Beltway Outsider

An archived selection of views from Matthew Blake, Marc Albert and others on federal agency performance around the U.S.

Natural foods co-op gets a raw deal

Acting in concert with federal officials, authorities in Los Angeles raided a local natural foods buyers co-op and arrested three people for distributing raw milk and dairy products, reports Ian Lovett of The New York Times and Stuart Pfeifer and P.J. Huffstutter in the Los Angeles Times. Authorities also seized $70,000 worth of inventory from the Venice co-op, Rawsome, on the grounds that the shop was selling unsafe and unlicensed products to consumers and doing so without a business license. Operators of the co-op maintain that the products in question weren’t being sold to unknowing consumers, but distributed to members of a buyers’ club who specifically sought out unadulterated foods and were well aware of the risks. Because the operation wasn’t open to non-members and was run by volunteers, its trustees claim they aren’t required to have a business license. (more…)

High-speed regional trains zoom into California

Several new trains capable of considerably higher speed should begin plying the rails in California in about four years time, thanks to an infusion of federal cash, reports Tim Sheehan of The Fresno Bee.

California received 68 million dollars from the federal government to buy 15 new American passenger cars and four new U.S.-made locomotives for the state’s three regional rail routes. The funding is a portion of the $336 million worth of Recovery Act funding — economic stimulus money — awarded as federal matching funds to California and outright grants to Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Missouri. (more…)

FAA Cleared for Takeoff

The U.S. Senate is expected to approve a bill this morning written by the House that will resume operations at the Federal Aviation Administration — at least until Sep. 16, reports the New York Times’ Edward Wyatt. At issue in the FAA’s shutdown is a Congressional dispute over whether the agency should give subsidies so rural airports get commercial airline service. The broader issue is Congress’s astonishing indifference about a functioning federal agency. (more…)

Illinois and racial profiling

The ACLU is calling for the federal Department of Justice to investigate whether or not Illinois cops use racial bias in traffic stop searches, reports Patrick Yeagle of the Illinois Times. A new study produced by the Illinois Department of Transportation found a slight disparity between the number of minorities stopped and the number of minorities who live in Illinois. It looks like real claims of bias lie in specific communities like Springfield, where 41 percent of all drivers stopped in 2010 were minorities and just 15 percent of the Springfield population is minority.

Safety first, second, and third in Chicago

I wrote a piece a month ago that looked at how the city of Chicago’s focus on violent crime comes at the expense of other worthy issues. Here’s an example: Rebecca Vevea of the Chicago News Cooperative reports that Chicago Public Schools will continue to spend millions on “Safe Passage,” a program that helps students arrive and depart from school safely.

Obviously, there are worse uses of taxpayer money. But Safe Passage was a program launched by federal stimulus funds and those funds have run out. Does CPS really need to keep this additional safety program — for which $10 million has been set aside — when it faces a $612 million deficit?

Crisis at the FAA

Overlooked in the agreement reached by Barack Obama and Congress on the debt ceiling is that an entire federal agency — the Federal Aviation Administration — has shut down with Congress on vacation until September. That means, among other issues,  that the agency has no authorization to keep funding projects like the expansion of O’Hare airport in Chicago or, as Nathan Hurst of the Detroit News reports on today, the reconstruction of a taxi way at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

The agency has shut down because of a dispute over how airline workers can unionize and how much subsidies should be provided to rural airports. These are fairly significant issues — but ones that a Congress that cares in the slightest about a functional aviation agency should have been able to solve.

 

 

Raptor deaths dirty California’s cleanest energy source

Federal wildlife conservation officials have launched an inquest into the deaths of protected birds at a California wind farm, Louis Sahagun of the Los Angeles Times reports, highlighting a potentially crippling drawback of one of the world’s cleanest power sources.

A total of seven golden eagles are believed to have been killed over the course of two years after colliding with one of 90 windmills at the Pine Tree windmill site. The windmills, operated by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in the Tehachapi Mountains went on-line in 2009 and are spread out among 8,000 acres, generating 120 megawatts of electricity. (more…)

EPA troubled by Wisconsin’s clean water regs

In 1974, Wisconsin became the sixth state in the country to administer its own water pollution regulations under a clause in the federal Clean Water Act. Lee Bergquist of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that this arrangement has proven problematic: the U.S. EPA wrote a letter to the Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources two weeks ago that cites 75 apparent omissions and deviations from federal law.

The important issue here is whether Wisconsin is keeping its water clean. Judging from Bergquist’s piece, though, the EPA might be more upset with Wisconsin’s processes and protocols than the effect of regulating in a different way.

Detroit-area Latinos don’t believe ICE

John Morton

Niraj Warikoo of the Detroit Free Press reports on Latino leaders’ charges in the Motor City area that the U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement agency has abused and wrongfully racially profiled Latino citizens in Michigan. John Morton — the head of ICE — had agreed to conduct a study on these charges when they were brought up in April. A just-released ICE report, though, calls the charges baseless — and now Michigan residents are questioning the credibility of the federal study.

Waiting on a bipartisan panel

Rich Miller’s Illinois-focused Capital Fax blog looks at how the federal deficit ceiling deal will impact the budgets of Illinois and other states. And the answer is… We don’t really know. The details of cutting Medicaid, public works projects, and education funding will — like much of the rest of the debt-cutting plan — be left to a bipartisan congressional panel. The good news for Illinois is that their already shaky credit status will not be hurt in a default.