Montgomery Initiative Aimed at Middle Class
The Montgomery County Council will consider a proposal today to require that 10 percent of homes built in new developments near Metro stations be set aside for middle-class families being priced out of the county’s soaring real estate market.
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Such a program would be geared toward county employees — including teachers, firefighters, police officers and nurses who make too much to qualify for Montgomery’s affordable-housing program but not enough to buy a house or condominium at market rate, [County Councilman Steve] Silverman said.
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Program Often Funds Risky Rebuilding
Dauphin Island is one of the most vulnerable barrier islands in the nation. Since 1979, it has been struck by six hurricanes and has lost nearly 500 expensive vacation homes and rental properties. Yet owners keep building back, trying to elevate their homes out of harm’s way. And the island has received more than $21 million in federal flood payments to help spur redevelopment.
Now, after Katrina, [Gail] Leacy and hundreds of other Dauphin property owners will join thousands of others in the Gulf states filing claims against their federally backed flood insurance, putting enormous financial strain on the government-run program.
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Many claims will come from properties that flood repeatedly. As coastal development has increased and more storms have hit the area, properties with repeated losses along the Gulf Coast have been making a growing share of the claims against the government-backed program, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data. Among the tens of thousands of such properties are older buildings in cities such as Houston and New Orleans, and in small outlying towns. Thousands of others are in resort communities such as Dauphin Island. Overall, the five Gulf Coast states account for $6 billion in claims since 1978 — half of the total nationwide.
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Some researchers…say that FEMA’s policies feed a vicious circle: They enable a boom in coastal development that leads to increasingly costly flood insurance payments that in turn fuel even more development. The researchers argue that FEMA and Congress ought to make such programs contingent on communities doing everything possible to lessen risks, including pulling back from the shoreline.
“If ever there were a poster child for a barrier island that shouldn’t have been developed, it’s Dauphin Island,” said Orrin H. Pilkey, a Duke University coastal geologist. “But it did, and now we all keep paying for it.”
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Torrential rains in Kansas at the beginning of October washed away hundreds of feet of track on Union Pacific Corp.’s lines and damaged several rail bridges, disrupting coal supplies being shipped from Wyoming. Since Wyoming mines provide about a third of the nation’s coal the disruption resulted in several utilities that depend on Wyoming coal to run dangerously low on supplies, sending prices to record highs.
Last week’s track problems aren’t the first of the year. Power plant owners across the Midwest, Great Plains, Southeast and Southwest have been receiving on average about 85 percent of expected coal deliveries since May, after heavy precipitation caused two trains to derail in Wyoming and started a massive maintenance program by the railroads to repair the track.
Since the May derailments, utilities have been relying more on power from natural gas-fired power plants and wholesale electricity purchases. But that was before Katrian and Rita tore through the natural gas fields in the Gulf, putting domestic supply of natural gas in question. As winter approaches and temperatures drop, utilities could come under intense pressure to produce enough energy to meet peak winter demand.
Air quality levels will suffer. Some utilities have turned to higher-sulfur eastern coals to replace missed shipments from the West, a move that requires them to buy more sulfur allowances to cover the extra pollution that will result.
Even so, an especially cold winter could push demand for energy past our ability to supply it.
This might be a good time to get one of those corn burning stoves and lay in a good supply of fuel before corn prices start rising too!
A Better Cure Than Abortion
I’d like to tell a story. Some years ago, South Africa’s game managers had to figure out what to do about the elephant herd at Kruger National Park. The herd was growing well beyond the ability of the park to sustain it.
The two-phase solution: transport some of the herd to the Pilanesberg game park and kill off some of those that were too big to transport. And so they did.
A dozen years later, several of the transported young males (now teenagers) started attacking Pilanesberg’s herd of white rhinos, an endangered species. They used their trunks to throw sticks at the rhinos, chased them over long hours and great distances, and stomped to death a tenth of the herd — all for no discernible reason.
Park managers decided they had no choice but to kill some of the worst juvenile offenders. They had killed five of them when someone came up with another bright idea: Bring in some of the mature males from Kruger — there was by then the technology to transport the larger animals — and hope that the bigger, stronger males could bring the adolescents under control.
To the delight of the park officials, it worked. The big bulls, quickly establishing the natural hierarchy, became the dominant sexual partners of the females, and the reduction in sexual activity among the juveniles lowered their soaring testosterone levels and reduced their violent behavior.
The new discipline, it turned out, was not just a matter of size intimidation. The young bulls actually started following the Big Daddies around, enjoying the association with the adults, yielding to their authority and learning from them proper elephant conduct. The assaults on the white rhinos ended abruptly.
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