The Local Area Watch

UNBUNDLING THE BAR

There's a movement afoot to loosen the monopolistic grip lawyers have upon the legal representation of parties in litigation.  This reform is hottest in several sagebrush states where "do-it-yourself" is a long-standing tradition.  It's called "unbundling", which allows lawyers to provide useful litigation services to clients who are otherwise appearing pro se (without a lawyer) in court.  Unbundling allows a pro se litigant to obtain the expert advice of a lawyer without that lawyer obligating himself in the representation of the litigant's claims.  This saves the pro se litigant a great deal in court expenses while getting practical assistance from an attorney.

Over the past few years the state bars in Alaska, Washington, California, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Maine, and Florida have formalized unbundling by adopting rules of professional conduct to govern it.  Other state bars, including those in neighboring Illinois and Ohio, are joining the unbundling movement.  The stodgy legal culture here will probably make the Michigan bar a johnny-come-lately.

The primary argument hidebound barristers have against unbundling is that it encourages ordinary citizens like you and me to go into court without an attorney and that we are really too ignorant of the nuances and sophistications of the practice of law to be trusted with handling our own legal complaints.  Of course, that misses the point.  Most of us would prefer to be represented by an attorney if we get mired in a lawsuit, but we cannot either afford or find one with sufficient experience for our case.  So, we're faced with either going into court pro se or giving up without a fight.  Unbundling addresses that dilemma.

It is really past time for the reactionary part of the bar (including judges) to get over their disdain for pro se litigants.  When it comes to the practice of law, there are basically two areas:  Litigation and transactions.  Transactions include the stuff of contracts, wills, trusts, and all manner of agreements.  Most people do these things without any legal advice.  For example, how many of you hired an attorney to review the purchase of your current home?  We use lawyers for agreements when we need them, not for every one of them.

So what's the difference with the other half of the legal trade, litigation?  Why is it the general assumption of lawyers and judges that a person should never enter a courtroom without a lawyer in tow?  Why shouldn't the legal profession accommodate our wide of preferences like unbundling does instead of shoehorning us into a one-size-fits-all approach to litigation?  Our legal complaints and our defense of complaints against us are our business, just like our contracts and wills are our business.  Isn't it our prerogative to decide what if any expert assistance we hire to handle our affairs?

PETTIFOGGING FOR THE PROSECUTOR

In response to yesterday's article about Kent County Prosecutor William Forsyth not pressing charges against the Boardwalk polluters, I received a comment to the effect that I was pointing the finger at the wrong guy.  My correspondent sought to educate me upon the fact that violations of state environmental law are the responsibility of the Attorney General's office.

This is a pettifogging fact I am painfully aware of.  I have already dealt with Asst. Attorney General Tom Piotrowski a number of times regarding the environmental crimes of the Boardwalk developers.  I know the drill.  (Click here to learn what the stumbling block is for Piotrowski.)  However, it's worth noting that what Ryan Gorth allegedly did could be prosecuted as an environmental crime by the Attorney General's office which would explicitly allow for the recovery of the costs of cleaning up the mercury he spilled, but that's not what is happening.  Instead Forsyth has taken the lead to prosecute the boy under criminal statutes that are ordinarily his jurisdiction.

Nothing is stopping Forsyth from applying the same laws to the Boardwalk developers, if he wanted to act against them.  Furthermore, Forsyth had a specific opportunity to prosecute one of the associates of the Boardwalk polluters on a perjury charge.  That was Robert Wardrop, one of the "River Rats" who made false statements to the Kent County Circuit Court which abetted the polluters' illegal dumping of the Boardwalk's hazardous waste.  Even though the perjury charge was supported by factual findings of the court, the matter was reviewed by one of Forsyth's deputies and he declined to act.

Again, dear readers, decide for yourselves why Forsyth falls like a pile of bricks on a minor transgression against a kid with no political connections and yet sees no evil in what the bigshots among the Boardwalk polluters did.

POISON AND THE PROSECUTOR

Kent County Prosecutor William Forsyth is charging an 18-year-old high school student with a felony that carries a ten-year prison sentence for spilling a vial of mercury in a classroom.  Meanwhile Forsyth has refused to take any action against the Boardwalk developers who deliberately dumped at least 10,000 times that amount of the deadly metal in local neighborhoods to evade the costs of proper hazardous waste disposal.

Forsyth has accused Ryan Gorter of malicious destruction of property because on May 11th he brought to Cedar Springs High School a small amount of mercury which he spilled in a classroom.  It cost the school district more than $40,000 to clean up the hazardous material, because they completely stripped the classroom to ensure that none of the dime-sized spill remained.  According to Forsyth, Gorter did more than spill the material, he stepped on it and rubbed it into the carpet.  For that reason and the cost involved, the prosecutor insists that Gorter must be charged with a felony.

Of course, mercury can be a toxic poison in sufficient quantity and concentration.  It is an insidious substance that can build up in body until it reaches a toxic level that damages vital organs, especially in children.  So let’s say that the Cedar Springs school district didn’t overreact in response to a miniscule and isolated spill of mercury in one of its classrooms.  Let’s say that Prosecutor Forsyth isn’t grandstanding when he says he must throw the book at the youngster who caused the spill.  That still leaves me scratching my head …

If a dime-sized spill of mercury by a boy who didn’t know of its danger means he should go to prison for ten years, why have Forsyth and his prosecutors turned a blind eye to the massive releases of arsenic, lead, and mercury into our neighborhoods by the Boardwalk developers?  These polluters spread real poison among us.  They did it deliberately.  They know how toxic it was.  They didn’t care.  They plotted their removal of this hazardous waste from the Boardwalk project site on the sly.  They lied to their workers about what they were digging up and dumping off-site.  They perjured themselves and faked evidence to evade responsibility for their crimes.  And when Forsyth had an opportunity to hold them accountable for all this two years ago, he refused to do so.

Why is that?  Why does Ryan Gorter get the full brunt of the law and the Boardwalk developers who made millions in profit by dumping their poison on the cheap get a free pass from Forsyth?  Well, you see, folks, when it comes election time, Forsyth gets to show you how much he cares about the children and their environment by leaning on Gorter, whereas going after the Boardwalk developers all he does is make a lot of power political enemies.  It’s all about what’s good for Forsyth’s career, not the safety of the public he was elected to serve.

Remember the thirteen tons of pure arsenic, lead, and mercury Forsyth let the Boardwalk developers dump in your neighborhoods the next time he asks for your vote.

CITY BLOCKS RELEASE OF BOARDWALK FRAUD RECORDS

If you have been following the comments on "The Blackballed Request", you know that a few of our readers filed with the City of Grand Rapids the same Freedom of Information Act request as we at L.A.W. did for the disclosure of public records relating to the value of the Boardwalk project on Monroe Avenue north of downtown.

As previously explained, the City has in its possession two written statements from the Boardwalk developers that conflict as to the amount they invested in the project.  In the first statement claimed they put $31.5 million into it at a time when they were preparing to close $26.5 million in loans with Old Kent Bank (now Fifth Third Bank) and National City Community Development Corporation.  Such an investment figure would support a high valuation of the Boardwalk property to properly collateralize, per federal regulations, the Old Kent and National City loans.  However, in the second statement they claimed to have put only $20 million into the project, including the original purchase price of the property.  This statement was made at the time the City was assessing the Boardwalk project for its taxable value.  Accordingly, the assessor's office low-balled the property's value and assessed it at about half of the bank appraisal.

By making these conflicting statements as to their investment, the Boardwalk developers had it both ways.  The high investment figure got them the big loan from the banks; the low investment figure got them a cut-rate tax assessment.  Of course, both statements cannot be true.  If the $31.5 million figure is false, then that would suggest bank fraud.  If the $20 million figure is false, then that would indicate tax fraud.  Someone is getting screwed, and we wanted the public record of these conflicting statements to determine who that is.  So, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request as shown in "The Blackballed Request" article.

Asst. City Attorney Daniel Ophoff, who is also helping to defend the Boardwalk developers in a hazardous waste complaint pending in Kent County Circuit Court, succeeded in blocking our requests on a false pretext.  When we reported this problem, three of our readers volunteered to make the same request.  Because Ophoff was unable to fabricate a rationale for blocking their requests, he agreed to disclose the requested public records.  But not really.  Yesterday we learned from reader Robert Harrison that Ophoff claims that he lacks sufficient information to identify two of the requested records and so cannot release them.  Can you guess which ones?  That's right:  The two letters containing conflicting statements as to the amount invested in the Boardwalk project.

Here is how those records were described to Ophoff in the FOIA request:

"2. A letter and all attachments from Thomas E. Beckering to the City of Grand Rapids, dated about February 2001, representing the actual cost of the Boardwalk project as $31.5 million"

and ...

"3. A letter and all attachments from the developer of the Boardwalk to the City of Grand Rapids representing the actual cost of the project as $20 million (this is the letter City Assessor Glen Beekman identified in an e-mail message to City Manager Kurt Kimball on April 28, 2005, at 4:28 p.m.)".

Now Ophoff claims he has no idea of what records are being asked for.  Of course, he knows precisely what is being requested, which is why he is blocking their release.  We'll keep you posted on the apparent fraud Ophoff is helping the Boardwalk developers to cover up.  Meanwhile, you can be assured that your elected guardians, Mayor Heartwell and the City Commission, are doing nothing to bring Ophoff to heel.  After all, folks, they have to work with him, not you, everyday.

ST. GEORGE AND THE A.W.O.L. ENVIRONMENTALIST

To distract us from the City’s budget woes, Mayor George Heartwell returned from a mayors’ conference in Salt Lake City with a resolution in hand demanding that state and federal governments enact policies to bring the United States in accord with the carbon-cutting Kyoto Protocols to reduce global warming.  Heartwell put the measure before the City Commission, which unanimously and idiotically approved the plea to embrace these economy-wrecking protocols.  The fatuousness of the entire enterprise belies belief.

Not one out of seven commissioners knows enough about the Kyoto Protocols to know that there is no scientific foundation for the claim that human activity is causing “global warming”, let alone whether or not a general increase in temperatures is even a bad thing – assuming that it’s even happening.  (Climatological data shows that the post-Ice Age warming trend has in fact reversed.  It peaked most recently in the Middle Ages.)  Nor have any of the solons of the city clued into the fact that the Kyoto Protocols are a dead letter everywhere else in the world.  The Third World countries rejected them for the good reason that they are not going to stop their industrializing economies to soothe the pieties of bien pensant Westerners like St. George the Self-Righteous, and the Europeans have no intention of ever implementing them.

ST. GEORGE

Meanwhile, the Grand Rapids Press uncritically ran last Saturday editorials in support of the City Commission’s vote to destroy River City’s economy from Heartwell and his ally, Tom Leonard, executive director of the West Michigan Environmental Action Council (WMEAC).  The Press let Heartwell blather on and on about his enlightenment in Salt Lake City by so-called experts in the “pending disaster known as global warming”, apparently too witless to realize that none of the majority of scientists who have refused to join the global warming bandwagon would not have been invited to dissent at such a cozy gathering of like-minded Chicken Littles.  Mindlessly, Heartwell drones on about how we in the U.S. and River City in particular must cut the carbon we emit into the air oblivious to the incredible feats of conservation we have already achieved in the use of fossil fuels in this country over the past three decades.  There just isn’t much more in the way of greenhouse gases to eliminate in the U.S. short of shutting down the country.

Ah yes, Heartwell does invoke the hoary escape hatch for all extreme environmentalist demands to get rid of fossil fuels:  Renewable energy.  Well, it appears that the mayor just doesn’t get it when it comes to the engineering of the energy infrastructure of any modern economy.  Fossil fuels are extremely compact compared to energy from wind, solar, hydro-electric, and biomass.  For any of these alternatives to provide any significant substitution for fossil fuels would entail huge tracts of land that would disrupt nature far beyond current industrial activities.  Windmills would need millions of acres of land along the migratory routes of birds.  Solar panels would carpet the deserts and plains destroying local habitats.  Hydro-electric would dam rivers and flood valleys.  Biomass would necessitate tilling areas that are marginal or even hostile to farming.  And none of this addresses the most basic problem with most of these alternatives when it comes to the nation’s electrical grid:  The generation of electricity must be synchronized with its consumption or the system blacks out.  A coal-fired generating plant can be turned on or shut down as electrical demand increases or decreases.  You can’t turn the wind on or off as you please.

THE A.W.O.L. ENVIRONMENTALIST

OK, enough of the primer on energy.  You get the idea.  St. George hasn’t a clue when it comes to the real world of energy policy.  He’d do more to stop global warming by shutting his piehole.  But there is more to this problem than his self-righteous sermonizing.  To address that, let me turn to the second editorial the Press ran on Saturday, the one by Leonard of WMEAC.  Leonard’s statement is burdened by the same faulty assumptions underlying Heartwell’s sermon, but he at least does us the favor of bulletin-pointing the resolution Heartwell and the commissioners passed.  In doing so, he highlights the resolution’s Trojan Horse of “promoting sustainable building practices” within the City, which empowers the City Commission and staff to embrace whatever goofy green ideas come along that make it harder and more expensive to build in River City.

That is the reason why Leonard’s editorial is disgusting.  He and his group are fixated upon telling us how we are going to live our lives instead of taking up the gauntlet for us when malefactors like the Boardwalk developers dump real poison into our backyards.  Although Leonard and WMEAC received piles of scientific, photographic, and videotape evidence from the Local Area Watch of the illegal excavation, transport, and disposal of 26,000 of hazardous waste from the Boardwalk project site, they did nothing but write a polite letter to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ).  When the MDEQ responded by telling Leonard and his gang to bug off, that’s what they did.  We received no support whatsoever from River City’s foremost environmental activists as we have fought in the courts over the past three years to get the Boardwalk developers to clean up the toxic materials they spilled onto our streets, into our storm sewer system, and into illegal landfills like that at the Monroe Avenue Water Filtration Plant.

Leonard and WMEAC were A.W.O.L. in this battle to protect you from the greedy scheme of the Boardwalk developers to turn a buck by burying their poison where your children play.  Yet, Leonard and WMEAC have the time and the resources to urge on the half-baked plans of Mayor Heartwell that do nothing but give the City government an excuse to interfere with how you live your life.  I am heartily sick of progressive phonies like St. George and the A.W.O.L. Environmentalist who talk up how much they care about you and your family when they want something from you and give you nothing but self-righteous sermons about how you need to do better when they fail to deliver.

MISS BLISS DIDN’T VOTE AND THAT’S A GOOD THING

As reported last week, Grand Rapids mayor George Heartwell endorsed youth over experience in this year’s City Commission race in the 2nd Ward.  His nod went to youngster Rosalynn Bliss over oldsters Shaula Johnston and Art Kroon.  On Friday the Grand Rapids Press followed up with its usual campaign season article on the record of voter participation of the candidates for local office.  It found that Miss Bliss made it to the polls only six times out of the past twenty-three elections, whereas her elderly opponents each missed only a handful of elections.

Apparently among right-thinking folks not voting is a bad bad thing.  I suspect that’s doubly so for Miss Bliss, a self-identified progressive who believes that the government (i.e., taxpayer dollars) is the solution to most of life’s problems.  However, I’m not so big on voter participation.  If you don’t know what the hell is going on in an election, you shouldn’t be in the voter booth pulling a lever.  Most young people pay no attention to the candidates or issues in a typical election, especially local ones.  Of those who have, too many merely parrot slogans they’ve picked up from those who have influenced them (let’s say a self-righteous banker turned preacher turned mayor).  So, I actually think it’s a good thing that most twenty-somethings never make it to a polling station.

Miss Bliss doesn’t put it quite my way.  Her excuse:  “You’re creating your space in the world, developing roots.  As you feel more connected, you feel you need to get involved.  With age, it’s true, we learn how important voting is.”  Well, that’s, um, very organic.  But her last statement sums it up correctly.  Voting is too important to encourage to the polls people who have paid no attention to public matters.  If Miss Bliss avoided the polls until recently because she had other things to do in her callow youth than follow the to-and-fro of politics, good for her.  She did the honorable thing by not casting ballots in ignorance.  A decent respect for democracy demands nothing less.

BLAME YOURSELVES, MOM AND DAD

Everyone is up and arms over the big increases in tuition announced by most of the state’s public universities over the past couple of weeks.  Even Guv Jen is irked, enough to denounce the schools for doing so.  The tuition hikes run as high as 18.5% at Wayne State University.  The increases at our two biggest schools are pretty stiff, too:  Michigan State and U-M are sticking freshmen with 13.5% and 12.3% boosts, respectively, in the price for each credit.  There’s even sticker shock at nearby public universities:  Central Michigan 9.2%, Ferris 8.9%, and Grand Valley 7.6%.  (Western Michigan has not yet announced its tuition increase.)

The schools are blaming the cuts in taxpayer funding that Guv Jen and the state legislature pushed through to help cure the state’s budget deficit.  Of course, none of the schools are blaming the bloated costs of lifetime tenure for their professors, under the rubric of protecting their academic freedom for a herd mentality, and the never-ending building programs, an example of which is the recent multi-million remodeling of the residence of Eastern Michigan’s president.  The idea that any of our public universities would cut their well-padded costs to make the education of our kids more affordable doesn’t even exist as a consideration.

Why?  In the end, it’s your fault, Mom and Dad.  You have bought into this insane mantra that anyone who wants a good job has got to have a college education.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  About half of the jobs that pay over forty grand a year do not require a four-year degree.  To the extent that a large part of the other half does demand a sheepskin, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that any kid with a head on his shoulders should be able to get a degree.  In other words, employers really do not want to hire a resume, they want to hire a good employee – something that a college education does nothing to create.

Yet, Mom and Dad, you pillage your savings or encourage your children to go deep into debt to pay for four, five, six years of schooling larded with drinking, sex, and drugs (why do you think they call those years “school daze”?) so that some mediocre professor can afford his-and-her Volvos and a summer home on the lake.  By the way, that professor is not even teaching your kids.  She has one of her wage-slave grad students doing that while she’s busy writing her seminal academic work on the feminist interpretation of quantum mechanics and the patriarchal oppression manifest in the study of physics.

OK, I’m having some fun.  There’s no question that a college education is the right track for students who aspire to enter into certain professions.  But just what head start in the world does a business degree give a kid?  I’m not talking about a Harvard MBA that lands junior a six-figure starting salary on Wall Street.  I’m talking about a bachelor’s from Central Michigan that might help your pride-and-joy get a sales rep job.  Instead of your kid starting his adult life with as much as thirty or forty grand of student debt, how much further ahead financially would he have been to take out of high school an entry-level job in the industry or business he likes and showed his employers over the next four years his moxie and smarts?

One thing is certain.  Our colleges and universities will never stop raising their prices so long as we continue to pay them.

NO MORE BREAD AND CIRCUSES

The Grand Rapids Press was miffed this weekend about the City of Grand Rapids axing its special events fund that pays for “ethnic” festivals and parades to celebrate our diversity.  I think the cuts are just as well.  I’m pretty sure the Santa Claus parade isn’t all that multicultural, Oktoberfest on Calder Mall is just about as ersatz an ethnicity as you can get here in town, and, of course, everyone knows we are all Irish when the Hibernians march on St. Patrick’s Day.  Lots of fun, but I don’t see how any of this merits support from the city government or the taxpayers other than occasionally making available a public street or plaza or park for the festivities.

Instead of burnishing its p.c. credentials with tears over these special events cuts, the Press might have worked on reporting all the news about another cut.  Last Thursday was the final night for the adult softball leagues sponsored by the City parks department.  The City has slashed $2.3 million from the parks department budget.  In turn that department has shut down the softball program that has been going strong since 1962.  The odd thing about this is, as reported here earlier, that the teams in this program all pay a fee to cover the cost of using city facilities.

If the softball program is self-funding, why end it?  That question deserves an answer.  I think you’ll find the reason is the same one public school districts have for canceling the buses when voters are resistant to a hike in the millage:  Petty bureaucratic vindictiveness.

PFIZER BAILS ON MICHIGAN BIO-TECH

Pfizer Inc. is the largest drug company in the world.  It has facilities here in the state at Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, Portage, and Holland.  Yesterday, the company announced that it is restructuring to eliminate $4 billion in expenses by 2008 to return to double-digit growth in profits.  The means to that end is the reduction of its research and development at Pfizer.  As a consequence, the manufacturing plant in Holland will be closed, pharmaceutical research programs in Kalamazoo and Portage will be terminated, and drug development in Ann Arbor will move to Connecticut.

Pfizer's decision will effect up to 8,500 "bio-tech" jobs in Michigan and cut out much of the substance in the state's mostly imaginary "life sciences" corridor.  Pharmaceutical R&D is one of those many activities the Michigan's economic development bureaucrats and boosters lumped into the "life sciences" to beef up the state's bio-tech credentials.  Now the biggest chunk of that in Michigan will soon be gone.  So much for Guv Jen traipsing around the globe touting Michigan's bio-tech future.  Maybe she should have been minding the store and not let another big employer slip out of the state.

Better yet, the governor should be sticking to basics and knock down the impediments to doing business in general in this state.  Of course, that would mean giving up the political power game of picking winners and losers.  It would also mean admitting that the Michigan "life sciences" corridor is the emperor with no clothes.  Not likely so long as there's opportunity to stick the taxpayers with the bill for Guv Jen's big-ticket bio-tech/high-tech program.

ANYTHING BUT THE NEWS

Well, that's not entirely true.  In this afternoon's edition of the Grand Rapids Press, the second bombing of London's Underground was the top headline -- although just barely.  It was squeezed in between a masthead assuring us of all the fun we will find at the Ionia Free Fair and the really big news of the day:

[1] The big lake's beaches contain bird droppings (message: don't feed the gulls);

[2] The Pistons hired a new coach (apparently the front page is now the sports page);

[3] Little girls were wearing lots a make-up at last night's Hillary Duff concert (who's Hillary Duff?).

Yes, I know, folks, I am running an article critical of the Press's front page quite frequently now.  That's the point.  I want to show that a Grand Rapids Press front page full of fluff is not newsworthy, remarkable, and even shocking.  It's the norm, and that's the news.

How trivial the Press has become is disgusting.  It is contemptuous of us.  I remember as a paperboy for the Press thirty years ago delivering a newspaper with a front page chock full of news.  For example, day after day the front page featured a map of the North Vietnamese advance upon Saigon until its fall.  It was serious day-by-day reporting of a major event.  It was a newspaper for adults.

Now it's just one big Flair section.

BETHANY DROPS BAN AGAINST CATHOLICS

WOOD TV8 just reported that Bethany Christian Services, a national adoption agency headquartered here in Grand Rapids, will no longer reject the adoption applications of Roman Catholic couples.  We reported here earlier this week that the Mississippi offices had a policy of refusing to consider Catholics as adoptive parents and that Glenn De Mots, president of Bethany, had no problem with that.  Today the Mississippi state director of Bethany announced that its offices will no longer discriminate against Catholics because of their religion, and Bethany's national headquarters affirmed that this the policy of the entire organization.

Little by little progress is made.

HEARTWELL AND FLOWER POWER

Either Grand Rapids mayor George Heartwell thinks the voters are idiots or he somehow time-warped himself back to 1970.  Yesterday he resurrected the hippie-dippy youth movement by endorsing Rosalyn Bliss for the open city commission seat in the 2nd Ward.  Bliss is all of 29 years old and for that reason, according to Heartwell, won his endorsement over oldsters Shaula Johnston (58) and Art Kroon (64).  Earnestly the mayor reminded us:  "It's very important for this generation to have a voice on the commission."

Gee, I would've thought it was very important for the residents of the 2nd Ward to have voice on the commission -- especially a voice that will seriously deal with the City's unresolved fiscal crisis, the looming tsunami of pension fund liabilities, out-of-control health benefits for city employees, the exodus of manufacturing from the city, crumbling streets and untended parks, a city manager and staff that don't understand they work for the city commissioners not vice versa, a general contempt throughout the city government for the principle of open government, and, not least of all, the huge liability the city could be saddled with for its role in turning the Monroe Avenue Water Filtration Plant into an unlicensed hazardous waste landfill.

Instead, Heartwell tells us that youth should win the day.  Of course, this is disingenuous although he hopes the voters will be stupid enough to not see that.  Case in point, Heartwell has not endorsed either of the conspicuous youngsters in the 1st and 3rd Ward races, David Shaffer and Daniel Tietema respectively.  Notably, those young men who failed to win the mayor's favor are conservative pro-business candidates, whereas Bliss is the apple of the eye of the Progressive Women's Alliance of West Michigan.  So much for youth being the true reason for Heartwell's endorsement of Bliss.

Why Heartwell is publicly supporting Bliss is simple.  She is a former schoolmate of his daughter's, a fellow activist with his wife, and now his protege in the loony left politics that have done far more to destroy the vitality of our urban centers than have ever truly helped the needy in our cities out of their plights.  One self-righteous scold in the service of the failed prescriptions of the Great Society, people's republic political conformity, and flower power dippiness is enough for most of the taxpayers and residents of Grand Rapids.  Apparently Heartwell disagrees.  He wants a soulmate to join him in pushing the discredited policies of the past.  Ironically, that champion of the old and tired is the youngster in the race.

ENCORE: GENERAL GEORGE

[Note:  This article was originally posted on March 7, 2005.]

Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell pumps and preens himself in Friday's Press with this comment:  "What mayor wouldn't fight to protect his city, even if he has to wage a battle against the White House?"

The threat General George poses the White House is about as large as a flea on one of its SAM battery radar screens.  Of course, he knows that, hence the amateurish moral posturing of his question.  Even so, let's answer that question seriously.  What mayor wouldn't fight for his city?  The answer:  George K. Heartwell.

While General George lobs empty threats against the White House, he refuses to take on his own City Attorney's Office that has blocked all discussion of resolving the Toxic Towers dumping scandal.  The City taking the side of the angels in this battle could mean the recovery of millions of dollars in fines and penalties from the polluters for the taxpayers of Grand Rapids.  Instead, the City's current alliance with the polluters puts it in the position to be assessed these same fines and penalties.

To give you some idea of the magnitude of the potential penalties, under state law alone, the polluters face a fine for just one truckload of the poison (that they dug up at The Boardwalk project site and then dumped into the tanks of the old Monroe Avenue Water Filtration Plant) that would cover the City's entire budget deficit for a year!  Eight hundred of these illicit transports of hazardous waste are recorded on surveillance videotape that has been submitted as evidence to the Kent County Circuit Court, the FBI, and the MDEQ.  You do the math, dear readers.

Yet, General General flays away at the White House instead taking on a battle that he can actually win for us.  He could take up the cause of the residents exposed by the polluters to The Boardwalk's poison and the taxpayers who have an opportunity to make the polluters pay.  But he won't.  The City Attorney's Office has ordered him to stand down in this battle, and so General George has taken leave from the fight.

E-mail the mayor today and ask him why he is letting the City Attorney's Office side with the polluters.  Better yet, tell General George to do his job and order the City Attorney's Office to represent us, the residents and taxpayers of Grand Rapids, instead of burying skeletons for the last administration.  The lawyers in that office -- Daniel Ophoff (and more here and here), Janice Bailey, and Catherine Mish -- work for you!  Not for ex-Mayor Logie and his clients.  Remind General George of that.  If he won't listen, tell your commissioners to whip the City Attorney's Office into shape.

ENCORE: THE KNOW-NOTHING, DO-NOTHING CITY COMMISSION

[Note:  This was originally published on March 16, 2005 as the third article in our "River of Corruption" series highlighting the failure of various public officials and institutions to respond to the illegal dumping of hazardous waste at the Monroe Avenue Water Filtration Plant and elsewhere.]

Our first entrant into the Hall of Shame for its role in the Toxic Towers dumping scandal is the Grand Rapids City Commission.  The commissioners distinguished themselves in their submissiveness to then-Mayor John Logie's agenda in support of the Boardwalk project (a.k.a. Toxic Towers).  The two largest clients of Logie's law firm had interests in the project (Fifth Third Bank -- then known as Old Kent Bank -- who is one of the Boardwalk developers, and Spectrum Health, whose training consortium is the Boardwalk's anchor tenant), and never once did the commissioners challenge Logie on this glaring conflict of interest between his public duty and his private business affairs.  Instead they rolled over for him each and every time the project needed help from the City.

Let's review the City Commission's record.

CITY TAX SUBSIDY:  City staffers looked hard and long to find a tax-subsidy for the developers of the Boardwalk project.  They found none.  No problem.  Logie was sitting on the board of the City's Monroe North Tax Increment Financing Authority (MNTIFA), and so they invented a subsidy funded by that agency to the tune of $2.5 million.  The City Commission rubberstamped the deal in September 1999 on the vague promise that the developers would include lots of low-income housing in the project.

When the Boardwalk developers inevitably reneged on the low-income housing to make room for high-rent apartments and commercial office space, Logie had the MNTIFA's attorney draft an amendment to preserve the tax subsidy deal.  The fact that this attorney, Dick Wendt of Dickinson Wright P.L.L.C., worked for the same firm representing the Boardwalk developers alerted none of the commissioners to question the propriety of the amendment.  The City Commission again rubberstamped it in June 2001.

However, to get the tax subsidy the Boardwalk developers had to show the City invoices recording at least $25 million of improvements they had put into the project.  The developers refused to do this.  Instead lead developer Thomas Beckering submitted to the City a building permit claiming that there were $150 million in improvements.  When that didn't work, the City interpreted the permit to mean only $15 million in improvements were made, allowing the City Assessor to value the completed Broadwalk project at less than half of the $31 million that Beckering had stated in a letter to the Assistant City Manager Eric DeLonge that his group had invested in the project!

Thus, the Boardwalk developers got their tax subsidy from the City through a low-ball assessment, and the City Commission has done nothing to date to correct this.

SALE OF THE FILTRATION PLANT:  James Czanko, the Boardwalk's project manager, complained to City officials that remediation of the project's hazardous waste was going to be very expensive.  (No kidding.  Everything along Monroe Avenue north of downtown is built atop contaminated urban fill.)  He needed a solution.  Fortunately, then-Mayor Logie was there to provide the Boardwalk developers with what they wanted:  A cheap nearby landfill.

In February 1999 Logie persuaded the City Commission to reject a $600,000 offer to purchase the defunct Monroe Avenue Water Filtration Plant and to accept instead a $400,000 offer from Dykema Excavators Inc. for the purpose of "storing dirt" there.  As it happened Dykema Excavators was one of the lead contractors for the Boardwalk project and its owner was also one of the project's developers.  The Filtration Plant was located only a few blocks north of the Boardwalk project site, and its grounds contained large empty concrete water tanks -- ready-made to be filled with dirt, such as the Boardwalk's contaminated soil (see "Poison" ).

Commissioner James Jendrasiak and some of his fellow commissioners were suspicious enough of Dykema Excavators' plan to use the Filtration Plant for the odd purpose of dirt storage.  They were concerned that Dykema Excavators would dump "toxic dirt", as Jendrasiak phrased it, into the plant's water tanks.  So they added to the purchase agreement a provision that required Dykema Excavators to have all dirt to be used as fill at the Filtration Plant inspected at its source by the City Engineer to ensure that it was free of contamination.

Enforcement of this provision was immediately dropped by the City Engineer after the sale of the Filtration Plant to Dykema Excavators was closed in May 1999.  Thereafter, the City's Environmental Protection Department refused to take any complaints that contaminated soil was being dumped at the Filtration Plant.  When the City Commission was informed of the City's failure to protect the surrounding Creston Heights neighborhood from Dykema Excavators turning the Filtration Plant into an illegal hazardous waste dump, it did nothing under the direction of then-Mayor Logie.

DESTRUCTION OF CITY RECORDS:  Logie and the City Commissioners discussed the illegal dumping at the Filtration Plant at least twice.  Once on March 6, 2001, and again on May 8, 2001, in executive sessions closed to the public.  At the March closed meeting Logie browbeat the commissioners into subsmission.  According to Commissioner Jendrasiak who attended the meeting, Logie said that the allegations of dumping at the Filtration Plant were lies and that there was no conflict of interest between his political involvement in this matter and his business ties.  The City Commission acquiesced to Logie.

At the May closed meeting Logie learned that the commissioners had requested a report from the City's Environmental Protection Department about the problem at the Filtration Plant.  He leaned on the commissioners to scrub the report.  Again according to Commissioner Jendrasiak, Logie told them that they would be embarrass by an inquiry that would turn up nothing improper about Dykema Excavators' use of the Filtration Plant.  Again the City Commission caved in to Logie.  (Scientific analysis of soil tests taken three years later prove that Logie misled the City Commission.)

Consequently, the Local Area Watch asked Logie to disclosed to the public the minutes of these closed sessions.  He refused.  In January 2002 we then sued for their disclosure under Michigan's Freedom of Information Act.  In March 2002 Logie learned that these closed session minutes might become evidence in a lawsuit in U.S. District Court.  Therefore, the City Attorney's Office destroyed the minutes to forever prevent their disclosure.

To date City Commissioners have not only refused to investigate this arrogant disregard for the rights of citizens under the Freedom of Information Act (or, even worse, the possibility that City staffers were involved in the destruction of evidence subject to a federal inquiry), they have taken orders from the City Attorney's Office to not even discuss the matter with the public.

Folks, this is only just the start of the City Commission's misfeasance in looking out for your interests.  They have let themselves be cowed at every turn by those who have a stake in keeping the Toxic Towers dumping scandal under wraps.  Click here for e-mail links to your City Commissioners and let them know it's well past time for them to start working for you and not the private agendas of Boss Logie and his ilk.

ENCORE: MISCONDUCT IN THE CITY ATTORNEY'S OFFICE

[Note:  This artcle was originally published on March 22, 2005, as the fourth entry in our "River of Corruption" series highlighting the failure of various public officials and institutions to respond to the illegal dumping of hazardous waste at the Monroe Avenue Water Filtration Plant and elsewhere.]

The Grand Rapids City Attorney's Office is the second entrant into the Hall of Shame for its role in the Toxic Towers dumping scandal.  Shamelessly the lawyers of that office have allied themselves with the Boardwalk developers, who illegally dumped 26,000 tons of hazardous waste (see the "Poison" article for a description of this toxic stew) next to a residential neighborhood in Creston Heights and elsewhere in the Grand Rapids vicinity.  Assistant City Attorneys Daniel Ophoff, Catherine Mish, and Janice Bailey have helped the developers' attorneys oppose every citizen suit brought on your behalf in state and federal court to clean up the contamination caused by the developers' deliberate, reckless, and dangerous dumping of toxic materials into our local environment.

Like it or not, your tax dollars, courtesy of the City Attorney's Office, are helping to defend these polluters.  The Boardwalk developers didn't care who they exposed to the poisoned soil they dug up from the Boardwalk project site.  To maintain the false pretense that this soil was clean, they let their workers excavate it without any protection from exposure to it.  They let it wash into and contaminate the City sewer system.  They let it spread across neighboring properties.  And they dumped it out in the open without any containment at the nearby Monroe Avenue Water Filtration Plant, creating an unlicensed hazardous waste landfill there.

The City Attorney's Office could have taken your side in this matter.  The Boardwalk developers dumped their hazardous waste at the Filtration Plant while the City still held title to it.  Instead of parroting then-Mayor John Logie's line that nothing happened at the Filtration Plant, the City Attorney's Office could have held the polluters to account for poisoning the grounds of a nationally registered historic landmark.  Instead the attorneys for the City sided with the developers, which has left taxpayers open to liability for the clean-up of the Filtration Plant and the fines attached to the developers' violations of state environmental laws.  (A figure that potentially exceeds $30 billion!)

To demonstrate how callous the City Attorney's Office is toward the public interest, Assistant City Attorneys Ophoff and Mish do not even deny in court documents the facts of the illegal dumping at the Filtration Plant.  Since the developers' environmental consultant disavowed the last piece of evidence claiming no illegal dumping occurred, how could they?  So, no hard evidence exists to refute the videotapes, photographs, admissions by employees of the developers, and soil testing that all confirm that the Boardwalk developers dumped 20,000 tons of hazardous waste at the Filtration Plant.  Yet, the City Attorney's Office continues to side with polluters.

Even worse, the City Attorney's Office deliberately destroyed evidence documenting then-Mayor Logie's successful backroom attempts to dissuade the Grand Rapids City Commission from making inquiries into the illegal dumping at the Filtration Plant.  (This story has been covered in the previous installment of the series and elsewhere on this site.  Click here.)  Give credit for this contemptuous assault against our right to open government to Ophoff, who was responsible for the destruction of the documents, and Mish, who brazenly defended their destruction before the Michigan Court of Appeals with half-truths and evasions.

Meanwhile, dear readers, give some thought to why the City Attorney's Office, whose typical mode of operation is pusillanimity, has been so vociferous in the defense of the Boardwalk developers.  Why is that Assistant City Attorneys Ophoff, Mish, and Bailey have lined up against you, whose health, safety, and pocketbook has been put in jeopardy by these remorseless polluters?  You may want to put that question to the head of the City Attorney's Office, Philip Balkema.  (Click here for his e-mail address.)  If he won't give you a satisfactory answer, it's time to tell Mayor Heartwell and the City Commission to sweep that office clean and hire lawyers who will defend you and not the self-anointed "players" in town.  (Click here for their e-mail addresses.)

Remember, folks, you pay these people.  They work for you.

WELL, OF COURSE, IT'S MISSISSIPPI

Bethany Christian Services is a nation-wide adoption agency headquarted here in Grand Rapids.  It is an explicitly pro-life Christian organization dedicated to placing homeless children in Christian homes.  To this end, it requires couples who want to adopt to agree to a Statement of Faith.  If you follow the hyperlink, you will see that it is an anodyne non-denominational statement of the basics of Christian belief.

Nevertheless, Bethany's Mississippi branch has banned adoptions to Roman Catholics.  Most recently on July 8th the Mississippi state director Karen Stewart rejected an adoption application from a Catholic couple, Robert and Sandy Steadman.  The Mississippians have blacklisted Catholics out of the plainly false belief that Roman Catholicism is in conflict with Bethany's Statement of Faith.  This, of course, smacks of that disreputable prejudice among some Protestants, still institutionally manifested in some places in this country such as Bob Jones University, that those papists are not truly Christian.

Apparently the hoods are gone, but the Klan's noxious creed is still plied by benighted Bethany employees like Stewart.  Yet, while ready to deny Catholics the benefit of Bethany's services in Mississippi, Stewart still collects for Bethany from the Mississippi state treasury the proceeds of the "Choose Life" license plates that Catholics buy.  Oh well, it's not like Mississippi hasn't given state sanction to bigotry in the past.  Moreover, Bethany Christian Services is a private organization whose members are free to engage in such nonsense.

However, it is still worth taking note of the gutless response Bethany's president Glenn De Mots, headquartered here in River City, had to give:  "I think it boils down to [the Mississippi branch's] commitment to place children into families that have the most in common with what their beliefs are as an evangelical Protestant-based office of Bethany."  De Mots added that Catholics in Mississippi do have their own adoption agencies they can go to in lieu of Bethany.  But not a word of misgiving for the Mississippi branch reading out Catholics from the Statement of Faith.

Yet, Bethany holds itself out as a Christian organization that welcomes all members of that faith while it solicits our donations.  It makes grand commitments against racial and ethnic prejudices.  Meanwhile Bethany's president refuses to drop the hammer on a relict of religious bigotry clinging to life in the adoption agency's own Mississippi offices.  Again, as a private organization Bethany can indulge in this kind of foolishness if it wants, but people of goodwill might want to reconsider what support they'll give to its hypocrisy on bigotry.

FIFTH THIRD STILL FLOUNDERING

The big Cincinnati bank that gobbled up Old Kent for a song, funded the biggest toxic dumping scandal in River City's history, eliminated over three thousand jobs locally, and alienated thousands of customers has appeared to have lost its groove.  Fifth Third Bancorp, which had run up its stock price through a running-on-water strategy of continually buying up smaller banks so that the dust would never settle look enough for anyone to see how well the organization was really doing, now seems stuck in decline since the feds nailed it two years ago for improprieties in the acquisition of Old Kent.

This was confirmed by Fifth Third's announcement that second-quarters profits have declined by seven percent.  CEO George Schaefer that the bank face some serious challenges that are not ameliorated by the difficult interest rate market.  Well, it all of Fifth Third's troubles really were Greenspan's fault, don't you think all the banks would be in the same soup?  It's past time for Schaefer to acknowledge that Fifth Third's go-go days are over and that bank needs to become a responsible company.

FRONT PAGE ENTERTAINMENT

On the heels of our rebuke of the Grand Rapids Press's "huggable" news policy for its front page, Editor Mike Lloyd defended his newspaper's slide into irrelevance.  In the Sunday edition of the Press's editorial page, Lloyd answered in a lengthy column a disgruntled reader who complained about the front-page prominence the Press recently gave to the story that a local TV news anchor, Tom Van Howe, will be retiring some months from now.

Lloyd defended the decision by saying that at the deadline for going to press there was no other news story more important than the Van Howe announcement.  Oh please.  Is Lloyd then also going to argue that on Thursday there was no other news story more important than the one that ran on the front page alerting readers to the need to keep their receipts if they want to return purchases to the store?

Interestingly, Lloyd revealed in his column the fight among the Press's editors to run the Van Howe announcement on the front page.  Entertainment Editor John Gonzalez pushed hard to put the story there.  Metro Editor John Barnes dissented, "I thought it was way too much."  Assistant Metro Editor Ruth Butler reinforced that position, "It was vastly overplayed."  However, folks, before you think that there may be some real newsmen over at the Press who understand that gossipy entertainment tidbits are not hard news, both Barnes and Butler justified their disagreement on the basis that Van Howe is no Suzanne Geha (the long-time TV personality here in town).

So, the real discord at the Press wasn't over an entertainment factoid getting a headline above the fold.  It was a matter of how big a mucky-up you have to be in the local TV scene to get that kind of front-page coverage in the Press.  Sadly, no one at the Press thinks it's never.

NO NEWS IN RIVER CITY

I really thought the Grand Rapids Press hit bottom last month when its headline front-page story was actually no story at all, just a picture of a girl swimming in a public pool on a hot summer day.  Then I was disgusted a week or so after that with how Publisher Gaydou and Editor Lloyd have reduced the region's newspaper of record to a P.R. vehicle for the pyramid builders' schemes.  Now I review Thursday's front page and realize the Press has completely lost its bearings in a media revolution that now delivers us news through a multitude of outlets and styles unanticipated even ten years ago.  What we are doing here at Local Area Watch is only one small example.

Yesterday's front page probably isn't the worst the Press has printed, but it makes clear that the news in River City is no longer the Press's mission.  The headliner was the imminent release of the latest "Harry Potter" book in area stores.  Talk about an utterly pointless "news" item:  The release of the book is no news to those who want the book, and those who don't want the book don't care.  Also above the fold was, as I predicted, a hint-from-Heloise article telling you to save your receipts if you want to return items purchased at retailers like Meijer's.  Below the fold was the hot news items that three months ago a 72-year-old man moved back into his house after it was flooded in January.  Finally there was a report on a study released by an environmental activist organization that concluded -- surprise! -- the sky is falling.

Let's examine that last bit of psuedo-news more closely.  On the front page the Press uncritically reports the release of a self-serving study by a group designed to alarm the average citizen about an environmental danger that does not exist.  Specifically, this study by the D.C.-based Environmental Working Group claims that the blood of newborns contains a couple hundred compounds used in manufacturing and agriculture.  Gee whiz, a baby born into an industrial society has traces of chemicals that pervade its mother's world.  Of course, completely absent from the Press's reportage is any scientific claim that the presence of these compounds in a newborn poses any danger to it -- because there is none.  The old saw remains true:  The dosage makes the poison.

And that brings us to the news in River City that the Press will not report:  The actual exposure of hundreds of people to toxic concentrations of hazardous substances when the Boardwalk developers illegally excavated, transported, and dumped in our neighborhoods 26,000 tons of contaminated soil laced with lead, arsenic, mercury, and at least twenty other dangerous materials.  Twenty-six thousand tons of this poison dumped in the middle of our city!  The volume of that material is huge.  It's the equivalent of a nine-story-high cube.  There is videotape, photographs, admissions, and soil tests to verify what happened.  Stuff the Press could publish and explain to you.

Yet Gaydou and Lloyd would rather try to scare you with a sensationalist study by the Chicken Little crowd than get you the facts on the genuine poison that the Boardwalk developers (with the assistance of the City of Grand Rapids) may have exposed you and your family too.  So, you see, folks, the Press cannot even honestly claim that it is running these "lifestyle" articles in place of hard news because it cares about your health and happiness.  It's just cheap, gutless sensationalism that some consultant, no doubt, told Gaydou and Lloyd to run to pump up the paper's circulation rate.

To sell more newspapers, all the Grand Rapids Press has to do is report the local news.  Name names and give us the facts about what's happening in River City.  Of course, that means kicking some deskbound asses in the newsroom where farting around with the rotisserie league of the season commands more time and attention than city hall, area businesses and organizations, and the neighborhoods.  But that's a lot of work when you can just phone in the breaking news of the day:  KIds, save your receipt for that Harry Potter book you bought!

SUCKING LESS THAN REST GARNERS PRAISE FOR WORST SCHOOL DISTRICT IN THE COUNTY

The Godfrey-Lee public school district, the tiniest of the four small districts that divide the City of Wyoming that has long out-lived its rationale as a separate government body, has been heralded in a study as a top performer in this year's MEAP testing.  Truly an extraordinary achievement for a school district that in one category scored six -- count 'em, SIX! -- points on a scale of one to a hundred.

The MEAP is, of course, the annual standardized testing of public schools used to determine their compliance with the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind" program.  The study that singled out Godfrey-Lee for honor was an evaluation of MEAP scores by Standard & Poor's.  Keep in mind that the fellas over at S&P, who are usually busy doing things like rating bonds, didn't do this out of the goodness of their hearts.  This evaluation is a service they sell to the state governments.

Because the education bureaucrats in the Michigan state government are perfectly capable of reading the results of MEAP testing for themselves, what S&P does is sell them a report that tells how good a job they are doing.  That isn't always easy when you have miserable school districts like Godfrey-Lee scoring 29 on math, 33 in English, and 6 on social studies -- even worse than the bottom-dwelling Grand Rapids public schools -- indeed, Godfrey-Lee is not just the lowest-scoring district in Kent County, but in the entire region.

But the fellas at S&P are pretty bright, and they have to be if they're going to sell their boondoggle wares.  So they figured out how to put lipstick on the pig.  They used a demographic factor that tends to associate similar-scoring schools together (in this case, the percentage of students below poverty level) and then ranked the school districts within these groups.  Voila!  Godfrey-Lee may have the lowest MEAP scores in the area, but by golly it's the best of the worst throughout the state.

So now the state's educrats can wave a report showing how swell of a job they are doing:  No child is left behind, because everyone has come in first!

A MAVERICK RESPONDS

In response to our recent article "Crypto-Carpetbaggers" about the activity of quasi-partisan political groups in this year's City Commission races, the chairman of one of those groups, Chris Beckering of the Mavericks, had a few things to say:

[1] He is no longer affiliated with any of his father's ventures and is neither a spokesman or a representative for any of them, the Boardwalk and American Seating Park in particular.  His father is Thomas Beckering, one of the Toxic Towers developers who decamped to Florida after completing a sentence for assaulting a waitress at the Boardwalk's watering hole.  (I take this to mean that the elder Beckering's business interests do not play a role in which candidate the Mavericks back.)

[2] The Mavericks have "fairly conservative" "core values" but that doesn't automatically put them in the Republican camp.  They will support a candidate they find agreeable without regard to partisan affiliation.  In short, the Mavericks are not crypto-Republicans.  (That's fine, but do the Mavericks' core values include a policy of open government so that the protection his father's companies are presently getting from the City Attorney's Office -- see the article below -- will not bear the glare of public scrutiny?)

[3] The Mavericks are, however, mostly carpetbaggers in G.R. politics -- i.e., suburbanites.  However, they do have the following interests the City:  Some of the Mavericks' boardmembers actually do live in the City and most are taxpayers by virtue of working in the City; many of the boardmembers do charitable works in the City; others are invested in development projects within the City; and all recognize the importance of the Grand Rapids urban core to the rest of the region.  (Whether or not there is a distinction to be made between Maverick boardmembers and Maverick members in general is not clear.)

[4] The Mavericks do not have a "plan" to back Dan Tietema as a candidate in the Third Ward.  Beckering states that he thinks Tietema would make a good city commissioner, but he is also impressed with incumbent Jim White's performance in office.  (Fair enough, although Beckering was not specific about how White has impressed him.)

We hope that gives you a better understanding of what the Mavericks are about.  If Beckering would like to further clarify the record, he is welcome to do so.  Also, we will extend the same courtesy to the "crypto-Democrat" group in this year's campaign, the Progressive Women's Alliance of West Michigan.

WE ANSWER THE CITY IN THE SUPREME COURT

On Monday your executive director and his co-plaintiff in the Boardwalk hazardous waste complaint, currently pending in Kent County Circuit Court, answered the leave to appeal that Assistant City Attorney Daniel Ophoff filed with the Michigan Supreme Court in a long-shot effort to put an end to our complaint.  As reported a couple of weeks ago, Ophoff filed this "Hail Mary" on behalf of the City of Grand Rapids and to the clear benefit of the private defendants in this case, Pioneer Incorporated, Dykema Excavators, and the Boardwalk development companies.

Because Ophoff's appeal has no merit, it has slim to no chance of being heard by the supreme court. For that reason, none of the private defendants in this case were willing to pay their attorneys to do the same.  However, Ophoff drafted the appeal so that it was applicable to all the defendants in the lawsuit, and so Pioneer, Dykema, and the Boardwalk development companies told the supreme court ditto.  Thus, the City Attorney's office at taxpayer expense provided the Toxic Towers defendants with a long-shot appeal to the state's highest court at little cost to themselves.

So why are the Toxic Towers defendants bothering with the Michigan Supreme Court if there is so little hope of success?  Delay.  Avoiding the day of reckoning has worked for them so far.  By filing the appeal, the local court granted the Toxic Towers defendants a stay until the supreme court decides what to do with the matter.  That could take months.  Meanwhile, the hazardous waste complaint grinds to halt.  In particular, there is no discovery allowed.

That matters to Ophoff, because he blocked our request for the Boardwalk's tax assessment and valuation documents under the Freedom of Information Act on the basis that we could obtain them through discovery in the hazardous waste complaint.  By filing a flimsy appeal and getting a stay in the hazardous waste complaint, those documents are not available through discovery either.  So the question of what the Boardwalk developers told the City about the value of their property to get a low-ball tax assessment remains under the thumb of Ophoff.

So, once again we have Ophoff with the acquiescence of the City Attorney's Office working for the private parties who dumped 26,000 tons of poisonous waste in the middle of River City.  And no one, dear readers, not the Mayor, not the City Commission, not the City Comptroller, and not the City Manager has put a stop to this.  Why you the taxpayer should be subsidizing the defense of a gang of polluters who have wantonly exposed hundreds of people to toxic concentrations of lead, arsenic, and mercury for no better reason than turning a dirty buck is a question your elected officials continue to duck.

Make them answer you.

REMEMBER THE PERSONAL COMPUTER REVOLUTION?

Three weeks ago Michigan had a pavilion at the BIO 2005 International Convention in Philadelphia.  Like all trade shows, the purpose of BIO 2005 was to give players in the bio-tech biz a chance to meet each other and see what deals might be done.  To this end, the state of Michigan put together a joint exhibit of eighteen bio-tech companies and twelve public agencies to hawk the merits of doing business in the Winter-Water-Wonderland.

Yeah, there's nothing unusual about an economic development agency having a booth at an industry trade show.  But it's time to scratch your heads, folks, when nearly half the exhibitors are public organizations, especially when they include the likes of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, a taxpayer-funded boondoggle with two dozen executive vice presidents receiving six-figure salaries to look busy about the business of business.  If the bounty of great wealth and great jobs of bio-tech is really everything that it is cracked up to be, why does it need all this government-sponsored boosterism?

Remember the personal computer revolution that started a quarter-century ago and remade our economy?  How much help did that boom need from the taxpayers?  None.

WI-FI BOONDOGGLE WATCH

Many of us in River City are vaguely aware of the City Commission's bold initiative to transform us into one of Guv Jen's Cool Cities by making wireless internet access available thoughout the city.  In the parlance of the geeks, Grand Rapids would become one big "hotspot" where anyone with a "wi-fi" card in his or her p.c. can make a high-speed connection to the web without plugging into anything.  You would have internet mobility with your laptop kinda like you do for telephone service with your cellphone.

It appears that some progress has been made toward this publicly sponsored wireless wonderland.  Several wi-fi service providers have installed demonstration projects throughout the city to allow residents to sample their services in a bid to win a contract from the Grand Rapids City Commission for the entire city.  There are eight demos in the works within the City, one in Walker, and another in Kentwood.  Some are up and running right now, including those at Calder Plaza, GRPD headquarters, and Creston High School.  The rest of the demos are slated to up and running within the next few days.  The prevailing company will get monopoly to build and operate a hotspot over the city, kinda like what Comcast has over the city's cable t.v. infrastructure.

Yes, that's right, folks.  Just like you must subscribe to the one and only cable company in town to get its cable t.v., you'll have to subscribe to whomever the City Commission chooses to get access to the city's wi-fi service.  Expect to pay four or five bucks a day for immediate one-time access, or twenty dollars or more a month for a regular subscription.  If the publicly sponsored wi-fi service in Grand Haven is anything to go by, those uncompetitive prices may not give you either a reliable or a fast connection.

Mayor Heartwell wanted to avoid the mistakes the City of Grand Haven made in picking a vendor to operate its hotspot by paying a consultant $100,000 to make that decision.  Commissioner Tormala had the sense at least to object to the City Commission paying someone a king's ransom to do what the City Commission was elected to do.  So the City Commission two weeks ago mandated that the agreements with the contending wi-fi service providers must be re-written so that whichever provider wins the contract must reimburse the City for the $100,000 consultant's fee.  And who do you think, dear readers, will be reimbursing the winning provider for that $100,000 cost?  Like always, you and me, the customers.

Well, that assumes we will be customers.  One must wonder how necessary a citywide hotspot accessible only through a monopoly wi-fi service provider really is?  With McDonald's, coffee shops, and other commercial gathering places offering the same service for free, and also with the technology available to make any office building, factory, or home a mini-hotspot in its own right, do we need the government sponsoring the same service with, more than likely, less service?  After all, what's the big benefit of the citywide system?  You can get your laptop to talk to the internet outside in the cold and the snow?  (Yes, I know we also have nice sunny days too, but then aren't those the days to be doing something better than banging the keyboard of a computer?)

How confident can we be that this won't be a boondoggle, when the City Commission is so lacking in the ability to make the key decision about this new wi-fi system that it must spend a $100,000 to be told what to do?  Indeed, no one in the City has even drafted a firm plan for how such a publicly sponsored wi-fi system is supposed to work for the benefit of residents.

I am not predicting disaster here.  I'm simply pointing out that this venture doesn't seem to be on the surest footing.  It bears keeping an eye on it.

HERE COMES THE SUN, THERE GOES THE MAYOR

Recently the Grand Rapids City Commission passed an idiotic resolution demanding that Bush administration do something about global warming.  On that flimsy pretext, Mayor Heartwell hopped a big ol' jetliner out west (purportedly at his own expense) to pound his shoe on a desk at the U.S. Conference of Mayor's "Sundance Summit" in Salt Lake City.  The conference has been organized to address the utterly unfounded claim that the energy consumption of cities is a "major contributor" to global warming.  Maybe the mayors will send a resolution to the sun?

[Aside: Not even the vaunted politically-correct scientific authority on global warming, the United Nations' International Panel on Climate Change, has found that human activity is a major cause of global warming, let alone whether it is actually occurring as a sustainable trend and, even it were, is that a bad thing?  After all, it was warmer in the Middle Ages than today, and we're still here to talk about it.]

Of course, dear readers, you may have sussed that Heartwell's attendence at this gassy gabfest during the City's big budget battle amid its worst fiscal crisis is akin to a tinpot dictator getting the natives agitated over foreign enemies to divert attention from the miserable conditions at home.  Last month, Heartwell skipped off to Poland to celebrate sister-citiliness over there.  No doubt he'll be off again somewhere else next month.  Meanwhile the City flounders.