Cleveland TN Town Hall meeting set to discuss plans for Downtown Central City Area

This Tuesday, July 17th, 2012, the Tea Party of Bradley County hosts a town hall meeting to discuss the growth in the downtown Cleveland Tennessee Central area. The meeting will be held at the Cleveland/Bradley County public library on Church street at 630 pm.

As many of you may know the Cleveland City Council and Mayor Tom Rowland has vehemently denied that 300 homes in the downtown area was set to be demolished and redeveloped. A flyer controversy erupted with the Mayor disputing the information from the flyer which resulted in the Mayor and City Council passing a resolution 7 to 0 to hunt down, arrest and expose the person or persons passing out these so called “untruthful and misleading literature!”

Little did the Mayor know that while he was ranting about the drafted plan being unbelieveable, untruthful and a scare tactic to scare senior citizens in the area, the plan that he and his council approved was the actual wording that was included in the plan he was admonishing.

Six days after he made a hasty news conference he announced along with Planner Greg Thomas that the plan had been changed in a private meeting because so many people didn’t like it. The changes were made unaware to the public and all the public had was the last public information given out at the last Charette at the mall.

Our question is to the planners and our councilmen is when are we going to get the real draft? When are we going to see the “real” plan? Is this going to be a pattern for future meetings? Are we going to get a public drafted plan and have a hidden private plan on the side?

Plans that are this fluid are no good to the public if they are going to be changed once the public is made aware behind closed private doors.

We are hoping our elected leaders who have been elected to lead us will show up and tell us what the plans are for our future. We are also hoping the planners are going to show up and tell us which plan are we to believe.

All members of the council and the Mayor have been sent certified letters and emails inviting them to this meeting to address the citizens concerns.

We are seeking answers, real answers to Growth concerns! If we are going to be given one drafted plan only to have the plans changed secretly behind a closed door with no public notice, the least we deserve is to have the opportunity to address our concerns.

Come and visit with us on Tuesday at the library, bring someone with you and ask some questions.

Please pass this news realease through your email lists and on Facebook. We are hoping to see a big crowd for this event.
See ya there!

EPA “dust regulation” on farmers discussed on Capitol Hill recently

Many said it wouldnt and couldnt happen! Many called me insane for writing about it! Conspiracy theory! A bad rumor! Even the EPA commented in the comment section on a past blog and refuted it!
The EPA responded and said that your allegations in the blog were unfounded! It sounds like even those within the EPA don’t know what the “higher ups” are doing to our country!

I wrote a version of this same article in the form of an email to my Mayors, State Rep, both City and County and their respective councils and commissioners to ask them to please watch this short YOU TUBE video and just watch where our congressmen are discussing and seeking ways to stop this in Congress, perhaps defunding the EPA so they can’t enforce these regulations on our farmers, who in my opinion are the back bone of our country! As I talk to many in my community, I get this feeling they are tiring from all these repeated regulatory attacks on their farms and livelihoods!

Our Mayors and our locally elected officials remaining silent and continuing to support this Regional Growth plan will only make our community more vulnerable to restrictive regulations as we give the EPA, DOT and HUD full reign in Bradley County for grant money!

The livable community grants that President Obama is handing out like candy and our Mayors are gladly accepting is going to put our property rights in grave danger!

Our property will be so heavily regulated that we will have no choice but to give it to the federal government pretty much like Mayfield Dairy Farm had to recently by conservation easement! (the latest tool to take your property rights away from you)

I asked them and among them was our own State Representative Kevin Brooks, who entered into a marriage with the catalyst of all this Regional development and ensuing regulations by the name of Beth Jones and the Southeast Tennesse Economic Development Council and the Chamber of Commerce!

I have asked them whom among you is going to step up and say enough is enough! Ignoring this will not make it go away! It only gives them quiet consensus to move forward!

Hoping and wishing this will go away will not make it go away! Accepting all the grant money and expect it to be “free money” with no strings attached is a very dangerous game to play with our lives and the constituency they represent!

So far and to date, not a single persin has called me or said they are willing to overlook the grant money and worry about the citizens of this county! For whatever reason, our elected officials think that requesting millions of our tax dollars to fix whatever, is the rule of the land!

I recently had a conversation with my State Representative and I posed this exact question! “why are we so bound to the federal grant dollar? His reply and I paraphrase was “ok, i got a bridge that needs repair, how are we going to fix it without grants” my instant reply was “then lets fix it” “lets put our house in order first, free up our tax money with a surplus and from that surplus we accept bids in the community and we go fix it” “we need to be more self reliant!” Our biggest mistake is being so darn reliant on the federal government to create jobs and fix things” “we became a great nation on the backs of a dream, an entrepeneur with enough tenacity to make it work, thats how you fix a bridge, not the federal governement making you jump through hoops for a dollar!” his immediate response was that he would give it some thought!

You know, I am getting tired of the wishy washy, meely mouthed,spineless, self centered, self serving, passive leadership in my presence! We need God fearing, patriotic, constitutionally based, fired up, pissed off people running for office in this area! Im done!

God bless our county, we are going to need it!

Watch this! Will blow your socks off! (may have to copy and paste it to you tube, some reason it will not let me choose it from this site!) Enjoy!

Bradley County accepts huge DOT grant, can’t pay it back! Work stopped!

The Bradley County Commission has recently voted to accept yet more grants! The latest from the DOT for roadwork and utility relocation for Durkee road, Benton pike and Michigan Avenue which was later applied to the list! Which may explain why we don’t have the money to pay for it!

As many of you may know, no federal grant comes without strings attached, many dollars in this instance!

Once again our elected leaders saw dollar signs and that “sexy” grant money which no politician can dare deny! She is too inviting! She has the lure of a prostitute on payday! She is undeniably the reason our country will fall to her knees and a very huge contributor to our counties demise!

Our County commissioners thought that half of the costs would be paid by the County and half by the City! Nope! No prior resolution to that effect! Folks, we accepted millions in grants and didnt even know that there wasnt a resolution for the City to pay half! What is going on down there in our county seat!

Again, we accepted money from the Feds to fix a road and had no plan to pay for it! This goes to show that this money in any form is blinding our politicians to see only the money and are not the least bit concerned about how it will affect the citizens of Bradley County they represent!

We all know who will have to pay for it and the billions our Mayors have planned for us in the upcoming new year! It will be you and me! We are the only ones that seem to have the “endless money flow!”

Since this announced blunder, mistake or oversight the City reacted in pure Socialist manner and annexed the Whirlpool site, but did not annex Durkee Road!

The Cleveland City Council announced they would pay 50 percent of the needed work on Benton Pike and not fund any portion of the road development in the county! Thank you very much Mayor Rowland!

This plan would stick the county with a bill for a cool 1,661,448.00 (that’s 1.66 million guys) and the cities portion at 336,781.00. Not half, but who is counting!

Mayor Davis after the fact said he was in a “true dilemma” of what to do! Really, Mr Mayor? We have accepted money from the fed and it is a certain portion match grant and we as a county didn’t account for how we were going to pay it back?

This is the dilemma and let me explain it to you and I have been on record many times as saying this! If we continue to take numerous federal grant money, we have to have our house in order to pay it back without raising our tax base! Listen closely and I will shout it “Mayors,Council and Commissioners THIS MONEY IS NOT A GIFT, IT IS NOT FREE AND WE WILL HAVE TO PAY IT BACK AND IT WILL NOT BE CHEAP! Did you hear that? Payback! We will have to pay it back!

Because of our snaffoo and hardly a mention in the community our politicians have once again been irresponsible with your tax dollars and we are left holding this federal grant money and the state has stopped the work on these roads because we can’t pay our portion! The trucks and workers will not immobilize till we pay a “right of way deposit!” From where will we get this Mayor? We are broke and now is not the time to dip into our investments!

According to TDOT estimates the county only had 114,000 allotted in the budget for this project, oh let’s see, my nine year old just calculated it for me and she says we are around a million short! Hmmmmm! The citizens you represent would have loved to have known this “before” you accepted the grant!

Finance Committee chair asked what the timeline is on making a decision and Mayor Davis replied uhhhhhhh,don’t know but the “sooner the decision is made the better!” Commissioner Ed Elkins chimed in and said “Right now, I don’t know where the money is coming from!”

People of Bradley County! Listen up and listen closely! This is your representatives of your local government! It sounds like an episode of Laurel and Hardy or for you younger guys Beavis and Butthead!

Can you believe we accepted a DOT federal grant, started work on a road, mistakenly thought someone else was going to pay for it, then they sit and debate to each other how are we going to pay for it! And the best answer given was by Mayor and it was and I am paraphrasing here “I don’t have a clue!”

“We have got to do something! Mayor Davis said! ” I don’t think an option is to do nothing” he went on to say “I don’t want to push the committee in any direction, but wants members to make the decision they think best” “I could argue certain ways, but I don’t want to do that because I don’t have a vote” Davis said!

Then Mayor Davis turns to County Planner Corey Divel and they both agreed “estimates for the project have come in higher than expected! Ya think?

Get a load of this! When the Mayor asked for an explanation of the “unexpected costs” the mayor was denied!!!

Knight said the TDOT said the work had to be started first! Started first? Haven’t you already started the work?

Mayor Davis handed out an info package for committee members to review in considering the situation! I have a scenario to propose to you! We will soon be marrying the DOT, EPA and HUD via the Regional 16 county, 3 state growth coalition in January that both of our Mayors and the city vice Mayor Avery have gotten us into so let’s think ahead and not do that either since I’m sure we have no idea of how we are going to pay for that too!

The upcoming development and plans they have for our community is going to make the Durkee road project look like a sand box by comparison! You have gotten us into this mess! Best be looking for a solution cause when the Federal Grant money comes in in the billions for the regional project, the city and county are not going to want to pay for it and the taxpayer is going to get real tired of bailing you out!

Here is a summary of our situation! Our Mayor accepted a large DOT grant, part of the work got done, we thought someone else was going to pay half, TDOT IS waiting for us to send more money and our county elected officials have not a clue where the money will come from! The project partially complete! Get used to this! Got a long road ahead!

We are in deep trouble Bradley County and our elected officials are not representing us well!

Time for change! What do you think?

This is the original article I used as a source for this narration of events!
http://www.clevelandbanner.com/view/full_story/16343305/article-County-roadwork-funding-debated?instance=homethirdleft

Bradley/Cleveland Mayors, duly elected! On notice for wrong decisions! It’s on you now!

This diatribe was sent to all of my locally elected officials in Cleveland/Bradley County and it is in this forum that I notify all others at the State and Federal levels! To also include the NGO ” useful idiots” such as the Chamber of Commerce and the development boards who think they have governmental authority in this town! Spread this around, copy, post and repost! It is up to you to spread the word about this Federal take over of our town, my town and to bring notice to you that our town is being given away by the very people we put in office to represent us! I dare you to call them! Don’t debate them, simply tell them you are fed up and you want them to stop this and you are here to take your city and county back!

I have been reading a little about this Regional Sustainable Coalition with 3 states and 16 counties.

Is anyone concerned that we are now going to have the Federal Government telling us how to live, work and breathe while designing the land we live on right now to be sustainable!

Does anyone know what this means or the affect it will have on the people you represent?

Answering to HUD, DOT and God forbid the EPA? Jumping into bed with these three is everything America is supposed to not do, constitutionally!

We will be so busy jumping through their hoops we will not have much time to do anything else and they will be expecting us to live exactly like they tell us!

Do you think this trio will dump millions perhaps billions into our lap and we go our merry way! Please guys you are much smarter than that!

If you allow this, the way we live is about to drastically change! Cleveland is a beautiful place! I love living here and enjoy having my family call it home! It has a small town feel! It feels good! My part of town is for the most part quite and peaceful! I can drive most anywhere around me and spend the day taking in it’s scenery!  For the most part we come and go as we please and can pretty much answer to no one except our selves, because we still have a say so about our own property and our way of life and can do so relatively cheap!

Making Cleveland a downtown Chattanooga or Atlanta is not my idea of something I want to duplicate or bring my children up in. The crime, the massive amounts of concrete and pollution, the cross section of people that migrate to “big” cities? Give me the old Cleveland any day!   

Guys I have hinted around about this for a while, but now it’s time to advise at this point!  What you guys are doing and allowing to be done will be devastating to our community where we will have little say so on what goes on on our own land!

Let’s get real here! I have probably researched this more than I care to recollect, countless hours! I do not give warnings out like this without great fear and assurance that what I have researched is true and relevant!  This is downright bad! As my daddy used to say “this is bad mojo, something smells!”

Anybody read what they plan to do? I would encourage you to! The total repercussions of this plan will greatly limit our ability to do as we please on our own property and in our own town!

Have you heard the word “a city with walkability?” this means and I have read it many time on HUDs website and others and even as it relates to this regional plan! Walkability means the ability of the federal government via HUD, DOT and the EPA to design “livable sustainable communities” where you are forced to live on designated areas or migrate into communities where all your shopping, churches, parks, banks, restaraunts, cinemas and etc are all within “walking” distance and I quote “so you want need cars!” THis is a sustainable community!

Is this your vision of Cleveland and Bradley County to become little pods of communities, everyone walking, co existing in a plastic world with all kinds of people in a relatively small area, taking the occasional train ride up the Ocoee to see the area we used to call home! Think im exaggerating! Research it!

I promise that vision is shared by many who are giving you money to do what they want!

Have you put any additional thought into why they want everyone to live in a “sustainable liveable, walkable community?” There is a bigger picture we are failing to see! There will be a day real soon where many of our rural areas will be just that and will be low population areas with restrictions on who can be on these properties that used to be yours!

The “urban sprawl” as it talks about in our very own 2035 Growth plan will be discouraged and the “human settlements” will be directed into “urban Growth areas”, doesn’t this scare you to death? We are annexing now to make that happen in the Northern part of the county to make that a reality! I didn’t make these facts up! It’s in our own growth plan!

Now, we go and make a certain deal with the devil in the form of a Regional Plan with huge plans to change Cleveland and Bradley County and for some reason. I’m predicting federal dollars are placing blinders on you and it appears you are willing to stand by and allow this to happen knowing it will affect Bradley Countians tremendously and you guys, our leaders are not even speaking up to defend us!  To speak out or to at least investigate what this is beyond what some Beuracrat in DC or Nashville convinces you it is!

If your answer is allow it to happen despite the outcome, I must say I am sorely disappointed in your humanity! This is no small decision here guys! This is big time and we have stepped into a mess by allowing our City, County and state to marry the federal government in this way while a great percentage of your constituency say stop and at least see what we are getting in to!

Who among you are man or woman enough to make a stand and say let’s at least look before we leap! This is not good! We are not making rational decisions as a community!

The people in this town in great part are in the dark about this, some are there because that the easiest path, some are there because they choose to listen to others as experts, some because they trust the wrong people!

Some of us prefer to research the facts, follow the  trails, look at other communities that have fallen into this trap and see if they are truly better off?

The burden is now on you! I feel as a complete county we are being taken down the wrong road by our elected leaders and guess what? You answer for you!

I am telling you this is a HUGE mistake and only YOU will be held responsible for the decision you make!

Have a great day!

I would hope some would respond to me as this is a cry to you to do the right thing and not be blinded by the relatively small amount of money you may get in exchange for our freedom!