Archive for category Environment

The Death of Redevelopment

Posted by admin in Public Policy, Resoration Economy on May 2, 2012

CITY OF RIVERSIDE: THE DEATH OF REDEVELOPMENT : THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE STATE IN THE BLOODY AFTERMATH..

Thanks to Thirty Miles of Corruption for sharing the documentation related to the State’s reply to the City’s redevelopment loans.

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Some Back Story About Riverside’s Electric Rates

Posted by admin in Public Policy, Resoration Economy on May 2, 2012

New post on TMC: Thirty Miles of Corruption

CITY OF RIVERSIDE: HIDDEN TAXES ON YOUR ELECTRIC UTILITY RATES!

by thirtymiles

If you think the City of Bell had serious taxation problems and mis-appropriation of funds, grab your socks!

Riverside levies hidden taxes on your utility bill. They are simply and stealthily included in the utility rates the city charges residential customers. Your minimum tax rate on electric utility services to your property is 11.5%. It expands upward from there depending on how much utility service you use each month that is subject to punitive tiered pricing.

Let us look at your bill for electricity and the city’s residential winter electric rate schedule. The first tier or the base metered rate for electric service is $0.1035 per kwh (this is the metered unit of measure for electric service). The base rate is charged to the consumption of each of the first 350 kwh of electric service each month. On a per kwh basis $0.0119 of the first tier rate per kwh is tax revenue paid to the general fund. That is a tax rate of 11.5%.

Should you exceed first tier usage as most homeowners do, then you are charged at the second tier price of $0.1646 per kwh from the 351^th thru the 750th kwh of service. The difference — of $0.0611 per kwh in the second tier electric rate — is an additional tax for using more electric service than the city thinks you should use. It is a punitive tax to economically force you the consumer to conserve electricity. You are being taxed even though you are using electricity for beneficial purposes and not wasting it. Looking at just the $0.0611 price difference per kwh of first tier and second tier prices/kwh the effective tax rate is 37%!

Should you use more than 750 kwh of electric service per month you are billed at the 3^rd tier rate of $0.1867 per kwh for those units consumed over 750 kwh. The third tier tax is $0.0951 per kwh. This is an effective tax rate of 51%!

Now, that’s a punitive tax!

To help put this into perspective with how our electricity is delivered to your property, please review the following facts:

A municipal electric utility provides property owners with the “service” of transporting the power to your property via government-owned infrastructure. The electricity is virtually worthless at the point of generation or acquisition. It is the city’s infrastructure of power transmission lines that imparts value to electricity. If they could not deliver it to your property you would not buy it and they could not give it away!
On average it costs the city $0.0500 to generate or acquire power and transport electricity to its residential customers.
Some power is purchased on long-term contracts and may cost as little as $o.o4 per kwh delivered to you. To be fair, other sources of electricity cost more. So in the end it all averages out to a range of $0.04-$0.06.
What the city has done to you is this: it has stopped putting ballot measures forward for a vote to approve electric bonds. Basically, it has improperly hidden the tremendous cost of borrowing money (and the burden to pay it back for thirty years) in your electric rates, fees and charges.
By law the cost of borrowed money used to build infrastructure must be approved in an election as a property assessment tax or a special tax. In this way you would be able to see the level of debt, the cost to you, the years left on each contract to continue paying and have the voter knowledge to understand what this means to you.
Since 2007 the City Council has approved instruments of borrowing that were created specifically to evade state constitutional restrictions that restrict the amount of borrowing or require voter approval. The city discloses that it knows how and why the contracts were created (specifically to avoid complying with the state constitution) but, since no one in Riverside has filed a lawsuit to stop the practice, it will continue to offer these contractual forms of debt at will. This results in electric rate schemes that have ever increasing hidden taxes in them; however the cost of debt to build infrastructure is not an annual variable operating cost to be included in the rate calculation. It is a fixed cost that should be collected via other means on your bill or property tax. It should not be included in the rate structure. The rate should always be determined from the variable costs of operating the infrastructure.
A vote to approve a constitutional form of municipal bond requires the city to account for the cost of debt service separately from the annual cost of operating the utility. In this way they cannot hide the cost of debt service in the rate calculation and charge you $0.1035 and up for each kwh.
A municipal utility is not allowed to make money. It is a government-owned monopoly and may not charge more than the actual cost of providing the service to you at your property. Municipal utilities are budgeted to break even. They have reserve funds in case of a bad year and the city can always make a loan or spend tax revenue to cover an annual loss.
In recent times the city has taken no steps to reduce costs of operating the utilities. They have taken every opportunity to expand the cost to residential consumers and buried it in the utility rate structure.
The electric utility has a huge fixed annual cost (mostly debt payments) averaged over the calculated electric rates and total annual production. It must sell all of its planned annual production to recoup the funds needed to pay the debt service. If you are forced to conserve electricity via tiered pricing, the city has to automatically raise the price. It is “Catch-22″ Math! The more you conserve the more it will cost you. Also,the city makes more money by transferring more utility (hidden tax) revenues to the general fund with every rate increase. This meets the definition of a special tax in the constitution! You have a constitutional right to vote yes or no on a special tax measure (remember the library special tax).
The city wants you to think it is running a business. A municipal utility provides services to the ownership of property. It is a government-owned and operated monopoly. You have to contract with the city for electric service to your property and pay the hidden tax rate of up to 57%!

Now that is some profit margin! Where is your money going? Can you live on 350 kwh of electric service per month!!

The city by approving 50% increases in electric rates over the last six years and instituting punitive tiered pricing, is forcing you to conserve electricity (remember in October 2006, city council approved electricity rate hikes to fund the “$1.5 billion Renaissance”) but, you don’t need more electricity. Most if not all of the $650 million dollars spent for electric infrastructure improvements has been for future growth of the city population, housing, downtown office space and re-development. It was never planned to help you but, you will pay and pay and pay. This burden of hidden taxation falls most harshly on fixed income (retirees) and low income families in the city. The city would prefer you to move to Mo-Val.

TMC, RATED RIVERSIDE’S MOST “SLANDEROUS” AND ~~MEZZSPELLED~~, “MISSPELLED” AND “OPINIONATED” BLOG SITE! TEMPORARILY BLOCKED BY THE CITY OF RIVERSIDE AT PUBLIC ACCESS SITES WITHIN THE CITY, THEN UNBLOCKED. I GUESS YOU CANNOT DO THAT ACCORDING TO THE ACLU. RATED ~~ONE~~ TWO STAR OUT OF FIVE IN TERMS OF COMMUNITY APPROVAL RATINGS.. TMC IS NOW EXCLUSIVELY ON FILE WITH THE COUNTY OF RIVERSIDE’S DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, AND ~~PROSSIBLY~~ POSSIBLY ON FILE WITH THE CITY OF RIVERSIDE’S POTENTIAL SLAPP SUIT LIST… WE WILL HAVE TO ASK GREGORY ABOUT THAT ONE ( OUR PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO CONTACT HIS PEOPLE)… AGAIN, THANK-YOU COMMUNITY OF RIVERSIDE AND THE CITY OF RIVERSIDE EMPLOYEE’S FOR YOUR SUPPORT! WE REALIZE IT’S TOUGH, SO HANG IN THERE.. COMMENTS ALWAYS WELCOMED, ESPECIALLY SPELL CHECKERS! EMAIL ANONYMOUSLY WITH YOUR DIRT OR FOR CONTACT! THIRTYMILESCORRUPTION@HOTMAIL.COM

thirtymiles | May 1, 2012 at 11:21 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/p1y4ps-1mX

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Perris Valley Line Goes To Court

Posted by admin in Environment, Transportation on April 14, 2012

It looks like our day in court has arrived. . . from the Press Enterprise

Richard Block, a Riverside Hills member, said concerns ranging from the tons of dirt that will be hauled away from the project to the squealing of train wheels are unresolved.

“The evidence presented in the environmental process clearly shows the project will have negative impacts,” Block said. “And they are either incompetent to them or ignoring them.”

He also said officials are grossly overestimating the line’s ridership, noting that the 4,300 daily riders estimated in the report would exceed the ridership of existing Metrolink service in Riverside County. Ridership along the entire 91 Line from Riverside to Union Station in Los Angeles was 5,161 in June, according to Metrolink.

Environmental Impact Report, Perris Valley Line

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Guerrilla Grafters Bring Forbidden Fruit Back To City Trees

Posted by admin in Gardening, Public Policy on April 12, 2012

Here is a problem begging for a solution. Let’s hope the fruit grafters and the city can come up with the perfect way to keep everyone fed, healthy and safe on the sidewalks!

Thanks to NPR’s food blog, The Salt.

Spring means cherry, pear and apple blossoms. But in many metropolitan areas, urban foresters ensure those flowering fruit trees don’t bear fruit to keep fallen fruit from being trampled into slippery sidewalk jelly.

But a group of fruit fans in the San Francisco Bay Area is secretly grafting fruit-bearing tree limbs onto those fruitless trees.

I visited the “crime scene” one recent day, but I can’t tell you where it is because I was with the “criminals.”

“If we say where it is, they could come after me,” says Tara Hui, a fruit tree grafter. She’s talking about city officials, who manage the trees and say it’s illegal to have fruit trees on sidewalks.

So let’s just say we’re in some Bay Area city in a working-class neighborhood, at a line of pear trees that bear no pears.

Hui and two assistants pull out a knife, reach into a plastic bag filled with twigs no bigger than your pinkie, and cut from a fruit bearing pear tree. She says it’s an Asian pear, and that she’s grafting it onto a flowering pear tree.

They whittle a wedge into one end of their twig, then cut a groove into a similar-sized twig on the city tree. They join the two, like tongue and groove carpenters. And when their grafted twig eventually grows into a branch.

“There will be a much better looking tree that actually will provide fruit for people that come by,” Hui says.

Hui’s motives to break the law are straightforward.

“We don’t have a supermarket and we have very few produce stores [here],” she says. “What better to alleviate scarcity of healthy produce in an impoverished area than to grow them yourself and to have it available for free.”

Carla Short, an urban forester for the San Francisco Department of Public Works who’s in charge of 103,000 public trees, has a different view of fruit trees.

“It gets very dangerous very quickly,” Short says. “I mean the minute that fruit gets crushed on the sidewalk, it is slippery. We certainly don’t want people to get injured.”

She says fruit isn’t forbidden everywhere, and the local government does encourage them in community gardens.

But that does put the city forester in an awkward position — advocating for publicly available fruit trees, but policing guerrilla grafters. Short says her team is looking for the guerrilla grafters but hasn’t found them yet.

And what will they do if they find them? First, try to reason with the grafters, she says.

Meanwhile, Hui imagines these same streets in the coming years.

“Just taking an evening stroll, and then you see a fruit and you reach over and now you’re nourished,” says Hui.

So far, officials have yet to discover which of the city’s decorative trees will become delicious trees because the grafts aren’t yet old enough to bear fruit.

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San Onofre Reactor Problems

Posted by admin in Environment, Resoration Economy on April 12, 2012

Regulator Vows Full Accounting of Tube Failure at San Onofre

Ray Lutz, national coordinator of Citizens' Oversight, speaks to the news media near the San Onofre nuclear power plant about shutting it down.

After touring the San Onofre nuclear power plant with federal lawmakers Friday, the nation’s top nuclear regulator vowed complete accounting and accountability for why a key radiation barrier at the facility degraded far more quickly than expected and caused a minor radioactive leak earlier this year.

San Onofre’s two reactors have been idle since January, when excessive wear to generator tubes in Unit 3 caused a rupture and a minor radioactive leak. A small amount of radiation escaped into the atmosphere but presented no health risk to workers or the public, officials say.

After visiting the plant, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko described the rapid deterioration of San Onofre’s generator tubes as “a very unique phenomenon” and said his agency will ensure the plant is safe before allowing it to operate again.

“The NRC wants to get to the bottom of why [San Onofre] is having trouble with relatively new steam generators,” said Jaczko.

“In the end, we will hold the licensee ultimately accountable for actions of the vendor,” he added later, referring to design changes that were made to the tubing.

Environmental groups say those changes caused the excessive wear.

Jaczko declined to comment on the cause of the rupture or estimate when the investigation would be completed.

Meanwhile, anti-nuclear activists continued to raise concerns Friday about the plant’s safety culture, the reliability of information provided by the plant’s operator and the willingness of federal regulators to hold the owner and operator, Southern California Edison, accountable for safety issues.

They insisted that regulators allow an independent analysis of why tubes wore down at such a rapid pace.

“We cannot trust these people,” said Ray Lutz, national coordinator of Citizens’ Oversight. “They can’t even keep the batteries hooked up,” he added, referring to a recent four-year period when a battery for backup safety systems was disconnected. The NRC found that poor maintenance was to blame, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Among the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors. San Onofre has had the highest number of safety complaints to federal regulators in the past five years, according to NRC statistics.

NRC spokesman Victor Dricks on Friday declined to discuss the statistics behind San Onofre’s safety rankings.

Dricks instead emphasized recent improvements in the plant’s safety record.

“San Onofre has an unusually high number of allegations brought to us by workers,” though “it’s not as high as it once was,” said Dricks.

Edison also acknowledges past safety problems but says the situation has improved.

“There were some safety culture issues,” though the plant has also seen “tremendous improvement,” said Edison spokeswoman Jennifer Manfre.

The activists also accused the news media — in particular television news — of slanting its coverage in favor of Edison and minimizing concerns about the plant due to the utility’s spending on advertisements.

Jaczko toured the plant Friday with U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), amid a recent surge of concern from environmentalists and several local officials about the tube break.

At a recent Irvine City Council discussion on the issue, City Councilman Larry Agran called for San Onofre to be shut down. No council member expressed support for the plant’s continued operation.

The environmentalists’ concerns were also bolstered last week by a report from nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen. He concluded that when Edison installed new generators, it made major changes to the tubing but misrepresented the new generators to the NRC as a ”like-for-like” replacement to avoid a thorough review by regulators. The changes are the likely cause of the rupture, Gundersen wrote.

Both Edison and the NRC, however, say the Edison notified regulators about the design changes before approval was given for the new generator.

“We notified them of all changes,” said Manfre, who said she couldn’t immediately provide details of the timing.

The NRC sees no intent by Edison to mislead it, Dricks said.

He declined to say what consequences would result if a nuclear plant operator provides incorrect information to regulators about major design changes to a steam generator.

“We depend on our licensees to provide complete and accurate information to any significant design change that they’re making to the plant,” he said. “There would be consequences if they didn’t, but that does not appear to be the case.”

— NICK GERDA

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A Sampling Of Some Of The Amazing Events Ahead In Riverside — Starting Saturday, March 24th

Posted by admin in Arts & Culture, Environment, Social Capital on March 23, 2012

Celebrating International Women’s Day

Award Winning Actor & Producer

Wendy Girard

Conference, Marketplace Details

Saturday March 24, 2012

Downtown 3657 Lemon St

Your Voice Is Requested. Share Your Thoughts About The Downtown Library. Click For Details.

Monday, March 26th

Thursday March 29th

9th Annual Senior Conference – Goske Center, Wed. March 28th. Click For Details

Inlandia Institute Happenings This Weekend

Your Part In A More Transparent and Participatory City Government

Please provide your thoughts and opinions on city matters from the comfort of your own home. I continue to strongly encourage you to participate in your municipal government. Log on to the city website and read through this coming Tuesday’s City Council Agenda: http://www.riversideca.gov/city_clerk/agenda.asp .

And then submit your E-comment though the same portal, http://riversideca.gov/city_clerk/ecomment.asp . This is our city and I welcome your input.

Thanks to Janice Bielman for sharing Rusty Bailey’s Ward 3 Newsletter.

City of Riverside and CCSE Electric Vehicle Workshop

Saturday, March 24th

UCR Science Lecture Series Kicks Off March 29

Is The Jury Out?

We’ve all received a jury summons at one time or another, but did we serve our one day or one trial or throw the summons in the trash? UCR Professor of Political Science, Kevin Esterling will discuss his recent research in collaboration with the Riverside County Superior Court results that looked at citizen response to jury summonses and methods to increase participation. Join us at the March 28th Citizens University Committee monthly breakfast meeting from 7:15 to 8:30 a.m. at the UCR Extension Center.

Reservations are required, with the cost for members at $18 and $22 for non-members and, as always, includes one of the best breakfast buffets around!. Call (951) 827-5184 for more information and to reserve your seat.

More Green For Less Green

The UCR Botanic Gardens Spring Plant Sale is Back March 31.

Free Shade Tree With March’s Utility Bill

Click For Details

Wood Streets Green Team How To Garden Tour

Announcing the Third Annual

2012 “HOW-TO-GARDEN” TOUR

Sunday, April 22, 11am-4pm

Wood Streets Homes and RCC Community Garden

The Wood Streets Green Team is hosting the third annual “How-to-Garden” Tour on Sunday, April 22, 2012 from 11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

The tour will feature four private gardens within the Wood Streets neighborhood that demonstrate sustainable gardening techniques along with the new Riverside City College Community Garden. Edible landscaping (fruit trees and veggies), composting, drip irrigation, creative repurposing and water-efficient landscaping will be showcased. A local expert will be on hand at each garden to answer visitors’ questions. There will also be an Eco-Fair at RCC from 11-2.

A suggested donation of $5 will help fund community garden efforts.

More information can be found at the website www.woodstreetsgreenteam.org or by calling 951-505-0172.

Still More Great Things To Come

April 1: Santa Ana River Community Workshop - Join the Santa Ana River Trust and 11 local community groups in discussing our most precious local natural resource. Prior to the workshop, please take the Santa Ana River and Trail Survey. More info below.

April 4: Tequesquite Community Garden Planning Meeting - Want to catch up? Click here for the latest garden update! Also, join the discussion! More info below.

Riverside Green Leadership Summit – Feedback and Website Info below. As always, great P-E coverage!