Lockport NY

The council agenda for this Wednesday is here:

11/29/10

The LUSJ has reported that the claim has been filed. Next up: CPS visits to question family about endangering the welfare of their 11yr old child by not properly supervising them. Actually, both scenarios are rediculus.

7/4/10

The Buffalo News reported today on a Notice of Claim against Niagara County for an injury that allegedly happened on the old Flintkote Site on Mill St.

"Notice of claim will be filed against Niagara County this week on behalf of an 11-year-old girl who fell from a decrepit building at the former Flintkote plant and broke her jaw.

Denis Bastible of the Cellino & Barnes law firm said he will file the mandatory preliminary to a lawsuit by Katie Sargent, of Chapel Street, who was hurt June 10 at the hazardous waste site, which the county has owned since 1999..."

I feel bad for the kid having to deal with the experience and the injuries. But I don't care if there is a hole in a fence or a sign has some weeds in front of it. 11 years is old enough to realize the risk you are taking and that you are not supposed to be there in the first place. If a kid is not old enough to making these decisions then why are they allowed out on their own?

If one can file a suit against the county in this instance, would counter suits by the county against parents for not properly raising their children to stay out of locations they do to belong at and not raising them to properly access risk be reasonable?

In either case no. A child learned a lesson the hard way (like most of us probably did growing up).

Well I missed it two weeks ago but Nov 12th was the 2nd anniversary of this blog (1st).

Views have gone from around 50k during the first year to almost 120k during the second. A big part of that is still the ever popular Molson Concert Series threads. The Our Lady Peace concert set a single day view record of 2,272 views the day of the show. The 2010 concert series thread as a whole has over 17,000 views at this time. The most viewed non-concert related thread was the recent Budget 2011 Part 1 post with over 1,000.

I just want to say thank you to everyone who participates be it by a name or anonymously and the 99.9% good behavior rate you bring to the discussions. I personally know more than a few in the city government that browse here from time to time as one of their sources of resident feedback. I'd also like to thank the couple that have posted here, as inviting to trolls as it may be.

I look forward to the next year as we continue to discuss ways to make the place we live better and enjoy all it has to offer. I hope everyone has a great holiday weekend.

The 2011 Discover Buffalo Niagara Calender is now out (FB). For those of you that enjoy all of the events around our part of WNY this calender offers over 400 of them by date. This is the 11th year of publication.

And as a side-note plug, I created this year's cover and Lockport resident Olivia is on the cover.

I have recently come across an article that once once again says something that I have "thought" for a long time but have never been able to explain well.

...Why is this happening? One big reason cities tend to fall into decline is that they accumulate huge unfunded liabilities, and those liabilities attach to the territory, not the people. This lets one generation of residents rack up huge future bills, then skip town to leave the next generation or those not lucky enough to get out with the bill. It’s the equivalent of being able run up a huge balance on the civic credit card, then pawn the bill off on someone else.

Imagine if you will if your house worked this way. Your mortgage, your credit card debt, etc. all happened to be chargeable not to you, but to whomever was living in your house. If you simply stopped paying and moved elsewhere, you’d be relieved of all those debts. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But that’s exactly how municipal debt and unfunded liabilities work. It is a huge incentive for politicians and residents to vote for immediate gratification with the bill – infrastructure costs, pensions, redevelopment costs, or what have you – pushed out 25-30 years. Then these people or their children simply move to a greenfield and start the process over again.

I suspect this, perhaps more than any other force, is what drives urban and suburban abandonment in favor of newer towns...

It is a pertinent subject as we come off the most recent budget process and hear the voices explain that newer places "just do it better". It's always easy to do better when you grow off of somewhere with the liabilities and have yet to reach the peak of your own.

It's also good insight into why an older city will never demolish and parking lot pave its way to success. The numbers are against the city competing against cheap green fields and lower newer cost structures. For cities that have survived or turned around it has come from embracing their urban infrastructure and walkability potential. Unfortunately places like Lockport still contain outdated zoning codes that do the opposite. They promote development of a second rate ‘burb instead of a first class city/village.

UPDATE:

This also reminded me of a favorite quote of mine: "In America we don't solve our problems, we just move away from them."

Interesting insight into a Traffic Engineer and his thoughts on current road standards.

...In retrospect I understand that this was utter insanity. Wider, faster, treeless roads not only ruin our public places, they kill people. Taking highway standards and applying them to urban and suburban streets, and even county roads, costs us thousands of lives every year. There is no earthly reason why an engineer would ever design a fourteen foot lane for a city block, yet we do it continuously. Why?

The answer is utterly shameful: Because that is the standard.

In the engineering profession's version of defensive medicine, we can't recommend standards that are not in the manual. We can't use logic to vary from a standard that gives us 60 mph design speeds on roads with intersections every 200 feet. We can't question why two cars would need to travel at high speed in opposite directions on a city block, let alone why we would want them to. We can yield to public pressure and post a speed limit -- itself a hazard -- but we can't recommend a road section that is not in the highway manual.

When the public and politicians tell engineers that their top priorities are safety and then cost, the engineer's brain hears something completely different. The engineer hears, "Once you set a design speed and handle the projected volume of traffic, safety is the top priority. Do what it takes to make the road safe, but do it as cheaply as you can." This is why engineers return projects with asinine "safety" features, like pedestrian bridges and tunnels that nobody will ever use, and costs that are astronomical....

Rather important lessons to rememeber especially when it comes to the city and future road projects. If you make it easier and more comfortable for people to go fast, they will. No matter how many speed limit signs you may try to put up. Mutliple wide lanes, no cars parked on the streets, trees removed etc all cause dirvers to feel more comfortable going faster and cause them to pay less attention.