Regional Community Development News – May 31, 2011

Note: First daily post of news. Delicious tags included. 


1. Ill. gambling expansion threatens Hammond's $36 million casino tax revenue


The city of Hammond's budget is boosted each year by about $36 million in casino tax revenue. That money is in danger after Illinois state lawmakers approved plans to build casinos in Chicago and its suburbs.


Similar efforts have failed in years past, but the Illinois General Assembly authorized a plan Tuesday for a casino in Chicago, two in the suburbs and slot machines at O'Hare and Midway airports.


It's not clear if Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn will sign the bill. He has criticized portions of it during past public appearances.
...
Hammond's 2011 budget uses $36 million of casino-related revenue.


That revenue has been "steady and predictable," City Controller Bob Lendi said.


Of that, $3.5 million goes to the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority, $900,000 to the Regional Bus Authority, and more than $1.2 million for costs associated with buying and closing the River Park Apartments.


...


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2. Regional campuses reject Grattan Institute report | The Australian


"Universities are obviously significant contributors to the regional development," Hal Swerissen said of La Trobe University's four non-metropolitan campuses in Bendigo, Shepparton, Albury-Wodonga and Mildura.


...
Professor Swerissen, La Trobe's pro vice-chancellor (regional), said the dynamics of regional universities were more complex than suggested by the recent, contentious Grattan report.


Investing in Regions: Making a Difference compared towns with campuses to centres of similar size but without campuses, measuring university participation and graduate retention as well as economic contributions.


"It's a problem with high-level aggregate data," Professor Swerissen said of the generalised conclusions. "Outcomes in different regional communities vary depending on local criteria. I agree in broad terms the data says the coast is growing [but] I'm not sure I agree that therefore every inland city is not worth investing in."

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3. “Invest in local democracy and regional development”, CoR President tells Tunisian government


Democracy and regional economic development in the Mediterranean go hand in hand, Committee of the Regions (CoR) President Mercedes Bresso underlined today. Joining EU Industry Commissioner Antonio Tajani and Tunisian Industry Minister Abdelaziz Rassaa at the CoR, President Bresso welcomed upgraded EU aid for the Arab spring as an “investment in democracy”.


The double challenge of consolidating democracy and promoting regional economic development in the Southern Mediterranean was the topic of a conference in Brussels today. The event was organised at the CoR headquarters in the framework of the Euro-Mediterranean Assembly of Local and Regional Authorities (ARLEM). CoR President Mercedes Bresso stated: “The Committee of the Regions affirms its unconditional support for the reform processes that must result in true democratisation and stability. Durable peace relies on sound economic growth, and vice versa. ...


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4. InsideHalton Article: Strong stance by Region necessary


Traffic gridlock has been a problem in the GTA for decades and only promises to get worse with the anticipation of three million new residents in the coming decades.

That’s why the Province is taking steps now to implement a future transportation strategy, including the proposed Mid-Pen highway.

Wednesday, the Region’s planning and public works committee approved a staff report that takes a strong stance against the highway.

The report states while accommodating new growth in the area is necessary, “staff will not support alternatives that would establish a new facility crossing the Niagara Escarpment.”

The report is expected to go before regional council this week.

With the protection of our Niagara Escarpment World Bisophere Reserve in mind, the Region is right to take such a stance.
...
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5. Monitoring is key for water source quality


Expected growth along Georgia’s coast is leading members of the Coastal Regional Water Resource Planning Council to monitor water usage, and possibly look for alternative water sources.

Phil Odom with the Coastal Regional Water Resource Planning Council and chair of the Liberty Regional Water Resource Council explained ... that it is important to monitor the quality of water sources throughout the region, especially over the next 40 years.

“The science given to the Coastal Georgia Regional Water Planning Council in preparing best management techniques for the statewide water and conservation plan for 2012 has led me to personally believe that our land use and surface water practices of the past 180 years, and our withdrawal of underground water over the past 130 years, has led to degradation of both natural water supply systems,” Odom said during the club’s weekly meeting at the Richmond Hill City Center.
...
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6. “Uncertain” Future for Lake Tahoe | LahontanValleyNews.com


... A bill is being considered that would pull Nevada out of the Tahoe Regional Planning Compact with California. Supporters of SB-271 say they're trying to protect private property rights.

Jean Stoess, ... says she's heard that argument many times before, when she served on the board of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, and she maintains the issue is much larger than that.
...
Sierra Club vice-chair Dave Hornbeck says if Nevada does end up pulling out of the compact, he fears for the future of the lake - ...

Some local governments hope to improve their tax base as a result of the measure, but Hornbeck says the federal government should withhold funding if Nevada leaves the compact, which he says has protected the lake for more than four decades.

"It's a bi-state compact, passed in 1969 by two Republican governors, Ronald Reagan of California and Paul Laxalt of Nevada, to protect the clarity of Lake Tahoe and its pristine blue waters - and it has been able to do that."

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7. Lorain, Sheffield consider revenue sharing - The Chronicle-Telegram - Lorain County, Ohio



Lorain and Sheffield are poised to share revenue from a joint economic development zone between the two communities.


“This is a prime example of regionalism,” Service Director Robert Gilchrist said after a May 23 public hearing on the zone by the City Council. “Not just talking about it, but actual action.”


If approved by Council, which is expected to vote on the zone in the next few weeks, Lorain would provide waste water services to businesses in a 45-acre region running north on Colorado Avenue on the east side. Sheffield would be responsible for all construction and maintenance of the sewer facilities in the village.


“Selling sanitary (sewer service) to the village is extremely profitable and it bears no cost on the city,” said ... representative of KR Irish Ltd., the limited liability corporation ... interested in moving into the zone.


“All we’re trying to do is promote development, jointly (and) equitably between two communities, the village and the municipality.”
...

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Regional Community Development News – May 30, 2011 - Announcements and Regional Links. & Financial Crisis.

Announcements and Regional Links.
    .01  Call for Papers and Organized Sessions - 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers - February 24 - 28 - New York, NY, USA
All scholars, researchers, and students are welcome to participate. The deadline for submitting abstracts is September 28.
 The AAG accepts all submitted abstracts and organized sessions for presentation. If you have any questions about these guidelines please direct them to Oscar Larson at meeting@aag.org
Link: http://www.aag.org/annualmeeting/call_for_papers
    .02  Call for Papers - Localism: Sufficient and fit for purpose? - November 3, 2011 - University of Manchester Conference Centre, Manchester, UK - Regional Studies Association
Conference Objectives
Localism and regionalism tend to be seen as conflicting and competing conceptions of territorial organisation. Indeed, there are well rehearsed, albeit evolving, debates which engage with the theoretical and policy architectures underpinning regionalism and localism. These two forms of territorial organisation have their origins in different schools of thought, underpinned by fundamentally different ideals around the structure and role of both government and governance in territorial management, the scales at which these functions are most effectively operationalised and how they relate to each other. The current debates in the UK on Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPS) illustrate this.

Nevertheless, many successful economies around the world have strong local government structures which are complemented by regional structures, either in the form of federal elected regional bodies, regional development institutions, or special purpose delivery vehicles. International evidence suggests that a regional structure provides a mechanism for thinking strategically about priorities of regional significance such as economic development and transport; that it allows scope for the setting of longer-term policy priorities; and that it can coordinate and frame collective arguments and priorities, and in doing so can provide a conduit through which to lobby national government and, increasingly, international agencies, yet also organise a plethora of local interests. This raises a crucial question which will form the theme for this conference: can localism deliver effective interventions and outcomes at a time when economic shifts have forced an adjustment to social, political, and cultural norms to which places must respond?
Please submit offers of papers in the form of 400 word abstracts through the Regional Studies Association on-line conference portal by Monday 6th June 2011.
Link:  http://www.regional-studies-assoc.ac.uk/events/2011/onedayconf/cfp.pdf
RSA Future events: http://www.regional-studies-assoc.ac.uk/events/future.asp
    .03  Bottom-Up Regional Statements - 14 Regions - Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade
During Round 3, County team members from every County worked together to come to consensus on the top five regional priorities, based on the existing content from the County Summaries. The product of those work sessions will be posted here for ten (10) days of public review, until May 27th. This work product is a piece of content that will be dropped into a larger regional template including a prologue, resource map, list of top five regional priorities, discussion about specific connections between the regional statement and the statewide blueprint, and finally a body of appendices.
http://www.colorado.gov/cs/Satellite/OEDIT/OEDIT/1251588546249
    .04  EDA Regional Innovation Network - KnowYourRegion.org
U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development John Fernandez … unveiled a web portal to launch the Regional Innovation Acceleration Network (RIAN), an effort in collaboration with the State Science & Technology Institute to promote organizations that are growing regional economies and creating jobs through innovation.
RIAN is an initiative to accelerate the growth of Venture Development Organizations (VDO), entities that make direct investments in companies and new ideas and increase access to capital in order to turn innovations into companies with jobs to drive America’s economy. VDO’s are non-profit, business driven partnerships with government, community foundations, universities and civic organizations focused on promoting technology and innovation-based development. They provide a multifaceted portfolio of services tailored to address specific needs of their particular regional economy.
http://www.knowyourregion.org/eda-announces-regional-innovation-network


Financial Crisis.
    .01  What Inflation Means to You: Inside the Consumer Price Index - dshort.com
Chart:  CPI and Core CPI - Cumulative Change and Annual Rate of Change - 2000-April, 2011
http://dshort.com/inflation/CPI-categories-since-2000.html?CPI-and-Core-CPI-since-2000
Full article
The Fed justified the current round of quantitative easing "to promote a stronger pace of economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with its mandate" (full text). In effect, the Fed is trying to increase inflation, operating at the macro level. But what does an increase in inflation mean at the micro level — specifically to your household?
Let's do some analysis of the Consumer Price Index, the best known measure of inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) divides all expenditures into eight categories and assigns a relative size to each. The pie chart below illustrates the components of the Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers, the CPI-U, which I'll refer to hereafter as the CPI.
http://dshort.com/inflation/CPI-category-overview.html

    .02  The New Feudalism - Global Economic Intersection
    Guest Author:  Derryl Hermanutz is a student of economic philosophy and frequent commentator on the subject.  This essay was originally written as a discussion comment on Dirk J. Bezemer’s recent article “This is Not a Credit Crisis.”
Dr. Bezemer is certainly on the right track by beginning his discussion with an objective observation of the core of the problem, which is unpayable debt. It is astonishing to see the extent to which so many academics, economists, financiers, pundits, financial journalists, bloggers, advocates, government and monetary officials, and ideologues of the various persuasions, apply their versions of “magic arithmetic” to the numbers of money, believing that somehow the economy can pay the banking system MORE money than exists.
The Babylonians recognized that for every credit there is a liability. In our system, where money is created and issued by the commercial banking system as loans at interest, for every credit of a $1000 loan at 5% interest, there is a corresponding debt charged to the borrower of $1050. The banks create ALL of our money. $1000 was created but $1050 is owed. The banks do not want your economic production in payment, they want money. But the banks have a monopoly on the production of money so the only money that exists is the money they create as loans which they credit to the borrower’s deposit account. The money to pay the interest is never created, so unpayable debt increases each time more new money enters the closed system.
Playing with Marbles
The fantasists believe that by some magic arithmetic the money to pay interest will somehow manifest itself. They believe that normal arithmetic does not apply to money numbers. ...
http://econintersect.com/wordpress/?p=3439
    .03  This Spanish Spring is the Real Thing - 21st Century Wire
It was perhaps inevitable given its long associations with, and geographical proximity to the Maghreb, that Spain should be the first European country to be swept up by the wave known as the “Arab Spring”. Protests have been raging across the country since May 15th, and like previous rumblings in Greece, this Spanish Spring will likely send a new shockwave through the EU.
...
An entirely false sense of prosperity engendered by their own infamous construction bubble is at the root of Spain’s subsequent economic collapse, with the by-product that the Spanish coastline has been completely and permanently ruined by the plethora of “Urbanisations” and “Apartamentos” that litter the once scenic Corniche. While thousands were temporarily employed as builders, surveyors, plumbers, estate agents and the like, their prosperity was only intermittent. But it had to end sooner or later. The market became completely saturated with identical apartments, few with any sense of place or purpose, bar enabling northern Europeans to soak up sun and sangria. Now the buyers have all gone away, thousands of flats and villas lie empty, unfinished building projects litter the edges of town centres and what have they got? Very little.
Franco’s failure to build a technological base in the mid 20th century, exacerbated by his democratic successors squandering of the opportunities afforded by EU membership, mean that Spain has very little to fall back on. ...
THE FLASH MOB MOVES NORTH
Thousands are now camped out in central Madrid along with 60 other sites nationwide, creating temporary cities of the dispossessed. The mainstream media in Britain and the West have chosen to largely ignore this phenomenon, perhaps because they fear that “it could happen here”.
...
http://21stcenturywire.com/2011/05/26/this-spanish-spring-is-the-real-thing/
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Regional Community Development News – May 30, 2011 - Other Regional Community News for Our Local Planet & Blogging about Regional Communities

Other Regional Community News for Our Local Planet 
    .01  Will Planning Act's 'core strategy' work?
The Irish Times - Dublin, Ireland
THE new 2010 Planning Act is beginning to bite. The “Core Strategy” concept, an inherent part of the integrated national-regional-local planning approach, is now being rolled out in all county and city development plans. It has huge merit in balancing the excesses and irresponsibility of the past decades. Dezoning of land will reduce value – which is having implications for banks and Nama as they consider the haircuts or reductions in value of assets and securities (e.g., existing planning permissions may not be renewed). Avoiding land supply being overly or locally constricted, such that it would create local monopolies It is based on zoning enough land for the plan period plus an allowance of “overzoning” of 50 per cent. The assumption is that sufficient land will be zoned and serviced to meet present development needs and in the five years before it is actually built upon.
...
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/commercialproperty/2011/0518/1224297207755.html
    .02  ECOWAS growth rate below level for millennium development goals - 234NEXT.com
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) at the weekend took stock of its progress since the treaty establishing it more than 36 years ago and concluded that its modest achievement of 6.2 percent economic growth rate remains below the minimum 7 percent rate required for the attainment of the millennium development goals (MDGs).
President, ECOWAS Commission, Victor Gbeho, said in Abuja at the 36th Anniversary briefing commemorating the formation of the regional body that the assessment of the progress made so far reveals that the organisation has come of age in terms of its maturity not only as a sustainable and vibrant brand for regional integration worldwide, but also a model in Africa.
Result-oriented partnership
“With a combined population of more than 230 million culturally diverse, but harmonious people, united in purpose, mission and goal, ours is a result-oriented partnership owned by our member states and community citizens. Our integration project is a success story,”  ...
http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Money/Business/5707168-147/ecowas_growth_rate_below_level_for.csp
    .03  Implementing an integrated place, local and regional planning scheme in NSW
On Line Opinion – Australia
... A scheme to improve local democracy, streamline the complex DA and planning instrument contexts, and reduce State Government involvement in local government and associated costs has been prepared by this author. The essence is described in the attached addendum with all contents being copyright: No forced amalgamations and no boundary changes but with the basis for a successful local government model for decades; Each of Sydney's regions would have a Regional Planning Council, replacing both PAC and JRPPs; The 6 RPCs would have the same balance of representation as the 1880 Sydney Water Board Act – 3 appointed officials and 4 indirectly-elected directors – improving the "confidence" of state and local governments; Each council would receive all DAs, with all councillors empowered to comment on all and any DA but without the constraints of statutory planning rules; ...
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12062
    .04  Milroy Observatory part of regional plan for renewed astronomy tourism
ABC News -Australian Broadcasting Corporation
The Warrumbungle Shire Council has applied for $2 million under the Regional Development Australia Fund, to upgrade the Shire's observatory. The Council says the facility coupled with the Milroy Observatory near Gunnedah, and the Warrumbungle Observatory, will stregthen astronomy tourism in the region. A consortium including council representatives, and astronomists has submitted the application, with the hopes of refurbishing the Siding Springs Observatory Exploratory Centre at Coonabarabran. The works would include an expansion of teaching facilities and the complex will be rebranded as the New South Wales Astronomy and Space Education Centre. It's hoped, if sucessfull, the centre will also attract more school groups. The Council says the development would also capitalise on the World's Largest Virtual Solar System Drives from regional centres including Dubbo, Tamworth, Moree, Gulgong and Merriwa. ...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/20/3222236.htm
    .05  Guadalcanal’s potentials for culture and tourism – Solomon Star – Solomon Islands
THE Guadalcanal province has great development potentials for cultural and tourism development.
This was according to the Guadalcanal provincial Governments Regional Rural Development and Empowerment (GRRDE) policy framework 2011-2015 that launched last week.
The preservation and protection of local culture and relics, and the promotion of culturally acceptable and economically sustainable tourism development is one of the priority development focuses of GRRDE framework. ...
http://www.solomonstarnews.com/news/national/10949-guadalcanals-potentials-for-culture-and-tourism

Blogging about Regional Communities

    .01  Building a Regional Music Market - The Texas Model
Twanz.com
For these of you who’ve been living under a rock, there’s something brewing down in Texas. Actually, it has been for rather a while. It began when Willie grew his hair, rolled his personal, moved back again to Austin, and introduced Waylon with him. It’s a revolution- its artists who flip their back on the establishment, and do well not regardless of it, but because of it. It’s a regional country music marketplace ... they even have a Texas songs chart where regional artists chart their newest singles. ... Artist/Fan Relationships This is the single most vital relationship in the equation. For a regional nation music market to thrive, there has to be need for it. And only the followers can create the need. It cannot be faked or made. It needs to be actual. There has to be a dedication in the artists to remain accurate to on their own and their music. And there needs to be a dedication through the supporters to visit the shows, invest in the new music, and aid market the artist …
http://www.twanz.com/health/general/building-a-regional-music-market-the-texas-model/
    .02  The Silly Argument Over BRT and Rail
The TransportPolitic
As if operating in parallel, Toronto’s Globe and Mail and The Wall Street Journal each published articles last week describing the merits of bus rapid transit, which each newspaper described as the future of urban transportation. Both noted that BRT was cheaper to construct than rail lines. Each suggested that in an age of government pull backs and general skepticism over the value of public investment, BRT could offer substantial benefits to a transit system at a reasonable price. And each article concluded with a warning by rail proponents that buses wouldn’t be able to attract people out of their cars. This is a sensationalized opposition between two modes of transportation that should be thought of as complementary. There are advantages to improved bus service in some corridors, reasons to support rail in others.
What is clear is that for the majority of American cities — excluding only a few in the Northeast — buses will remain the predominant mode of public transit for most riders, even after major expansions in train networks planned for cities from Charlotte to Phoenix. So even cities that choose to invest in rail projects must also spend on the improvement of their bus lines. Nor is the difference in costs between rail lines and BRT nearly as great as some would argue ...
http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2011/05/25/the-silly-argument-over-brt-and-rail/
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