After the business coalition forum was over I was disappointed that I didn’t get a chance to bring up the issue of school uniforms especially after I witnessed the passion against new taxes from commission candidates and guests.  The school board recently mandated a uniform policy for all k-12 schools.  This policy is far worse than a tax though because not only is it putting an undue financial burden on families, it restricts freedom of speech and expression.

The policy was founded on misconceptions and false premises. The research (including studies from the Journal of Educational Research and a 4 year tracking study by the Miami-Dade school district) shows that uniforms do not lessen dress code violations, nor do they have a positive affect on attendance, behavior, performance, or substance use.  The main ‘issue’ as claimed by board members really comes down to enforcement of dress code standards already in place.

Some people say that uniforms aren’t that bad but for a public policy to be enacted that takes away rights, there has to be an overwhelming good to justify it.  In the case of uniforms there is none.  In fact there is no rational reason to have uniforms (and a million reasons against them but I’ll keep this post short).

In tough economic times parents will now have to buy a new wardrobe for their kids.  (Don’t believe the farce that uniforms save money, no student wears uniforms outside of school.  That means that the cost of uniforms is in addition to whatever regular clothes they buy.)

I couldn’t believe that the new policy was passed or that it was even brought up when there are pressing fundamental issues with education that actually affect performance in schools. (see my website)

There has been significant opposition to uniforms.  All 7 high school principals wrote a letter to the board urging them to not pass the policy and to let them continue to enforce the dress code already in place.  There have been a couple of protests already and a number of groups have been formed; legal action is anticipated.  Whether you have children or not we all need to fight injustice and I urge all of you to email the board, to join one of the groups via facebook, or to connect with parents and dissenters (you can email me at chris.smiley@gmx.com).

Elected or not I will continue to work to reverse this policy.

My website- Fleducationreform.com

Letter from principals-  http://notopolos.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/copy-of-the-letter-sent-to-school-board-from-alachua-county-school-principals/

This is just a simple web poll on the school board candidates. Please check out their web sites listed on the 2010 candidates’ page and then take the poll! Then pass it around to your friends! It’s almost like a real election…

This poll is over. Thanks to the few who participated…just like our real elections.

Why am I doing this? Because the issues will continue to be the same: rapacious utility rates and mismanagement of the city government. I have also had every encouragement from friends and strangers alike, and this has intensified since I filed. Whereas most conservatives who have lost have gone back to their business and gotten politics behind them, I have decided to build on the support that I have, and to start early. I need you to do the same. I need your financial support, and the sooner the better. If we lay the ground work now, everything will go much smoother later.

Please limit your contributions to $250 per person or business entity. Contributions over $100 must also list your occupation. Please make out your check and mail it to:

The Marsh Campaign
3904 NW 15 St.
Gainesville, FL 32605

As I near the deadline to qualify for the County Commission District 2 race , I , Walt Boyer, am left wondering if our Conservative voters are just going to sit back and watch as the Liberal majority maintain the stranglehold on our local governments that they have had for years. I am wondering how long will you sit back and allow your taxes to skyrocket just to fund projects that will only benifit the few. How long will you sit back and watch as businesses choose to become established in the surrounding counties instead of Alachua County because the regulations of our County are so unfreindly to business. How long will you sit back and do nothing knowing that your opinions or concerns are going unheeded.

It is time to make a stand and elect a person that has no special interest group affiliations and can openly and honestly represent the voice of the citizens of Alachua County. I encourage you to visit WWW.VOTEFORWALT.COM for more info on me or call 352-356-VOTE with any county concerns. I believe that in order to represent, you have to be in touch with how the citizens for whom you serve are feeling so I will always have an “open door” policy for anyone to voice concern or ideas on how to make our County better.  So are you ready to step up and invest in a candidate that will pick the current budget apart line by line and make those responsible for the wasteful spending accountable to you the voter, that will invite clean industries and manufacterers to our County to ease unemployment and bring in more revenue, that will ease the regulations for small businesses to help stimulate our economy.We only have till June 14 and I know with your help our voice can be heard again. I need campaign donations to qualify and then we can work on presence in our communities

Just remember to make it a point to vote in November. Many Americans have given their lives to assure you have the freedom to do just that . Dont let your friends stay home, push everyone you know to register and vote.

I was well aware of the low turnout, and for that reason I focused on our electric bills, which have been astronomical lately. I believe that 100% of Gainesville voters get their electric sewer and water from GRU, so it was reasonable to think this would get people to care enough to come out. I made sure that they knew that the city OWNS GRU, and that my opponent actually voted for the increases. This was never disputed in the various candidate forums nor in the press.

Of course, the press never really covered the issues. They  spent a lot of time looking into the flyers someone made that warned about my opponent becoming Gainesville’s first gay mayor. Although it appears (if the voter turnout means anything) that this meant almost nothing on election day, this was the Maypole that the Sun and the Alligator continued to dance around throughout the campaigns. So, either the voting public was distracted by an irrelevant issue or people actually LIKE rapacious electric bills.

Unfortunately, there is probably something true about that last point. Each year, as the City of Gainesville continues to elect big spenders with huge appetites for your money, I tell other members of the Loyal Opposition that, “The people of this town like high taxes, gridlock, and less economic opportunity.” I actually met some of these people while knocking on doors throughout the city. I stumbled upon a dinner party at which I was invited to come in and pitch my candidacy. I started with our high electric bills and the millions that the city depends on getting from GRU to pay for their spending. The hostess told me we deserved to pay more because other people in the world were suffering. She could make no correlation between my high bills and the suffering of Darfur, but that didn’t matter. The argument seems to have more to do with Karma than logic.

I was going to post the results here, but I thought I would just send you to the Supervisor of Elections site for the complete results of both the March 16th general election and the April 13th Runoff. It includes a precincts by precinct breakdown so you can see what are the most apathetic (Precinct 31, Reitz Union, 1.95%) and most civic minded (Precinct 64, Westminster Presbyterian Church, 31.65%)  parts of town are. That was in March. It April, it was the same precincts, only they improved to 2.45% and 42.51% respectively. The runoff actually had an improved turnout of 16.75%. Very sad indeed.

Craig Lowe in MP3

Don Marsh in MP3

Our own toxic time bomb!

What kind of city official would claim to have saved a toxic waste disaster for just before an election? Craig Lowe is your man of action. He has been a city commissioner for 7 years, and now he wants to be your Mayor, Gainesville. Cabot/Koppers has been an EPA Superfund site since 1983. And it has still been allowed to stay in business since that time!

Koppers has been a wood treatment plant in Gainesville since 1916. For many years they maintained lagoons full of creosote. This industrial coal tar product has been sinking deeper and closer to the Florida Aquifer. This will eventually pollute our drinking water.

The EPA could have started cleaning this up in the 1980s, but for some strange reason, Koppers has been allowed to stay in business. No one has had the backbone to close them down so a clean-up could begin. Solid majorities of the city commissioners have persisted in letting these poisons run their course rather than shut down a documented polluter…IN GAINESVILLE!

Koppers has also been cited for air-born pollutants, which have been scattered up to a ten mile radius around the plant, which is located behind the Big Lots store at Main St. and NW 39th Ave. Dioxin has been found in the dirt around the Stephen Foster neighborhood and beyond.

Craig Lowe says that only he has the experience to clean up this mess. I guess he has been waiting until he has been on the city commission for 7 years to feel confident enough to know what should have been done 27 years ago. No thanks, commissioner! Your time is up!

Don Marsh, candidate for Mayor

VOTE APRIL 13th!

Although Gainesville Mayoral candidates  Craig Lowe and Monica Leadon Cooper disagree about biomass, they have this in common: they are the candidates of scarcity!

When Craig Lowe decided to give up the cheapest fuel source for biomass, he sentenced our city to a future of higher utility bills, more people moving out of Gainesville, more businesses struggling, fewer jobs, and less tax revenue. As utility bills climb higher, we will lose more homeowners, have more foreclosures, and more blight. It will be the beginning of the end. And if you think UF will save us from this, they are already looking at budget cuts and high tuition that will eventually cause students to go elsewhere…even online for an education.

Monica Cooper does not promise us anything better. She wants us to forget coal AND biomass and to limp along on solar energy and conservation and belt-tightening. Solar currently costs more than coal generated power and can only be had during the day. And it better be a sunny day. This will also lead to higher costs, fewer jobs, less tax revenue, and fewer reasons for anyone to stick around here.

I am Don Marsh, and I am the only candidate in this race that knows we need more generating capacity so we can have cheaper, more plentiful electricity, so that businesses will want to move here, and existing businesses can stay in business. Coal, although it will not last forever, is the only sensible fuel source until new technologies mature and become cheap enough to compete and produce power for the rest of the 21st century.

Remember: scarcity will cause prices to rise, and opportunities to shrink. Deciding to stop using coal is a decision to suffer lack. It is the error of politicians to distort the free market and create shortages with unnecessary, ideologically driven regulations. When Barack Obama said that he would bankrupt the coal industry, he set in motion false shortages as investments ran away from coal production. Then Florida stopped all coal plants and this lead to higher prices still. THIS MUST BE REVERSED. But first we must save the coal plant we have!

In the meantime, I will stop hiding Gainesville’s city taxes on your utility bill and cut the budget down to core services like police, fire, roads, and other basic infrastructure. I will get rid of the tiered pricing that punishes families. And I will stop the feed-in tariff that subsidizes solar panels on the homes of people who can afford them, while you are doing without!

Vote for me March 16 for sensible solutions and honest, transparent government.

Nathaniel Sperling for Gainesville City Commission

On March 16^th, the voters of the City of Gainesville will be able to send a glaring message to our local elected officials: we are sick and tired of the irresponsibility that seems to pass for governance these days. Right now, the City of Gainesville is current over $7 Million in the red with no end in sight.

Instead of cutting costs where possible (oh, Mayor Hanrahan has claimed that the city has tried cut all the fat off this year’s budget, but I will show where that is just flat out wrong), the city is just finding nifty little ways of getting our money into their empty coffers. For example, did you know that, since GRU is owned by the City of Gainesville, our utility company has become a giant cash cow to the tune of $34 Million (plus another $9 Million in collected utility taxes) in this year alone? Have your utility rates gone up in the past few months? If so, blame the City Commission and its continued mismanagement of the budget. Is this responsible governance? Oh, we have a shortage of funds…I know, we’ll just spend more and leave the citizenry to foot the bill? It certainly is not realistic…only in government can one legally seize other people’s money to make up for poor spending decisions.

Now, where is all this money going? How about $600k per year for Ironwood Golf Course (another $450K is being spent this year to renovate it…thus, over $1 Million this year is going to pay for a golf course). Approximately $900K per year is being spent so that city employees have access to three fully-equipped and staffed private fitness centers (these centers are only for city employees and their families, the general public who is footing the bill is not welcome) and Proclub services. Then there is half a million dollars being spent per year on a City Communications office. If this office is so indispensable, why did our City Commission function just fine for decades without it? Right here I have mentioned easy ways to eliminate over half the current deficit. I have not even touched on the Mom’s Kitchen boondoggle or the Biomass issue (high startup costs plus potentially high cost of “dead stuff” equals a hefty bill for the taxpayer to foot).

How about all that money that the city is going to waste on a one-stop homeless shelter? Instead of working with local charities (i.e. St. Francis House) and making use of existing social organizations, the city is going to spend a lot of money to put this one-stop center out in the middle of nowhere (how much is it then going to cost to get the homeless out there?) and likely continue to squelch private sector attempts to help alleviate the problem. How much do you think the lawsuits are going to end up costing when something goes terribly and tragically wrong at this one-stop center–what usually happens when you put single mothers and young children in a poorly supervised area with potentially dangerous derelicts?

As Mayor Hanrahan wastes our money on a golf course, she condemns our police and fire fighters for wanting to be treated fairly and the city manager wants to lay off a few dozen police officers. That seems like a fair trade: an unprofitable golf course but a more dangerous and crime-ridden city. Perhaps the only group to benefit from this cut in police officers will be the less responsible members of our college student community who will now be able to party and drink and play loud music because you can bet ‘party patrol’ units will take a hit in these foolish across-the-board cuts the city manager is proposing–sort of like doing brain surgery with a meat cleaver.

At the same time as we waste money, we scare businesses away with draconian regulations and an air of unfriendliness. Now, we have an even weaker tax base and serious underemployment problems. Unless you work for UF or Shands, it is very difficult to find a good paying job with benefits. Our city’s unfriendliness to business hurts our working families and professionals by denying them access to good job opportunities and forces small businesses out of business.

The City Commission shows a great disconnect to the people of Gainesville. It is time we change this. The irresponsibility of our local government seems downright criminal: endangering the welfare of young children by exposing them to dangerous elements of society in a poorly conceived one-stop center, endangering our residents with unnecessary cuts to public safety services, failing to address the Koppers Superfund site and putting the surrounding neighborhoods and the aquifer at extreme risk, even increasing congestion by narrowing major thoroughfares (it will be infuriatingly interesting to see if the number of accidents and road rage incidents increase as the number of lanes on Main Street and University Avenue decrease).

There are those who say that we need people experienced in the working of local government to serve as our new District 4 City Commissioner and Mayor, but I say we need individuals with common sense and a firm grasp of reality. Political experience just means they know how to play the game and we see where that has gotten us: HUGE deficits, underemployment, a severe environmental catastrophe in the making and burdensome regulations and fee.

The reality is that:

1) We need to stop wasting money on boondoggles (i.e. Ironwood Golf course, Mom’s Kitchen, etc.)

2) We need to strengthen our business community and promote greater job development through intelligent deregulation and ending the air of unfriendliness toward business that permeates our local government. The jobs and the businesses are there: look at the town of Alachua, they are doing quite well because their city government shows some common sense.

3) We need to live within our means and stop just increasing taxes and fees (i.e. through siphoning money from GRU)

4) We need to keep our city safe and functional by responsibly allocating our funds (i.e. for police and fire protection)

This is what needs to be done to make our city prosperous and safe. The City Commission needs to stop buying into the failed dogma of New Urbanism and instead listen to the concerns of the people: we want good jobs, we want government to stop wasting money and then hitting us with the bill, we want the government to show the same managerial responsibility that any head of a household or business owner must show in order to survive.

On March 16th, the voters of this city can send a message that even our City Commissioners (who seem to consistently have their head in a land of fantasy) will hear: WE ARE SICK AND TIRED OF IRRESPONSIBILITY AND UNREALISTIC GOVERNANCE AND WE WILL BE HEARD!

Call and e-mail your candidates and ask the tough questions and demand a straight answer. No circumspection, obfuscation or pontification allowed. I can be reached by phone at 352-214-3170 and my e-mail address is nathanielsperling@yahoo.com. Other candidates’ contact information can be found at the Alachua County Supervisor of Elections website.

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There are three ways to cast your ballot in the City of Gainesville elections:

1) Regular voting will occur on March 16th. You can find your polling place on the Supervisor of Elections webiste.

2) Early voting: March 8th-13th at the Alachua County Administration Building (12 SE 1st Street, Gainesville, FL). Hours of operation are 9 AM to 5 PM each day.

3) Absentee voting: Contact the Supervisor of Elections at 352-374-5252 to learn more and request an absentee ballot.

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If you want responsibility and a sense of reality back on your City Commission, if you want a person who will truly listen to your concerns and approach city government with an air of common sense, then please consider voting for me, Nathaniel Sperling, for Gainesville City Commission (District 4).

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Political advertisement paid for and approved by Nathaniel Sperling for Gainesviille City Commission District 4.

Organizers prepare for "Senate in the City" event

It was pretty darned cold yesterday when I got to the Plaza of the Americas, but it warmed up a little bit. The students who stopped by my table were interested in the local issues and wanted to make a responsible choice. I felt like I was very well received. I was asked if I expected students to turn out in large numbers, and I told him that I was counting on a larger turnout from everyone. City elections are notorious for their 9-12% voter turnouts.

Student Senate candidates were there as well, and their tables got a lot of traffic. A WUFT-FM reporter asked me if I had any advice for Senate candidates. I shared my story of how I was in student government in 1977. It was where I first learned how powerful it felt to spend other people’s money. We had begun our political tenures being really cheap, and making every student club and activity justify every expense. Toward the end of the year, we had so much money left over that we started throwing it around on frivolous things, like keg parties and wine and cheese events. We even brought in Steve Martin and charged only 50 cents admission to make sure we lost money. I guess you could say we had subsidized stand-up comedy that year. In the final analysis, I wanted to remind them that those student activity fees are the taxes students pay to the student government, and that their clubs deserve to be funded.

It was a lot of fun, and I gave away a lot of window clings!