realloudoun

Only our all-Republican Loudoun Board of Supervisors could come up with the bright idea of spraying toxic chemical pesticides in a nature preserve, but their eagerness to appease the Lyme Loonies led by local wacko right-wing religious zealot and science denier Michael Farris apparently knows no bounds.

Last year, not even bothering to talk to anyone who actually knows anything about the science of Lyme disease, ticks, or how to apply pesticides safely, the Board rushed out a $10,000 contract to have nine county parks sprayed with a dangerous pesticide, hosing down a total of 196 acres including open grassy areas and ballfields — completely oblivious to the unanimous expert guidelines which state that even if you think spraying pesticides is an effective strategy to reduce human exposure to the tick-borne disease  (the evidence actually suggests it is a total waste), only a small band a few yards wide along the edges of woods ought to be sprayed (i.e., the places where ticks actually live) —  and that it is utterly pointless, as well as dangerous to humans and deadly to honeybees, to spray open areas. Had they followed the proper procedure, they would have sprayed at most 6 acres instead of 196 acres.

This year, the hit list of targeted parks includes Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve: under the contract issued last Friday, the county will be fearlessly attempting to create a nature-free cordon sanitaire by spraying along the the nature trails in this nature preserve. (The other parks to be sprayed are West Brambleton Regional Park, Claude Moore Park, Conklin Park, Franklin Park, and Philip A. Bolen Park.)

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Delgaudio presents petitions against a secret homosexual agenda, known to him alone, to corrupt our children’s innocence

You would think out of sheer self-preservation the Loudoun County Republican Party would have concluded long ago that the time had come to stop renominating Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio (R-Sterling) for elective office, given that his day job is making up stuff about the imminent takeover of the nation by “radical homosexuals.”

Delgaudio’s extremely lucrative business, which personally earns him more than $150,000 a year (not even counting the free county-paid staff time he misused to run it) is to stage ludicrous theatrical stunts in which he publicizes his “discoveries” about secret gay conspiracies (“The Radical Homosexuals infiltrating the United States Congress have a plan: Indoctrinate an entire generation of American children with pro-homosexual propaganda and eliminate traditional values from American society”) and urging those on his mailing lists (compiled by county paid staffers) to donate money to him so he can . . . stage more theatrical stunts to generate more donations.

You might also think that Delgaudio himself, currently under investigation for misappropriation of public funds and staff time, might lie low. But he was at it again the other day, Continue reading →

Last year, as we fondly recall, our all-Republican Loudoun Board of Supervisors had no sooner finished their very fraught deliberations over the next year’s budget — during which they demonstrated their great fiscal rectitude by whacking out small grants to non-profit community-based organizations — than they started doling out very generous gifts to their friends, totally outside of the budget process.

So while the Loudoun Symphony, the Master Gardeners program, and many other volunteer programs lost their small funding amid much hand-wringing over the tough need to set tough priorities and make tough spending choices, a couple of months later, without any discussion or notice, the Board turned around and laid a cool $50,000 on the Babe Ruth World Series, a pet project of big local GOP honcho Dale Polen Myers.

Youth baseball is a perfectly fine thing, but it was unclear why a single weeklong event was deemed worthy of such a fat grant at the very same time local cultural and community organizations that serve the community year round and/or bring in visitors year round were being axed on budgetary grounds. The argument, such as it was, for this act of munificence was that hosting one of the dozen “world series” that the Florida-based Babe Ruth outfit stages each year would bring in such a “return on investment” to Loudoun’s hotels Continue reading →

In continuing its philosophy that the people’s business is so much easier if the people butt out, our all-Republican Loudoun Board of Supervisors is proposing yet another one of those snappy zoning amendments they have flooded the agenda with, this one to eliminate the need for any public hearings when choosing the site for a new public school. Continue reading →

During the 2011 election campaign, there was much talk by many of the candidates about Loudoun County joining the modern universe of governance and creating an independent permanent inspector general (such as every agency of the federal government has), who could look into mismanagement, funny dealings, and improper actions by our elected officials and others.

Of course with such pressing business as covering up scandals, abusing office staff, appropriating government resources for personal enrichment, arranging sweetheart deals for generous campaign contributors, taking repeated unaccountable overseas trips at taxpayer expense, firing county employees who rocked the boat, and rewriting zoning laws to favor politically and financially connected insiders, it’s understandable that it’s taken our all-Republican Loudoun Board of Supervisors until now to finally get around to the question of creating an IG. Continue reading →