Halifax Politics dot ca

I recently had the joy of attending another meeting of the Halifax Regional School Board (HRSB).

In what I recognize from the Save Beaufort days, the HRSB kindly moved the motion 95% of the people here are here to see to the very end of the agenda, so that we have to sit through all the “orders of the day” motions. It seems a typical move from the staff and board here at the old HRSB.

We are here to stop the construction of a new school. That’s right. Stop construction.

A parent asked me if it was a good idea to bring their babies. I replied “Oh yes, we brought Emma as a baby and Rhett as a grade 1 to the last big HRSB Beaufort meeting… at that one they called the cops to come and arrest us!” The parents think and hope I am joking. I am not kidding… I sat then as I sat at this meeting, with laptop and a cell phone, and then I started calling all the media… “please come and cover this, the HRSB threatened to have us all charged! There are kids here!” When the police came, we left, peacefully.

As we, the concerned parents, get into this deeper and deeper, it has pretty shocking to realize that this massive board that administers, well, let me check the financial report – $350,604,300 dollars of your money – well, they don’t get reports from staff until the morning of the day before the Board meeting. That’s right! At $350 million the HRSB is the third largest arms length government agency or body after HRM and Capital District Health Authority, and this almost volunteer Board has all of 36 hours to read all the information that will inform their decisions.

And in fact, some times they don’t even get the report at all! Some don’t actually have a report out to the Board in advance of the meeting. The ability of the Board to ask the important questions under these kind of conditions is, of course, zero.

This an apparent considerable lack of understanding of Robert’s Rules by the Chair means that, well, I have seen prom committees that were better run.

So I am not sure what exactly should be done to fix the fundamental failure of Board governance of public education, but I have some ideas. This sure isn’t working!

The volunteer community oversight component of the Boards is important. A Board with a physical area bigger than PEI cannot count on Board members to actually know enough about the region to make meaningful decisions. As it is politically impossible to make being an elected school Board rep a full time, well paying job, that means the Board needs to be a lot smaller.

How big? Maybe a couple of school families? A couple of high schools each? Other options I have heard thrown around include have each family of schools elect a representative through the SACs to the Board, so CP Allen would have a rep. Or, have the HRSB be made a department of HRM. Or, make each school family its own Board, with the DOE more involved in some aspects of the administration.

The meeting goes on and on, its 8pm and no end in sight. Delay, and delay, it’s a classic small town tactics. Sometimes I swear to god like I feel like I am in Hazzard County.

I am actually impressed with the quality of the questions from some of the Board members. Unfortunately the good questions have almost with out exception come from Board members that we already know or strongly believe are going to support our goal. We do not have enough support to win.

Duringa break I go over and speak to Gary O’Hara. I ask, nicely but firmly, why the public part of the meeting was moved to the very bottom of the agenda. He got a little angry and said that there were several contentious issues coming and he did not want that debate to overshadow the good work of the staff. He said that no Board member complained.

I asked him if they could at least move the school delay motion to the top of the agenda so that the public could, you know, go home. He said smugly that the agenda was already voted on and passed… I looked at him and said “yes, but a 2/3 vote can change the agenda at any time, right?” He shrugs and walks away and walked away.

In the end we loose, but we knew we were going to loose going into the meeting. Nobody gets anything done in this Province without getting the Minister to do it. We are talking to her next week.

Rain, the bar most in question, is a Cabaret, but it serves food. The Palace has food at the Alehouse, which is sometimes open to the Palace, and sometimes it is not. So it still comes down to what kind of licensing you want to exist.

The bar owners don’t want a police state, and don’t want early closing hours. Fair enough. But its a lot more complicated, as I am sure you know.

Every year, people from Toronto and parts west come to the Halifax Pop Explosion and are shocked by the late closings in Halifax. They are also shocked by how late people come out to drink. In Toronto bars are closed at 2am and people are at shows watching bands or dancing in a club by 9-10pm, here it is 10-11-12pm.

I am personally convinced that a 1am or 2am closing would not cost any bar lost sales. People would come out sooner and drink sooner and go home sooner. Bars might actually save money on staffing. The city would save money on policing.

One of the things you really notice in Toronto and Montreal is how many more adults in the 25-40 are in clubs, and at shows. Earlier closing times mean more 21+ age people are out, going to shows, seeing bands, dancing, having a martini, until close. When you have a show at the Attic where the headliner goes on stage at 1am or 2am, very few adults with day jobs can stay out until then.

The biggest issue of course is the cabarets. The only cabaret that is actually living up to its license is Grafton-Connor, with the Attic and the Dome. Cabaret was created for “quality live entertainment” and “good quality food”. Reflections and the Palace do not even have kitchens, and neither comes anywhere near the mandated 4 nights of live quality music. If you want to know about food service at these bars, they hand you a delivery menu for pizza! Unless the regulations have changed since I last reviewed it, if the actual letter of the law was enforced all the bars would loose their cabaret license except Grafton-Connor.

And cabaret might have made sense 30-40 years ago, but I don’t think it does now. Long gone are the days when 2,000 people cheered on Matt Minglewood or Soma on the stage of the Misty Moon until 3:30 am. There was a reason for this license, at that time. That time is past. Now most cabarets are warehouses where drunk people go to get even drunker between 2:30-3:30. What socially positive good does that serve?

Select quotes from rightwingers in the US, just cause I think its funny and interesting to watch them squirm. NOTE: I am in no way endorsing any of these views… obviously.

Pat Toomey: This election wasn’t a repudiation of conservatism, it was a repudiation of Republicans. We did a Sunday night poll in the seats we thought were most likely to switch. They didn’t believe the GOP was the party of limited government and fiscal discipline. When we asked which party was the party of big government, the Republican Party won that by 11 points over Democrats.

http://www.rightwingnews.com/

A moonbat reader e-mailed a taunt earlier this evening:

“How’s it feel to be a Loser, Loser?”

The GOP lost. Conservatism prevailed. “San Francisco values” may control the gavels in Congress, but they do not control America. Property rights initiatives limiting eminent domain won big. MCRI, the anti-racial preference measure, passed resoundingly. Congressman Tom Tancredo, the GOP’s leading warrior against illegal immigration–opposed by both the open-borders Left and the open-borders White House–won a fifth term handily. Gay marriage bans won approval in 3 states. And as of this writing, the oil tax initiative, Prop. 87–backed by deep-pocketed Hollywood libs, is trailing badly in California.

http://www.michellemalkin.com/

Yesterday’s biggest winners:

illegal immigrants.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/

No doubt Iraq played a significant part of the decision by Americans last night. However, one has to wonder if Americans would have lost confidence in Republican leadership in the war if they had not lost confidence in their ability to keep a clean Congress first. As I write in the NRO piece, I don’t recall the last time America has switched control of Congress during wartime, and I think that’s pretty significant.

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/

I’m not going to write anything about the election. I woke up this morning and everything was just too depressing to contemplate.
Other people are covering it in depth; start at Gateway Pundit and move on from there.
The administration and the Republicans did a terrible job, but they’ve got an uphill battle, anyway, with the entire mainstream media in lockstep against them, and foursquare behind the Islamists. I can’t see any opportunities for change unless the 910 Group can somehow acquire a major media outlet. You working on that, guys?
The Iranians will now get their nukes, and then other Middle Eastern countries will race to get their own. All the corrupt and tyrannical regimes will want to have the bomb, and then it’s only a matter of time until the terrorists have one of their very own.
I think I’ll go back to bed. Wake me up for Armageddon

http://www.noisyroom.net/blog

RE: Interview with Lynn MacGregor, District 9, HRSB

The amalgamation of the south end school is just the start of HRSBs plan. The plan would see four large, 750 student Elementary schools on the peninsula. This is almost double the ideal size from the Provinces own guidelines, of 350-450 students for a P-6 school.

There can be no doubt that HRSB’s planners are incompetent or politically motivated, when again and again schools are closed by the School Board as “beyond use” and then renovated and made beautiful by others, such as Tower Road becoming the Grammer School, Chebucto Road becoming Martime Conservatory of Music, or Beaufort becoming Universite De St-Anne. All these renovations were done for far less than the cost of building a new building.

All Nova Scotia taxpayers should be concerned that the lack of money to fund renovations and rehabilitation of full schools with 350 student populations is resulting in plans for new, much more expensive construction of brand new schools.