An Open Letter to John Faccin:

You are about to run headfirst into the Michigan
constitution's Headlee amendment with your latest
proposal which will have the effect of ingratiating
yourself to the Iron County Board.

From Iron County Reporter 21 October 2008:

"Faccin thought the boat wash and road improvements
would have to be bid out. The boat launch entrance
would be moved from County Road 424 into Pentoga
Park, so boaters have to pay a fee to get onto
the lake."

This is clearly a money raising scheme, in short,
a tax on lake use.

I urge you to educate yourself before making any
further such suggestions by reading:

http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=1657

There is a plethora of online material about the
Headlee Amendment. Please avail yourself of it.

It is clear that the scheme is designed to collect
a fee in order to raise money for the use of a
lake that presently acquires no income for the
county. That clearly violates the Headlee
Amendment and I will fight this. You're effectively
driving boaters away from Iron County.

Before you even think about mentioning Eurasian
watermilfoil control you might want to determine
some way of controlling the use of our lakes by
water fowl and curtailing bald eagle fishing.
Obviously those are impossible tasks.

The above is the opinion and activism of
Bill Vajk
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Rodeo Roundup

The October 8, 2008 issue of The Iron County Reporter has an article on Page 1 that requested ideas. A meeting was organized for tonight, 13 October 2008, at Iron River City Hall. I did not attend that meeting but I met Todd Laturi, president of the Rodeo Board, and provided him with 30 copies of a 3 page paper of suggestions for the Rodeo.

That paper is available at http://www.angelfire.com/planet/iron-river/rodeo

The final paragraph of my paper reads:

"I cannot implement these plans for the community. Indeed, I have committed to suing the City of Iron River relating to constitutional issues in the city's creation and enforcement of chapter 52 (water) and chapter 91 (nuisances) of their municipal ordinances. That activity is a harsh mistress that is taking up all my spare time and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future."
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Bill Vajk
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"Shadow Man" busted

There are some readers of these blogs who also frequent
a sometimes free for all disguised as a Yahoo discussion
group called IronCountyWatch.

For some time a member posting under the pseudonym
"Shadow Man" has been playing games with other
members; sometimes not very nice games. Indeed
in the past day or so this individual lashed out at
Ben Smith, a gentleman with whom I disagree on many
points but nevertheless I can safely say that we remain
friends despite our opposing viewpoints because even
with all that there remain many points of commonality.

Because I had asked Ben to post a particular opinion
editorial from my other blog,

www.ironcountyscoop.blogspot.com

he had emailed me a few of the responses. Among the
responses were a couple from "Shadow Man."

Given the content of those, "Shadow Man" might just
as well have signed with a legal name because the content
was as positively identifying as any signature.

Should you read this, "Shadow Man," you made another
mistake. In most of history it has been correct to refer to
"the King's English," however, whenever there is a
queen regnant (this time since February of 1952) of the
United Kingdom, the correct reference is to "the Queen's
English."

Having a female monarch in charge is not such a rare
event. Please see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_regnant

To readers not involved with the IronCountyWatch,
I offer my apology for this minor distraction.

Bill Vajk
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