The Hayseeds blog, No. 171 for the week starting August 20, 2006.
August 6, 2006
Hayseeds No. 170
August 20, 2006
Hayseeds No. 171
August 27, 2006
Hayseeds No. 171
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For those living under a rug and not listening to WAMC, you probably have missed the fact that the Weekly Rundown, This American Life, and the ever witty As It Happens has been preempted to replay Tanglewood Concerts.
We at NYC are rather disappointed by that. It's fun to spend Friday evenings in the woods by a campfire, drinking, and listening to the fascinating stories—particularly of This American Life which is now at 10 PM—often after one might be drunk and asleep.
The infamous bus authority in the Capital Region very quietly upgraded all of their big buses to have bike racks so commuters can take their bikes with them to work. While the CDTA website doesn't tell you about this, they do have instructions on taking a Bikeable Bus.
At the same time they've started adding LED electronic signs in a limited test buses. While some of the small buses have had them for a while, it's a first for the big buses. They are bright and clear, and something that most other transit authorities like ODTA out in Syracuse have had for a long time.
They are planning major upgrades to the fleet next year, including 6-hybrid diesel/electric buses, 8-midsized buses, and another 8-full sized buses. Their goal is to replace the old 1996-2000 Orion buses and hopefully standardize on Gilla buses. A lot on this can be found at Wikipedia's Entry on CDTA.
What does this all mean? The bike racks on all buses are really nice. Bikes are a great way to get around the city, and they are a lot cheaper to ride then to drive your truck. The signs are nice too, particularly when the conventional fabric signs are often outdated or incorrect.
Yet, replacing those things cost a lot of money that ultimately taxpayers will be paying for on an aging fleet that at least some of the buses are slated for replacement in another year. Particularly it's concering that they are spending money on extras when they have problems with adaquate staffing and buses that break down quite often.
CDTA Buses service is largely paid through a tax on all mortages in Albany County, from Cooksberg to Colonie. So you have to be concerned on how well money is being spent. With all the problems in the existing fleet, you'd wonder when they would put more money into maintaining the buses and hiring qualified drivers, then the newest gagets—although the later probably gets more federal and state money to get.
That's the city's response to utterly disregarding the DEC and getting fined a couple of bucks—$50,000 to be exact and mandated to install adaquate methane collection equipment.
It's not that much money for a dump that makes the city a profit of $10 mil. It's kind of like cost of a parking ticket when you fail to keep the metermaid happy with your quarters in the meter downtown. I don't think we will be seeing the mayor arraigned like this poor and stupid guy pumping out containated water from his basement.
Yet, it's a step in the right way. The Cuomo and later Pataki DEC has never been willing to show much backbone against the well connected Mayor. Maybe now the city will work to continue to reduce methane waste not to mention the terrible smell.
Methane can be and should be burnt like natural gas as a fuel. They use some of it already to fuel a generator, but they don't have enough generating capacity to use all the methane though are promising to do that. They plan to also create a methane fueling station for city vechicles in the next couple of years.
It's far better to burn it then to release it as methane i super-global warming gas (20x more powerful then CO2). When you burn it for fuel in a turbine or in a truck modified to run on natural gas or methane, you get energy while cutting global warming gas emissions that would come from that massive pile of rotting garbage.
The Capital City of the State of New York now has a population of only 78,402 people down from 85,700 in 2000 and 101,000 in 1990. Colonie has 78,973 people in it now. That's going to have profound political consequences and change how many people view the Capital City.
NYC predicted about 2 years ago that Albany would be beat by Colonie in population by around 2011. Yet, it seems Albany's decline has been far steeper then one could have predicted by 2000 and 1999 censuses. People are leaving the city as fast as they can.
When will Colonie become top dog in our county, essentially replacing the cozy relationship between the County and the City? Probably not for a while, but watch for the suburbs to exert more and more power over the Democratic party. The machine is continuing to run out of gas.
What Albany Democrats have going for them is they are the basden of the Democratic Party in this county. With the higher Democratic Party registration then the suburbs, they can continue to dominate the policies of the county. Yet, the suburbs are coming more Democratic and with their booming population and particularly Albany's steep decline, it seems suburbs will ultimately be the victors.
The question still is how much of Albany can rot away and continue to lose population? The city once had a population of 150,000 and infrastructure to support it. How much more farmland must we eat up for people to get away from the machine?
See the TU coverage of this change with it's somewhat misleading headline.
It looks like the State Senator from Westchester lacks a proper permit with the DEC and might be one of many cited in a crackdown on docks built post-1973 law that required all docks to be registered with the state prior to construction.
It looks like the AFL-CIO won't be endorsing former Labor Commisoner and incumbent John Sweeney in his race for Congress, instead going for Gillibrand cite Sweeney's poor record on labor.
Almost all the unions are going for Gillibrand, which is fairly surpising as she's not the incumbent. It's always risky to endorse a challenger, and suggests that many have made a calculation and that Kirsten will snap up this district, bringing us one closer to a Democratic majority in the house.
There are 15 nuclear power stations on this one lake that borders Central/Western New York and Ontario, Canada and that can mean some serious problems.
There are varying forms of low-level radioactive containmentation in sites in and around the lake, and all that hot water being discharged in the lake has both raised the tempeture of the lake slightly and caused dead zones.
US PIRG/Sierra Club has put together an interesting report on the effects of expanding coal usage in our country not just on global warming, but on mountaintops and conventional pollutants like NOx and SO2.
While I don't have cable and was volunteering with the Gillibrand people last night, the Press Connects has a rundown on what was said at the Democratic AG debate.
Unlike the Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate debate this one isn't going to be rebroadcast on WAMC. That really is too bad as that field is far more competive then the Spitzer-Suozzi race.
Intercities rot away and then ignoring the problems of the suburbs, they can rot away proves this year's census data.
More than 500 vacant buildings clutter Cheektowaga's landscape. Violent crime doubled in the Town of Tonawanda the past five years and spiked in Cheektowaga. Kenmore's main drag is pockmarked with empty storefronts. Tonawanda lost a larger percentage of people since 2000 than Buffalo. West Seneca and other older suburbs weren't far behind.
...Nine years ago, we heard that - unless we slowed sprawl and turned development into the city - the woes of Buffalo would spread to neighboring suburbs...
Gaughan founded the 1997 Chautauqua Regionalism Conference, where urban experts described the price of doing nothing: Buffalo would keep falling. Its closest suburbs would become more like the city - plummeting property values, more absentee landlords, more crime, fewer people. Distant, outer-ring suburbs would grow, straining tax loads as more roads, sewers, water lines, schools and fire houses were built.
We hear about Buffalo's problems from time to time. Yet, as is now apparent suburbanization destroys all and goes after more and more farmland while the intercity and more and more distant suburbs rot. It's starting to come to our backyards.
Think Colonie is safe now that Albany has clearly fallen off the map except for being the seat of state government? Take a look a newer suburbs and strips and how they have replaced much of the functionality of the existing Colonie suburbs.
The good news is most of Albany's growth has been to the North in Schenectady and Saratoga Counties, and to the West in Renselear county and not in my backyard. Yet, these cookycutter developments are not only hard to drive through and tacky, they also mean more and more people have to drive further and further to work.
That's basically what he had to say when it came to racist profiling for Muslims for security.
