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Fair ~ River stage: 33.35 Rising Friday, November 20, 2009 |
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Residents' green board to advise Cape officialsFriday, April 10, 2009After a lengthy negotiation over the scope of its duties, Cape Girardeau will have a new advisory board soon to discuss how the city can use its resources in more environmentally conscious ways. The Girardeau Goes Green Advisory Board, which needs a final vote April 20 to become official, will be a seven-member committee of city residents dedicated to studying city operations from an environmental point of view. The idea for the advisory board grew out of discussions by the Southeast Missouri Climate Protection Initiative, an organization founded to promote regional actions to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Bringing the advisory board into existence required compromise on the side of proponents, who wanted broad language that would allow the board to look beyond city activities to private actions and make suggestions. And some council members, carefully reading the initial proposal, wanted to make sure the board wasn't authorized to make suggestions that would impose large costs but provide little in the way of savings. Acceptable language was finally written, and Monday the council approved the board with a 5-2 vote. "I think it is a good step for Cape," said Kathy Conway, an associate professor of education at Southeast Missouri State University. Conway, along with biology professor Alan Journet and Ellen Dillon, a communications instructor, pressed the council to create the board. "Life is full of compromises," Conway said. "A compromise is something that wouldn't be your first choice but it is something you can live with. Our idea is to use the resources of the community to help the city. If the board can do that, then our goal has been accomplished." Journet, too, said that getting the board established with a purpose that focuses on the city government rather than a more general directive was part of the give-and-take. "It wasn't exactly the way we proposed it. We think it is a reasonable compromise." One of the dissenting votes was cast by Marcia Riter, councilwoman for Ward 6. She said she would have preferred to create a temporary task force for a comprehensive look at city operations. If the results justified an advisory board, she said, one could be created later. "I felt that was a more conservative way of going about it," she said. And Mark Lanzotti, councilman for Ward 5, voted for the board but was deeply involved in the negotiations that narrowed its scope to city operations. At one point, Lanzotti wanted the language to include a provision that the board not suggest actions that impose a cost on the city. Lanzotti said Thursday that he meant every suggestion needs to be cost-effective, capable of reducing city costs by more than the initial expense. "If there are cost-effective ways to have Cape Girardeau city government reduce its environmental impact, we would love to have those suggestions and channel these folks' passion into those areas," Lanzotti said. The original proposal also allowed for nonresidents to hold seats on the board. Journet and Conway, for example, live just outside city limits. The council kept the residency requirement, which is the same for other advisory boards, but will allow county residents with special expertise to be named as nonvoting members. The resolution of the residency issue, while disappointing, wasn't a fight worth killing the idea over, Conway said. "It wasn't Alan and Kathy and Ellen's board," she said. "This is an idea we think should happen." 388-3642 Pertinent address 401 Independence St., Cape Girardeau, MO Comments  Note: The nature of the Internet makes it impractical for our staff to review every comment. If you feel that a comment is offensive, please Login or Create an account first, and then you will be able to flag a comment as objectionable. Please also note that those who post comments on semissourian.com may do so using a screen name, which may or may not reflect a website user's actual name. Readers should be careful not to assign comments to real people who may have names similar to screen names. Refrain from obscenity in your comments, and to keep discussions civil, don't say anything in a way your grandmother would be ashamed to read.
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Perhaps an effort to mollify the 'outsiders' so's there will be no claims of, or litigation towards excess (sales) taxation without representation? :-)~
All seriousness aside - perhaps not such a terrible arrangement, with the 'non-voting participants' approach/compromise. IMO, this issue was a 'hill to die for', as one council-person had said previously.
Suggest Mr. Lanzotti has a reasonable perspective. Sure, there are a lot of good 'green' ideas - but important to understand what these ideas cost (or save) overall, in real dollars and not in generic fluffy, feel-good terms.
Further suggest it was wise to focus only on city government operations. Should private entities be interested in participating, I would think they would receive all the 'help' they could stand, by just asking for it.
While I have yet to completely buy into the 'greenhouse gas' thing - do believe that energy efficiency is a wise undertaking, so as to better control total energy costs both now and in the future 'light' (ar,ar,ar) of upcoming increased rates.
I'd be more interested in why Rudi Keller conveniently avoids a more balanced revelation that Al Journet and his alleged wife, Kathy Conway, has had other local and national affiliations with radical leftist (meaning, to me, socialist/communist) groups. For example, Al and company were leaders of the local campus radical group, SEMO Coalition for Peace & Justice, whose web site was SEMO Progressives (another convenient front word for communists that "Uncle Karl" would approve of), which also boasted of their affiliation with the far left national group with the same moniker who, of course, were/are joined at the hip with fun-loving leftists such as the Communist Party USA. When the "SEMO Progressives" felt they were sufficiently exposed for their true agenda, they quietly morphed into the SEMO Climate Protection Initiative to continue with their subversive mission.
The trouble is, too many of us realize that "enviromentalism" was adapted as the feel-good albeit subversive cloak of the socialist/communist movement as far back as the 1970s. Even I was in on some of the initial campus movements and classes back then. So come on, Rudi, please get with the program. With all due respect, your paper has been aware of Journet's affiliations and agenda for quite some time now. So why you folks and the City of Cape Girardeau choose to listen to and promote this kind of nonsense tends to make me wonder at times what your true agenda is.
Herr, I mean no disrespect toward you however, you showed none toward the Journet's. Your Tirade sounds and reads much like something Joe McCarthy
would have come up with. I doubt you have anything to fear from A.Journet or his wife Kathy.
Although I do not agree with some of their politics I don't think they deserve such nonsense.
That being said, have a great weekend and a happy Easter.
Greywolf:
Meaning no disrespect to a fellow veteran either, of whom I think it's fair to add that we both served our country honorably, in my case, volunteering to do so twice. But I wish to ask you a few questions regarding what you deem as "nonsense" in what I honestly stated in my post below, just for my own edification: Have you ever attended any of the leftist events which Journet or his fellow leftist indoctrinators attend, if not sponsor? Did you ever have a chance to visit the SEMO Progressive web site when it was up and running, or even check out some of the extremist leftist web sites of groups they were affiliated with? Have you ever had to sit in college classes, at SEMO U. or elsewhere and put up with the agenda and pressures of some of these leftists just to pass a course? Have you ever talked to younger students at SEMO who have confirmed that they have in fact been "indoctrinated" with leftist nonsense in class, plus pressured not only to accept it, but also become activists for "the cause"? Well, sir, I can honestly answer all the above questions in the affirmative, and not just while attending SEMO, but as far back as the 70's when I was pursuing my first degree at another university.
So I suppose the above questions beg yet another question of you, Greywolf. What precisely do you see as inaccurate or even disingenuous with what I previously posted? I won't speak for you, but the two times I served, I accepted that the worst enemy of this nation and it's Constitution was socialism, or communism if you will. And I prefer to keep things as simple as possible in this respect, so I subscribe to Vlad Lenin's definition of communism, which is "socialism in a hurry". And perhaps you haven't seen it, but in my lifetime I've witnessed incremental socialism transform into outright in-your-face, we-want-socialism-right-now, which is happening today, especially in government schools including tax-funded universities. I'm not asking that you agree with me, but merely stating that it's the way I view the threats to our country not only in the past, but even today. And I don't personally hate Journet and his ilk, but I certainly hate the historically failed and deadly ideology they insist on oppressing the rest of us with.
You seem to have missed one other key point I was attempting earlier, and that is my displeasure that this paper seems to pander to if not promote the leftist agenda spewing out of SEMO U., which is probably why I don't value much of what I read in this paper anymore. I sent Rudi a note on that issue; however, he has not been good enough to reply yet. Oh, and by the way, I don't think Joe McCarthy was such a bad guy, but merely vilified like anyone else who chooses to resist the socialist agenda. In fact, where is he now that this country really needs him?!
With all that said, Grey, I hope you have a great Easter weekend too. Who knows? Soon those types of "extremist activities" may be deemed as more fun than we're allowed to have!!