A Tree Grows in Richmond

A lot of them do. The city of Richmond, county seat of Fort Bend County, has a whole bunch of big oak trees in it.

And the county’s Office of Emergency Management wants to chop down three of them.

The problem is, they say, if a hurricane blows any of them over, they might just take out their radio antenna. The antenna, you see, was placed right next to the trees.

Soon-to-be ex county commissioner Tom Stavinoha, whose Precinct 1 office shares a boundary with the OEM saw the OEM workers fixing to chop down one of the trees and immediately ordered them to stop.

Said Stavinoha to the Fort Bend Herald:

“I just feel like the beauty of the trees far outweighs any risk; and there’s not much of a risk, anyway. Richmond is known for its massive oak trees. If everybody cut them down because of what might happen, there wouldn’t be any oak trees in Richmond anymore.”

For now, the situation remains at a stand-off, with neither side budging, nor neither moving forward. Stavinoha claims that when he leaves office on January 1^st, the trees will be dead meat.

Apparently he feels that Richard Morrison will not stand in the way of the chain saw.

Now first, I have to wonder why the antenna was erected where it was in the first place, if the trees are now such a menace to it.

I also have to wonder about Stavinoha’s new-found tree-huggery. How this laudable inclination in the direction of conservation meshes with his past penchant for laying wide ribbons of concrete across vast acres of untouched wilderness is beyond my understanding.

But in the end, I have to come down on the side of the common good, which, by the way, is what any true public servant should be inclined to do. To make the specious argument that there wouldn’t be any trees in Richmond if everyone cut them down because of what could happen misses the point. The point of the whole OEM argument is that should a natural disaster strike, and one of those trees demolishes one of the county’s main means of communicating during this emergency, their effectiveness in responding in this disaster is impaired.

And in this age of the lessons of Katrina, obstructing these emergency responders’ attempts to make their means of communications more secure seems a little delusional.

Shelley Sekula-Gibbs Issues Her Texas CD-22 "Lampson Watch" Missive

I’m going to let others write about how poor Bush’s speech was tonight, mainly because I didn’t watch it. I did get home in time to watch the Democratic Party rebuttal by Jim Webb (D-Va).

I liked what he had to say.

But no, instead I’d like to share with you an email message that was forwarded to me by someone who is still on Shelley Sekula-Gibbs’ list of friends of the congresswoman.

Apparently she is running for US Congress in ’08. She’s got a Lampson Watch going and is going to keep informing the good people of Texas CD 22 what evils their congressman is visiting on them. Am I missing something? Bush has a SOTUS speech to give tonight and she sends this out hours before the speech? But don’t let me summarize, take a look yourself:


Is the woman delusional? Paraphrasing my source of this message, these bills are just about the only ones I am happy that Nick voted “Aye” on. She left the one out about voting to raise the minimum raise, thus placing CD 22 small business owners behind the 8 Ball and raising prices. I guess she would have voted for that one? A Republican who wants to help the poor and underpaid? The Pink One is reverting to her liberal ways.

She left the dig in at the end about Nancy Pelosi, but Shelley should know that Nicholas Valentino Lampson (previously Lampsoni) must always vote the way The Don wishes. Omertà goes back centuries you know.

Does Shelley for one minute think that the people who voted for her in the Special Election aren't absolutely mortified at her behavior during her tenure at DC? They are mortified, and the rest of us still burst out laughing when we think back on it.

Know what I think? I think she’s pissed off that Nick got to plop down $375 million simoleons in Tom DeLay’s old district. I’ll bet she wanted to have that honor. But no, she probably didn’t know about the done deal that Nick brokered back when he was a candidate. By the time she got there she was too busy fussing and kicking up dust about erased computer hard drives and staffers who walk out on her because she is such a mean person.

All of that in exchange for a job she was going to have to leave in November 2007. She was term limited. The Bad: Houston has to plunk down somewhere between $2 and 4 million, to fill her vacant seat. The Good? Former State Rep. Melissa Noriega is very probably going to be elected to that seat this May 12th.

Isn’t it incredibly interesting how all of these things are so cross-linked as in a complex Dan Brown novel?