Tavares, FL Updated Nov. 14, 2017 Created Oct. 24, 2017 by Vance Jochim
The short link to this page is: https://tinyurl.com/DemocratCityDangers
Overview
Most political discussions are about national politics and the two parties and candidates.
But this blog focuses on mostly local government and politics, favoring the conservative/non-establishment Republican viewpoint.
So, below are some sections to ponder. This is a running list, which will be updated or "organized" later.
Updated Nov. 7, 2017 with many more items at end. Issues are not in a particular order but will be re-organized later. Some items expanded on Nov. 14.
Liberal / Democrat Actions Implemented at Cities and Counties if controlled by Democrats/Rinos
Liberals vs Conservatives - Democrats will Implement these Practices if they control a city
Implement Sanctuary City policies, preventing deportation of illegal immigrants who could be rapists, murderers, criminals. The massive fires in California were apparently caused by illegal immigrants protected by Sanctuary Implementations. HERE is a Tampa Bay Times Nov. 14, 2017 op-ed by Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran on reasons why Sanctuary cities should be banned in Florida. (added Nov. 14, 2017) HERE is a 7-minute debate about sanctuary cities between Tucker Carlson and the Mayor of sanctuary city Albany, NY. Tucker asks if the Albany police cooperate with the Feds to hand over a captured bank robber, why don't they cooperate and hand over people violating US immigration laws?
Ban and remove “objectionable” but historic statues like Confederate Generals
Support ethnic (Black Lives Matter) and violent groups (Antifa) over police.
Allow unfunded pensions to support union employees and deferring increased benefits like retiree health insurance.
Practice Cronyism and Corruption rather than transparent decisions
Implementation of EXPENSIVE Agenda 21/2030 practices like Complete Streets, less parking, high density buildings.
Shift of road funds to “walkable” areas, bike and train facilities which are not self-funding.
Mandate inclusion of expensive bicycle paths without ridership surveys or funding, siphon road tax funds for maintenance by regulation, not referendums.
Expand protections for “endangered” plants, animals delaying construction projects, increasing development cost and reducing property rights. Even the City of Astatula, FL's project to build a city park was delayed substantially because they could not afford to deal with dealing with endangered plants and relocation of gopher tortoises.
Prohibit activities related to guns or right to bear arms. The Eustis City Council tried that by trying to prohibit a gun dealer from offering a gun for a charity raffle at a table at a city event. Local City efforts to control guns resulted in the Florida legislature passing a statute prohibiting local gun control rules.
Eliminate prayer in meetings, allowing only moment of silence. May not stand for pledge of alleginance. In October, 2017, the Lake County P&Z committee mysteriously dropped prayers from the agenda until a member demanded reinstatement of at least a moment of silence.
Manipulate local voting or allow illegal aliens to vote (several cities in MD doing it now). Allow liberal groups to confront voters arriving at voting sites like Groveland did in 2016. Fortunately, conservatives were voted in during the Nov. 2017 elections to switch control of the city away from liberals.
Invite refugee agencies to bring in unvetted Syrian and other uneducated refugees that live on welfare. Many times there are no public hearings or notice when a new refugee office is opened and all of a sudden, 100 uneducated Muslim refugees show up. This is not much of a factor yet in Lake County, but the problem is growing in Orlando.
Shift local government taxpayer funding to favorite liberal “charities”. Lake County and many cities allocate some funds to favored charities. You have to watch to see who gets the funding.
Reduce educational or work experience requirements for employees and vendors to meet various "social justice" goals.
Require vendors to meet liberal conditions to qualify for work, such as meet defined hiring percentages, wage requirements. The problem is that not enough qualified workers exist in the target groups so the ones hired are sub-standard.
Democrats have links to violent groups like Antifa or in Orlando, Knights for Socialism, which is controlled (according to Trevor Loudon) by “American’s largest Marxist Assoc., the Democratic Socialists of America". The Chair of the DSA in Orlando is Adam Whitmer, Regional Field Director for the Florida Democratic Party at UCF. Antifa is often funded by Democratic related labor unions. In Portland, OR, there was Antifa training provided by the SEIU Local union. SEIU is the same union representing Lake County School District service workers. (Trevor Loudon’s new video “America Under Siege: Antifa”: “Antifa is brainwashed communists trying to kill people. Another group is BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) - The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights. It is an American left-wing militant group that organizes protests and litigation to achieve its aims”. (Wikipedia)
Liberals follow the Cloward Piven strategy of causing chaos and increase cost of government so that the public turns to government and gives them power to “fix” the problem. Obama was a practitioner of Cloward & Piven.
You can identify liberals by their attempt to shout down critics using name calling and failure to use logic or facts. They use namecalling because they cannot debate facts. Names can include "racist", "Islamophobes", etc. A related practice to this is to find witnesses to accuse a conservative opponent of crimes, whether "touching", sexual, cronyism or other foggy transgressions. The trend is Republicans will quit, but if a Democrat is accused of such practices, they never resign and the press leaves them alone. When you see such tactics, look to see if they actually can debate with any FACTS.
Liberals that control a city can order the Police to stand down to ignore violent protests (Baltimore, Berkeley, and many cities where Antifa violence occurred because the police intentionally did not step in to reduce violent conflict). Thus a good indicator of a Democrat controlled city is when police refuse to control crowd violence.
Liberals who control a city can act to eliminate criticism by reducing public input, transparency and oversight. Critics can be denied records access, be given documents without explanations designed to confuse critics. Look for city leaders who invoke rules like less than 3-minutes for public input, time limits on total input, invoking some new rule to cutoff feedback, etc.
Democrats implement the original Communist Objectives: http://www.fiscalrangers.com/45communist-objectives.html
Encourage non-English refugees/illegal immigrants which runs up costs to teach their kids in a separate language.
Democrats who are Jews support cooperation with Muslims, even though, worldwide, Muslims publicly state plans to kill Jews, destroy Israel, etc.
Democrats can shift maintenance & capital funds to increased union or employee hiring, wages, benefits (LCSD). This was done by union controlled Board and Administration in the Lake County School System where $20+million of capital funds for needed school construction was shifted to pay wage increases. Then they found they didn't have enough money to construct new schools mandated to deal with population growth, thus shifted school boundaries and relocated students to other less desired schools.
Increase low income residents’ reliance on government freebies vs workfare and self-reliance. Funding of low income housing, taxpayer employment subsidies result, rather than emphasizing programs to get education and training to be employable.
City leaders can replace a national patriotic day, like Austin, TX which changed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day.
Expand “Home Rule” to implement questionable regulations based on political motivations. See above for the example of gun control issues. Another is to set rules mandating certain types of trees on homeowner properties, or demanding permits when trees are removed.
Liberals could increase minimum wages to a non-sustainable $15 while ignoring economic studies showing many workers would be replaced with automation. Result is automation & robots or closing of many restaurants due to increased minimum wages AND Obamacare costs.
Liberal officials may try to set local rules to benefit impractical, politically correct electric cars and subsidize them with taxpayer funds. Notice the parking spaces in downtown Tavares dedicated to electric car charging, and the complete lack of cars using them.
Taxpayer funds may be used to subsidize non-competitive energy sources like solar panel roofs or wind energy. Examples are the “PACE” finance programs to pay for solar roofs which may not last as long as the payments, and local government is responsible for collecting annual payments via property tax bills. (Orlando area and other cities have PACE programs). There are many LOCAL solar roof scams being operated (not just federal solar farm scams like Solyndra).
Liberal officials could require construction follow hugely expensive LEED or Green construction. The result is much higher cost for the construction just to "feel good".
Liberals will HIDE favored external costly programs from visibility by embedding them into the budget as a separate line item, instead of a budget line where they have to compete for justification like “Community Groups”.
Liberals will modify County or City Comprehensive Land Use Plans to remove flexibility by mandating actions like endangered PLANT species protections by inclusion of “SHALL” requirements, meaning the agency can be SUED for not implementing “SHALL” statements. This provides a living to favored liberal providers as well as liberal attorneys who sue over ignored “SHALL” statements. Another example is reduction of property rights by saying a residential lot “SHALL” have 40% open space. At an Oct. 10, 2017 meeting of the Lake County Commissioners, a planning staff member told a residence owner if they didn’t like a proposed nearby property density change, they should hire an attorney to “work with the staff” about their concerns. Another example is the County SHALL “maintain… corridors for wildlife movement in coordination with adjacent properties” which precludes use of property for many uses, AND results in COSTLY bridges like those mandated for the Wekiva Parkway just so animals can cross under the highway. “Wildlife corridors” is a method of reducing property rights and increasing taxpayer costs.
Welfare & Unemployment not capped: Liberals will buy votes and spend more taxpayer funds by creating and extending any type of welfare or benefit for non-working people rather than cap the benefit or require workfare. This YouTube rant describes anger at job-hunters who turn down jobs to keep getting benefits. Liberals let welfare recipients turn down jobs, or do things to prevent hiring such as get tatoos. https://youtu.be/FYyxGrhGy1A
Welcoming Communities or Cities or Counties are front liberal groups organized by “Welcoming America” to smooth way to bring in uneducated, legal or illegal immigrants and refugees. Once Democrats control a city, they implement programs to bring in “inclusion and long-term economic and social integration of newcomers”. Thus they create a drain on taxpayer funds to subsidize and attract immigrants. It would be one thing if it was all privately funded, but they end up using taxpayer funds to budget support systems, including welfare, etc. This is a front group to bring in new immigrants who are “educated” and indebted to Democrats. The result is cities that are inundated with refugees who run up social and benefit costs. Here is one article about the conflict it has caused in a city like St. Cloud, MN which has over 300 refugees. This is the result of the St. Cloud City Councilman’s attempt to restrict refugees – The Council voted 6-1 to be a “Welcoming City” which is a liberal movement.
Additions added on Nov. 7, 2017
Liberals take actions with name calling and regulations to silence viewpoints they do not like. Muslims try to implement blasphemy laws to punish those who criticize Islam. “Antifa and the highly discredited Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) have something in common. They both exist to silence viewpoints they deem unacceptable” (Trevor Loudon article HERE). SPLC creates “Hate maps” of conservative groups and calls them Hate groups, but leave out Antifa and aggressive Communist groups and most Terror connected Muslim groups. The liberal news media then publishes the SPLC Hate List without balanced research. At the local level, liberal Mayors can take action to cut off dissent, like limiting public input time to less than the customary 3-minutes. They could interrupt citizen dialog with arbitrary actions to end debate. They can cancel or hold offsite meetings to disrupt opposition. They can refuse to take videos, live videos, or post audio recordings online.
Liberals take campaign contributions and support from anti-conservative groups aligned with Communism like the SEIU and NEA unions. Then they implement liberal policies favored by those groups like increasing employee wages and benefits beyond the market without adequate funding. For instance, the Lake County, FL schools, controlled by union favored Board members, gave out raises by siphoning $20+million “legally” over several years of a recession from funds intended for building schools and maintenance. Now the safety and health of students is at risk due to roof leaks, failed air-conditioning, etc. since there are no capital funds to rebuild facilities.
Liberals recite inaccurate emotion driven “facts” constantly, such as “the rising seas” or “global warming” or “climate change” as reasons to justify an action, and then cite debunked facts (see our page debunking liberal "climate change" arguments HERE).
Solving conflict by Appeasement – Liberals cave in to emotional demands without facts and implement rules that penalize 99.5% of the public to appease a small liberal minority like transgenders. Each of these actions create a beachhead for further appeasement demands.
Setting quotas to create “equality” – Liberals will specify quotas for contracts, employees, etc. without regard to competence or objective facts in order to get votes.
Healthcare service funding is re-distributed from taxpayers to those who don’t work for it. But, non-favored groups like elders get rationed health care (death panels?) Healthcare is also used as a giant reward system to mandate coverages for many services rather than let the consumer save money by deselecting un-needed coverages like birth control coverage paid by men, and Chiropractic care funding should not be mandatory for those who don’t believe in it or need it.
Democrats push costly smart meters for “sustainability” ( a nonsense word), especially if they are a City Council that owns a local electric utility. Leesburg, FL did that and it was a boondoggle, costing rate payers millions more than promises from supporters.
Democrats support environmental waste processing boondoggles that are not economical, and the cost basis changes after long term contracts are in place. An example is the waste processing system implemented by Lake County, FL years ago where promised income from electricity generated by burning waste was not realized when not enough waste could be found locally. The one sided contract required the County to provide a minimum waste level, so they had to buy it from outside the county and truck it in. Then, the contract also was one sided, because once the 20-year period ended, the County did not retain ownership of the waste processing plant. Only Democrats or insider Republicans who benefit would sign such bad deals.
Democrats on local government City Councils and other agencies downplay religion & values to reduce cultural affiliations that would stand up to them. The result for cities is elimination of prayers at meetings, and new laws that require government agencies to allow atheists and other “religions” like Satanists to give prayers if prayers are allowed at meetings. By focusing on hate towards organized religions and values, they divide the public and it results in angry atheists like the one who killed 26 at church in Texas. The result for School Districts is acceptance of clubs indoctrinating kids to be anti-religious or pro LGBT, plus elimination of prayers (values) in schools. Just last week, at the end of Sept., 2017, a member of the Lake County Planning & Zoning Committee discovered the pre-meeting prayer was removed from the agenda without notice. The Chair would not disclose who asked to have it removed, so at the member’s request, a “moment of silence” was added to future agendas. We regard the addition of prayer to meetings to be a method to re-emphasize a need for values in governance, not to exclude them.
