Here we go again. Honestly, it’s difficult to comprehend this type of management style. But for those that don’t know, it appears Corey’s looking for another spectacle on Tuesday. Here’s the email blast he sent out to everyone and their brother.
This morning in today’s Washington Post, one of my fellow supervisors, Woodbridge Supervisor Frank Principi, proposed repealing the cracking down on illegal immigration. Please email Supervisor Principi and the whole Board at [email protected] and ask them to continue the crackdown. The vote to fund the resolution will be next Tuesday, April 29, at 2:00 p.m. at the McCoart building at 1 County Complex, Woodbridge, VA 22192. I know it may be inconvenient, but please try to attend and ask others to attend as well. Everyone will have 3 minutes to speak.
— Corey
Guess we should be glad that he’s not spending the $30,000 on the postcards this time.
Chairman Stewart should just listen to the business owners that have been lining up at Citizens Time, look at the housing market, recognize the source of the resolution, view the budget constraints, pay attention to the economist, think for yourself and stop following the know-nothing that will eventually get himself thrown out of the Republican party. Distance yourself from him, distance yourself from FAIR, and distance yourself from this non-sense about filling out pieces of papers to send to a government agency that will not do anything with them. Chairman Stewart, focus on the jails so that felons don’t continue to slip through the cracks and be released back onto the street. Keep the tax rate low so that another 18 million dollars are cut from the school budget. Get rid of the part of the resolution that surely will attract litigation and put the county into a situation of having to spend money we don’t have to defend it. Then get back to our county business, by healing the wounds and working together to attract businesses and home buyers to our community.
Quick question since its late for me and I haven’t gone through all these new posts. Michael, who fills the positions that support the affulent? The busboys, dishwashers, lawn mowers, teachers, police officers, street cleaners, social workers? Where do they live? News falsh, rich peopel like to enjoy their money by way of services and the folks that provide those services are not often so affluent.
Yes, excellent question moon-howler, I’d like to know the answers too!
Got to love the concept of banning free speech. Admin I too agree with Mackie and would encourage you to think that one over and decide to let people openly express their views. If theyt say something illegal, you can justify deleting the illegal content. You can gain far more with words than you can with force. Power of the pen, you just have to have a more rational argument that the person disagreeing with you to win a debate and gain converts. A person with hysterical emotions just screws themselves into the ceiling, and everyone sees that forming thier own opinion of rational/irrational argument. When one side is screaming, the other side wins in the public policy debate.
I will do some more research on the current school extraneous social program issue and get back with you. I only know what it was like when my last child went to school here 7 years ago. Things may have changed, possibly for the worse.
Vally girl, we all know there is a full range of people needed to fill every job. But we also know the difference in affluent neighborhoods and non-affluent neighborhoods and the economy and community standards around them. Which would you like to have and live in?
We have taken a step to make PWC and manassas more affluant and less decayed and declining toward slum status.
In my previous experience high school and college kids had most of those jobs, even cutting the lawn, now they don’t. Who are we hurting here?
except teachers, police officers and social workers, I hope they are all “legal”. If they are not, we are in HUGE trouble and headed toward third world corruption.
It looks like you made your earlier statement without any evidence to support it. How about 7 years ago? What were the bloated social programs in your child’s school then that you found so worrisome? As for the research you intend to do now, it seems you’re going into it with a clear bias.
Gentrification happens in urban areas, and starts when younger affluent people start buying and rehabbing properties.
We’re in the suburbs, with no Metro service. If gentrification were going to happen, it would have happened during the economic boom of the 1990s and early-2000s. Instead, newly constructed gated communities started going up in the nether western regions of the county, and that’s where the affluent people moved. Soon, the retail followed them out there. There was some modest success in gentrifying Georgetown South as young singles and couples starting moving in, attracted by the homes’ solid construction (they are some of the best built townhomes in the county) and affordable prices. A community police sub-station also helped reduce the “criminal element” that was so notorious in the late-80s through mid-90s. But that’s the only true example I can think of, and now Georgetown is starting to slip backward as more homes become vacant.
Oh…I don’t want to overlook Old Town Manassas! The Old Town Business Association has done an amazing job turning it from a run-down couple of city blocks into a retail gem. They only residential development it incorporated, though, has been a few very nice apartment rehabs above some of the stores. Again, these are being rented by young people who ride the VRE into DC, Crystal City, the Pentagon, etc. for work.
Other than those examples, developers took their money westward, further out on !-66, Rt. 28 and Rt. 29, and south down the new by-pass toward mid-county (including all of the Hoadly area) and Brentsville/Bristow. Even when money was growing on trees, nothing much was done in Manassas City and PWC along the Sudley Rd. and Rt. 1 corridors. A few new subdivisions (mostly of the McMansion variety) built on previously undeveloped land, and some infill construction of new homes on the site of older homes in older neighborhoods, but not very much and certainly nothing coordinated by a single developer.
My point, Michael, is that I don’t see anything PWC and Manassas can do about removing “decay and corruption” from older residential areas that’s going to attract builders and affluent home buyers on a large scale. All the commercial and residential investment capital that flowed into the county until recently didn’t do it, and I don’t see how the resolution can be expected to.
If it’s going to happen at all, it will be because we’ve started attracting the likes of Ely Lilly to come build plants again. But they’re not, and they won’t as long as their employees don’t want to move here. And why would they? High income employees with children expect strong government commitment to community services (police, firefighters, libraries, recreation, etc.) and public schools. A few minutes Googling will make it clear none of those things has been a priority for our BOCS for the past 18 months. Even in hard economic times, it’s clear what the funding priorities are in this county. It doesn’t have to be so.
http://video.adl.org/services/link/bcpid1365202651/bclid823491515/bctid823347224
This is a great speech by JFK regarding immigration
http://www.adl.org/Civil_Rights/immigration.asp
Does the information in this video sound familiar?
Thanks for the posts Elena. Rather than wait for the next wacko to come on here and say the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center are bad while FAIR and Numbers USA are good, I thought I’d just respond now:
How brainwashed do you have to be to feel MORE in league with those who exploit bigotry than with who fight it?
Children are not born this way.
WhyHereWhyNow, you are right. Hate is taught.
Wanted to respond to /\/\3|)iç 64 ‘s statement that we should give the resolution time. No. When you are a likely victim of profiling, you dont want to give it more time. When you civil rights are more likely to be violated, you dont want to give it more time. When the greatest threat to our society is being dealt by those entrusted to represent all of us, you dont give it more time.
And the reason Corey is sending out emails rather than letters is because there are no more funds in the rainy day account…
kgotthard wants rules? Now that is funny!
“Gentrification happens in urban areas, and starts when younger affluent people start buying and rehabbing properties.” I think it also starts when a developer moves into an older neighrbohood and tries to outclass it with a trendy subdivision. Besides looking stupid and out of place, subdivisions like these, especially if they are gated communities, tend to highight inequities in wealth and cause social tensions between long-term residents and newbies, as well as between thr “haves and have nots”.
I’m not talking about moderate, nice looking new homes being built or extensive renovations. I’m talking about places like Sumner Lake, thrown in the middle of a cute, older neighborhood full of more affordable homes. (Again no offense to anyone who might live there….I’m talkng about the looks of a development, not judging residents.)
Michael, why do we even WANT to attract affluence? Is there something wrong with affordable housing and the middle/working classes? If the economy and communities are thriving, if the neighborhoods are attractive, if the area is safe, why do we need “affluence”? Are we looking for some kind of status here? Yes, we want businesses, but we HAVE businesses. But instead of trying to make them healthier, we have a BOCS Chair and Vice intent on RUINING those businesses by driving out the hard working people/consumers we already have! It’s absurd.
You don’t need extreme wealth to make a viable community. You need sense, smarts, and a semblance of harmony. PWC doesn’t project any of those things at the moment.
I still don’t get the “racial profiling” objection to the resolution. Do you assume that all illegals are Hispanic, and only Hispanics will be targeted? Don’t you suppose that Caucasions, Asians and African Americans might also present probable cause and have their status checked as well? I want criminals to be targeted no matter what, and I want them off the streets, and I want all of them checked to make sure they belong here in the first place.
White, black, purple or spotted, no one is going to question your immigration status if you are not committing a crime.
Michael – if I had the luxury of choosing what kind of neighborhood I would want to live in (and this is a very personal decision based on generalities about people) I would pick a low/moderate income neighborhood. I have only lived in one urban/suburban enviornment as it was what was affordable to us at the time. Our doors were always open, and on a late summer afternnon there was nothing more relaxing to me than to hear the sounds of a busy neighborhood. Children laughing, loud music driving by and then fading off, an occasional argument, good natured neighborhood gossip. The clatter and clanging of Urdu, Spanish, Vietnamese, African American slang, and all manner of other English accents. The sounds of folks who work hard relaxing and and having a good time without pretension.
An affluent neighborhood often has restrictions that are too overbearing for my taste, and I find that there is a subtle competition to out do each other in perfection and wealth while maintaining an erie uniformity.
In a low income neighborhood is there a greater incidence of crime and drug use? Perhaps, but in my experience it is more visible and thus easier to avoid. Upper middle income neighborhoods sure have their fairshare of it too, though often concealed. Child predators do not discrimanate based on income. Teenage kids have beer parties with drugs and sex when the parents are out of the house. Disfunction knows no bounds.
“The clatter and clanging of Urdu, Spanish, Vietnamese, African American slang, and all manner of other English accents. The sounds of folks who work hard relaxing and and having a good time without pretension.”
Lovely, Valley! I just love it. There is nothing better than seeing and hearing groups of different people living in happiness and harmony. NOTHING. Now THAT is a luxury.
WhyHereWhyNow said on 26 Apr 2008 at 2:16 am:
I agree, I think I’ll be on the side that if they err, they err to stop racism, not promote racism, like FAIR and NUMBERS.
Ruby said on 25 Apr 2008 at 3:19 pm:
K,
Sir Connoughton did absolutely NOTHING to defend us from the developers. IMHO… Glad, to see that guy GONE from PWC politics.
Kenneth said – and you think Stewart did anything about this? He used it as a campaign theme….not knowing what he was talking about …..recession coming….most land already zoned…..yet idiotic voters believed Stewarrt’s crap about growth…..just like they believed his immigration pitch
EMMA …….”Most law-abiding, tax-paying, hard-working and LEGAL residents do not support you, and you will NEVER win with the race card you pull out every time you run out of ammunition. The voters will speak again and again, and no matter how you try to manipulate the truth, you will lose.
If you believe things are so awful in PWC, you always have the option to leave, don’t you? Or are you being held against your will somehow?”
Kenneth said – You really have delusions that you speak for these law-abiding etc citizens? Look at the mess that Stewart and Letiecq created…..we need some maturity in our leadership….people who will define the issues and do something………but damn, they’re guarding the entrances to the Senior Centers and arresting people for immigration violations once they have been arrested for something else…i mean how dumb are you!!!!
KR – Emma is Willoughby and Willoughby is Emma. They are plants. Not the potted kind either!
Juturna,
“They are plants. Not the potted kind either!”
HYBRID
something (as a power plant, vehicle, or electronic circuit) that has two different types of components performing essentially the same function
To DISTRACT from the real issue ( extreme sides, same tactic)
That was a an Ollie North lawyer quote. I am not a potted plant. That’s what his lawyer said when a Senator told him to stop talking and let North answer for himself.
Regean used to quote this…..
Juturna,
I had the privilege to meet Ollie North and I loved Regan.
So much for transparency in government. I see no difference in what Greg talks about and the smoke filled rooms of days gone by. Secret meetings behind closed doors?
Is this the kind of government any of us want? That’s not something I would be bragging about.
Redawn,
Why do you feel that meeting Ollie North was a privilege?
The only reason he didn’t spend time in prison is because he cut a deal in congress. He sang so he wasn’t prosecuted. I never shred mail that I don’t think of Fawn Hall and the shredded documents.
Moon-howler,
I don’t know if privileged was the right word. I was just saying that I met him. It was about 9 or 10 years ago at Joe Gibbs Youth for Tomorrow Country Fair fund raiser.
I don’t know what all that contra stuff was all about because it happened when I was just a teen and just like back then, politics was the furthest thing from my mind until a year ago. Now, I want to look into it out of curiosity what it was all about.
casual observer 12:38
I don’t know about gentrification of GeorgeTown South in the 80’s and 90’s, I only know what it was like there in the 2000’s. It was a slum, and is getting worse. I know because I did part of the Census 2000 taking in Georgetown South. Most of the people I interviewed there where not capable of “gentrifying” a neighborhood. I got the impression they could not support a family or “others” they had there in any way that would promote community “growth” and prosperity.
For those who can’t understand why poverty and criminal behavior is not a good thing to promote in your neighboorhood, and that a desire to live away from people of wealth is self-destructive, you only need to go to the areas where these slums have been created from once affluent neighborhoods. In every city that took a slum back out of poverty to affluence, it took a desire to get rid of the local people who did not make any money and replace the neighborhood decline with new buildings, new shops, new restaurants and new homes, to attract affluent people. The 287G program is having that same effect, just wait until you can tear these buildings down, because no one occupies them, they have been destroyed and made worthless, and build new ones targeted to a higher income section of the population. Ever see Pittsburg, before and after?, Hampton/Newport News before and after?, St Louis waterfront before and after? That’s what I talking about.
Illegal people work for illegal wages, which are much less than legal wages. The standard of living they bring to the community sinks to the lower wage scales they accept, with a corresponding lowering of the affluence of the neighborhood, that will not recover unless removed and re-built.
Old Town Manassas is doing exactly the right thing. Creating a village and more “affluent” town center. They are displacing residents who cannot contribute to a more affluent community effort.
The less “illegal” workers we have the more “affluent” our neighborhoods will become. It is simple economics.
Legal workers then need to compete with innovative business ventures and “quality” work, for a fair and competitive price to create more affluence and growth. You cannot do that on an “illegal” black market. Look at USSR/Russia when it tried to have an “illegal” black market. Now it has a legal market, with legal workers and it is recovering economically, and very rapidly. It can even compete with us.
KG at 7:57. Why do you think a community wants to attract affluence? THe higher the wages paid to the majority of people in a communty, the more stable, growing and modern it becomes (or more artistic and elegant, depending on the tastes of people living there). These people in turn, create small businesses that thrive on this artistic, renaissance style village, or modern technical center that creates more innovative wealth and economic growth. Without a substantial percentage of these people in a community, the community becomes a declining one, that successively migrates from affluent, to middle class and the wages continually decline in averages from there until the majority of the people in the community are below poverty level and relying entirely on the handouts of social services to keep the community even livable (if you can call most of these communities livable).
I did a dissertation on “ratios of worker wages to CEO wages”, as a solution to poverty, on BVBL (some people didn’t get it). Not everyone can be at the top of the social ladder, but a community that is legally thriving and educated legally can pay wages that are 25-50% of a CEO salary, instead of 1/5000th of a CEO salary (which equates to lawless abject miserable poverty). Education and minimum wage laws enforced by the government are the only way out of these slums. Illegal aliens undermine minimum wage laws and destroy the standard of living until they accept 1/5000th of a CEO salary, and the government cannot force the business owners to pay minimum wage since they can’t and won’t even enforce immigration law on the business owners. Do you not see the logic in this?
I have never seen a section 8A mandatory affordable housing area ever be economically thriving, safe or attractive. It is because the people who live in them are not economically thriving, safe or care about the community being attractive. They are kind of like the socialist workers of the Soviet Union, where everything is given to them, they can be lazy, and not work hard, and still “get by” with government handouts. That kind of socialist attitude, resulted in no competition, no motivation, no incentive to work, and no quality and productivity (like bread in a socialist store, is rationed, and never affordable or available). Handouts destroy communities by destroying initiative and competition for wealth. And yes you don’t need extreme wealth to have a thriving market economy, just proportional wealth. “illegal” alien workers undermine the wages of proportional wealth and remove incentive for legal people to compete, thus destroying the economy and creating a financial decay in the community.
This whole issue is about the impact of “illegal” people on “legal” people.
KG what planet are you seeing this language diversity, and cultural diversity living in harmony on? I have never seen this situation in the rest of the world and I have traveled a lot. Everywhere there are different business languages spoken, they are not in harmony, but conflicting, competing, self-segregating and undermining each other politically to get only their people in political power. The world you describe I have never seen. I have only seen conflict and groups of people from different ethnic groups, genders, religious groups and racial groups hating each other, at war with each other and politically fighting each other. A common business language, binding different ethnic groups into a common culture (not different cultures) is the only place(s) in the world where I see peace and harmony prevail (with underground social conflicts). I think you have a distorted sense of reality, and need to go spend some time in Afganistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon, South Africa, Malaysia, Korea, China, etc, etc, etc. You will not see harmony there, only people speaking different languages and of different cultures trying to kill each other. To not see this and understand this is naive.
Does everyone here not understand that “racism” IS seperating into diverse groups, IS intentionally speaking different languages, just to be intentionally and culturally unique? That “racism” IS identifying with a cultural ethnic group and claiming you have a right and desire to be different that everyone else, and that no-one else is as good as your particular ethnic group? Do you not understand that the heart of racism is promoting cultural differences, so you can claim you are better than everyone else? Do you not understand that racial/ethnic diversity, religious diversity, and self-segregation IS the cause of conflict and hatred in the world. Do you not know that in the 60’s and 70’s the only way to stop RACISM was to culturally merge, stop seperatist beliefs, speak the same “language”, enforce the same “laws” on everyone equally and tell people to stop thinking they are better than everyone else because their race is DIFFERENT and SPECIAL?
Why have we returned to a desire to be separate and “unequal” and have a cacephony of special interest racial and ethnic groups? That is racism at its very core!