Author Archives: jimgilvin

Flying coach is for the little people

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Kyle Wingfield of the AJC is fired up about Georgia politicians accepting free perks from Delta and he’s right to be disappointed. Can you imagine if Delta were the defendant in a trial and gave the judge free frequent flyer miles during pre-trial hearings? That would be absurd. So what is the difference? From the article:

The upgrades are properly understood as gifts — lobbying gifts — from a company seeking an extension of the partial exemption on sales tax for jet fuel it’s enjoyed since 2005. Delta got just that when HB 322 was passed this spring, saving the company tens of millions of dollars.

No wonder it passed: Besides Ralston, Delta contributed to Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones, House Majority Leader Larry O’Neal and House Transportation Chairman Jay Roberts, who sponsored HB 322. On the Senate side, it wasn’t only Cagle and Williams but Majority Leader Chip Rogers and Ronnie Chance, a floor leader for the Deal administration.

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For some reason, this story got my goat more than the typical campaign-money revelation. Maybe it’s the obviously false pretext that these gifts were election-related.

More likely, it’s the reinforcement that our elected officials believe they deserve a cushier lifestyle than their constituents. Not because they can afford it, but just because they’ve been elected.

As Bob Irvin, former House minority leader and past chairman of Common Cause Georgia, told me, “This just ought to be stopped. It feeds the entitlement mentality of people in government. And while we’re fixing the entitlement problems for the country as a whole, we ought to be fixing it for government officials and staff, too.”

Every single day there are thousands of people in Georgia volunteering their time on behalf of their community. These people volunteer in soup kitchens, teach Sunday school classes, coach baseball or softball and donate time to the local PTA just to name a few. And not a single one of them expects to get free gifts worth thousands of dollars for their service to society. Yet for some reason many of our current political “public servants” seem to think their contribution is so singularly important that they should be entitled to special privileges.

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi dictated that the “little people” of the United States had to use low flow toilets and cfl light bulbs while she flew around on gigantic military aicraft stocked with enough booze to supply an entire Russian village for a year. Before Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for raping a hotel maid, the head of the International Monetary Fund was staying in $3,000 a night hotel rooms while he redistributed wealth from the United States to people all over the world.

Membership in the ruling class does have its privileges.

Hide your kids… Hide your wife… Governor Deal is looking for resources

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Georgia Governor Nathan Deal took time from his busy schedule of punishing insolent reporters to appoint a new commisssion to look for innovative ways to stick it to Georgia taxpayers “find the right ways to balance  the educational needs of Georgia’s children with the appropriate resources to  fund them.” You can read all about it here.

A blue ribbon panel of experts and politicians looking for new ways to get money? My wallet feels lighter already.

Why don’t those commissions ever have regular old everyday taxpayers on them? You know… someone that pays taxes but doesn’t benefit from the question at hand. I’d feel a heckuva lot better if the governor had taken Bill Buckley’s advice and just pulled random names out of the phone book instead of hand picking educators, politicians and bureaucrats. Time to sound the Antoine Dobson tax increase alert!

Is Alpharetta a good place for a black family?

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In looking over the GA Jim traffic yesterday I noticed that someone was directed to this blog after asking a search engine “is alpharetta a good place for black family”. The searcher was directed to my earlier post Racial diversity in Alpharetta? Duh! and I hope they found the answer they were looking for.

And if anyone else ever finds GA Jim looking for an answer to that same question let me give them a clear and unambiguous answer: YES.

Alpharetta has great schools, low crime and a fantastic quality of life. Any family that values those qualities will find Alpharetta is an outstanding place to call home… regardless of race. Welcome to Alpharetta!

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Over the Weekend

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Governor Deal strikes back at reporters telling the truth. Anyone that is surprised by Governor Deal using political money to benefit his family clearly wasn’t paying attention during the election but what bothers me even more than Governor Deal’s actions are his reactions in this case. Facts are facts and politicians that don’t want facts to be exposed remind me of a something I read once. I don’t remember the source or the exact quote but it was basically,”If you don’t want people to know what you  are doing… Stop Doing It!”

Carlos Santana, musical genius and immigration moron I love Carlos Santana’s music and I am generally accepting of marketing spectacles like Major League Baseball’s “Civil Rights Game” at Turner Field Sunday. But giving a platform to ignorant hypocrites like Carlos Santana is not advancing the cause of civil rights. How dare he come to our state and criticize us for our immigration laws when Mexico’s immigration laws are draconian by comparison. I am prohibited by law from owning land in Mexico and “Foreigners who are deported from Mexico and attempt to re-enter the country without authorization can be imprisoned for up to 10 years.” Would Mr. Santana prefer we just adopt the same standards of his homeland?

And in the really important news: Atlanta Braves won 2 out of 3 from the Philthies!

Is the arbitrary application of justice just?

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Last week I wrote this post about the federal Department of Justice investigating the City of Alpharetta over a zoning case which involved a local mosque. I understand that some people believe the mosque decision was a case of religious discrimination but I followed the case closely and there has never been one shred of evidence produced to support that claim. The Justice Department may find some evidence of discrimination and if so I expect the city would immediately reverse their decision. But why did the feds choose to investigate that particular case without any evidence of discrimination?

I bring this up again because the Roswell Neighbor contains this article by Joan Durbin about a zoning case that the City of Roswell decided against a Christian school. As far as I am concerned that case and the case involving the mosque are both zoning issues that just happen to involve religious organizations and when the Roswell case was originally decided against the school it also sued the city. In the case of the Christian school the article says:

The court stated it was “within the purview and discretion of mayor and council to determine the factors of the preservation of the residential neighborhoods.”

Funny though… the article doesn’t mention a federal investigation over that case. Surely the Justice Department wouldn’t single out zoning cases involving mosques for special scrutiny would they?

It just so happens that my son plays baseball on a field with no lights because the neighborhood stopped a Christian school from installing them… but the justice department never investigated that case. So how is the Justice Department deciding which zoning cases to investigate when there is no evidence of discrimination?

If they are going to investigate cases involving mosques or temples shouldn’t they be investigating ones which involve churches too? I am not seriously suggesting that every zoning case involving a religious institution should be investigated by the federal government but it does seem blatantly discriminatory to bully local governments about cases which involve an Islamic mosque while ignoring similar cases which involve Christian churches. If all religions are protected equally then every religious organization should get the same level of protection afforded to mosques, right?

Otherwise people might get the idea that some religions are more equal than others and that wouldn’t be right because the arbitrary application of justice is no justice at all.

Atlanta Regional Commission disproportionately represents seniors

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Today’s Atlanta Journal has an article that reminds me of something most people don’t realize: the Atlanta Regional Commission disproportionately represents seniors in the metro Atlanta community.

The article is Metro Atlanta getting older quickly and it is about the aging of the suburban population in Atlanta. It is a good article and I recommend you read the whole thing. As you do, also keep in mind that control of local issues like zoning and transportation are being systematically regionalized to an organization primarily responsible for providing services to the elderly, the Atlanta Regional Commission. Below is a graph of the ARC’s revenue sources and you can see that about one third of their money, more than 20 million dollars, comes from federal grants to serve Atlanta’s aging population.

ARC Revenue

The reason I point this out is that the AJC article makes it seem as though Atlanta is overwhelmed by an elderly population that it estimates to be 472,000 when in fact that is less than 10% of the metro area’s total population. Our aging population is certainly an important part of Atlanta’s community and future but it is still a relatively small percentage of our overall population.

And yet ARC, the organization which is increasingly responsible for the economic future of our entire state, is primarily an organization responsible for services catering to less than 1/10th of our population. Regardless of how you feel about government involvement in these kind of social programs it seems obvious that such a distortion is not in the best interest of our region.

More bad news for Reynolds Plantation

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The Reynolds Plantation developments in Georgia are beautiful reminders of the real estate boom and bust cycle we have experienced in our state. A Ritz Carlton, exclusive golf courses and million dollar lake lots all cover what was just farms and cow pastures a couple of decades ago. But now the developers are fighting bankruptcy, the homeowners are frustrated and the future of one of the state’s most exclusive areas is now in question.

So what better time for the federal government to step in and make things worse? The federal government is currently reviewing the maximum amount they will allow for standard mortgages issued in the U.S. and they are making changes on an arbitrary, county by county basis. As I was checking to make sure none of the changes would affect Fulton County, I noticed that the only county in Georgia negatively impacted is Greene County which includes Reynolds Plantation. In Greene County the federal guidelines will reduce standard mortgage limits from $662,500 to $515,200. That is a reduction of more than $140,000 and the difference will put even more downward pressure on property values in the area. Thanks feds!

The good news though, is that if you happen to have a few hundred thousand laying around you should be able to get a steal on a beautiful place.

North Fulton Redistricting update

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Well it looks like the North Fulton High School Redistricting is a fait accompli. While not yet official there doesn’t seem to be much doubt that the final redistricting map will be the one presented to the school board today. You can click on the picture below to enlarge the map and you can find more information here.

Teenage consultants advise Alpharetta on vacant property

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The other day Channel 2 in Atlanta had a news report about a vacant car dealership in Alpharetta and mentioned that the city was asking the Atlanta Regional Commission for help in finding a use for the property. You can read the report by clicking the picture below:

Then today I saw this article about kids that had found a use for vacant car dealerships in Alpharetta:

According to Alpharetta police, the five, whose names have not been released, broke into a vacant building in the 1400 block of Alpharetta Highway that was formerly an automobile dealership and set up a skate park.

So a few of Alpharetta’s enterprising youths have already solved the city’s dilemma: The city needs an indoor skateboard facility on the site! The market has spoken.