Opponents Fear Drainage System Will Allow Development on Preserved Land
They are nothing more than mounds of earth, often camouflaged by grass. But in the fight to stave off suburban sprawl in northwestern Montgomery County, sand mounds have taken on unusual prominence.
Twenty-five years ago, county planners created one of the nation’s most ambitious land preservation programs, setting aside 93,000 acres for farmland and open space. To deter residential development, they kept public water and sewer service out of most of this agricultural reserve, forcing property owners to use wells for water and septic systems to filter sewage into the ground for absorption.
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The mechanics of sewage disposal are well-known to residents of Montgomery’s “upcounty.” In a conventional septic system, waste flows into a storage tank, then into a drain field where the soil soaks up most of it. In a sand mound system, a pump carries the sewage up into a man-made mound of sand and gravel, bypassing the unsuitable soil. A pipeline then lets the waste drain down through the soil.
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Former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Mark McClellan voiced strong doubts about a proposal to make the “morning after pill” more easily accessible months before the agency overrode the advice of its staff and an expert panel and rejected the application, government investigators reported today.
The Government Accountability Office report said the apparent involvement of McClellan and other top officials was one of four unusual aspects of FDA’s handling of the politically sensitive decision. The investigators reported that several key FDA officials told colleagues that the application to allow over-the-counter sales of the emergency contraceptive would be rejected months before the decision was announced.
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Two months ago, in his prime-time address from New Orleans, President Bush called upon the nation to “rise above the legacy of inequality.” He was joking, obviously. The president’s congressional allies now propose to cut Medicaid, food stamps, free school lunches and child-care subsides. They do not propose to save money by undoing the tax cuts that have handed an average of $103,000 a year to people making over $1 million.
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So here’s a plea to Democrats. I know you’re better on inequality than the other guys. I know you don’t like to be accused of class warfare, so you shy away from attacking inequality head-on and prefer to dream up trendy policies that address middle-class concerns in an era of globalization. But this trendy stuff is a mistake. Let individuals navigate the shift from sunset industries to sunrise ones, which they can do mainly on their own. The core problem is class, which increasingly is destiny.
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Property Taxes Soar Based on Scenery
This just goes to show you what will happen when you don’t have a progressive income tax…
Now, landowners with high-value views are livid about their tax bills, and they have started pressing officials to explain just how, exactly, they managed to distill the ineffable majesty of nature into dollar values.
Turns out, it is not a totally exact science.
“It’s more of an ‘I know it when I see it’ kind of thing,” said Thomas Holmes, the assessor for the town of Conway, N.H.
The problem in New Hampshire is not simply that “view factors” are being used in property appraisal — that is by no means unique to the Granite State. In most places, experts say, if a property’s view is good enough to make a buyer pay something extra for it, an assessor will try to estimate that something extra and include it in the property’s assessed value.
In the Washington area, for instance, an Annapolis home with a view of the Severn River might be worth 15 percent more than a similar house with a view of a cul-de-sac.
But New Hampshire is different, because the state’s views have become so sky-high valuable, and so fast. Statewide, one assessor said the maximum value added because of a view has jumped from a maximum of around $20,000 about 10 years ago to $200,000 or more now.
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