From the Norristown Times Herald. I wonder if anyone from the Morrisville Borough Council or the Morrisville School Board would attend or host a similar conference right here at home.
Event to address suburban issues
CARL ROTENBERG, Times Herald Staff, 09/27/2008
NORRISTOWN - The problems of ever-increasing school budgets, crumbling water and sewer infrastructure and blighted housing in the Philadelphia suburbs will be addressed Sunday afternoon in a unique "First Suburbs" public forum at St. Patrick's R.C. Church.
The 4 to 6 p.m. public program will feature Gov. Ed Rendell with 600 elected and appointed officials from Montgomery, Chester, Bucks and Delaware counties. It is free and open to the public, but requires pre-registration.
A coalition of clergy and public officials organized the agenda to address problems specific to the first-ring suburbs adjacent to Philadelphia.
John McKelligott, the former school board president of William Penn School District in eastern Delaware County, will talk about reducing unfunded state and federal mandates for local school districts while increasing the funding base for schools.
"This is about fighting blight and preventing blight in the older suburbs. One prime issue are the financially burdensome school districts that cost more than the residents can pay," McKelligott said. "The schools need to be renewed to attract new residents."
McKelligott praised Rendell's education budget for making the school funding system "reasonable and equitable."
"We need to proceed with this school financing going forward," he said. "We need to diminish the excessive property tax burden on older communities."
McKelligott argued that because school taxes are a big chunk of the total tax burden it inhibits township government from creating innovative programs.
"The First Suburbs program will present our needs and our petitions to significant state legislators and public officials," McKelligott said.
Several area state representatives are slated to attend the forum.
State Rep. Jay Moyer, R-70th Dist., said he was in agreement with the First Suburbs agenda and will attend.
"I'm in synch with what they want to do. The revitalization of Norristown is one of my top priority items," Moyer said.
"On the school finance reform, I was proud to vote for the additional $1.5 million for the Norristown Area School District," Moyer said. "We changed the formula around and the governor agreed."
Moyer will support a $100 million earmark from the federal government for water and sewer repairs in Pennsylvania.
"I've been working with (Sen.) Arlen Specter's office on this," Moyer said.
David Forrest, the Norristown Municipal Administrator, is looking forward to the forum.
"The aim of the project is to bring all the community leaders together to identify the challenges we all have in common and ask our legislative leaders to support us in addressing those challenges," Forrest said.
"We've gotten over 400 people who have pre-registered," Forrest said. "We're expecting at least 200 on Sunday who have not registered yet."
Father William Murphy of St. Patrick's Church, said the church hierarchy had decided to host the event "because it will bring together people of different faiths and anyone interested in the welfare of Norristown."
Montgomery County Commissioner Joseph M. Hoeffel III, state Rep. Lawrence Curry, D-154th Dist., and eight state senators and representatives from neighboring districts will attend the forum.
The William Penn Foundation and several charitable organizations are sponsoring the forum.
"After this convention we'll come away with a work plan to put this into action," said Alison Murawski, the communications manager of Good Schools Pennsylvania. "We will see more gatherings of this organization and discussions on how we will roll out this agenda."
Sunday, September 28, 2008
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2 comments:
No no no no no! This article has it all wrong. We need to get rid of the schools and their crushing tax burden to keep all the people who are here here. And by "keep all the people who are here here", I mean the "good" long-time residents who agree with the likes of the current school board majority, or if they do disagree, have the decency to shut up about it, suffer in silence, and keep their views to themselves. That's how you really go about revitalizing a town.
From today's Phila. Inquirer. It's not so much a Republic/Democrat thing here in Morrisville, but I believe the frame game is alive and well here. Can you think of some examples?
Chris Satullo: Republicans excel at playing the frame game
By Chris Satullo
Inquirer Columnist
He who frames the debate wins the debate.
This is the heart of modern American politics. This is why the Republican Party wins more elections than its governing record would seem to justify.
What does it mean to frame the debate? It involves something deeper than the shadings known as spin.
Spin dances across the terrain; framing defines it.
Win the framing war, and it's easier to spin even the most uncomfortable facts. Lose this war, and you forever slip, slide, and fumble uphill towards entrenched positions.
You are, to put it another way, a Democrat.
What is framing, and why does it matter so?
First, it's an essential human activity. The world is too vast, volatile and various for us to take it all in. We need to sort and cull data.
Second, it's an essential political skill. How does it work? Well, consider three common meanings of the verb to frame. Each has a political corollary.
Framing a house: A house's wooden skeleton defines its basic shape and size, while allowing for design variety inside.
Political framing means shaping a master narrative into which you fit your smaller, ad hoc issues. At this, Ronald Reagan was a great American master. We still live inside the core narrative he framed about American renewal through strength, moral clarity and reluctant government. This is what Barack Obama meant when he praised Reagan's political achievement - an achievement he would like to match and replace.
Framing the photo: When you use a camera, you shape how others see the scene you shoot. You select the angle, put certain elements in sharp focus, relegate others to a fuzzy background, and shunt still others outside the frame altogether.
So it is with political issues. Whoever builds the frame through which the public sees an issue gains an advantage. And in politics, frames are built out of language.
George Lakoff is a linguist who had a brief vogue among Democratic operatives after the 2004 election. In books such as Don't Think of an Elephant, he explored how conservatives frame issues to their advantage. As a political guru, Lakoff proved inept, but his basic premise was sound: Words matter, and they work on subterranean as well as conscious levels.
Take the phrase tax relief, a favored Lakoff example. What does one need relief from? A burden. The phrase dictates that taxes be seen as an onus to be lifted, not an essential act of a mature government. In any debate framed as "Do you support tax relief?" only one answer wins. Yes, I do.
Framing a person: In this legal usage, a frame discards, invents or arranges facts to indict a culprit.
In politics, it involves the quest to pin blame: Who lost Vietnam? Who lost control of our streets? Who caused the deficit? Who let 9/11 happen? Who failed New Orleans? Who enabled the mortgage meltdown?
Such framing battles go to the swift and shameless. Tab a villain and you force the other guy to play defense. Harp on small facts that support your case, while pooh-poohing big ones that don't.
Each side does this feverishly. Republicans do it better.
Think this is all just semantics? Our use of words, Lakoff argues, actually rewires our brains, making them more receptive to messages that travel established neural pathways, and hostile to messages that must forge new paths.
This is why facts bounce off frames. We hate it when a fact challenges an entrenched mental frame. We resist, we refuse.
For years, conservatives have deftly pounded home frames that imply a sharp character advantage for them over liberals.
Sarah Palin is such a hit with social conservatives because, compared to wooden John McCain, she's a whiz at invoking their favorite culture-war framings: conservatives' steadfast moral clarity vs. liberals' weak-kneed addiction to nuance; real people vs. arrogant experts; small-town goodness vs. big-city perfidy; doers vs. talkers.
Palin's Twin Cities triumph was an object lesson in how conservatives try to exploit the power of framing to enable cultural resentments to trump economic ones.
Democrats lose elections for lots of reasons. Too much corruption. Too many backward-looking solutions. But a top reason is their relative ineptitude when they try their hand at framing.
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