Mexico shuts Cancun beach, alleges sand was stolen
Published - Jul 31 2009 07:04AM EDT
By MARK STEVENSON - Associated Press Writer
Surprised tourists found their little piece of Cancun beach paradise ringed by crime-scene tape and gun-toting sailors on Thursday.
Environmental enforcement officers backed by Mexican navy personnel closed off hundreds of feet (dozens of meters) of powder-white coastline in front of a hotel accused of illegally accumulating sand on its beach.
Mexico spent $19 million to replace Cancun beaches washed away by Hurricane Wilma in 2005. But much of the sand pumped from the sea floor has since washed away, leading some property owners to build breakwaters in a bid to retain sand. The practice often merely shifts sand loss to beaches below the breakwaters.
"Today we made the decision to close this stretch of ill-gotten, illegally accumulated sand," said Patricio Patron, Mexico's attorney general for environmental protection. "This hotel was telling its tourists: 'Come here, I have sand ... the other hotels don't, because I stole it.'"
Patron said five people were detained in a raid for allegedly using pumps to move sand from the sea floor onto the beach in front of the Gran Caribe Real Hotel. The hotel is also suspected of illegally building a breakwater that impeded the natural flow of sand onto other hotels' beaches, he said.
An employee of the hotel's marketing office said nobody was available to comment on the allegations. Authorities said the hotel owner ignored previous orders to remove the breakwater.
A knot of angry tourists gathered around the closed beach.
Some were irked by the sight of police tape and "Closed" signs.
Maria Bachino, a travel agent from Rocha, Uruguay, said by telephone that she had booked a beachfront room in Cancun, only to find herself cut off from the clear, bathub-temperature waters that lure millions to Cancun each year.
"They promised us a beach," said Bachino. "This is very unpleasant, we feel bad. This is intimidating," she said of the armed navy personnel who participated in the raid.
Patron said he regretted any inconvenience for tourists, but said the government is planning projects to restore beaches throughout Cancun in an orderly, environmentally responsible way.
"I apologize to the tourists for this problem, but it is a question of enforcing the law," Patron said.
No matter how dumb, the people who are questioning whether Obama was born in the U.S. could eventually cause real problems.
By Bill Maher July 31, 2009
Never underestimate the ability of a tiny fringe group of losers to ruin everything.
For the last couple of weeks, we've all been laughing heartily at the wacky antics of the "birthers" -- the far-right goofballs who claim Barack Obama wasn't really born in Hawaii and therefore the job of president goes to the runner-up, former Miss California Carrie Prejean.
Also, when Obama was sworn in as president, he forgot to give his answer in the form of a question.
And yet, every week, the chorus of conservatives demanding to see his birth certificate grows. It's like they're the Cambridge police, Obama's in his house -- the White House -- and they need to see some ID.
And there's nothing anyone can do to convince these folks. You could hand them, in person, the original birth certificate and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background ... and they still wouldn't believe it.
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Which raises the question: Why, in this country, is it always the religious right that won't take anything on faith?
So far, the reaction from Democrats is to laugh this off, and I understand why. If you seriously believe that President Obama is an African sleeper spy, get out of your chat room and have your house tested for lead.
But we live in America, and in America, if you don't immediately kill arrant nonsense, no matter how ridiculous, it can grow and thrive and eventually take over, like crab grass or reality shows about fat people.
This flap might be a deluded right-wing obsession that is a total waste of time, but so was Whitewater, and look where that ended up. A handful of Republican operatives, enraged at Bill Clinton's unprecedented economic growth and budget surpluses, found a woman named Paula Jones, which led to a woman named Monica Lewinsky, which gave me enough material to eventually be able to buy a big house in Bel-Air. Which I'm still conflicted about.
More recently we had the Swift Boat allegations against John Kerry, in which Kerry was accused of volunteering to serve in Vietnam so he could jump in front of a bullet so he could get a medal and then throw it away to satisfy his urge to insult real Americans. This was so stupid that Kerry refused to even discuss it.
And we all know how well that worked out.
And once these stories get out there, they're hard to stamp out because our media do such a lousy job of speaking truth to stupid. Vietnam, Iraq and the Spanish-American War were all sold on lies that were unchallenged or even abetted by the media. Clinton got impeached and Kerry got destroyed in large part because the media didn't have the guts to say, "This is nonsense."
Lou Dobbs has been saying recently that people are asking a lot of questions about the birth certificate. Yes, the same people who want to know where the sun goes at night.
And Lou, you're their new king.
That's why it's so important that we the few, the proud, the reality-based attack this stuff before it has a chance to fester and spread. This isn't a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It's sentient beings versus the lizard people, and it is to them I offer this deal: I'll show you Obama's birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin's high school diploma.
Bill Maher is host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher."
FILE -- This is a July 15, 2009 file photo showing Erin Andrews arriving at the ESPY Awards in Los Angeles.
The ESPN reporter surreptitiously videotaped nude in a hotel room expressed frustration at being "treated like Britney Spears" when she called 911 to report paparazzi gathered outside her Atlanta area home.
In an audiotape released Wednesday, Erin Andrews is heard speaking with a 911 operator in suburban DeKalb County on July 22 to complain about two people parked in a car outside her home in a gated community.
Andrews identifies herself and tells the operator, "I'm all over the news right now," and describes herself as "the girl that was videotaped in my hotel room in the nude."
Clearly frustrated on the call, Andrews uses expletives to describe the two men whom she says also knocked on her door.
"I did nothing wrong, and I am being treated like (expletive) Britney Spears, and it sucks," Andrews told the operator.
Dunwoody police spokesman, Sgt. Mike Carlson, said officers responded to the call but no incident report was filed. Dunwoody is about 14 miles north of Atlanta.
It was not clear when the video of Andrews in the hotel room first appeared on the Internet. The person who first posted the video didn't identify the nude woman, but Andrews' attorney has since confirmed the video was of the 31-year-old reporter.
The blurry, five-minute video shows Andrews standing in front of a hotel room mirror, fixing her hair in the nude. It's unknown when or where it was shot. Andrews' attorney Marshall Grossman said the video was shot without her knowledge and Andrews plans to seek criminal charges and file civil lawsuits against whoever shot the video and anyone who publishes the material.
Andrews, a former University of Florida dance team member, was an Internet sensation even before the video's circulation. Some Web sites have referred to her as "Erin Pageviews" because of the traffic she can generate, and Playboy magazine named her "sexiest sportscaster" in both 2008 and 2009. She has covered numerous sports for the network since 2004, often as a sideline reporter.
It’s never been an easy life. Up at 4:30 for the first milking, finish up around 8 at night. You make a living, but not much of one, which is why the average age of dairy farmers keeps creeping up into the 50s and 60s. The big payday is when you get out of it and sell your land.
“It’s a profession that if you weren’t born into it, no one would do it,” said Donald Hosking, who with his wife, Joanne, raises 100 Holsteins on 81 lovely rolling acres in Delaware County at the far reaches of the Catskills. “We just don’t know any better.”
So back when they started dairy farming on Roses Brook Road 22 years ago, there were seven other dairy farms on the road. Now one other is still hanging on, and the rest have been sold to lawyers, architects, commodity brokers from the city and suburbs. In 1998, there were 8,700 dairy farmers in New York. Now there are 5,700.
For all the vagaries of markets and weather and balky cows, there used to be a hazy ostensible logic to the business. Now it’s a global market complicated by commodities traders, the balance between imports and exports, the needs of agri-conglomerates, and the role played by strange new players like the imported milk protein concentrates, or M.P.C.’s, which some say are distorting the market with unregulated and potentially unsafe milk substitutes used in cheeses and dips.
But the bottom line seems to be that the global recession slammed the brakes on demand — fewer restaurant visits, less ice cream, less cheese — at a time of peak supply. Two years ago, Mr. Hosking was making about $20 per 100 pounds of milk. Now he’s making about $10.85. Meanwhile his costs — grain, fuel, high-protein feed — have gone up about 50 percent. Last year he took out about $40,000 from savings to keep going. This year it will be about $50,000. Farmers who have tapped out their equity — a growing number — could be gone in months.
“It’s 1973 prices and 2009 costs,” he said. “It still costs X number of dollars to run the farm, no matter what you’re bringing in. Detroit can shut down when their lots are full. We still have to feed and milk our cows every day.”
Dave Rama, who has a cattle auction business in Delhi, said everyone was in the same boat, with the cost of producing milk exceeding its price.
“I am learning more about bankruptcy than I ever intended to learn,” Mr. Rama said.
He drives from Mr. Hosking’s farm to Unadilla, the hills impossibly green from all the rain, grain silos poking into the blue sky. There he meets two of the younger farmers, Luke and Derek Johnson, 32 and 24, Cornell ag achool grads taking over their family farm. There are 300 cows and beehives and fields of corn, the bounty of American agriculture everywhere you turn.
LUKE JOHNSON says he’s always been an optimist, and he figures this will work out, too. He’s lucky to have a highly regarded farm operation, though he worries about his neighbors and already has $300,000 in debt against $500,000 in equity in cows and machinery. Still, he says: “It’s hard to see good farmers desperate. I was just in California at the national Holstein convention, and all the delegates there had desperate looks on their faces, as if they didn’t know what was going to happen next.”
It all seems far away. We don’t see where our food comes from, and who could pay attention anyway, what with the endless cavalcade of amusements that’s the summer news — the randy governors and senators, Jon and Kate, poor, put-upon Sarah Palin, the farewell to M.J.? But maybe that’s the idea. In the real world around the corner and in distant places like Hobart and Delhi and Unadilla it’s not getting better and it’s not getting clearer, so bring on the freak shows, the more the merrier.
Mike Van Amburgh is an animal science professor at Cornell who grew up on an Ohio dairy farm. “I’m almost 50 years old, and in my lifetime it’s never been this bad,” he said. “Everyone’s in the red.”
For the dairy farmers, he said, absent a sudden worldwide boom pumping up demand, the most likely result is a historic washout of dairy farmers — some say 10 percent, 20 percent or more around the end of the year — that would reduce supply, raise prices and reset the bar.
Which kind of dairymen, he was asked, are in the biggest trouble?
But dance at strip clubs? Sure. Just as long as the teens submit work permits, and are off the stripper’s pole by 11:30 on school nights.
It’s enough to surprise even those in America’s mecca of striptease and sin –– Las Vegas.
“Everybody buzzes about ‘Nevada and Sin City, tsk, tsk,’ ” said Edie Cartwright, spokeswoman for the Nevada attorney general’s office. “But we regulate it.”
Providence police recently discovered that teen job opportunities extend into the local adult entertainment world while they were investigating a 16-year-old runaway from Boston. The girl told detectives that she worked at Cheaters strip club this spring, and the police got tips about other underage girls working at another club on Allens Avenue.
That’s when the police found that neither state law, nor city ordinance bars minors from working at strip clubs. Those under 18 can’t buy pornography, and no one may take pictures or film minors in sexually suggestive ways. But the law doesn’t stop underage teens from stripping for money. Even if the police saw underage boys or girls on stage at a strip club, they wouldn’t be able to charge them or the club owners with a crime.
“I’ve been doing this a long time,” said youth services Sgt. Carl Weston, “and I can’t find anything that says it’s illegal for a 16-year-old or a 17-year-old to take her top off and dance.”
State law says that anyone who employs a person under 18 for prostitution or for “any other lewd or indecent act” faces up to 20 years in prison and up to $20,000 in fines. But that isn’t enough to prevent underage girls from working in strip clubs, said senior assistant city solicitor Kevin McHugh, who researched the issue a dozen years ago when a teenage dancer was found at a raided strip club.
The term “lewd or indecent” is subjective, McHugh said, and is applied to behavior that’s protected by the First Amendment. “Since we have strip clubs in Providence,” McHugh said, “citizens don’t consider [stripping] lewd.”
With the age of consent at 16 in Rhode Island, the police worry that teenage strippers could take their business to the next level and offer sexual favors –– and it wouldn’t be illegal. State law currently allows indoor prostitution, and two bills intended to ban it have stalled in the General Assembly.
State and federal child labor laws dictate the number of hours and times of days that minors may work, and forbid certain jobs considered to be hazardous. For example, those under 16 can’t work on ladders or pump gas. Youths age 16 and 17 can’t work in manufacturing or excavation.
“Nowhere does it say anything about a kid not being able to strip,” Weston said.
Establishments with city liquor licenses need to keep the teenagers from the booze, but not the stage. “You can’t serve alcohol if you’re under 18,” Weston said, “but you can be the target of a man’s groping hands at age 16.”
But a Rhode Island teen stripper won’t find work in Massachusetts, where state law prohibits anyone from hiring minors under 18 for live performances involving sexual conduct.
Other states have had mixed encounters with the issue.
After a 12-year-old girl was found dancing nude in a club in Dallas last year, the city council swiftly passed rules barring minors from strip clubs and automatically revokes for a year licenses for sex businesses caught employing or entertaining minors.
But an Iowa county judge ruled last year that a striptease by a 17-year-old girl at a strip club was artistic expression protected by the First Amendment. The state attorney general’s office has asked the state Supreme Court to review the ruling.
Nevada, meanwhile, doesn’t let anyone under 18 work in casinos or in public dance halls where there is alcohol — and there are no strip clubs in Nevada without one or the other, or both, said Cartwright, of the attorney general’s office. Minors aren’t even allowed to deliver mail to brothels.
When questioned about Rhode Island’s law, Michael J. Healey, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, offered a copy of the current state law but did not comment for this article.
But Weston, of the Providence police, was adamant that the law should be changed.
“It leads to a societal breakdown,” he said. “These are just little girls.”
The hallway and waiting area at the Division of Taxation at the Department of Administration Building in Providence on Wednesday was crowded with people who have received notices telling them to cease their business operations.
The Providence Journal / Kris Craig
PROVIDENCE — State tax officials have put more than 1,200 businesses across the state on notice this week that they are out of business unless they pay their overdue sales taxes immediately.
For most, that action came in the form of a personal visit from the state Division of Taxation, ordering business owners to lock their doors at once.
By Wednesday, a line of people had queued up inside the Department of Administration building on Smith Hill, waiting their turn to plead their case to a state revenue agent. Some were angry. Others frustrated.
“I understand the state needs money, but to put pressure on the small guy or the moderate guy that’s struggling, it’s not going to do any good,” said Mike Suriani, who owns an electrical supply company in South Providence.
In Suriani’s case, it may have been a bookkeeping error that landed him in the three-hour line. Suriani says he paid his taxes in full — albeit a little late –– and had copies of the cancelled checks from the state showing he had indeed turned over the sales taxes he collected.
But that didn’t keep taxation officials from appearing at his door Tuesday demanding that he close up shop.
“Yes, the rules state that we have a responsibility to pay our bills every quarter. But when your customers come in and they don’t pay you for a month, and then another month, and another month, businesses have no choice [in] the eyes of the state but to close up and get out,” Suriani said.
State officials say they’ve given businesses with sales-tax permits plenty of notice that they’ve fallen behind in making tax payments.
The permits expired on June 30, and the last in a series of letters sent to owners in recent months said they would not be issued new permits without straightening out their tax situation. In the interim, they were told: “You are conducting business without a permit and must cease immediately.”
A handful in line Wednesday said the process wasn’t quite that simple. Desmond Clark, who owns a small video-game store in North Providence, said he spent months trying to negotiate a payment plan with the state that would allow him to keep current on owed taxes, while staying afloat in a tough economy.
“They didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t want any payment plan whatsoever,” said Clark.
In a joint interview Wednesday, state Tax Administrator David Sullivan and Department of Revenue Director Gary Sasse said this marks the fourth year the state has taken similar steps to extract overdue sales taxes from businesses that they believe have, in most cases, collected them, but not remitted them to the state.
They said the first notice goes out in February to put businesses delinquent in paying their sales taxes on notice that their continued failure to do so “will result in your being denied a renewal of your sales tax permit and, if applicable, cigarette license effective July 1, 2009.”
A second notice goes out about 90 days later with a repeated warning. A third and final notices goes out 30 days after that, in late June.
The letters hand-delivered by the hundreds this week reiterated the message that owners are now operating without a permit and that under state law “each officer of any corporation which so engages in business shall be guilty of a misdemeanor” for which they can be fined up to $5,000 and imprisoned for up to a year.
“Each day in which such person so engages in business shall constitute a separate offense,” the letter says.
Initially, 3,949 letters went out which, in turn, precipitated the payment of $3,072,500 in delinquent sales tax payments, Sullivan said. By the time the final notices went out, the holders of all but 1,248 had paid their overdue taxes, or settled their cases in some other way.
The officials would not disclose who received the in-person visits this week, but said they reached every conceivable kind of retail business in Rhode Island, including small mom-and-pop stores, restaurants and bars.
Sullivan said the number of business owners in this category is up this year, though not significantly despite the recession.
But most standing in line Wednesday cited economic pressures and the constant fear of closure as the reason for their delinquency.
By 4 p.m., as Division of Taxation employees worked their way down the list, tensions were on the rise. A few in the 50-person queue made frantic calls to explain to vendors why their restaurants were closed for the day. Others ran out to feed expiring parking meters, while sweating over the lost revenue and embarrassment that appeared on their doorsteps Wednesday morning.
And then there was Pawtucket clothing manufacturer Jessica Bahl who, like Mike Suriani, said she didn’t owe any taxes at all. State officials closed her business Wednesday insisting she never renewed her permit. But in her hand she held a copy of the application along with proof that the state had cashed her renewal check.
“The economy is [terrible], people are hardly staying in business. I had to shut down my business for a day to come here and do this and they already got my check. So why am I here?” a frustrated Bahl said.
“And then they send someone over to scare me in front of my customers?” she continued. “It’s ridiculous … It’s embarrassing.”
Schwarzenegger blasts unemployment appeals board over backlog
Responding to criticism that furloughs he'd imposed are partly to blame for the pileup of cases, the governor says staffers and appeals judges aren't working hard enough and demands immediate action.
By Marc Lifsher
7:46 PM PDT, July 29, 2009
Reporting from Sacramento — Stung by criticism, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger blasted his administration's Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, plagued by a massive backlog in handling appeals of jobless Californians denied unemployment compensation.
The board has blamed the governor's policies for at least part of an 82,500-case pileup, citing state-ordered work furloughs for its employees. Now Schwarzenegger is firing back, saying board staff members including judges are not working hard enough.
The governor attacked the six-member board, which includes four of his own appointees, for allowing some judges to work at home. He also denounced the board for signing off on a labor agreement that caps the number of appeals cases that an administrative law judge can hear each week.
"It's outrageous that at a time when the people of California are most in need of their services, these judges are hiding behind a provision in a union contract to avoid work," the governor said in a statement issued by his office.
In a letter late Tuesday night, Schwarzenegger demanded that the board "take immediate action to eliminate these proven obstacles to the public interest."
Board members and staff, during an emergency telephone meeting Wednesday afternoon, disputed most of the governor's assertions. They voted to conduct a quick study of the efficiency of the board's limited telecommuting program. They also asked Schwarzenegger to look into renegotiating the judges' labor contract.
But the main culprit in building the backlog is Schwarzenegger's order that the board's 728 employees take three unpaid days off a month, board members said. The furloughs make it harder to reduce a backlog that's stretched the average case's life to about two months. One member, Liz Figueroa, a former Democratic state senator, accused Schwarzenegger of "trying to distract from the real problem we are having with the furloughs." The loss of manpower "is putting us deeper and deeper in trouble, making it almost impossible to serve our workers on a timely basis," she said.
Furloughing board workers won't save the state any money, because almost all the cost of administering the unemployment insurance program is paid by the federal government, said U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. Her agency, which this week sent a team of officials to Sacramento, told California that it is not legal to furlough state workers paid with federal funds. Board Chairwoman Bonnie Garcia, a former Republican Assembly member named by Schwarzenegger late last year, said she respected the governor's attempt to impose furloughs on all state agencies, including hers. But she said she felt compelled to tell to him "the truth about what is going on, so he can make a well-informed decision."
Garcia stressed that only 14 of 205 judges currently telecommute. Two of those are physically disabled and have the legal right to work from home, she said. The remaining dozen handle second-level appeals that do not involve taking testimony from the public.
Only Schwarzenegger's Department of Personnel Administration can renegotiate a 3-year-old contract with the judges union that contains caps on cases, Garcia said.
The governor's office said it planned to do that, said spokeswoman Rachel Cameron.
The Spanish-style house has 5 bedrooms, including a master suite that opens to a deck with a view of the yard and swimming pool.
By Lauren Beale July 28, 2009
Actress Melissa Joan Hart has sold her Sherman Oaks home for close to $2.5 million.
The one-story Spanish-style house has five bedrooms and five bathrooms in 4,911 square feet. There are fireplaces in the living room and master bedroom, hardwood floors, recessed lighting and crown molding. The master suite opens to a deck with a view of the yard and swimming pool.
Hart, 33, had listed her residence for sale in October at $3.25 million, but had since reduced it to $2.85 million.
This year she stars in the ABC Family film "My Fake Fiance" and the upcoming thriller "Nine Dead" from her company Hartbreak Films. Hart played the title characters in the TV series "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch" (1996-2003), episodes of which she also produced and directed, and "Clarissa Explains It All" (1991-94). She recently opened Sweet Harts, a confectionery that sells candy, frozen yogurt, gelato and baked goods in Sherman Oaks.
The actress, who had owned the custom home since 2005, sold to get a change of scenery, according to her listing agent, Matt Epstein of Re/Max on the Boulevard, Sherman Oaks.
Governor signs budget-balancing bills swiegand@sacbee.com Published Tuesday, Jul. 28, 2009
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a 27-bill "good, bad and ugly" budget-balancing package today that imposes deeper cuts in programs that range from operating state parks to preventing AIDS and puts aside a relatively paltry $500 million reserve.
"This has been a very tough budget, probably the toughest since I have been here in Sacramento," the governor said as he signed the bills before a horde of reporters and aides packed into a Capitol conference room. "I'm the only one responsible for these cuts ... but we dealt with it because I think it's important to have a reserve."
Schwarzenegger characterized what amounted to re-balancing the budget adopted last February for the fiscal year that started July 1 as "good, bad and ugly:"
• Good because it contains no tax increases, "lives within our means" and includes reforms of some programs.
• Bad because of severe cuts in virtually every state program that serves California's most needy populations. "That's why you don't see us celebrating."
• Ugly because the package legislators sent Schwarzenegger on Friday lacked a reserve and was $156 million short of balanced, forcing the governor to make even deeper cuts. "That's ugly, when already we've cut so much," he said.
The governor also warned that more cuts might be in the offing if the state's economy continues to deteriorate.
"We are not out of the troubled waters yet," he said. "We are ready if our revenues drop further to make the necessary cuts to again live within our means."
At least one legislative leader took immediate umbrage to the cuts, challenging whether the governor had the legal authority to make further reductions in a budget adopted in February.
"We will fight to restore every dollar of additional cuts to health and human services," Senate President Darrell Steinberg said in a prepared statement. "We question whether the majority of these vetoes are legal.
"The Governor has the right to blue pencil an appropriation. The funding levels identified in the budget revision in many cases are not new appropriations. This is not the last word."
To eliminate the $156 million deficit and create the $500 million reserve, Schwarzenegger made $489 million in additional cuts, borrowed $50 million from one of the state's special funds and found about $117 million in savings from money not spent in the last fiscal year.
The biggest single cut was $80 million in funds allocated to counties to finance programs that investigate and remediate cases of child abuse and neglect. Administration officials said the program had been spared in earlier rounds of budget cuts.
"The situation has just gotten to the point we can't exempt them anymore," said Mike Genest, Schwarzenegger's finance director.
Other cuts include:
• $60.6 million from funds used to pay for Medi-Cal eligibility workers at the county level. Aid to recipients was not cut, but they will likely have to wait longer for service.
• $50 million from the Healthy Families Program, a 12-year-old program that provides low-cost medical insurance to low-income families that don't qualify for Medi-Cal. New enrollments were frozen two weeks ago due to budget cuts; officials say that unless other funding is found, some families now on the program will be disenrolled.
• $52.1 million from the Office of AIDS Prevention and Treatment. Officials said the cut means the elimination of all services except providing drug assistance and monitoring the number of cases.
• $27.8 million from the Williamson Act program, which provides money to counties that give tax breaks to landowners who keep their land as open space. Because the governor couldn't unilaterally abolish the program, he cut the budget to a token $1,000.
• $6.2 million from state parks. Coupled with earlier cuts, the added reduction could mean as many as 100 of the state's 279 parks could close in October. But officials cautioned that local governments with nearby parks, or public-private partnerships, might save some parks.
Officials are banking on the package being enough to convince Wall Street lenders to provide the state with $8 billion to $10 billion in loans to help with California's cash-flow needs, and allow state Controller John Chiang to stop paying many of the state's bills with IOUs.
"It's not going to be as easy as it has in the past," Genest said of the prospects of securing the loans.
Genest said administration officials would be huddling with Chiang and state Treasurer Bill Lockyer to figure out exactly how much in loans the state should seek, and when Chiang can turn off the IOUs.
But he acknowledged that even if all of the lawmakers' and governor's machinations work, the state has no unforeseen emergencies and no one successfully sues the state to thwart some budget-balancing effort, California's books might still be from $7 billion to $8 billion out of whack by the end of this fiscal year.
"No one can predict with certainty what's going to happen," he said. ********************* Budget .pdf 52 pp
*********************
Quote:
"No one can predict with certainty what's going to happen," he said.
Yeah we can!
1) You will be sued by those trying to thwart the cuts
more importantly...
2) You will need to balance the deficit again in 3-4 months due to further tax revenue losses
And I'm not even a fortune teller!
********************* Six months? Halloween at the latest. I bet they can't get their bridge financing, the IOUs don't get redeemed, and it really gets fun. ********************* What really surprises me, is that all the US congresscritters, for the state of CA, are virtually mute. Elected by the state, for the state? Who do they work for? "we are bailing out the nations banks and the AIG's, so that CDS is made whole to Gold**** Ballsacks, and other FED members." I guess arnie, is all by himself. Unemployment will continue at a parabolic rate, but we can't print money for Americans, only for banksters in the name of credit availabilty. A big hoax, like WMD's, that never existed. THese people, have no more morals, than if I ****d everbody, including the poor family dog. ********************* They didn't cut salaries
They didn't cut pensions
They didn't defer pensions to like age 65
They borrow from the next 3 years budgets
They stole from counties and cities.
They did raise TAXES and FEES... just earlier in the year.
Example San Jose Police and Fireman 100's of them retiring with a obscene pensions ($121+ K) each year. This is exactly what bankrupt other CA cities/counties/the state. ***********************
(Corfu, N.Y.) - The National Weather Service says that a Category F1 tornado touched down in the Town of Darien at approximately 4:50 p.m. Saturday. It lasted approximately ten minutes, leaving a 4-mile path of varying destruction ending in the Village of Corfu, about 100 meters wide.
Amanda Alexander was at her home on Thompson Street in the Village of Corfu when she heard the storm approaching.
"All of a sudden, it sounded like a train was coming through the house," said Alexander. "But we live next to a train, so I didn't think much of it at first, but then when I looked out the front window, I've never seen winds blowing like that before. So, I went and shut the front door, grabbed my dog, and headed for the basement."
Ten minutes later, her neighborhood was turned upside down.
"Almost all of the trees are down, so we lost all of our trees," said Alexander. "Everything in our backyard was destroyed. We have a screened-in porch, and that was destroyed. Everything inside the screened-in porch was destroyed. Windows were blown in."
Mickey Zanghi lives a couple of streets down from Alexander. She had a similar story.
"We thought it was a loud train going by and we thought it was a loud crash with the train, so we looked out our window and there was the tornado, smack right in front of us. Everybody you could see scrambling, taking cover, running into their basements," Zanghi said.
In all, emergency officials say close to 30 homes, barns and sheds suffered mostly minor damage. A few homes suffered severe damage, some losing roofs. A florist shop lost its roof, and a greenhouse business was nearly leveled to the ground.
Luckily, though, no one was hurt.
"It's scary, knowing that [the tornado] was going to my neighbors and my neighboring towns," commented Corfu Fire Chief Brian McMartin, who witnessed the funnel cloud going through his backyard. "So, I got on the radio to warn the next town over that it was on its way."
"The main thing was everybody checked with each other's neighbors to make sure that nobody was hurt, then we started looking around. My house got a trampoline on it," said Mickey Zanghi.
On Sunday morning, officials with the National Weather Service along with members of the New York State Police will be doing an aerial fly-over to gauge just how many times the tornado touched down, and also to assess the damage along the storm's path. ****************************************************************************
Tornado Causes Damage in Hilton
Last Update: 7/26 10:44 am
Hilton, NY -- The National Weather Service has confirmed a tornado touched down in parts of Hilton Saturday night.
The tornado caused damage in the area of Hilton Parma Road. One house and several trees sustained damage. Other items were thrown around including, patio furniture, trampolines and children's toys. No injuries were reported.
The NWS said this is the first tornado to touch down in Monroe County in 28 years. The last tornado was in Rush in September of 1981.
So the pages 1-4 of this form are not included here, but it was dated June 20th, mailed July 8th, Due back July 13th, arrived in my mailbox July 27th at my address because the envelope was handwritten by the worker to my address, but to the wrong person. On page one of the form is the supposedly correct name & address (much different than mine) where this mail obviously never made it to yet. Somebody just lost their Medical Assistance because of a clerical error & a postmaster confusion (it did take 19 days to wind up in my mailbox).
This brief New York annual application is in stark contrast to the 50 page annual application in Minnesota. Click pics for larger size.
Of course, the Medicaid Spenddown (somewhere in the $500-$750 threshold, I really don't know & depends on the state), is a non-starter for Medicaid for most people because they can't afford the rent & food on such limited income if they have to spend down $1300 of SSDI income to $500 on Medical expenses ($800 monthly medical deductible in this particular case) before getting Medicaid care. I haven't really found anybody who can explain the Spenddown to me in specifics. Most websites tell you the rules but never give appropriate examples of how it all adds up in real life. If they did, you'd probably commit suicide before applying. *********************** PS: I saw some dude outside my window with his dog & asked him if his name (was the same as the addressed envelope) was xxx, he said YES, so I fetched the mail from my apt. and gave it to him. Turns out there was a misreading of 1 digit in the address since he just moved into my complex from another one across town. So the Post Office & the County thinks he lives in my place when a simple mistake in interpreting a digit was the problem. (DAMN!)
Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times, left; Steve Shaw / 42West; Dan Steinberg / Associated Press
"American Idol" judge Paula Abdul, left is making $4 million a year and is seeking $12 million, sources say. Host Ryan Seacrest has made a three-year deal, while judge Simon Cowell, who some see as essential for the show to remain a success, is in talks. He could use his leverage to try to get "X Factor," which he hosts overseas, on Fox.
Ryan Seacrest has a $30-million deal, Simon Cowell is in talks for what could be $45 million a year and Paula Abdul has cut her request for $20 million, sources say, amid a dearth of TV network hits.
By Joe Flint>>> July 27, 2009
The first talent auditions for the ninth season of the Fox juggernaut "American Idol" are still two weeks away, but there is already a beauty contest going on behind the scenes.
Negotiations on a new contract for Simon Cowell, the show's linchpin, chief prosecutor and animating force, are progressing quickly and could be concluded as early as this week. Cowell, who currently makes about $36 million annually and still has another year on his pact, is looking at a new multiyear deal that would boost his pay to the $45-million range, people close to the talks said.
Cowell's push for more money comes on the heels of host Ryan Seacrest's new contract, which pays him $30 million over three years to host plus $15 million for merchandising rights to his image. Co-judge and pop diva Paula Abdul is also seeking a hefty increase in pay, although it's unclear whether she will be able to wrangle the kind of raises won by her colleagues.
Costly renewal contracts are not uncommon for the stars of hit sitcoms and dramas, where the fate of a series often rests with an actor or actress who has legions of fans that would abandon the show if their idol did not return. But the high-stakes poker game over pay currently underway with the judges of "American Idol," a talent show that has soared to popularity in the reality TV boom, points up the paucity of giant hits in an era when few network series attract broad swaths of the viewing public.
"There are fewer and fewer of these shows," said Brent Poer, senior vice president at MediaVest USA, which buys TV commercial time for clients such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. " 'American Idol' is one of the last bastions of appointment viewing. For advertisers, it shows there is still a show that can generate water cooler talk."
Such singular status makes "American Idol" a cash cow for Fox, which airs it twice each week and uses the outsize viewership to promote the network's other shows, turning it into an audience-generating machine.
Although ratings and advertising revenue for "American Idol" have declined in recent years, it is still the most-watched show on television and commands the second-highest rates from advertisers. (The Super Bowl is No. 1.) In the most recent season, the program averaged 26.6 million viewers per episode, and advertisers shelled out more than $700,000 for a 30-second commercial, TNS Media Intelligence said. Overall, "American Idol" took in almost $850 million in advertising revenue last season, more than any other television show, despite the weak economy.
But as good as that is, it's not as good as it used to be. In 2008, "American Idol" generated $903.3 million in advertising. The show is a co-production of 19 Entertainment Ltd., the British production and talent management firm owned by CKX Inc., and the TV company FremantleMedia, a unit of German media giant Bertelsmann.
The current round of negotiations with talent points to a long-standing issue in the television business: Lucrative employment contracts are frequently reached after the show has peaked in the ratings and in advertising, reducing profit margins in a program's later years as the costs rise while the revenue falls. But networks and producers are loath to risk losing talent, which could devalue the show even faster and lead to a premature cancellation.
Although Cowell's current contract does not expire until next season, Fox is committed to "American Idol" for two more years, so the network would prefer to lock him in now. Renowned for brutally frank critiques of contestants' talent ("There are only so many words I can drag out of my vocabulary to say how awful that was," he told one auditioning contestant), the British-born and tight-black-T-shirt clad Cowell is a key ingredient in the show's popularity -- and could be difficult to replace.
Finding a judge to take Cowell's place "would really be a challenge," TV historian Tim Brooks said. He said "American Idol" could probably survive if it lost Abdul or judges Randy Jackson and Kara DioGuardi -- but not Cowell.
A complicating factor in Cowell's contract negotiations is "X-Factor," another musical talent program overseas that he hosts and would like to land on the U.S. network. As part of any new agreement for "American Idol," Cowell could try to leverage a long-term commitment out of Fox to put "X-Factor" on the air.
A representative for Cowell declined to comment.
Although Cowell's deal is moving along smoothly, negotiations with Abdul have crashed. Abdul, who has become as well-known for occasional erratic behavior on and off the set -- she's notorious for rambling appraisals of contestants' performances -- has gone public with her displeasure about the talks. Abdul's current annual salary is around $4 million, people close to the show say, and she wants to be higher on the food chain than Seacrest and initially asked for as much as $20 million, although that has since come down to $12 million.
Last week, an offer was made to Abdul's manager David Sonenberg, and he passed, people involved in the talks said. Sonenberg did not respond to requests for comment. Earlier this month, he told The Times that Fox had been "rude and disrespectful" in their handling of the talks.
Fremantle 19 and Fox representatives declined to comment about Abdul's contract talks. But Nigel Lythgoe, an original executive producer of "American Idol," said he didn't think it would be a fatal blow to the show if Abdul did walk.
"First and foremost, 'Idol' is stronger than any individual on it," he said.
Tonight on "Inside Edition," you can visit the scene outside Paula Abdul’s home in Sherman Oaks, Calif., where a young fan may have committed suicide.
Paula Goodspeed was a self-described fan of the “American Idol” judge. There is no known reason why she would have committed suicide outside Abdul’s home, other than to be close at the end of her life to her apparent idol. Or to have her name forever linked with Abdul's.
Goodspeed’s body was found inside her car, which was decorated with a photo of Abdul hanging from the rear-view mirror. Her personalized license plate reads “ABL LV,” which has been said to stand for Abdul Love.
"Ms. Goodspeed's mother had gone to [the sheriff's department] to report her daughter missing and advised them that she might be suicidal," Los Angeles Police Capt. James Miller tells People. Officials "determined that Ms. Goodspeed may be up in the vicinity by Paula Abdul's house. Our officers discovered her vehicle parked on the street and found her inside. She was unresponsive to officers."
Turns out Goodspeed auditioned for “American Idol” in 2005 and admitted a lifelong fascination with Abdul.
“I really like Paula Abdul a lot. She’s really cool. ... I’m like a really big fan and I make life-size drawings of Paula. I’ve been drawing ever since I was a little kid, and my first drawing was of Paula Abdul.”
Goodspeed attended the Austin, Texas, tryouts wearing braces and dressed like a gypsy, a look said to be inspired by Abdul. “Definitely, I really think I’m a pop star. They call me fashion genius.”
Even “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell noticed Goodspeed’s resemblance to Abdul.
Cowell observed, “A similarity here ... more than just the name. ... I see it definitely.”
But the judges weren’t impressed with Goodspeed’s version of Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary.” Simon Cowell was downright rude, especially about her braces. As co-judge Randy Jackson said, "That was terrible. What was that?"
Afterward, Goodspeed vented in an expletive-filled post-audition interview. “I was pitchy on a couple of notes. Big ... deal. ... They send a lot to HW that can’t even really hold a note. It’s not over and I’m not gonna stop singing just cause you don’t like my voice.”
Frankly, we're surprised more kids haven't felt suicidal, suffered from depression or developed mental or emotional problems after an "Idol" audition. Those dudes' remarks are often pretty harsh!
What do you think? Was this just a matter of time or an isolated incident?
Paula Abdul, who has a long history of bizarre behavior on-air and off, has long denied reports of any drug or alcohol abuse. She even told Cynthia McFadden two weeks ago on "Nightline" that she never abused prescription drugs.
Now she's apparently completely changed her tune. "American Idol" fans, should this come as a shockeroo?
In the June issue of Ladies Home Journal, she reveals her struggle to kick a secret, 12-year painkiller habit, though she says she never shot an "Idol" episode under the influence.
In pain after a series of injuries, the self-professed "old-school professional" turned to a combination of painkillers and Chinese medicine, the article says, to get her through her grueling dance routines on tour.
Then in 2005, she was diagnosed with reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome. The chronic illness causes disabling pain, teeth-chattering and shingles-like lesions. To help combat the pain, the article says, Paula wore a patch that delivered a pain medication about 80 times more potent than morphine and took a nerve medication to relieve her symptoms.
And sometimes she took a muscle relaxer too. And OK, sometimes that wouldn't work either, and she couldn't sleep at all. And sometimes the combination of all those things made her "get weird" on the air. Yeah, no kidding.
Last Thanksgiving, Paula checked into the La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, Calif., to get off the stuff.
Says Paula: “I could have killed myself…. Withdrawal – it’s the worst thing. I was freezing cold, then sweating hot, then chattering and in so much pain, it was excruciating. But at my very core, I did not like existing the way I had been.”
Glad you made it, Paula. Congrats. But we'll kind of miss those funny out-there Paula moments.
Musician mourns loss of WBCN, 'the rock' that will no longer roll
Boston, Mass.
By Katie Curley Staff writer
NEWBURYPORT — For Joe and Donna Holaday, the sounds of WBCN have been the background music to much of their lives.
Donna Holaday, a Newburyport city councilor, remembers being a poor college kid and walking down to the WBCN headquarters to request songs through an open window. Though she had yet to meet her future husband, the love of Boston radio would one day turn into something they shared.
"It was great," Holaday said. "There you were; you could see the whole Boston skyline."
Joe Holaday credits WBCN for much of his musical success.
"This is the end of an era," Holaday said. "Radio has been slowly dying for years."
Holaday, a 51-year-old Newburyport resident who has played bass with The Fools since 1976, has witnessed 30 years of musical evolution and is as passionate about it today as he was decades ago. He said much of that evolution was carefully documented for all Boston music fans on WBCN.
In an unprecedented shake-up in Boston radio, this week WBCN's owner CBS announced the station will no longer be a place for progressive rock.
The new 98.5 "The Sports Hub" will air sports talk shows and play-by-play of the New England Patriots and Boston Bruins. The Patriots most recently were heard on WBCN. The Bruins have been airing on CBS-owned WBZ-AM.
CBS also said it is moving its "Mix 98.5" station, WBMX, from its spot to WBCN's old position at 104.1.
WBCN began playing underground rock in 1968 before it evolved into a more mainstream, album-oriented rock format. Once the nation's first rock station, WBCN helped launch U2 among other prominent artists of the 1970s and '80s
"WBCN was so integral to the Boston music scene in the 1970s and 1980s," Holaday said. "You didn't do anything over the weekend without listening to BCN first to know what bands were playing or what new events were happening."
The Fools was a mostly tongue-in-cheek band whose major hit in 1979 was "Psycho Chicken," an X-rated parody of the Talking Heads song "Psycho Killer." Holaday now also plays in Beatlejuice, the well-known Beatles cover band, as well as Velvet Elvis.
"WBCN was extremely helpful in signing The Fools," Holaday said.
For nearly two years, Holaday and his band would play each Friday morning on WBCN. Although they didn't get paid, the exposure to Boston radio fans was priceless.
"We were doing 200 shows a year at that point," Holaday said. "But we would go each Friday morning and play on air. We were doing it for free and loving every minute of being part of something very special."
Holaday said some of his best memories were made on the air.
"Jay Leno was there before he was on the Tonight Show. He had his mom on the phone and was singing along with our songs over the air," Holaday said. "We wrote a song for (television newsman) Jack Williams one morning. The craziest things would happen. They meant the world to the Boston music scene."
Holaday said when WBCN goes off the air next month, it will not just be the end of an era but also the end of an era of disc jockeys who cared about their listeners.
Holaday still calls some of those DJs even while some have left the station or retired. Charles Laquidara was a household name for his "Big Mattress" show, and Oedipus hosted "Nocturnal Emissions'' featuring local bands on Sunday nights. Ken Shelton and Mark Parenteau still stay in touch with The Fools and sometimes attend shows.
Holaday said Carter Alan was one of the reasons his band was signed to begin with.
"They helped our career; they were friends," Holaday said. "Carter Alan heard our song "life sucks then you die" and said if we recorded it, he would put the song in rotation."
Holaday says the days of disc jockeys who cared about bringing music to their fans is dead, making way for shock jocks and major media conglomerates to decide what songs will be played.
"There was a time radio was regional and they talked about places and people you knew. It was our hometown station," Holaday said.
Holaday said WBCN represented media at its best, when the content mattered to the people who were consuming it. The station made it easy for local bands to get on air and played what local people liked.
"The DJs cared about the listenership. It was like they were friends and wanted you to listen to this new band they had found."
Today, Holaday is still creating original music with the Fools and Beatlejuice and Friends. While he stopped listened to WBCN about 10 years ago when he says radio changed and it lost its cutting-edge appeal, he will remember and credit his hometown station always.
"I will remember the station as great friends and a big part of not just our lives but the Boston music scene," he said. "A lot of Boston bands can credit them for their success. Boy, we'll miss them."
Site: http://www.bhamweekly.com About: Is a staff writer and columnist for Birmingham Weekly. His political column, War on Dumb won the 2008 Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Award for Best Political Column. Follow on Twitter. See Authors Posts (322)
A week ago, Commissioner Jim Carns sat behind the wide desk in his office at the Jefferson County courthouse. He had the beaten look you’d expect from a man who’d spent several hours on a witness stand getting mugged by a hostile attorney. One floor upstairs, in Circuit Judge Joseph Boohaker’s courtroom, Sheriff Mike Hale was suing the county to keep the commission from cutting $5 million from his department’s budget. Commission President Bettye Fine Collins was supposed to testify that morning, but she called in sick. Carns, who had wrangled with Collins on the commission for more than a year, testified in her place.
Carns and his ally on the commission, Bobby Humphryes, were elected to their offices at the county in 2006, both of them having served first in the Alabama House of Representatives. With incumbent Bettye Fine Collins they campaigned for their offices as a Republican slate with a pithy campaign pitch: “No debt, no dome, no Democrats.”
Once they arrived downtown, however, they found the political realities askew from their sloganeering. The debt was already there – $3.8 billion of it, in addition to derivatives, called interest rate swaps, that were backfiring on the county. Because of the burgeoning financial crisis, a domed stadium was no longer a realistic agenda item. Political alliances blurred ideological lines as Collins split with the Republicans to ally with two Democrats to form a new majority.
To make matters worse, a decade-old fight over the county’s occupational tax threatened to send Jefferson County off a financial cliff. In 1999, the Alabama Legislature had voted to repeal the tax, and after 10 years, the courts had affirmed that decision. That reduced the county’s revenue by about $70 million per year. Without that money, Carns now says, county government probably won’t be able to survive, certainly not in its current form. That’s not an easy admission for Carns to make. You see, while they were in the legislature, he and Humphryes both voted to kill that very tax.
If Carns wasn’t an ideologue when he arrived at the Jefferson County courthouse, he certainly benefited from the support of reactionaries in his district. Now, however, he sits in his office, watching the unfolding disaster from an informed and lonesome perspective. Many of his constituents have had enough of what’s happened at the county and long ago tuned out the minutia of the crisis, even though those details are important.
“I think there is an information overload with the county,” he said last week. “When most citizens hear news about the county now – they were overwhelmed with it a year ago.”
It’s a fair point. For the last several years, news about Jefferson County government has been a torrent of bad headlines. If you listen to talk radio or read the posts in online chat rooms, you’ll see reactions that don’t draw distinctions between the sewer debt crisis and the occupational tax crisis. Sometimes the lines seemed blurred between the Jefferson County Commission and the City of Birmingham.
What is clear to all is that Jefferson County is nearly out of money. When its bank account is empty, the county will not be able to make payroll without drastic cuts. That could leave county residents without essential services on which they’ve come to rely, things such as police protection in unincorporated Jefferson County and even some incorporated areas such as Center Point. Citizens are left to do two things: be angry and demand answers.
To the casual observer, watching what’s been happening at Jefferson County has been a bit like staring into the sun. The magnitude of what’s happening can overwhelm the senses and scar the eyes. For as long as anyone can remember, the county has hovered there as a constant thing. Just as Alabamians hate the August heat, some have loathed the county government. Others have worshiped at its altar and assumed that it was, as they say, too big to fail. But look at it through a welder’s mask or an appropriate telescope, and you will see there discrete acts of violence – flares, sun spots and eruptions of dangerous radiation. Extrapolate its future, and you’ll see that it’s exploding in slow motion before collapsing into a cold dark nothing.
Sewer debt crisis
The first thing to understand is that, on paper at least, the sewer debt crisis and the occupational tax crisis are two different things. And for the moment, at least, the sewer debt crisis is the more stable of the two challenges facing the county.
Jefferson County residents are probably more familiar and impatient with the sewer debt crisis. For at least half of the households in the county, a reminder of it lands in their mail boxes once a month.
In the early 1990s, a lawsuit brought by residents and later taken up by the Environmental Protection Agency forced the county to repair its sewer system. That lawsuit left some politicos grousing about environmental activists, but the reason for the lawsuit was as clear as it was gross. Sewer systems throughout Jefferson County were consistently conducting “sewer treatment plant by-passes,” engineer-speak for dumping raw sewage directly into rivers and streams. The practice was a public health hazard, and in 1996, Jefferson County agreed to fix the problem without having a clear idea how much a solution would cost. Estimates at the time ran as high as $1.2 billion, but over the next 10 years the county incurred more than $3.2 billion in debt trying to fix the system. That debt was simply too much for the county to pay, but it tried, and the mechanisms it used in the attempt have only made matters worse.
There is no longer any question that cost was inflated by corruption and waste. More than 20 public officials and contractors have been convicted of public corruption charges related to the sewer crisis. Corruption caused the debt to grow, and prosecutors argue that corruption caused the county then to enter into complex and poorly understood derivative agreements called interest rate swaps.
All three members of the county’s finance committee from 2002-2006 – Larry Langford, Gary White and Mary Buckelew – have federal charges pending against them. Gary White was convicted last year of taking kickbacks from a sewer contractor but he was granted a motion for a new trial. Buckelew has pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and admitted that she took gifts from Montgomery investment banker Bill Blount while on trips to meet with Wall Street bankers in New York. Langford is under indictment for accepting gifts from Blount, too. Prosecutors say he took more than $230,000 worth of cash, clothes and jewelry from Blount in exchange for county bond business.
Those deals were supposed to save the county money in interest rates, but the consequences of Jefferson County trying to outsmart the market have been disastrous. Beginning in 2002, Jefferson County converted nearly all of its bond debt from fixed-rate bonds to variable rate demand warrants and auction rate securities. Those securities gave the county low interest rates, at least in the beginning, but they came with greater risks. On top of the $3.2 billion of mostly variable-rate debt, the county conducted the interest rate swaps with a notional of more than $5 billion. That’s not how much the county owes on the swaps, but it is a significant fact for this reason: That the county had a notional value of its swaps greater than its debt should have been a red flag that the county was using swaps to speculate on interest rates rather than to hedge. Under Alabama law, using swaps to hedge against interest fluctuations is legal, but speculation is not. The county was literally gambling with public money.
Early swaps did well for the county, but by 2007, the county’s transactions had drawn the attention of national media and the SEC. That attention was too late. The county was unable to unwind and restructure its overly complicated debt. The only way to do so would have involved significant increases in sewer rates – political suicide for county commissioners.
In the early spring of 2008, it all fell apart, but the timing was not the county’s fault. The county had supported its bond deals with bond insurance. Those insurers had invested heavily in mortgage-backed securities. When the ratings agencies downgraded those insurers, it triggered a chain reaction in the county’s debt structure. The county itself was downgraded. The variable rate demand warrants and auction rate securities reverted back to the banks that sold them, as the bond-holders were allowed to do under the agreements. By those same agreements, the banks were allowed to hike interest rates on the debt, often higher than 10 percent. At the same time, this triggered accelerated payment schedules on sewer debt as well as general obligation debt. Instead of paying the debt off over perhaps 20 years, the county would have to pay off the debt over three or four years.
It was simply too much for the county to pay. The county entered into a long series of forbearance agreements with the banks. Negotiations stalled as commissioners fought among themselves for a solution. Carns and Humphryes supported bankruptcy, choosing to fight the banks in court and perhaps expose wrong doing on Wall Street’s side of these deals. Collins, Shelia Smoot and William Bell supported continued negotiations, and Gov. Bob Riley stepped in to broker a deal for the county with Wall Street.
The deal they reached was to redirect a one-cent sales tax to help pay down some of the debt, while Wall Street banks agreed to forgive more than $1 billion in swap termination fees and interest payments. That agreement, however, needed the backing of the Alabama Legislature. The Legislature said no.
On the hook for Jefferson County’s debts, the bond insurers sued the county. They asked a federal judge to appoint a receiver, essentially a court-appointed dictator, to take charge of the sewer system. U.S. District Judge David Proctor ruled that a receiver wouldn’t do much good since federal law prohibited him from appointing a receiver with the power to raise sewer rates.
Contractually, the county is obligated to pay only net sewer revenues to its bond holders. Creditors can’t force the county to raise taxes or sell property. They might be able to force the county to raise rates in state court, but with elected judges in Alabama, that’s far from certain.
For the time being, the sewer debt crisis is in stasis, and that’s exactly where the county wants to keep it. Because, while the county was struggling with its sewer debt, a far greater threat crept up on the county, and now that threat just might kill it.
The occupational tax
Ten minutes of C-SPAN will cure any delusion that legislators sit at the in-chambers desks all day dutifully listening to arguments and studying fine print before passing new laws. During much of the legislative session in Montgomery, it’s possible to find more state legislators down the hall getting their shoes shined than making public policy in chambers.
Regardless, the Alabama Constitution of 1901 seems to require a quorum of legislators to take a vote, and a majority of that quorum is needed to approve a bill. With that assumption, any vote with less than half of the legislators wouldn’t be legal.
Or maybe it would.
Yes, it’s silly, but this is the issue that has left the status of the occupational tax in limbo for a decade.
For years, the Legislature has taken votes with what has been called an “implied quorum.” Instead of taking roll, the Legislature would assume a quorum was present. This allowed local delegations, such as ours from Jefferson County, to vote on issues that affected only that delegation’s constituents.
One of those votes by implied quorum happened in 1999. Rep. Arthur Payne introduced a bill to repeal Jefferson County’s occupational tax and business license fees. The legislative delegation had been quarreling with the county commission because some legislators wanted the commission to fund their pet pork projects. The commission refused, and by a vote using the implied quorum, the Legislature voted to repeal the tax, effective April Fool’s Day, 2000.
In March of that year, Jefferson County employees sued the commission. They argued the Legislature had not voted legally to repeal the tax. The commission entered the lawsuit as a friendly party. A Jefferson County Circuit Court judge ruled in their favor that the tax would remain in place and for several years that seemed to be the end of the issue.
The quick legal fix didn’t hold, however. In 2005, Rep. John Rogers introduced a bill to take all city sales taxes collected at the BJCC and give those funds to the civic center. Then-mayor Bernard Kincaid went ballistic and filed a lawsuit to have the bill declared illegal. One of the arguments the city used, and the argument that had the greatest effect, was that the Legislature had passed the bill by an implied quorum. Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Scott Vowell ruled in the city’s favor, but the BJCC appealed it to the Alabama Supreme Court.
Since the previous implied quorum lawsuit had not gone so high in the appeals process, the affect on case law had been negligible. But since this lawsuit went to the state Supreme Court, its impact would be felt throughout the state, applying to all other laws passed by an implied quorum. Judge Vowell’s decision seemed based firmly on the law, but had the Supreme Court upheld that decision, it could have potentially negated thousands of laws in Alabama, including almost all local bills passed for as long as anyone could remember.
Instead of scrapping the Alabama Code, the state Supreme Court stretched as far as it could to rule the implied quorum legal. The court found that state law allows the Legislature to set its own rules, including an implied quorum, even if those rules apparently violate the state constitution.
Suddenly, the basis for preserving Jefferson County’s occupational tax was gone.
In 2007, a lawsuit filed in state court asked the courts to revisit the occupational tax issue. The county fought the suit while simultaneously asking the Alabama Legislature to reinstate the tax. During the last two years, every commissioner has asked either through the media, through correspondence, over the phones or in person for the Legislature to reenact the tax. Even Humphryes and Carns, who while members of the Legislature voted to kill it, asked their old colleagues to support it.
During the last two sessions, several legislators introduced bills to reinstate the tax, but none of the bills made it to the governor’s desk. One major sticking point was an existing exemption for licensed professionals. As the argument goes, lawyers and doctors were exempt from the tax, but not their secretaries. Democrats wanted the exemption removed. Republicans loaded the tax with poison-pill earmarks.
At the end of the 2009 Legislative session, Rep. Rogers refused to let a compromise bill go to a conference committee, effectively killing it.
He might have killed the county, too.
Earlier this year, Circuit Judge David Rains ruled the tax illegal. After some more legal wrangling between the plaintiffs and the county, Rains ruled the county could keep tax collections in escrow but not touch them until an appeal to the Supreme Court had run its course.
The End?
Losing the occupational tax has left the county with a devastating cash flow problem, and there are no more reserves to buy the county time. Years of wasteful spending, outrageous debt service, fiscal mismanagement and legal entanglements have left Jefferson County’s coffers depleted. Repeated scandals have left the county’s political capital spent as well. There’s no sense of urgency among the public to save the county from its possible collapse.
During the sheriff’s lawsuit last week, finance director Travis Hulsey told the court that the county was operating with less than $5 million in the bank. What was more startling were the figures he gave for cash flow. The county had $18 million per month in expenses, he said, and only $8 million in revenue.
In a memo this week, to county department heads, Hulsey and county attorney Jeff Sewell updated those figures. The county has cut costs by about $2 million per month, not nearly enough to balance the budget. Of the remaining $16 million in monthly expenses, about $12 million goes to payroll. Without drastic cuts, the county will not have money to make payroll on Aug. 21.
“It is not appropriate or lawful for the County to permit employees to work if their wages cannot be paid,” the memo said. “To prevent that from happening and to comply with the balanced budget requirement of Alabama law, the Commission must cut County payroll costs by $8 million per month by Aug. 1, 2009.”
The county has more than 3,000 employees, but employees at Cooper Green, the sewer department, economic development and the sheriff’s department will be exempt. Cooper Green is supported by an earmarked tax. The sewer department subsists on sewer fees and economic development relies mostly on grants for its funding, Human Resource Director Demitrius Taylor said Tuesday. Judge Boohaker ruled the county is required by law to fund the sheriff’s department.
That means, nearly two thirds of the remaining employees will be put on administrative leave as of Aug. 1. The administrative leave will likely last for six weeks, and can last for as long as a year. More than 1,000 county employees will be asked to stay home.
“Jefferson County is going to be skeletal,” Commission President Bettye Fine Collins said Tuesday.
