Monday, June 28, 2010

Saving money with civilian Flaggers

A recent report provided by AP, shows that the State saved 28,000 dollars during 4 relatively slow days in May here in Mass. 49 other states allow civilian flaggers as a way to save money on construction sites and allows companies to under bid companies who do not use civilian flaggers.

There will be police picket lines around Devals events as he has promised us all that civilian flaggers will be used. Baker wants flaggers to be paid less than cops and Cahill has said civilian flaggers have cost the State more than using police officers.

Last week while trying to get down Concord Street, we were detoured and no less than 2 Sheriffs cars with Sheriffs stood by the detour signs. So we don't have enough of Framinghma's finest to do detail, we have to import sheriffs deputies. It's absolutely sicking.

Quinn funding gets ugly.

In what some say will be a trend for towns and cities across the State, 8 Boston Cops are suing the City for up to 10 million dollars, for bonus money they say they deserve after pursuing college degrees.

As Ms. Hall said at TM, this is another unfunded mandate that will never go away here in Framingham.

At it again, 6 groups file to stop Cape Wind

From California to Cape Cod, 6 groups have filed what is expected to be many lawsuits trying to stop Cape Wind. The latest physco babble is that the government has failed to collect data on migration of birds and whales. The two birds in question are the rare roseate tern and the piping plover which are smaller than my hand and beach at Kalmus Park in Hyannis.

Cape wind has the endorsement of Mass Audubon and Greenpeace.

After what has happened in the Gulf of Mexico and what some say is the most devastating environmental disaster in this countries history, one has to wonder why anyone or group would stand in the way of Cape Wind.

New Recycle Bins

There will be an informational meeting at Cameron School on Wednesday night at 7PM. The purpose of this public meeting is to ask questions and see the new recycling carts.

The new 96 gallon cart will be available soon and the new Bi-weekly recycling begins Sept 6th. You may choose a smaller, 64 gallon recycling cart or the 96 by calling 508 532 6001.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

That 17.5% pay raise.. is actually 20%

So the employees at Boston Fire gave 1% back for drug testing, postponed 2.5%, bullied city councilors and at the end of 5 years, the total raise will be 20%. Just wait and see what happens in the city when the other 41 unions come to the table. Playing chicken with the future will come back and bite Menio and the City Council this year and could spark real trouble for the residents who rely on the rank and file union members who have less than hero status with City Hall.

To think any tax payer, anywhere in this state should be forced into giving more money to public employee's to take a drug test is just loony and demonstrates how far off base the unions have gone to cheat tax payers.

Burning wood .. bad for the enviroment?

In a flash... the two wood burning plants proposed here in western mass could go up in smoke. A six month study by Massachusetts Manoment Center for Conservation Sciences in Plymouth indicates that burning wood to generate electricity can be worse for global warming than burning coal. The short of it: The study looks only at new forest being burned and not the waste wood that biomass plants use now.

This may be trouble for the two power plants for burning wood but MAY increase the awareness of other biomass materials that are grown yearly and don't add to the problem of co2 in our air. By the way, burning hemp has less detrimental effects on our environment than wood, oil and natural gas. It releases the same amount of co2 that it took to grow it when burned.

Immediately after the report was issued, BPA, Biomass Power Association has requested an apology for the Manoment Center and the State of Mass, citing these reasons.
“Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study” examines biomass energy in the state of Massachusetts, but bases its analysis on new forest biomass instead of the waste wood most biomass plants use or propose to use. It’s a subject of grave concern for the members of the BPA who do business in 20 states, according to Bob Cleaves, president and CEO of the BPA. “The report issued by Manomet on behalf of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has generated both a lot of interest, but also a tremendous amount of confusion and misinformation about a very, very important issue for our industry and that issue is carbon impacts from utilizing biomass in the production of electricity,” he said.

In response to the study, Cleaves emphasized four major principles of the BPA and its members that guide operations: only sustainable fuels that do not contribute to land-use changes and offer much lower greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels are used; members do not promote harvesting of forests for energy; members fully support use of wood waste and byproducts from sustainable forestry; and members support the use of nonforestry waste from the agricultural industry. The Manomet study completely ignores waste wood fuels for the first 109 pages, Cleaves said, addressing them almost as an afterthought on page 110: “All bioenergy technologies, even biomass electric power compared to natural gas electric, looks favorable when biomass waste wood is compared to fossil fuel alternatives.”

Another unethical Rep at the State House?

If you haven't been following the State Rep Jeffery Perry's inquiry, let me fill you in. The Globe, in addition to reviewing sworn testimony in depositions and the civil trial, obtained transcripts of Flanagan’s disciplinary hearing, State Police and Wareham police reports, and correspondence in the criminal case through requests under state public records law, has investigated Rep Perry, since it was discovered, as Police Sargent in Wareham in the early nineties, he may have witnessed illegal strip searches of two teenage girls by officer Scott Flanagan. The long of it is, Officer Fallangan confessed to strip searching a 14 and 16 year old girl and Sergeant Perry who was there lied to his superiors about what happened. Even going to one parents home and not filing a criminal report when one set of parents came to the police station. One civil suit was tried and the other was settled out of court, both in favor of the victims.

The short of this story is that Mr. Perry is running against another crook in former auditor Joe Malone for a chance to replace another questionable elected official in William Delahunt. All kinds of people who have once said they praised Perry for his work in the past, but have refused to back up what they wrote back then. Unfortunate for our Scott Brown, Perry's past may come back and haunt Brown, who has endorsed Perry.

To think this kind of guy walks the halls of our State House and feels he deserves the right to walk the halls of congress.

Look for this to be tops of the list of dirty laundry hung out by the press and the opposition, who has a very tainted past as well.

117 reasons to be hopefull this November

A total of 117 people are running for the State House this year and 10 congressional seats are being challenged. This hasn't happened in years and may get 2.5 million people to the voting both this November. We may know little to nothing of the challengers at this point, but ask yourself, could 117 new legislators do any worse than those who have been there for a decade or longer? Will they elect a corrupt and unethcial speaker of the house? Will they let unions and special interest run Beacon Hill? I think not.

The ruling party has nothing to be proud of, nor does the minority party, but without any moderation or compromise from both sides, nothing good will happen for our future.

I say... vote each and every incumbent out of office and get back to electing people who will and want to represent us and not the people who continue to use us as a floor mat.

Friday, June 4, 2010

Concerts on the Common

2010 Show Schedule

June 4 Framingham High School Band - kickin' off the summer concert season.
June 11 Chad Burdick - some of the best country western in the area!
June 18 Marshalee - inspirational and gospel/
June 25 Summer Street Band - this cover band is a Metrowest favorite!

July 2 Off the Hook - a 9-piece fun pop band.
July 3 • Saturday Special! Concert & Movie! • FREE Admission!
6:00PM - CONCERT: Sound Assembly Chorus
8:00PM - MOVIE: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Movie Sponsored by Adesa-Boston)
• 28ft Screen! • Open-air Movie •
• Free Popcorn and Soda 'til it Lasts •
Movie Raindate is Sunday July 4th at 8:00pm.

July 9 HELP! - Beatles cover music at its best.
July 16 Reminisants - oldies and more!
July 23 The Glamour Girls - this popular band returns!
July 30 The Infractions - they play it all from oldies to present.


August 6 John Penny Band - more great country & western classics!
August 13 The Skinny Ties - new wave and power pop.
August 20 Amy Gallatin - for all your bluegrass lovers!!
August 27 Tom Nutile Orchestra - big band sounds of yesteryear

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

This nations enviromental nightmare and Greedy BP

None of us can even speculate how bad it is for this country's Gulf region, it's people, it's economy, effecting now three states, with Alabama just reporting oil on it's outer coast. Just like war, we now get live images of pain and sorrow with commentary. Not only do we see the gushing oil, we now see sick clean-up workers making 3thousand a day, wildlife being cleaned, all kinds of death and political parties who are strolling through the investigation process, allowing those who have contributed to their campaign coffers, slide out of Washington unscathed.

The piece is from WSJ and clearly shows how this unimaginable disaster could have been prevented, should have been prevented with proper competent oversight. The unquestionable time line of permitting shows us how BP's ultimate greed gambled this countries survival. Blaming this entirely on one data entry employee's "typos" is not acceptable to anyone.

Just a week before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, BP PLC asked regulators to approve three successive changes to its oil well over 24 hours, according to federal records reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

The unusual rapid-fire requests to modify permits reveal that BP was tweaking a crucial aspect of the well's design up until its final days.

One of the design decisions outlined in the revised permits, drilling experts say, may have left the well more vulnerable to the blowout that occurred April 20, killing 11 workers and leaving crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.
Journal Community

The Minerals Management Service approved all the changes quickly, in one instance within five minutes of submission.

New information about the well has become public as BP faces increasing pressure from government officials and Gulf Coast residents angry and frustrated over the protracted spill, now the worst in U.S. history.

Both BP and the MMS have faced growing scrutiny from congressional investigators looking into the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the resulting oil spill. Last week, a Wall Street Journal investigation found that BP had made a series of choices that made the well more vulnerable to a blowout.
The Final Moments

BP's flurry of revisions and re-revisions stands out as uncommon. Of the more than 2,200 wells that have been drilled in the Gulf since 2004, only 5% have had multiple permit revisions submitted to MMS within one calendar day, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of MMS records.

In only one other case, a 2005 well drilled in just 48 feet of water, has a company submitted three revisions within 24 hours, as happened on BP's well. BP's well was in nearly 5,000 feet of water, which has made dealing with the well far more complicated.

By April 14, when BP filed the first of three permits that would later be amended, the London-based oil company had already faced many problems with the well, including losing costly drilling fluid and fighting back natural gas that tried to force its way into the well. The problems had caused BP to use eight pieces of steel pipe to seal the well, rather than the planned six pieces. The permit filed on April 14 dealt with the eighth and final section, which hadn't yet been installed in the well.

BP had hoped to get a 9 7/8-inch pipe—big enough to handle a lot of oil and gas—into the reservoir. But for the final section, the largest pipe they could fit was a 7-inch pipe. The company had to decide whether to use a single piece of pipe that reached all the way from the sea floor down to the oil reservoir, or use two pipes, one inside the other.
Timeline

The two-pipe method was the safer option, according to many industry experts, because it would have provided an extra layer of protection against gas traveling up the outside of the well to the surface. Gene Beck, a longtime industry engineer and a professor at Texas A&M University, said the two-pipe method is "more or less the gold standard," especially for high-pressure wells such as the one BP was drilling.

But the one-pipe option was easier and faster, likely taking a week less time than the two-pipe method. BP was spending about $1 million per day to operate the Deepwater Horizon.

In an April report, a BP engineer concluded that the one-pipe option was the "best economic case" despite having "some risk" of leaving an open path for gas to travel up the outside of the well. The two-pipe option, the report said, would provide an extra barrier against gas but would only be used if "stability problems" or other issues arose with the well.

On April 14, at 8:34 p.m., BP informed the MMS that it planned to use the one-pipe method, using a single 7-inch-wide pipe for the whole length of the well. The MMS approved the permit at 8:13 the next morning, according to federal records.

At 9:54 a.m. on April 15 BP filed another permit informing the MMS of a correction. Rather than using a 7-inch-wide pipe the whole way, it planned to run a tapered pipe that was wider at the top than at the bottom. This was approved by the MMS seven minutes later.

Then, at 2:35 p.m., BP filed another revision. This one informed the MMS that it had "inadvertently" omitted mention of a section of pipe already in the well. Four and one-half minutes later, MMS approved this permit also.

Demonstrators turned out in New Orleans to express outrage at BP and the U.S. government over their handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Video courtesy of Reuters.

Last year, the MMS floated a proposal to require all companies to "document and analyze" all major changes. BP responded during a comment period that the proposed safety rules were unnecessary.

In addition to well-design tweaks, the company's day-to-day operational plan was also in flux, according to testimony from an investigative hearing held by the Coast Guard and MMS in Kenner, La., last week.

On Thursday, Jimmy Wayne Harrell, a Transocean employee who was the rig's offshore installation manager, said "the drilling program was constantly changing."

He testified that BP representatives overseeing the job had repeatedly altered plans in the days leading up to the accident, and he had had to argue to ensure certain tests were done.

BP senior drilling engineer Mark Hafle, in testimony on Friday at the same hearings, blamed the multiple well-design corrections on an inexperienced data entry employee who "made some typos" filling out the forms.