Good day friends and readers…. It is now official. I am once again running for Alachua County School Board. I have many concerns about our students education and many related budget issues. Please peruse my new website at www.JodiWood.info to get further information about this candidacy. Jodi
Jan Jordan was instrumental in unionizing Alachua County teachers back in the 70s. Today, she is the Director of Continuing Education at City College, Gainesville, Casselberry, Miami, and Fort Lauderdale. This Saturday, she was just one of several speakers doing an educational presentation about unions and their history for the Gainesville Tea Party at their monthly meeting. Some members left the meeting because they were strongly anti-union and didn’t want to hear anything good about them.
Overall, it was a pretty even-handed event, that dealt with the good and the bad about unions. Ms. Jordan concluded that the rank and file members of the teachers’ union has allowed its leadership to create a counter-productive bureaucratic machine that is more about politics than education.
Enjoy the 14 minute video below, and feel free to comment!
Excerpts from Gainesville City Commission meeting show Craig Lowe admitting that the commissioners didn’t think they needed an opt-out as a safety net.
Newcomer Todd Chase took out incumbent Lauren Poe with almost 55% of the vote in the race for the District 2 seat on the Gainesville City Commission.
The voter turnout for this spring election was a paltry 21.9% in this district that is made up of mostly homeowners.
In District 3, Susan Bottcher won the battle of the newcomers with over 57% of the vote.
The turnout in this District was an abysmal 11.5% and it is mostly populated with students and university staff.
The Alachua County Republicans made an ad with parts of a Susan Bottcher campaign speech, put it on YouTube, and drew fire from the Bottcher Campaign. We had this video embedded on this site, and you can see as of this time it is taken down due to a copyright complaint.
Every candidate knows that whatever they say in public is up for grabs, and is likely to end up as an opposition ad if it serves their opponents’ purpose. The Bottcher campaign still prevailed upon YouTube to take the Republican ad down. But the ad is still available on the Alachua Republican web site at this location.
The Alachua Republicans have responded to this take down with this statement:
“As soon as we put out our “Bottcher Is Wrong” web ad, it was apparent from the phone calls and emails that we received that we had upset some Democrats. Apparently, being held accountable for her own words bothered her so much that she had a campaign operative file a BOGUS copyright complaint against us with YouTube.
“We made sure that we met all four criteria for “Fair Use” as described by the U.S. Copyright office, and we are confident that the video will be restored by YouTube. Still, that process can take several days, so, in the meantime, we installed our own video payer on our website.”
Last year’s contested Mayoral election, that ended up in court but was not overturned, may be the impetus for this story coming out of Tallahassee:
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) – A bill that would overhaul Florida’s elections law has cleared a House subcommittee.
The Government Operations Subcommittee cleared the bill (PCS for HB 1355) on Friday by a party-line vote of nine-to-four.
The bill is sponsored by state Representative Dennis Baxley. The Ocala Republican says the proposed changes include requiring county election supervisors to take direction from the Department of State.
The bill also would prevent a voter from changing his or her address at the polling place. And it would tighten oversight of third-party voter registration groups like the League of Women Voters.
The League and a group representing county elections supervisors oppose the bill. Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho says the changes are unneeded and calls the bill “partisan shenanigans.”
Last year, there were reports that people came from Tampa to vote for Craig Lowe, which led to local plaintiffs demanding to see the “blue sheets”. These are the records of people who came in to vote on election day, claiming to have moved to Gainesville and changing their official residence that day. According to a controversial Florida law, any voter living in Florida can change their address right up until and on election day anywhere else in Florida without having to present evidence other than signing an oath.
Although the law suit failed to overturn the election, evidence was brought to light that there were many residency discrepancies; enough to have possibly affected the election outcome. In court, Alachua County Supervisor of Elections Pam Carpenter said that her office was, “an administrative office, not an enforcement office,” absolving herself of any responsibility to make sure voters are really qualified.
I am one of those people who likes a combative campaign. I want something that highlights the differences. I want to be compelled. Now, I think this can be done without name calling and digging up personal dirt. And I think it’s entirely appropriate to point out why your opponent is WRONG.
Last night’s forum was a bust, in my opinion, because it was bland. It was too “nice” to highlight the differences. But this kind of thing is just what the doctor ordered. Are there more out there? Let me know about em in the comments section…
Last night, at the Leadership Gainesville Alumni Association candidate forum, the remaining city commission candidates squared off. This clip gives you a good snapshot of the candidates and what they had to say.
This from a concerned citizen:
“While cleaning ashes from his fireplace two years ago, Stewart A. Farber mused that if trees filter and store airborne pollutants, they might also harbor fallout from the nuclear weapons tests of the 1950s and 1960s. On a whim, he brought some of his fireplace ash to Yankee Atomic Electric Companies’ environmental lab in Boston, Mass., where he manages environmental monitoring. Farber says he was amazed to discover that his sample showed the distinctive cesium and strontium ‘signatures’ of nuclear fallout-and that the concentration of radioactivity “was easily 100 times greater than anything (our Lab) had ever seen in an environmental sample.”
Since then, he has obtained wood-ash radioactivity assays from 16 other scientists across the nation. These 47 data sets, representing trees in 14 states, suggest that fallout in wood ash “is a major source of radioactivity released into the environment,” Farber says.
With the exception of some very low California readings, all measurements of ash with fallout-cesium exceeded – some by 100 times or more – the levels of radioactive cesium that may be released from nuclear plants (about 100 picocuries per kilogram of sludge). Ash-cesium levels were especially high in the Northeast – probably because naturally high levels of nonradioactive cesium in the soil discourage trees from releasing fallout-derived cesium through their roots, he says.
Industrial wood burning in the United States generates and estimated 900,000 tons of ash each year: residential and utility wood burning generates another 543,000 tons. Already, many companies are recycling this unregulated ash in fertilizers. The irony, Farber says, is that federal regulations require releases from nuclear plants to be disposed of as radioactive waste if they contain even 1 percent of the cesium and strontium levels detected in the ash samples from New England. If ash were subject to the same regulations, he says, its disposal would cost U.A. wood burners more than $30 billion annually.”
http://burningissues.org/car-www/science/radwaste1.html
It was a pretty quick candidate forum at the Alachua County Health Department tonight as the African American Accountability Alliance only had the two District 3 candidates to examine. Susan Bottcher and Rob Zeller fielded some fairly routine and unrevealing questions before the local political organization gave the nod to Bottcher by a 9-2 margin. The organization does not make the final tally public, but I saw the sheet and the final vote total.
The forum was poorly attended, and a lot less interesting than those in the past, which used to have some fairly hot exchanges between opponents. The candidates were asked few questions, and some of them were irrelevant to the job of a city commissioner. The contrast was between Bottcher, a long time volunteer in civic organizations who has never run a business or made a payroll who brags that she will be the commissions “only full time commissioner”, and Zeller, a business owner with 140 employees and three young children.
Bottcher has been endorsed by Mayor Craig Lowe, which makes her the status quo candidate. The 4As have endorsed the incumbents as well. It makes me wonder just who they think they are holding accountable. High utility rates that hit poor East Gainesville citizens hardest, years of empty promises of growth, and a new fire services fee on struggling churches cry out for a message to be sent. But instead they gave the same old rubber stamp to the choice of the Democrat machine.
Tuesday night there will be another candidate forum, hosted by the Leadership Gainesville Alumni Association. It is scheduled to begin at 7pm and will be held at Santa Fe College in Building E Auditorium.
