Things Will Be Great When You're Downtown

The Christmas season is upon us hot and heavy here in the desert. I offer you pictorial evidence, the newly decorated tree here at Casa Sneed. Technically, it is upon us cold and heavy, because temperatures have dropped. Its cold by our standards anyway. 60F (18C) during the day and 30F (-1C) at night. Cold enough for me and pretty close to as cold as it ever gets here. We live in right in the city, just a block off a main thoroughfare, so neighborhood businesses are lit up. The nudie bar and the porn shop around the corner from Casa Sneed are both decorated for the season. I spied a Christmas tree in one of the 5 or 6 car lots within 2 blocks of the house. Many of the neighbors have their lights up. Only 25 days now. I had better get cracking on my shopping. Yeah, that's gonna happen. In other news, I going to start calling my fair city, Berkley by the Border. The reason is that our local government keeps getting more liberal and goofier by the month. Case in point. Our downtown area is basically a dump, like that of many American cities. The hope is that it can be rejuvenated in a big way. At the moment our downtown consists of the government offices of various sorts, a load of law offices and the small service businesses that cater to them, plus, and this is a big plus, a bunch of artists, none of note, if you ask me. We have a couple of old falling down warehouses, being used as artist studios. It goes by the name, the Warehouse District. The moniker district is generous. Dump is more appropriate. Downtown is mostly closed at night, except for the alternative music crowd. Lately, the downtown area has had a spate of housing construction and some people have moved downtown. More construction is planned, but with the housing slowdown, who knows when it will happen. Since there is no shopping or services for homeowners downtown, the pool of people willing to shell out big money to live there is limited. Our fair city has a master plan for downtown, called Rio Nuevo, or roughly New River in Spanish. It is really a taxing scheme to finance the construction of a bunch of really swell stuff downtown, none of which has actually been built thus far. Like most government projects, the drill is study, study more, scrap the plan and start over with a new study. After 10 years, they have built almost nothing, but spent a ton of money doing it. In fairness they did restore the old movie theater downtown, convert the Greyhound station to a vacant lot and tear down some other buildings. Sensing a need for some retail business downtown, the latest plan is to lure a used bookstore operation downtown. That's their big idea, a used bookstore. A giant used bookstore, but a bookstore none-the-less. Not exactly a retail magnet. Plus the bookstore guys say there isn't enough parking downtown and even if they wanted to go downtown when the lease on their current building expires in 2008, there is no building for them to go to. The chances of the city getting one ready in less than two years is zero. Oh, I nearly forgot the trolley. They have a plan to run a trolley from downtown to the University Medical Center. It will cost a zillion bucks and the potential ridership is suspect since almost no one lives downtown and how many of those who do need to get to the hospital daily? You can already take the bus from downtown to the hospital, but evidently we have money to burn. I'm also fairly sure that the medical center end of the line was pulled out of their butts. It had to go to somewhere and since the routes to places people might actually want to go to lacked the right-of-way to get the trolley there, it was the medical center or nowhere. The old buzzards behind the trolley idea weren't willing to take nowhere for a destination. Enough about the government buffoonery, in a bizarre juxtaposition, I have to work tomorrow and the lovely Mrs. Sneed is off. Lucky her and since my boss is off, I might find myself off part of the day by accident. Merle. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor