Monthly Archives: May 2010

To the Editor:

Regarding the current Boulder Valley School District budget, I think parents, students and tax-payers would all agree that the District’s objective should be to provide a quality education for our students. School Board spending priorities over the past several years, however, have consistently taken funds from the classroom and diverted them to programs that do not directly benefit students. You quote the Chief Financial Officer of the District as saying that the current School Board’s spending provides “flexibility.” Citizens should be asking our School Board why this flexibility is not used for reducing class size and other classroom enhancements rather than non-academic programs.

Tom Dozier
Boulder Continue reading →

My daughter graduated from BHS this year, and I also was disappointed in the Chipotle ad that was presented as both an introduction to the Commencement speech, and the speech itself.

There were so many “I” did this, and “I” did that. Did this man think we cared about what he did? Did he offer any guidance, other than borrow money from your father and do what you want? Hey, what did he get from his mother?

The student speakers that followed were not much better. The first and last seemed to recognize that this was a group that was to be honored, not just themselves.

We got the gift card, with my daughter’s approval it will be donated to the homeless shelter.

Mary Davis
Boulder Continue reading →

For those Colorado residents currently frustrated with the lack of highway maintenance (potholes, crumbling bridges etc), dwindling enforcement by the Colorado State Patrol, longer wait times for drivers license renewal and others in the myriad of state provided services…Please feel free to right a cordial Thank You note to Attorney Douglas Bruce c/o Colorado Springs. His authorship of the Tax Payer Bill of Rights (aka TABOR amendment) abolished the ability of the state to convert excess tax revenues into a “rainy day” fund. With the current recession deluge any reserve funding that might have been placed in the piggy bank for unforeseen expenses went down the drain of TABOR. A hail and hearty Thank You, Doug.

RC Lloyd
Longmont Continue reading →

We seem asleep to our fate. Just weeks after President Obama lifts the moratorium on off-shore oil drilling, a sea of highly toxic oil is irreparably poisoning our country’s most sensitive and valuable marine ecosystem.

The estuaries along the Gulf coast, teeming with fish and birds, oysters, reptiles, marine mammals and life of all kind are in for a fight that they won’t win. In one of the most productive marine estuaries and spawning habitats in the world, our somnolence as a people is about to become undeniable.

We encourage companies like BP to open holes in the ocean floor to extract oil. We know enough to drill the holes, but not enough to stop the catastrophes we inevitably create.

Chemical dispersants do not remove the oil and may do more harm than good. Burning the oil didn’t work. Waves are washing oil over the containment booms.

The Obama administration wants to find out what caused this disaster. It happened because we know enough to get ourselves into trouble, but not enough to reliably get ourselves out.

We must reinstate the moratorium on off shore oil drilling.

Jay Adler
Boulder
Continue reading →

It’s May and hordes of new college graduates are flooding a country where there aren’t enough jobs to go around. But is this really a bad thing? In one sense our society is becoming overeducated and overqualified. Look at college towns, for example, where grocery baggers have BAs, waiters have MAs, or baristas are working on a PHD. Most of us recent graduates make some attempt at finding a career-like job, but those being scarce, many of us give up the perpetual job hunt and take a less-beaten path. In a way, we have a guilt-free excuse to opt out of the mainstream path of graduating, establishing our profession, and then preparing for retirement. With this get-out-of-a-career-free card, graduates may go teach English in China, work on farms in Europe or Australia, volunteer in South America, or backpack through Southeast Asia. If grads can’t find work in their field they may still want to put their educations to good use, which explains why non-profits like Teach for America and The Peace Corps are getting more applicants than ever. Or some grads may just work menial jobs while they self-actualize in their free time with art, tutoring, freelancing or whatever. It’s a time when we can do all the things that if we don’t, then in the future we’ll say we wish we had. Someday the job markets will get better, and someday we rovers and bohemians will need to find gainful employment, but these rough and wayward years will prove to be formative in ways we can’t predict.
Teague Anderson Continue reading →

The gentleman immigrant who has entertained so many of us residents and so many tourists on the dowtown Mall for so many years by his inside-the-box feats is facing expulsion from the US for some minor infraction. He has very little money, and now has to pay a (Denver) lawyer to present his side of the story. He could use some help now from his fans in Boulder!

F.W. Williams
Boulder Continue reading →

I currently teach at Centaurus High School and wanted to discuss negotiations from a teacher’s perspective. We were told by our district and school administration last semester that there were three target cuts, with the last being the largest to prepare for. Our principal led a variety of committees discussing the cuts. We were told in February that each department must prepare for Tier I by cutting sections of core classes and deciding which electives should be offered. In my department alone, we cut two electives, raised class sizes (i.e. 33 students in each of my three Advanced Placement courses), and were forced to lose 1.3 teachers. Once these decisions were made, students then registered for classes in the first two weeks of March. My point is that even if teachers take a pay cut or steps freeze (by the way, attrition of teachers at the top of the pay scale pays for step increases), teachers will not be hired back at my school because students have already registered for classes, the master schedule has been completed, and teachers have been told they do not have a job next year. It seems disingenuous to even mention such a thing in the press, when it is actually impossible at my school. I also read the school board proclaim they are working for smaller classes, but the reduction by 1 student, which the math works out to be, will not make a significant difference in my classes of 33 (or the physical education classes of 75 to 100). It seems to me that I am being asked to teach already larger classes and increase standardized test scores while gettting paid less. As surrounding districts keep their current pay scale or are getting increases, I am confused as why our relatively economically healthy district is attempting to cut my salary.

Timothy R. Donnelly
Social Studies Department
Centaurus High School
Lafayette Continue reading →

It is very clear that cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico is a losing battle. Natural Scientists of all disciplines should be converging on the Gulf to save species unique to that ecosystem.
Biologists of every ilk know the routine: Collect and remove small samples of as many plants, animals, birds, fish, amphibians…. as possible. Take these specimens to herbariums, zoos, and universities across the country. Do research, collect the DNA to differentiate them from previously studied sub-species and eventually reintroduce them to the gulf area.
Mitigation is a misleading word. An ecosystem can never be replicated but to reintroduce organisms that were there in the past is preferable to forming political panels.
Jan Justice-Waddington
Golden Continue reading →

Sir If American children truly need and deserve anything in this world
it is a sound, serious, quality, reality based primary education. It
is ALL that will keep us as one of the richest, most sophisticated and
intellectually competitive countries in an incredibly competitive
international environment.
Publishers and other interested parties should do everything in their
power to reverse this ‘Whitewashing’ of history, a crime perpetrated
upon our young irrespective of purchasing power and that domino effect
influence. If not then our students will be truly percieved as dolts
and our institutions and instructors will lose credibility in the
world, what have you.This is a shame. p.s. And no the world is NOT
just 7000 or so years old.
In disgust
Grant D. Cyrus
Boulder Continue reading →

Will someone please explain to me why our wise and compassionate City Council has not yet been invited as a special delegation to the United Nations? It’s clear that they’re completely under utilized running our silly little college town. And they know it. They are world changers and that’s what they should be doing. The victory of the Open Space Master Plan has saved us from what surely would have been an environmental catastrophe in the Flatirons. And don’t forget the Resolution Against The Iraq War. It’s a tragic injustice that it was never read on the floor of the UN. Just one grumpy old council member voted against it. Maybe he was concerned with some mundane city stuff and couldn’t see the bigger picture. His silly rant about 5000 signatures not necessarily representing the true beliefs of all 120,000 Boulder citizens is just another example of the way some small minded people can spins numbers to make their point. And I want to thank the council for finally letting me know where I stand on the Arizona Immigration law. Until our council passed this resolution I was confused. Keep in mind that we elected these people to speak for our collective values and beliefs on a world stage. And they seem to love it. So let’s leave them alone and let them do our thinking and judging for us. Quit going to those council meetings to voice your opinion. It’s a waste of valuable council time. Our council has bigger things to deal with than simple city matters. They’re smarter and holier than thou so they’re not listening anyway. And they shouldn’t. And don’t bother voting either. In fact I think our council members should be coronated not elected. They’re already monarchs in their own minds.

Russell Holcomb
Boulder Continue reading →

Open Forum:

I am sympathetic to the plea of the Camera reader who wants subdivisions repaved.

Assuming he was as serious with his solution as in his ire I don’t think firing 90 open space employees and the entire planning department takes into account the “law of unintended consequences”.

Surely the local economy would be hurt in a host of ways such as nearly 200 jobs not contributing to local retail, more houses in foreclosure and families traumatized. Then there is open space management itself and future planning – for example, new construction.

A special assessment district for repaving the reader’s own subdivision might be a better place to start. Then my tax dollars can be focused on open space, planning and jobs.

Doug Thorburn
Boulder Continue reading →

On Sunday morning I was running on the sidewalk on Arapahoe Ave. in Boulder while my 8 year old was at a lesson. Not being used to running on sidewalks I was stunned when I tripped and landed
flat out hitting head to toe on the concrete. I slowly got up, dazed with bloody knees the likes of which I had not seen since I was a kid. My head was very foggy and I somehow staggered back to the house where my daughter was having her lesson. My daughter’s teacher said, “oh, no I’m driving you to the hospital”,which she did while my daughter stayed with her daughter. I started to realize that in the half mile or so in which I staggered with blood dripping down my legs I passed numerous riders, runners, walkers and cars. No one stopped to help me. I’ve lived in New York, New Haven and Boston amongst other places but thought that the good folks in Boulder were somehow more attentive to their surroundings. The staff at the Foothills ER was exceptionally
efficient and caring. They patched me up, made sure that my head was all in one piece and sent me home with excellent follow-up instructions for a concussion. The unlikely hero in all of this was my sunglasses, locally made. They hit the concrete first and if not for them I would have fractured my orbit.

What have I learned from this Sunday jog in Boulder ? Stay off concrete, don’t expect fellow
citizens to help, wear good sunglasses, Foothills has a great ER, there will be another Bolder Boulder next year.

Sincerely,

Marcy Cooper, M.D.
Louisville Continue reading →

While recognizing that the oil well accident in the Gulf is devastating, both economically and environmentally, and both to the many industries in the area and to the oil companies involved, we must try to avoid jumping into actions and reactions that harm us even more in the long run.

Aside from the cleanup, one of the knee-jerk reactions is to stop all offshore drilling, because of the fear of another accident. If this were a logical solution, it would follow that we should stop all airlines from operating because of a serious plane crash or stop all automobile driving after a bad car accident.

But stopping or severely cutting back on offshore drilling actually has a worsening effect on the environment. World tabulations of sources of oil pollution in the ocean show that oil contamination from natural seeps constitutes the largest source (46%). The second largest comes from operational discharges from ships and land-based industrial sources (37%), then 12% comes from spills from shipping of oil, and finally only 3% from offshore drilling operations, (see http://oils.gpa.unep.org/facts/sources.htm).

Stopping our offshore drilling would increase the oil being shipped in, and thus actually increase oil contamination of the oceans! Though it may be desirable to reduce dependence on oil, such changes will take many years to accomplish, and meanwhile the US economy depends heavily upon oil.

The Deepwater Horizon well employed the latest, state of the art technology and the accident was truly disastrous. After the blow-out preventer failed to shut down the well, numerous measures have been attempted, but remote operations a mile beneath the ocean aren’t so easy to implement. While BP struggles with every conceivable action to stop the leaks, the very last thing needed is for the Government to take over this work, in place of those with know-how in deep-water drilling operations. Threats, roadblocks and harassment of the oil companies by Congress and the EPA do more harm than good in resolving the problems.

Don Lloyd
Boulder Continue reading →

On this Memorial Day, remember that the holiday isn’t about a race, the Creek Festival, a barbecue, or a day off from work, though all those things are very enjoyable. During this Memorial Day, pause for a moment and think about those who gave their all in battle defending the rights and freedoms that this country enjoys. Freedom is not free.

Cathy Burchett
Boulder Continue reading →

Like the vast majority of Coloradans, the Colorado banking industry supports financial reform and is pleased to see certain key reform principles in the recently passed Senate financial regulatory reform bill S.3217. For over a year we’ve encouraged Congress to act on provisions that fill in regulatory gaps, create a systemic risk council, abolish too-big-to-fail protections, and provide an orderly systematic way to get rid of big failing companies will help protect taxpayers and our country’s economy.

However, in addition to the thoughtful provisions, the 1500 plus page Wall Street reform bill contains many politically charged, last minute proposals that have nothing to do with reigning in Wall Street. These proposals, along with the unintended consequences, overshadow the good provisions within the bill and threaten key aspects of our recovering economy. This bill will negatively affect our customers and our ability to strengthen our communities, which is why we take exception.

Legislation that was meant to protect our economy from future bailouts and large unstable companies, in fact put in place numerous hurdles that will undoubtedly make it harder for all our customers – even the most creditworthy – to obtain credit. In some cases it implements a second or third layer of regulation on banks while leaving the unregulated nonbanks, unregulated.

Also, proposals that started with good intentions such as derivative oversight, consumer protection oversight, and safety and soundness requirements took a wrong turn. The Senate was aiming at Wall Street but hit regulated banks on Main Street and the business community. Wall Street was exempted from many consumer oversight protection regulations, while 30 new or increased regulatory burdens were placed directly on main street banks. This provides the unregulated markets with additional competitive advantages, driving consumers into those niches and outside the scope of oversight that the Congress was trying to implement.

The bill has numerous good provisions as well as bad ones, but when implementation comes, so will the unintended consequences. Many provisions, we are afraid, will provide no tangible benefit to our country and end up doing more harm than good. We hope this is not the case, but we’re concerned.

Don Childears, Colorado Bankers Association
President/CEO Continue reading →

Editor:

Until very recently world stock markets showed surprising resilience. Small wonder; U.S. corporate profits jumped by more than 30% year-over-year, in last year’s fourth quarter. But recovery is not restoration, at least not for many. During this recession the gap between the incomes of the very rich and the rest of us has grown even more pronounced. In 1978 CEOs of the largest American companies earned 35 times as much as the average worker (whatever that is; most of those have been pink-slipped). That figure is higher than 300 to one now. Even more interesting, the 400 people with the highest incomes in the country ($138 billion in 2007) pay very little in taxes. Of that $138 billion the total income tax bite in 2007 was but $23 billion(source: the IRS). That’s an aggregate effective tax rate of almost 17%. Small wonder major corporations like GE admit that government incentive programs are a key factor in their decision making process. And transferring people from their payrolls to the government’s (it’s called unemployment) seems to be a primary business strategy today. So why do we hear so much growling about taxes, anyway?

Gregory Iwan
Longmont Continue reading →

Did you see President Calderon speaking to congress on Wednesday? He criticized the Arizona
immigration law and the Democrats gave him a standing ovation. Calderon said, “We reject the criminalization
of migration”. Not ‘legal migration’ mind you, but any migration, especially illegal.
I have a proposal that will solve the illegal immigration problem and should make Calderon happy at the same time.
Let’s adopt Mexican immigration law. Here are a few of their laws we could start with:
1. Immigrants must learn English.
2. They will provide their own healthcare.
3. No bilingual schools and all government business will be conducted in English.
4. You will never be able to hold a political office or vote in an election.
5. No welfare or foodstamps or government assistance programs.
6. If you enter the US illegally you will be subject to jail for 2 years and then deportation.
7. If you reenter the US after deportation, you are then subject to 10 years in prison.
8. Visa violators can be sentenced up to 6 years in prison.
These really are Mexican immigration laws, and if we adopted them, I’ll bet it would solve our border problem,
not to mention gaining great praise from President Calderon and the Democrats. I mean, they wouldn’t
condemn us for implementing these Mexican laws would they? Naaaaah.

Ron Weinard
Lafayette Continue reading →

Regarding the invitation from an Open forum letter on May 24 to check out the Libertarian party as a third party alternative: Libertarians are just Republicans on steroids. Do not be fooled!

Nancy Jones
Louisville Continue reading →

Dear editor,

Since Jared Polis didn’t bother to read the 1000 page Stimulus Bill before he voted for it, it’s no surprise that it sounds as if he and Joe Pelle didn’t bother to read the 10 page Arizona “illegal” immigration bill either. They are both in good company since Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano admitted that they had not read the law before hyper-ventilating about it’s so-called dire consequences. They ignore the fact that much of the wording is taken verbatim from the federal statute already on the books. In fact, throughout the Pelle & Polis piece, “illegal” is conspicuously absent from being coupled with “immigration.”

The Federal Government, under both Republican and Democrat administrations, has chosen to not enforce the current law so it is finally up to individual states to take decisive action. Most polls show the majority of American citizens in favor of the Arizona law and by default, the stringent enforcement of the current federal law that requires every resident alien to be able to produce proof of legal residence upon demand. Asking for papers while investigating a crime or other offense will not put an undue burden on local police and is no different than being asked for you drivers license when pulled over for a traffic offense or going through security at the airport.

It’s also interesting the Polis & Pelle choose to state the low end estimate of 11 million illegals in the USA. The number is estimated to be from 11 million to 30 million illegal aliens, with more arriving every day. When Democrats talk about comprehensive immigration reform, what they really mean is blanket amnesty. Rather than this being a humanitarian or logistics issue, Polis, Obama, Pelosi, Reid and company salivate at the thought of creating up to 30 million voters who will need to rely on the entitlement “paradise” being constructed by the Democrats.

Alan Bloom
Boulder Continue reading →

Dear Editor,

As teachers and school administrators approach their summer break, I hope they might consider taking one small homework assignment with them over the summer. Consider why and how much homework you give to your students and discuss with your colleagues alternative practices which might benefit the academic, social-emotional, physical and spiritual needs of our kids.

Recently, there has been some excellent discussion about the value and effectiveness of homework. Alfie Kohn’s talk last month on his book “The Homework Myth” and the recent showing of the movie “Race to Nowhere” gave us much food for thought, including the statement that there is little evidence that homework improves academic performance. While there may be disagreement about this, I believe we need to take a serious look at our homework practices and the unintended consequences that follow, including anxiety, lack of curiosity, pressure and lack of sleep.

Many of our kids simply aren’t getting enough sleep. Parents I talk with say their kids only get 7-8 hours and are concerned. Studies show this has a real impact on performance, and it’s time we reflect on how we are helping to create kids who are tired and over-stressed. Our kids need down-time, family time and play-time—critical elements for developing their full potential as whole human beings—and homework often interferes with these. Is it possible to give less homework and get to a better place as a result? I think so. And, yes, it’s true that we may all be trying to do too much.

Randy Compton
Boulder Continue reading →