Monday, October 31, 2011

Hell NO!!!

The following Google Earth graphic depicts a small isolated example to precise scale of minimum standards established by Roanoke County. All in the best interests of the citizenry for additional tax revenue and GREED energy!!!


What the f*&# are they thinking? Our property values are going to be higher? Tourism will increase?

Gimme a break. Show me JUST ONE elected official or candidate from Southwestern Virginia who will stand up against yet another colossal ripoff of our nation and I will campaign hard for his or her election.

Friday, October 28, 2011


One of the most exciting events of the century is now taking place in the Heart of Roanoke.
Ed & Katherine Walker have focused their resources on developing am exciting new role for the center of our appalachian community. This sold out conference with international attention marks what we hope is a new beginning for our beloved home as a model for replication of a renewed future vision for our local communities world-wide.

On this blog, I have been entirely too focused  upon the greed and other negative aspects driving a quest of a currently proposed industrial wind turbine installation of 15 -18 behemoth turbines on Poor Mountain. This indeed is a threat to the magnificent vistas of the Blue Ridge through out Virginia as well as a long term environmental degradation driven by our own unrelenting demand for more energy.

To effectively respond to such threats, we can take a cue from the Walkers and focus more upon positive solutions to defining our future as opposed to giving more credibility to unproven schemes to capitalize upon our weaknesses.

This brings me back to the idea of the PACE program that I have described an earlier post:
 http://bentmountain.blogspot.com/#!/2010/12/how-long-will-it-be-before-we-see-that.html 

This represents exactly the type of idea that can and will have a vastly more far-reaching impact in clearly definable terms and funding than the grid based proposal of "renewable" wind energy. How? We need to educate and promote to ourselves the real benefits of such highly feasible and economically viable ideas particularly in relation to beneficial expenditure of our hard-earned federal tax contributions. Unfortunately, our elected representatives do not exhibit due diligence regarding the indiscriminate spending of our tax revenues, they only respond to that which they perceive to be in the public interest.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

October 25, 2011 Address to the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors



On Bent Mountain we are pleased that you have given time to reconsider the minimum decibel readings permitted at a non-participating property line. We remain, however, disappointed and disillusioned by the process you engaged in to adopt the large and utility scale wind turbine amendment to the Roanoke County Zoning Ordinance.

The minimum setback requirements that you have put in place will not sufficiently protect neighboring property owners in any site based application of the ordinance in Roanoke County.

The decommissioning section of the amendment is very weak in its protection of Roanoke County’s interests. The amendment you have adopted allows for financial protection for the County in the form of letters of credit and corporate guarantees or promises.

The amendment itself clearly accommodates the taking of land from adjacent property owners with the inadequate distance of 1000 feet from an occupied dwelling.

We must continue to respectfully ask that you revisit the entire amendment and revise the manner in which you would revise it for this highly complex and technical land use. This is not a land use in the Blue Ridge of Virginia that should ever be judged solely on the basis of uninformed public opinion.

Regretfully, our government on all levels has become corrupted by financial greed and media manipulation. A recent example can be found in a recent article regarding a Roanoke County personnel issue that is being inappropriately used as a political manipulation to discredit a current supervisor.

(Edit – Added extemporaneously in response to board comments.)

With regard to the observation made that over two years has already been spent by staff, the Planning Commission and Supervisors studying and crafting the ordinance; and that, the requirement of a Special Use Permit allows the opportunity for design standards to be made either more of less restrictive, two obvious questions must follow:

If the Supervisors as shown this evening, remain still unsettled regarding the appropriate minimums, how can the citizens have confidence that Roanoke County can protect them under the pressure of a Special Use Permit process?

Why does the ordinance define any minimum design standards at all?

Again, please repeal and reconsider these recent amendments to our zoning ordinance.

Attached, I have presented, for your consideration, some excerpts from:

Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (Studies in Communication, Media, and Public Opinion) [Paperback]
Lawrence R. Jacobs (Author),
Robert Y. Shapiro (Author)



Thank You


“…Public opinion polls are everywhere. The media report them without stop and polltica1 activists of all kinds- from candidates in election contests to political parties and interest groups- pump millions into focus groups and polls, The flood of polls has fueled the nearly unquestioned assumption among observers of American politics that elected officials "pander" to public opinion.

Politicians tailor their significant policy decisions to polls and other indicators of public opinion. Elected officials are faced with the terrifying choice of pandering or perishing in the next ejection and- as a 1997 article in the Atlantic Monthly exclaimed- are "running scared" and are settling for "poll readership".

The New Yorker nostalgically wished for the golden years of "the silent majority" as it bemoaned the current era in which "what the American people think trumps."

Political commentators and policymakers lament that the politicians who do exercise independence from public opinion are not reelected or drop out, and the officeholders who remain have stopped "deciding, and saying, what they themselves think" in their zeal to anticipate the reaction of future voters.

The enormous cost of "mass participatory democracy' is the abdication of responsible leadership that promotes the national interest, and the abandonment of the Framers' constitutional design for a more reflective, more considered form of government.