After Ken Eyring presented the overall situation (the joint program of “Sustainable Communities Initiative” by the EPA, the Federal Dept. of Transportation, and by Housing and Urban Development), Eileen Mashimo stood up. She is a researcher and she was the one that started to follow and trackdown all the known details – and the further she dug, the more it seemed that a net has been thrown out by the Feds to ensnare local communities “with strings attached”
This is the most insidious part of the effort – the Federal Government and their “point folks” just can’t seem to be open and transparent. When the local folks, especially here in NH where they are mostly volunteers in their local communities, start to figure out that they been lured into bottomless pits, it is too late to pull out.
Put it another way: the “muscle” shows up when the local folks figure out that these Feds are just the governmental equivalents of crack dealer (as in “here, try this – it’s good for you” with what seems to be innocuous “memorandums” as the crack equivalent). The problem is, having been sucked in, only then does the legally binding agreement that stem from those first one pagers start showing up – with very small fine print with really deep-pocketed (funded by your tax dollars) and BIG lawyers backing it up.
Previous posts in this series:
- Is the EPA / DoT / HUD “Sustainable Communities Initiative” a stealth way to Federalize local communities? Ken Eyring of Southern NH 9-12 Project Presenting
