When we lived in New York it seemed that our local news became national news. I remember having a conversation with my friend Ryan--who lives in the SLO-town bubble--about Sean Bell, a young black unarmed groom in Queens getting blasted by a hale of fifty bullets from cops early in the morning of his wedding day.
But now, being in a "small" town (most everything is small compared to NYC), the local news is precious, but no less real and nearly "catastrophic" to its local community. And barely anybody here is paying attention, let alone people in other cities.
Right now I'm talking about the Cap Metro. This is Austin's light-rail/subway authority. Corrie says she remembers the discussions for the installation of the first line, the Red Line, before her family left Austin in 1995. It just opened on March 22nd of this year. Fifteen years to get that working? Okay...voters rejected more funding in 2000, which pushed back construction timetables, and that kind of thing happens in towns that want to view themselves as hippy-type places but also really like their big cars.
One of the pieces of legislation that was passed to help get the Cap Metro the funds to finish the project, known as the Quarter Cent Program, was ultimately going to generate money for the city. But now, because the train runs rarely and irregularly and hasn't generated the kind of revenue originally forecasted, Austin is facing a fifty-one million dollar shortfall.
The city council is quickly drawing to vote a bond measure to put on this November's ballot to try and raise some cash for thirsty programs that will be needing an infusion probably before then.
You can read more about it here.
here in racist ole az... we just made it illegal to be in the state if you don't have papers and the police are now required to ask all stops and folks just off the street if they have papers that prove they are legal... of course they won't be asking the white man... just the brown man cause well this state's budget is in the toilet and it's all the brown man's fault... if this sounds like Adolf's line of thinking it was passed the day before his birthday....
ReplyDelete