public transit

Portland Public Transit Provides Lesson for Boise, Pundit Warns

Public transit, such as Boise’s proposed streetcar, is bad for the economy and bad for the environment. Just ask Randal O’Toole, who works on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues at the Cato Institute, and who spoke in Boise today about public transit, particularly in Portland.

By the way, O’Toole also believes that urban planners caused the recession, that they’re using social engineering to try to turn the U.S. Communist, and that all roads should be privately owned.

internet technology

Idaho Awaiting Broadband Mapping Grant

In addition to funding broadband projects in the states, particularly in rural areas, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, includes funds for collection of state-level broadband data, as well as state-wide broadband mapping and planning.

internet technology

How Intermountain West States Rate for Broadband Stimulus Funds

In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband grants, loans, and loan guarantees to be administered by the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The deadline for submissions was August of this year.

Now, the applications from each state are posted, and in a number of Intermountain West states, the Governors have already taken the next step of reviewing and prioritizing the projects, and made their recommendations public.

environment

Global Climate Change the Topic of the Boise Frank Church Conference

Recalling her late husband’s statement, “Give Earth a chance,” Bethine Church opened the 26th annual Frank Church Conference on the Global Environment in Boise.

Subtitled “From Kyoto to Copenhagen,” the conference focused on climate change since the Kyoto Protocol—which then-President George W. Bush refused in 2001 to sign—and the approach of the Copenhagen Climate Conference, scheduled for December, which Church speakers expect President Barack Obama to attend.

idaho legislature

How Will Idaho Legislators Make Big Budget Cuts?

In Idaho, just about everywhere you look these days are legislators and legislative staff muttering dire warnings about how much next year’s state budget is going to have to be cut when the legislators go back into session in January (in their shiny newly renovated Statehouse, though that came from a different budget).

“Idaho’s Medicaid program could see a shortfall so extreme it’d have to eliminate 23 percent of the health benefits it provides to the state’s poor and disabled,” says Betsy Russell in the Spokesman-Review.

H1N1 report

H1N1 Vaccination—Lessons for the Future

When I was a junior in high school, Gerald Ford was President, and amid fears of a swine flu epidemic, I joined thousands of other schoolchildren getting mass vaccinations. Honestly, at this point I don’t much remember the details; I get too mixed up with my memory of reading the vaccination scene in The Andromeda Strain, which I read about the same time. (I didn’t, incidentally, wind up with Guillain-Barré Syndrome.)

Now it’s 2009, Barack Obama is President, the swine flu epidemic is much more of a reality than in 1976, I have a fourth grader, and mass vaccinations are going on again.

Here’s some things you might want to know, based on my experience at one of the clinics.

new economy

VengaWorks to Manage Downtown Meridian Office Space

Let’s say you’re a worker, either on your own or for an employer, who finds themselves bopping all over the Treasure Valley on a daily basis. Maybe you’re a real estate agent, a developer, a startup, a mortgage broker, a public relations person, a legislator, a lobbyist.

Maybe, even, a writer.

Anyway, you find yourself setting up shop in coffeehouses, libraries, maybe even in parking lots from your car, in-between traveling and your various meetings. You know by heart which restaurants offer free wifi, where you can plug in your laptop for a while, and just how long you can hang out in a coffee place before they start getting testy at you.

Meanwhile, you’re trying to work, hoping nobody spills their double-shot white chocolate mocha on you, and attempting to conduct business over the cell phone squished into your shoulder over the noise in the room without contributing too much to it yourself.

This is where VengaWorks wants to come in.

Opinion: Technology

Idaho ‘Innovation’—More of the Same?

The big news event out of Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter’s Innovation Summit today at Boise State University was the announcement of a $5 million grant to Micron to help it develop light-emitting diode (LED) technology. While the money was awarded by the state, it comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), commonly referred to as the federal stimulus package.

Otter, as well as Scott DeBoer, Micron’s Vice President of Process Research and Development, praised the announcement as supporting green technology, as well as providing new jobs for Idahoans.

“Through our 30-year history, the success of Micron and the state of Idaho have been closely tied,” DeBoer said.

That’s the problem.

idaho legislature

Idaho Legislators Appear Skeptical of PUC-Based Health Insurance

What do gas, water, electricity, telephone service, and health care have in common?

Right now, nothing. But if a Boise State University professor has his way, health insurance in Idaho could also be regulated by a public utilities commission (PUC), which the professor said could result in better service for less money.

However, the legislators in Idaho’s health care task force interim committee, which heard about the proposal yesterday, expressed concern about several aspects of the plan—with some saying it didn’t go far enough.