Saturday, June 28, 2014

Kiss Drops a Bombshell


Coldstream Councillor Gyula Kiss has something important to say re the Master Water Plan.

Everyone on the North Okanagan's Greater Vernon Water system has been overcharged $6.5 million per year. 

His quote should raise the hackles of everyone in the North Okanagan on the Greater Vernon Water system.



How come we collected $68 million for Master Water Plan infrastructure when the approved borrowing was for $35 million and the cost of the borrowed money to date is only about $15 million?
 That is an average overcharge of over $6.5 million per year.

 $6.5 million could have financed an additional $90 million borrowing.
That was direct cash out of the customers' pockets.

No future customer will contribute to that $53 million collected from us beyond the approved borrowing.



At blog publish date, the Agenda wasn't posted yet to RDNO's website...but the July 3rd Agenda may be clickable now here...so check the date.

If (when) access to the July 3rd Agenda is linked, view pages 7 through 13 dealing with the Fall borrowing referendum and the "communication strategy" that will be implemented immediately to convince people to vote Yes.

And even THIS link for the Master Water Plan is being revised soon.

"So, who will hold GVW to task for gouging us?
And who at GVW will reply?" asks Kia.
 
Since price gouging presumably isn't illegal, perhaps we should ask whether lying to the electorate is.


The illegal department...

Friday, June 27, 2014

Right on, Maria!


If bureaucrats wag the tails of political dogs, what's amiss or missing when a politician or two cry foul?
When a politician or two go against the wishes of other politicians who approved the earlier plan?

You'd think bureaucrats would go out of their way to convince any dissenters that the status quo was indeed correct to have approved the earlier plan.

"...this plan is flawed and should be challenged" 
     Maria Besso, Coldstream councillor
 

What--or who--gives bureaucrats the audacity to refuse (imagine that!) the request of one or two elected officials who demand more information of the area's Master Water Plan?  When bureaucrats refuse to revisit a plan with a peer review...indeed even to attend a meeting for a Question and Answer session at an adjacent community's council meeting? 

Consultants, that's what.
And, likely, fear.
Fear that bureaucrats themselves, and other politicians on the Greater Vernon Advisory Committee--were incorrect in approving original consultants' plans in the first place.







Bureaucrats can't lose their jobs at the polls.
Bureaucrats will continue hiring consultants...perhaps even--as is suspected in this case--consultants that agree with their original position.

So, for any politician to--at the eleventh hour--question an approved multi-million dollar plan might be a sign of political suicide.
Or that the cream of the political crop has indeed risen to the top, given further study of the data that formulated the Master Water Plan.

Admittedly the above is a hell of a long intro...to the following Letter to the Editor by Coldstream Councillor Maria Besso (in support of Coldstream Councillor's Gyula Kiss' position).

First, Maria's questions to the technical experts at the Regional District of North Okanagan:

1.  Given that the water from Duteau Creek is much more expensive to treat than the Kal Lake water (about four times as expensive in the winter), and given that most of the water from the Duteau source is needed and used for agricultural irrigation, why does phase 1 of the new 2012 master water plan call for the planning and building of a huge capacity filtration plant at Duteau prior to doing filtration at Kalamalka Lake, when Kal Lake supplies 80 per cent of the domestic water supply for Greater Vernon?

2.  Could you please explain, and quantify the magnitude of the direct effect on residential, industrial, institutional, commercial and agricultural water rates if the relative distribution of expenses between the types of customers remains the same as it is now, and we incur the costs projected in the master water plan that has been approved by the (other) politicians?  

3.  Could you please clearly review, for the public, the timeline and expenditures that have been proposed in phase one of the 2012 MWP, for which they are being asked to endorse the borrowing referendum of $70 million dollars?


Now, Maria Besso's preamble to her three questions:

"I am writing in response to your article 'no peer review for water plan' in The Morning Star.  In my opinion, this is a very bad decision taken by the Greater Vernon Advisory Committee.

I understand that the politicians feel powerless to challenge a plan that has been put forward by technical experts.  But in my opinion, this plan is flawed and should be challenged.

Most people just want to know if there is going to be fresh, clean, safe drinking water when they turn on the tap, and how much will they pay for it.

As one reporter put it to me, "Just cut to the chase, how much is the new water rate?"

Well, after having watched the process for five years, and water rates climb every year, while domestic consumption goes down, and the water utility is left with a shortfall in revenue, I have started to think that this is the definition of insanity.  We do the same thing over and over and expect a different result.

To have some influence on the cost of water, we have to start paying attention to what is in the plan.

If we proceed with the master water plan option that has been approved by GVAC, then we will need to borrow $70 million to pay for the projects in phase one of the plan.

In phase one, we will immediately start with plans to build a huge capacity (110 megalitres per day) filtration plant at Duteau Creek.  It will cost $26.5 million to build this filtration plant.

The Duteau plant treats water from the Aberdeen Plateau lakes.  These lakes draw from an abundant supply of water from a neighbouring watershed.

The quality of this water is yellow and full of organics.  Many will remember the yellow VID water we had prior to October 2010 when the Duteau plant first opened. 

We have come a long way since then, but it comes at a cost.

"In summer...64 Olympic-size pools per day.
In winter...we treat 2.4 Olympic-size pools per day.
The difference ... the irrigation water that we treat!"


Because most of the water that comes from Duteau was used for irrigation, and irrigation uses a lot of water at summer peak, we had to build a huge treatment plant to handle the peak demand, and treat all the water (irrigation and domestic water in the same pipes).

To illustrate the insanity, in the summer of 2011, we treated 160 megalitres of water per day at the Duteau plant (the equivalent of 64 Olympic-size pools per day).  By contrast, in the winter of 2011 when there was no irrigation, we treated six megalitres per day (the equivalent of 2.4 Olympic-size pools).  That means that 96 per cent of water went for irrigation.

"...then filter Kal first." 

Even with some expensive pipe separation, this plan will have us using the majority of the water we filter for irrigation of fields.  This is wrong.

Also by building the filtration plant at Duteau as a first step, we are again building a huge, expensive, over-capacity plant, while Kal Lake water remains the cheaper to clean, more desirable source of domestic drinking water. 

Kal Lake water is cheaper to filger because it's cleaner to begin with, so if that continues to be the IHA (Interior Health) requirement, and we cannot get around it, then filter Kal first.

Some Coldstream politicans have asked for a third-party peer review.

Since this review is not forthcoming, and a borrowing referendum has been approved by GVAC, I feel that the public will want, and need, many questions answered to help make up their minds."
Maria Besso, Coldstream councillor

 
 Note:  The City of Kelowna has applied for Filtration Deferral here
 Note:  An interesting view, author Jim Cooperman, re Vernon's possible need for Shuswap water is here:
 Note:  A virtual tour of the Duteau water treatment plant is here.

  
"If this is phase 1, the concept of phase 2 scares the hell out of me," intones Kia.


Whatever happens, a big thanks to Maria Besso and Gyula Kiss, councillors at District of Coldstream, for having the chutzpah to question not only their counterparts, but consultants and bureaucrats (both at RDNO and Interior Health).

Where the hell is Coldstream Mayor, Jim Garlick's push to have this insane plan corrected/revised/stopped????

After all, he's been on GVAC all along.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Landfill "Fallout" from "Mini Material" B.C.


Paul Twa had his opinion printed in the Morning Star's June 8th, 2014 issue:

         "Re:  letter to editor "Please trash new recycling plan" by Jean Collier:  Our household and most neighbours agree with Jean's comments regarding the difficulties in recycling with the new MMBC system.  Due to age and mobility issues our neighbourhood will be going from avid recyclers to little to no recycling, and I suspect the only items that will be left out for pick up will be the blue boxes themselves.  

Due to inability to store and move the new bins, in our household we will therefore be going from one or two large blue bags per pick-up to none, with all of the recyclable material now going to the landfill.  Great job reducing waste B.C. government." 
                                                Paul Twa

None of the plastic pictured is allowed to be placed in the blue boxes! 

"Paul, they'll hire another bureaucrat and audit your garbage," suggests Kia.


Mother Earth is weeping at the travesty.

Gasping from the recycling program shoved down our throats by the mafia, MMBC.



"It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.”
― Benjamin Franklin


Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Even the Math is Unsustainable


Whether it's the Vital Signs--or Money Sense--report, different numbers tell varying stories.
Often, it's reading between the numbers that provides a more accurate picture than the numbers themselves.

Today's Morning Star story "Fewer staff, large salaries highlight report" is no exception.

The City of Vernon states there were 16 fewer jobs in 2013 than 2012, with total compensation dropping from $21.46 million in 2012 to $21.2 million.

At first glance, that seems to merit a congratulatory remark.

But hold on, Humphrey, do the math.

It works out to an average of $69,508.20 per employee last year, up from the previous $66,853.58.  So with 16 fewer employees, each retained employee averaged $2,654.62 more than the previous year.

And those 16 fewer employees?
Apparently some jobs were transferred to the regional district.

Huh?
Need we remind folks that we area residents pay for the regional district employees too?

Two pages further into the newspaper, Rolke's editorial says the City of Vernon's community profile verifies the median income for men is $35,575 and for women $23,000 (below the provincial average).

So...the $66,853.58 averaged City of Vernon wage is $31,278.58 more than the median wage of  residents ... the residents who are paying the City employees' wages.  And those of the Regional District.



"If teachers weren't on strike, these folks could enrol in remedial math class," offers Kia.

Because numbers don't lie.

Do a spelling bee on  S-U-S-T-A-I-N-A-B-L-E too.
 
 

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Another Compelling Internet Document



...and it deals with instructions to "boycott everything and anything that originates with the Jewish people."

Those instructions were reportedly--according to the internet--issued by Iran's Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to the entire Muslim World.


In response, Meyer M. Treinkman, a pharmacist, out of the kindness of his heart, offered to assist them in their boycott as follows:

     "Any Muslim who has Syphilis must not be cured by Salvarsan
     discovered by a Jew, Dr. Ehrlich. He should not even try to
     find out whether he has Syphilis, because the Wasserman Test
     is the discovery of a Jew. If a Muslim suspects that he has
     Gonorrhea, he must not seek diagnosis, because he will be
     using the method of a Jew named Neissner.

     "A Muslim who has heart disease must not use Digitalis, a
     discovery by a Jew, Ludwig Traube.

     Should he suffer with a toothache, he must not use Novocaine
     , a discovery of the Jews, Widal and Weil.

     If a Muslim has Diabetes, he must not use Insulin, the
     result of research by Minkowsky, a Jew. If one has a
     headache, he must shun Pyramidon and Antypyrin, due to the
     Jews, Spiro and Ellege.

     Muslims with convulsions must put up with them because it
     was a Jew, Oscar Leibreich, who proposed the use of Chloral
     Hydrate.

     Arabs must do likewise with their psychic ailments because
     Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was a Jew.

     Should a Muslim child get Diphtheria, he must refrain from
     the "Schick" reaction which was invented by the Jew,
     Bella Schick.

     "Muslims should be ready to die in great numbers and must
     not permit treatment of ear and brain damage, work of Jewish
     Nobel Prize winner, Robert Baram.

     They should continue to die or remain crippled by Infantile
     Paralysis because the discoverer of the anti-polio vaccine
     is a Jew, Jonas Salk.

     "Muslims must refuse to use Streptomycin and continue to die
     of Tuberculosis because a Jew, Zalman Waxman, invented the
     wonder drug against this killing disease.

     Muslim doctors must discard all discoveries and improvements
     by dermatologist Judas Sehn Benedict, or the lung specialist
     , Frawnkel, and of many other world renowned Jewish
     scientists and medical experts.

     "In short, good and loyal Muslims properly and fittingly
     should remain afflicted with Syphilis, Gonorrhea, Heart
     Disease, Headaches, Typhus, Diabetes, Mental Disorders,
     Polio Convulsions and Tuberculosis and be proud to obey the
     Islamic boycott."

     Oh, and by the way, don't call for a doctor on your cell
     phone because the cell phone was invented in Israel by a
     Jewish engineer.

     Meanwhile I ask, what medical contributions to the world
     have the Muslims made?"

     The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000
     ; that is ONE BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or 20% of the
     world's population.

     They have received the following Nobel Prizes:



Literature:

     1988 - Najib Mahfooz

     Peace:

     1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
     1990 - Elias James Corey
     1994 - Yaser Arafat:
     1999 - Ahmed Zewai

     Economics:

     (zero)

     Physics:
 

      (zero)

     Medicine:

     1960 - Peter Brian Medawar
     1998 - Ferid Mourad

     TOTAL: 7 SEVEN

     The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000;
     that is FOURTEEN MILLION or about 0.02% of the world's
     population.

     They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

     Literature:

     1910 - Paul Heyse
     1927 - Henri Bergson
     1958 - Boris Pasternak
     1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
     1966 - Nelly Sachs
     1976 - Saul Bellow
     1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
     1981 - Elias Canetti
     1987 - Joseph Brodsky
     1991 - Nadine Gordimer World

     Peace:


     1911 - Alfred Fried
     1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
     1968 - Rene Cassin
     1973 - Henry Kissinger
     1978 - Menachem Begin
     1986 - Elie Wiesel
     1994 - Shimon Peres
     1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

     Physics:


     1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
     1906 - Henri Moissan
     1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
     1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
     1910 - Otto Wallach
     1915 - Richard Willstaetter
     1918 - Fritz Haber
     1921 - Albert Einstein
     1922 - Niels Bohr
     1925 - James Franck
     1925 - Gustav Hertz
     1943 - Gustav Stern
     1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
     1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
     1952 - Felix Bloch
     1954 - Max Born
     1958 - Igor Tamm
     1959 - Emilio Segre
     1960 - Donald A. Glaser
     1961 - Robert Hofstadter
     1961 - Melvin Calvin
     1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
     1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
     1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
     1965 - Julian Schwinger
     1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
     1971 - Dennis Gabor
     1972 - William Howard Stein
     1973 - Brian David Josephson
     1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
     1976 - Burton Richter
     1977 - Ilya Prigogine
     1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
     1978 - Peter L Kapitza
     1979 - Stephen Weinberg
     1979 - Sheldon Glashow
     1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
     1980 - Paul Berg
     1980 - Walter Gilbert
     1981 - Roald Hoffmann
     1982 - Aaron Klug
     1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
     1985 - Jerome Karle
     1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
     1988 - Robert Huber
     1988 - Leon Lederman
     1988 - Melvin Schwartz
     1988 - Jack Steinberger
     1989 - Sidney Altman
     1990 - Jerome Friedman
     1992 - Rudolph Marcus
     1995 - Martin Perl
     2000 - Alan J. Heeger

     Economics:

     1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
     1971 - Simon Kuznets
     1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
     1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
     1976 - Milton Friedman
     1978 - Herbert A. Simon
     1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
     1985 - Franco Modigliani
     1987 - Robert M. Solow
     1990 - Harry Markowitz
     1990 - Merton Miller
     1992 - Gary Becker
     1993 - Robert Fogel

     Medicine:


     1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
     1908 - Paul Erlich
     1914 - Robert Barany
     1922 - Otto Meyerhof
     1930 - Karl Landsteiner
     1931 - Otto Warburg
     1936 - Otto Loewi
     1944 - Joseph Erlanger
     1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
     1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
     1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
     1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
     1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
     1953 - Hans Krebs
     1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
     1958 - Joshua Lederberg
     1959 - Arthur Kornberg
     1964 - Konrad Bloch
     1965 - Francois Jacob
     1965 - Andre Lwoff
     1967 - George Wald
     1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
     1969 - Salvador Luria
     1970 - Julius Axelrod
     1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
     1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
     1975 - Howard Martin Temin
     1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
     1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow
     1978 - Daniel Nathans
     1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
     1984 - Cesar Milstein
     1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
     1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
     1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
     1988 - Gertrude Elion
     1989 - Harold Varmus
     1991 - Erwin Neher
     1991 - Bert Sakmann
     1993 - Richard J. Roberts
     1993 - Phillip Sharp
     1994 - Alfred Gilman
     1995 - Edward B. Lewis
     1996- Lu RoseIacovino

     TOTAL: 129!

     The Jews are NOT promoting brainwashing children in military
     training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and
     cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims.

     The Jews don't hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the
     Olympics, or blow themselves up in German restaurants.

     There is NOT one single Jew who has destroyed a church.

     There is NOT a single Jew who protests by killing people.
     The Jews don't traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for
     Jihad and death to all the Infidels.

     Perhaps the world's Muslims should consider investing more
     in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all
     their problems.

     Muslims must ask 'what can they do for humankind' before
     they demand that humankind respects them.

     Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel
     and the Palestinians and Arab neighbors, even if you believe
     there is more culpability on Israel 's part, the following
     two sentences really say it all:

     'If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be
     no more violence.

     If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no
     more Israel."


     Benjamin Netanyahu: General Eisenhower warned us. It is a
     matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the
     Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims
     of the death camps he ordered all possible photographs to be
     taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages
     to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the
     dead.

     He did this because he said in words to this effect: 'Get it
     all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses -
     because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will
     get up and say that this never happened'

     Recently, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust
     from its school curriculum because it 'offends' the Muslim
     population which claims it never occurred.

     It is not removed as yet. However, this is a frightening
     portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how
     easily each country is giving into it.

     It is now more than 65 years after the Second World War in
     Europe ended.

     Now, more than ever, with Iran, among others, claiming the
     Holocaust to be 'a myth,' it is imperative to make sure the
     world never forgets.


"Man, oh man," sighs Kia.