GASLAND in Cowtown: Save the Date!

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Split Estate: Together We Bargain, Divided We Beg

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Please consider joining with us to make a healthy difference in our neighborhoods and for your children's future.

Sounds like a plan...

What's the plan for the Water issues facing Tarrant County?

Spend money on an ad campaign asking people to conserve water. Take property in another part of Texas, by eminent domain. Sue Oklahoma. Oh and don't forget - ignore flooding.

We pay the Tarrant Regional Water Board director almost $300,0000 a year for this?? How long have the Board members been in place? You guessed it, too long.

Read about the "plans" in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Read more about the folks fighting for their property and water - Marvin Nichols. Seems average folks stepping up everywhere to protect what's right. Too bad they don't represent us...YET.

Our plan - VOTE for Adrian Murray and John Basham May 8th!

Too broke to meet?

Fort Worth City Council meeting cancelled. Yes, cancelled.

Read about it in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Thank you?

Are we suppose to thank Kay Granger for honoring a one-year earmark moratorium?

The same Congresswoman WHO sits on the Appropriations committee?

The same Congresswoman that hired her son to run the Billion dollar boondoggle while in other areas of her district flooding runs rampant and funds do not?

The Billion dollar Boondoggle being disguised as flood control? Remember if you don't take the levees down, you don't have flooding. And all those areas that flood now...they will do so if the Boondoggle ever gets done.

Wonder where the bad image of earmarks came from? Ask.

Read the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for the story.

But with Granger and the rest of the Tarrant delegation honoring the freeze, the question is, Who will carry the water for such projects as Trinity River Vision, Fort Worth's $909 million economic development and flood control project? The project is in Granger's district, and she has been its chief proponent in Congress.

Edwards, who in the past has co-sponsored funding for Central City/Trinity Uptown -- as the Army Corps of Engineers' part of the project is known -- with Granger, did not include any funding for it in his earmarks for fiscal 2011.

People Talk

And people are listening.

Two excellent letters in the Fort Worth Business Press today. We'll give you a preview of each of them, go here to read both.

Why hasn’t the council demanded the gas industry use its own product, compressed natural gas, to fuel compressors and vehicles? Why hasn’t the council imposed use fees on the thousands of heavily-laden trucks plying our city streets on a daily basis? As the roads continue to deteriorate, will the council add another surcharge to the water bill and make the residents pay for council negligence?

Probably, and because of council’s disdain for public input, Rogers should not hold her breath – either for clean air or responsible government.

The aim of the eminent-domaining earmarkers is to cover the confluence with a detritus-filled 33-acre town lake, an unsavory olla podrida of pollutants, excrement, sewage, garbage, oil and grease, fertilizer, mercury and myriad other chemicals, dangerous PCBs, known and unknown carcinogens, and other flotsam and jetsam that washes down from a hundred miles upstream – a rancid, malodorous pond in which no Streams and Valleys Mayfester or knowing tourist would wade or swim, and whose bottom-dwelling catfish you would not eat. Tourist? Perhaps a lawsuit waiting to be filed? It happens.

One of the letters above came from Mr. Woodard. We saw some Cheers in the Fort Worth Star- Telegram this weekend, one because of him and one from him. Both too good to pass up. Cheers, Don, carry on sir!

Cheers: To Don Woodard, whose letters are always a delight to read. I can usually pick his out even before getting to the name at the end. Although I am sure there are those who do not appreciate his opinion, he always tells it as it is!
-- C.S. Morford, Fort Worth

Cheers: To the Tarrant County College Board of Trustees for saving a search firm fee by naming Erma Johnson Hadley chancellor. It's a no-brainer. She knows the college like the back of her hand. Some criticize because she does not have a doctorate. So? Whoever heard the Bard of the Avon called Dr. Shakespeare?
-- Don Woodard Sr.

Questions Answered

Yesterday a friend asked, WHERE is the EPA?

The Fort Worth Business Press answered with the article, "EPA proposes oil, gas sector should track its emissions."

The EPA is proposing for the first time a national mandatory greenhouse gas reporting system to get “a better understanding of where GHGs are coming from,” according to a March 23 statement. The information also will help the EPA and businesses draft policies and programs to reduce emissions, a goal since Administrator Lisa P. Jackson was appointed.

Energy trade groups have bristled at the suggestion that their operations should be held accountable for greenhouse gas emissions, arguing new federal rules would throw the industry and economies into nothing short of total calamity.

Please excuse the language...

A friend of ours caught the PBS special on Josh Fox and Gasland. This is what they had to say with some minor editing. You'll have to excuse our friend, he just got it.

Are you familiar with hydrolic fracking?? Just watching the PBS documentary on Gasland. Scary XXXX. The process to get natural gas is undoubedtly contaminating us!! Several clips on utube. check it out. No one warning these people signing contracts. They're simply told to get a lawyer, process not regulated. This is WRONG!!! They use 500+ chemicals in the process and only get about half of what they put into the ground back out! This XXXX is showing up in the wells, rivers and streams.

Where the XXXX is the EPA???

Sunday!

Incoming from the #1 Watchdog -

GASLAND director, Josh Fox is the guest on NOW on PBS this Sunday.

I think this airs at 11 pm CST. Check local listings for exact date and time. Streaming video will be available online after broadcast.

DY

LINK:

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/613/index.html

What do the people say?

Good letters in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

More pressing issues

I was sorry to hear that Rep. Kay Granger and her U.S. House colleagues put a moratorium on earmarks, affecting the "flood control" project headed by her son J.D. Granger.

I sure hope all those people standing on the roofs of their businesses will be rescued from the floods after our most recent thunderstorms. More importantly, I pray that the private developers and eminent domain enthusiasts will be able to feed their families after the latest attempt by Granger's "conservative" colleagues to feign disdain over the rising deficits they helped to create.

This taxpayer's "Trinity River Vision" involves three more pressing priorities: 1) Expand Interstate 35W north of Fort Worth, home of the worst gridlock in the Metroplex; 2) fix Tower 55, a bottleneck slowing interstate commerce; and 3) fund the Southwest Parkway, a thoroughfare necessary to reduce the headache of traveling in southwest Fort Worth and to its southern neighbors.

Solutions to these three issues will undoubtedly benefit more taxpayers in Fort Worth than a lake north of downtown that only serves to enrich a select few.

-- William W. Thorburn, Benbrook

Questionable priorities

In reference to the March 13 article, "Trinity officials say project will go on," let me get this straight: The Fort Worth City Council can't balance the budget and must cut essential services or increase taxes and/or fees to fix our streets and complete our road projects. Yet, it managed to find "68 million local dollars" for the Trinity River "Vision." Benefiting whom? Private enterprise? The son of a politician?

I did not see Councilwoman Kathleen Hicks fighting to keep the recreation centers open. I think it's time to elect a new City Council (and let's throw in a new mayor).

-- Irene Kjornes, Fort Worth