a one cent sales tax to fund expansion of the overburdened sewer system. Now, the cause of the problem was the new housing developments and strip malls springing up all over the place, built primarily by billionaire real estate developer and Trump-wannabe Jim Lindsey. But Coody said the “only alternatives” were the sales tax or a 30% increase in sewer rates. That’s the way it works, see: he tells us what the “only alternatives” are, and we good little voters choose from what’s put on our plates. Increasing sewer hookup fees to cover the costs Lindsey and the other hogs at the trough were imposing on the system was never even considered.

The voters, convinced by Coody’s hint that “out-of-town” shoppers would bear much of the burden (it’s always easier to cheat a greedy man), voted for the tax.

Then, next year, sewer impact fees came up as a local ballot issue. You’ll never convince me the timing and the wording of the proposal weren’t a deliberate strategy of the real estate interests. Since the proposal came after the voters had already approved the sales tax, and not before, they were obviously likely to reject it as double taxation. And they’d have been a lot more likely to approve it if it had been proposed as a replacement for the sales tax they were already paying.

Now, the “progressive” element in Fayetteville have a better shot than anywhere else in NW Arkansas. In most other towns, whatever the good ol’ boys want just gets quietly passed without a peep of public debate. In Fayetteville, a college town with a large contingent of “back to the land” hippies who settled there in the ’70s, there is at least grass-roots organizing and heated debate over everything–before the good ol’ boys win.

And Coody was the fair-haired boy of the “progressives,” put forth as David to the Chamber of Commerce’s Goliath. His election was the closest thing to a victory the “progressive” and “green” coalition was or will be ever likely to see. And in the end, he was just another greenwashed good ol’ boy. All the stuff he could have legitimately done to stop sprawl — eliminating barriers to mixed-use development, making new roads pay their way with tolls, making developments pay utility hookup fees — he didn’t have the political guts to do. So instead, he focused on aesthetic regulations, bike paths, anti-smoking ordiances, and other forms of nannyism — basically just greenwashed gentrification.

At the level of the Northwest Arkansas region as a whole, the Washington-Benton County area (with a population of several hundred thousand) has an organization called the Northwest Arkansas Council. It’s a nominally private shadow government, made up of representatives of local corporate powerhouses like Wal-Mart, Tyson, J.B. Hunt (and of course the above-mentioned Jim Lindsey), along with ex officio representatives of local governments and the University. Its primary purpose, civic-minded lot that they are, is to promote the building of regional “infrastructure” for “economic growth,” and all kinds of other “government-business partnership” (In other words, line up at the trough, corporate welfare piggies!). I think there’s a similar organization in just about every metropolitan area in the country of the same size or larger.

For decades, regional elites had attempted to railroad through a regional airport to serve their interests, only to have it fail when it came up for a vote.

In 1990, the NWA Council changed its strategy. Like a filthy sneak-thief skulking about under cover of darkness, it quietly lobbied five city and two country governments to create a regional airport authority. You’d expect such an authority to be the topic of extensive public debate, considering that under state law such authorities have power to condemn land and levy taxes, and are immortal corporations so long as any two member governments remain parties to them. You’d expect wrong. The seven local governments, under secret pressure from the REAL GOVERNMENT of Northwest Arkansas, voted to create the authority as an “emergency ordinance” — without any prior notice, multiple readings, or chance for public debate. The Northwest Arkansas Council, in partnership with the NWA Regional Airport Authority, immediately began a campaign to suppress opposition. ”Leadership Fayetteville,” an elite annual seminar in the city Chamber of Commerce, devoted its primary focus to strategies for combating the “anti-growth” faction that had “hijacked” Fayetteville’s progress. Shortly after, under pressure from local movers and shakers, a popular radio DJ and the editor of the Northwest Arkansas Times were fired (they’d both been active proponents of a public vote on the airport issue). In the end, the airport was railroaded through. We now have a regional airport at Highfill, serving the interests of Tyson, Wal-Mart and J.B. Hunt.

I can cheerfully contemplate the people who did this taking up eternal residence in the Ninth Circle of Hell, with an apartment in Beelzebub’s rectum and Judas Iscariot for a roommate.

And so it goes. Democracy doesn’t work, at least not above the level of face-to-face direct democracy. The problem is, regardless of how formally democratic the system of representation is, no matter how “progressive” the controls on campaign finance (or even public financing), government is by its very nature a centralized machine whose day-to-day operations must be carried out by a few people. And by the nature of things, there will be a close affinity between them and similar elites running the corporate economic system, and other centralized institutional networks like the big charitable foundations and universities. By the nature of things, the average person has only limited energy and attention to devote to public issues, and to keeping an eye on those engaged in public business. The average person, by necessity, will always devote the overwhelming share of his energy and attention to work, family, and friends. But for the insiders actually running the large institutions, the politics and policies of those institutions ARE their work and friends. So the insiders, and the small circles of wealthy outsiders whose pecuniary interests depend most heavily subsidies and protections, will always have an advantage in time, energy, attention, information, and agenda control. Democracy is and must be a sham, because the public’s attention will always be the first to wander.

At the national level, Obama is probably the closest thing to a “progressive” president ever likely to be elected — a sort of national Dan Coody, in fact. A friend of Alinsky and “community organizer,” he came across last year as a sort of Jerry Brown knockoff, the outside-the-box alternative to Hillary Clinton (who was almost a parody of establishment managerial liberalism). And what has he done?

He’s pursued a Wall Street bailout policy that’s a direct continuation of Paulson’s version of TARP, based on the uber-Hamiltonian project of using taxpayer money to (at least partially) reinflate the value of the plutocracy’s investment assets.

He’s pushed through a “stimulus” whose primary goal is to restore the suicidal and pathological economic model of running overbuilt industry at full capacity. That, in turn, can only be done (given its present capacity) through consumer debt and planned obsolescence–the latter extending to actually paying people, via the latest “Cash for [insert name of subsidized industry here]” program, to throw stuff away and replace it. Well, THAT’s certainly a sustainable economic model. Should work out great, as long as the government can afford to run a $2 trillion deficit indefinitely. In any case, nobody who promotes an intensified version of the 20th century economic model of throwing shit away fast enough to keep the assembly lines running, should be passing himself off as “green,” in any way, shape or form.

He’s designed a “progressive” healthcare reform whose overall paramaters were fixed at the beginning by the insurance and pharma industries.

Political activism within the system, at best, may make the system a little more bearable to those who suffer under it while it lasts. If you want to put energy into that, good luck. But fundamental change can only come from outside the system. That’s why the primary focus of my C4SS research papers has been on the outside forces beyond the control of the people running the system, that render it unsustainable, and on alternatives being built outside the system that don’t require anybody’s permission.

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, both of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

http://c4ss.org/content/1054

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"Government is essentially the negation of liberty." — Ludwig von Mises

protesters blast Obama, Congress, More Tea-Parties Planned

Thousands of downtown DC protesters blast Obama, Congress, More Tea-Parties Planned.

AP - Saturday, September 12, 2009 12:13:57 PM By NAFEESA SYEED Photo By AP

Tens of thousands of protesters fed up with government spending marched to the U.S. Capitol on Saturday, showing their disdain for the president's health care plan with slogans such as "Obamacare makes me sick" and "I'm not your ATM."

The line of protesters clogged several blocks near capitol, according to the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. Demonstrators chanted "enough, enough" and "We the People." Others yelled "You lie, you lie!" and "Pelosi has to go," referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Throngs of people waved U.S. flags and held signs reading "Go Green Recycle Congress" and "I'm Not Your ATM." Men wore colonial costumes as they listened to speakers who warned of "judgment day" -- Election Day 2010.

Richard Brigle, 57, a Vietnam War veteran and former Teamster, came from Paw Paw, Mich. He said health care needs to be reformed -- but not according to President Barack Obama's plan.

"My grandkids are going to be paying for this. It's going to cost too much money that we don't have," he said while marching, bracing himself with a wooden cane as he walked.

FreedomWorks Foundation, a conservative organization led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, organized several groups from across the country for what they billed as a "March on Washington."

Organizers say they built on momentum from the April "tea party" demonstrations held nationwide to protest tax policies, along with growing resentment over the economic stimulus packages and bank bailouts.

Armey and other speakers directed their ire at Pelosi -- Armey took a photo, telling the crowd he wanted to be able to prove to her they were there.

"If it's necessary, we'll come back here next year," he said.

Many protesters said they paid their own way to the event -- an ethic they believe should be applied to the government. They say unchecked spending on things like a government-run health insurance option could increase inflation and lead to economic ruin.

Terri Hall, 45, of Starke, Fla., said she felt compelled to become political for the first time this year because she was upset by government spending.

"Our government has lost sight of the powers they were granted," she said. She added that the deficit spending was out of control, and said she thought it was putting the country at risk.

Race also became an issue when a black Republican leader denounced African-American politicians that she said had an "affinity" for socialism.

"The president has warned us if we disagree with him he's going to call us out," DeMint said. "Well, Mr. President, we are out."

Norman Kennedy, 64, of Charleston, S.C., said he wants to send a message to federal lawmakers that America is "deeply in debt." He said though he'd like everyone to have free health care, he said there's no money to pay for it.

"We want change and we're going to get change," Kennedy said. "I want to see fiscal responsibility and if that means changing Congress that will be a means to that end."

Other sponsors of the rally include the Heartland Institute, Americans for Tax Reform and the Ayn Rand Center for Individuals Rights. Other scheduled speakers included actor Stephen Baldwin and C. Boyden Gray, who worked under the administration of George H.W. Bush.