bs.com » Uncategorized

Water bills go up as usage drops

BS God — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:59:13 +0000

AP – In this Thursday, March 11, 2010 photo, Norm Labbe, water district superintendent, sits by Branch Brook, …

PORTLAND, Maine – The grim economy is hitting some consumers in the wallet in yet another way: their water bills.

Many water utilities are raising rates because water use is down, in part because manufacturers have closed or are cutting back, tourism has fallen and the real estate market is in the doldrums.

Water sales for the Kennebunk, Kennebunkport & Wells Water District in southern Maine fell 11 percent last year, to 1995 levels. The No. 1 reason is the sour economy, said superintendent Norm Labbe.

One of the utility’s largest customers, a catalog printer, shut its doors last year, putting 374 people out of work. Tourism also has been down — meaning fewer tourists are taking showers and flushing toilets in the motels in the region’s beachside communities.

“This is happening most everywhere. It’s a regional thing, it’s a national thing,” Labbe said. “Many, many (water utilities) around the country are seeing decreases in revenues. Because if industry goes down, revenues go down.”

A recent study by the Water Research Foundation, a Denver-based nonprofit, on the recession’s impact on water utilities found that home foreclosures and business contractions have reduced water demand in many areas. Cities with high unemployment also have seen reduced water consumption as people move away in search of jobs, said Rob Renner, the foundation’s executive director.

“It depends on where you are in the country. Regionally, the economy is better in some places than in others,” he said.

Water companies for the most part get their money from customers. When water consumption goes up, revenues go up — but when consumption falls, so do revenues.

Water companies often raise rates to pay for high-priced capital expenditures, such as new water lines or treatment plant expansions. But they also have to hike rates when water use goes down to bring in enough money to pay their basic operating costs.

Water rates are based on a wide range of factors, such as infrastructure and water treatment costs as well as revenues from water use. When water use falls, that would be a reason to seek a rate increase, Renner said.

Water consumption can be influenced by the weather. In the Northeast, usage declined last summer in part because homeowners watered their lawns less with the rainy weather. The epic drought that gripped the Southeast in recent years also resulted in falling consumption as people were ordered to conserve water.

Nowadays, the bad economy is taking a toll.

Even after cutting costs 10 percent and laying off nine employees, the water utility in Mount Pleasant, S.C., recently raised rates 9 percent after its customer base and water sales tumbled. That amounts to about $50 a year for the average homeowner.

“We attribute our revenue decline to unoccupied homes due to foreclosures, and commercial businesses just going out of business,” said Clay Duffie, Mount Pleasant Waterworks’ general manager. “When you have fewer customers, you have less revenue.”

At the same time, impact fees the utility collects from developers have dried up, from as much as $6 million a few years ago to $500,000 this fiscal year, Duffie said.

Mount Pleasant, outside of Charleston, has been one of the state’s fastest-growing communities in the past 20 years, growing from about 30,000 to 65,000 residents. But development has come nearly to a halt with the down economy.

In New Jersey, the Sayreville water department recently raised rates 13 percent. One big reason was the department’s biggest customer, a steel mill, suspended operations for several months because of lower demand for its products.

As a result, the water department’s revenues fell $350,000 to $400,000, said Jeff Bertrand, the town’s business administrator.

“That was because of the economy,” Bertrand said. “Nobody was buying the rebar because nobody was doing construction.”

And in California, water and sewer rates in tiny Davenport outside of Santa Cruz are going up because the economy has forced a shutdown of the local cement plant, built in 1906. Sewer rates will increase especially fast — up 74 percent to nearly $2,500 a year — because of the plant shutting down, said Rachel Lather of the Santa Cruz County Sanitation District.

When water rates go up, customers’ bills might increase anywhere from a buck or two to $20 or more a month. That doesn’t sound like it’ll break the bank, but collectively the higher rates could amount to tens of millions of dollars.

And when jobs are scarce, every extra dollar hurts.

In the eastern Maine town of Baileyville along the Canadian border, residents faced the prospect of both lost jobs and higher water bills when the local pulp mill announced it was closing.

Baileyville’s water utility proposed raising rates 80 percent after the Domtar Corp. mill, the utility’s largest customer by far, said it would close because of the poor global economy. Domtar accounted for 52 percent of the utility’s total sales, and residents would have seen their minimum quarterly bills go from $55 to nearly $97.

Domtar shut down last May, putting 300 employees out of work, but unexpectedly reopened two months later after business conditions improved. Even so, the Baileyville Utilities District had to raise rates 9 percent.

But the prospect of nearly doubled water rates when residents were losing their jobs was too much for Baileyville, a small town of about 1,500 people where employment largely revolves around the pulp mill.

“You’ve got to charge more when revenues go down,” said water utility manager Gardner Ross. “But people don’t have incomes coming in, so it’s a double-whammy.”

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Scarface School Play

BS God — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:16:26 +0000

Someone sent this elementary school production of Scarface. I have no idea what district would allow such explicit material to be portrayed by children, or why they used popcorn instead of cocaine. My guess is some drama teacher got his pink slip and said, “F*ck it, I’m puttin’ on Scarface.” Then before the administrators knew it, Tony Montana was dead face-down in a hot tub and parents were clapping from sheer confusion.

Source

School used student laptop webcams to spy According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Fox Nation Punks Itself with Global Warming “News” Story

BS God — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:50:50 +0000

...

Jeeze, Fox Nation ran this story yesterday, and I’ve yet to see any other outlet pick it up. You would think that a thing like this would have been more widely reported…

Famed global warming activist James Schneider and a journalist friend were both found frozen to death on Saturday, about 90 miles from South Pole Station, by the pilot of a ski plane practicing emergency evacuation procedures.

Oh, wow. That’s really sad to hear. Thank you, Fox Nation, for bringing this sorrowful and somewhat suspiciously ironic story to light. But what was this famous activist whom I’ve never heard of doing down there in the first place?

One friend of Prof. Schneider told ecoEnquirer that he had been planning a trip to an ice sheet to film the devastation brought on by global warming. His wife, Linda, said that she had heard him discussing the trip with his environmental activist friends, but she assumed that he was talking about the Greenland ice sheet, a much smaller ice sheet than Antarctica.

“He kept talking about when they ‘get down to chili’, and I thought they were talking about the order in which they would consume their food supplies“, Mrs. Schneider recounted. “I had no idea they were talking about Chile, the country from which you usually fly or sail in order to reach Antarctica.”

Oh, wow. That’s really… kind of pretty unbelievable. I don’t wanna not trust you, Fox Nation, just because you’re Fox Nation, but, um… I’m gonna check with Snopes on this one…

The above-referenced ironic tale of a global warming activist’s freezing to death in Antarctica was presented on the Fox Nation web site as a straightforward news story on 29 March 2010. However, the original source for the story (which is linked from the Fox site) was a 2006 article from ecoEnquirer.com, a satirical site featuring spoof articles such as “Court Orders Fisherman to Apologize to Eagle” and “Penguins ‘Fed Up’ with Media Attention.”

You know what they say, Fox Nation. The best April Fools jokes are the ones you play on yourself. (Do they say that? I don’t know, maybe.)

Update: It seems that Fox Nation accidentally deleted this highly important news story from their site. Whoops! Don’t worry, Fox Nation. Google kept a cached version of the page for you. (Thanks for the heads up, siskita and KT.)

AKPC_IDS += “23989,”;

TAGS: Antarctica, Climate Change, Fox Nation, Fox News, Snopes

Is Global Warming a “Crock of S*%t?” On that period’s causes there is no scientific agreement even...
Twins Discover Teenage Brother’s Death on Facebook This isn’t the way you should learn about the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

US military admits role in killing of Afghan women

rickf — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:09:50 +0000

The US-led military command in Kabul admitted, after an earlier denial, that American forces killed three Afghan female civilians in February, and tried to cover up their deaths. There are reports that “Special Operations forces dug bullets out of the bodies of the women to hide the true nature of their deaths,” and “that an Afghan-led team of investigators had found signs of evidence tampering at the scene, including the removal of bullets from walls near where the women were killed.” One was a pregnant mother of 10 and another was a pregnant mother of six.

Digging bullets out of pregnant women? Thats BS!

source

1 in 3 women in the US Military raped According to NPR, “In 2003, a survey of female veterans...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

iBooks can’t say “sperm” but can say “dick”

BS God — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:37:49 +0000

...

Source

Dean spotted that bowdlerization is afoot in the iPad’s bookstore’s selection of classic literature! This includes obvious candidates such as a certain Joseph Conrad classic.

But … sperm?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Vermont cop tases a mentally ill homeless 59 year old woman

BS God — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:54:47 +0000

A cop in Barre, Vermont repeatedly tased Ann Osborn, a 59-year-old mentally ill homeless woman who was standing in a parking lot with her arms folded.

“I could see that this was not getting any results so I pulled out the cartridge and went for a drive stun to Osborn’s left thigh. This did have some affect and she screamed a little bit and went down on her buttocks, in the shrub area, next to the store at which time the Taser slipped off her thigh… Before Osborn could get up I was able to apply a second drive stun to her right thigh. This again kept her down and she began to scream. I advised her to roll over and place her hands behind her back, which she did and the Taser came off her leg losing contact again. Now Osborn was still screaming without the Taser being on her, and would still not put her hands behind her back. I again applied the drive stun to the back of her left thigh. Osborn finally complied, put her hands behind her back at which time I was able to get the handcuffs on her and take her into custody.”

(Thats BS!!!)

Source

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Taliban chops off nose, ears of 19-year-old girl

BS God — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:21:14 +0000

...

“When they cut off my nose and ears, I passed out.” Bibi Aisha, 19, of Afghanistan, who was punished by the Taliban for “shaming” her in-laws when she ran away to escape torturous domestic abuse. Her father sold her to her abusive husband when she was 10.

Atia Awabi, a CNN International correspondent based in Kabul, says “If you are moved by [this] story you can help by donating to womenforafghanwomen.org.” CNN interviewed this young woman in January, and ABC News followed recently.

Women for Afghan Women has posted an update on her story here (some people may find the full image of her brutally disfigured face disturbing).

Her husband “kept her in the stable with the animals until she was 12 (when she got her first menstrual period).”

Aisha has been recovering these past months from the unimaginable trauma she has suffered. She has brought criminal charges against her father for giving her away in the illegal practice of “baad.” She would like to also bring charges against her husband, but since he is a Talib in Uruzgan, he is unreachable. Aisha has decided after weighing all the options before her that she would like to come to the United States for her surgery and post-operative care. Just as important as her surgery, will be the support system we organize for her recuperation. We are currently engaged in setting up that support system for Aisha.

US soldier waterboards his 4-year-old daughter An Army sergeant who served in Iraq for 15 months...
1 in 3 women in the US Military raped According to NPR, “In 2003, a survey of female veterans...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

IRS visits carwash in pursuit of 4 cents

BS God — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:59:18 +0000

It was every businessperson’s nightmare. Arriving at Harv’s Metro Car Wash in midtown Wednesday afternoon were two dark-suited IRS agents demanding payment of delinquent taxes. “They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending,” says Harv’s owner, Aaron Zeff.

The really odd part of this: The letter that was hand-delivered to Zeff’s on-site manager showed the amount of money owed to the feds was … 4 cents.

Inexplicably, penalties and taxes accruing on the debt – stemming from the 2006 tax year – were listed as $202.31, leaving Harv’s with an obligation of $202.35.

Zeff, who also owns local parking lots and is the president of the Midtown Business Association, finds the situation a bit comical.

“It’s hilarious,” he says, “that two people hopped in a car and came down here for just 4 cents. I think (the IRS) may have a problem with priorities.”

Now he’s trying to figure out how penalties and interest could climb so high on such a small debt. He says he’s never been told he owes any taxes or that he’s ever incurred any late-payment penalties in the four years he’s owned Harv’s.

In fact, he provided us with an Oct. 22, 2009, letter from the IRS that states Harv’s “has filed all required returns and addressed any balances due.”

IRS spokesman Jesse Weller isn’t commenting “due to privacy and disclosure laws.”

Zeff says he’s as offended as much as anything else by what he considers rude behavior by the IRS guys. While at Harv’s, he sniffs, “they didn’t even get a car wash.”

NO CARWASH? THATS BS!

Tax preparation fees Can someone explain to me WTF this is about? We’re...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Mans sues for right to flip the bird at police officer

BS God — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:12:07 +0000

Twins Discover Teenage Brother’s Death on Facebook This isn’t the way you should learn about the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Black Barbie Sold for Less Than White Barbie?

BS God — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:26:15 +0000

...

Walmart is raising eyebrows after cutting the price of a black Barbie doll to nearly half of that of the doll’s white counterpart at one store and possibly others. Famous 1940s test used dolls and kids to gain insight into race perspectives.

A photo first posted to the humor Web site FunnyJunk.com and later to the Latino Web site Guanabee.com shows packages of Mattel’s Ballerina Barbie and Ballerina Teresa dolls hanging side by side at an unidentified store. The Teresa dolls, which feature brown skin and dark hair, are marked as being on sale at $3.00. The Barbies to the right of the Teresa dolls, meanwhile, retain their original price of $5.93. The dolls look identical aside from their color.

Editors at Guanabee.com said the person responsible for the photo told the Web site that it was taken at a Louisiana Walmart store. The person did not return e-mails from ABCNews.com.

A Walmart spokeswoman, who could not verify the exact store shown in the photo, said that the price change on the Teresa doll was part of the chain’s efforts to clear shelf space for its new spring inventory.

“To prepare for (s)pring inventory, a number of items are marked for clearance, ” spokeswoman Melissa O’Brien said in an e-mail. “… Both are great dolls. The red price sticker indicates that this particular doll was on clearance when the photo was taken, and though both dolls were priced the same to start, one was marked down due to its lower sales to hopefully increase purchase from customers.”

“Pricing like items differently is a part of inventory management in retailing,” O’Brien said.

But critics say Walmart should have been more sensitive in its pricing choice.

“The implication of the lowering of the price is that’s devaluing the black doll,” said Thelma Dye, the executive director of the Northside Center for Child Development, a Harlem, N.Y. organization founded by pioneering psychologists and segregation researchers Kenneth B. Clark and Marnie Phipps Clark.

“While it’s clear that’s not what was intended, sometimes these things have collateral damage,” Dye said.

Other experts agree. Walmart could have decided “that it’s really important that we as a company don’t send a message that we value blackness less than whiteness,” said Lisa Wade, an assistant sociology professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the founder of the blog Sociological Images.

Last year, Wade posted a blog entry on another case where a black doll was apparently priced less than its white counterpart at an unidentified store. Wade said that when white dolls outsell black dolls, it’s usually because black parents are more likely than white parents to buy their children dolls of a different race.

“Most white parents wouldn’t think to buy a black doll for their child, even if they believe in equality and all those things,” she said.

Source

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.