Superfast Internet Connections for Newton?

Google has just announced that it is looking for cities and towns to pilot its new ultra high-speed internet connection service. According to their announcement, they will build high-speed fiber networks that will connect people and business to the Internet at speeds 100-times that of traditional broadband connections. They are interested cities and towns to contact them.

In researching my NewtonNet wireless Internet access proposal, I had a question placed on the city census a few years ago regarding computer use in Newton and I believe we could use those data to make a great case to Google that Newton would make a perfect place to test their new service.

I'm hoping our city officials will act quickly to jump on this opportunity.

Here's a link to a New York Times article about Google's new initiative.

Budget Cuts Devastate City Services

Kelly in Colorado Springs with Pike's Peak (7/5/07)Is there a point at which budget cuts can force the elimination of basic municipal services? Well, it may not have happened yet in Newton, but residents of Colorado Springs (including my grandparents) are experiencing it now. The Denver Post reports:

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need. (The Denver Post, 1/31/10)

Are we headed in this direction in Newton? My sense is that unless we can get the rate of employee health insurance cost growth under control, we will be faced with either significant property tax increases or cuts in services similar to what Colorado Springs is experiencing. Sound far-fetched? Already, many of our parks and playgrounds are as poorly maintained as those described in the article and our buildings and streets are in far worse shape than what I saw in Colorado Springs on a visit last year.

Of course, problems with maintenance in Newton are not just budgetary in nature. There are basic management issues that need to be addressed. But it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to take significant action now in order to achieve long-term fiscal health or we may be forced to deal with cuts in services similar to those now being implemented in Colorado Springs.

Happy Groundhog Day!

You can't help but smile on the silliest holiday on the calendar. Six more weeks of winter? In Boston, winter ends on the first day of Spring Training every year. In Newton, another indicator is when we stop arguing about sidewalk snow shoveling and start arguing about dog parks.

What Spring-indicators to you rely on? How do you know that winter is over?

Do you vote? Comments of a revolutionary rebel...

I have been reading lots of tributes to Howard Zinn online. We lost him this week at age 87. In an interview he gave a few years back he was asked if he voted. If you knew Howard, there was not a simple yes or no answer to anything! I know we always ask why people don't vote, which was a hard fought right for so many in this country. Here is his radical response...

ZV: One personal question. Do you go to the polls? Do you vote?

HZ: I do. Sometimes, not always. It depends. But I believe that it is preferable sometimes to have one candidate rather another candidate, while you understand that that is not the solution. Sometimes the lesser evil is not so lesser, so you want to ignore that, and you either do not vote or vote for third party as a protest against the party system. Sometimes the difference between two candidates is an important one in the immediate sense, and then I believe trying to get somebody into office, who is a little better, who is less dangerous, is understandable. But never forgetting that no matter who gets into office, the crucial question is not who is in office, but what kind of social movement do you have. Because we have seen historically that if you have a powerful social movement, it doesn’t matter who is in office. Whoever is in office, they could be Republican or Democrat, if you have a powerful social movement, the person in office will have to yield, will have to in some ways respect the power of social movements.

We saw this in the 1960s. Richard Nixon was not the lesser evil, he was the greater evil, but in his administration the war was finally brought to an end, because he had to deal with the power of the anti-war movement as well as the power of the Vietnamese movement. I will vote, but always with a caution that voting is not crucial, and organizing is the important thing.

When some people ask me about voting, they would say will you support this candidate or that candidate? I say: “I will support this candidate for one minute that I am in the voting booth. At that moment I will support A versus B, but before I am going to the voting booth, and after I leave the voting booth, I am going to concentrate on organizing people and not organizing electoral campaign.”

http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/an-interview-with-howard-zinn-on-anarchism-rebels-against-tyranny/