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Mayor
and City Council Speech given October 6th 2004 at 7:00 P.M.
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Esteemed members of municipal government
for the City of Elkton,
ladies and gentlemen of the audience, I’d like to address this august body tonight on the matter of the blight on our
community known as the Big Elk Creek.
We have had the sorry misfortune to live
on Howard St. for the past year and over the course of that year, we have
been forced to flee from our home repeatedly, with every rain. We have had to take refuge in our car and sleep in the
parking lot of the Country Pride restaurant, to avoid these incessant floods caused by the Big Elk Creek.
The last flooding caused by the creek coming
over it’s banks on September 28thof this year, destroyed four motorcars we’ve been told, and did immeasurable
damage to businesses on both Bridge and Howard Streets. The Big Elk Creek is
costing our business owners and our citizens thousands and thousands of dollars. I
need not point out to you, this is disastrous for own tourist trade and our municipal tax base, as we cannot levy taxes on
empty shops and tax non-existent tourists.
Could not the Big Elk Creek be dammed
by the Pennsylvania border, to get around interstate red tape or at the very
least, flood walls be built on Bridge and Howard Streets to protect our homeowners and businesses located in the most flood-prone
parts of the city? Before you say the cost would be prohibitive, think of the
losses our citizens suffer every time the Big Elk Creek floods, and the revenue the floods cost this city.
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Speech
for National Homeless Persons Memorial Day of December 21st 2004
Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand
before you tonight as one who was homeless in my youth in New York City, so I do understand the plight of the homeless and know what I
am talking about.
Part of what is creating the
ever-expanding number of homeless people in the USA may indeed
be drug addiction and alcoholism. Another part of it may be mental illness and
physical handicaps that prevent people from finding jobs. However, I believe
the major cause of homelessness today is the cost of rent and buying real estate, combined with the fact that America
really has no large, unskilled, non-union, blue-collar work force anymore.
Therefore, in order to solve
the plight of the homeless we must do two things :( 1.) Making renting and buying homes affordable and ( 2.) Then revive America’s
heavy industry. To do the first, we need to introduce legislation at the Federal
and State levels to institute caps on apartment rent followed by “Universal Rent Control” everywhere across the
nation. That will force landlords to play fair with tenants. To achieve the second, we must abolish Labour Unions, so companies will stay in this country. Then a commission should be formed to study and revive the local heavy industry, whatever that was in the
past, so that large numbers of unskilled, blue-collar workers could be trained and employed rapidly. In Zanesville, Ohio and Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania, where I used to live, that would be potteries and coal mines. Here in Baltimore that would be shipping.
As I see it, this will
not only curb homelessness but it will also help get America
working again. Isn’t that what we all really want, a chance to earn a decent
living and live decently in a vital, living, healthy country?
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