New Woodburn Community School

LUDICROUS STATEMENTS FROM THE LOSING MAYOR AND THE CLUELESS MEDIA

But what more in victory?

The political action committee Morgantown Together won 5 races and 5 seats on the Morgantown City Council yesterday and lost none, an undefeated election season.

Of the 4 council members who voted these past couple years as a Backwards Bloc, two were defeated, including Mayor Jim Manilla, also Linda Herbst, while the other two stood for re-election unopposed: Ron Bane and Wes Nugent. It seems apparent that Morgantown Together could have run Mickey Mouse again against Bane and defeated him handily, while Nugent, who is the most personable and youngest Backwards Bloc voter, would also have been seriously challenged and quite possibly defeated by virtually any Morgantown Together candidate.

The absurd and petty hypocrisy of the two defeated Backwards Bloc candidates was striking in the run-up to the election. Both Manilla and Herbst ran inane and vapid ads denouncing the Morgantown Together candidates for running as a group, and yet these Backwards Blockers had no compunction against their own continual voting as a group throughout the past years.

Even more striking, some excellent investigation and reporting work by Sam Wilkinson at his blog shows the unmistakable signs that the Backwards Bloc councilors and BB-aligned candidates themselves operated as a group under the designation “Victory for Morgantown”. They lost every contested race. For the politics behind the politics see Wilkinson’s findings:

• April 22, 2013 Me Thinketh Mayor Manilla Doth Protesteth Too Much
• April 23, 2013 Morgantown’s Mayor Jim Manilla Hates Slates Of Candidates…Except His Own
• April 25, 2013 But I Thought Coordinating Campaigning Was Bad?
• April 30, 2013 This Is What A Thin Skin Looks Like (City Council Edition)

“The very, very low number of voter turn out.” contributed to his defeat says Jim Manilla.  “We expected a lot more, we were hoping that people really followed the issues.” he says.

The irony is that Mayor Manilla largely led the charge to do away with Vote By Mail (VBM), which had helped raise voter turnout last election to a relatively high 25 percent. With no VBM this election, voter turnout was cut nearly in half. The further irony is that the VBM election had swept 3 of the 4 Backwards Bloc councilors into office, only to be swept out in both contested races after voting in bloc, 4-3, to get rid of Vote by Mail. By all appearances, most of the registered voters who turned out did pay attention to the issues, and voted accordingly.

WAJR has been pronouncing repeatedly on this the day after the election that the low turnout shows that city residents were “not interested” in the election. In reality, the city council dominated by the Backwards Bloc were the ones “not interested” in making democracy and governmental decisions as accessible as they should be, as they need to be.

WAJR morning host Kay Murray, evidently demoralized by the election results, showed virtually no interest in discussing the elections and was astonished at how long she thought it seemed to take to get the final count (after the ultimate results had been made plain by the early returns). She was swiftly informed by the city manager that it took far longer to tabulate the results in the previous election, 3:30 a.m., when the Backwards Bloc swept into power, as compared to 11:30 p.m., this time, when the Backwards Bloc was utterly broken up.

The need for independent media in Morgantown remains painfully obvious.

The configuration of the Morgantown City Council was significantly improved by these elections, but is it very promising? Not really, not apparently. Without a strong and serious, let alone any, city council push for comprehensive annexation, the city can do little to banish or remediate much of its current woes. And therein lies probably the great part of the reason for low voter turnout: even the new city council, which could do so much, seems so bound and determined to do so little – and it shows – it shows badly – not least to would-be voters. Read the rest of this entry »

THE BALLPARK TIF – OBLITERATING GOVERNMENT CONTROL OF PUBLIC FUNDS BY LOCKING IN PUBLIC MONIES TO PRIVATE AND WEALTHY INTERESTS

It has come to this in West Virginia. In the same year that the state has cut more than $13 million in funding to WVU, the state has approved and signed away multi-millions of state sales tax dollars to build a baseball stadium for WVU.

That’s right. The university gets cut financially by the state, while WVU sports, which are said to be paid for by the ostensibly “self-sustaining” WVU athletic department, gets millions of dollars from the state, via the TIF (Tax Increment Financing) swindle signed into law yesterday.

Why does no one, let alone any media outlet, comment on that scandalous juxtaposition: state financial cut to the university, state financial boon to WVU sports. That’s wrong. That’s backwards. That is what one would expect in a state that ranks dead last in well-being among the fifty states.

No WVU department or programs, office or services should allow the WVU administration to cut a dime from their budgets. No student tuition should be raised. No Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) should be disallowed by the administration. After all, WVU is currently loaning the ostensibly “self-sustaining” athletic department “about $12 million” and is awaiting the approximately $14 million gift baseball stadium from the state (and Monongalia County) TIF scam. So WVU has the money to offset this year’s state cuts to the university. Or, that is, it had the money, before diverting it to the athletic department. The university could readily raise the money by selling some of its investments and assets. Or even by tapping one of its bank accounts or fundraising arms. The university had millions of dollars on hand to lend to the athletic department and is throwing tens of millions of dollars into new construction projects left and right, and WVU recently reported that it saved $17.5 million by bond refinancing and had another $4.9 million freed up when new construction bids came in lower than expected. That alone is $22.4 million – far more than enough to offset this year’s $13.3 million cut from the state. Any cut to the university that WVU administrators blame on the state funding cut would be phony, another lie, and another swindle, not unlike the “ballpark” TIF. (More on that hijacking of public funds in forthcoming posts.)

What’s wrong with this picture?:

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