On June 11, horseshoe crabs made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. These prehistoric looking creatures have been the subject of discussions between conservationists and watermen on the Delaware Bay for several years. Horseshoe crabs use the beaches of the Delaware Bay as the prime location for laying their eggs in the spring. A migratory bird called the Red Knot uses this same area as a stopover to feast on the eggs which sustain them on their annual journey between the Arctic and the southern tip of South America. Add in the dollars from the increasing industry of ecotourism, and things become quite contentious.

The horseshoe crab has become an increasingly sought after form of bait for fishermen who use the creature to lure another sea dweller called the whelk into watermen’s traps. The crab is also used for bait to attract several species of fish as well. The controversy surrounds the fact that as the horseshoe crab population has decreased due to the harvest by about 60 watermen in the business, the number of Red Knots counted around the bay has also decreased by an alarming rate, from 90,000 in 1989 to 13,000 in 2006 according to the WSJ story.

The result of this decline was a moratorium imposed by the states of Delaware and New Jersey on the harvest of horseshoe crabs in the Delaware Bay which was challenged in court. The Delaware moratorium was recently overturned by the state court, so the debate is renewed once again to find a balance between man and nature. One possible solution is to allow the harvesting of only male crabs which is a reasonable suggestion due to the fact that female crabs take ten years to reach egg laying maturity. The creation of a crab sanctuary off the coast and harvest limits will lessen the chances of overfishing the horseshoe crab, but a permanent long term solution is the ultimate goal to protect all of the interests involved in this debate.

Did you wake up this morning and realize that you missed the premiere of Lil’ Bush on Comedy Central last night? Well maybe not. Just in case, Comedy Central has joined the increasing ranks of on demand web TV to make Lil’ Bush and other popular shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart available on their web site for your viewing pleasure.

Lil’ Bush is irreverent to say the least, and offensive in many ways, but the adventurous viewer will find many a snicker in this animated type show. Lil’ Cheney utters few decipherable words and has the tendency to rip the heads off of various species of birds. In Part 1 of the episode, Lil’ George goes to BaghDAD to shop for Father’s Day. In Part 2, the gang makes a bet on who can get the first kiss. You’ll never see this on Fox News.

Wicomico County and the City of Salisbury share a governmental entity known as the Department of Planning, Zoning and Community Development. The mission of this organization is stated on the county’s web site.

It is the mission of the Department to provide objective, professional planning and development related assistance to any and all citizens of Wicomico County in a fair and reasonable manner consistent with City or County policies.

My question is, “Where’s the planning in the Planning & Zoning Department?” Based on the results of residential development in Wicomico County over the past six years, and even the past twenty years, it is quite clear that the planning has not included adequate study of such areas as roads or school capacity.

Currently, there is an ongoing discussion regarding development around the Town of Hebron. Waller Landing is the name of a proposed development that will add over 1,600 residential units along with some commercial businesses to this town of 800 residents. The fact that this behemoth of construction is even being considered in civil discussions shows how little consideration there is among the planners for the effects of such a development on the infrastructure and schools of Wicomico County.

Wicomico County schools are currently operating at over 102% of their State Rated Capacity. Wicomico County has not built a new school in over 8 years even though thousands of residential building permits have been issued during this time. We have replaced schools that were several decades old and long past their useful life, but we have not built new schools or expanded existing schools to provide added capacity for increased enrollment. Pemberton Elementary school has been recently renovated, but this new structure already has two portable classrooms taking up playground space because of increased enrollment. Due to budget restrictions, the county and its municipalities have not been able to complete collector roads on either the east or west side of Salisbury to handle the traffic from development that has already occurred. Local routes such as Nanticoke Road on the west side and South Division Street near the university are not designed to handle the traffic loads of current development, and they will be overwhelmed by continued growth.

It is obvious from these facts that residential growth is not providing an adequate financial benefit to support the additional infrastructure and school capacity that are required by our increasing population. The county must not allow Waller Landing or any other large scale residential development, such as the one across from Nutters Crossing near Salisbury, to continue until it is clear that our schools have additional capacity and our roads can handle the additional traffic load.

The law of supply and demand has long been a standard of the study of economics. This law controls the prices of everything from raw materials and commodities to the latest fad items like the iPhone or Tickle Me Elmo. There are two vastly different products that are currently seeing new highs in prices due to high demand and restricted supply. These two products are gasoline and stocks.

The effects of supply and demand on the price of gasoline are quite obvious to us on a daily basis. This coveted fuel recently hit all time highs in price even on an inflation adjusted basis compared to the peak in the 80’s. The supply of gasoline is restricted at the point of refining. There has not been a significant increase in the capacity of our nations refineries in decades. This lack of investment in refinery infrastructure can be blamed mostly on integrated oil companies who are driven to optimize their earnings, but blame can also be placed on increasingly restrictive environmental regulations that have discouraged the expansion of our refinery base. As a result, we now import about 13% of our gasoline from foreign refiners to make up for a lack of capacity domestically.

There is another number that is reported in the business pages on a regular basis that is referred to as refinery utilization. This number quantifies the percentage of all refineries that are currently operating. The current range of refinery utilization varies between 85% and 90% which is considerably less than the historical range of 90% to 95%. There are also complications involved with the production of as many as 12 different formulations of gasoline required by different regions of the country. If a national standard for gasoline formulation were adopted, the refining of gasoline would be less expensive, and the price of gas would decrease considerably.

The law of supply and demand can also produce positive effects on our finances. The recent new highs in the Dow 30 and S&P 500 stock averages are due in large part to a decreasing supply of stocks being sought by an increasing amount of dollars. The supply of stocks is decreasing due to record volumes of stock buybacks by publicly traded companies and private equity buyouts of other companies listed on the various stock exchanges.

Many companies are currently using their cash flow to buy back their own shares in the open market. These buybacks provide support for stock prices at current levels, and they decrease the amount of stock that is available for trading. These buybacks have reached numbers in the hundreds of billions of dollars among all the companies that are removing their shares from the market. Exxon Mobil is buying back $31 billion in stock, while Proctor & Gamble and Time Warner are each purchasing about $11 billion of their own shares.

Private equity buyouts are also removing hundreds of billions of dollars of stock from the open market. The most recent buyouts include Avaya for $8.2 billion and CDW for $7.3 billion. All of the money that is paid by companies in their share buybacks and by private equity groups in their buyouts is usually reinvested in the stock market. The supply of stocks is decreasing, and the amount of free cash for investing is increasing, so our IRA’s and 401k’s are hitting new highs all thanks to the law of supply and demand.

The recent petition drive to bring the City of Salisbury tax cap issue to referendum failed to reach the required 20% of signatures of registered voters. This failure brings up an interesting debate for the future of petition drive efforts. The elected officials of the city have no vested interest in reducing the rolls of registered voters. The citizens involved in the recent petition effort may want to examine the possibility that there are voters on the registry that should have been removed for various reasons.

The removal of voters from the registry is governed by very specific guidelines from the Maryland State Board of Elections. Title 3 of the Election Law describes the cases in which a registered voter may be removed from the rolls. The most obvious of these is a written request by the voter to be removed for any reason including a change in residence. The Election Law goes on to describe the procedures that should be followed to determine if an inactive voter should be removed from the voter registry. Confirmation notices are sent to registered voters, and in some cases, the information returned by the post office can be used to determine that a voter has moved out of state. If a voter fails to respond to the confirmation, they are placed on an inactive voter list. If this voter does not vote in the next two general elections, they can be removed from the registry. There are other situations, such as deceased voters, that must also be addressed. Election boards are also expected to keep track of the demolition of residential buildings in their jurisdiction to determine if those addresses are currently included on the voter registry.

All of the requirements applied by election law make it quite possible that there are ineligibe voters on the registry for the city. Concerned citizens should request information regarding the procedures that the local election board is following in regards to the voter registry, so that they can be confident that the 20% requirement is based on an accurate list of voters.

The recent rise in the price of gasoline has all of the news sources proclaiming that citizens are going to stay home this summer because they can’t afford to buy gas for their vacation travels. This theory has been proven wrong so many times that I can’t believe respectable journalists resort to this tired topic each year. For thirty years, since the energy crisis of the 70’s, the federal government has been pushing the use of corn based ethanol as the alternative to fossil fuels for use in transportation. Part of this push has been through the use of huge subsidies paid for by US taxpayers. If it weren’t for these subsidies, ethanol would not be at the top of the list for alternative energy sources today.

I have been doing some online research about the big push toward ethanol as the alternative fuel for vehicles on the roadways of the United States. Much of the information about ethanol has led me to believe that we need to get off the ethanol bandwagon.

The demand for corn used in the production of ethanol has increased the price per bushel from $2 to $4. This is great for the farmers(mostly large corporate farms like Archer Daniels Midland), but this increased cost per bushel is creating a trickle down effect on many other products. The cost of feed corn is driving up the cost of beef, poultry and pork. The cost of corn and corn byproducts used in the production of other food, such as cereal, is causing an increase in prices at the grocery store. The increased demand for corn also makes the price per bushel more susceptible to spikes due to environmental issues such as drought or disease.

A gallon of ethanol produces less energy than a gallon of gasoline. The mileage estimates for motor vehicles are decreased by 20-30% when using ethanol.

The use of ethanol blended fuels will increase the cost per gallon because ethanol is more difficult to store and transport. Ethanol cannot be transported through traditional pipelines, because it causes corrosion of the pipeline materials. Ethanol fuels must be transported by rail tank cars and tanker trucks. The increased demand for these transportation modes will increase the cost of transportation for other products as well, which will cause an additional increase in prices at the store.

Depending on whose findings you believe, corn ethanol may actually take more energy to produce than it can create through its combustion. In fact, some studies show that all forms of ethanol require more energy to produce than they contain which will actually increase our nations total energy consumption. One estimate is that it takes 29% more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than it contains when finished.

There are other storage issues with ethanol blended fuels. They absorb water and they evaporate quickly which increases the complexity of storage methods.

Corn ethanol subsidies are costing taxpayers billions of dollars. One estimate calculates ethanol subsidies for the year 2006 of $7 billion for 4.9 billion gallons of fuel, or about $1.43 per gallon.

The United States government is imposing a tariff of 54 cents per gallon to discourage the importation of ethanol in favor of the subsidized home grown ethanol.

The increase in the acreage of corn production, which requires a lot of irrigation, will create a stress on water sources in areas that are already stretching this nonrenewable resource.

According to the Cato Institute, we would need to dedicate 100% of United States crop land plus find an additional 20% of crop land in order for corn ethanol to provide energy independence. Their practical estimate is that ethanol will account for about 6% of motor vehicle fuel by 2030.

In 2005, the US Agriculture Department produced a study finding that it cost $2.53 to produce a gallon of ethanol which is several times what it costs to produce a gallon of gasoline.

I could probably go on for hours finding bad things about ethanol. All of the information listed above comes from various sources, so I feel confident that it is not biased to any one organization. It is quite clear that if the subsidies that originated during the energy crisis of the ’70s (remember gasohol) were not in place, ethanol would not be the dominant player in alternative fuels today. Ethanol subsidies are an excellent example of government by the corporation, for the corporation. The ethanol bandwagon has been gaining speed for 30 years, so it will be difficult to stop, but I, for one, refuse to ride along.

Mr. Duvafiles complains today that the Wicomico County Council passed the budget, and, “Neither the executive nor council even considered the possibility of reducing taxes.”

The 2% revenue cap resulted in a required cut to the Real Property tax rate of about 6 cents, from .942 to .881 per $100 dollars of property value. This means that if the phased in assessment for your property as of 7/1/2007 is $232,596 then your tax bill will be $2049 at the new rate instead of $2191 at the old rate. By my calculations, that is a tax cut of $142 for this citizen of the county. The council passed the budget with a tax cut, decreased the Board of Education request by $1 million, and only supplied the Public Works department about a third of what it needs to properly maintain our roads. Think about that the next time you hit a pothole, and your mechanic can’t spell alignment correctly on the work order.

Down the road a little, the Worcester County council passed a $175 million dollar budget which includes a revenue increase of $20 million because they did not include a tax cut in their final draft. Go complain about that.

And to top it off, according to the Daily Times, the Worcester County budget includes funding that will allow the Board of Education to fill seven new positions at $40,390 each while granting 7.5-percent salary increases.

Guess where the teachers are going.

I’m with ya!

As a resident of Wicomico County, I am not directly impacted by the politics of the budget in the City of Salisbury, but the ongoing dysfunctional relationship between the mayor and current and recent councils does have an indirect impact on the quality of life in Wicomico County.

Two members of the current city council are making an admirable effort to be fiscally responsible with the city taxpayers’ dollars, but I wonder if all of the controversy surrounding the divided council is worth the negative publicity for the city. Louise Smith, president of the current council, seems to have succumbed to the idea that she is just an administrator of the Mayor’s directions. My prediction would be that most, if not all of Cohen’s and Campbell’s amendments to the budget will fail by a 3-2 vote. Smith certainly will not support cuts to the zoo if her connection to Ron Alessi is as strong as is suggested in local discussions.

Theoretically, even if the budget cuts suggested by Cohen and Campbell were to somehow pass a council vote, the budget in the form of an ordinance would be submitted to the mayor and promptly vetoed.

In my humble opinion, Cohen and Campbell should refrain from any further statements regarding controversial budget cuts and focus their support on the petition drive to reinstate the former tax rate cap. This petition appears to be the only way that the citizens of Salisbury can make their voices heard over the battles of the 3-2 council. A referendum vote will make clear the opinion of the citizens on the budget battle and give further credence to either the 3 or the 2.

According to a recent post on Duvafiles titled Recall Nonsense, the mayor and council of Salisbury are not subject to recall. I am not a student of these legal matters, but Section SC6-13 of the city charter does appear to provide guidelines for a recall of these elected officials via petition. The guidelines state that the Initiator of a petition has 90 days to acquire the signatures of 30% of the qualified registered voters of the city or district, whichever applies.

There has been a recall petition effort in the recent history of the City of Salisbury, but my memory is weak on the details. I do remember that the owners of the former Buddy’s Shell were quite active in the cause, and I think the recall petitions were for the mayor and most if not all of the council. I believe that the section of the charter concerning recalls was a result of the extended length of time taken by the petitioners in this case. Maybe someone can help me fill in the blanks.

After many weeks of reading blog posts about this and that on Robinson on the Radio, I finally listened to the show for the first time today. I am usually not near a radio at 3:00, but today, quite by accident, I had the chance to listen to the councilman that I voted for on ROTR. Councilman McCain discussed many topics with ROTR, from his background as a native of Wicomico County to the issues that are currently the focus of the county council. Mr. McCain also directed part of the discussion to a correction of the Daily Times story saying that CE Pollitt wanted to do away with the revenue cap. The councilman was at the Rotary Club meeting where CE Pollitt made his statements, and according to Mr. McCain’s account, Pollitt stated that he would like to see the revenue cap modified, not ended. It will be interesting to see how this correction is handled in the Times.

ROTR provided an informative hour of radio, and I will probably listen again when I can. I just have one question. What exactly is a “pet peeve project”?!?

The revenue cap in Wicomico County seemed like a simple concept to the voters when it was approved. Let’s keep our property tax rate from going up. The citizens responded to a vocal minority led by an organization named VOICE. Unfortunately, the citizens were not shown the big picture, and it would have been difficult to predict the explosion of growth that would follow the vote to enforce a revenue cap. There has been a domino effect caused by the restrictions of the cap that has tipped to our roads and our schools and ultimately our quality of life here in Wicomico County. Another effect that was not advertised by VOICE during its campaign is the effect of the revenue cap on Personal Property taxes. The revenue cap has kept the income from the existing base of property growing at 2% per year. This growth rate means that the Real Property tax rate must go down. The Personal Property tax rate is 2.5 times the Real Property rate according to state law. The decrease in the Real Property tax rate has resulted in a decrease in revenue from Personal Property taxes of almost $1 million over the past two years. Some citizens will look at that decrease and say ‘Great!!’, but the teachers who are leaving our classrooms for other opportunities will tell us that we need to look at the big picture. The Real Property tax rate has been reduced from .993 in 2005 to .881 in 2007. That decrease means that the taxes on a $200,000 house have gone down by $224 in two years. Shouldn’t we be willing to pay $18.66 more per month for better schools, roads and public safety. I am looking at the big picture, and for the first time in my 20 years as a citizen of Wicomico County, I don’t like what I see.

While reviewing the list of bills that Governor O’Malley signed on May 8, 2007, I ran across this sale of surplus property in Somerset County. The wording that bothers me is ‘exempting the sale of the property from specified general requirements for the sale of surplus property’. I hope this is not a new trend. I am sure that Shore Up is a worthy beneficiary of this deal, but shouldn’t Somerset County be looking for the best financial result from the sale for the benefit of Somerset taxpayers.

SB0180
Senator Stoltzfus
SOMERSET COUNTY – SALE OF PROPERTY – WHITTINGTON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
Authorizing the County Commissioners of Somerset County to sell specified property known as Whittington Elementary School to Shore Up Inc., under terms the County Commissioners consider appropriate; and exempting the sale of the property from specified general requirements for the sale of surplus property.
EFFECTIVE OCTOBER 1, 2007

HB0254
Delegate Elmore
SOMERSET COUNTY – SALE OF PROPERTY TO CITY OF CRISFIELD
Authorizing the County Commissioners of Somerset County to sell specified property to the City of Crisfield under terms the County Commissioners consider appropriate; and exempting the sale of specified property from specified general requirements for the sale of surplus property.
EFFECTIVE OCTOBER 1, 2007

Governor Martin O’Malley announced today that he is cutting the size of the Governor’s Office vehicle fleet in half, and eliminating all take-home cars for members of his staff. Governor O’Malley also issued a directive that all state agencies conduct similar audits to reduce the size of their vehicle fleet. Read more…

A very troubling relationship between the large pharmaceutical companies and generic drug manufacturers has been exposed over the last few months. The first report I saw on the issue was from CNBC’s Business Nation . Generic drug companies file suits to challenge the patents of big pharma in order to provide a more affordable version of prescription drugs. In the past, the generics might win some and lose some. Recently, big pharma has been settling these challenges through agreements called exclusion payments or reverse payments. These reverse payments are actually more than the generic drug company would have made in profits from producing their version of the drug. Generic drug companies no longer have an incentive to actually produce the medicine. The generics accept the reverse payment, and big pharma keeps raking in the big profits on their proprietary products. The FTC appears to be at odds with the Justice Department on this subject. Legislation in the form of H.R. 1902 has been introduced in an effort to end this practice. I am sure the big pharma lobbyists are keeping busy on this one.