Friday, April 29, 2005

Congress Approving Toll Roads

What does it mean?

A blurb up on the Drudge Report mentioned that toll interstates could become more common.

Seems that the House passed an amendment to a highway bill that would allow states to establish tolls on federal interstate highways. The reasoning behind it is that the federal gas tax (1) is not doing enough to keep the current road network at their proper level of maintenance and (2) not generating the funds necessary for the construction on new roads where they are needed.

Somehow, this looks like it is related to the discussion of the Super-Slab. I’m curious as to how the Salazar Boys are involved….

We Have a Candidate!

Someone is throwing their hat in the ring for 1st District of the Pueblo City Council.

This monday, 2 May 2005, Steve Nawrocki is intending to announce his candidacy for the position on the City Council that is currently held by Robert Schilling.

Here is the text of the press release that was passed to us.

Press Release
April 29, 2005

You are invited to attend a Press Conference on Monday, May 2, 2005 at 12:15pm in the Pueblo City Hall Council Chambers.

Steve Nawrocki will be announcing his candidacy for Pueblo City Council, District One.  Steve has been a resident of Pueblo County for over 25 years; he received his undergraduate degree from Southern Colorado State College (CSU-Pueblo) and his Masters degree from the University of Oklahoma. 

Steve chose to raise his family in Pueblo. His daughter, Louisa Nawrocki Rodriguez graduated from Centennial High School in 1989 where she was an active student and athlete.

For the past 17 years, Steve has been the Executive Director of the Senior Resource Development Agency (SRDA).  He was Chair of the 2010 Commission in both 2001 and 2002.  Through the years he has had the experience of serving on committees and boards at both state and local levels. Steve continues his support of both the Latino and Greater Pueblo Chambers in their efforts to assist local business. In more recent years, he has been active in promoting ballot issues for building new police and fire stations and the ½ cent sales tax for primary jobs.

Today, we face ongoing critical issues that affect our quality of life within Pueblo.
Our quality of life must be preserved. As a candidate for City Council, District One, Steve will focus on the following issues on behalf of his constituents of the West and North Sides of Pueblo:

We must preserve the water in our basin for Pueblo and its neighbors.
We must grow our employment opportunities for our citizens, the goal being decent paying jobs with benefits.
We must support children, families, senior citizens and the disabled through support for our non-profits.
We must sustain and enhance our city services, (i.e. police, fire, parks and public works).
We must maintain the ½ cent sales tax for new job development
We must support local business—“Shop Pueblo”.
We must support local developers and contractors—we need to grow to survive.
We must support our diverse neighborhoods and respond to their particular needs.

Our community must come together to preserve our quality of life and speak with one voice on water, jobs and services for our citizens. VOTE FOR STEVE NAWROCKI, CITY COUNCIL, DISTRICT ONE.  A Leader…for a change.

Steve lives in the OHNO area. He ‘comments’ on how my security light ‘distracts’ him as he walks his dog. [Note: I had the same sort of ‘distractions’ while doing my morning constitutionals jogging through Cherry Hills Village up in Denver.] I’m working on a way to make mine a bit less of a distraction for passers by. It really should only come on when they venture closer than the sidewalk.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on this. I’m sure we’ll have lots of questions to ask of Steve over the next few months. Hopefully, we can get him to answer them for us here.

Friday, April 08, 2005

PACOG CAC Transportation — 050407

First impressions of a first meeting.

I had my first meeting as a member-at-large of the Pueblo Area Council Of Governments (PACOG) Civilian Advisory Committee (CAC) for Transportation. What! No acronym for ‘transportation’? Oh well….

Rather interesting group of people, they. 

The meeting was relatively short. I take it that most meetings take up the better part of the morning.

There were several things discussed. The most important, in my opinion, being:

[1] The transportation planners are in a hurt. Seems that one of their own is getting married and moving out of town. Therefore, the remaining members are now in the market for a Senior Transportation Planner to take her place. Considering the long faces and mournful sounds from a number of people there, this person is going to be hard to replace.

While they do the formal search process, they are willing to take on some part-time help. If you think you have some skill with transportation planning with an emphasis in streets, roads, highways and load balancing on such, get in touch with Bill Moore at PACOG.

[2] The City of Pueblo is getting down into planning how to manage traffic and land use issues surrounding the proposed Honor Farm to the west of town. There will be a lot of coordination amongst numerous groups and agencies in order to work out the best possible plan to accomodate need for roads in and around the area, balanced against a desire to maintain/develop hoped for recreational and open space. Lots of easements criss-cross the land involved, including a possible route for Colorado Springs’ proposed Southern [Water] Delivery System (SDS), power lines, Pueblo West sewer, etc., etc., etc. I’m sure the coordination meetings are going to be ‘interesting’.

[3] There is some concern amongst the MPOs that CDOT is not listening to them. Seems that new guidelines on how to prepare plans to be submitted to CDOT did not include many, if any, suggestions from the MPOs on how to improve the process. I’m not certain of the implications here. Or their significance. We’ll see what transpires.

[4] HB 1030, the bill to authorize setting of tolls for use of the proposed Super-Slab, has been shelved ‘indefinitely’ for this legislative session. It passed the house vote and, after considerable public input, the Senate decided they needed more information. Therefore, they will hold off on final passage until they can gather such information over the course of this Summer and Fall.

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Healthy Digs

Health Department seeks new home.

The City and County Public Health Department is looking for a new home. Some place bigger. Some place newer. Some place they can grow into. And this is both normal and natural.

On the other hand, they are a government entity and, from past experience, when I wore a green suit 24/7, you can’t always get what you want. [Note: I remember working out of a rat-infested, abandoned boxcar for a while, at one point. And I was grateful for even that.]

But the people in that department are doing a good effort at expressing their desires to the public. And a pretty good job of examining their options, as far as I can tell.

They’ve got seven sites identified:

[A] Santa Fe, on the east side, just a tad south of 1st avenue.
[B] An “Off Building” of the Mid-Town Center area. Right next to 4th avenue.
[C] South Main Street, near D street. [Note: The star on the MapQuest map looked like it was on Union and B street, across from Holmes Hardware.]
[D] South Union Avenue(?) The location seemed a bit confused as the MapQuest and eye-in-the-sky elements depicted the location as being Central Main and Grand.
[E] Central Pueblo Center, between 4th and 6th, West and the Midtown Center. Looks like my computer shop may have to find new quarters.
[F] The Olde Holmes Hardware store at Union and B street.
[G] The old Sears store in Mid-Town Center.

Each of these options have their respective advantages and disadvantages. But that is always the case. The challenge is to balance all of those, not only as perceived by the Public Health Department, but also by the city, the county, and the citizens therein. Futhermore, they need to be aware of the impact, not only for themselves but upon the area they land in.

Case in point….if they were to occupy the old Holmes Hardware (site F), the advantage is they’d get a great old building for themselves. The disadvantage to the city of Pueblo would be that it would eliminate a great old building that could be used by an anchor store to bring commercial business into the Union Historic District. That would put a big kabosh on enhancing the city tax base by having, say….a Borders book store in their instead.

Then there is the situation with site A; Santa Fe near 1st. A big open area with some big old buildings on it. According to the plan, they would raze those buildings and put in something else. However, those old buildings could serve well for new offices, with renovation. And I suspect that renovation would cost less than demolition, hauling away, prepping the ground and new construction. Unless those buildings are about to fall down, and from seeing them last they didn’t look quite that bad, why throw away tax-payers money?

Site B, on 4th Street, in the vicinity of Mid-Town Center has promise, but there is no building there. Something new would have to be built.

Site C, on Main Street, has the same situation as Site B; having to build new.

Site D, on South Union(?)/actually Central Main, is the same as sites B and C; having to build new.

Site E, in the large building east of Mid-Town, has an existing building and good parking. I’ll have to figure out where MaxTech moves too, or maybe they can provide IT support to the department and co-exist there?

Site G, the vacant Sears building has a sitaution similar to the old Holmes Hardware. Where we need commercial enterprise, it’s something of a self-inflicted wound to move a government agency into such a facility.

Personally, I favor site A. A little paint. Some suspended ceiling with cable tracks and air conditioning/heating above it a bit of dry wall and paint and the place would look like new, on the inside. On the outside, the building could well last into the NEXT century….but I’d like a good engineer to be certain of that. And the money saved could be used to put in that in-door gymnasium one young employee of the department was hankering to have.

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Pueblo Neighborhood Partnership Meeting — 050405

The monthly gathering of the guys and gals in the ‘hoods.

Yesterdays meeting of the Pueblo Neighborhood Partnership (PNP) was well attended.

Here’s a round up of what transpired.

Hyde Park

They’re as pleased as punch with their new computer education center. The classes seem to be going well and other people are pointing to it as a model of how other neighborhoods should be doing something like this.

I tend to agree as I think good communications is essential to most of what we do in life. [Note: More on that, in the form of an essay on my own experiences with such, later.] And computers are the tool of choice for communicating without having to chop down and grind up all kinds of trees.

Eastside

They’ve got a computer thing going too.

Bessemer

The folks are planning a get-together in their annual effort to make their place look spiffy. They’ve probably got details up on their BAND web-site, so I won’t bother to repeat it all here. Just go there.

The big discussions revolved around the following issues:

[1] Clean-Up: What does anyone, or perhaps EVERYONE, have to do in order to keep the community clean.

The principle thrust I got out of this was that EVERYONE has to do THEIR PART in order to eliminate the trash that seems to prevail in parts of town.

There was a bit of polite finger-pointing going on in the meeting, but no one got on their ear about it. And that’s a good sign. And it is what causes me to have (1) the opinion that it’s something everyone needs to be involved with and (2) hope that we’ll all do what we need to in order to accomplish this.

Some of the discussion here involved:

    • Mandatory trash service for everyone in the town.

It seemed to me that this would be a big step in the right direction. There were many reports of people slacking off and taking advantage of their neighbors with respect to that.

    • Education programs.

Not a particularly immediate remedy, but a long term approach.

    • Public Health Department overseeing the total effort, no matter what the venue.

Well…after all…trash IS a ‘health’ issue. Even moreso than being an eye-sore, it is a threat to health.

We’ll see what the City Fathers decide on in the near future about this.

[2] CDBG Funds: Well…there’s good news and that brings about bad news.

First the good news. According to the Feds, Pueblo is not quite as poverty stricken as it has been. Things, apparently, are looking up.

Now the bad news. CDBG funding is being reduced in proportion to the good news (above). Such is ‘life’. The Fed giveth and the Fed taketh away. You just can’t ‘count on the Fed’.

Because of some difficulties with respect to actually spending some of the CDBG funds received last year, this years application program is going to be a bit more ‘detail-oriented’. This means that there will be workshops on how to fill out the forms. There will be staff reviews of applications to make sure all the t’s are dotted and the i’s are crossed…which, if I know the Feds very well, eveyone’s will be by the end of the process.

I think I’ll sit in on the workshops, just to see how things are going.

That pretty well wrapped it up.

Sometime soon, I think we’re going to dedicate a whole session to clean-up efforts. Some of the discussion will be on how often do they need to do it. Some of it will be on the ‘interesting’ economic pressures that cause our trash trucks to be hauling garbage up to El Paso county landfills instead of using those in Pueblo.

It should be interesting….

Friday, April 01, 2005

Caveat Emptor — ViewSonic

¡Cuidado! Compadres….

Beware, if you are in the market for a projector. I just got ‘stung’ by ViewSonic over one of their projectors.

Seems that their attitude is along the lines of giving you the projector, at $2000, and then selling you the lamps that it goes through like an elephant does peanuts, at $400 each.

We had been looking for a projector for business and pleasure purposes a year or so ago. And we came across the ViewSonic PJ250 which was compact, light weight, powerful, and had very impressive features attached to it. So we bought it.

Now, eighteen months later, after using it less than 50 hours, the lamp blew out.

I talked with their tech support people who said that the lamp was rated for 2000 hours. But they caveated their statement with, “Your experience may vary.” Nice little strategem that. It’s like my gas mileage may vary from their ‘standard’, especially if I actually use the car. If I don’t use the car, the gas will last almost forever, once I fill it up. However, if I use the car and drive it in a manner any reasonably prudent individual would, I would expect to get the sort of mileage the car was rated at. Preferably better. However, if I drive the car, as stated above and instead of getting 28 mpg, I see I’m getting 5 mpg, and the car is acting normally, this is something of a problem.

In the venue of light bulbs, if you buy a light bulb that says it will last for 2000 hours and you only get 50 hours out of it, there is something VERY WRONG here.

It could be a fluke. We’ll give ViewSonic another shot with another lamp. But we’ll be watching this one closely and clocking it’s performance in a log. If IT fails in less than 1600 hours, we’ll tell you ALL about it, so that you and everyone else who pays heed will know that you can’t trust ViewSonic as far as you can throw their owner’s manual.