In Megyn Kelly’s Fox News report about the tragic event in Roanoke, where a news reporter and her cameraman were shot and killed, toward the end of the hour she had a liberal from Obama’s W H, as well as a lady who supports the 2nd Amendment. Of course, the liberal wants more gun control as if one more law on top of the 23,000 already on the books will keep felons and nut cases from obtaining guns. The killer yesterday passed the great background check in VA as did the mad man at VPI. Besides yesterday’s sad event the last two notorious murders were done by people who passed the background check due to bad record keeping by the FBI. Following the murder of the pretty woman in San Francisco immediately a liberal on TV called for more gun control. What good are gun laws when deportees are permitted to keep returning and then steal a service weapon from a real estate agent (BLM agent) left in a parked car? The lady last night put her finger on the problem and I have tried to lie this out for my elected “representatives” but they really don’t have the time to protect the public. The crux of the matter is that the laws are not being enforced.
Amnesty for Undocumented Workers–YES
With the presidential election process beginning to take shape, the issue of Immigration reform is a hot button issue. While Donald Trump may want to build a wall (and have Mexico pay for it), this may not be the best thing for the economy. The Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project states that there are over 8.4 million unauthorized immigrants working in America. For Northampton County, these workers are critical. Without them, the current workforce would decline, and this would have a serious effect on elements of our core economy, such as agricultural production.
Even as undocumented workers are easy political targets, statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows that, “about half of the hired workers employed in U.S. crop agriculture were unauthorized, with the overwhelming majority of these workers coming from Mexico.” The USDA has also warned that, “Any potential immigration reform could have significant impacts on the U.S. fruit and vegetable industry.” For perspective, if our immigrant labor force was cleared out, U.S. retail milk prices would increase well over 50 percent.
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Response to Teeling: Time to get Northampton’s good news out
The Northampton Board of Supervisors wouldn’t know a good idea if it poured a bucket of ice water over them.
Hire somebody to market the county? We just paid a so-called Economic Development Director more than a quarter million dollars to do just that. The Board hired him with no marketing experience, no rural development experience, and guess what? Surprise—he took our money, hit the road and left us with jack squat.
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Karen Gay: Business Association should pay for website overages
I’ve attended the last several Town Council meetings primarily to hear what will happen to the Cape Charles by the Bay website. In June, I was encouraged to hear that the Town awarded the contract for the website to the Cape Charles Wave, LLC. In a fair contest, they submitted a bid for $5,300 in contrast to the next closest bid of $9,700—a difference of over $4000. Naively, I thought that the Town had been able to set aside hard feelings created when the Cape Charles Wave online Newspaper voiced opposition to the sale of the former school for $10. What some saw as hard-hitting reporting others saw as inflammatory and inaccurate.
Teeling: Time to get Northampton’s good news out
Cape Charles Mirror Report
by Wayne Creed
In Education and Economic Growth: From the 19th to the 21st Century, Charles Fadel and Riel Miller state, “There is strong evidence from the recent past that economic growth has been accompanied by growth in both spending and participation in schooling. Economists have examined this association quite carefully and come to the conclusion that, through a variety of different avenues and in a number of different ways, investment in school systems does have a strong economic pay-off.”
No one in Northampton County knows this more than Andy Teeling. Last spring, Andy brought a resolution before the County Board of Supervisors that states that the future of our county’s prosperity hinges on an engaged, informed, and educated youth, and is “the engine that drives, and will continue to drive our local and regional economy.”
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Andy Zahn: The Math Man & Despair
I think the kindergarten teacher is by far the most important. She, and she should be a she, should be a loving motherly type who plays the piano and who gets the children to love her and love school AND TO LOVE LEARNING!
It really is not the school or the teacher who matters as much as how much the kid himself puts into learning. From K to 8 I went to a large city school with an auditorium, gym and wood shop. No cafeteria. We went home for lunch. No buses. We walked. After New Year’s in 8th grade I went to a 2 room country school in Ca and my teacher was the principal and taught grades 5, 6, 7 and 8. The other teacher in the other room had grades 1 through 4. No gym. No auditorium. No buses. We walked on the shoulder of Hy 99. We had a modern lavatory but it was in a separate little building. 9th grade was in a huge campus type H S with going from building to building and it was like a college with a dean of boys and a dean of girls, grass and trees and two of us ate sandwiches under a nice tree at noon. Grades 10 to 12 in an old fashioned H S in NJ so overcrowded we had half days but, know what? We who wanted to learn did and they who didn’t care didn’t learn.
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RH Meyers: County has lost control of the government and the confidence of the citizens
Last month Carl Nordstrom addressed you expressing severe disappointment that you, the Board of Supervisors have not acted on the pressing issues facing the County. I am going to expand on the substandard performance report he presented.
You have made little to no progress in addressing the major county-wide concerns expressed repeatedly by citizens, and community organizations. You have not even addressed the professional studies including the one you commissioned and paid for with our tax dollars. You have done nothing to replace the loss of local emergency services when the hospital moves from Nassawadox. You perpetuate deteriorating relationships with the towns. You preside over the huge void of a prepared workforce. Internet broadband is available in the County but you have done little to support extending its services to the majority of the county for businesses and to other areas where internet service is poor. You continue to refuse to address with solutions the declining enrollment in the public schools. The blindness you show to the stranglehold the lack of parental involvement has over the educational system is astounding.
JANET STURGIS: County not considering CAFO health issues
There has apparently been concern in our Zoning office( I actually spoke with Melissa Kellam today) that our current setbacks are unfriendly to the CAFO industry, and specifically to the chicken agribusiness sector. I could not ascertain from our conversation, when they decided that our zoning laws needed tweaking to accommodate this industry’s specific needs, or why they would even try to accommodate that sector, but I was told that our zoning sets backs appeared unfriendly to agriculture and the tinkering was an attempt to ward off problems.
Problems? What problems? I thought no one in our county was approached by the chicken industry. Are there nefarious forces at work behind the scenes, with veiled threats of law suits and or job security issues? Since when did not liking laws/ regulations make them unenforceable? Our regs have been in force since 2009. Can someone please enlighten me?
No one, is suggesting farmers not farm in Northampton County. We are suggesting, however, that not every agricultural endeavor is suited for every piece of farm land. I don’t think for instance, I should try to grow rice in Seaview.
Editors Note: This letter is from the Ms. Sturgis comments which were read into the record at the August Board of Supervisor’s meeting
Virginia’s Right to Farm Laws prohibit local governments from requiring a special or conditional use permit for agriculture or forestry operations located within an agriculturally zoned area or classification. Theses Code were specifically created (Right to Farm Legislation)to protect agriculture from being deemed a nuisance by localities.
As localities began the process of morphing from agriculture to suburbia, pressures brought on by nuisance complaints were forcing farmers off their land and prohibiting them from activities traditionally associated with their way of life.
Northampton County recognized this early on and , specifically evoking our agricultural heritage, provided mechanisms in our zoning code to insure our valued rural lifestyle would not, hopefully, fall to those pressures.
Although the Right to Farm Act says that local governments cannot require a special use permit for normal farming operations, they can still adopt setback requirements and minimum area requirements that apply to all like agriculture or forestry operations within an agriculturally zoned area. However, these requirements cannot unreasonably restrict or regulate farm structures or farming and forestry practices unless such restrictions bear a relationship to the health, safety, and general welfare of its citizens.
Apparently, the powerful farm lobby feels some localities, in particular Northampton County, have created setbacks that go beyond the health, safety and welfare of their citizens. I, and many others, think the Northampton County Zoning code, particularly set backs, afford some of the necessary protection to the county’s citizens against a myriad of health and safety issues associated with CAFOs. Northanpton County zoning regs, along with the CBPA and the new Storm Water regulations, are three complementary and intertwined tools,that must be used in concert, as no single set of regulations, can be relied upon to afford the coverage needed to insure there are no gaps in protecting our county. Please keep the CBPA and our current zoning setback requirements. I also urge, if a legal mechanism exists, the review and update of our current setbacks , to see if they can be increased , as current evidence and review of these set backs in other areas, such as South Carolina, reveal that ours may not in fact, be large enough.
Rebuttal to Andy Zahn’s Have our leaders forsaken us?
By C.Chris Chandler
I was clearly moved by your piece in the Mirror. I want to respond in kind. First of all, I have a better understanding of how you think and what you feel has happened to this country in the past fifty or so years. I have an aunt who is approaching her ninth decade. She once told me this isn’t the same country she remembered as a young woman and she thought it was a shame. And you know, in some ways, I’d have to agree with both you and her. And though I am approaching my sixth decade, I still see some very bright hopes for this nation and our place in the world.[Read more…]
Cape Charles Planning Commission: Pin Heads and Brew Pubs
Son of Backassward
There is sufficient language in the Comprehensive Plan as reason to propose reverse-angle parking on Bay Avenue as a policy in line with stated town goals.-Staff report
Like a sequel to the classic horror film, Plan 9 from Outer Space, reverse-angle parking is lurking behind the tomb stones, ready to wreak more havoc in the lives and souls of Cape Charles residents—this time on Bay Avenue. For some unknown reason, there is a high level of concern among members of the Planning Commission (members who have never actually been seen on Cape Charles beach), that there is somehow a major parking issue on Bay Avenue, and that steps must be taken to remediate the problem or a scenario as dire as a zombie apocalypse is most surely imminent. This, of course is patently ridiculous (the parking problem, not the zombie apocalypse), and is indicative of the shoddy, half-baked thinking that led to the Planning Commission’s ruining Mason Avenue’s small town appeal by stupidly implementing reverse angle parking there. [Read more…]