Newspaper Page Text
•f«M 1*M®RP*W©2011 -...www.thlsmodemwoiid.com...twttter.com/tomtoi
DEAL'S PORT PROJECT IS SINKING
WHAT’S UP IN NEW DEVELOPMENT
ANYWAY, IF YOU'RE IMNOCEMT--
THEN WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO HIDE?
THANKS, BARACK
OBAMA.'
“--WE WILL BE 6IVING TERRORISTS
THE OPPORTUNITY TO PLOT AGAINST
our country UNDETECTED!“
"WHEN...THE AMERICAN PEOPLE COME
TO UNDERSTAND HOW THE PATRIOT
ACT HAS ACTUALLY BEEN INTER
PRETED IN SECRET, THEY WILL
INSIST ON SlGNtflCANT REfORMSr
“(THEY) WOULD BE A8
SQLUTELY STUNNED!*
A BRIEF
HISTORY
OF THE
PATRIOT
2001: bosh administration uses
threat of terrorism to justify
UNCONSTITUTIONAL POWER GRAB.
2005/2006*. DEMOCRATS PROPOSE
MAKING UNCONSTITUTIONAL POWER
GRAB SOMEWHAT LESS UNCONSTI
TUTIONAL.
(QUOTATION MARKS - ACTUAL QUOTES)
20M*. SENATORS WTDEN AND UDALL
,80TH MEMBERS oF the SENATE
intelligence committee) 5EEM
TO BE TRYING TO tell US SOME
THING--^ ONLY WE COULD FIGURE
OUT WHAT!
ion CONT-D*. harry REID USES
THREAT of TERRORISM TO JUSTIFY
Bipartisan NORMALIZATION of
UNCONSTITUTIONAL POWER GRAB —
WARNING that If the ACT is
allowed to EXPIRE--
SOME UNSPECIfiED POINT IN THE
future: democrats are simply
SHOCKED to learn of patriot
Act ABUSES.
Privatization and related notions of how our
local urban government might make money
were on the agenda last time, but this
week, I'd like to go a little further afield
and explore how some of those ideas might
be considered in the context of more rural
resources.
One worrying recent news item was the
announcement that the U6A ag school would
be selling off its 500-acre farm in Oconee
County, in part, as reported in the Athens-
Banner Herald, to generate funds that will
alleviate a maintenance backlog elsewhere.
Of course, they'll need to lease that land
back for a couple of years from the buyer, in
order to complete ongoing experiments. Given
that we're somewhere near the bottom of the
real estate market, and the university is still
using the land, it might make sense to hold
onto it for a few more years in order to get a
better price.
While the BLM isn't immune to criticism, there
are certainly aspects of its approach that are
worth investigating in light of our current
concerns.
What if a similar approach were adopted
here, with a continuous stream of revenue
coming from leasing the property to a sus
tainably managed farm or forestry operation,
which was also compatible with recreational
uses by nearby residents? It wouldn't be the
kind of quick cash that the proposed sale
would generate, but it does have the poten
tial to be perpetual. It's also a model which,
if successful, might build capacity not only
on this one site, but across the state, for new
types of open public space, fulfilling that uni
versity's goal of educating the state.
Cutbacks in the state park system are
another example of how the economic down
turn has combined with dwindling support for
various public services at the state level. In
Gov. Nathan Deal has zoomed in on the
project he believes will bring a more prosper
ous Georgia: dredging the Savannah River har
bor. The state wants to deepen the Savannah
port by another six feet so that it can handle
the larger ships that will be traversing an
expanded Panama Canal. The price tag is S600
million.
Deal, hoping that Georgia can get the
money for the project from the federal govern
ment, went to Washington, D.C. last week with
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. There had been
hopes that Reed's close political ties to Barack
Obama might persuade the president to give a
hearing to Georgia's request for money.
It was no sale. A sitdown with Obama could
not be worked out. It's commendable
that Deal, a Republican, and Reed,
a Democrat, have put aside their
partisan preferences to work on
a project that could benefit all
Georgians. Deal, however, is con
fronting some political hurdles
he may not be able to overcome.
For one thing, there is the
fact that a majority of Georgia's
congressional delegation has
fought and taunted the president at
every turn since he took office. Deal
himself, while still a member of Congress,
delayed his resignation from the U.S. House so
that he could make a very public vote against
Obama's health care reform program. Deal's
House colleagues, Tom Price and Phil Gingrey,
have been outspoken critics of Obama's health
care reform initiative at every opportunity on
the cable talk shows. During the 2008 cam
paign, Congressman Lynn Westmoreland used a
racially charged word to describe Obama when
he remarked that the Democratic nominee was
too "uppity" to be running for president. Rep.
Paul Broun of Athens has compared Obama's
administration to Hitler and Nazi Germany. At
a town hall meeting last February, Broun was
observed chuckling along with the audience
when one of the participants asked, "Who's
going to shoot Obama?"
The chairman of the Georgia Ports
Authority, which would administer the harbor
dredging project if funds were allocated for
it, is Bainbridge businessman Alec Poitevint.
Poitevint is the former head of the Georgia
Republican Party who is actively supporting
GOP efforts to oust Obama when he runs for
reelection in 2012.
That's politics, of course. Everyone under
stands that Republicans are going to oppose
Democrats and Democrats are going to do the
same thing to Republicans. At the same time,
it's probably unrealistic to think that a presi
dent is going to fork over $600 million for a
harbor project after you've spent two years
attacking his policies and making disparaging
remarks about his ethnic background.
Deal has another problem with
the guy who replaced him in the
House, Tom Graves. Normally, if
a president will not come across
with the money for a local proj
ect, congressmen can put an
"earmark" in the budget that
bypasses the president and frees
up the money. That process is
even easier for a member of the
House Appropriations Committee,
which writes the budget bill.
Graves, who is an Appropriations
Committee member, refuses to do any ear
marking out of deference to his tea party sup
porters. He's not going to earmark money in
the budget for the Savannah project, no mat
ter how badly Deal wants it.
"We don't think that it's over," Deal said
after last week's Washington trip. "We think
if we had $70 million, that's the figure we'd
probably need to go forward on a timely *
schedule."
Deal is doing what all governors try to do,
that is persuade the feds to help pay for a
public project he considers important to his
state. This one, however, may be a bridge too
far.
Tom Crawford tcrawford@gareport.com
Academic farms and forests help to alleviate a deficit of public open space in Georgia. Can those facilities con
tribute to the budgets of the agencies that manage them in positive ways?
That's assuming that the land's sale is
actually the right course of action, and I'm
not so sure that it is. It certainly doesn't
bode well for public higher education when
the nation's first land-grant college is selling
its defining asset. There's also the question
of how the ag school properties' next main
tenance backlog will be addressed. If aging
facilities can't be kept up, selling hard assets
like research farms seems only to be treating
the symptom, rather than the root cause: a
model that isn't self-sufficient. Will another
large tract of land be sold off 10 years from
now as more needed repairs accumulate?
So, why keep this farm? The tract is one of
the last major pieces of undeveloped property
in that part of foreclosure-saturated Oconee
County, providing much needed open space,
even if it is only utilized by neighbors in a
scenic capacity at present, rather than as a
park. Especially in comparison to the western
portion of the country, there is a serious defi
cit of undeveloped and public lands, and so
every acre counts here.
Out west, we might find inspiration for
how to keep public lands public, while actually
generating revenue. The U.S. Bureau of Land
Management is an agency managing millions
of acres in the western United States, much
of it leased to various natural resources-
driven industries like forestry or energy. The
agency actually makes money for the federal
government, and also makes many grants to
support local communities, while support
ing a diverse economic ecosystem around it.
the scaling-down of that "system, many parks
were downgraded to unstaffed recreation sites,
and facilities shuttered or moved to remaining
parks with the goal of becoming an organiza
tion self-sufficient from user fees.
Perhaps these properties could be inves
tigated in a similar way, with a more fine
grained look at how sustainable management
and full-fledged preservation strategies are
applied to public lands, and where opportu
nities might exist for compatible revenue
generating uses in a manner similar to the
BLM's leases. If a slightly less intensive level
of preservation of some state lands yielded
benefits that allowed public lands not just to
operate in the black, but also potentially to
grow, it is definitely worth exploring.
Open space does many things for us, from
providing recreational amenities to more
intangible ecosystem services like controlling
stormwater and filtering pollutants in the
air. Currently, we don't have a way to really
account for the value of those intangible
services, or generate revenue from them.
However, they're still necessary. If sustainable
management of those natural resources could
result in a revenue stream that preserves or
even grows the land base providing those
ecosystem services, then we should consider
them. Hybrid models that combine public
goals with private financing models could be
a solution that results in long-term unsubsi
dized operations.
Kevan Williams aJhensrising@flagpole.com
by TOM TOMORROW
"MEMBERS ...NEED ID TAKE A CARE
FUL LOOK AT PRESIDENT BUSH'S
USE OF WARRANTLESS WIRETAPS—
AND DETERMINE THE RIGHT BALANCE
BETWEEN PROTECTING OUR SECUR-
tn AND SAFEGUARDING ouR CIVIL
LIBERTIES!
THIS MSIIII WSILB
X'VE GOT THE SECRET. UNACCOUNT
ABLE POWER TO DO RHATV.J
WOOO-
Hooooi
JUNE 8, 2011 FLAGPOLE.COM 5
KEVAN WILLIAMS