Category: Uncategorized

Updated information from contacts at Cingular:

Areas affected appear to be limited to parts of Texas.

Having trouble making or receiving calls from your Cingular phones? Or maybe having trouble calling someone with a Cingular phone? Well this just in:

About 2:45 p.m., Cingular began experiencing a problem with the long distance signaling system between Texas and Washington state. The problem may affect customers’ abilities to make or receive calls. Areas affected include parts of Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma.
Repair teams are fully engaged but we have no estimated time of restoral at this time.
Customers can still communicate by text messaging, since data services are unaffected.

And my friends said text messaging was just a fad. You know technology has moved from a fad to useful when you start text messaging the county judge and commissioners.

The Startle Gram suggests we should be pointing blame the Texas PUC, not TXU for our high electricity rates.

It’s a natural thing to blame TXU for our high electric bills, but is TXU really at fault?
If we’re going to blame anybody or anything, it should be Texas Public Utilities Commission, which has allowed TXU to jack up rates by 24 percent in just one year …
Twice a year, TXU is allowed to ask for a rate increase and it usually does, and the PUC usually says “Sure!” …. You all might be interested to know that TXU has never asked for a rate decrease.
You all also might remember that the PUC will go out of business in January. That’s when deregulation of utilities in Texas is supposed to kick in …
I have no idea how this is going to play out, but it can’t be as bad as having an agency as ineffective as the PUC looking out for us …

In the August edition of D Magazine, Joe Bob Briggs spends a week in Dallas without a car and gives his 10 decrees for making DART even better. In case you’ve missed the advertising, the DART Light Rail turns 10 this year, years after DART’s original executive director Maurice Carter was basically laughed out of town for suggesting the system use light rail.

DART is the most socialistic city service Dallas ever came up with. In fact, it’s not unlike the transist system built in Moscow under Stalin, where the infrastructure is massive, the stations are pristine symbols of civic pride, the trains and buses run on time and the service is almost free. It’s what communisim was supposed to be!

Briggs also points out that fares on the system only make up 11.6 percent of the cost for running the system. Yet with subsidies from member cities (a 1 percent sales tax) the system is working and train stations have become a commerce magnet.
So you’re asking, why should I care? Well according to studies by the North Central Texas Council of Government, Waxahachie and Ellis County could have two commuter rail lines connecting the county to the rest of the DART system within the next 20-50 years.
If history stands true, the train stations will continue to be economic and commercial magnets – and one of those train stations are supposed to end up in downtown Waxahachie.
Briggs also suggests that more parking downtown leads to less economic development. Bet you never thought you’d hear that. But Briggs points to Jane Jacobs who suggested that under the principals of urban traffic, more downtown parking spaces destroy downtown.

The more parking garages and parking lots you have, the more street life you lose. There’s very little parking in the West End; that’s why it hangs together as a neighborhood.

So pick up a copy or read the story online and discuss it amongst yourselves.

After my article Sunday in the WDL on Parkland and the county’s indigent health care I’ve been doing some more research today.
I’ve found out some interesting things and I’m waiting for some more specifics and details.
When it comes to indigent health care, the county is required to put 8 percent of the county’s tax revenue levy aside for indigent health care.
That 8 percent is broken up with 4 percent going to hospital care, 2 percent to medical care and 2 percent to prescription.
According to the state, the county is only required to reimburse indigent health care for people at or below 21 percent of the federal poverty level, but the county may choose to qualify people for assistance up to 50 percent of the federal poverty level.
Here’s a breakdown of monthly income standards at 21 percent of the FPG.
Family of 1 – $172
Family of 2 – $231
Family of 3 – $291
Family of 4 – $350
If you’re making more than that a month, you wont qualify for assistance.
According to county sources, the county has not reached the budgeted amount for indigent health care in any recent years. If it were to reach or pass the budgeted amount, the state will reimburse up to 90 percent of the health care costs over budget.
Otherwise, any budgeted money that does not get spent, rolls over into the general fund to fix your roads and bridges or other misc. county projects.
So what does this mean?
I tried to explain it to a friend this way (as I understand it – granted I may be overlooking something at this point or over simplifying it):

Lets say 8 percent of the tax revenue is $200,000 (these are totally hypothetical dollar amounts)
The county gives some money to Hope clinic, lets say $25,000.
Parkland or other hospitals bill the county for the three indigent health care patients they had in FY 2005 at nearly $100,000.
At the end of the year the county has $75,000 left over (not including medicine or other medical costs).
Whatever is not spent, that money goes into the general fund and gets divided up into the different precints for their road and bridge construction money.
In the meantime, someone making $5,000 a year with four members in the family is stuck having to pay huge medical bills because the county has such a low qualification amount.
The county will only pay for people at 21% or below the federal poverty level.
The state says you can change that to 50 percent and they’ll reimburse 90 percent of it.
So if the county budgeted $200,000 and ended up having to spend $300,000 in a year the state would give the county $90,000.
It would only cost the county $10,000 to provide $100,000 of service.

I hope its not as “simple” as that. I hope there’s some other situations I’m overlooking at this point as to why we’re not helping more people in need.

Just found this quote on a series the BBC is/has doing called The Gospel According To…
After turning down £12.5 million to allow an advertising company to use their song, Where the Streets Have No Name, Bono said, “That’s the one song we can guarantee God will walk through the room as soon as we play it”.
It sounds like U2 did not want to risk God’s arrival at a gig being confused with a product which the song might have been used to advertise.
It’s an interesting series. Check it out.