DL Open Thread: Thursday, June 6, 2024

Some Guy Clear-Cut Around Silver Lake Because…:

A legally questionable land deed and government agencies’ failure to act quickly on complaints may have led to the illegal filling of wetlands on Silver Lake in Rehoboth Beach.

Silver Lake and the adjacent Lake Comegys are glacial remnants, the Delaware Public Archives website says, as well as the only natural freshwater lakes in Delaware. There aren’t many wetlands left along the lake, but herons, egrets and other shorebirds frequent the areas where there is still shallow water, mud and vegetation. The lakes were named a State Bird Refuge in 1933.

Before that, as far back as anyone can remember, the property contained trees and what were thought to be wetlands. No one knows for sure, since the dirt was dumped on the property before any analyses could be done.

Which government agency has jurisdiction over the property is a matter of some debate.

DNREC, per usual, claims they have no jurisdiction:

More locally, Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control representatives have continually claimed the land is not in their jurisdiction, leaving the matter to the appropriate municipality or the county. The surrounding properties have Rehoboth or Dewey addresses but are outside of both towns’ municipal limits, making it a county issue.

DELDOT?:

Zolper contacted DelDOT and told them as much in July 2023, but a representative told him the agency “doesn’t normally respond to complaints of someone cutting trees/brush within our ROW.”

Nice to know.

Maybe Carney’s shadow economic development panel will provide funds for a warehouse to be built there.

Senate Rethugs Vote Against Right To Contraception.  Except for Sens. Collins and Murkowski.  Yes, the vote was designed for political purposes.  However:

The vote comes on the heels of former President Donald Trump telling a local television station that he’s “looking at” restrictions on contraception, and just ahead of the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision that ended the federal right to abortion. Trump quickly walked back his comment in a social media post, vowing never to “ban” birth control. But Democrats point to Trump’s comments as part of the broader fallout of losing Roe v. Wade, and argue that Republicans will limit access to contraception if given the chance.

Justice Thomas has been actively soliciting radical Rethugs to being suits before the Supreme Court to further restrict women’s reproductive rights:

Democrats and their progressive allies counter that the threat to birth control access is very real, at both the state and federal level. The text of the bill, for instance, cited a concurring opinion Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the 2022 Dobbs decision that the court “should reconsider” other longstanding precedents like Griswold v. Connecticut — the 1965 decision guaranteeing the right for married couples to use contraception.

Many of Trump’s policies as president made it harder to access birth control — particularly for the poor and working class — including changes to the Title X family planning program, carveouts to Obamacare’s contraception mandate and deep cuts to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. Trump allies, who have drafted a policy manifesto for him to implement should he win in November, are calling for him to reimplement those policies and go further — by rolling back insurance coverage for some forms of emergency contraception and allowing virtually any employer to refuse to cover any contraception in their health plans.

So don’t tell me this is much ado about nothing.

Yet Another Example Of Why Dems Suck.  This time, and not for the first time, NY Governor Kathy Hochul:

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York announced on Wednesday that she was shelving the long-awaited tolling plan known as congestion pricing, just weeks before it was to go into effect.

“After careful consideration I have come to the difficult decision that implementing the planned congestion pricing system risks too many unintended consequences,” Ms. Hochul said, adding: “I have directed the M.T.A. to indefinitely pause the program.”

The move angered environmentalists, transit advocates and economists, with some accusing the governor of abandoning a plan that was decades in the making for political reasons in a critical election year.

Few lawmakers could say they loved congestion pricing and the optics of taxing constituents. But the proposal was championed by economists and environmentalists alike as the solution not only to the financial woes of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs New York’s subways and buses, but also the city’s infamous gridlock.

Many key players in New York politics, from Albany to New York City, expressed dismay at the reversal, which cast the transportation authority’s finances into uncertainty.

“I’m very upset that suddenly, out of the blue, this would pop up,” State Senator Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat, said on Wednesday, adding: “If we stop congestion pricing now we’re never going to get it.”

Kate Slevin of the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit urban research and advocacy group that has championed the tolling program, called the move “a total betrayal of New Yorkers and our climate.”

“We know from the experiences of other cities that have implemented congestion pricing that public support is at its nadir right before implementation,” said Nicholas Klein, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University. “That is when the public, media and politicians panic. But time and again, we see that the sky does not fall.”

The sky, of course, would have become less polluted.  Oh, well, it’s an election year.

Israel Bombs UN School.  ‘We were targeting Hamas fighters, blahblahblah.’:

Israel bombed a UN school sheltering thousands of displaced Palestinians in central Gaza in the early hours of Thursday morning, killing at least 33 people including 23 women and children, according to hospital records and an eyewitness.

Missiles hit the second and third floors of the al-Sardi school in Deir al-Balah, where the UN said about 6,000 people were living. Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, called for an investigation into the attack, with scores also reported injured.

The Israeli military said it targeted “20 or 30” Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters who took part in the 7 October attack and were using the school as an operations centre. The military spokesperson Lt Col Peter Lerner said he was not aware of any civilian casualties.

Wonder if US weapons were used in the bombing…

What do you want to talk about?