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City Hall's Slam-Dunk Gang
City Manager John Ware sat stone-faced, staring straight at Larry Duncan while they did it to him. Mayor Ron Kirk turned away, trying to gloss over the moment with decorum and weak jokes. But the truth of it--the smell--broke out over the room in the moment right after they had ripped open and gutted the two-year capital budget for Duncan's council district at a February Dallas City Council briefing. For a few seconds afterward, none of the council members, not even the ones who had voted unsuccessfully to rescue Duncan, would look him in the eye.
It had been an ugly, ugly thing. Their eyes were averted in sympathy and shame. John Ware and Ron Kirk had just administered the political equivalent of a slap hard enough to knock the spit out of Larry Duncan's mouth.
Even then, if he had just managed to stay quiet in the pause after the vote, Duncan
might have denied the mayor his drop of blood. But in that moment, speaking over the hubbub, Duncan asked plaintively, "So what are we cutting?"
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The quaver in his voice was a rare crack in the wall of gamesmanship that normally encloses these proceedings. Through it, one could glimpse both the emotion of the moment and the agonizing poverty of much of his district, which includes some of the most depressed neighborhoods in southern Dallas.
Duncan had spent two years getting his constituents to agree on what they could and could not claim as their slice of the bond-program pie. His question seemed fair. The city manager had cut the capital budget for his district to half the budgeted amount for all the city's more affluent districts.
Duncan had made a valiant last-ditch effort to protect his people from the cut. But his motion had failed on a 7-7 split vote.
Now who would tell the people of District 4 what was to be taken away? Would it be the bridge across the railroad yards in the ancient Freedmen's Town at Joppa? The flood-control projects? The improvements along Military Parkway? How would they make up the $4 million that had been yanked away from them?
Kirk pounced on the question. With evident pleasure in his voice, he said, "That's up to you, Mr. Duncan." He told him he'd have to go back to his constituents and tell them they need to "re-prioritize."
In other words, you go tell them in Joppa. Look them in the face and tell them you lost their money. Try that on for size.
You may have missed the funeral. But the 14-1 single-member Dallas City Council system is dead. Mayor Ron Kirk and John Ware are the slam-dunk gang of City Hall. They run everything. It's not 14-1 anymore. It's 2-nothing.
That's the unmistakable impression left by a month of interviews with people involved in the political process, with grassroots community organizers and with some members of the Dallas City Council, past and present.
There isn't even a lot of debate about it. The only real difference of opinion is how long it's been dead, who did it, and if it was euthanasia.
Even some of the people who say Kirk and Ware have become City Hall's slam-dunk duo blame the actual death of single-member districts on the people who occupy them, some of whom seem to have difficulty understanding compound sentences, let alone policy issues.
Gerald Britt, pastor of New Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist Church in South Dallas and a stalwart in the battle for single-member districts in the late 1980s, put the issue at City Hall succinctly:
"Nature abhors a vacuum," Britt says.
Though Britt doesn't think Kirk and Ware are all that terrible as rulers, he worries about what the current setup may bode for the inevitable day, perhaps not all that far off, when they leave.
"The thing that is dangerous, as long as you've got amateurs and political unsophisticates on the council," he says, "is that you leave the potential for a really bad mayor and a really bad city manager to take over the city."
Lots of people do think Ware and Kirk are terrible rulers. But no matter what you think of them personally, the fact seems to be that Kirk and Ware are the only ones in the house. They are the people who can make things happen at City Hall. Council members who dare cross them are dealt with vindictively. And the programs Kirk and Ware support are the programs of the city's traditional downtown business establishment.
It's not an academic point for the people who are out there trying to change the city. For them, the effects are personal and harsh. The landscape is littered with examples: Members of a neighborhood group who've fought for years to get badly needed street improvements find their projects simply lopped off the manager's budget without a word. A young auto-racing entrepreneur with a dream for reviving a decaying block in South Dallas is told by his council member that she can do nothing to help him. The whole process by which dreams and goals bubble up out of grassroots communities is not only stunted and ignored, but seems to be actively reviled by the regime at City Hall.
There's enormous irony in this moment in the city's history. Neighborhood leaders, civil rights activists, yuppie re-doers, preservationists, all kinds of people who believed in the power of communities fought for the 14-1 single-member council system that is now in its seventh year. They won. We've got it. And now these very people are weaker and less welcome at City Hall than ever before. "Slam-Dunk Gang" is the epithet with which frustrated black leaders have described the white and Hispanic majority on recent Dallas school boards. The term is a little rusty, especially now that the downtown business establishment's Ultimate Slam-Dunk Secret Weapon, former superintendent Yvonne Gonzalez, has been trotted off to the federal pokey with her hands behind her back.
But it applies perfectly at City Hall, allowing for multiple layers of irony and a good deal of game-playing genius. There, the new and much more cleverly constructed Slam-Dunk Gang is made up of two men who seem to function almost as one.
City Manager John Ware, the hireling of the pair, is an ex-military man with a martial bearing. He draws some predictable darts for being too tough on subordinates and sometimes using naughty words when he bawls them out. But he's a paid boss. That's his style. They hired him.
It's the mayor who draws a more bitter and emotional brand of complaint from critics, including members of his own City Council--even some who appear to be his staunchest allies in their public remarks.
One member, generally thought of as a right-hand man to the mayor, extracted a blood vow of off-the-record anonymity, closed his office door, then said in whispers, "The mayor is very, very arrogant. He doesn't listen to anyone. He has the answer before you ask the question."
But why are we talking in whispers?
We are talking in whispers because the council member doing the talking is seriously afraid of Ron Kirk. In Kirk's three years of elective office, he has acquired a behind-the-scenes reputation for brass-knuckled vindictiveness, in sharp contrast with his public persona as a glib, quick-witted, back-slapping, jokey kind of guy.
You might argue that the current Dallas City Council often needs a little kick-start in order to achieve a fully wakeful state. But in truth, not all of the council is composed of space debris. There are still a few in there who are a lot sharper than what Dallas deserves for not paying them to serve.
Larry Duncan, for example, represents one of the city's most racially and economically diverse districts, in southwest Dallas. He probably comes closest of any council member to having a coherent, reliable, predictable political organization in his district. (Donna Blumer, who represents a much more conservative, whiter district in North Dallas, is also very organized politically.)
Duncan is also controversial. He's a white man who consistently gets elected in what was supposed to have been a safe black district. But he gets elected with lots of black votes, as well as white.
Some people like him a lot. There are people who don't like him a lot. But almost everyone thinks he's good at the difficult process of consensus--staying in touch with the wishes of his constituents.
Larry Duncan ought to be good at it. He was one of the early architects of the 14-1 system, and, before that, when he was president of the Dallas Homeowners League, he helped create the movement that made 14-1 happen.
The single-member-district idea was always simple. And big. The idea was to let people rule their own communities. The old system included two at-large members, in addition to the mayor, who was also elected city-wide. The other eight council members ran from districts in their own parts of town.
You could win a district by trudging door-to-door, going to crime-watch meetings, speaking at Rotary Clubs and garden parties, calling people up one by one at dinner time and not letting them off the phone until they promised you their votes. You could be poor or middle-class and win without going into somebody's pocket.
But to win the city-wide seats, you had to be able to afford a lot of TV advertising--very expensive, especially for an unpaid job. So whoever had the biggest bucks always won the at-large seats. The money they used was almost always raised money. And it almost never failed to do the trick.
A certain portion of the business establishment that had an interest in city business--especially real estate developers, airline companies, road and bridge builders, that ilk--always made sure their people got the most money. That way, the old system gave three guaranteed seats on the council to people who had a business reason for dominating city decisions. All they needed were two more votes out of the remaining five, and they ruled.
So they ruled.
The shortcomings of the old system were usually viewed in strictly racial terms. The system was replaced in 1991 after a federal judge ruled that the old system of three at-large seats gave control to the white community. But the trick was that it wasn't really about race. Race was, if anything, a diversion to keep people from seeing that everybody's political power had been usurped.
In the early and mid-1980s in Dallas, middle-class and working-class white people started figuring out that they were getting screwed too, just like the ethnic minorities. People like Duncan decided they didn't want to be ruled by developers any more than African-Americans wanted to be ruled by whites.
Everybody wanted to rule himself and live like an American. Everybody. That's really why the city went to a system of all single-member districts.
And now it's gone. It was only around for seven years. But the single-member-district system is effectively extinct.
Politics is more than money, but money is sometimes the clearest reflection of what's going on. In an election next May, Dallas voters will decide whether to allow the city council to borrow approximately $543 million by selling bonds over the next four years.
That money, if approved, will be divvied into pots, most of it going to the high-profile big-trophy projects backed by the city's major real-estate development interests--the plan to rebuild the Trinity River and money for the arts district, for example.
In fact, so much of the bond issue will be sucked up by the flash-and-glory deals that only about $140 million--a quarter of the total--will be available for the basic street, gutter, and pothole things that most council members' constituents seem to yearn for.
And why is it that so many of the city's average, everyday citizens keep telling their council members that what they want is the streets fixed, the garbage picked up by city employees instead of exploited homeless people, storm sewers repaired, trees planted, medians mowed? Are people in Dallas just whiners? Are they imagining that the city is decaying before their eyes when it is not?
No. It's nobody's imagination. In fact, there is a single number, a figure, a statistic that explains everything. It is the number on which to keep one's eyes. It is the number that tells the story of the city in today's perplexing times:
$3.2 billion.
According to information supplied to the City Council by the city manager, that is the amount of backlogged work--deferred maintenance, nuts and bolts, stuff people want fixed or replaced or somehow remedied--sitting on the books of City Hall today.
$3.2 billion.
Dallas has a credit rating that allows it to borrow approximately $135 million a year at good interest rates. In order to fix the things the citizens of the city have told their council members they want fixed, Dallas would have to borrow every cent it could, spend every cent it could--forget about the river deal and the arts district and the arena and everything else except what the citizens say they want fixed in their neighborhoods--and it would take 23 1/2 years to get the task done, long enough actually for another generation to be born and grow up, and why not just have them do it?
But that's only if we were spending all of our bond money on fixing the city, not just 25 percent. At the rate the mayor and the city manager want to spend the money, taking care of the city's basic "inventory needs list" will take more than 91 years. By then, people may be living on other planets, or, more pessimistically, in trees again.
That's another way of saying we're not going to do it. Other fish to fry. Forget about it.
The $140 million left for the basic needs of the city over the next four years is divided into pots of approximately $10 million for each council district. Up until now, the informal rule of the council has been that each council member decides how his or her slice of the bond money should be allocated.
It's up to them. And who knows? Some of them probably consult the Ouija board to figure out how to spread it. Others obviously consult the people who pay for their campaigns. Larry Duncan, like Blumer, gets out and around. So do a few others.
For Duncan, it's meetings, meetings, and more meetings. Lots more meetings than most people could stand. But that's how he does it.
What Ware and Kirk did to Larry Duncan over the bond money at the February 18 briefing wasn't exactly an ambush. Duncan, who has been around city politics for the better part of a quarter century, saw it coming. Several weeks before the meeting, Duncan sat down with the Dallas Observer over a cup of coffee at a Denny's restaurant in his district and laid out exactly what they were going to do to him. He wanted to explain why it wasn't just fun and games to him.
Duncan represents District 4 in southwest Dallas--a diverse hodgepodge of ethnicities and economic cadres, including some snappy new neighborhoods, some respectably aging middle-class subdivisions, and a lot of staggering poverty.
"But we don't have problems about sharing the money in my district. We work it out," he said. "People in my district are accustomed to making do with limited resources. That doesn't seem to be a problem for them. Everybody here gets it."
Tapping his finger on the Formica table, he said, "There are unlimited things people might like to have. But then there are things like the bridge at Joppa that we just have to do."
Joppa is an old Freedmen's town, cut off by a bend of the Trinity River on one side, bound up and trussed on all others by highways and a railroad switching yard. It is one of the city's sinfully forgotten and neglected pockets of poverty--a patch of rural East Texas in the shadow of downtown.
"I had two constituents who died in Joppa last year while the ambulances sat on the other side of the tracks waiting for a train to clear," Duncan said.
His constituents in Joppa want a bridge over the rail yard. They want it badly. They have wanted it for years. His district has consistently voted in favor of city bond issues, hoping to get its own narrow wedge of the pie. They knew they couldn't get the whole overpass all at once, so they settled for only the design portion of the project out of the 1995 bond election. They were told the bridge itself would be built with money from the upcoming election.
But Ron Kirk doesn't like Larry Duncan. Duncan, in fact, is part of City Hall's strangest club and alliance--The People Who Aren't With Ron. It's difficult to see any unifying theme in their group other than Kirk's dislike for them. The other founding member of the club, and a very unlikely ally of Duncan's, indeed, is arch-conservative council member Donna Blumer, who represents a North Dallas district.
At her desk in City Hall, Blumer related a lot of ancient City Council history to explain why Kirk is so vindictive toward her and Duncan, as he was toward former councilman Paul Fielding, now in the clink. A lot of it, she says, goes back to Kirk's first few days in office, when he was furious with some of the council for resisting his personal selection for mayor pro tem, Chris Luna. But the end of the story, according to Blumer, is that Kirk whips up on her and Duncan because he needs people to use as an example. He beats them up to keep the others on the council in line.
"He stripped Larry and me of our committee posts," Blumer says. "Then he worked very hard to keep all of our appointees from being put on any significant subcommittees."
Duncan had been chairman of the council's health and human services committee. Blumer had served on the transportation committee and wanted badly to be chairperson or at least vice chair. Her constituents feel hammered by traffic congestion in the LBJ/Tollway region of the city, and the transportation committee is where the key decisions will be made on those issues.
Kirk used his appointive power to bust Duncan from the chairmanship of health and human services and to keep Blumer off the transportation committee entirely.
Maybe that's just politics. But it isn't the way the game was played before Ron Kirk took office.
Former Councilman Jerry Bartos says, "It wasn't like that." He told the story of Pleasant Grove Councilman John Evans, who was caught hammering campaign yard signs for the man who was running against Annette Strauss for mayor.
"That was in the paper," Bartos says. "But after Annette won, she appointed Evans to the chair of the finance committee. She thought he was the best for the job, and all that campaign business was behind them."
Not Kirk. He plays a relentlessly jugular game in which personal slights are never forgotten. No one has been on the dirty end of that stick worse than Larry Duncan.
Duncan spent two years asking his constituents what they wanted to spend their next bond-election budget on. They told him. He drew up his list.
Then Ware informed him that he would be stripping away $4 million of Duncan's $10 million for a new branch library in his district.
Duncan told Ware he had discussed the branch library with his constituents. They didn't want it. Not yet. They were willing to spend part of their money for the land for the library, phasing it in on a time-delayed budget the way they had to do everything else in their part of town.
But not the whole thing. They had other things they wanted more. Like flood-control projects. Like the ambulance bridge at Joppa. They wanted to put off the library building.
Too bad. Ware was taking it all. Now.
At the nasty little briefing in the back of City Hall, Duncan pleaded for his constituents' money back, his voice shaking with emotion. Kirk explained coolly that wealthy patrons like Margaret McDermott might stop kicking in so generously to help the city's library system if the city didn't make the tough choices and kick in some of its own money.
His tough choice? Take all the money from Duncan's district. Now.
Duncan fought it to the last. He proposed an amendment to the bond package taking the branch library out of his budget, so that he could spend his money the way his constituents told him to.
At the briefing, Sandy Greyson, the normally reticent new member from Far North Dallas, made a pointed, compelling speech in Duncan's favor and against the Kirk-Ware attack on a lone council member. "I think this is just going to tear us apart," she said.
In a quietly intense speech, Don Hicks, a long-standing leader in the black community who usually tries not to get cross-wise with Kirk and Ware, also took on the slam-dunk duo.
Hicks said, "This district stuff is important. I don't expect the mayor to have any respect for that, because he's at-large. He's the 1 in 14-1. But I don't think that most of us want to encroach upon the deference that we've traditionally shown each district. We've said that that's the form of government closest to the people.
"With all of us out here scrounging for money for our districts, what we generally get is a more meaningful and robust spending plan. That's the genius of the system."
Hicks said he thought allowing the city manager and the mayor to soak up a single council member's budget by loading large city-wide projects into it was an assault on the single-member system equivalent to "changing the charter by fiat."
Al Lipscomb, the aging black councilman who is hip-deep in his own legal problems, seemed especially distressed by what was going on, flailing his arms as he spoke like a man caught in ropes. He clearly thought the assault on Duncan was wrong, but he as much as said he was not free to come to his aid.
Kirk lectured them against their parochial views, reminding them that they were elected to the Dallas City Council, "not the Oak Cliff City Council or the Pleasant Grove City Council."
It was exactly the kind of condescending speech that advocates for single-member districts used to have to endure from the downtown oligarchy back in the 1980s.
Part of the enormous irony of what's going on at City Hall now is the way the race card has been played. Kirk and Ware are black. Both men have an ability to express themselves and deal with controversial issues in ways that tend to put white people at ease. Kirk especially has a personal charm and intelligence that can quickly disarm even the prickliest of white skeptics.
But Kirk is also enormously popular in the rank-and-file black community, where his appeal sometimes verges on the magical, in spite of the fact that he comes from nowhere politically in the city, was hand-picked by the white business establishment, and is maintained on a generous salary by a major downtown law firm.
Nowhere is there greater frustration over the racial puzzle at City Hall than among the longtime veteran community organizers of the black community--not the accommodationists but the tough grassroots political opinion-makers who have always fought for African-American self-determination.
"The black community in Dallas never believed that a black man could be mayor," said Peter Johnson, who was a civil rights organizer for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. "Then Ron Kirk was chosen and given to the black community by the white business leadership. The trick that white people must understand is that this has to do with racism. The only reason black people voted for him was because of the color of his skin."
That he is the city's first black mayor, with a magnetic appeal to the rank and file, makes most black leaders loath to criticize Kirk publicly. White political leaders have to walk a careful line for similar reasons. In a city that is still decades short of anything resembling racial poise, both sides pull back nervously from certain levels of criticism, leaving between them a vacuum that has become Kirk and Ware's political base of operation.
Johnson, like many of the veterans in the city's community organizing wars, can't help expressing a certain admiration for the sheer cleverness of the establishment in coming up with the Kirk-Ware mechanism.
"I tell people I have a lot of admiration and respect for the people who run this city," he said. "Not only do they play hardball, but they're slick as most pimps I know."
The tendency at City Hall to move major public policy issues off the council table isn't limited to the bond election. A number of City Hall watchers believe, for example, that the whole Love Field lawsuit business between Kirk and Fort Worth Mayor Kenneth Barr is a sham in which the state court judge handling the case is playing the role of either dupe or co-conspirator.
Nothing may express this skepticism better than the fact that former Dallas City Councilman Jerry Bartos--champion for decades of the effort to get the Wright Amendment flight restrictions lifted from Dallas' Love Field--doesn't like what's going on. That's in spite of the fact that the Wright Amendment restrictions probably are going to be partly lifted at last, as part of a settlement in the dueling lawsuits between the two cities.
Bartos ought to be dancing on his desk. But he's not. Simply put, Bartos thinks the settlement in the lawsuit will be a backroom slam-dunk deal to guarantee the monopolies of American Airlines at D/FW and Southwest at Love Field.
"I don't know how it works exactly, but I think it's a game," Bartos says.
By agreeing to sue each other and then treating the thing like a football rivalry, the two mayors have put the matter safely off the public agenda and into the hands of lawyers, Bartos and others believe. The deal, when it is done, will be presented as a fait accompli to the two hapless city councils.
"They will allow through-ticketing at Love Field," Bartos says, "but they will continue to force planes leaving Love Field to land in the surrounding states, stopping every 280 miles or so. Probably nobody could come into Love Field and compete with Southwest on that basis."
While protecting Southwest's monopoly at Love Field, the deal would also keep Southwest out of American's monopoly at D/FW.
"It is an arrangement that divides the market and maintains two virtual monopolies in aviation for the metroplex traveler to deal with," Bartos says.
And all of it will be done without much reference to that pathetic City Council thing downtown.
So solid is the lock on things at City Hall that huge controversial issues fly right past the City Council without stirring a hair on a single council member's forehead. Some members don't get it. Some are afraid. Some have given up. There are many paths to catatonia.
Right in the midst of the debate on the bond package, the Northrup family announced that a Houston developer wants to build a $100 million apartment complex on Northrup property in the Farmers Market area. During the recent briefing, before the esteemed council voted to remove both of Larry Duncan's hands and one foot, several of them made glowing speeches thanking the slam-dunk duo for bringing this wonderful deal to them.
The developers were asking the city to put $11 million into the project, and council members said that seemed like a great deal: $11 million to get $100 million.
Well, oopsy on that. No, $11 million doesn't get us $100 million. That really would be a wonderful deal. If that sort of deal were available, we should expect to see people flying in from Bahrain and elsewhere to get in on more of the same.
No, the city's $11 million investment would get the city an additional amount of tax base that may or may not wind up being worth $100 million. At today's tax rates, that additional amount of tax base will take 17 years to pay back the city's $11 million investment. And by then, there's no telling if the apartments will still be worth enough to pay any decent taxes at all.
That amount, of course--$11 million--is more than the four-year capital budget for an entire City Council district. In Mr. Duncan's case, of course, it's twice as much. It's not a trivial amount.
Not that developing Farmers Market is a bad idea. It may be a great idea. But it's difficult to imagine a time in the last 20 years when such a large idea could move through the minds of the entire City Council and appear not to rustle a single mental leaf.
Only days before, the council had acquiesced just as meekly to the manager's decision to stretch out the payments on the bond issue by an extra year and borrow an additional $73 million.
Maybe it sounds good. It's what the guy on the lot says when you look like you might want to buy the Honda: You can afford the Lexus. Same payments. Just more of them.
It will give the mayor and the manager a public relations ploy when opponents of the bond issue argue that all of the money will go to the river and only a pittance will be spent on the $3.2 billion worth of deferred potholes, sewers, curbs, and gutters.
They can say, "Oh no. We feel your pain. We're borrowing extra money. We'll get to you. Be patient."
But you're going to have to be really patient, more patient than you were going to have to be already. The new plan means the street improvements and nuts-and-bolts projects people want are being pushed even farther to the back of the gravy train. In fact, what the mayor and the manager are doing is heavily front-loading the city's borrowing capacity in order to get the trophy projects, especially the river, paid for up front.
Most of the nuts-and-bolts projects that council members have promised their constituents are premised on what used to be the city's basic policy on borrowing money: that it would borrow about $200 million in elections held every three years.
So now the city is going to borrow $543 million and take four years to pay it off. But when did that policy change happen? There probably isn't a more fundamental policy issue than the underlying capital-borrowing plan of the city. It governs everything that can happen, everything that can be done. But there you have it. Kirk and Ware sailed it over the council's heads, and nary a propeller turned on a beanie.
In all of this, there is a single overarching question, capable of being expressed in a single three-letter word.
If Ron Kirk is a man making a career in politics, which he ought to be, and if John Ware is a man making a career in public administration, which he seems to be, then why would they want to do anything other than what the voting public of the city wants them to do? If there is a general sense out there that the city is sliding down into a $3.2 billion rat-hole of its own deferred needs, and if that sense is what brings the voters to their feet, then why wouldn't Kirk and Ware be doing everything in their power to meet that demand?
Why instead do they seem to be devoting all of their muscle and energy to shutting down small, community-driven issues in favor of things like the $246 million Trinity River bond package?
Neither Kirk nor Ware would talk to the Observer for this story. Kirk did return one call, which the Observer missed, but he declined to return several more after his press spokeswoman determined the story would contain criticism of him. A spokesman for Ware said he was "not interested" in commenting.
There are recurring rumors that Ware is a short-timer and will jump to a job in the private sector. It's possible he sees big, high-profile projects like the new sports arena and the river project as better career monuments than a lot of little pothole jobs scattered around the city.
It's easier to speculate about Ron Kirk's motivation. From the moment he was first mentioned as a candidate for mayor, his main backers have included people like William T. Solomon, a past chairman of the Dallas Citizens Council who was co-chairman of Kirk's campaign finance committee.
Austin Industries, founded by Solomon's grandfather, is a Forbes 500 company historically involved in public-works projects, especially roads and bridges. Austin Industries built the downtown Triple Underpass, the old Fort Worth toll road (now Interstate 30), and more recently has been a major player in the construction and expansion of the Dallas Convention Center.
The river project promises to be a $2 billion roads and bridges and levees public-works bonanza for someone with solid connections at City Hall--probably one of the biggest public-works projects of its kind anywhere in the nation.
Kirk draws a salary reported at about $200,000 a year from the downtown law firm of Gardere & Wynne, consistently one of the top 10 biggest law firms in Texas over the last decade.
Gardere & Wynne does not publicize its client list, but the list is known to include American Airlines. Also on the list in recent years have been Electronic Data Systems, U.S. Homes, and Donald Carter, former owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team.
Larry Schoenbrun, managing partner of Gardere & Wynne, says the firm never seeks to influence city decisions and turns away clients who want help at City Hall. He concedes that being mayor is "substantially a full-time job" and that Kirk spends little time at the firm's offices, but he says Kirk does maintain "rather regular hours here, though limited."
If Kirk seems to march to some drummer other than community pressure, and if one were inclined to guess who that drummer or drummers might be, it would be hard to resist guessing that it's probably the same old drum major who has always made Dallas City Hall march.
Bid'ness. The Citizens Council. The crew downtown that has a dollars-and-cents interest in public-policy decisions coming out of City Hall.
So what does any of that mean for real people? Kirk and Ware will say it doesn't mean anything, of course. All is well. Show's over. Everybody move along home now.
The numbers are sufficiently rubbery, to say nothing of the people spouting them, that's it's difficult to come up with a precise measure for what the Kirk-Ware slam-dunk bond program will do to neighborhood needs. The duo have conceded that it means the city will have to push back the basic streets-and-gutters items at least an additional year, to the end of the four-year cycle.
But even that assumes a great many things--that the city's tax base will continue to grow by at least 2 percent a year, that conditions in the national economy will remain favorable. A dip here or a blip there in the trends, and the city might not be able to sell those street bonds four years from now, whether the voters have approved them or not.
Meanwhile, the anecdotal evidence everywhere is that the manager is already scouring the landscape, searching hard for projects he can shut down or put off in order to take the heat off the trophy deals.
In the Claremont neighborhood, near Ferguson Road and R.L. Thornton, fate has thrown together a mainly white middle-class subdivision with what were some ghastly Soweto-style slum tenement buildings only a few years ago. People from the two sides of the tracks pulled together, and they have accomplished miracles in cleaning up the apartments and fighting for other improvements.
In this bond election, the people of the Claremont Addition Neighborhood Association anticipated they would finally get three street-improvement projects that would be the culmination of years of activism and working with City Hall. Vikki Martin, an artist who is a mainstay of the group, was excited when her council member, Charlotte Mayes, sent her the city manager's bond proposal and told her all three of the street projects were included.
"But I looked through it, and two of them were gone," Martin says. "I called Ms. Mayes, and I said I couldn't find two-thirds of our stuff. She said, 'Oh, don't worry, it's in there.'"
No. It wasn't. You really have to read the whole thing. Two-thirds of the projects the neighborhood had worked for years to get--all of which Mayes had told them they would get--were gone. Disappeared.
The manager took them.
"You can imagine the embarrassment that council member Mayes must have felt," Martin says, "to be telling us, 'It's on the bond program,' and then we do the research and it's not. And this is to a community that's done the work on this for years and years."
Derrick Mitchem is a 30-year-old, second-generation, professional drag-car racer, well known on the national circuit, who grew up in Dallas. Nine months ago he bought a funky, falling-down building in South Dallas--the original headquarters of the Bama Pie Co.
Named for the lady who originally baked them, Cornelia Alabama Marshall, Bama Pies are little pecan confections you can still find in some convenience stores. The pies gave birth to what is now a mammoth food-processing corporation headquartered in Tulsa, run by Bama Marshall's granddaughter.
Mitchem, a rangy, good-natured, quick-smiling guy with a lot of energy, wants to restore the old Bama Pie Company as a historic site and set it up as the new headquarters for his racing company. Leaning on the trunk of a car next to the building recently, he proudly displayed architectural renderings and a raft of letters from preservation experts saying his project had real merit.
He stumbled on the property and ordinarily would never have considered investing in that area. He's from a relatively privileged background. The blasted area around the old Bama building isn't where he grew up. But something about the place and the idea spoke deeply to him.
"Can you imagine?" he says, nodding toward kids picking their way across a littered intersection a week ago. "I want to use part of it for a display room for historic race cars, so kids could come and look in the window and see them. Can you imagine what that could do for this area?"
He says that six months ago he was told by more than one City Council member there could be as much as $150,000 to $250,000 in local community-development financing available for his project.
"Now they just say, 'It's not there anymore.' That's all I'm getting. 'It's not there.'"
He turns, looks at his building, and exhales a mighty sigh. "This is something that really hits hard to me," he says. "This is my life. This is something that I want to do."
Of course, beneath the surface of the bad news, there is wonderful news. It's a mysterious blessing on us all that the city even has people in it like Vikki Martin and Derrick Mitchem, people who weave the fabric of community around them according to some spiritual warp even they probably don't fully understand.
The weavers of community enjoy successes, even without money. Usually without money. And they do get help from good people who work for the city.
Jonathan Sterling is a 29-year-old laborer from New Hampshire who has put down roots in a bitter landscape of bottle shards and discarded drug needles along the Santa Fe tracks in East Dallas. He and his young wife own two old sun-bleached houses that rise above the ruined dirt like shipwrecks. They have helped organize the neighborhood around a host of causes.
He conducted a walking tour, proudly showing off the vacant lots where he has persuaded someone to dump truckloads of chip-mulch, steaming on a cool morning recently. "We're trying to create a layer of earth between the glass and the children's feet," he said.
He showed off the best houses on his block and the apartment buildings where landlords have been persuaded to haul off years of accumulated trash.
The end of the tour was his pride and joy--a scrawny park next to the tracks where the Parks Department has built a tidy tin-roofed pavilion with a concrete floor. Parks workers have put in sandboxes and a wooden climbing structure and will soon plant trees.
It's a patch of orderly green in a world of chaos--a sign that someone cares.
"The city built that pavilion," he says, as if announcing the Miracle at Lourdes. "They work with us all the time to keep this park like it is, really nice. They have a Central Services Team that comes in and sets up meetings between us and the people in the city we need to get to help us.
"We are very, very happy with this program and with the help we've gotten from the city," he says.
Those are the people who build the city anyway--the grassroots community builders and the hands-on city employees who work with them. They are the pillars. The city doesn't spill out of a sports arena. It grows up organically from places where someone found a way to create new soil between the glass and the feet of playing children.
There are all kinds of people who work for the city who want to do good work, who draw satisfaction from helping build the community, just as grassroots organizers do. The single-member system was supposed to have reached up from the grassroots, found the outreached hands of help from City Hall, and helped both sides accomplish together the quiet thatching of community.
But it didn't. The single-member system has failed. It's gone. We don't have 14-1. We have 2-zip.
And a word of advice? Don't use the phrase, "quiet thatching of community" around the mayor and the manager. You could find yourself with a large library building hooked up to your water meter.
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Cattle feeders know management back on the ranch affects the health and performance of cattle during the feeding period, and they use pre-arrival information in their management decisions. Those were some of the key points USDA veterinarian Dave Dargatz presented during the Academy of Veterinary Consultants meeting last week in Denver.
Dargatz works on the National Animal Health Monitoring System, a division of Veterinary Services at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
NAHMS conducted an extensive survey of health and management practices on U.S. feedlots, both large and small, during 2011. The full results will not be available until early 2013, but Dargatz provided AVC members with some highlights from the study.
Operators on 69.3 percent of all feedlots believed that pre-arrival processing information was very
Important, while an additional 23.8 percent rate the information as somewhat important. Asked about specific pre-arrival management practices, a large majority of cattle feeders rated these practices as extremely or very effective:
- Introduction to feed bunk – 81.2 percent
- Respiratory vaccinations given two weeks prior to weaning – 85.4 percent
- Respiratory vaccinations given at weaning – 80.4 percent
- Calves weaned four weeks prior to shipping – 79.1 percent
- Calves castrated/dehorned four weeks prior to shipping – 91.6 percent
- Calves treated for parasites prior to shipping – 71 percent.
Among feedlots with a capacity of 8,000 head or more, 26 percent say they always receive pre-arrival information on cattle and 70 percent say they sometimes receive the information. Among feedlots with capacity of 1,000 to 7,999 head, 38 percent say they always receive the information while 53 percent receive it sometimes.
About half of feedlots with 1,000 head or more and 20 percent of smaller feedlots say they modify their antibiotic or vaccination procedures during processing new arrivals based on criteria such as the
current state of the animals or the animals' management history.
As for procedures used upon arrival at fdeedlots with 8,000 head or more, 95 percent vaccinate against respiratory disease, 72 percent vaccinate against clostridial disease, 71 percent use an injectable antibiotic, 85.6 percent administer an implant and 91 percent treat for parasites.
Operators on 52.4 percent of feedlots with a capacity of 1,000 to 7,999 head were very familiar with the Beef Quality Assurance (BQA) program, compared with operators on 69.4 percent of feedlots with a capacity of 8,000 or more head. Overall, only 4.6 percent of feedlots with a capacity of 1,000 to 7,999 head and 0.3 percent of feedlots with a capacity of 8,000 or more head had operators who were not familiar with the BQA program. Among the larger feedlots, 96.1 had engaged in at least some formal BQA training for employees, while 70.1 percent of the smaller feedlots had some of that training.
Almost all feedlots with 1,000 head or more indicated they follow BQA guidelines on practices such as injection sites, implant strategies, antibiotic selection and residue avoidance.
Several information sheets on the 2011 feedlot study are available on the NAHMS website.

subset: commoncrawl


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- Doctors
- California
- Valencia
- Podiatrists
- Dr. Justin J. Franson
You may also like
Dr. Loris Yadegarian
Ratings for Dr. Justin J. Franson
He didn't offer to show me my x-rays. I should have asked. My previous doctor showed me my -rays and explained everything in detail.
He wanted to do surgery on my 7 year old to remove her bunion. I took her to an orthopedic doctor. She does not even have a bunion! Which he would have known, had he even bothered to take an x-ray.
Excellent doctor and staff. I travelled from northern Nevada to consult with the University Foot & Ankle Institute. Saw another doctor first who then sent me to the doctor from the numerous doctors available in the institute who was the best for what I needed a new ankle - Ankle replacement and Dr. Franson! He was without a doubt excellent as I had this done Nov. 8th 2013 and I am getting around quite well now. No one in my area has done more than one. He was worth the cost of travel expenses many times over and I highly recommend him!
My bunions got to the point where I could no longer enjoy wearing nice shoes comfortably so I decided to find a podiatrist to rid me of this discomfort! After 3 appointments with different podiatrists and not feeling comfortable with any of them, my wife found Dr. Franson at the University Foot & Ankle Institute in Valencia which was comfortably located within a 25 minute drive from our house. After meeting Dr. Franson, we both felt at ease and very confident about his ability and decided to put my foot in his hands (so to speak). He was THE ONLY Doctor I had been to who offered to perform the surgery to meet OUR schedule, in fact- he agreed to do the bunionectomy the morning before he left for a week's vacation! His staff was friendly and helpful. It's been one week since my surgery and I went to have the bandage changed this morning! WOW! I was amazed at the incredible job he did and how quickly my foot is healing! Institute are amazing!! Thanks SO MUCH for a tremendous experience!
I am 4 weeks post Achilles' tendon surgery now and got my cast off today. Dr. Franson is the BEST foot specialist I have ever been to. He is extremely kind, he's caring and compassionate. He truly cares about his patients and has a fantastic bedside manner, but above all of that, he is an extremely talented surgeon. I was so comprehensive about having this surgery due to all of the horror stories I had read about others who have had the same Achilles' tendon surgery with other doctors. I feel very fortunate to have found Dr. Franson because so far it's been a breeze compared to others. His staff is great as well. They are all very friendly, caring and professional. The wait is never long and I always feel that he spends an appropriate amount of time with me answering all of my questions. I have never written a review about a doctor before but I truly believe Dr. Franson deserves one. I highly recommend Dr. Franson and University Foot & Ankle Institute!
Dr. Franson spent the time to listen to my problem. He thoroughly evaluated my condition, discussed my problem in detail so I understood it. He discussed the options and let me participate in the decision making process. Refreshing. Excellent doctor.
My daughter who is an athlete has suffered for years with flat feet issues. We live in the Antelope Valley and sadly have not been able to find a decent podiatrist. A close friend of ours who ventured out of the AV with foot issues recommended Dr. Justin Franson in Valencia,The Foot and Ankle Institute. We learned more in one visit with him than all the other visits with other doctors combined. Since he is an athlete himself, he relates well with athletes and their injuries. He has called us three times with suggestions and information, answered all of my questions and has given me hope with my daughter's condition. His staff is wonderful too, we are very grateful to have found him, do yourself a favor and let Dr. Franson evaluate your foot or ankle problem, and I hope you will be as happy as we are.
Dr. Justin J. Franson's Credentials
Facility Affiliations
Accepting New Patients
- Dr. William M. Scholl College Of Podiatric Medicine (Grad. 2001)
Other Specialties
Areas of Expertise
Awards & Recognitions
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text: Tech starts life after MSC with rebuilt roster By Ryan Pritt October 4, 2012 Story Share It's not official, but WVU Tech will have a shiny new championship banner hanging from the rafters this year, celebrating what would have been the team's Mid-South Conference regular-season title from last season - if the Golden Bears hadn't been ruled ineligible by the league.Save for the coach and a couple of players, that might be about all that's left in Montgomery from last year.The Golden Bears lost seven seniors to graduation and are entering life after the Mid-South, playing as an NAIA independent in the United States Collegiate Athletic Association."In my opinion, we were never a good fit for the Mid-South," coach Bob Williams said. "Those Kentucky schools are private and full-funded for all sports and it was tough for us to compete. Now we have the chance to control our schedule a little more and we were able to schedule more in-state games than before."No matter where or whom they are playing, the Golden Bears will bring an inexperienced roster with them, and growing pains figure to follow at least early in the season."Obviously, we're a work in progress," Williams said. "We have few experienced returners. Other kids will have to step up."We've got a lot of question marks here, but the kids are working hard and they're a great group of kids. Last year's team was so experienced and now we have so many new pieces and they're learning a new system. But we're excited, the school is excited, and we think the student body and the faculty are excited as well."Tech will roll out enough local talent to have a lot of people in the Kanawha Valley and outlying areas excited.Junior Brandon Burgraff (Williamson), sophomores David Ward (Scott) and Jaren Marino (South Charleston) and freshmen Cam Powell (Winfield), Eddie Gordon (South Charleston), Hunter Lambert (Lincoln County), Joe Saunders (George Washington) and Nicholas Lee (Mingo Central) will represent a hodgepodge of in-state players that will look to build upon last season's success.Tolsia standout Jacob Copley was in many ways the prized recruit of this year's recruiting class, but the incoming freshman left school a few weeks ago.Junior-college transfers Armond Perez, Jauries Thomas and Floyd Campbell are all listed at 6-foot-6, and if and when they are cleared to play should provide significant contributions this season.nn To call West Virginia State's 2011-2012 campaign a failure may seem a bit harsh.After all, the Yellow Jackets were able to patch together a 12-10 record in the West Virginia Conference to go with a 14-13 overall record, keeping their heads above .500.But to State and coach Bryan Poore, those marks are not in the same stratosphere as what Yellow Jackets fans, players and coaches have come to expect in Institute. As evidence, the 12-10 league mark was State's lowest winning percentage within the conference since the Jackets finished 10-8 back in 2003.Injuries and inexperience contributed to State's down year, but with practice beginning on Oct. 15, Poore is confident is team is ready to return to the upper tier of the conference standings."Right now, with the workouts we're able to do and a little bit of team practice [2 hours a week], I like the makeup that we've got," Poore said. "I think this team will kind of get back to my style of teams - athletic, pretty versatile, and we've got some decent size. We've got a couple of 6-foot-7, 6-8 kids, and the kids we've got are strong, big kids. Even the 6-4, 6-5 kids are strong enough to play down low if we have to. We have some toughness, and I thought we lacked that at times last year." Poore had a busy offseason, adding several players that will look to help the turnaround cause this year.One is Ray Austin, who played junior college ball in Texas. Poore recruited Austin when he was playing in high school in Cleveland. And the 6-8, 220-pound junior forward could provide an important presence inside for the Jackets."He's going to be a really big help for us," Poore said. "He's big, athletic, strong, skilled, fast - he's just going to be good for us." Fellow junior college transfers Dimitri Abner (6-4, 225) and Juan Johnson (6-2, 170) will both come in from Columbus State, the same school from which senior Brandon Ross hails.Anton Hutchins (6-4, 190) will transfer in from Cincinnati State while Ravenswood High School's Ben Pannell (6-5, 190) and Victor Sharp from Warren (Mich.) Mott High School will begin their freshman seasons.But perhaps the addition that could pay the most immediate dividends will be the return of former Charleston Catholic standout Bo King, who was dismissed from the State program prior to last season.Poore said King asked for a second chance, and while he will not be under scholarship for this his senior year, he will be ready to contribute and has a lot of people rooting for him."I'm one of them," Poore said. "I hope he does right and graduates, and as long as he does all the things he's supposed to do, he will."nnThe University of Charleston is looking to reload after narrowly missing a conference championship and making an NCAA Division II tournament appearance.Gone from that team are five seniors, including WVC player of the year P.J. Reyes.But depth was maybe UC's strongest attribute, and five rising juniors as well as a few transfers will look to build off last season's 26-7 campaign.Former Logan standout Paul Williamson will transfer in from West Virginia for his sophomore season to add some local flavor to the roster.Meanwhile, Serbian Aleksander Kesic will transfer in from Division I Iona after playing for Huntington Prep in 2009-2010.Quincy Washington will also come in from the junior college level after averaging 14.5 points for USC-Salkehatchie last year.Coach Mark Downey did not return phone calls from the Gazette requesting an interview.Reach Ryan Pritt at 304-348-7948, email@example.com, or follow him at twitter.com/RPritt. Story Share Story Share Trending Now 1 Teen pleads guilty to involuntary manslaughter in Oakes Field shooting 2 Facebook founder visits Cabin Creek Health Systems 3 Toyota announces new $115 million project for WV plant 4 'Report for America' pilot project begins in Appalachia 5 Congressional opioid investigation targets drug wholesaler Miami-Luken WVU club hockey team opens season Saturday in South Charleston Previous Story Roundup: Kellie Schmitt added to Marshall tennis coaching staff Next Story


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/ Guided Climbing Holidays in Spain
Climbing anchors may not seem to be the most exciting topic for UKC; what is there to know you might ask? Surely they are... Read more
The two climbers linked the west faces of the three towers in the Bugaboos in 23.5 hours The link-up consisted of 2,000m of... Read more
The fifth round of the IFSC Lead World Cup took place at EICA Ratho near Edinburgh this weekend. For the first time in 14 years,... Read more
Occupying a menacing position high above the Chew Valley's reservoir, is a grit stone monster of truly biblical proportions. By... Read more


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Dainty Desserts, Candies, Salads
The front cover is yellow with a roses bordering the title. At the bottom are two southern belles in a doorway admiring a plate of dessert made with Knox Gelatine. The title is styled to resemble cross-stitching and is surrounded by a blue and gold wooden frame. The back is similar to the front, but replaces the southern belles with the Knox trade mark and two boxes of Sparkling Gelatine.View this piece: jpg pdf
Donor: Sliker, Shirley Brocker
Brand Name: Knox
Publisher: Charles B. Knox Co. (Johnstown, N.Y.)
47 p.
17.1 x 11.4 cm
Language: English
Key Terms:
Copyright: Permission is granted from the copyright owner/holder.
Citation: Dainty Desserts, Candies, Salads. The Alan and Shirley Brocker Sliker Collection, MSS 314, Special Collections, Michigan State University Libraries. Available at http://www.lib.msu.edu/exhibits/sliker/detail.jsp?id=1643


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An Ilkley pub is set to host its first charity beer festival next weekend to raise funds for Help for Heroes.
The Flying Duck, in Church Street, will be showcasing over 30 real ales from Cumbrian breweries, across three bars and 13 hand pumps, between Thursday, March 27, and Sunday, March 30.
The majority of the investors involved in the consortium behind the town's newest venue are past chairmen of Ilkley Round Table and founder members of the highly successful Ilkley Beer Festival which raises tens of thousands of pounds for needed causes every year.
The Flying Duck's general manager Stewart Ross said: "Real ale is our passion, we have a long history of raising money for charity and our first beer festival at the pub gives us another opportunity to bring the two together.
"Cumbrian beers are always very popular and we feel that Help for Heroes is a very worthwhile cause for us to bet getting behind."
Help for Heroes was founded by Bryn and Emma Parry in October 2007 out of a desire to help the wounded servicemen and women returning from Afghanistan and Iraq and provides direct, practical support to those injured in the current conflicts.
The Flying Duck will be making a substantial donation at the end of the beer festival based upon the number of pints sold.
The event is free to enter but there will be collecting tins available throughout the weekend should visitors wish to contribute. Donations can also be made online via bmy charity.com/FlyingDuck Ilkley.
Last week, the Flying Duck held a wine tasting evening in aid of the Yorkshire Air Ambulance and presented BBC Look North Presenters Harry Gration and Amy Garcia with a Wharfedale Blonde bottle set and a collection bucket with monies raised from their customers in support of their Tour de Yorkshire tandem ride for Sport Relief, when they paid a brief visit.


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The Affordable Care Act will produce both winners and losers when the individual mandate begins in 2014, a panel of insurance and accounting experts told a trade group Wednesday.
ALACHUA — The Affordable Care Act will produce both winners and losers when the individual mandate begins in 2014, a panel of insurance and accounting experts told a trade group Wednesday.
For individuals, the cost of health insurance premiums will go up or down based on their age, gender and health.
For employers, the cost of providing insurance or paying penalties for not providing it depends on how many people they employ and the quality of insurance they already provide.
The North Central Florida Chapter of the Construction Financial Management Association, made up of people involved in finance and accounting for construction companies, hosted "A Look Inside the Intricate Panorama of Obamacare" at the National Center for Construction Education building in Alachua on Wednesday.
For people who do not have access to health insurance through an employer plan, the law calls for a health insurance exchange to be available online starting Oct. 1 so they can shop for plans from different insurers and enroll by Jan. 1, 2014. Florida has decided not to implement an exchange, so state residents will have to use the federal exchange.
For people on employer plans, the provisions of the ACA kick in whenever their plans renew in 2014.
The panelists said the winners include people who can't currently get insurance because they have pre-existing health conditions and people eligible for subsidies through health exchanges because they make within 400 percent of the federal poverty level, currently $46,000 for an individual or $94,000 for a family of four.
The losers in the cost structure are younger, healthier men who will pay more to bring down the costs to young women and older adults, said Brad Bentley, senior vice president of AvMed Health Plans.
Many young and healthy people are expected to opt out of buying insurance and instead pay a $95 penalty next year, driving up the average cost for everyone else.
"The big unknown is how many will remain uninsured," Bentley said. "Our best estimate is about half because it will be cheaper to pay the penalty."
"That's one facet that makes absolutely no sense at all in relation to what the intent of the ACA was — to get more people participating," he said.
The penalty goes up each year, however, so at some point depending on what premiums cost, it will make sense for young people to buy insurance, said Lee Brockway, owner of D&B Insurance Services.
People at small companies with high-deductible, low-premium plans will see their premiums increase since the law will limit deductibles to $2,000, Bentley said.
Businesses with more than 50 full-time equivalent employees will be required to provide insurance with a minimum level of benefits and an affordable level of premium costs to employees or have to pay penalties.
For some large employers, it might make financial sense to redirect some low-wage workers to Medicaid and pay a $3,000 penalty per employee, said Jay Hutto, partner with James Moore Certified Public Accountants and Consultants.
Panelists said the formula for determining full-time equivalent employees is affecting worker hours. Full time is considered 30 hours per week, while part-time worker hours are added together to determine the number of full-time equivalents.
Hutto said some smaller companies are cutting hours to stay below the 50-employee threshold, and larger companies are cutting hours to reduce the penalties they will have to pay based on the number of uninsured full-time equivalent employees.
Companies also are cutting low-wage staff and using temporary workers instead, Brockway said, adding that moves creates another winner from the law — temp agencies.


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Hampton 5-Drawer Dresser Set
- Overview
Make the most of your space. This set's dresser has a clean, sharp look with five roomy drawers. Towers on either side can store books, desk accessories and everyday essentials. Four cubbies in the overhead hutch are perfect for keeping smaller items.
- Crafted with a kiln-dried hardwood frame.
- Dark Espresso is built from pine, MDF, premium-quality plywood and veneer.
- White is built from hardwood, MDF, premium-quality plywood and veneer.
- Finish is hand-applied in a multi-step process. Simply White is a flat white paint, our most true clean white finish.
- Dark Espresso is detailed with polished black hardware; White is detailed with brushed nickel hardware.
- English dovetailed drawers open smoothly on waxed wood glides, and feature drawer stops for safety.
- Hardware is made of nickel with a dark finish.
- Five deep drawers and one long drawer hold all of your essentials.
- Cabinet doors secure with magnetic latches.
- Cutouts in back keep cords organized and easily accessible.
- Dimensions + Care
- Overall: 78" wide x 21" deep x 73.5" high
- Overall: 42" wide x 21" deep x 37" high
- Top Drawer Interior (2): 18" wide x 15" deep x 3.25" high
- Bottom Drawer Interior (3): 39" wide x 15" deep x 5.25" high
- Distance Drawers Extend: 11"
- Overall: 42" wide x 15.5" deep x 12" high
- Cubby Interior (4): 9.5" wide x 13.5" deep x 10" high
Tower (2)
- Overall: 18" wide x 15.5" deep x 73.5" high
- Top Cabinet Interior: 16.5" wide x 13" deep x 18" high
- Cubby Interior: 16.5" wide x 13" deep x 24.5" high
- Bottom Cabinet Interior: 16.5" wide x 13" deep x 23" high
- Dust often using a soft, dry cloth.
- To protect the finish, do not apply abrasives or household cleaners.
- Shipping Info
This item is delivered by our Premium In-Home Delivery Service. With In-Home delivery, the item is brought into your home, unpacked, and assembled (except for some headboards and Style-It Desk components, which are not unpacked or assembled. Our service also does not mount hutches and shelves to customer's walls.) Delivery is by appointment. Monday-Friday, in all areas; Saturday delivery in some areas. Our delivery service will contact you to arrange a day. This service is available in the contiguous 48 states only. Please allow approximately 2-3 weeks for delivery. Returns of mattresses are subject to a $40 return shipping fee.


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The Monki online shop stocks our entire Monki collection, alongside inspirational images and features from our Monki Magazine and Monki Television, as well as our very own "radio", playing our Monki DJ of the Month. It's really important to us that you enjoy shopping in the Monki online store, so we take great care to make sure that everything is simple to use, easy to understand and that your details are always secure.
If you'd like to know more about the things we do at Monki and all the goings on in the Monki World -our famous Monki parties, oh-so-fine store openings, sales and offers -subscribe to our newsletter and we'll make sure to keep you posted!
To shop at the Monki online store you need to be 18 years old or over and possess a valid credit or debit card that we accept. By placing an order, you are accepting the Monki contract and terms and conditions. All orders are subject to availability and confirmation of the order price. The language of the contract is English and we will sell our collections in Euro (€), Swedish Kronor (SEK) for shipments to Sweden and pounds (GBP) for shipments to UK. Based on the selected shipping country, the prices displayed on the Monki Online Shop include the statutory Value Added Tax but they do not include a delivery charge.


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Brock Nelson and Mathew Barzal recorded first period goals for the Islanders, but the Devils failed to answer back, losing 3-0 in a split squad matchup. >> Read more
The Devils scored five goals in the first period, including two from Pavel Zacha, and went on to defeat the Ottawa Senators, 8-1 on Monday evening at Consolidated Credit Union Place. >> Read more
Drew Stafford scored the game-winning goal in the third quarter to lead the Devils to a 2-1 win over the Rangers on Saturday at the Prudential Center. >> Read more
First Period
- No goals
Second Period
Jesper Bratt scored two goals in the third period and Keith Kinkaid saved 28 of 29 shots to help the Devils defeat the Canadiens, 4-1, on Thursday at the Bell Centre. >> Read more
Tags: Devin Smith, Keith Kinkaid
With four seconds left in overtime, Filip Chytil scored to give the Rangers a 4-3 win over the Devils on Wednesday night. >> Read more
First Period
- 15:54 NYR: Kevin Hayes (Power Play); Assists: Jimmy Vesey, Kevin Shattenkirk
Second Period
- 4:11 NJD: Pavel Zacha; Assists: Drew Stafford, Miles Wood
- 4:32 NYR: Chris Kreider; Assist: Mats Zuccarello
- 7:15 NJD: Brian Gibbons (Power Play); Assists: Drew Stafford, Jimmy Hayes
- 10:16 NYR: David Desharnais; Assists: Kevin Shattenkirk, Chris Kreider
Devils C Brian Boyle has been diagnosed with Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, the team announced on Tuesday.
Devils GM Ray Shero said the cancer was found through routine bloodwork at the beginning of the team's training camp. Boyle has missed practice throughout the week.
The New Jersey Devils blew out the Washington Capitals, 4-1, on Monday at Prudential Center. >> Read more
The Devils re-signed D Damon Severson to a six-year, $25 million contract, GM Ray Shero announced Monday.
Severson, 23, has spent his first three NHL seasons with the Devils, who now have him under contract until the 2022-23 season.
"Damon brings an important dimension to our hockey club and he is a young defenseman that we are excited to work with," Shero said. "This deal shows our ownership's commitment in what we continue to build here. We look forward to helping Damon continue to grow and develop as a player."
Tags: Damon Severson
The New Jersey Devils agreed to a two-year entry deal worth $925,000 annually with former University of Denver defenseman Will Butcher, the team announced Sunday.
Butcher, 22, became an unrestricted free agent earlier in the month when he chose not to sign with the Colorado Avalanche.
Butcher won the Hobey Baker Award last season after totaling seven goals and 30 assists. He recorded 28 goals and 75 assists in 158 career games with Denver.
The Devils have signed veteran winger Drew Stafford to a one-year deal.
The deal is worth $800,000 as GM Ray Shero announced the signing on Friday.
Stafford split time with the Boston Bruins and Winnipeg Jets last season where he totaled eight goals and 13 assists for 21 points
The 31-year-old took a tremendous pay cut after making $4.35 million the past two seasons. He has totaled 400 points since joining the NHL in 2006.
The New Jersey Devils have lost top center Travis Zajac for four to six months with a pectoral injury.
Devils executive vice president and general manager Ray Shero announced that Zajac had surgery to repair the pectoral muscle on Thursday.
Shero said the Zajac was hurt last week during offseason training. >> Read more
Copyright 2017 by The Associated Press
Tags: Travis Zajac
The Devils will retire Patrik Elias' No. 26 during a pregame ceremony on Feb. 24, the team announced Wednesday.
Elias underwent knee surgery prior to last season and looked to make a comeback bid to the ice, but decided to hang up his skates this March. He did not suit up during any game last year.
Tags: Patrik Elias
Former Devils F Ilya Kovalchuk will likely make his return to the NHL in the 2018-19 season, per NJ.com's Chris Ryan.
Kovalchuk expressed interest in returning to the NHL this season with the Devils granting him permission to seek a deal with other teams. However, he told Russia-24 TV that he will likely play one last season in the SKA before returning to the states.
As Kovalchuk sought deals this season, the Devils were not opposed to making a sign-and-trade. However, GM Ray Shero said the deal had to make sense for the Devils.
The Devils have signed first overall pick Nico Hischier to a maximum entry-level three-year contract, Vice President/GM Ray Shero announced on Saturday.
Hischier's contract is worth $925,000 AAV and includes performance bonuses. The 18-year-old just completed New Jersey's Development Camp on Saturday, according to the team.
Hischier tallied 38 goals and 48 assists in 57 games for for Halifax (QMJHL) in 2016-17, which was the most among rookies. In the playoffs, Hischier scored three goals and had four assists.
Despite the Devils lacking on the defensive front last season, G Cory Schneider believes the group the team already has, per NJ.com's Chris Ryan.
Instead of the defense needing to improve, Schneider thinks the goals allowed last season were his fault. He knows that if he plays his game, there is bound to be a drastic change.
"Defensively, we're returning a lot of the guys we had last year. Goal prevention may have been more of a me issue than a team defense issue," Schneider said. "If I can play the way I know I can, it will obviously clear up any holes for defensive issues we have. I trust our defensemen. They player hard last year, they played their hearts out. We expect the same from them this year."
Tags: Cory Schneider
The number one overall pick in the NHL draft, Nico Hischier, talks with Justine Ward about his first practice with the New Jersey Devils.
Devils newest F Marcus Johansson is embracing the role as an underdog with the Devils, and believes the team can surprise the league this season, per NJ.com's Chris Ryan.
Johansson knows playoff hockey, having made the postseason in six seasons with the Washington Capitals including last year. Now, he is on the other side of the spectrum with the Devils searching for their first playoff berth since the 2011-12 season where they lost in the Stanley Cup Final.
Though the Devils were 12 games under .500 last season, he thinks the team is on the right path toward winning this year.
"It's something that's moving in the right direction I fee like, and I don't mind being an underdog here," Johansson said. "I think we have a great team and if we can just put all the pieces together, I think we can surprise some people."
Tags: Marcus Johansson
This offseason, the Devils allowed Beau Bennett to walk in free agency and bought out the contract of forward Mike Cammalleri.
Bennett, a UFA, signed a one-year deal worth $650,000 with the Blues after leaving New Jersey. The Devils never really made a serious offer to Bennett, who notched 19 points in 65 games.
Tags: Beau Bennett, Mike Cammalleri
The Capitals have agreed to terms with former Devil Devante Smith-Pelly on a one-year, two-way deal, the team announced.
The New Jersey Devils acquired forward Marcus Johansson from the Washington Capitals in exchange for 2018 second- and third-round picks.
Johansson, 26, recorded 24 goals and 34 assists in 82 games during the regular season and two goals and six assists in 13 playoff games for Washington.
A first-round pick in 2009, Johansson has 102 goals and 188 assists in 501 career NHL games.
The Devils will give up Florida's second-round pick and Toronto's third-round pick next season.
Tags: Washington Capitals
The Kings are expected to sign LW Michael Cammalleri to a one-year, $1 million deal, according to TSN's Bob McKenzie.
The Devils had placed Cammalleri and RW Devante Smith-Pelly on unconditional waivers, for the purpose of buying out their contracts, the team announced Friday.
Tags: Mike Cammalleri
The Devils have signed free agent F Brian Boyle to a two-year deal worth $6.1 million, according to Chris Ryan of NJ.com.
The 32-year-old forward, who played the final 21 games with the Maple Leafs last year, reportedly was interested in returning to the Tampa Bay Lightning. Between Toronto and Tampa Bay in 2016-17, Boyle recorded 13 goals and 12 assists in 75 games.
The former New York Ranger has notched 93 goals, 76 assists and a minus-20 in 624 NHL games.
The New Jersey Devils extended qualifying offers to nine players, including defenseman Damon Severson and forward Blake Coleman, on Monday.
The Devils also extended offers to defenseman Vojtech Mozik, goaltender Scott Wedgewood and forwards Joseph Blandisi, Stefan Noesen, Blake Pietila, Kevin Rooney and Ben Thomson.
Players have until July 15 to sign a contract with the team. They may sign an offer sheet with another team, but the Devils are given the right of first refusal or draft choice compensation.
The league's salary arbitration phase takes place from July 20 to Aug. 4.
Tags: Damon Severson
The New Jersey Devils drafted 11 players in the 2017 NHL Draft, including two third round picks, two fifth round picks, and three seventh round picks.
Round 1, 1st overall pick: C Nico Hischier
Scouting report...
The Devils selected C Jesper Boqvist with the fifth pick in the second round of the NHL Draft on Saturday at the United Center in Chicago.
Boqvist had six assists in 16 games for Brynas IF in 2016-17 before moving to Timra IK, where he scored three goals and added nine assists in 19 games. In seven games of international competition at the IIHF U18 World Championship in 2016, he had two goals and an assist in seven games.
"The left-shot forward has great speed with offensive skill. Boqvist (6-0, 179) is a very good skater with good first-step quickness and balance," said Mike G. Morreale of NHL.com. "He's a skilled puck carrier, and effective in traffic."
The Devils selected Swiss center Nico Hischier with the No. 1 pick Friday night at the first NHL draft to ever be held in Chicago. Hischier, 18, had 38 goals and 86 points for the Halifax Mooseheads of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey Legue last season.
He is the highest-drafted Swiss player in NHL history and is known for his speed and excellent skating ability. He is listed at 6 foot and 179 pounds. He won the Michael Bossy Trophy (Best Professional Prospect) and Michael Bergeron Trophy (Offensive Rookie of the Year) last year.
New Jersey is coming off a last-place finish with a 28-40-14 record last season. The Devils also have the No. 36 pick in this year's draft.
The Devils will kick off their 2017-18 season against the Colorado Avalanche on October 7 at the Prudential Center.
The Devils have lost defenseman Jon Merrill in the Expansion Draft to the Las Vegas Golden Knights.
Tags: Jon Merrill
The Devils announced they will play the Avalanche in their home opener on Oct. 7.
New Jersey Devils forwards Adam Henrique and Taylor Hall are among the nine players the team will protect in the NHL expension draft.
The Devils will also protect forwards Kyle Palmieri and Travis Zajac, defensemen Andy Greene, John Moore, Mirco Mueller and Damon Severson, and goaltender Cory Schneider.
Goaltender Keith Kinkaid and forwards Michael Cammalleri and Devante Smith-Pelly are among the 24 players the Devils made available for the Las Vegas Golden Knights, who will submit their draft selections by 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday.
Las Vegas must choose one player from each team and must take a minimum of 14 forwards, nine defensemen and three goaltenders.
Tags: Adam Henrique, Taylor Hall
Though he has not ruled out the option, Devils general manager Ray Shero says he will "probably" hold on to the first overall pick in this year's NHL Draft, per NHL.com's Mike G. Morreale.
Shero has been getting calls from teams interested in trading for the No. 1 overall selection, but he isn't returning them.
"I've gotten calls asking if there's interest moving down and other calls where it's been more specific and it's something to think about," Shero said. "But I haven't called them back. The idea is we'll probably be picking, but we're open to a lot of things."
The New Jersey Devils have announced their 2017-2018 preseason schedule Monday morning.
The Devils preseason schedule consists of seven games, all against Eastern Conference opponents, with two home games and five road matchups, including one neutral-site "road" game.
New Jersey begins its preseason on Monday, September 18 at home against Washington. The Devils will then travel across the Hudson River to take on the Rangers on Wednesday, September 20, and to Montreal to face the Canadiens on September 21.
The Devils then return home for another matchup against the Rangers on Saturday, September 23.
Devils 2016 first-round pick, Michael McLeod, will look to improve his strength and conditioning to hopefully make it to the NHL this season, per Chris Ryan of NJ.com.
The 19-year-old, who was selected 12th overall last year, is hoping to make the big leagues this season. To do so, director of amatuer scouting Paul Castron thinks he needs to hit the weights.
"I think the biggest part is the strength and conditioning," Castron said. "You don't necessarily need to rush that, sometimes it's just a maturing factor. Guys get older, they fill out. Sometimes guys rush that and get injured working out. You've got to put the time in the gym obviously, got to eat properfly and do all the little things right."
Tags: Michael McLeod
With the NHL Draft just a few weeks away, the Devils are contemplating which of the top prospects to take with the number one pick.
New Jersey is expected to select one of two centers with the first overall selection: Nolan Patrick or Nico Hischier. Patrick is ranked No. 1 and Hischier No. 2 by Central Scouting, but many consider both prospects equally worthy of the top selection.
"They are different types of players," Devils general manager Ray Shero said to the New York Times.
Patrick was the captain of the Brandon Wheat Kings of the Western Hockey League. Although he missed more than half of the season due to injuries, Patrick finished the year with 20 goals and 26 assists in just 33 games. He truly put himself in the national spotlight during the 2015-2016 season, when he recorded 102 points in 72 games and led the Wheat Kings to the Memorial Cup (the championship of Canadian junior hockey), earning MVP honors for the playoffs.
Devils general manager Ray Shero isn't losing sleep over the possible return of Ilya Kovalchuk to the NHL, according to Mike G. Morreale of NHL.com.
Kovalchuk has expressed interest in returning to the NHL, but with the Devils holding the No. 1 pick in the NHL Draft later this month, Shero isn't focused on him at the moment.
"As far as I know, that's still the plan," Shero said at the NHL Scouting Combine Thursday. "Kovalchuk kind of drives the bus on this in terms of talking to teams or where he could want to play."
The Devils have met with potential first overall pick, Nolan Patrick, at the NHL Scouting Combine, according to Mike G. Morreale of NHL.com.
The team met with the 18-year-old on the first day of the six-day combine, and Patrick said the meeting was straightforward.
"It was straightforward questioning, they were really friendly," Patrick said. "They asked at one point what was most important to me, being a top scorer or winning the game. That answer is pretty obvious: winning the game."
The Devils have fired radio analyst Sherry Ross on Tuesday, according to Chris Ryan of NJ.com.
Ross has served as the Devils color commentator on their WFAN radio broadcasts for the past 10 seasons. She worked as a hockey reporter with the Daily Record, The Record, Newsday and New York Daily News as well.
Ilya Kovalchuk wants to return to the NHL next season, and the Devils have given him and his agent permission to seek a deal with other teams, according to Pierre LeBrun of TSN.
New Jersey still holds the forward's rights as Kovalchuk left the NHL in the middle of his contract with the Devils.
LeBrun writes that Devils GM Ray Shero confirmed with Kovalchuk's agent, Jay Grossman, that the 34-year old definitely wants to return to the NHL next season.
The Devils will pick first overall in the NHL Draft after winning the NHL Entry Draft lottery.
The Philadelphia Flyers and Dallas Star will have the second and third overall draft picks, respectively.
The Devils have missed the postseason five straight seasons and finished their 2016-17 campaign with a 28-40 record.
The Devils have signed defenseman Yaroslav Dyblenko to a two-year, entry-level contract, the team announced Thursday morning.
Dyblenko spent the past five seasons in the Kontinental Hockey League. He spent last season with Moscow Spartak, where he recorded four goals, seven assists, and 51 penalty minutes in 51 games.
Through 180 KHL games, Dyblenko has 12 goals and 27 assists.
The Devils cleaned out their lockers at The Prudential Center on Tuesday, marking the official end of their 2016-17 season.
New Jersey finished in last place in the Eastern Conference and won just 28 games as the team missed the postseason for the fifth consecutive year. The Devils finished with the second-worst record in the NHL behind only the Colorado Avalanche.
The New Jersey Devils ended the 2016-17 season with a 4-1 loss to the Detroit Red Wings on Sunday at Joe Louis Arena. >> Read more
First period:
- 7:09 DET Riley Sheahan; Assists: Frans Nielsen, Darren Helm
- 11:19 DET Tomas Tatar; Assists: Gustav Nyquist, Henrik Zetterberg
Second period:
- 10:18 DET Zetterberg; Assist: Nyquist
Third period:
- 1:15 NJ John Moore; Assists: Jacob Josefson, Michael Cammalleri
- 17:27 DET Riley Sheahan (power play); Assists: Nielsen, Dylan Larkin
Tags: Detroit Red Wings, Jacob Josefson, John Moore, Mike Cammalleri
Anders Lee scored two goals and Jaroslav Halak saved 37 shots as the Islanders beat the Devils on Saturday at the Prudential Center. >> Read more
First period
No goals
The Islanders and Devils play each other for the final time this season at 6 p.m. at the Prudential Center.
According to STATS:
- The Islanders beat the Hurricanes, 3-0, at PNC Arena on Thursday night, keeping their slim postseason hopes alive in the process. New York has won four straight games -- its longest win streak of the 2016-17 campaign.
- New Jersey lost, 7-4, to Pittsburgh at Prudential Center on Thursday night, dropping to 1-5-2 in the last eight games overall. The seven goals scored by the Pens were the most allowed by the Devils in any game this season.
The Devils fell behind early on Thursday night and were unable to keep up with the Pittsburgh Penguins, who defeated New Jersey by a score of 7-4 on at the Prudential Center to clinch home-ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs. >> Read more
John Moore scored 59 seconds into overtime and New Jersey Devils snapped a six-game losing streak with a 1-0 victory over the Philadelphia Flyers on Tuesday night.
Keith Kinkaid made 35 saves in posting his first shutout of the season and helping the Devils win for only the third time in 21 games (3-14-4).
The Flyers scored twice in the first period and cruised to a 3-0 victory over the Devils at The Wells Fargo Center. >> Read more
First Period
7:28 PHI Brayden Schenn (Power Play); Assists: Claude Giroux, Shayne Gostisbehere


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Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg says that Facebook losing teen users has been "blown out of proportion." Read »
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took 30 minutes of questions from angry investors at the social network's first annual shareholders meeting. Read »
Facebook's chief financial officer warns Menlo Park that Facebook could take its new headquarters elsewhere without a good deal. Read »


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Friday July 15, 2005 6:05 pm
Use Samsing i730 As An EV-DO Modem
Posted by Andru Edwards - Categories: Cell Phones, Mods / Hacks
Verizon doesn't want you to use your EV-DO phones as BlueTooth modems, but really - who cares what they want? While it was previously thought impossible, DavesiPaq has put up information on how to hack into your Samsung i730 to use it as an EV-DO modem over BlueTooth or USB. Like many other phones, it involves using the username "email@example.com" with the password "vzw". Unfortunately, there is a lot more to this. Check them out for the full details.
Read More | Samsung i730 EV-DO Modem Instruction
Edit: The issue between DavesiPaq and engadget has been cleared up. Aside from that, the comment above did not come across correctly, and shouldn't have been made in the first place.
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Brain Insulin Resistance Linked to Overeating, Altered Homeostatic Setpoint
A new study found that in obese college students with significant visceral fat, specific brain regions became insulin-resistant.
Battle of the Bulge: An Obesity Photo Quiz
Obesity, a health hazard in its own right, is linked with heart disease, diabetes, and a wide range of other clinical concerns. This week's photo quiz offers a variety of presentations to test your diagnostic acumen.
Crohn Disease Linked With Vitamin D Deficiency: Please Test and Replete
A 30% to 40% prevalence of vitamin D deficiency among Crohn disease patients highlights the importance of testing these patients for vitamin D levels.
The VitDISH Study: Vit D Supplementation Does Not Improve ISH in Older Patients
Vitamin D supplementation in the VitDISH study did not improve isolated systolic hypertension in elderly patients who were deficient.
The ABCs—and Ds and Es—of Vitamins
Schools of thought on their relative value differ greatly. Fortify your knowledge of the pros and cons with this baker's dozen of facts and figures.
Fish Oils and Prostate Cancer: Unraveling the Confusion
It is vital to acknowledge trusted sources and avoid being misguided by faulty research and sensationalized headlines.
ADA Take-Aways: Assail Obesity, Stay the Course With Incretins
Bariatric surgery is recommended along with oral therapy to help patients with type 2 diabetes control overweight and obesity.
Obesity: A Bariatric Surgeon Speaks to Primary Care Physicians
Dr. David von Rueden discusses factors that make it difficult for obese patients to lose weight with diet and medication; offers practical guidance about when to broach the subject of weight loss with your patient and what options to suggest; and what your role is after a patient has had bariatric surgery.
Video: Observer Bias in GERD Diagnosis
Is obesity really leading to an increase in GERD? Or, has GERD just become a catch-all phrase for all sorts of upper GI distress? Has GERD become the new "dyspepsia"? G. Richard Locke, MD, FACG, from the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, discusses his findings as presented at the ACG 2011 program.
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NetWellness is a global, community service providing quality, unbiased health information from our partner university faculty. NetWellness is commercial-free and does not accept advertising.
Friday, September 22, 2017
Child Abuse
Distinguishing Between Spiral Fracture and Oblique Fracture
could you also tell me how can you distinguish between spiral fracture from oblique fracture and does it take a great deal of twisting force to break the femur
Oblique and spiral are ways to describe the fractured bone. Both types of fractures involve the shaft or long portion of the bone. Spiral fractures may be confused with oblique fractures on xray because special views are sometimes needed to differentiate between the two.
It is difficult to say how much force it takes to break a bone, and often depends on many factors.
Robert Shapiro, MD
Professor of Clinical Pediatrics
College of Medicine
University of Cincinnati


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Pecans are one of my all-time favorite foods. Perhaps it's because I grew up in Texas and spent many afternoons grabbing them off the ground, smashing their shells and digging out the sweet treat inside, but whatever it is my fondness for them knows no bounds. Another favorite combination of mine is cheesecake and caramel, so this recipe for baked pecan caramel cheesecake from Tonya at Blissfully Domestic is going right into my recipe stash.
Recipe: Baked Pecan Caramel Cheesecake


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Champaign County Board to Consider Raises for Elected Officials
The Champaign County Board will get its first look Tuesday night at a proposal to raise salaries for countywide elected officials.
County Administrator Deb Busey's proposal outlines three options, providing the greatest increases to the county clerk, treasurer, and sheriff. The memo applies to fiscal years 2013 through 2016.
But County Board Chair and Democrat Pius Weibel, who would also benefit under the memo sent out by Busey, said he is leery of any increases when Illinois' fiscal situation is so unstable.
"The state has been erractic in making payments to us, so we can't depend upon them," he said. "This deals with more than the issue of pay raises, how to budget when you have an uncertain income?"
Democrat Brendan McGinty, who chairs the board's finance committee, suggests the proposal comes from overconfidence in one-time balances. He favors Option 1 of 3, which freezes salaries for the Circuit Clerk, Coroner, Recorder, and Auditor over four years, while the County Clerk, Treasurer and Sheriff receive 2-percent increases each year through 2016.
"That's something we think we can afford," McGinty said. "That's something that I think is fair, based on today's economy, and something that also reflects our seriousness as a whole with the county when we deal with nearly 1,000 employees."
A comparison with other Central Illinois counties shows average salaries for officials are more in McLean, Peoria, and Sangamon. But County Board Republican Alan Nudo said the memo should be expanded to salaries in the private sector.
"It's a self-fulfilling prophecy," he said. "One county looks at what the others are doing, and they say 'hey, we're behind', so then they jump ahead, and then the next county looks at it and says 'hey, we're behind', and they jump ahead. I want to see what competition in the private sector is doing as a true base."
Nudo also said he wants the board to consider some worst-case scenarios, like members did in the spring of 2008.
There's no rush for the board consider the raises. A new salary schedule must be released by May.
The Champaign County Board Committee of the Whole meets Tuesday night at 6 as the Brookens Administrative Center.


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Avery® Mini 5-1/2" x 8-1/2" Binder Filler Paper 14230, 100 SheetsProduct Number: 14230
Always have a place to pen your thoughts with our Filler Paper for 5-1/2" x 8-1/2" mini binders. Our medium weight, college-ruled filler paper is pre-punched with seven holes to conveniently fit in your three- or seven-ring mini binder. The package contains 100 sheets so you'll always have paper at the ready, whether at home or on the road.
Product Description:


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Giants recall Duvall from Triple-A Fresno
KANSAS CITY -- The Giants recalled first baseman Adam Duvall from Triple-A Fresno before Sunday's series finale with the Royals.
This is Duvall's third stint with the team in 2014. His debut came June 26, and he's hit .200 with a pair of home runs in 40 plate appearances this season, entering play Sunday.
Duvall provides a reinforcement at first, after starter Brandon Belt went on the seven-day concussion disabled list Friday. Duvall was penciled into the fifth spot in the lineup and started at first for the Giants on Sunday.
"We've got some left-handed pitching coming up here, and [Duvall can] help out at first with [Travis] Ishikawa," Giants manager Bruce Bochy said.
In a corresponding roster move, San Francisco optioned outfielder Juan Perez to Fresno.
Perez compiled a .175/.246/.286 slash line in 71 plate appearances.
Jackson Alexander is an associate reporter for MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.


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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - Biketoberfest is officially underway and it means big business for the local economy.
[PHOTOS: Biketoberfest kicks off in Daytona Beach]
Visitors like Kelly and James Davis travel into Daytona Beach expecting to spend hundreds of dollars in one weekend alone.
"Anywhere from four to $400 to $500," said Davis. "You're going to spend some money."
While they shell out cash, April Schehr picks up part-time work handing out flyers for a bikini car wash.
"Probably around a thousand dollars or more," said Schehr, who finds temporary work during Biketoberfest every year.
Local businesses have a good outlook for this year.
"It's a good opening. It's a good start. We've got a lot of people coming through. We'll take what we can get," said Zach Shaw, whose shop, Biker's Pride, is based in Daytona Beach but only opens for Bike Week and Biketoberfest.
Over the past seven years, Shaw thinks business is finally coming back.
"People are coming back. The economy's picking up so there's more people coming out. So we're taking full advantage," said Shaw.
Reports estimate 150,000 people visitors will pump in $250 million to the area over the weekend.
Copyright 2013 by ClickOrlando.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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The Age of Cognac
A Cognac may only be soldy when its youngest eau-de-vie reaches a minimum of two and a half years old, as of the first day of October following the harvest of the grapes.
Only the years of storage in oak barrels count to determine its age.
Once transferred into glass, the Cognac stops maturing . It stands still.
V.S (for Very Special) , also called *** (or Three Stars) is a cognac which youngest eau-de-vie is at least two and a half years old.
V.S.O.P ( for Very Superior Old Pale) , also called Reserve, is a cognac which youngest eau-de-vie is between four and a half and six and a half years old.
XO (for Extra Old ) , Napoléon, also called Hors d'âge, is a cognac which youngest eau-de-vie is at least six and a half years old.
Most Cognac houses will use Cognacs much older than those required by law, allowing X.Os to reach a minimum of twenty years old, in order to reveal their very best.
Delamain - XO VESPER Vieux CognacExcl. Tax: €115.42 Incl. Tax: €138.50
Delamain - Le Voyage de DelamainExcl. Tax: €5,216.67 Incl. Tax: €6,260.00
Delamain - Extra Vieux CognacExcl. Tax: €236.67 Incl. Tax: €284.00
Delamain - Très VénérableExcl. Tax: €276.25 Incl. Tax: €331.50
Delamain - Réserve de la FamilleExcl. Tax: €431.67 Incl. Tax: €518.00
Delamain - Pale and Dry XOExcl. Tax: €73.75 Incl. Tax: €88.50


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Indestructible Camping Gear to Tame the Outdoors
The ping of a baseball popping off an aluminum bat can herald a superhuman swat, but those high-velocity line drives can cause devastating injury to a collegiate or Little League player. New 2012 regulations known as BBCOR—inside baseball, that's "batted ball coefficient of restitution"—force bat manufacturers to find a way to make aluminum and composite bats perform more like wooden ones. To play by the new rules, some manufacturers have wedged discs inside the barrels, and others have slimmed down key spots of the bat's walls by hundredths of an inch. So do the sticks work? We took batting practice with two styles of the new bats, an Easton and a Louisville Slugger, along with a white ash classic. The bats hit with a wooden thump and a lower velocity than the aluminum of yore. But one stood out as the smoothest swinger with the biggest sweet spot. Turn the page to see the bat we'd take to the on-deck circle.
The exterior walls of the Easton Power Brigade S3 ($200) vary in thickness by thousandths of an inch, from the end of the taper to the barrel's fat sweet spot. Three testers agreed that this 33-inch model had the swiftest swing and the smoothest stroke. Vibration was as rare as the Cubs making the playoffs.
A Look Inside the Nike Sports Research Lab