Monday, March 28, 2011

Changeable Minds on the City Council

My granddad said "Smart people change their minds."  I take that to mean"smart people can reconsider and change their minds."

There has been a certain amount of mind-changing in Lubbock's city government.  Two instances in point.

First, the Great Lubbock Visitor's Center debacle.

It was decided by the mayor and a majority of the city council that the city needed a visitor's center, not kiosks or like racks holding sightseeing literature at various places like we already have, but a palatial structure paid for out of the hotel and motel funds.  And there was only one --ONE! -- place it needed to be, and that was on a half block of land between Buddy Holly and what is now Crickets Avenues and 18th and 19th Streets.  No where else, only there. 

One teeny little trouble being that the land was already occupied, by a night club called South Beach.  Not a fancy building, and it was rented to SoBe, which also had an option to purchase the land. 

After much criticism, the city bought the land and immediately, more immediately than anything involving the city usually occurs, the bulldozers appeared and took down the buildings on the site.  Before any further objection or discussion could prevent demolition.

And there the property sat, vacant, blowing dust, for what seemed like an interminable time.  Bulldozers, then,,, nothing.

One factor in the location selected being that a city councilwoman had an interest in an entertainment venue purely by coincidence right next to the land acquired for the new visitor's center.   (She voted on the proposal too.  Some demanded that she abstain but Ann Burgess, the poisonous city attorney, would not let any objection to the councilwoman's vote on be heard.  So much for the wrong-headed theory that the city attorney represents the interests of the public, perish the thought!)

And then, and then, aftr all this, Councilman and former radio personality Paul Beane met with Maria Elena Holly, the professional widow of Buddy Holly, with whom the city had been at loggerheads for years over the right to use the name and/or image of the late Buddy Holly, and with alacrity terms were worked out for a solution to many of the matters in dispute.

And lo and behold the land that was destined to become a palatial visitor's center was now to become a park, named after Buddy Holly and Maria Elena Holly.  [Did any later husband of Maria's object to playing second guitar to her husband, killed years before in the Iowa snows, in 1959?  One pities the fool, whoever he was.]

So what happened to Lubbock's great and abiding need for a visitor's center, RIGHT THERE!, in the Depot District and nowhere else?    All gone.   Last I heard, they were thinking about kiosks.

Second, there was the Great Animal Shelter Controversy.

Lubbock's animal shelter (shelter, ha!  Euphemism  for a place where pets are killed) is located on Municipal Drive just off the interstate near other city maintainance buildings and the LP&L offices.  But the existing facility is too small and needs to be enlarged and updated.  Okay.

The idea was to relocate to a place where the people of Lubbock would find it convenient, so more animals could be seen and mayhap, adopted. 

The trouble with that is that Lubbockites didn't want a kill center in propserous neighborhoods, close to their homes.   So, scratch that idea.  My idea of a semi truck set up as a portable adoption center didn't fly either.

Where to put the new animal control shelter?   Low and behold it was announced that the city had bought property off southeast loop 289, in one of the most out-of-the-way places in the city that could be found.  And that is the new animal shelter, soon to open.  

I guess going by my granddad's aphorism those folks at the city are pretty smart.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

New Coach

I've never been a fan of the idea that you can buy success by buying a track record, either in hiring on a new CEO or a new coach.

How many times has a CEO been hired on for an enormous salary, perks, and golden parachute only to be fired at great cost not long after?  Same with coaches.

Part of this is statistical. All businesses want to succeed, all schools want their sports teams to win.  But about half are going to have losing records.  What makes the difference?  Was Pat Knight so bad and Gillispie so good?

Success is not like a porfolio you carry with you from one gig to another.  It is not readily transferable, it does not always follow the person. 

Sure, I'll grant you that in college sports a famous coach will make a difference in recruiting.  But do coaching skills differ by that much from a team that ends 1-29 as opposed to one that is 29-1?  How much less do coaching skills differ between teams that are 20-10 and those that are 10-20? 

It is the height of bombast and arrogance to declare that winning ways will start immediately.  It is very much like the preacher in the pulpit declaring that his flock is going to heaven if they bless the collection plate.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Bees!

Read in the newspaper this morning about the bees that killed a dog in a Lubbock backyard.

It was said the backyard was full of bees. A single swarm does not take up a whole backyard. If it was "full of bees," then there might have been more than one swarm, which would be possible only if the original hive was nearby.

The article said to call a pest control if you see a few bees in one area. Well, I love to see plenty of bees visiting my flowers. I and others often choose plants that attract bees. I have wanted to keep bees, but the small backyard makes that difficult, plus there is all the time and worry of taking care of them, seeing they are disease-free and so on.

A dog, if it has never been stung by a bee or wasp, will tend to get aggressive if it sees a swarm of bees in its territory, just like a dog will attack a water sprinkler. Unfortunate.   Sad. 

My family had an old farm house north of Idalou West of 400. Abandoned as long as I can remember, but bees had taken up residence in a wall cavity of the house. My grandfather didn't have a good beekeeper's rig and got stung pretty bad pulling off the siding in order to harvest a chunk of honeycomb. Nice to have the bees there though.

I remember when Sears Roebuck at 13th & Q stocked supers and beekeeping equipment. Ah, the good old days.

Bees spread by "swarming."  When bee population or other conditions warrant, a queen (which may be a newly hatched queen or the old queen--only one queen being permitted to a hive) along with a mass of several thousand workers will leave the hive, like emmigrants leaving their home country.  They will fly for a distance, then land in a swarming mass in an attempt to found a new hive.  Commonly happens in May or thereabouts.

Back 20 years ago, I spotted a swarm on a tree in the front yard.  Called a bee keeper, who brought over a hive with honeycomb inside and hived the swarm over a couple of days.  Assuming the bees were healthy, they were worth some bucks.  About that time, a queen cost $20 or more plus shipping.    A few days later, we found a jar of fresh honey left on the porch as thanks.

So I would say, if you find a swarm of bees on your property you do not want, first try to find a bee keeper who might be interested and use pest control as a last resort.  Or. you can go to the library and learn about bees and then try to hive them yourself. 

Like the "prairie dog problem," IMO this is more a problem of too many citified people than bees or p-dogs. When are we ever going to classify people as "pests?" When a new family moves into the neighborhood, is there a pest control to call for that?  

Actually, bees are essential to our well-being.  And a big problem bees have is disease and pesticides.  There reports of bees declining in population, much like amphibians have.  Not good.  Without bees, what or who will fertilize our crops?  Without bees, we can starve.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Lubbock's Homeless Issue

A couple of days ago the little tent city that arose this winter in the park at the corner of Ave. Q and Broadway has moved, to a new location on privately-owned ground, soon to be equipped with more rest rooms, showers, and washers.

Good.   IMO this is a near-optimal solution for a number of the homeless in the city.

Back a few years ago when I was posting on the now defunct Lubbock Avalanche-Journal forum, I put forward the idea that the city should make available a piece of out-of-the-way undeveloped land where the homeless could camp and even erect makeshift shelters out of cardboard and scrap metal and lumber.  The only amenities would be showers, restrooms, and lockers.  There would be rules to fillow--no alcohol, drugs, or weapons--and random inspections by police.

I called it "Peppermint Trees" after the famous hobo song.

My reasoning was two-fold.  First, that to some extent and for some individuals, homelessness is a choice, that ought to be respected and enabled for those who want to take that path.  Second, that providing shelters and structure is to a degree condescending and paternalistic and ineffectual for the chronically homeless.

Also it helps to have a tolerable bottom level to which one can sink without total loss of self-respect.  Maybe for women, the elderly and children the level of social concern should be higher and include shelters, but in Lubbock, Texas, one can camp outside 300+ days a year without extreme discomfort.

And where there is discomfort, well, fine, the discomfort is an incentive to change one's life.  Our society needs more discomfort, I think.

Nobody liked my idea.  They were either of the "we need to help them and bring them out of homelessness" school, or of the opinion that "the homeless are deadbeats by choice who are like flies and rats and are the dregs of society" school.

My father rode the rails during the Great Depression.  Not a lot but some.  Many did back then.  The freight car was the poor man's coach.  Many subsisted for a time in Hoovervilles or stood in breadlines.  I wonder how many of those who condemn the homeless have ancestors who themselves lived on the road or accepted charity.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Lubbock-Downtown Redevelopment

Here follows a series of my posts about Lubbock's planned redevelopment, still in the planning stages.

When I glanced at the newspaper article this morning, I was livid.

Did you notice this statement? "Tepper [the planner working for McDougal Companies] said there was still room for the Salvation Army’s complex, the size of a city block, at 16th Street between Avenues J and K."

Well [dad-burned, golnobbit, kerblasted] the Salvation Army is there right now and who the [heck]  is this Tepper to be telling property owners whether they have a right to remain there or not? To continue operations or not?????????????????

Time to load up the shotguns and go hunt some Tepper.

Hey you guys who mouth off about Obama being a socialist, does it bother you that a socialistically planned economy'development is on tap right here in Lubbock-city?

It is bad enough that we have the city authorizing McDougal Companies to come up with a plan while McDougal companies are involved in property ownership, property management, and realty activities, which is as clearly a conflict of interest as you will ever see in all your born days, but for those [so and sos] at McDougal to presume to be prescribing property usages in the downtown area is socialistic, communistic, and unAmerican. It is time to take a lesson from Egypt and Libya and points east and conduct an armed march on city hall.

There. Now I'm like to get one of those [illegal]  "criminal trespass" notices served on me....
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The North Overton project [a massive redevelopment project of a whole Lubbock neighborhood] was private. What is planned for downtown is not.

What is planned for downtown is authoritarian planning imposed by government. You get people like Tepper who want to call the tune that others dance to.

I notice no one except Roger has responded to the matter of the McDougals being in a position to dictate (with city council approval) the course of development while they are major property owners downtown.

For example, McDougal Companies has a major ownership stake in the Wells Fargo building, which they also manage.

For example, you see McDougal Realty signs all over downtown, and more nowadays.

For example, the McDougals are sitting on a property that was once the Lubbock Hotel, that they wish to sell as condominiums. At this time, they likely have no takers, and that is likely why the project sits stalled and incomplete. Well, by structuring downtown redevelopment in their preferred direction, the McDougals will, they hope, be able to make that a viable project. And remember...

Remember that the McDougals are being paid, by the city, by taxpayers, BY US, for their work in consulting/planning concerning the redevelopment! Which means that we are paying them to enhance their profit manyfold.

No one except Roger and I sees this as one huge conflict of interest?

And don't you think it's funny how folks who are quick to protest government involvement in private business have no object to the manipulation of zoning and code enforcement and the use of condemnation in order to effect a master plan for the downtown area?

My proposal was to accomplish redevelopment via tax incentives and assistance in finding loans and grants, not by compelling private land owners to comply with government planning. Not by mass bull-dozing of buildings.

And this Tepper quote buried in the newspaper story shows precisely how arrogant and doctatorial these planners are going to be.
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Forgetting about government control and the tentacles of the McDougals, there was a entrepeneur who first put into practice entirely at his own risk the redevelopment of downtown.

His name was Kim Morris.

He successfully renovated the old Hester's/Draughan's and Welsh Plumbing buildings into living or mixed use space. He was the first to remodel downtown buildings for apartment space. Others followed with the abortive Anderson Jewelry building project and projects on Broadway just west of the underpass--which look good, btw.

Morris bought or optioned masses of downtown real estate, including the LubbockHotel/Caprock Retirement Center, the Myrick/Green building, Murphy's Dept. Store, the Townhouse Inn. He had great plans for Lubbock's downtown.

He was a partner in the remodeling of an old livestock-killing, meat-packing plant on the lip of the canyon into an entertainment venue. He was at odds with the city, who started another amphitheater project at the same time.

Unfortunately, Kim Morris did not have the financing or political influence of the McDougals. His little empire was highly leveraged and collapsed and he was sent to prison over some of his efforts to keep it going.

He was the first to have the vision and to bet his financial life on it.

Contrast that entrepeneurship with the bets being placed and guaranteed with our money in this new downtown redevelopment.
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Advocate, it's not the wealth of the McDougals that I object to. It's the interweaving of their interests with government. And the power of government to control land uses and development projects in the downtown area, which according to that AJ article you quoted, is more and more looking like the McDougal Companies' control of land uses downtown.

I was delighted that the McDougals launched a renovation of the Lubbock Hotel. A private enterprise, privately financed. Great! I myself am cool with the North Overton redevelopment, to the extent that public monies and influence were not involved. But for McDougal companies to be awarded a city contract to plan and manage downtown redevelopment is a whole other animal.

And remember, most of the city council are friends/cronies/proteges of the McDougals. Which means minimal oversite or criticism of the redevelopment plan.