I’m glad to report that last night (Sept. 13, 2021) Evanston’s City Council voted 5-4 against a moratorium on permits for internal ADUs (separate apartments) if the property is not owner-occupied. If that sounds like gobbledygook, it is. That’s the problem with trying to micro-manage human behavior through zoning. It’s also the problem with proceduralism […]
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In a corrupt, confused, and outdated political system, implementation is always the hardest part of good public policy. I think this is why Evanston and other U.S. governmental units are having such public trust problems these days. In this situation, I find it helpful to spend time bouncing back and forth between the nitty-gritty — […]
As a 70-year old Midwestern secular Jew, born feminist, there have been surprising moments in my intellectual and political life where my “progressive, left” perspective has come face-to-face with the “conservative, right” viewpoint, as if we were standing in the same place. This has made me wonder if the human political spectrum is actually a circle, […]
Public trust issues are compounding fast in Evanston and it’s hard to make sense of everything — especially when officials (staff and elected) are playing “cover my ass”. On the other hand, we all still have to keep plugging along on City business — for example, deciding how to spend the American Rescue Plan […]
On July 16, 2021, current elected officials and residents first learned of a long-standing complaint by female lakefront staff of sexual harassment by male lakefront staff (including supervisors). From a public trust point of view, there were additional egregious problems:— Although City staff received a petition signed by 50+ women in July 2020, no one […]
For this newsletter, I only have one Evanston news item to share (Wild Onion Market). But there’s a lot of important national news with (a) local connections, (b) local impact, and (c) local actionability — with lots of interconnections among the areas of Money, Banking, Food, Farms, and Democracy. Two items have action deadlines. I hope […]
I just got great news from Ken Pentel in Minnesota (Ecology Democracy Network), who has been working on one of the two bills that U.S. Ilhan Omar (MN) is packaging as Establishing a 21st Century Economy for All — Support the GPI Act and SUPPORT Act. According to Ken, the GPI Act and the SUPPORT Act will be […]
Fossil fuel is fuel made out of fossils — long dead and buried organic organisms, plant and animal. Before it became fuel — oil, coal, natural gas — what was it? Before people started using it for fuel, what purpose did it serve in the cosmos? What was the meaning of its presence? How did […]