Tumult near Bethlehem

It might have been reported this way:

Jerusalem, December 24

This reporter has reliable information that a miraculous event took place near Bethlehem today. Numerous shepherds in the field with their sheep report brilliant lights in the night sky. Some shepherds report seeing angels and hearing them say that the "Christ is born today in Bethlehem."

King Herod's information officer reports that all is quiet in Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

This reporter reminds the reader that the Prophet Micah wrote that the Shepherd would be born in Bethlehem. I am on my way to interview these shepherds. As news breaks, I'll keep you informed.

Crowds larger, night sky brighter

It could have been reported this way:

Bethlehem: December 19

The stir around the census continues to grow as more and more descendents of David arrive in Bethlehem for the census ordered by Emperor Augustus. Already crowded family homes strive to host more and more people each day.

Coupled with the large influx of visitors, the odd light in the night sky is disrupting the autumnal lambing season. David, an area shepherd, said, "the ewes get confused sometimes thinking it's time to graze because the night is so bright. Funny isn't it, these lambs will be used for Temple services, yet we who look after them have to be purified before we can join in the celebrations of the Feast of Tabernacles."

New light in the sky

Maybe it could have been reported this way:

Jerusalem: December 15
People in Jerusalem are all agog over the light display in the night sky. King Herod's spokesperson said that priest, scribes, and astrologers are studying the newly discovered light to find any facts about the new "star." The Scribes have been studying holy scripture and haven't found a description of this new star.

Governor Sulpicius Quirinius said, from somewhere in the field with the XXth Legion in Syria, "it appears to be a flux in the light from a previously dim star. It is of no concern to Rome."

Report from Bethlehem

Maybe it could have been this way...

Jerusalem: December 13
Small villages all across Judah are experiencing larger than normal visitors. This reporter is in Bethlehem, a small village about 6 miles south of Jerusalem. The reason for this is the imperial edict of a new census. Mathais, the person in charge, for the Roman government said, "the census will give the government a more accurate number of the people living in Judah and will be the basis of the amount of taxes due each year to Rome."

Tax collectors say that the census effort will continue through the rest of the month, and people are required to register in their tribal homeland/villages. For people who have moved from their tribal areas, it will mean, in many cases, long distance travel and trying to find lodging while completing the census procedure. Census travelers are urged to contact their relatives for living space while in Bethlehem.

Thanks to the Poll Managers

I wanted to take a moment to express thanks to the dedicated poll workers and managers for the City of Dacula and the two Gwinnett County precincts in or near Dacula. Thank you for a job well done!

For our Dacula candidates, thanks for a good clean, political campaign during the 2011 General Election. We will have a run-off election for the contested seat of Tim Montgomery on December 6, 2011. Congratulations to Susan Robinson on her uncontested race.

Most of all thanks to those who took the time to vote in the City and County elections. I know it is sometimes thought of as an imposition to have to go to two polls. I, personally, am used to it, having voted in every City and County election since I became old enough to vote. Ain't it a grand place to live--a place you can get mad because you have to visit two polling places. I think of those on our old globe that don't have a chance to voice an opinion nor shape public policy. That ought to make us mad!

Elections...Now and in the Future

On November 8, 2011, the City will hold the Municipal General Election at the Dacula City Hall. In fact, City residents have been able to vote since October 21, 2011 in this election. Gwinnett County will hold the County General Election on the same day at regular county-polling places. This article is not designed to tell you how to vote in any of these elections. However, I hope the questions raised in this blog can be considered by every voter. If you have a better plan, let your elected officials know.

On the City ballot, residents will be voting to fill two council seats, that of Timothy Montgomery which is an opposed race and that of Susan Robinson who has no opponent. Residents will also vote on two referendums about the sale of alcohol and alcoholic beverages on Sunday. If a majority of voters concur, beer and wine will be allowed to be sold on Sunday afternoons in convenience stores and grocery stores. If voters concur on the second referendum, restaurants will be able to sell mixed drinks on Sunday afternoons.

There is only one item on the 2011 County General Election. It is to decide whether or not to extend the one penny sales taxes for educational purposes—the ESPLOST question.

In 2012, Gwinnett County residents will potentially vote on several items. Scheduled currently for July, the issue of providing a new one cent sales tax for transportation improvements on a regional basis will be decided--TSPLOST.

There will be no City election in 2012, unless there are ballot questions to be determined. I know of none now.

In 2013, I assume the Board of Commissioners will vote to continue the regular SPLOST one cent sales tax. The City will have an election in 2013 to elect the mayor and two council seats.

So currently and in the two future years, residents will be asked whether or not to continue ESPLOST and SPLOST and add a new TSPLOST tax. How does a voter decide on these matters especially in a time of economic turmoil?

Will any of these tax matters solve all the problems? The answer to that is NO. A follow-up question, will affirmative votes on these matters keep the situation from further deterioration? The answer is PROBABLY. Will defeating any or all of these tax issues make matters worse? MAYBE. Finally, if these tax issues are defeated, on whom does the problem devolve? THE PROPERTY OWNER AND TAXPAYER.

Let shoot straight from the hip. The City (for that matter Gwinnett County and the Gwinnett County School Board) doesn’t have any funding that doesn’t come from taxpayers. Your contribution to funding the City of Dacula may come from property taxes, other hidden taxes that are considered fees, from paying for services you personally receive such as trash collection and the like, from sales taxes on goods and services that you pay directly, or from business taxes that you pay indirectly. Some amounts, especially for sales taxes, come from outside our community, county, and even State--not from your pocket.

All state and local governments must have a balanced budget. Only the U. S. government can create money from a printing press. How has that worked for you? Every time the President puts a new dollar in circulation, your current dollar is worth less. Hence inflation and higher prices. And since your current dollar is worth less, the need arises for more tax money at every level—just to keep pace.

So what to do in the election cycles mentioned in this article? Every voter must decide the question does the benefit outweigh the cost of the sales tax for me personally? What benefit do I receive for my 1 penny sales tax for education? Better jobs maybe for my children. Higher paying jobs, maybe. A well-educated public or the like.

So what about the TSPLOST? Many have criticized the list of projects to be funded saying it isn’t ambitious enough. And truly it will not solve all our transportation problems in our region. Take a look at the list, and determine what it means for you. Will your commute be shorter, if you work downtown? Will it make your travel in the Dacula area easier? Be aware that more than half the money dedicated from the Gwinnett County TSPLOST list, directly affects the Dacula area.

As far as the regular SPLOST (assumed for 2013), you can look at how the City is spending current funding from previously passed sales-tax votes. You can see where the money is going and how it is helping you.

As you decide how to vote in these critical elections (both City and Gwinnett County), please consider the questions raised in this article. Remember the only money that any local government has to spend on these services and problem areas is from you.

Small Business in Dacula

I appreciate the businesses that serve our residents and that are located in our City. It really takes guts to want to be an entrepreneur in these hard economic times. I want to congratulate the small business people and national companies that invest their money, time, and lives in our City.

Starting your own business is a risk. About 30% of all new businesses will fail to be profitable in the first several years of operation. But starting your own business may be an answer to the problem of unemployment or underemployment for many. Most small businesses in the nation have only one employee, the owner, who works out of the home. But even with this statistic, small business is the major employer in the nation, and I think that is true in Dacula as well.

Why then do small businesses fail? One reason is, of course, the economy. Most startup businesses are underfunded. In our economy, it is hard right now to get entrepreneurial funding from banks and financial institutions.

A business may be started for the wrong reason. The owner may underestimate the time and hard work necessary to run a business. The business might be located in the wrong place. The owner may not understand how to plan using strategic, careful methods.

There may be regulatory problems that the owner didn’t consider, or there may be major, established competition for the customers of the startup.

Simply opening a business and waiting for customers just doesn’t get it. I found this statement from statistics gathered by the Small Business Administration interesting, “No website. Simply put, if you have a business today, you need a website. Period.”

I think this means that you have to be active on the “WEB” and social media, but you also need to be active in the locality also. If you don’t have a professional looking website describing your activity, you will lose business to those businesses that do. If your business is not active in the community, your business will lose customers to those businesses that are active community participants. One way any business can begin to work the community is through the Dacula Business Association. Joining with other businesses in the community is a first step. These are people you can network with who understand meeting a payroll, employee problems, what social media means, and the need for personal time.

When it comes to the success of any business, the business owner is ultimately the “secret” to success. Setbacks in business are to be expected. How the owner approaches those with drive, determination to learn, and a positive mindset will ultimately determine success or failure of a given business.

I am always pro-business in my outlook. Businesses mean jobs. Jobs mean a more successful community. Successful communities are places people want to visit and live. Spend you dollars in the community supporting your local businesses. It means success for you too.

Have you practiced your family emergency plan lately?

Hurricane Irene passed Georgia by with not even a wisp of disaster. But you can be sure that a new emergency will arise soon. So let me suggest that this would be a good time to begin family emergency planning or, if you already have a plan, to practice it.

Emergency preparedness starts at home. You should have a personal/family disaster plan, and it should be written down and practiced. At a very minimum, you should have a family fire disaster plan.

Some things (probably not exhastive) that need to be in your plan:

• · Be prepared to exist for at least 3 days without outside help.
• · Prepare your home—secure all outside accessories—they can become missiles.
• · Prepare for electricity outages.
• · Videotape or take pictures of the contents of your home, and store them off-site.
• · If you are told to leave your home, plan beforehand where you will go.
• · Have a week’s supply of non-perishable foods for your family and pets.
• · Prepare 2-liter bottles for an emergency supply of water.
• · Make sure you have a flood-insurance rider to your homeowner’s policy.
• · Determine where the safest place in your home is for wind and water emergencies.
• · For fire emergencies, have a rally point where everyone in the house reports as they exit the house.
• · Make sure you have at least a 30-day supply of prescription drugs, ask your physician for nonperishable prescriptions for necessary drugs.
• · Stock plenty of batteries for your flashlights, radios, cameras, phone and the like.
• · As a situation develops, charge all cell phones and the like.
• · Be sure you have a battery powered or crank weather radio for warnings.
• · Locate valuable papers and put them in a safe, off-site location, or secure them in a watertight envelop to take them with you.
• · Equip you home with working smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors.
• · If your bedrooms are on a higher floor, make sure you have emergency ladders and know how to use them.
• · Determine environmental factors, such as trees overhanging your home that need to be addressed before disaster.
• Try to have an emergency supply of cash on hand, ATM won't work without electricity.
  

Having a plan is only the beginning. Family discussions and practice are needed. Some disasters are slow moving and give time to get ready. A fire in your home at 2AM is a catastrophe in the making, giving little time to act to save yourself and your family. Prepare your own plan, and have a fire drill some dark night.

It might save your life.

August Weather, Crazy Cats, Nearly deliquent tax payers

Moving from a hot, muggy July to a hot/muggy August isn’t going to be any fun at all. I don’t know about you , but I’m kind of like my neighborhood cats. I don’t want to do much on these hot days except to lay around in the shade.

I thought maybe July would be a slow month at the city, but I’ve been busy almost every day meeting with different groups and looking at the construction that is improving the city’s infrastructure. So unfortunately I haven’t been able just to laze around like the cats.

There is an old adage about death and taxes. Simply put the only two sure things are death and taxes. And we face these possibilities every day. Stretching the analogy, cats pay their taxes by chasing away (or eating) annoying creatures like chipmunks or mice, and there are a number of cat predators around like coyotes not to mention the lesser pests like ticks, fleas, and mosquitos.

Paying taxes is never pleasant. They are an inevitable part of our lives. So the other day, I took a sample of the parcels that make up the 2010 tax digest for the city. The idea was to see if the property taxes had been paid on the parcels. Since the county collects our property taxes along with the county taxes, we don’t have a good way of determining when a parcel’s taxes have (or not) been paid. So I took a sort of random sampling of the 10 tax digest parcels, looked them up on the county’s website. Guess what I found. Of the ten parcels, taxes have been paid in full on eight of the parcels. Two of the parcels have not had any 2010 taxes paid, but they are not yet considered by the tax commissioner’s office to be in default even though the taxes were fully due and payable by November 2010.

Of the $20,195 assessed by the county, $1,886 remains unpaid. Of the $2,499 assessed by the city, $194 remains unpaid. Maybe the heat got to these taxpayers, or maybe the economy.

While my survey is in no wise valid as a predictor of total tax collections, I found it interesting. Like my neighborhood cats, I find early morning and early evening the time to get things done. Yesterday evening, I saw one of the neighborhood cats running full out across the backyard. I couldn’t tell if the cat was running from a predator, chasing prey, or just being a cat.

I’m looking forward to fall, and I bet the cats are too. Maybe cooler weather will inspire our nearly delinquent taxpayers to action too.

TSPLOST Survey Request

The TSPLOST constrained list will be out in a little while. I’ve heard many different ideas about how the vote for TSPLOST might go. All of the City of Dacula suggested projects were omitted from the first unconstrained list, except for a joint Gwinnett/Dacula proposal to complete Sugarloaf Extension from GA 316 to Peachtree Industrial Boulevard near Sugar Hill.

The most needed project for the City is the replacement of the bridge over the railroad at Winder Highway and the four-lane expansion of Harbins and Dacula Roads. This system is a regional system. Harbins Road/Dacula Road collects traffic from at least three counties and constrains them at the bridge. The system provides for school traffic as well.

I’ve heard some say that they will not vote for the TSPLOST unless the improvements for Harbins/Dacula Roads and the bridge are included. I’ve heard other say that they will vote against the TSPLOST no matter what.

I wonder if readers would spend a few seconds answering a short survey on this matter? The questions to be answered are short and sweet.

Click here for the survey.

Would you be likely to vote for or against the TSPLOST based on the information you have at the present time?

Would you be more likely to vote for/against the TSPLOST if the bridge at Winder Highway were included in the constrained list?

Would you be more likely to vote for/against the TSPLOST if you knew that there are penalties for future transportation dollars if TSPLOST fails or the roundtable fails to produce a constrained list?

Would you be more likely to vote for/against the TSPLOST if some or all of the light and heavy transit projects were removed?

If you would like to provide further information beyond you survey answers, please email me at mayordacula@att.net so that I can provide the information to the appropriate folks at the County and State levels.

Weathering the Recession

Many economists suggest that the depressed state of the U.S. economy is not going to get much better for several years--maybe out to the 2014-2016 time frame. Most economists believe the economy will only get better once the U.S. starts to create more jobs. Jobs that affect our local economy are jobs that are created locally. Local jobs are created by local businesses. A strong local business community has a lot to do with the health of a community. So I ask the following question:

When is $1 more than a dollar? The answer is when you spend it in your local community.

Often your dollar, spent locally, turns over in the community about six times. Each time after the initial expenditure, some of the money in the turn over remains in the community as well. The benefit to the community is the amount of money that is kept in the community. In the six-turnover scenario, the equivalent of about $1.65 for every dollar spent remains in the community. The total impact of a dollar produced or spent in a community is measured with a multiplier. In this case the multiplier is a positive 1.65. Negative multipliers are also possible. Say you go outside your community and spend that same dollar for the same goods or services you could have spent in your community. That has a negative multiplier effect for your home community (-1.65).

Naturally, it isn’t as simple as that. Different economic sectors and different scenarios have different multipliers, and there are different employment multipliers for different sectors as well.

Let’s take a look at an example: Retailer C is coming to Dacula. They plan to build a nice building, and provide employment for about 30 workers. These will be new jobs for Dacula. Can we estimate what kind of economic impact this will have on Dacula?

Here are some assumptions. The building will cost about $500,000 and the yearly payroll will be about $550,000. Retailer C expects to have yearly sales of $1,000,0000.

2.28 is a well-established North Carolina State University multiplier for local construction. 35.9 is a well-established multiplier for new employment as a result of construction spending. So for the one time construction of Retailer C’s new store, we might expect one time new spending in the community to be about 2.28 x 500000 or $1,140,000, and new community employment to be around 35.9 x .5 = 18 new construction jobs in the community from this initial investment. If we use our guesstimate multiplier of 1.65, we can determine that Retailer C’s sales will result in keeping $1,650,000 circulating through the local community. North Carolina State University uses a multiplier of 2.04 for retailers. Using that multiplier (2.04 x $1,000,000) we calculate a figure of $2,040,000.

What’s the estimate?

Results	Money in Community	Community Employment
Initial construction	$1,140,000	18
Ongoing operations	$2,040,000	30

What can be wrong with our economic forecast? Well, the mulitpliers may be out of kilter. Estimated sales may be too little or too much. The business may fail. We haven’t included the effect of new employees moving to the community, buying new homes or renting, the effect of their wages in the community.

Lots can be wrong with economic forecasts, including the general economy of the country. But it’s better to be on the positive side of the multiplier formulas than on the negative side. The moral of the story is "keep your money in Dacula by supporting our local businesses."

In the U.S., small business generated nearly 80 percent of new jobs in the last decade. Help us grow a community. Keep your money in Dacula by supporting our local businesses. They are the job creators.