Month: May 2008

Just wanted to put this link up and see what people thought. Are other counties struggling with this mowing crisis? How can we deny that the resolution did not have some impact on our double foreclosure rate? Obviously, if Fairfax and Arlington received many of our students that left PWC, they must be living in homes in that county! Whether they rented or owned, many Hispanics in our community left and now we must reap what we sow. What was the final number we have spent on the resolution so far? How much more money at ADC? What services are we NOT funding now….Adult Day Care, children’s group homes, etc. Are we a county that now mows grass instead of provide critical services to the elderly and the young, the most vulnerable in our society?

http://www.examiner.com/a-1390202~Foreclosures_spike_bill_for_lawn_mowing.html

Tonight – 5/21 attend a 7 PM Corridor Planning meeting May 21 at Brentsville Courthouse concerning ‘The Journey thru Hollow Ground’ designation.

Tomorrow – 5/22 Virginia Commission on Immigration

2 – 5pm and 6 – 9pm; sign-ups start at 1:00pm
George Mason University Campus – Johnson Center Cinema
4400 University Drive, Fairfax, Virginia 22030

See you there.

Apparently Corey stated that his amendment to the already amended resolution would not be discussed OR voted on today.  What is he doing?  Does he even know what he is doing?  This obsession with the resolution is moving into a realm of irresponsibility.  This county has many serious issues before it, and continuing to be mired in the resolution is NOT addressing those very serious problems in PWC.

Alanna said it best at citizen time, short and sweet……”it is time to move on”

 

Rescue Prince William County’s Rt. 15 for The Journey Through Hallowed Ground
This message is sent by The Friends of Rt. 15 in PWC

Development & History can coexist with “Context Sensitive Solutions”

Despite the Prince William County Board of Supervisors voting one year ago to be involved in The Journey Through Hallowed Ground, Rt. 15, also known as James Madison Highway in Prince William County is being rapidly suburbanized with new, thoughtless growth. The Journey is a National Heritage Area running the 175 miles along Rt. 15 from Gettysburg , PA to Thomas Jefferson’s home “ Monticello ” near Charlottesville , VA. This area contains more American history than any other. This means money for PWC from Heritage Tourism. The Journey will also give us federal funds to beautify and protect the rural, historic viewshed, roadbed and roadside along Rt. 15. At this time, those that organized The Journey are saying that without improvements, the Journey will bypass most of Prince William County. If this happens…

Rt. 15 will continue with its ugly growth.

Most of us using Rt. 15 daily are appalled at the ugliness that is unnecessarily being created. Prince William has much history to be proud of in its Rural Crescent and it is getting lost. There are ways of hiding the new development, such as berms (earthen hills), set backs, landscaping, putting wires underground, having planted road mediums, etc. (all called Context Sensitive Solutions). If a road needs to be four lanes it can look like a parkway. People will be paid to leave their woods uncut. Now the Board of Supervisors must put some bite into their declaration one year ago that they want to be a part of The Journey, a decision that gives our county some desirable class, increases the value of our homes and improves the quality of our lives.

Messages of concern can be sent to:

John Stirrup, Gainesville District at [email protected] or

Wally Covington, Brentsville District at [email protected] and/or

Corey Stewart, Chairman At-Large, at [email protected]

This message is sent by The Friends of Rt. 15 in PWC

Great article in yesterday’s Washington Post concerning relationships between neighbors in economic downturns with suggestions on how to effectively communicate so that issues get resolved.

The potential for conflicts between neighbors can deepen during a housing slump like this one. Homeowners worried about their property values are prone to get more agitated more quickly about smaller things. Add to that today’s mounting economic worries, and the likelihood for disputes grows because people have fewer financial or emotional reserves to tap.

Great suggestions in the article include:

Avoid gossiping with other neighbors

Talking face-to-face with your neighbor, do not send an email.

Try starting a friendly conversation then transition into discussing your concerns.

If one-on-one negotiations don’t go well, try using a third party.

Contact zoning officials.

I know we posted this story before, but this is a recent article in the New York Times and it bears repeating! People come to this country, not to take us over in some bizarre plot to overthrow our democracy, but to have an opportunity that we all were blessed to be born into. We have people within our own PWC community, having come here “illegally”, that are now thriving business owners. Yes, we have issues that need to be constructively resolved, but lets not forget, that ALL our ancestors came here as immigrants, dreaming that they too, could live the American dream.

At the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa has four positions. He is a neurosurgeon who teaches oncology and neurosurgery, directs a neurosurgery clinic and heads a laboratory studying brain tumors. He also performs nearly 250 brain operations a year. Twenty years ago, Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa, now 40, was an illegal immigrant working in the vegetable fields of the Central Valley in California. He became a citizen in 1997 while at Harvard.

 WHEN YOU HEAR ANTI-IMMIGRANT EXPRESSIONS ON TALK RADIO AND CABLE TELEVISION, HOW DO YOU FEEL?

A. It bothers me. Because I know what it was that drove me to jump the fence. It was poverty and frustration with a system that would have never allowed me to be who I am today.

As long as there is poverty in the rest of the world and we export our culture through movies and television, people who are hungry are going to come here. There’s no way to stop it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/science/13conv.html?ex=1211601600&en=71650dca2f060786&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Tough immigration enforcement with no parallel comprehensive immigration reform, will only bring severe negative consequences to everyone!

Citing a November Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, the Manhattan Institute’s Tamar Jacoby noted recently that “63 percent of Democrats, 64 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of independents favor allowing illegal immigrants who meet certain conditions — registering, being fingerprinted, paying a fine and learning English — to earn citizenship over time.”

Riverside, NJ

The law had worked. Perhaps, so me said, too well.

With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/nyregion/26riverside.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Arizona

Arizona’s new “enforcement only” immigration law, which mandates the use of an electronic verification system and subjects employers to the loss of their business license for hiring the wrong person, has turned out to be a disaster that might rank up there with the Edsel or New Coke in the pantheon of bone-headed ideas.

The unintended consequences haven’t been pretty, and now the very lawmakers that thumped their chest about getting tough on illegal immigration are trying to enact some sort of state-level guest worker program in order to bring those undocumented immigrants back to the state.

The state had a very low unemployment rate when the law was passed — it was, at least in part, a “solution” to a problem they didn’t have. Unemployment was at 4.1 percent when the law went into effect in January and had been at 3.7 percent when a judge upheld the measure in early 2007.

Arizona is now faced with labor shortages, and when combined with the loss in demand from all those worker-consumers, the whole enchilada might end up costing the state’s economy tens of billions of dollars.

http://www.alternet.org/immigration/85022/?page=1

Prince William County

County business leaders have created “image committees” to examine the direction Prince William is heading. Now, some analysts said, the economic downturn makes it a bad time to carry out the immigration measures.

“It undermines the image of the county as a good place to invest,” said Stephen Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. “The political environment has made people feel unwelcome.”

Richard L. Hendershot, who chairs the Prince William County Greater Manassas Chamber of Commerce, said it has been hard to sell Prince William as progressive, dynamic and thriving.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/19/AR2008041900943.html?nav=rss_metro

Last month, Prince William County had the most new filings of any Washington area jurisdiction, followed by Prince George’s, Fairfax, Montgomery, Loudoun and the District, according to RealtyTrac Inc., a California-based company that tracks real estate trends.

When foreclosures rise, crime often follows, researchers said. A 2005 study by the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Woodstock Institute found that, holding other factors constant, each foreclosure in a 100-house neighborhood corresponded to a 2.4 percent jump in violent crime.

Law enforcement agencies typically don’t keep statistics for crimes that occur in vacant houses, but the concerns of local officials are mirrored across the nation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/26/AR2008042601288_2.html

Still trying to follow the logic in yesterday’s rantings on BVBL:

The promotion of efforts by Mexicans Without Borders to protest Prince William County’s policies within the historic district of Manassas City by 9500Liberty, and their new appreciation for Jeff Winder and “The People United” as reasonable voices in the immigration debate leaves this film propaganda project without any credibility whatsoever. They have embraced the radical open borders crowd, allied themselves with the local arm of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, and now characterize the leftist rantings of Jeff Winder as “prohpetic words”. I guess if one could consider Karl Marx’s rantings as prophesy, this would fit pretty well, but not too many Virginians think there’s a lot of value in the Communist Manifesto.

Can anyone help me understand this? 9500Liberty has a video of Jeff Winder speaking at Citizens’ Time and that means they have ’embraced the radical open borders crowd’? What about this video with Robert Duecaster aka Advocator aka ResolutionMan have they not too embraced the other extreme?

After the torrential rains and local tornado, the County is considering ways to become better prepared in the event of a disaster. Specifically mentioned were sirens or other similar methods of alerting the public especially through the night when people are sleeping. Hopefully, at some point the County could invest in a service which calls homes in a particular geographic neighborhood with a warning message which is already in use in parts of California to notify residents about wildfires. It’s similar to the computer phone messages that we receive from the school system when there’s some event. Perhaps the county already owns the technology but would need to adapt it to focus on zipcodes or neighborhoods. Another suggestion is to sign-up for text messages through the County’s website which offers a 24 hour weather alert system. Being prepared in the case of an emergency is crucial, now with the news about the earthquake in China and the cyclone in Myanmar, it should give us pause to consider how to better equip ourselves for when we are faced with another disaster.

9500Liberty has released another new video, this is a flashback to the marathon session from October 16th. This gentleman’s words are rather prophetic, the struggle did continue after the vote, by other Americans who think like him.

I want to make this very clear, I oppose illegal immigration. I especially do not want anybody risking life or limb to gain entry to this country. However, I recognize many injustices in our immigration policy, and it is my opinion, in order to resolve the problem, it will, in part, require that undocumented individuals become legalized.

Update: BVBL claims this gentleman is Jeff Winder. I have no first-hand knowledge of whether or not this is true. BVBL posts it as a question, so perhaps he’s not convinced either. I don’t know Jeff Winder, his affiliations or idealogy. I will say, the picture that BVBL has posted does bear a striking resemblance to the gentleman in the video. If they are, in fact, one in the same, obviously I do not subscribe to everything that someone believes in when I agree with them for 3 minutes. Apparently, BVBL desperately wants to categorize me, I’ll make it easy, call me a Republican.

I stand by what I said concerning this gentleman Citizens’ Time comments. I’ve reviewed the video and find nothing overly objectionable in his content or delivery.

By Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press.