The Local Area Watch

LOW BIDDER FOR HUFF SCHOOL WALKS OUT ON DEAL

As you may recall, the Grand Rapids school board approved the sale of Huff Elementary School late last year to the Redstone Group, a residential developer, who offered $1 million for the property.  In doing so, the school board rejected a bid for $1.38 million from Mosaica.  They stiffed the taxpayers and signed on with the lower bidder because Mosaica is a charter school company who wanted to use Huff for its intended purpose -- a school.  That meant parents in the neighborhood might choose to send their children to a Mosaica-run Huff School instead of to a more distant Grand Rapids public school.  To protect its turf, instead of the best interests of students and taxpayers, our school board told Mosaica to take a hike and agreed to sell the school to Redstone for residential redevelopment.

This week Redstone has informed the Grand Rapids school board that it is renegeing on the deal.  It won't buy Huff School, because the company cannot make the school building fit into a financially viable residential project.  Meanwhile, Mosaica told the school board that it no longer has any interest in buying Huff School, especially in light of the treatment it received from board members and other school officials.  So the Grand Rapids public school district is stuck with yet another empty building and a lost opportunity to put some money in the district's declining coffers.

Expect more of these disappointments now that the school board has hired Bernard Taylor as the new superintendent.  Although Taylor was fired from his previous gig running the Kansas City public school district, his redeeming quality to our school board was his willingness to do battle with charter schools.  Instead of finding a superintendent who could innovate, knock heads within the public school bureaucracy, get the teachers union to reckon with reality, excoriate parents who think it is the public school's job to inspire their children to learn instead of them, brook no nonsense with the racialism corrupting the operation of the district, and truly put the kids first by harnessing the pressure for reform from outside forces like charter schools to make the Grand Rapids public school district better, our school board has hired a reactionary who will raise walls against the reformers instead of building bridges to them.

The collapse of the Huff deal is an omen of the ruin that the Grand Rapids school board is courting.

MANAGED SPEECH

The Grand Rapids school board is rightly disturbed by the raucus conduct at its public meetings.  The heckling, showboating, and insults by some attendees is disgraceful -- and should NOT be tolerated.

However, instead of taking the necessary measures to remove from the meeting members of the public who will not conduct themselves in a civil manner, the board, along with new superintendent Bernard Taylor's support, wants to manage public comment at school board meetings.  Their plan is to force a person who might want to make a public comment to alert the school board of that fact in advance of the meeting, provide his name and address to the board, and then receive instructions from school officials that comments not related to the meeting's policy agenda are prohibited.

Furthermore Superintendent Taylor wants to further restrict public monitoring of school board meetings by terminating their broadcast on cable TV's public access channel for education.  That reveals the real agenda of Grand Rapids school officials.  By itself, one might conclude that the board and the superintendent have merely taken a wrong path in controlling the crowd at public meetings with the proposed advance-notice rules.  But blacking out public viewing of school board meetings on cable TV, which has no impact whatsoever upon the atmosphere of those meetings, can only mean that the overall objective of these changes is to limit and control public input to and knowledge of the school board's decision-making.

The school board should reject this attempt to manage speech.  Keep the meetings open to spontaneous public comment.  Exercise judgment to cut the mike for those who are abusive, insulting, or out of order.  Eject hecklers who disrupt the meeting.  (Yes, I know these things require backbone from our school officials.  But is that so much to ask to maintain decorum?)  And, of course, keep broadcasting the school board meetings on cable TV.

MSM CATCHES UP WITH L.A.W.

Our readers send us many interesting things.  The other day, in response to our recent criticism of the Grand Rapids Press's uncritical reporting about the National Academy of Sciences report on "global warming", one reader faxed us a clip from the Wall Street Journal titled "Hockey Stick Hockum".  (Log-in required to access link.)  The commentary confirmed what we had to say in our article and our ensuing responses to readers (here and here) about the mendacity behind global warming.

Of particular interest in the Journal's commentary was the Wegman Report commissioned by the House Energy Committee.  (Note how the Press splashed a big story on Page Three about the NAS report commissioned by the House Science Committee that fanned the flames of global warming hysteria but had nothing to print about Wegman Report that critically reviewed the scientists and their claims in support of catatrosphic climate change.  Bias or incompetence?  Your pick.)  In addition to dismantling the severely flawed statistical methodologies used to fashion out of nothing an unprecedented and alarming increase in temperature over the past century (i.e., climatologist Michael Mann's notorious "hockey stick" graph that has now become the holy grail for global warming Cassandras), the Wegman Report also analyzes the behavior of the scientists involved in climate research.

As I noted in a response to a reader, the ordinary layman need not and should not simply accept the statements of a scientist as authoritative because he has a PhD after his name.  That scientist is also a human being subject to the same perversities that all of us are which can impair a dispassionate judgment of the facts.  Indeed, the Wegman Report finds that the climate research establishment is "a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis [i.e., catastrophic global warming]" and that "this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility".  In short, among too many climatologists, ego has trumphed professional integrity.

Well, it's always heartening when the mainstream media catches up with us.  Can we hope that the Press will do so, too?  After all, it matters to you when a group has the ear of much of the government and is demanding that you pay more taxes and give more power to the bureaucrats to address what they say is a looming crisis.  It's the job of the media to give you all the information you need to figure out if that crisis is real or just another boondoggle targeted at your wallet and your liberty.  When it uncritically reports only half the story, like the Grand Rapids Press has regarding global warming, it has failed in its responsibility to the public.

CORKY HAS A PET PROJECT TOO

I have now heard from two sources that the City's new "sustainability manager", Earth Tech hireling Corky Overmyer, has plan to bring to heel you despoilers of Mother Earth who have the unmitigated gall to use city water to sprinkle your lawns and water your gardens.  (Yours truly numbers among you miscreants with the lush verdant expanse of my Heritage Hill lawn amid the dry tawny scrub of my neighbors.)

You see, like the mayor, Corky has a pet project too.  He wants us to use rainwater rather than city water on our lawns and gardens.  Now Corky will tell you that he doesn't want to force anyone to do this.  He would prefer to encourage us to do so.  Well, that may be true if you consider holding a gun to someone's head to do something is a form of encouragement.  What Corky wants to do is start charging all of us a "rain tax", which he would graciously waive for those of us who put a stormwater collection facility in our backyards.

I doubt those extra pots and pans in the cupboard laid out on the back forty will meet Corky's standards.  And for those of you who are thinking, aren't we already paying sky-high water and sewer rates for all those new stormwater sewers the city has been installing, you are really missing the point.  Either you pay the city a rain tax or you pay for a collector on your property, which Corky's boss, Earth Tech, will be happy to help you with to justify its six-figure annual contract with the city.  The only flow that matters is not rainwater from your home to the river, but the dollars in your wallet to the coffers of the city and Earth Tech.

HE WHO PAYS THE PIPER ...

Many of you have now heard about the brouhaha over the just completed mural in the Lee High School gym.  The Lee school board and the Lee sports boosters hired recent Lee High School graduate and current Kendall School of Art & Design student Arturo Araujo to paint the school's mascot, the Rebel, on the gymnasium wall for $4,000.  Araujo presented the board with a sketch illustrating what he proposed to paint, and they approved it.  The booster club advanced Araujo $2,000 and he got underway.  A month later his masterpiece was completed.

Then the trouble began.  A board member complained that the Rebel in Araujo's mural was not the same as the Rebel in Araujo's sketch.  Specifically, the Rebel was dark-skinned in the mural and lighter-skinned in the sketch.  Well, yeah.  But then the sketch was cartoonlike whereas the mural presented a more realistically human character.  As for the specific issue of skin color, the sketched Rebel had an orange cast, and I really doubt that the school board expected the mural to keep that color.

In fact, it would seem to me that the board must have understood that the completed mural would be somewhat different from the cartoonlike sketch.  The mural is significantly different from the sketch because it is qualitatively better than sketch, both in form and in color (and by color, I'm not talking about skin tone but the artist's technique).  The board must have known that there would be these qualitative improvements and so the sketch was only an approximation of the final product.  And if the Lee Rebel is now dark-skinned, I'm not sure that is such a leap from the orange-skinned sketch.

Nevertheless, some board members had threatened to withhold the $2,000 balance they owed Araujo if he didn't repaint the Rebel as a caucasian.  Araujo refused.  As a practical matter, why not?  He had the support of the Lee High School's principal, the student body, and the booster club.  Last night the Lee school board probably took note of this, too, and ended the showdown.  They voted 5-1 to pay Araujo the remaining two grand.  From a contractual point of view, the board made the right decision considering that Araujo did not submit to them a sketch intended to be an exact representation of his final product.

Even so, there is justice in the old adage that he who pays the piper calls the tune.  An artist works for his patron, and so it is the patron, not the artist, who is entitled to satisfaction at the end of the day.  Araujo will do well as a professional artist to keep that in mind.  After all, the customer is king.

SYSTEM GLITCH

Typepad, the service L.A.W. uses to support this website, had a hiccup yesterday.  Everything posted yesterday was dumped into the ether.  Fortunately, we didn't lose any articles.  However, all comments posted yesterday are now gone.  We apologize for the disruption. -- The Editor

PLANNING THE UNPLANNED

In this week's issue of the Grand Rapids Business Journal, reporter David Czurak wrote about an award that the Grand Valley Metro Council received for devising a uniform zoning, the "Metropolitan Blueprint", that area municipalities and townships could adopt.  Apparently what got everyone's attention was how this blueprint eschewed such zoning mugwumpery like focusing on separating uses into different district in favor of mixing uses together in a single district.

Christina Anderson is an urban planner from Chicago whose firm, Farr Associates, was one of the authors of the Metropolitan Blueprint.  She commented to Czurak that zoning that separates uses -- e.g., keeps that pig farm away from your subdivision -- makes it difficult to recreate mixed-use districts.  Well, I suppose so, because that's precisely what zoning was designed to prevent.  Anderson, like many "new urbanists", have a yen for old-fashioned core city neighborhoods that are a jumble of stores, small businesses, public facilities, and homes that somehow work in harmony.  I enjoy places like that, too.  In fact, I live in a neighborhood like that.

However, you can't zone by government fiat those sorts of neighborhoods.  As Anderson noted, "Often those locations were something that was done before zoning."  Precisely.  They are organic.  They didn't pop up from a top-down municipal master plan.  They came together through the efforts of individuals working out their conflicts over a period of time.  Nevertheless, Anderson's firm thinks that local governments can dictate these "new urbanist" mixed-use neighborhoods by dictating the types of buildings, the layout of streets, and all manner of goo-gaws like porches, stoops, window design, and storefronts that must be constructed.

In other words, Anderson and company think that function will follow form.  Hmm, I'm not so sure about that, but squaring that circle is probably less of a fool's errand than the whole notion of planning the unplannable.  Current zoning practices have some real flaws that impede the harmonious development of communities.  The Grand Valley Metropolitan Council was not wrong to have Farr Associates address these deficiencies.  However, the solution is not further constraints forcing property owners to conform to the aesthetics of a handful of planners, but fewer which emulate the free-wheeling conditions that allowed those 19th-century mixed-use neighborhoods that "new urbanists" love to sprout in a 21st-century way.

RETURNING A FAVOR TO MS. HINKEL

Regular readers will recall Lisa Hinkel's recent participation in this forum.  Ms. Hinkel is a member of the Grand Rapids Board of Education who took exception to my criticism of her position on school elections.  However, she did grace me with her pity:  "I will definitely pray for the ignorance and white-male anger sy[n]drome from which you suffer."  I am grateful for that.

So I now want to return her kindness and alert Ms. Hinkel that someone under the false e-mail address "nicksajoke @ angrywhitemen.com" has been using her internet access to harass Nancy Capriglione and her husband in the comment section of our recent story on Corky Overmyer.  (The all-seeing eye of L.A.W. can track these things, you know.)  It seems that the intruder has been clever enough to make reference to "angry white men" to give the appearance that it is Ms. Hinkel who has been posting defamatory comments in response to Ms. Capriglione.  However, I think we can all agree that a public official of Ms. Hinkel's caliber would not engage in such loathsome behavior, especially under a psuedonym.

Furthermore, Ms. Hinkel and Ms. Capriglione were fellow members of the Board of Education.  No doubt that means Ms. Hinkel would have nothing but a sense of comity with Ms. Capriglione (despite significant policy differences), which is further evidence that the scurrilous remarks were made by someone other than Ms. Hinkel.  And I am certain that Ms. Hinkel would not abuse our forum for such a purpose because we had cause to praise Ms. Capriglione's positions in the past while criticizing hers.

Therefore, Ms. Hinkel, please take action and track down the intruder who has been abusing your internet access.  We do not want to be forced to block messages from your IP address if this miscreant continues to post malicious comments here.

[NOTE:  In the comment section, Ms. Hinkel's husband Bruce has admitted to posting the malicious remarks about Ms. Capriglione's husband.  Because my tone in the article above was clearly ironic, I apologize to Ms. Hinkel for insinuating that she was the culprit.]

BROTHER'S KEEPER

Oh sure, little brothers can be a pain, but sometimes they're pretty helpful.  Just ask Dick DeVos Jr., closet organizer entrepreneur, Amway scion, and candidate for governor.  What he is not, any longer, is the owner of the racing sloop Windquest.  Dick was the owner a year ago when he had his sailboat up for sale.  But apparently there were no takers.

Now Dick Jr. is running for governor, and I suppose a man of the people just doesn't go sporting around in regatta-winning racing sloops.  So, we learn in today's edition of the Detroit Free Press that his younger brother Doug is now not only the new owner of the Windquest but is also replacing Dick as the vessel's skipper in this year's big race from Port Huron to Mackinac Island.

Maybe Doug provided his brother this bit of P.R. cover, because Dick figured that Michiganders are a small-minded race who would begrudge him a token of his success as the proprietor of a capital-venture-firm-now-shelving-concern, husband of an heiress, and son of the biggest multi-level marketing huckster in the world.  But then, with Dick now trimming his sails on all manner of political positions he once held, maybe he's just tired of literally trimming them.

TURNING A BLIND EYE

A few years back, right at the time Fifth Third (FITB) gobbled up Old Kent, I had this to say about one of local bigwig Peter Secchia’s public musings:  “Commenting on the unfolding disgrace of boardroom thievery in Corporate America, former Ambassador Peter Secchia wants us to know that he thinks these crooks should be thrown in jail. … Let us hope that the Ambassador, who was a director of Old Kent Bank, is just as demanding when the role played by bank insiders in the 25-million-dollar Toxic Towers fiasco comes to light.”

Since then the sewage continues to spill from Fifth Third’s acquisition of Old Kent.  Even if regulators haven’t been on their toes, the market has delivered its punishment to the big bank from Cincinnati by knocking the hype out of Fifth Third’s sleaze-inflated shares.  Meanwhile, many Fifth Third top executives have fallen on their swords to keep the ruin of scandal at bay.  But one man, who perhaps did the most to keep the skeletons of the Old Kent takeover in the closet, has instead been crowned heir-apparent to succeed George Schaeffer, the ringmaster of Fifth Third’s go-go years, as head honcho of the bank.

That man is Kevin Kabat, an Old Kent executive who made the transition to Fifth Third.  Kabat was instrumental in squelching a lawsuit that key Old Kent shareholders wanted to bring to remedy the malfeasance of top management that made the bank ripe for takeover by Fifth Third.  As it happens Kabat was a colleague of Secchia’s.  So, I must think that Secchia has some inkling of the troubles that forced Old Kent into the maw of Fifth Third, Fifth Third’s subsequent mismanagement of the takeover, and Kabat’s role in all of this.  Therefore, I am more than a little disappointed that the Ambassador is publicly silent about local boardroom thievery, especially the crookedness that destroyed one of the great business institutions of Grand Rapids.

So why bring all of this up now?  On Wednesday, June 28th, Secchia appeared on TV-13 news to announce that “Grand Rapids is without corruption or scandal.”  Well, yes, the Ambassador is a hometown booster in a most agreeable old-fashioned way, and God bless him for that.  But anyone who truly loves River City cannot turn a blind eye to the rot that will consume this town if not exposed.  Not only is there the Fifth Third scandal, there is the obstruction of justice by prominent citizens that thwarted the investigation of twenty-thousand tons of hazardous waste dumped in a residential neighborhood, there is a medical examiner who has botched autopsies in favor of a major business client he has on the side, there is an alleged billionaire who financed the work-out of his failed empire on the backs of local taxpayers and healthcare ratepayers, there is the family of his late partner who looted the private foundation that provided most of the support to the Van Andel Institute, and so on.

These blights impede the progress of our city.  As ordinary citizens we can remove the stains by speaking up, pulling the right levers in the voting booth, and withholding our donations from dubious projects.  However, we can clean up River City even quicker when citizens of Secchia’s stature also speak up.  Eyes wide open is the best sort of boosterism.