This is not the only option. As I said in my last post about this court projects, they have an option to build a tower in the middle of the current building, saving space and money compared to using the Granby Tower site. Please read Just Say NO to Federal Courthouse Plan.

Council’s typical reaction to opposition to an agenda item is to either listen and then vote for it anyway or defer it to a later date in hopes that the opposition can not make that meeting. If opposition continues, it seems to be getting more and more frequent that they have to take out petitions and costly lawsuits to have their voices heard. The City of Norfolk should not be spending money to defend itself against its residents. We need to create comprehensive plans with input from the residents of the city. Then the city needs to actually stick to the plans. These past failings can be attributed to our city leadership. We need new leaders. The current leadership has served its time. If they want to run again after a term of someone else, more power to them. All organizations need a change after awhile.

1. Publication – The plaintiff must prove that the alleged defamatory remarks were published
2. Identification – The plaintiff must prove that he/she was reasonably identified in the remarks
3. Harm – The plaintiff must prove that the remarks are harmful to his/her reputation
4. Fault – The plaintiff must prove that the defendant is at fault

Councilman Burfoot can easily prove the first three. Without an admission of guilt, however, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to prove a particular person published something online. Additionally, according to the Supreme Court Case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, because he is a public official, he has to prove “actual malice.” In other words, on top of the main four things that he must prove, he also has to prove that the author published information that he knew was false. Good luck with that. All it takes is for the author to claim that he thought it was true and Mr. Burfoot’s case is dismissed.

Back to the actual website. It has been taken down. If you Google “may4thcounts” you can still get most of it through Google’s cached site. Unfortunately for anyone who wants to fact-check, the cached site does not include the images or the supporting documents.  At first glance, however, I don’t see how Mr. Burfoot could sue for anything. The site had news articles,photos, and public documents to support most of his allegations. A couple of things were suspect such as where he claimed that Burfoot had pushed for the MacArthur Center policy or that it has had a negative effect on the mall. Have you been to the mall lately? It seems to have more customers than ever.

Whoever the author of this site is, they appear to have connections somewhere. My guess is that they work for the city somewhere or have a relative who works for the city.  While I hope that they remain anonymous, since the Norfolk City Council would like to ban free speech in its entirety, I also hope that the author will post his website again to a different server. Better yet, I hope he would post a zipped file version of his entire site plus content to an online file sharing site such as http://www.2shared.com. If he does, I hope he posts a link to it here somewhere.

Regardless, good for him/her. Its about time someone stood up to a council member.

Here is my list of activities that I have seen that should be banned while driving:

• All phone use
• shaving
• eating anything that requires two hands or a table
• any kind of sexual activity
• reading books, newspapers, reports, etc.
• photography
• applying makeup
• looking at other accidents
• actually programming your radio
• watching TV/DVDs
• Smoking (ban smoking because you can’t just ban dropping it in your crotch)
• writing
• searching the internet

Have I touched the tip of the iceberg yet? I won’t claim that I have never done at least one (or five). I will say though, that it is decidedly riskier to attempt one of these actions than it is to simply drive over the speed limit. There are many roads around (especially in Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, and Suffolk) that were actually designed for speeds as high as 65 mph, but their speeds are lowered due to residential areas, schools, etc. It is not the speed that causes the accidents, it is the combination of other activities with the speed. The only speed that contributes to accidents is the low speed of slow interstate drivers. They themselves are rarely involved, but the drivers going the speed limit have to pay extra attention (that they may not have due to other activities) to avoid them.

Come on General Assembly. Allow radar detectors. Work on actual problems. I will file this story with the one about Norfolk trying to ban low riding pants awhile back.

The part that I really worry about is whether his budgetary sense is going to have a positive or negative effect on ridership and ease of use. This man has very little in his published background that suggests that he knows anything about running a public transit company. I am not saying that this is a bad thing. Given the fact that most transit companies are poorly run, it might be time for someone who is different. I just think that we need to keep a watchful eye on what he thinks are cuts waiting to be made.

I want to emphasize the fact that the committee in charge of handing our money stated that “public transit is the future of transportation.” This is a huge leap forward for state policy on transportation. I can only hope and pray that they follow through with some HSR money and maybe some more LRT money.

He seems to be full of ideas. Some of them I agree with (Privatizing ABC) and some of them I think are terrible ideas (off-shore drilling). I only hope that he can muster the political will to fix our transportation system. We need more money to be devoted to transit construction and operation and we need to focus highway money on the construction of rebuilt choke points.

Good Luck Governor. Good Luck GA. Good Luck Virginia. There is definitely a lot to be done.

Cities Without Suburbs - By: David Rusk

I recently finished reading a book by David Rusk called “Cities without Suburbs.” I highly recommend this book to everyone. The book argues in support of regional cooperation and/or consolidation of suburbs with their historically central cities. Going beyond your typical benefits of regional cooperation, this book explains, with evidence, that there are many benefits for regional consolidation of services. He thoroughly identifies the problems facing inner cities today including, increasing poverty rates, decreasing tax revenues, and the inherent problems with solving complicated social, transportation, housing, economic, and budgetary problems when cooperating with a number of municipalities. Using census data, he explains why cities that have expanded their boundaries to encompass their own suburbs have historically done much better than cities that are unable to expand their boundaries.These locked-in cities lose revenue, resources, and opportunities in the long run to their independent suburbs. This same reason is also why suburbanites fight consolidation/annexation. They believe that their suburbs are doing well and that they don’t want to take on the inner city’s problems. There are a couple of problems with this philosophy, however. First, history and statistics have shown that suburbs that are independent from their central city do not grow as fast as suburbs that are connected to their city. In fact, the average income for the entire region is lower for regions that are segmented versus those that are not. Second, when connected to their suburbs, central cities have fewer problems and the region as a whole has a lower crime rate and a better quality of life.

While I have always felt that a regional Hampton Roads would be a good thing, this book got me thinking that it should go further than that. It is certainly a step in a positive direction to have regional organizations. Certainly don’t get me wrong. Our current institutions such as HRT, SPSA, HRPDC, HRTPO etc all have their problems but when it comes down to it, they make certain things simpler for our area. Imagine if each city had to run its own bus service. You would have to transfer to another bus every time you crossed a city boundary. What if each city had to compete individually for transportation money from the state and federal government? You think we get shorted our share now? Despite current and planned or possible future regional entities, we still need to go further.

Let’s look at one thing that our region does. It may seem minor but think about it. Tourism. Our region has many great tourist attractions. From the Virginia Beach Oceanfront and Ocean Breeze to Colonial Williamsburg and Busch Gardens/Water Country and everything in between such as Nauticus and the Wisconsin, Hampton Roads has a lot to offer. Each city spends millions a year in tourism advertising money to attempt to attract visitors to patronize their respective city. While places like Virginia Beach and Williamsburg spend money to directly advertise their attractions, other places such as Chesapeake advertise to attract visitors to stay in their hotels, hoping to capture tourists’ shopping dollars at Greenbrier, etc. The reason this has to be done is because otherwise, Chesapeake makes no money off of Virginia Beach’s tourists. If our cities were one jurisdiction, however, things would be much different. We could combine our money to advertise for our regional attractions and the whole area would benefit. The area of Chesapeake would benefit just as much from tourists that came to Greenbrier as from those that never shopped west of Lynnhaven.

The same goes for transportation. Think of our major projects. The HRBT is a good example. As it stands, Hampton and Newport News want an expanded HRBT. Norfolk, however, is against it because the outcome on our side of the water would be destroyed properties. If we were one city, though, we would be much more likely to support it. An expanded HRBT would almost certainly be a catalyst for a better business climate on the Peninsula. Norfolk doesn’t really care about that. Hampton voters can’t vote for Norfolk’s City Council. As one city, the Peninsula’s economic climate would be Norfolk’s economic climate meaning that the expanded HRBT would benefit the city. Same goes for the Dominion Blvd. project. Peninsula, Norfolk and VB leaders can see how it is important to Chesapeake and the region overall. Secretly, though, they also know that Chesapeake residents are not their constituency. They can support Chesapeake’s project but at the same time they are obligated to do what is best for their constituency.

We can look at social issues. Public housing for example. First, current housing projects were built in Norfolk, Portsmouth, Newport News, and Hampton simply because the cities were there. Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, Suffolk and the counties of Hampton Roads did not have the capacity to support large scale housing projects at the time. Current housing policy no longer supports concentrated ‘projects.’ Studies have shown that everyone does better when the poor are dispersed throughout the middle class housing areas. This dispersion keeps the poor from feeling hopeless about their situation. Their income rates increase as does the pass rate for their school children. College attendance and graduation rates increase. Despite the objections by some middle class areas, the property values do not decrease and crime does not increase. In cities that are serious about this policy, overall crime rates tend to decrease and overall income averages go up. In our area, however, due to our segmented cities and therefore our segmented housing authorities, the residents of the current projects cannot be transferred to other cities using funds from their home city to pay the rent. This condition severely limits the ability of our housing authorities to successfully assist the poor residents of the housing projects. As one city, the authority could move residents freely around the region to make sure that they have the best opportunity to advance their situations.

I think that this can be accomplished with the right amount of public support. This will not be easy, however, and will take careful consideration to make a thorough proposal to the General Assembly (required for consolidation in Virginia). This will require public education and public input to make sure that all issues are addressed. I know that not everyone will support this but that is typical of any major proposal. I also know that if we could consolidate our area so that the central cities encompasses 60-75 % of our regional population that we would be a force to be reckoned with at the state, federal, and economic levels.