President's Message

My tenure as your President ends on December 31, 2003.

I ask that you give prayerful thought to your selection of a new President. With a newly elected administration in Frankfort, that person will have opportunities to lead our organization in areas we have not enjoyed in the past. It is my hope that these new public servants will be sympathetic to our message to pass and implement property rights legislation.

Our future opportunities to thwart further regulations eroding our property rights are exciting, as are those to review and discard existing regulations that have been harmful.

In the meantime, count on my continued presence and availability for League projects.

Thanks to all for your steadfast support.

Sincerely,
william h adkisson

Annual Meeting Review

Approximately 100 people attended the 8th annual meeting of the League of Kentucky Property Owners. The meeting was held on September 25th at the Triple Crown Country Club. We enjoyed an interesting and informative talk by Mr. Henry Lamb, founding Chairman of Sovereignty International and the founding CEO of the Environmental Conservation Organization.

A special thanks goes to our meeting sponsors, Ed Bessler, Jim Berling, Dallas Bray, Ralph Drees, Henry Fischer and Matth. Toebben. We appreciate their continual support of the League.

We would also like to thank Classic Country 106.5 that gave us several free public service announcements for our annual meeting.

The Patriot Act

John Ashcroft and his pep rallies on the Patriot Act miss the point. Basically, the Attorney General is saying: We are from the government; trust us when we say the Patriot Act does not threaten civil liberties. But in a free society the assurances of government fall woefully short.

Ashcroft forgets that he is an administrator and not a legislator. His job is not to write laws or determine what the law should be. His job description is to execute the laws passed by Congress. How dare he admonish Congress or the American people for not supporting his viewpoint. It is a misuse of our tax dollars for him to travel throughout the country and lobby for his political positions.

The Patriot Act contains over 500 pages of complicated legalese, and the full text of the bill was not made available to Congress before the vote was taken. It was passed in the hysteria of the moment, and it clearly expands the government's ability to monitor the American people. The Patriot Act eases federal rules for search warrants, allows secret "sneak and peek" searches, expanded wiretaps and Internet monitoring and permits federal agents to examine library and bookstore records. It is no wonder that bumper stickers reading "I love my country but fear my government" are growing in popularity.

Submitted by:
Bernie Kunkel,
Legislative Chairperson
LOKPO

Smart Growth

The Smart Growth forces are now finding themselves on the defensive. In Loudoun County, Virginia - the second fastest growing county in the nation - opponents have filed more than 200 lawsuits to overturn tough growth control measures enacted in the late nineties to control sprawl. In New Jersey, builders and developers are mounting a series of legal challenges against the policies of Governor James McGreevey to promote "smart growth." In Colorado, local communities, eager to spur development and increase local tax base, are turning away from previously adopted growth restrictions. In California, the state has shelved legislation designed to shape California's future growth through financial rewards to cities that adopted the "smart growth" vision.

In other areas of the country, advocates for affordable housing and pro-growth forces are challenging "smart growth" initiatives in South and North Carolina, Michigan, Oregon, and Utah. These are just some of the overt signs of what many see as a growing backlash against anti-sprawl measures enacted in the 1990s - measures which were meant to slow down suburban growth but whose outcome has come to be seen as exclusionary and elitist.

Increasingly, the "smart growth" movement is defending itself against accusations that its real motivation in urging denser infill development is to shelter wealthy suburbanites from further urbanization and shift the burden of growth to the city; and that its main consequence has
been to raise suburban housing prices and deprive low income households and minorities of an opportunity to pursue the American dream of home ownership.

Many communities are finding that "smart growth" is not preventing sprawl ---"smart growth" is just spreading it over a larger area. Counties surrounding Washington DC for instance, which a decade ago were primarily dairy farms and agricultural fields, are now dotted with mini-mansions on 10-acre lots. In the meantime, construction of affordable housing on the urban periphery has slowed down to a trickle and in many areas has come to a complete standstill.

Faced with accusations of exclusionary practices and with pressures to provide affordable housing, many communities are relaxing previously adopted anti-sprawl policies. But "smart growth" forces are not about to surrender to populist pressures. Instead, they are going to ridiculous extremes to demonize sprawl by blaming it for all sorts of contemporary problems such as traffic congestion, last year's drought, etc.

Their latest offensive is to blame suburban sprawl for America's growing obesity epidemic. A report, Measuring the Health Effects of Sprawl, released by Smart Growth America and the Surface Transportation Policy project, purports to demonstrate that people living in low density suburbs walk less and therefore tend to be overweight. "If these results hold up," claimed the report's author, Reid Ewing, "then building more compact communities will become a public health imperative."

"This is another attempt by the report's sponsors to spin research showing only trivial weight differences between city and suburban residents into a national crisis requiring land use restrictions," said the Heritage Foundation's Ronald D. Utt. Other critics point out that obesity is associated more with poor diet than with geography, as witnessed by the fact that the highest incidence of obesity is found among minority residents of inner cities rather than among fitness-conscious suburbanites.

The "smart growth" movement is likely to go down in history as yet another planning ideology that has foundered for lack of a realistic understanding of demographics, market forces and consumer preferences. And we say good riddance.

California Fires

The Stephen's Kangaroo Rat was listed as "endangered" by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on October 31, 1988. This little-noticed action launched a revolution in land use in southern California that has culminated in the fires that have now claimed at least 17 lives, destroyed close to 2,000 homes, and consumed more than 600,000 acres throughout the region. For 15 years the federal government, urged on by environmental activists and assisted by state agency bureaucrats, has pursued an aggressive displacement of local authorities from the control of land use policies, all in the name of environmental protection. The result is an environmental disaster on a monumental scale.

Update from the Al Yelton Chapter
in Grant County

At the September 29, 2003 Grant County Fiscal Court Caucus meeting, we presented our case for one A-1 zone of 5 acres average density for the next zoning ordinances in Grant County.

Thanks to the 85 plus people for coming out to show our elected officials that we are interested in property rights and we're not going to sit idly by and let our rights be taken from us by a few carefully appointed people and one hired planning administrator.

Also, thanks to Marc Wilson, Logan Murphy, John Malone, Dorothy Altman, Greg Hicks and all our corporate sponsors for their support.

Marc K. Wilson, a professional Public Affairs and Government Relations person, started our presentation by explaining that for many people, the property they owned was their life savings, their equivalent to a 401K plan in the business world. These property owners should have the right to dispose of their property to their best advantage. Logan Murphy, an engineer at Hicks and Mann, Inc., drew the maps that graphically displayed the loss of productive agriculture land as the size of the agriculture zones increased.

John Malone, Dorothy Altman, Greg Hicks and I met several times with Marc Wilson and Logan Murphy to accumulate our material for this presentation.

We believe the meeting was a great success and now the work begins on follow up meetings with the individual members of the Fiscal Court. We are on the Planning and Zoning Commission's agenda for November 24, 2003. We will present in writing, an AG1 proposed ordinance and give details as to why it should be incorporated into the proposed ordinance to be presented to the Grant County Fiscal Court.

John Malone and I met on Saturday, November 9th with Jay Weber, treasurer of the League, and discussed a proposed bill that would establish term limits on appointed officials to our local and state governments. We think we can get bipartisan support for this type of bill at the state level.

Thanks for your support. We need you as a member.

Submitted by:
Charlie Phillips, President
Al Yelton Chapter in Grant County
859-824-6501