Lincolnite

It has been a while since we last saw sub-two dollar gas here in Lincoln, but it looks like some gas stations have dusted off their 1's and begun posting them today. Sure, we're just talking $1.999 and $1.989 here, but the return of the 1 is awfully refreshing. Next up: buck-fifty?

I'm not feeling very creative for today's Friday Five, so here are five anagrams related to Lincoln. Bonus points if you give me some good suggestions for future Friday Fives.

1. VODKA BONES
2. CLIMB ON A SHRINE
3. ACT TEENY, NORM
4. NEAT MAN WEPT
5. JOHN TOOK A CAN

Sorry folks, but if you plan to wait at a Star Tran bus shelter, you'll have to leave your weapons behind. New "No Weapons" stickers have popped up at bus shelters across town. I can't say it boosts my confidence in public transit to see a sticker like that as I board my bus.

I had the pleasure of witnessing the traffic signals and railroad crossing arms go berserk at 48th and Highway 2 just now. It was pretty entertaining to watch, except that I was stuck in traffic as a result. When the lights on 48th Street turned green, the crossing arms would come down. When the Highway 2 lights turned green, the arms went up. But the really fun part was that you never knew how long the green light would last. Sometimes the light on Highway 2 would only stay green for a few seconds. Long story short, within a matter of minutes traffic was backed up for blocks. I have to assume the problem was caused in part by the semi parked across the tracks and pointed south in the northbound lanes of 40th Street at Highway 2. I'm not sure how it managed to get there, nor did I get a good look at the scene as the bus drove by.

Perhaps I am missing something, but I fail to see the problem with renaming Lincoln High's football field to Pfeiff Field, after one of the school's football coaches. The argument from opponents, as I interpret it, is that a facility used by all schools should be named in a way that is relevant to all of the schools. Otherwise it implies that the facility belongs to the school on whose property it sits, and that implies inequity issues (i.e. "why does that school get a fancy football field while we get a strip of mud and weeds?"). I'm not convinced. I don't have any problem with a school having ownership over facilities on its grounds, even if the facilities are technically for the use of all schools in the district. I especially don't have a problem with it in the case of the football field at Lincoln High, which was Lincoln High's football field long, long before there were even any other schools in the district. Decades of Lincoln High-specific history are tied up in that field. Why deny that fact? Can anybody convince me otherwise?

Local business owners won't pay for it, and now it appears neither will the City Council. The "it", of course, is the extension of 50th Street from O to R. *sigh* A new Hy-Vee in the 48th and O corridor would be a nice, attractive addition to the area, especially relative to what's there now. I can understand why the City pursued the deal, and why Hy-Vee made their proposal contingent on the 50th Street extension. What irks me is how the City keeps flubbing these economic development opportunities after promoting them so heavily. John Q. Hammond's hotel evaporated; the Verizon RFP had to be scrubbed; and now this. I would even add a project like The Grand Theatre as an example of an opportunity lost. Is it just a string of bad luck, or is it symptomatic of problems endemic to the City's economic development policies and procedures? (That's an actual question, by the way, not an accusation disguised as a question.) Lincoln can do well, of course. Downtown's Embassy Suites is a good example of economic development success, and even Verizon will be an overall success once the RFP mess gets sorted out. Hopefully the Hy-Vee deal can be salvaged (or replaced by something even better). Regardless, the City needs to figure out what it can change to better help prevent these snafus. They aren't good for the City's image, and they don't do anything to build the community's faith in major projects like Antelope Valley, the proposed Downtown parking garage/high rise, or a new arena/convention center.

I don't subscribe to Time Warner's digital cable, but I have heard that the new navigation software is no good. To add insult to injury, many subscribers lost cable altogether this morning. Did any of you suffer the outage? Is the new software as bad as advertised, or is it just different?

Lincolnites should thank Monte Froehlich, who stepped up and bought Taste of China from Chan Hua for $730,000 so that the City could move forward with its plans to build a parking garage and high-rise at 14th and Q. The deal required some unusual twists, but at least the City was spared from having to renege on its promise not to abuse the power of eminent domain in order to take hold of the property, thus setting up a potential legal mess. Froehlich will ultimately break even on the deal. We also should give Chan Hua a pat on the back for standing up for himself and his business. In the face of government pressure he held his ground until he got a deal he could live with. Good for him.

One thing I like about Deena Winter's column in the Journal Star is that her style presents the news, but she also tells a story. Take her column in today's paper. As I read it, I couldn't help but feel uninspired by the Council's approach to solving the City's budget problem. Ms. Winter could just as easily have summed up her entire article thusly:

The Council met on Tuesday to discuss the City's impending $9 million budget shortfall. The Council took no action and will meet again on the topic in two weeks.

Fortunately she didn't go that route. Instead, through quotes and her own use of language ("The council got distracted..."), those of us who can't attend the meetings get a good feel for the quality of discourse at the meeting. By the way, kudos to Dan Marvin for his handout describing how he might go about finding the missing $9 million. My praise isn't contingent on his ideas being any good; I just appreciate that he went on record and put real ideas on paper. Good for him.

Nobody lives there and nobody has an address there, but the strip of pavement formerly known as Capital Parkway West is now called Rosa Parks Way. I don't have any feelings one way or the other about the name of that stretch of road, so this is basically non-news to me. I do, however, get a kick out of listening to and reading comments from people who are, for some inexplicable reason, adamantly opposed to the new name. I don't understand the need to spend so many calories calling it, in the words of one LJS commenter, "the stupidest thing I've seen yet". Methinks that commenter walks around with his eyes closed too often.

The blight train keeps on rollin', this time in the vicinity of 9th and Van Dorn. I'm not opposed to blight designations per se, but the City Council needs to get real. Surely at some point the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in. Is Lincoln really better off with so many blighted acres? I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that it is.

A hearty congratulations to the Lincoln Children's Zoo, which won one of six prestigious National Awards from The Institute of Museum and Library Service. The Children's Zoo may be tiny, especially in comparison to its much-larger cousin in Omaha, but it is a tremendous community asset. Good job, folks!

If you were left cold by the city's sub-stellar snow removal performance last week, you may be warmed to know that changes have been made. And not just small "we'll do better next time" changes. Public Works Director Karl Fredrickson actually yanked oversight of street maintenance away from City Engineer Roger Figard and assigned it to Antelope Valley Project manager Wayne Teten instead. "We will have new direction in street maintenance," according to Fredrickson. Talk about a vote of no-confidence in Figard. Ouch. One gets the feeling that this shake-up is about bigger things than just this one event, and that it was a long time coming. Or perhaps I'm over-analyzing. In any event, I have had only limited interaction with Wayne Teten, but the interactions I had were positive. Short story even shorter, I requested information about the Antelope Valley Project a couple times, and I received prompt and thorough replies each time. That doesn't say much about his ability to manage his new 135 full-time employees, but it's a positive data point nonetheless.

It's awfully annoying to me as a taxpayer to see a regular stream of articles describing school break-ins and the items stolen each time. I wonder how much it would cost to set up a small network of webcams at each school that broadcast live video, 24/7. Then anybody, anywhere could check in on the schools and report trouble as appropriate. With some basic equipment and a little programming skill, a security system could be assembled on the cheap. Or we could unleash some very angry, underfed dogs in the hallways of the schools every night and weekend.

It must be very annoying to walk outside in the morning to find out that your car has been shot up with a BB gun. The only vandalism my car has ever experienced was having its plates stolen. (They were found a couple weeks later in an alley in a town in Kansas. I actually got a phone call from the town's police chief to see if I wanted them back.) Have any of you been victims of the latest rash of BB gun vandalism? Would anybody be opposed to punishing the perpetrators by allowing their victims to shoot at them with BB guns?