A primer on open government...

Blog Index:

1) Preface: On Preservation of the Natural World

2) Current Status of "Stabilization".

3) Introduction…

4) Temporary Restraining Order in Place...

5) How it all Started...

6) "Friends of Oatka Park" Protest...

7) Winter along the Creek…the park through the seasons of the year.

A primer on open government:

This blog is a running account of the events which started near the end of July 2009 this past summer in the Town of Wheatland to construct soccer playing fields. They were hatched nearly a year prior…behind closed doors, under the table, in a smoke-filled back room, and during darkness of night…as the old story goes!

(At the bottom of each blog page you can click on "older posts" to move on through the blog. Every time you do this, the header page will reappear and you will need to scroll past it to continue reading. The blog tells the entire story of the recent events at Oatka Creek Park and then shows the natural beauty of Oatka Creek Park though the seasons of the year. You can click on the small pictures to increase their size.)

This story serves as a typical example of what most sane people detest: Events which fuel constant property tax hikes, more taxes every time the next shoe drops, and more of "same old, same old".

Paying taxes is a part of citizenship when it provides the revenues to keep us safe, deliver public services we can't afford individually, and funds the necessary resources to operate our communities.

When these tax revenues tilt in the direction of "making work" for the sake of building political empires and creating a hidden infrastructure of back-slapping buddies who empty our pockets, then it has gone well beyond the scope of "the cost of citizenship".

For example, every time I hear the mower coming down the street across from my home, cutting down the wild flowers along the shoulder and making a mess out of something natural which otherwise looked pretty good to me, I am reminded that somebody is being paid to run that mower, somebody bought that mower, somebody pays for the fuel to run it, and more somebodys will maintain that mower into the distant future. This and many other "nice things" like olympic running tracks at our local high school, etc are hardly what we need in order to survive sustainably. If we really want all this stuff, we can most certainly expect more and more taxes from now on well into the future. Just maintaining all the "stuff" already materialized will be a guaranteed struggle.

Sadly, if we don't continue to maintain these things, some decent people will loose jobs who now do that work and they will need to find other more sustainable things to do. Thus the vicious cycle of "getting and maintaining unnecessary/unsustainable goodies" with our taxes (tails) and paying out fewer tax dollars (heads) are on opposite sides of the coin. This coin is a fair coin…heads we win, tails we loose.

The coin now being tossed seems to constantly give us heads we loose, tails we loose and something is decisively wrong with it which can only be fixed in the voting booth.

If you are personally elated with your local property taxes and "same old, same old thinking" then don't vote at all or vote for the same people on the blue poster boards around this Town.

Read this blog about the incredible story of how the blue poster folks have served us recently and keep it in mind when you go out to vote!

Unfortunately the latest decision as of 16 October 2009 regarding the soccer fields is "full speed ahead". We now may have one more "goodie" and local nuisance to maintain well into the future unless appeals are mounted and the one in a bazillion odds move in favor of the improbable.

Oatka Creek Park is not alone in attack by development pressure. Read more about "Parks Preservation in Monroe County, NY".

Contact "Friends of Oatka Park" here:
friends.of.oatka.park@gmail.com