Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 111, No. 80, Ed. 1 Tuesday, October 21, 2014 Page: 4 of 16
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4A
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
OPINION
Denton Record-Chronicle
Denton Record-Chronicle
Published by Denton Publishing Co.,
a subsidiary of A.H. Belo Corporation
Founded from weekly newspapers,
the Denton Chronicle, established in 1882,
and the Denton Record, established in 1897.
Published daily as the Denton
Record-Chronicle since Aug. 3,1903.
EDITORIAL BOARD
Bill Patterson
Publisher and CEO
Scott K. Parks
Managing Editor
Les Cockrell
Region Editor
Mark Finley
City Editor
Mariel Tarn-Ray
News Editor
PAST PUBLISHERS
William C. “Will” Edwards
1903-1927
Robert J. “Bob” Edwards
1927-1945
Riley Cross
1945-1970
Vivian Cross
1970-1986
Fred Patterson
1986-1999
Editorials published in the Denton Record-Chronicle
are determined by the editorial board.
Questions and suggestions should be directed to the:
Denton Record-Chronicle
314 E. Hickory St., Denton, TX 76201
Phone: 940-387-3811
Fax: 940-566-6888
E-mail: drc@dentonrc.com
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Editorial
Vote to improve
Denton’s future
« m me urge Denton residents to approve all four
mJm# bond propositions on the Nov. 4 ballot and
W W clear the way for much-needed improvements.
Voters are being asked to OK the sale of $98.2 million
in bonds to finance a six-year construction program tar-
geting streets, public safety, drainage and parks. We be-
lieve each one is worthy of your support.
A citizens committee studied a list of proposals from
city staff members and residents before recommending
the final selections. The process took about a year to col-
lect input through a variety of methods, including com-
ments at public meetings, telephone calls, emails and
online surveys.
The lion’s share of the money in this proposed bond
package — about $61.7 million — would go to fund street
reconstruction and improvements, and that’s one area
that needs immediate attention. A list of the targeted
streets can be found online at www.cityofdenton.com/
departments-services/2014-bond-program.
The second proposition would authorize the expendi-
ture of about $16.6 million for public safety. The police
and fire departments are in serious need of building ex-
pansion to relieve overcrowding and make way for
growth. Funding includes $13.5 million to replace two
substandard fire stations. In our view, this is another easy
check mark on the ballot.
Officials tell us that the stations on McCormick Street
and Sherman Drive are sadly outdated. Both were built
many years ago and were not designed to accommodate
the equipment firefighters need today.
This proposition would also fund important projects to
help the police department, including relocation of the
Communications Center and Criminal Investigations
Bureau, improvements to the firing range and a renova-
tion of the police headquarters lobby.
Proposition 3 would provide $8.5 million for drainage
and flood-control improvements focused on two major
areas of the city, the Magnolia Street and Hinkle Drive
area and the downtown area. Both measures would help
ensure that the city’s drainage system is adequate to han-
dle runoff during heavy rains and that public safety vehi-
cles can get to areas where they are needed.
The fourth proposition, $11.4 million for parks, would
fund far-reaching improvements to city parks and would
include renovations and expansions at various locations
and new equipment for several facilities.
As Denton has continued to grow, it has become ap-
parent that many existing park facilities are no longer
sufficient to deal with demand. We need to upgrade and
expand, and this proposition should go a long way toward
helping enhance some of the most popular amenities in
the city.
We feel strongly that all ballot propositions are neces-
sary and would help maintain the quality of life that Den-
ton residents want and deserve.
Officials have estimated that approval of all proposi-
tions could ultimately bring a 3-cent increase to the city’s
property tax rate, which currently stands at 68.975 cents
per $100 valuation. City officials calculate that the average
Denton homeowner could pay about $48 more in prop-
erty taxes each year based on an average home price of
about $160,000.
We believe the extra expense would be money well
spent, based on existing needs and the extensive improve-
ments funded by the bond package, and we encourage
local voters to join us in supporting all four propositions.
It’s a sound investment in our city’s future.
This day in history: October 21
Today is Tuesday, Oct. 21,
the 294th day of 2014. There
are 71 days left in the year.
On Oct. 21, 1944?, during
World War II, U.S. troops cap-
tured the German city of Aa-
chen.
In 1805, a British fleet com-
manded by Adm. Horatio Nel-
son defeated a French-Spanish
fleet in the Battle of Trafalgar;
Nelson, however, was killed.
In 1879, Thomas Edison
perfected a workable electric
light at his laboratory in Menlo
Park, New Jersey.
In 1917, members of the 1st
Division of the U.S. Army train-
ing in Luneville, France, became
the first Americans to see action
on the front lines of World War
I.
In 1959, the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, de-
signed by Frank Lloyd Wright,
opened to the public in New
York.
— The Associated Press
Driving losing appeal
&
Froma
Harrop
m ^oung Americans are just not into
driving the way their elders are or did
at their age. They are less likely to
own cars or use cars. The drives they do are
shorter. Meanwhile, the bus is looking good
to them.
A new report confirms this trend and of-
fers reasons that millennials — we’re talking
14- to 31-year-olds — seem less drawn to the
automobile thing. They’re sure not singing
car songs as the baby
boomers did. No “lit-
tle Deuce Coupe,” no
“G.T.O.,” no “Hot Rod
Lincoln.”
But the report, by
the U.S. Public Interest
Research Group and
the Frontier Group,
misses what I see as the
biggest factor.
Driving is no longer
a coast down the great
American open road. It’s become a pain and
a drag — drag as in “a boring or tiresome
thing.”
From 2001 to 2009, the average number
of miles driven by 16- to 34-year-olds fell by
an astounding 23 percent. There are eco-
nomic reasons, for sure.
The Great Recession whacked millenni-
als especially hard in the job area. They are
therefore shorter of cash — and less likely to
get married, have kids and pursue other ac-
tivities conducive to car ownership than pre-
vious generations at their age.
They’ve also shown a greater passion for
living in urban or otherwise walkable com-
munities. These are neighborhoods where
automobiles are not the only way to get
around and at least remnants of a public
transportation system survive.
Our gadgets make it all easier. Millenni-
als lead in using apps to car share (Zipcar) or
summon a ride (Uber, Lyft, Sidecar) with
minimum hassle. Other apps quickly display
public transit options, connections and
schedules. And time not spent behind the
wheel of a car is time freed for texting, email-
ing, tweeting and whatever.
What really killed the American love af-
fair with the car? The hell of American driv-
ing.
Oh, there still exist some heavenly road
experiences in this country: drives at dawn
through West Coast wine country, two-lane
dreamscapes in rural regions sprawl has yet
to wreck.
But the typical car experience takes place
in the exhaust of suburban congestion. What
younger adults recall as children is being
strapped in the back seat as Mom lurched
the vehicle through a soulless crudscape of
drab chain retailing.
They’ve done the six lanes of stop-and-go
— bored out of their skulls and worried
about Mom’s frazzled nerves.
They don’t want to do this anymore. And
if it means sharing a 700-square-foot apart-
ment downtown, so be it. The more young
people — or any people — establish their
nests downtown, the faster America’s long-
suffering town centers will mend.
Something in the report did evoke a
smile. We’re in think tank land, which
means the most elemental activities take on
tech-speak labels. In this case, it’s the refer-
ence to walking as another “mode” of trans-
portation.
Since the caveman, walking’s been the
default — with every other way of getting
around being the instead-of.
But perhaps the authors are right. Per-
haps locomotory momentum has become
just another option on the multiple choice:
“Do I put on shoes today or strap on the jet
pack?”
At least they didn’t refer to sidewalks as
the “pedestrian interface.”
The mission going forward is to build up
the public transportation system to serve
Americans’ changing needs. Conservatives
of yore framed public transit as a devious
plot to force Americans from their five-bed-
room spreads to apartment houses along
bus lines.
But a bus-and-rail boom was not the big
thing accelerating multifamily home con-
struction during the Great Recession and
beyond. It was market forces, guys.
And the Americans leading that market
are the millennials, yearning to hang up the
car keys.
FROMA HARROP is a columnist for
The Providence Journal. Her column is
distributed by Creators Syndicate Inc.
Letters to the editor
ELECTION LETTERS
The Denton Record-Chronicle wel-
comes letters to the editor pertaining to the
Nov. 4 general election. All regular submissi-
on rules apply. Letters concerning statewide
races and local propositions on the Nov. 4
ballot must be received in this office by 5
p.m. Friday, Oct. 24. None will be published
after Friday, Oct. 31.
Deja vu all over again
It looks like Darth Lee Jackson and his
minions strike again. Our Denia neighbor-
hood will be losing Sack & Save, our neigh-
borhood grocery.
The University of North Texas is taking
our only close community service grocery
store and post office and replacing it with a
UNT Community Services Center where
you can’t buy groceries, send mail or get ac-
tual neighborhood services.
I am also concerned with the use of emi-
nent domain to force the sale of the proper-
ty. Guess who will be next when they decide
they really do need commercial services on
our side of the freeway for their proposed
convention center and hotel?
We already know UNT’s opinion of our
neighborhood.
SUBMISSIONS
Letters for publication must include the writer’s
signature, address and telephone number.
Authorship must be verified before publication.
The Record-Chronicle reserves the right to edit
letters for length. Letters should be typed or
legibly handwritten and be 250 or fewer words.
We prefer e-mail submissions.
Send to: drc@dentonrc.com.
Otherwise, fax to 940-566-6888, or mail to:
Letters to the editor
P.0. Box 369
Denton, TX 76202
We continue to have problems with traf-
fic and parking for Apology Stadium games,
although we do thank our Denton police for
their valiant efforts in protecting our neigh-
borhood.
It is a shame we have to deal with a uni-
versity that has so little regard for the resi-
dents of our city. Maybe if the mighty Chan-
cellor Jackson got out of his Ivory Dallas Pal-
ace and came to earth to actually communi-
cate with us, we would feel more secure
about our future relationship.
John T. Weber, president,
Denia Area Community Group
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your commentary and your actions.
Jonah
Goldberg
Clinton
Democrats
making a
comeback
emocrat Alison Lundergan Grimes is
■ running for U.S. Senate in the great
state of Kentucky. She is a woman of
conviction, of substance, of principle. “I’m
not an empty dress,” she insists, “I’m not a
rubber stamp, and I am not a cheerleader! I
am a Clinton Democrat.”
I’m old enough to remember when “Clin-
ton Democrat” had a fairly specific meaning.
Back when Bill Clinton
first ran for president,
he did so as “new kind
of Democrat.” He de-
cried the ‘brain-dead
policies of both par-
ties.” He was so deter-
mined to dispel the im-
age of the Democrats
as being soft on crime,
he took time off from
the campaign trail to
approve the execution
of Ricky Ray Rector, a man so mentally disa-
bled that when he ate his last meal, he left
some of his pecan pie on his plate and told
guards he was saving it “for later.”
Clinton broke with his party’s racial poli-
tics by deliberately picking a fight with the
deservedly forgotten rapper Sister Souljah.
He vowed to reform welfare (though it took a
Republican Congress to get him to follow
through) and end the era of “something for
nothing” government handouts.
The Clinton Democrats were spawns of
the Democratic Leadership Council, a
proudly centrist, pro-business and hawkish
(by liberal standards) outfit within the Dem-
ocratic Party, which is why left-wing Demo-
crats often distrusted and occasionally de-
spised it. Jesse Jackson said DLC stood for
“Democrats for the Leisure Class” and rid-
iculed it as a “Southern white boys club.”
The DLC closed up shop in 2011, in large
part because the Democratic Party has
moved so far to the left (a fact repeatedly
confirmed by Pew and Gallup surveys show-
ing that Democrats favor activist govern-
ment more than they used to and are much
more comfortable calling themselves liberals
than they were even a decade ago).
So it’s interesting that Grimes, and a
number of other Democrats, are calling
themselves “Clinton Democrats.” Grimes
goes so far as to insist, “I’m not Barack Oba-
ma.” She won’t even say whether she voted
for Obama in 2008 or 2012, invoking her
constitutional right to ballot secrecy — a
right she eagerly waives to tell people she
supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries.
Now it’s obviously true that Bill Clinton
did not like empty dresses, unless he was the
one emptying them, but I don’t think that’s
what Grimes means by “Clinton Democrat.”
So what does she mean? When asked, she
said that being a Clinton Democrat involves
“growing the middle class the right way.”
‘As we saw under President Clinton’s ten-
ure,” she explained, “especially when you in-
crease the minimum wage, you actually help
to expand the middle class.” On another oc-
casion, she said, “We all know what being a
Clinton Democrat is all about... it’s about re-
membering what President Clinton said in
his campaign in 1992 — it’s the economy, stu-
pid!”
The only serious response to this has to
be, “Huh?”
While it’s true that Clinton raised the
minimum wage, few economists would ar-
gue it had much to do with the booming
economy of the 1990s. More to the point:
Obama has been campaigning relentlessly to
increase the minimum wage. (I’d also note
that “the economy, stupid” was James Car-
ville’s phrase, not Clinton’s).
In fact, when Obama recently declared
that his policies were “on the ballot” in No-
vember, he was explicitly referring to a mini-
mum-wage hike.
In other words, Grimes is running against
Obama’s policies while supporting Obama’s
policies. She just doesn’t want to say so be-
cause Obama is unpopular and Hillary Clin-
ton is popular.
And that raises another intriguing ques-
tion: Is Hillary Clinton a Clinton Democrat?
Left-wing writer Joshua Micah Marshall
concluded in 2001 that she wasn’t when
Clinton was in the Senate. Clinton opposed
the DLC agenda on almost every front. And
as first lady, it was widely believed that she
wasn’t a centrist but a voice for the left in her
husband’s administration.
Indeed, most histories suggest that Bill
only reclaimed the center in the mid-’90s be-
cause Hillary’s health-care scheme (the pre-
cursor to Obamacare) was seen as too left-
wing.
This lent weight to the theory that Bill
himself wasn’t so much a principled centrist
as a shrewd opportunist who went wherever
the polls took him. (This was the man, after
all, who consulted polls to decide where he
would go on vacation.)
So maybe Grimes really is a Clinton Dem-
ocrat.
JONAH GOLDBERG is editor-at-large
of National Review Online. His column
is distributed by Tribune Content Agen-
cy.
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Parks, Scott K. Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 111, No. 80, Ed. 1 Tuesday, October 21, 2014, newspaper, October 21, 2014; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1124685/m1/4/?q=%22~1~1~1%22~1&rotate=270: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .