Image: Francesco Marino / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Just because I like complaining about the water/sewer rates in Grand Rapids I’ll post the mail box findings from today.

Water is now at $31.92 + $1.82 per HCF

Sewer is now at $40.99 + $3.33 per HCF

The over all increase from last quarter is not drastic; Base rates of $70.65, water $1.752, sewer $3.238, but it is still and increase.

Our usage stayed the same from last quarter, but due to the rate increases I owe the city more money. I would have to dig a little to confirm this, but every quarter the rates have gone up since we moved in in December of 2004.

I know that I’m just complaining to complain, but this is starting to get a bit out of hand.

I have worked elections for the city for the past few years and am just amazed at the low turnout. In the precinct that I was working there were three things on the ballot. 1) A school board race 2) The income tax hike 3) A vote to remove the city charter requirement that a work day must be 8 hours. The school board race was hit or miss, since I am sure not everyone knew, myself included, every name on the ballot. The income tax hike failed 91 No to 72 Yes. The charter rule removal passed with a wide margin. To quantify the turn out, we processed 163 ballots for 1066 registered voters, or about 15%.

I really thought that city voters would come out in droves because of the income tax hike. Unlike property taxes, the city income tax effects every resident that has any form of income. However the city leaders are not stupid, and they know that the low turnout in May coupled with the ultimatum they gave would work in their favor.

“City officials are clear about one thing — without the additional revenue, as many as 35 police officers and firefighters would be among a new round of cuts. Some services, like parks and recreation, would go away all together.” WOOD TV

The city is estimating they will raise $7.5 million with the tax increase, however they are only dedicating $2.5 million to the police and fire departments. I guess one way to bully a yes vote is to threaten to fire 35 public safety persons.

Yes I know they were asking for this money to help fund the parks department. Yes I know the hike is officially only for 5 years. This does remind me of a time when the school district where I grew up asked for and received a property tax millage to build and renovate. The millage was written to automatically expire after a set number of years. However, when that deadline grew near the district asked to extend the millage. They promoted this as “Your taxes will not go up at all from their current level.” I don’t remember if that millage extension passed, or if it was eventually removed. I can’t help but think that in four years the City of Grand Rapids is going to ask residents to approve making the 1.5% tax rate permanent.

I have no problem letting everyone know that I voted no. I don’t like higher taxes. I don’t like city leaders that think they can bully people for more money. I don’t like that the city leaders think five years of higher taxes while they get their act together with the budget is okay.

The “Readiness to Serve Charge” has gone up another 8.2% from $65.29 to $70.65.

Water Rate last year: $1.591 per HCF. This quarter the rate is $1.752 per HCF for an increase of 10.1%.

Sewer Rate last year: $2.898 per HCF of water use. This quarter the rate is $3.238 per HCF of water use for an increase of 11.7%.

I’m just bitching to bitch. Our usage has gone down, but our overall cost has gone up. One year later we are using 7 HCF less of water, down to 11 HCF from 18, but paying about 10% more.

Now I’ve been told that some communities on the GR water/sewer system are getting much higher bills then we are in the city. I guess this might be one good thing of living out of town and just needed to pay for the electricity to pump water.

I also put together two short shows of our trip to the John Ball Zoo and the Grand Rapids Children’s Museum.

The “Readiness to Serve Charge” has gone up 13.67% from $57.44 to $65.29. Even before any water is used we have to pay $65.29 just because we are hooked up to the system. By comparison the electric companies “Just to be a customer charge” is $18.00 per quarter. The gas company? $25.50 per quarter.

Not only are we now paying more just to have the opportunity to use water, the rate for the water has gone up.

Water Rate last quarter: $1.57 per HCF. This quarter the rate is $1.591 per HCF for an increase of 1.34%.

Sewer Rate last quarter: $2.58 per HCF of water use. This quarter the rate is $2.898 per HCF of water use for an increase of 12.33%.

I’m just flabbergasted.

Averaged out with the same HCF usage of 18 our bill increased by 10.56%.

Daniel Larsson blanked Philadelphia with 27 saves, while Teslak stopped 44 of Grand Rapids’ season-high 48 shots in net for the Phantoms. With the win, Larsson is now 12-2-1 with five shutouts, a 1.88 GAA and a 0.937 save percentage through his last 16 games. He also is just one blanking shy of the Griffins franchise record for shutouts in a season (6). griffinshockey.com: News Releases

Before the game on Saturday we all headed over to Founders for some drinks and sandwiches. As a note, order your sandwich at the window as soon as you get there. We didn’t know that there was a separate window for food. The bar tender did not fill us in on this when we asked for menus. That aside, the food was delicious, and I was told the beer was good as well.

I actually got dressed on Sunday. The three of us went shopping to get a few things for Drake. A tent is now set up in his room. After it was up he took everything off from his bed and put it in there. If you have seen his room you know how many stuffed animals live on his bed. I’ll have to take some pictures for everyone.

In other news, I started a farm on Facebook, and I finally watched Death Race and Traitor.

183 Travel Channel HD
216 MGM HD
238 Toon Disney HD
250 Fuse HD
260 IFC HD
261 WE HD

New Years Eve was nice. The Grand Rapids Griffins game was fun. The team had nice black jerseys on. I know there are a lot of teams that have black third jerseys that people don’t like, but I do. One this is that if they were to wear these black jerseys on a regular basis they will need to get black helmets. The Griffins normal helmets are a dark blue, but they still looked good with the black. We did not stay for the indoor fireworks, Drake was tired and I wanted to get over to Brooke’s place.

Drake went home with Grandma and Grandpa, and Theresa and I went to Brooke and Rob’s apartment. My other sister Megan and Brooke’s friend Katie was there as well. Nothing too fancy, we just played some Apples to Apples and watched Dick Clark stumble through the night. I think it was about 2am when Theresa and I made it home.

New Year Day was Christmas all over again. We had waited to have Christmas for my immediate family until then for a number of reasons. One thing that worked out well was that the Winter Classic II was on NBC. We opened more presents and watched the Red Wings win over the Blackhawks in classic fashion. It seems strange that last season Detroit could not beat Chicago.

After the game I helped Eric change the serpentine belt on Theresa’s Alero. Funny thing, you have to take off a motor mount to get the belt off and on. It didn’t take too long to do, but I wouldn’t have been able to do it by myself.

On our way home we stopped by Theresa’s sisters house to say hi and check on our niece. She had swallowed something earlier in the day and made a hospital visit. She’s fine now, but she still has not passed whatever she ingested.

Once we got home we made a Best Buy run. I had accumulated enough gift card money to purchase an Asus Eee PC 1000H for $5.99. My mom had picked one up a few days ago and I didn’t think about it when she bought it, but there is no dial modem in these. My mom’s house currently only has dial up internet, so now she is waiting for a usb modem to be delivered. They are thinking about getting a connection card from Sprint for their internet, which might even save them money if they were to drop their land line. The only problem with that is they would lose the phone number that I grew up with, and is the only number of theirs that I can remember off the top of my head.

Moving on… the Eee PC that I bought does not have the new fancy Atom processor in it. In fact it only has a 900mhz processor in it. That has yet to bother me though. There is 1GB of ram in the little thing which helps. The real test is going to be installing the Sling player. If It can handle that then I’m all set. I don’t plan on doing anything more intensive then that on the little guy. Surfing the web, checking the email, playing Pogo.com, and watching TV via Sling, that about it.

The software success come in the form of getting the HP On-Screen Cap/Num/Scroll Lock Indicator software extracted from my computer at work so I can put it on my Eee PC. There is no light or on screen notification for caps lock on the Eee PC, which bugs me. I set a router password in reverse case because I didn’t know the caps lock key was on. This program will help out tremendously. The other thing I did was remap the up arrow and right shift key. I made them trade places because my right pinky kept hitting up when I wanted shift.

Saturday morning was kind of strange. Once Drake got up and exhausted his attention in my computer we went into the TV room to watch a little Saturday morning cartoons. Instead of Drake being all hyper, running around, and waking up Eric and Megan, he just sat on me, then started to lay down on me. He didn’t want to do anything he normally does on Saturday mornings.

Once we were all up and ready we left Grand Rapids for Frankenmuth. My dad’s parents were celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary. The car ride there was perfect. Drake took a good nap and was not cranky once he did wake up. Dinner went well, which included the best chicken I have ever had. (Which reminds me that I need to pay my Dad.) Theresa and I are going to have to go out there sometime. She was working and was not able to go with us. Drake ate lots of food, was social, and only had one small meltdown. We needed to leave dinner as soon as everything was finished so we would be able to make it back to town in time for Griffins hockey.

We got home, picked Theresa up, and headed to the arena for the Griffins home opener. The Griffins’ website provides a better game story then I could come up with…

October 25, Griffinshockey.com: Grand Rapids needed just 1:42 to net its first home-ice goal of the campaign. From the right boards, Mattias Ritola sent a long cross-ice pass to Garrett Stafford, who ripped a shot past Marc Denis from the left circle.

Goal number two came courtesy of a power play less than two minutes later, when Muskegon native Justin Abdelkader set up in front of the Hamilton cage and redirected Jonathan Ericsson’s low shot from the left point at the 3:19 mark. The onslaught continued at 4:51 when Ritola finished off a 2-on-1 by blasting Cory Emmerton’s pass over Denis’ shoulder from the slot, making it 3-0 and sending Denis and his four saves to an early shower in favor of Cedrick Desjardins. More…

One we got home from the game I was able to watch the thrid period of the Wings game. When I first turned on the game I was mildy disapointed because they were down 4-2. They did end up winning in a shootout.

Sunday was afternoon hockey with the Griffins. George James Malik does a good job with this one…

The Grand Rapids Griffins dropped a 3-1 lead against the Norfolk Admirals before Ryan Oulahen’s late-second-period goal and a perfect third period, punctuated by an insurance marker and an empty-netter that gave Justin Abdelkader his first professional hat trick, pushed the Griffins past Norfolk by a 6-3 tally. Ville Leino must have read the pre-emptive press release regarding a Red Wings call-up before the game, because he posted three assists. Continue reading the entry…

The Griffins had not seen the Norfolk Admirals in town for about five years. Which brings me around to the new AHL and NHL schedules. There are more cross conference games this season then ever before. Well, at lease for as long as I can remember. It was last year during the summer that I read an article that was talking about how the Griffins and some teams from the east had to work together with the AHL to get some games scheduled. This is a great step in the correct direction to having a minimum of a home and home with every team in the league. The NHL has gotten very close to that. Every NHL team will see every other team at least once this season.

Now that the weekend is done I have to get back to work this morning. Oh, and I do have a few pictures of Drake from this weekend that I’ll have to get posted soon.