Wednesday, June 08, 2005
It's Not Easy Being Green
From the Daily Texan comes an unsettling story about more unhingedness at Austin City Hall. The story’s second paragraph sounds an ominous warning of what is to come:
“[Austin Mayor Will] Wynn, as well as 59 other international mayors, traveled to San Francisco, joining world leaders to sign the San Francisco Urban Environmental Accords, which support the need to address environmental issues, beginning with cities. The accords endorse the United Nations' efforts to advance sustainability, foster vibrant economies, promote social equity, and protect the planet’s natural systems. ""San Francisco". "Environmental Accords". "United Nations". "Sustainability". As a property owner, taxpayer, and one who loves freedom, those are words you never want to see associated with your city’s head of government.
At Mayor Wynn’s behest, Austin City Council unanimously adopted a resolution on May 19 that Austin would comply with these 21 accords by 2012. He then traipsed off to San Francisco for the UN-sponsored World Environment Day celebration (Hmmmm….I wonder who paid for that little jaunt?) on June 5th to sign the Urban Environmental Accords.
The Mayor’s press release on the topic also boasts that Mayor Wynn signed the U.S. Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement, which purportedly "works to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in communities throughout the United States."
So, what exactly did we all agree to and what will it mean for our weird little city?
Here is the draft of the Urban Environmental Accords. Highlights include:
- Reduce the city’s peak electric load by ten per cent within seven years
- Adopt a citywide greenhouse gas reduction plan that reduces the jurisdiction’s emissions by twenty-five per cent by 2030
- Adopt a policy that mandates a green building rating system standard that applies to all new municipal buildings.
- Adopt a policy or implement a program that creates environmentally beneficial jobs in slums and/or low-income neighborhoods. (Is the UN saying that blacks and Hispanics in the slums are somehow dirtier than everyone else?)
- Adopt urban planning principles and practices that advance higher density
- Ensure that there is a public transportation and accessible public park or recreational open space within half-a kilometer of every city resident.
- Implement a policy to reduce the percentage of commute trips by single occupancy vehicles by ten per cent in seven years.
- Inventory global warming emissions in City operations and in the community, set reduction targets and create an action plan.
- Adopt and enforce land-use policies that reduce sprawl, preserve open space, and create compact, walk able urban communities.
Well doesn’t that give you a warm fuzzy? Mayor Wynn goes on a ritzy junket to Frisco and we end up on the receiving end of a risky, UN-conceived, social engineering scheme.
The accords go on to say:
"The call to action set forth in the Accords will most often result in cost savings as a result of diminished resource consumption and improvements in the health and general well-being of city residents. Implementation of the Accords can leverage each city's purchasing power to promote and even require responsible environmental, labor and human rights practices from vendors."I believe this was the comic relief portion of the presentation. I would like to see the business case that shows the “cost savings as a result of diminished consumption…” yadda yadda yadda versus the procurement, implementation, administration, and economic costs of the recommendations above. Furthermore, reducing the city’s peak electric load by ten per cent within seven years will harm economic development. Energy efficiency measures extant and in development will likely not outstrip the city’s projected population and economic growth to net a 10% reduction over the same time period. Finally, foisting greater restrictions on city contractors can only drive up their cost of doing business which they will pass on to the city. Austin taxpayers will have to pony up more, hard earned payola to support this unnecessary procurement cost.
In other words, it appears that Mayor Wynn’s unilateral rush to regulate may leave Austin in an economic quagmire.
I am greatly concerned about what committing to these UN-concocted accords will mean for regular people living in Austin. The changes conjured up by Kofi and crew amount to a wholesale restructuring of Austin life and society into a compacted, high density, over-regulated, latte-tropolis. It is not hard to deduce from these measures that I will be subjected to economic and practical disincentives for driving by myself to work each day and living in my modest house in southwest Austin. Same goes for the vast majority of people who live in Austin proper and the satellite communities that Austin would strong arm into compliance (If ACC can do it, so can city hall). Why can’t we drive where we want to, when we want to and accept the cost in terms of gasoline purchased, auto maintenance, and time in traffic?
Downtown Austin has many amenities that I enjoy. Yet, it also has many blights common to dense, urban areas such as aggressive panhandlers, drug-crazed zombies, celebrity transvestites, and, this being Austin, the destructive antics of the professional protestor class. I do not wish to live in that environment, and I definitely would not want to subject my children to it, were I so blessed. Will signing the UN Urban Environmental Accords mean that the City of Austin will cajole and coerce its citizenry into this unnecessary social experiment?
6/9/05 Update: Others are onto the UN's attempt to circumvent national and state governments and go right for the ambitious local pols. This CNSNews.com article by Tom DeWeese (hat tip to KeathMilligan.net) helps expose the true, communistic motives. Here's the money quote:
Sustainable Development is truly stunning in its magnitude to transform the world into feudal-like governance by making nature the central organizing principle for our economy and society.
It is a scheme fueled by unsound science and discredited economics that can only lead modern society down the road to a new dark age. It is a policy of banning goods and regulating and controlling human action. It is systematically implemented through the creation of non-elected visioning boards and planning commissions.
There is no place in the Sustainable world for individual thought, private property or free enterprise. It is the exact opposite of the free society envisioned by this nation's founders.
Read the whole post.
Monday, June 06, 2005
Michael Levy is not a Happy Camper
The run off election for Austin City Council, Place 3 seat between Margot Clarke and Jennifer Kim is slated for this Saturday, June 11.
In advance of the run off, I recently received an unexpected letter via both snail mail and email. Texas Monthly publisher Michael Levy sent all Austin voters a strongly worded and impassioned letter against Margot Clarke.Mr. Levy rails against the failings of the current local pols in maintaining basic services, mistimed traffic lights, under funded police/fire/EMS, and city’s current high debt among other foibles. Furthermore, Mr. Levy rightly ascertains the source of these problems:
“A deficit in intelligent and rational leadership has been the primary reason for our problems. Too many of our elected officials have had an almost philosophic comfort level with mediocrity, and an apparent fear of excellence.”
He then turns his verbal cannonade on Ms. Clarke:
“Ms. Clarke has reportedly stated that she is committed to not another new road in Austin, saying ‘we need to do everything it takes to get people out of their cars’
Sheer goofiness”? Yeeouch! You can almost smell the cordite from Mr. Levy’s rhetorical barrage. Ms. Clarke must have really PO’ed Levy at some point in the past if he’s sending out a mass mailing against Margot Clarke for city council without even mentioning her opponent, Jennifer Kim.“Ms. Clarke will serve as a behind-the-scenes obstructionist who will be the sand in the gears of local government with a Pavlovian propensity to support even the most absurd requests from noisy fringe groups whom she would see as her political allies.”
“Ms. Clarke will try to raise the level of sheer goofiness in Austin city government to even higher levels”
Like Mr. Levy, I am against Ms. Clarke. But I am also for Jennifer Kim:
- Kim has put forth the money, time, and energy to start and run a small business; Clarke’s closest brush with private sector is briefly working as a software developer for IBM before diving into all sorts of liberal activist misadventures, like Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club.
- As a small business proprietor, Kim is exposed to the reality of competition and the economic environment. When governments at all levels create economically inhibitive laws and regulations, she feels it. Ms. Clarke’s experience is championing regulation, not entrepreneurship or economic development. Austin City Council has enough regulatory bureaucrats on it already. It needs more economic development chops and Kim is the best candidate available who can provide that.
- On toll roads, Kim is more pragmatic, Clarke is more dogmatic. Clarke’s recent sign advertising posits her as stringently anti-toll road. Kim’s advertisements says she is against tolling existing roads, which implies she may be open to tolls on new roads. I hold that tolls will probably be part of Austin’s future mobility solution in some form or fashion, in spite of the obvious shortcomings of the current toll plan. I think being open-minded about mobility solutions will ultimately yield a better local transportation solution.
For me, the deciding factors are evident in the Statesman write-ups for each candidate. According to the Statesman write up on Ms. Kim:
“Born in Los Angeles, Kim and her family moved quite a bit because her father worked for the U.S. Defense Department. She lived in Japan, Korea, Arizona and Germany before landing in Houston as a teenager when her parents separated. Moving so often ripened her curiosity and independence, she said. “
“She majored in political science at Texas A&M University then risked giving up a graduate school scholarship to work as a legislative aide for state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo.…”
“After tackling Princeton's grueling public policy graduate program, Kim watched her peers lunge for Wall Street jobs, but she wanted a quieter life. She returned to Austin to work for the U.S. Economic Development Administration.…”
“In 2003 Kim wanted to try running a business and bought a Computer Moms franchise; her five employees help small companies fix computer glitches.”
Ms. Kim has worked her way up through the echelons of society and has a proven intellect. Working for Sen. Zaffirini means Kim is probably liberal. Yet, the fact that she has started and maintained a small business should make her sympathetic the struggles facing entrepreneurs and business owners. I hope she will factor this experience into her policy decisions.
The Statesman’s write up on Ms. Clarke says:
“Her family came to Austin in 1955 and took up residence atop a hill near RM 2222, where Clarke's mother, Custis Wright, still lives. Clarke, 51, recalls that as a child she would look westward from her home and see no roads, no houses, nothing but rolling, unadulterated Hill Country. That was back when going to St. Stephen's Episcopal School every morning was a half-hour drive into the country.
During the summer evenings Anderson spent at the Wright home, she said, Custis would hold court in the kitchen to discuss books, politics and philosophy. Clarke's stepfather, Charles Alan Wright, was a prominent University of Texas law professor and constitutional scholar who ingrained in his children the importance of political participation and integrity, Clarke said.”
Having been born of privilege in that toney, Hill Country mansion, it is clear that Ms. Clarke’s Little Lord Fauntleroy upbringing has permeated her political outlook.
The lion’s share of Ms. Clarke’s experience, and all of her recent experience, are purely of the liberal public policy persuasion. I’m not saying this is all bad (well, Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club are bad), but it does have an insulating effect on one’s political sensibilities. Predictably, Ms. Clarke’s campaign web page features a bevy of hard left environmental, gay/lesbian, feminist, and union endorsements.
Furthermore, as the Austin Review recently observed, Ms. Clarke may not be too familiar with the notion of private property rights. Her risky “community land trust” scheme, which involves using local tax money to buy tracts of land for low-income housing, is pure socialism. She was also for the abominable smoking ban, which passed in the city’s recent general election.
Just as she looked down from that law professor’s mansion atop a West Austin hill, it is clear that Ms. Clarke would perpetually look down on the common folk of Austin if given the chance ply her elite, radical politics at Austin City Hall.
Austin has had enough misrule by the old-money, liberal aristocracy. Voice in the Wilderness endorses Jennifer Kim for the Austin City Council, Place 3 seat.
Early voting goes through Tuesday, June 7. Click here to see early voting days/times/places. Click here for election day voting times/places.
