OT: And the Governments Wants to Run Our Health Care!

The Larned, Kansas National Guard Armory was among those announced for closure this week. A few months ago they completed a thorough renovation. The half-million dollar project included plumbing, electrical, insulation, windows and other improvements. If it's like similar buildings they might get $25 - $50K from the building if they can sell it at all.

I wonder how many other closed facilities fall into this category.

RonB

Reply to
RonB
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Shhhhhhhhhh. You're going to interfere with the vote buying process currently underway.

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Reply to
Tim Daneliuk

Reply to
RonB

Hmm - nice looking building...

Reply to
Morris Dovey

Other than it was KS budgetary constraints/cutbacks that was root cause of the closure that wouldn't have been done nor was intended other than for the need to make even further cuts in State expenditures to close the shortfall from the reduced collections (primarily sales tax) that is mandated by State Constitution (one place where they do at least pay token attention to the fact there is such a thing/document still being a positive)...

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Reply to
dpb

Happens all the time. The most common example is a street resurfacing followed three month's later by a storm drain refurbishment.

Reply to
HeyBub

I thought the Washington DOT was the only ones that stupid though, around here, it usually only takes a week or two for them to come out and tear up a new road. You'd think that they would figure out that there is something wrong with their sequence of opperation.

Reply to
CW

Must be a PNW issue. Same here in Oregon. Typically the concrete cutting crew follows the resurfacing crew by no more than a week. Then they mess with it until it needs resurfaced again.

Reply to
LDosser

Followed by periodic street flooding during gentle showers because the new resurfacing lowered the streets 3' below original grade to act as secondary flood control channels per the Master Flood Control Plan designed by the bottom 10% of the affirmative action graduate engineer curriculum and administered in two languages by "educated beyond their intelligence" government employees ...

Reply to
Swingman

At least a few previously closed have been success stories; others haven't. The one in (I believe it's Coldwater or Medicine Lodge) was sold to a local manufacturing startup that is now largest employer in the County (it's a very low-population county :) ) and has expanded to fill it and another building or two. A couple other places have converted them to public use for rec facilities, etc., where there weren't any other such available (or likely to be)...a couple have been abandoned, however, as they were simply too old and out-of-date to be cost-effective to bring to current standards for other than intended use...nothing particularly unusual in that, of course, for 60-70+ yr-old buildings.

The occurrence to really p-o one is the announcement yesterday of some

20 of the largest school districts filing suit to force that cutbacks not include them but be made up for exclusively by other areas...d'ed leeches... :(

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Reply to
dpb

I hope that the state clobbers them in the courts and then exacts a special assessment from them to cover the costs of defending the suit.

Reply to
J. Clarke

Nope. I think it's universal. As an undergraduate, I commuted to college down Baseline Road in Boulder. For 4 of the 5 years I drove it (since I was also working, I took 5 years to get my degree), there was a section that was awful -- potholes, broken up, etc. My last year, they went through and resurfaced it with new blacktop. Smooth, quiet, it was wonderful. Not two weeks after they were done, somebody decided they needed to cut a trench across it for a utility. Of course, the repair is never even with the original surface.

Reply to
Mark & Juanita

J. Clarke wrote: ...

Unfortunately, that's not likely. :(

The State Supreme Court decreed a mandatory level of funding a few years ago which is what there isn't revenue to match. How the Courts got the jurisdiction to set budgets over the legislative branch isn't yet clear to me. :(

Reply to
dpb

That's something that needs a Constitutional Amendment--the courts should be able to require the government to make a lump sum payment in compensation for damages but not to make ongoing payments in perpetuity or provide equivalent services.

Reply to
J. Clarke

cf Marbury v. Madison

The highest court in the land declared itself to be the final arbiter of all things legal. It is still unclear to this day whether they had the right to do this.

Reply to
Tim Daneliuk

Tim Daneliuk wrote: ...

That's the US Supreme and they didn't adjudicate this dispute... :)

KS Constitution requires the legislature provide "adequate" funding; it doesn't specify what adequate is. My contention and the KS Supreme Court didn't convince me otherwise that there are sufficient funds to educate kids with appropriated; it's the school districts w/ essentially unlimited ideas of things to try and buildings to build and administrators to ensure they keep growing the bureaucracy of which they're the prime recipients that are responsible imo for meeting their budgetary constraints...

From a practical standpoint since over 2/3-rds of the state outlay goes to K-12, there's absolutely no way any significant reduction in State spending _can't_ impact them as well as everybody else.

The (primarily larger, used to more) school districts just have the opinion they're entitled to whatever they ask for and it's somebody else's job to simply ante up for them...

I need stop else't I'm agonna' 'splode thinkin' about it... :)

Reply to
dpb

Yeah, but the states followed suit...

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. P. J. O'Rourke

Reply to
Tim Daneliuk

Here the city sends out notice a year in advance notifying all Utilities and others that if a street needs work they have a year to complete it. After that its don't ask to pull a permit for 4 years on any work on that street. Seems to work but I'm not sure about the 4 years.

Reply to
Evodawg

To close this out as I see it...

First, the thought of "throwing the book" at the litigants and assessing them additional for their chutzpah in hard times is a great gut-reaction response. Unfortunately, what that does is simply waste even more State funding since the primary source of revenue these folks have w/ which to fund their lawsuits are the same funds they're claiming to be short of (augmented by local tax assessments, but those are also, of course, public funds so any waste of them is also a tax burden in-the-making).

As for the latter, I don't see still the right of the judicial branch to usurp that of the legislative to the extent have done so, constitutional amendment or no. The case revolves about what the level of "adequate" is and the Court basically took a study funded by the litigants and mandated it as a minimum taking the ability of the legislature to meet its other similarly mandated duties in as even-handed manner as it could and as it sees fit--which is their duty.

The mandated solution if carried out verbatim would dump something close to 80-85% of all State revenue into K-12's pocket leaving virtually nothing for any other program from social services to roads.

It's the single-issue focus group problem run completely amok... :(

*And, btw, the reductions they're so upset about are otoo 10% of the per-pupil annual allocation. While that can be sizable in absolute $$ in large districts, it's hardly a complete shutdown of the system. Overall, one legislator figured out that if include all State contributions to K-12 besides this one allocation pool the overall reduction in support is about 2%.

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Reply to
dpb

I think Tucson has a 1 year moratorium. That's probably a bit too loose,

4 years does seem a bit long. A couple of years of rut-free driving would be nice though.
Reply to
Mark & Juanita

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