Opinion
Page 4 University Daily Kansan, July 19, 1982
Carlin drops budget ball
Enough is enough.
Granted, Gov. John Carlin has a difficult job; balancing a state budget and riding herd over the state Legislature definitely takes more than 40 hours a week, but that is no excuse for Carolin's recent slash-happy manner of running the state's front office.
Declaring that he suspected upcoming budget problems in April, our glorious governor this month used the excuse that the Legislature's failure to heed his warnings led to the necessity of a 4 percent statewide budget cut for state agencies. This cut came after the budget for fiscal year 1983 had been approved and implemented.
What Carlin forgot to declare when he cut the budget was that he had padded the 1983 budget with revenues that the state actually didn't have, namely the then-proposed
severance tax, which never gained approval. This political blunder resulted in the 4 percent cut and also supposedly required the governor to withhold the state employees' merit pay. The Merit Pay Plan, instituted two years ago, was designed to reward employees who performed well on the job.
Now, not only do state employees have less than they thought they would, but they also have no incentive to work at anything above a "standard" level. Consequently, because they have less money they will spend less; because they have no incentive to work harder they will produce less on the job. Thus, the state will receive less revenues; the state's offices will be less cost effective. Not even the most talented circus seal could balance such a budget plan.
Letters to the Editor
National nuclear nightmare
Dear Editor:
I was pleased to read the examinations revealing flaws of the nuclear energy industry. I found that many were too careless.
Two overlooked facts about nuclear power should also be considered. A nuclear fission power reactor, loaded with fissile uranium or plutonium isotopes, can be denoted as a devastating atomic explosion by concussion and radiation from a nearby atomic warhead explosion. Should a nuclear fission operation and operation of nuclear fission power reactors in urban or rural areas where they could be targets of enemy delivered atomic warheads?
Nuclear fission power reactors permanently destroy uranium metal, which is not abundant, by nuclear fission. This uranium reacts with fluorine to form fledged inessive intoxic isotopes, can be used with strontium metal in vacuum-insulated, radiation-heated thermovoltaic generators, in which the metals are not destroyed and which would generate DC electricity for billions of years.
Radiation-heated thermoelectric generators have been used in ocean buoys, arctic stations and spacecraft. Someday, radiation generators may permanently replace the chemical batteries used in portable electrical devices. The only disadvantage is heavier weight.
These facts have been overlooked by negligent promoters of hazardous, wasteful nuclear fission power reactors. Somehow we must achieve, by law, a prohibition of assembly or operation of nuclear power reactors; to further secure national and international defenses, to prevent further accumulations of radioactive wastes, to prevent further permanent waste of uranium) and thorium metals and to allow proper progress in development and application of radiation thermovoltaic generators.
Atomic fission reactors must be restricted to a very small size, perhaps less than one-tenth of a ton of TNT explosion potential. These very small atomic fission reactors would be used for radiation related research and nuclear generation.
Electrical requirements now provided by nuclear fission power reactors can be safely and economically provided with the necessary equipment, as well as large radiation thermovoltaic
generators instead. A properly shielded large radiation thermovoltaic generator would be extremely difficult to detonate even during the hit detonation of an atomic warhead.
The direct hit detonation of an atomic warhead on a nuclear fission power reactor would probably detonate the fissile "fuel" of the reactor.
Lawrence Smith
Lawrence, Kansas
Straight facts needed
Charlie Barnes had better get his figures straight if he wants people to believe what he's saying and not discount him as just someone who exaggerates to make his point.
Dear Editor
On Page 1 of Thursday's Kansan, he was reported as saying Wednesday that "the cost of construction has increased from $500 million ... to $19.3 billion." However, on page 4 in line 6, he claimed, "A price tag of $500 million has skyrocketed to more than $2 billion."
Granted, both figures are exhortable, but a discrepancy of more than 70 million dollars and what seems to be a willingness to exaggerate one's facts and figures are just the sort of things proponents of nuclear power will jump on and use to their advantage. It is an age-old tactic—make your opponent look untrustworthy and nobody will pay attention to what he says. It's a great lesson in his column, how true are the rest of his facts? It's going to be hard enough for the Kansas Natural Guard to have any impact—it doesn't need to give fuel to its opponents.
Kendall Simmons Watson Library
Semantic malpractice
It is really dismaying to find that people whose business deals with using words don't know even the passport number of their coach, how could there be only a single pest, when coaches equals pests?
Dear Editor:
Jeanne Ellermeier Lawrence, Kansas
Such a glaring headline error detracts markedly from the obvious quality of Mr. Rizk's work.
CHINA DAILY
Lawrence a victim of poor land use
By TIM MILLER
Guest columnist
Indeed, examples of bad planning abound all over Lawrence. Some go back decades; for example, Pinckney Elementary School, 810 W. Sixth St. and Lawrence Memorial Hospital, 325 Maine should trade placements hospitals should work on the highways for children's safety, be away from highways. A nationally distributed film, "Planning for People," made by Lawrence's Centron Corporation Inc., 1821 W. Ninth St., shows a child walking to Pinkney School and getting hit by a speeding car, illustrating bad placement of the school.
IN PRACTICE, alas, Plan 59 is used not as a planning tool but as a political football. In most cases, developers here are allowed to pursue their projects whether or not the projects conform to the plan, while the older neighborhoods trying to protect themselves find the plan either more difficult or easier to develop wants to do to the neighborhood. Thus we have little planning worthy of the name.
LAND USE PLANNING will make a better Lawrence. Few who are concerned with quality of life here openly dispute that, Superficially, the people on both sides of the local land-use fence could subscribe to similar statements: that we should plan for good land use; that growth should be guided for community benefit. If I were to stick to such plattitudes, I could probably write an article that the Chamber of Commerce would approve of.
But platitudes, don't lead to rational land use. Lawrence's go-go development forces like to talk about planning—but their record shows that by planning they mean greasing the skids for what any developer wants to do at any particular place. If you skip their rhetoric and look at what they do, you see developers, the city staff, the city-county planning commission and often the city commission teaming up to push through whatever the developers want, and the hell with neighbors who are affected by increased traffic, inadequate drainage, dense housing and blight.
THE GOALS of good planning are basically two: to minimize the effects of new development on the surrounding area, and to use the supply of land to the best benefit of the entire population, developing it in such a way that it meets community needs (for example, by providing schools and shopping in places convenient to homes). Proper land use planning demands that all design goals be met, and that we should make exceptions here and there, and that's exactly what Lawrence routinely does; but a lot of exceptions can add up to a land use disaster.
There are several tools for managing land use—zoning, subdivision regulations and capital improvements programs among them. But the most important tool is proper administration of the planning process. That is precisely Lawrence's weakest planning link. Proper adminis- tion of a plan requires that lands used be considered in light of basic goals; in Lawrence, our overall community land-use goals are outlined in a master plan called Plan 95 (referring to the year 1995).
BUT MANY EXAMPLES of bad planning are more recent, having come at times when we should have known better. Right now one developer has started a practice of building two houses on single lots in the neighborhood and then bright in the neighborhood—and the city just lets it happen. The area known as the Blufs at Sixth and Iowa streets was recently rezoned for development, to the detriment of its neighborhood, in violation of Plan 96, and the planning process continues to be violated where the community wants to create small plans for small parts of the Blufs rather than planning the whole area at once.
Housing has recently been built in North Lawrence which has violated our development laws. The houses are placed on illegal small lots, and the combination of substandard streets and many small lots is already leading to traffic congestion, parking problems and other difficulties. And then there's 23rd Street, a planning nightmare.
UNFORTUNATELY, when the planning process conflicts with a developer's plans in Lawrence, the latter usually prevails. A good example of that is the shopping center at 23rd and Iowa streets. The city planning staff found that the center should not be built there, because the extra retail space wasn't needed in that area. Also safe access would be difficult, since 23rd and Iowa streets are located in the city. The developers, as usual, prevailed. The result is a poorly patronized shopping center in which several businesses, including a Safety store, have gone under.
We do have some examples of good planning however. The Lawrence auto plaza, where several like businesses are near each other and where access to the busy highway is limited, is one. But for every good one there are a dozen others that stink.
If as it weren't enough to have no meaningful restraints on land developers, the city of Lawrence (meaning taxpayers) actually gives them several direct subsidies. Some of them are flagrant, others are slightly more subtle. But they are all taking money out of the pockets of those who are and putting it into the pocketes of those who are already making aid丰 profit on their activities.
ONE FLAGRANT EXAMPLE of a wasted subsidy recently at Sixth and Maine involved a former mayor of Lawrence who owned land at Sixth and Maine streets. Most of it could not be developed because it was a creekbed, which needed to be a place for drainage. The former mayor somehow got the city to pay most of the tax revenue that he made the construction of the multi-million-dollar Medical Plaza building possible. He made a bundle, one presumes, and we are paying for it.
Another enormous subsidy for development in Lawrence is our city's practice of providing high-tech jobs to workers.
hoods. Those who buy the new houses are supposed to pay the city back- but often the land just sits there with those improvements, and if the developers don't want to pay the bill, they may offset the payments. In fact, they make money by doing that, because the penalties are very low.
In the Four Seasons development a few years ago, the city installed several million dollars' worth of improvements, and the majority of the land turned out to be unsuited for building because it was on a flood plain. The city was stuck in a state of crisis, and the developers just walked away from it.
LAST YEAR the city was gouged for $230,000 in these unpaid "specials," as they are called; so far this year the total is $440,000 and rising. We will eventually recapture part of that but why are we holding the bag at all? Why do the poorest people have to subsidize the richest?
We subsidize new industries—and some commercial facilities—by giving them tax-subsidized construction loans (called industrial revenue bonds) and ten-year exemptions from all property taxes (meaning that the rest of us have to pay their share). We subsidize development through our local policy of having the city purchase park land for new neighborhoods, when they are in need. We provide it free as part of their privilege of doing business. We subsidize development by providing extensive help to developers from the planning staff, help that isn't adequately paid for by the fees we charge during the review process. We provide a subsidy when we don't require developers to help alleviate the problems they face. We provide subsidies to wide and widen streets and supply street and traffic lights, among other things, to provide for the increased traffic which the projects generate;
HERE IN LAWRENCE every water user is subsidizing new development by paying for a new water treatment plant—even though it is necessary solely because of new developments.
Quite a few people in Lawrence oppose net growth altogether or believe that it should be strictly limited. They argue that growth lines the pockets of a few while the majority are hurt by it—having to endure more congestion, traffic, crime, pollution, drainage problems and the like. But as long as growth is Lawrence's official policy, we ought to get better at it.
LAND USE POLICY involves a lot of tough questions and requires a lot of work. But it's time that we abolished unfettered development and started real planning in Lawrence. Developers like to talk about their right to do whatever they like with their property, but they ignore the fact that the rest of us have rights too. One no has a divinely given right to build something that will be used for many years. Property rights work two ways—and it is high time that some one other than the pave-it-over, pocket-the-profit crowd got some consideration in Lawrence.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Tim Miller lectures in Religious Studies at KU and is a member of Gracie Woods University.
Letters Policy
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters.
The University Daily KANSAN
Kansan Telephone Numbers
Newroom- 864-4140
Business Office- 864-4158
(USPS 650-640) Published at the University of Kansas daily August through May and Thursday
during June and July except Saturday, Sunday and holidays. Second-class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas
June and July include a mile fee in six months or $7 away to Lawrence, Kansas a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are $2 a semester, paid through the student fee fee
Postmaster. Send changes of address to the University Daily Kansas, Fint Hall, The University of Kansas,
Lawrence, 869038
Editor
Coral Peach
Managing Editor
Campaign Editor
Assistant Campus Editor
Editorial Assistant
Editorial Editor
Wire Layout Editor
Wire Layout Editor
Copy Chef
Editorial Columnists
Editorial Sales Manager
National Campus and Classified
Back to School Coordinator
Retail Sales Representatives
Business Manager
Sharon Boldin
Martha Brush
Jane Murphy
Catherine Heban
Cynthia Nechreh
Jen Barry
Kristen Penner
Susan Page, Jill M. Traxas
Wendar Warner
Patrici Quino, Alvin A. Redd, John Scartell
Martha Koele
Larry Allison
Haven
Angela Bryce, Jill Bole, Kathy Murray
Demine Popovits, Melissa Payne, Ed Keating
John Merger
Paul Jessica
General Marketing and News Advisor