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My Page: Christian Probasco

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But let’s get one thing clear: Wendell Cox, a St. Louis-based public policy consultant, editor of Demographia and The Public Purpose websites, vice president of “Cooperation for urban mobility in the Developing World” (CODATU[!]), fellow at the Heritage Foundation, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute and senior fellow for urban policy at the Independence Institute (all conservative and/or libertarian organizations) does not consider himself an antiplanner, though some on the other side of the aisle (such as the Sierra Club) might. As he puts it:

“I am not an anti-planner. I am an advocate of the type of planning that created the automobile oriented suburb (responsive planning) and in so doing expanded the middle class in the United States, Western Europe and Japan to an unprecedented extent. There is a role for planning, but not prescriptive (smart growth) planning.”
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My contribution to the upcoming “Designing the New West” seminar, sponsored by the incomparable New West Network is to review and analyze University of Colorado Department of Geography Associate Professor William R. Travis’ new book, New Geographies of the American West in the context of my own experiences. Being of an anti-authoritarian—bent, as I suspect a greater percentage of Westerners are, I was dubious about the planning genre, but I tried to approach the work with an open mind. I thought, this author, Travis, might be trying to reach out and make a connection with myself and other folks who are skeptical of central planning and “smart” growth, and not just preach to the choir.
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West Jordan State Senator Chris Buttars has been all over the local and national news for a supposedly racial remark he recently made in the senate and a controversial bill he introduced restricting public access to the disciplinary records of Salt Lake City police officers. [more]

COMMENTARY

Here’s an idea that should strike most Westerners, old or new, as absolutely un-Western, and it comes in the form of a Senate companion bill to a House bill that passed 404-6, under a temporary suspension of House rules to prevent debate, namely S. 1959, a.k.a. the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act. [more]

Commentary

Over a million viewers have watched Jared Massey get tasered on YouTube. The video goes like this: Utah Highway Patrol Trooper Jon Gardner pulls out onto Highway 40, aims his vehicle and dash cam briefly at the speed limit sign, which clearly reads 40, and then pulls over an SUV. He walks up to the driver’s side window, asks to see Massey’s license and registration. Massey, of Vernal, Utah, collecting the paperwork, admits he might have been going a little fast, and Gardner, annoyed, repeats his request, adding, “Now!”
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Betty Perry, the 70-year-old woman who was bloodied in a scuffle with an Orem, Utah police officer and then handcuffed and imprisoned, plead not guilty to “having a bad lawn and resisting arrest,” according to a September 18th story by the Associated Press. Said her high profile California lawyer, Gloria Allred, “I ask the citizens of Orem: How many of you would like to have your great-grandmother taken from her home with bruises and blood and placed in handcuffs for failing to water her lawn?” [more]

Film Review

Jeremy and Randy Stulberg spent two years documenting the lifestyles of the poor and infamous “homeless” residents of a New Mexico mesa. I found the result riveting. I led the same sort of life while I was working at a truck stop in northern Arizona. I parked my 14 foot trailer in various locations in the national forest behind the store and pointed my solar panel at the sun to charge the bank of deep-cycle batteries that ran my computer, radio, black-and-white television and mobile phone. I filled up a five gallon propane tank and a water tank once a month and washed my laundry in the machines by the trucker’s lounge. [more]

reduced to embers

I spent Sunday evening on the roof of my in-laws’ house, watching the Salt Creek Fire creep down the hills to the north towards their town of Fountain Green.

The fire started on Thursday. My wife Sarah and I were in Ephraim, about a half-hour from our home in Mount Pleasant, when we noticed a column of smoke rising from Nephi Canyon, not far from Fountain Green. The power went out in the restaurant where we were eating. That’s when the blaze burned up the lines on the north side of the canyon and blacked out nearly all of Sanpete County. The electricity stayed gone for hours, until it could be routed up from the south.

The fire incinerated a campground, burned up to the rim of the canyon and over the hills above Fountain Green and threatened to sweep into town that first evening. I drove out to a ranch which belonged to the Johnson family and watched the flames eat up the rangeland above their home. Fire trucks and cop cars raced up and down closed Highway 132 through the canyon, and spotter planes circled overhead. [more]

pitch black plains

The Milford Flat Fire was the largest in Utah’s history. Last Wednesday afternoon, after my wife Sarah came home from work to take care of our baby, I filled up my in-laws’ Suburban and took a drive south from Fountain Green to get a firsthand view of it, or at least the damage it left in its wake.

First stop: Kanosh, the staging area. The park was filled with firefighters’ tents. I checked in at the information yurt and met incident management information officer Vince Mazzier. He told me that the fire had burned over 330,000 acres and was 30% contained. The current hot spots were in the extreme north and south, and the south end, near Beaver, was “burning into itself” as it ran up into the mountains. There were over 400 firefighters involved. There were cumulus clouds over the site. I asked Mazzier how the weather would affect the operation. He didn’t expect much rain but believed that the “outflow from the thunder cell,” could make the situation worse. I further enquired where I could get some pictures of the fire without getting fried. “How ‘bout up here?” I asked him, pointing west of Highway I-15 on the big map of central Utah hanging on the wall, “Look at all those dirt roads heading out in the desert.” [more]

Milford Flat fire

Part of the haze you may observe over your city today will no doubt have originated from the Milford Flat fire in central Utah. The lightning-caused fire traveled 40 miles in its first 24 hours and currently covers about 283,000 acres, making it Utah’s largest on record.

Officials were not prepared when the fire raced up to and then crossed highway I-15. Two motorcyclists, Roy and Mary Ann Redmon, were killed after they pulled over in the dense smoke that clouded the highway. They were struck from behind by a Subaru Outback and thrown into traffic, and then hit by a truck. [more]

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