By DR. LARRY MOSES
No one asked me but… We have been in Texas for the last two weeks. We are back in town now, after a pleasant visit with our Texas kin.
My brother-in-law Bill is a farrier and an equestrian who has competed on the international level. He hitched up his competition team and took me for a ride through the backcountry of Texas.
We ran across a group of hog hunters; two young couples, who had killed one hog and were on the hunt for others. The young man explained that they hunt the hogs down with dogs and then jump in and stab them with a knife.
I explained to the hunter that gunpowder had been invented. His girl friend said that they were aware of that; however, the use of a gun would take all the fun out of the hunt.
You got to like a girl who finds hunting hogs with a knife a good date; after all, it was Valentine’s Day.
Now before you animal lovers storm the offices of the Moapa Valley PROGRESS, let me clarify the fact that this is not your lovable porky pig we are talking about here. The feral hog population of Texas has reached plague proportion. These hogs are destroying acres and acres of cultivated farmland, golf courses, and national parks. They are varmints and there is an open season on them.
Speaking of pork, Belva and Bill took us to Decker’s, a local restaurant, where we ordered a pork chop dinner. It was a thick cut chop that was grilled and was the best I have had in long time.
When we raved about how good it was, Belva told us to wait until Friday noon. We went to Perry’s in Katy, Texas. Their Friday noon special was a pork chop dinner for $10.99. The chop was anywhere from six to eight inches high. It was more like a small bone-in pork roast. It was delicious but we took most of it home and ate on it for days.
I also spent a couple of days plying Bill’s farrier trade. One day we worked on seven horses.
Well, when I say “we”, I mean Bill and his assistant. I sat in the truck and read Fannie Flagg’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. It is a great read but watching all that hard work sent me home exhausted.
No one asked me but… It is great to be back in the valley. All one needs to do is travel through a major metropolis to appreciate the slower paced traffic of Moapa Valley.
Moving through El Paso is no problem. You just get in the left lane and stay there for twenty miles of city traffic.
But San Antonio is a nightmare. You are continually changing lanes to get to the right exit to move through one loop or another as you change from I-10 to 1-35 and back to I-10. The only good thing about this is that Texans allow you to change lanes at the last minute and don’t seem to resent giving up space. It may have been the Nevada plate or the grey hair.
We stopped in Phoenix on the way home to see my grandson play baseball. While the weather was great, the traffic was crazy. My grandson lives and plays in Mesa but one cannot tell where Mesa begins and where Glendale ends; it is all one big megaplex named Phoenix that makes Los Angeles look rural.
We took North Shore road home from Boulder City and it was therapeutic.
No one asked me but… The Clark County School Board is debating the issue of asking for an extension of the 1998 increase in the property tax rate on the 2014 ballot. However, the Chief Financial Officer of the District, Jim McIntosh, is calling it a bad idea.
In 1998, the voters agreed to raise the property taxes by 55 cents per $100 valuation for ten years. That tax has remained in place to help pay off the bonds purchased. The vote would allow the district to extend the tax increase for another 10 years and bond against it. It would generate an estimated $1.3 billion.
This is on top of the 75 cents per $100 of assessed evaluation that is now earmarked for maintenance and operation of facilities in the Clark County School District. This 75 cents generates from $800 million to $1 billion a year for facilities, depending on the valuation of property within the county. During the boom years, it generated a little over a billion dollars a year. During the recession it dropped into the $800 million category.
Growth in the Clark County School District slowed during the recession but apparently is once again on the rise. One cannot argue the need for facilities. But one can surely take issue with how some of the 1998 bond money, designated for buildings, was expended.
If you have an afternoon, go on line and find the accounting for the 1998 bond money and decide for yourself if it was spent wisely. In past columns I have listed areas where bond money was spent that did not seem to fall under the category of facilities.
When the residents rejected a request to raise property taxes by 21 cents in 2012 by a 2-1 margin, it was the first time in the nearly fifty years I have lived in Clark County that the people did not step up and support funding of schools.
While School Board Vice President Linda Young, a board member for whom I have a great deal of respect, stated that people are not convinced we are in crisis, I don’t believe that was the issue. In 2012, we were in the middle of a recession and many people were frustrated that money they voted for to go to buildings was spent on other items.
When the people see the district spending money on programs that are dumped only to turn to other expensive programs that will to be dumped, they become frustrated. Millions were spent to meet the guidelines of “No Child Left Behind”, it has been declared a failure and now we venture into another federal program called “Core Curriculum”, which will also fail and in a few years after expending millions of dollars, we will find a new fad to chase. None of these fads addresses the real problems of education, but that is a topic for another day.
Thought of the week… Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.
– Claus Moser
