Contrary To Ordinary

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Aug. 10, 2008

I do not mean to be a contrarian.

My aim in life is not to be contrary. When I have an idle moment, I do not plot out ways to be contrary. When I was 8 years old and I was hanging out with the guys in my second grade class and we were discussing what we wanted to be when we grew up – fireman, policeman, white collar criminal -- I did not offer up the notion that no matter what the other aspects of my eventual career – spiffy uniform, cool company car, fat pension benefits, five weeks paid vacation, etc. – I wanted to make certain I would be able to get in arguments with people at the drop of an opinion.

So please do not take what I am about to say as the ranting of someone who just wants to take the opposing position, no matter what. It just comes natural with me.

Are the people who run West Chester crazy?

Last month, West Chester Borough Council Vice President Charles A. “Chuck” Christy got together in a room with a guy dressed up like Benjamin Franklin and signed a “Declaration of Classic Towns” to launch a regional marketing campaign developed to spotlight 11 communities across the Delaware Valley as “desirable places to live, work, play and prosper.”

I have few hard and fast rules in life: Always over-tip. Always pick the Phillies to lose. Never buy a hamburger from someone dressed as a clown. And never involve yourself in an event at which there is a man dressed up as Ben Franklin. It can only lead to no good.

So with Ben in the picture, immediately I had my reservations about this “Classic Towns” effort. As I understand it, some folks in the borough are going to pay the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission good money to go out and talk up West Chester so that more people come and live and work and play and prosper here. "Every year hundreds of thousands of people relocate and choose where they will live," said Barry Seymour, executive director of the DVRPC. The “Classic Towns” program "will help the communities market themselves (and) become the communities of choice."

To which I rejoined, “And that’s a good thing?”

For the life of me, I have not noticed that West Chester faces a shortage of people choosing to live here, or work here, or – and the folks who listen fondly to the wolves howling on High Street after midnight on weekends will bear me out on this – play here. I have not noticed that there are gaping holes in the retail market here. I have not noticed that the borough’s landscape resembles that of a ghost town.

As far as I can tell, we’re fine. We really don’t need any help in letting people know that we’re on the map. If we did, we’d only have to turn to Brandon “Bam” Margera, who would gladly go on national cable television and vomit on the “Welcome to West Chester” sign, or whatever, and we’d have free marketing for a year.

Here’s what I want. I want to create a regional marketing campaign to get people to stay away from West Chester. I want to keep them from coming into the borough at all hours of the day and night, clogging up the streets, begging for parking meter quarters, jamming the lines at the Growers Market on Saturday mornings, and driving up the high cost of locally produced beer. I want the DVRPC to devise a way of cloaking West Chester so that people driving south on Route 202 looking for good places to spend the rest of their lives end up buying real estate in Modena.

Some people say this sort of attitude is close minded, chauvinistic and small. I say: “To the contrary.”

A Modest Proposal

This appeared on Sunday, April 1, 2007

Although I am certain he means well, the new legislation that state Sen. Andy Dinniman, D-19th, of West Whiteland, introduced at a sparsely attended session of the Legislature last week seems to me to be, well, shall we say, a trifle odd.

His legislation, SB 90210, is termed the ”Chester County Open Space Creation Act of 2007.“ When you get past most of the legislative gobbledygook that these documents always include (”Whereas …“ ”Be it therefore resolved …“ ”The General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania hereby enacts ...“ ”The term ’Dinniman‘ shall refer to the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful Legislator from Exton …“) what it comes down to is that Sen. Andy is tired of seeing open space in Chester County simply preserved; he now wants to actually make more of it.

Which I admit is a pretty nifty idea on its face. But somehow draining Marsh Creek State Park Lake and filling it in with prime topsoil from Carbon County appears to pose some engineering obstacles that might prove nettlesome, to say the least.

To his credit, Dinniman is optimistic about his plan.

"What a worthy goal this extensively researched legislation aspires to," the county‘s lone Democratic senator said in prepared comments. "For far too long, the waters of Marsh Creek Lake have taken up too much room, when that acreage could instead be a fertile plain among the landscape of Uwchlan Township, giving homeowners a place to walk their dogs, provided they are leashed.

"We all know that we can‘t just sit idly by while developers rape and pillage our hills and valleys and meadows and compost farms," Dinniman continued. "We‘ve got to be pro-active about this. What better way to start creating new open space than by also creating a massive civil service project that would bring new jobs to the underemployed in northern Chester County. Like, those so-called ’soccer‘ moms I see sipping Starbucks at Exton Square in the middle of the day. Don‘t they have a game to go to?"

Regarding the environmental impact of draining a 535-acre lake, Dinniman stated: "Impact, schmimpact. We‘ll grow grass there, and in my book green is good. Except for that moldy stuff that forms on my dog‘s teeth when we don‘t give him the right snacks."

At this point, it appears the biggest fallout over Dinniman‘s bill has been the introduction by state Rep. Carole Rubley of another piece of legislation, seemingly put together to keep her potential rival from getting the lead in the fast-developing Open Space Race.

Rubley, R-157th, of Tredyffrin, said her bill, HB 4-01-2007, the ”Even Better Chester County Open Space Creation Act“ would tackle two problems at once — making more open space and reducing rush-hour traffic.

"I know it would be expensive to tear down the entire Great Valley Corporate Center and return it to the farmland it once was," Rubley said. "But come on! How many cars would that take off 202 at the worst time of day, and how many more ears of corn could it put in the stalls at the West Chester Growers‘ Market? You do the math."

Me, I‘m reserving judgment on the entire thing.

P.S. Check the date on this posting.

The Summertime Blues

This appeared Aug. 27, 2006

During the past week, while you and the rest of the Chester County public have been glued to whatever news outlet strikes your fancy these days - newspaper, television, radio, blogosphere, press releases from the desk of state Sen. Andy "47 Days Since Last Quoted in Daily Local News, And Counting" Dinniman - in hopes of learning the fate of the Former Planet Pluto, you might have missed some truly important news.

Summer's over.

I know you still have August on the calendar, that you still see green leaves on the trees, still fill your shopping bags with sweet corn at the West Chester Growers Market and still wait for the Phillies to take a swan dive, but, trust me, summer's gone.

How do I know? School starts this week.

It didn't always used to be this way, but this is the age of "post" America. You know, post-Watergate, post-Reagan, post 9/11, post-Katrina. The new seasonal calendar began whatever day it was that the planners in school districts across the country decided that students needed to get back to their books before Labor Day Weekend. Call it "post-Age of Reason" America.

Monday will be the first day of school for students in a majority of county school districts. Instead of having that one last weekend splurge down at the beach or camping trip up in the mountains, students will have to lug their 75-pound backpacks to class a week before September starts.

No more final breath of summer at the amusement park on Labor Day; for anyone under the age of 25, it's time to sit down and shut up and listen to the first few lessons of Algebra I of the new school year.

If the kids went to school in vacuum chambers instead of multi-million dollar buildings with state-of-the-art cafeterias, this wouldn't be so bad. We adults could go on pretending that we were surrounded by the carefree days of summer. Yes, there would still be time to get that deep tropical tan we've been thinking of since May 31, or to get that vegetable garden planted in the backyard as we've promised to do for lo these many years.

But school rules all. It's hard to keep up the pretense that summer is still here when you're stuck in traffic behind a bright yellow school bus - the kids inside taking their ADD aggressive frustrations out by flashing the kind of sign language which usually gets you beaten with a baseball bat in certain sections of Upper Darby out the back window in your direction.

"Back to School" sales started, I'm told, sometime in June, about two weeks after graduation. You can believe me or not.

I feel sorry for the kids because, frankly, its hard to concentrate on the business of learning when its 95 degrees inside the classroom and there's not a breeze in sight. And I feel sorry for the teachers, too, because they grew up in a world where Aug. 15 meant there was still three weeks of freedom left. These days, Aug. 15 means you'd better have completed your first six weeks of lesson plans or you'll be hopelessly behind the kids who have been brushing up on their critiques of "Beowulf" in between visits to MySpace.com all summer.

But mostly I feel sorry us, as we lose more time to the Gods of Planning. And for Pluto, who never meant no one no harm.