Boone County zoning board sits through hours of testimony detailing dangers of wind turbines - News - Rockford Register Star - Rockford, IL

 

BELVIDERE — The Boone County Zoning Board of Appeals listened to more than three hours of testimony Tuesday night from Michigan and Illinois property owners who said having wind turbines near their homes ruined their health and plummeted property values.

In the next 1 to 2 months, the board will vote on whether to recommend zoning ordinance amendments to the County Board that would increase the setback distances between homes and wind turbines. The amendments would require wind turbines to be placed 2,640 feet or 5.5 times the height of the turbine's highest point — whichever is greater — from property lines.

Supporters of the amendment say that when wind turbines are too close to homes, they can disrupt sleep cycles, cause health problems and make properties less attractive to potential buyers. Those who oppose the amendments say the proposed setbacks are too extreme and would make wind turbine development in Boone County essentially impossible.

"No matter how worthy you believe a cause, other people's lives should not be disregarded or their health and welfare diminished in an effort to achieve your goal," said Cary Shineldecker, of Mason County, Michigan, who recently sold his home on 16 acres of land for $80,000 under his original asking price.

Shineldecker said lack of sleep deteriorated his and his wife's mental and physical well-being and both were prescribed medication for anxiety after wind turbines were built on their property.

More than 50 people attended the meeting to watch the final testimonies of witnesses who support the increased setbacks. Witnesses who oppose the proposed amendments will speak at the zoning board's next meeting sometime in April.

Shineldecker said that Boone County's current setback laws, which require wind turbines be placed 1,000 feet or 1.1 times the height of the turbine from primary structures, are "completely inadequate to protect the welfare of residents."

Ben Stanley: 815-987-1369; bstanley@rrstar.com; @ben_j_stanley

Click on the following for more details:  Boone County zoning board sits through hours of testimony detailing dangers of wind turbines - News - Rockford Register Star - Rockford, IL

42 Rockford-area Road Ranger gas stations sold - News - Rockford Register Star - Rockford, IL

By Isaac Guerrero
Rockford Register Star

ROCKFORD — Rockford's Road Ranger, LLC sold 42 of its gas station and convenience store outlets in the Rockford area this week as the company narrows its focus to truck stops.

GPM Investments, a private company based in Richmond, Virginia, bought the gas stations. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. GPM operates about 600 convenience stores, mostly on the East Coast and will transition the Rockford area gas stations to one of its existing brands, which include Fas Mart, Shore Stop and then transition them to one of its existing retail brands, which include Fas Mart, Shore Stop, Scotchman Stores, Young's, Li'l Cricket and BreadBox.

Road Ranger president David Saporta said GPM retained all Road Ranger employees as part of the sale. The sale did not include a Road Ranger truck stop in South Beloit or the company's gas stations in the village of Winnebago, on East Riverside Boulevard near Interstate 90 and on South Main Street near the Chicago Rockford International Airport. Road Ranger operates 32 truck stops nationwide and "will continue to operate, grow and expand" those core businesses, Saporta said.

Isaac Guerrero: 815-987-1361; iguerrero@rrstar.com; @isaac_rrs

42 Rockford-area Road Ranger gas stations sold - News - Rockford Register Star - Rockford, IL

Scientists Urge Museums to Sever Koch Ties - Bloomberg Politics

Ben Brody t @betbrod

Dozens of scientists have signed an open letter to museums urging them to cut ties with donors and board members who deny climate change, singling out billionaire political donor David Koch, who sits on the boards of the two of the nation's largest natural history museums.

"We are deeply concerned by the links between museums of science and natural history with those who profit from fossil fuels or fund lobby groups that misrepresent climate science," says the letter, published Tuesday at thenaturalhistorymuseum.org. "David Koch’s oil and manufacturing conglomerate Koch Industries is one of the greatest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States."

David Koch's exhibit at the Smithsonian was criticized for downplaying climate change.

Koch, who sits on the boards of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in D.C. and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has also helped finance efforts to deny the scientific consensus that human actions cause climate change, according to a 2013 study from Drexel University. Along with his brother, Charles, Koch is a major political donor. They send millions to conservative and libertarian candidates and causes each cycle, usually through a network of non-profits for which they also act as bundlers, and their political network plans to pump nearly $1 billion into the coming presidential election.

"We are concerned that the integrity of these institutions is compromised by association with special interests who obfuscate climate science, fight environmental regulation, oppose clean energy legislation, and seek to ease limits on industrial pollution," the letter reads. It urges museums "to cut all ties with the fossil fuel industry and funders of climate science obfuscation."

The letter's signers include James Hansen, the former head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and three authors of the Nobel Prize-winning 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Natural History Museum that published the letter touts itself as a "mobile museum" that "makes a point to include and highlight the socio-political forces that shape nature" in a way traditional museum don't. The letter so far has 37 signatures, but has been accompanied by petitions from environmental groups including Greenpeace and the Sierra Club to oust Koch.

Museum spokesmen told the New York Times that Koch's position as a board member and donor does not give him influence over museum content, although the article also linked to a 2010 New Yorker profile of Koch that suggested the Smithsonian's David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins downplayed rising global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.

Freedom Partners, a hub for the brothers' political network, referred questions to Koch spokesman Ken Spain, who wrote in an e-mail that Koch and his foundation “have pledged or contributed more than $1.2 billion to educational institutions and cultural institutions, cancer research, medical centers, and to assist public policy organizations. Mr. Koch remains committed to supporting these causes.”

Scientists Urge Museums to Sever Koch Ties - Bloomberg Politics

Male nurses are scarce but earn thousands more than women | The Kansas City Star The Kansas City Star

By Karen Kaplan

Los Angeles Times

Registered nurses who are male earn nearly $11,000 more per year than RNs who are female, new research shows. Only about half of that difference can be explained by factors like education, work experience and clinical specialty.

That leaves a $5,148 annual salary gap that effectively discriminates against women, who make up the vast majority of the nursing workforce, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

With nurses earning an average of $66,973 per year, that $5,148 amounts to an 8 percent bump in pay for men.

Approximately 2.5 million women – and the families they support – are being shortchanged by the gender-based pay difference, say the researchers who conducted the study.

“Given the large numbers of women employed in nursing, gender pay differences affect a sizable part of the population,” said study leader Ulrike Muench, a nurse practitioner with a PhD from Yale who studies nursing, health policy and health care economics at UC San Francisco.

“We hope that our results will bring awareness to this important topic,” she said in a statement.

Muench and her colleagues examined two decades’ worth of salary information from the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses. Before the survey ended in 2008, it collected data once every four years from more than 30,000 RNs across the country. Altogether, the study sample included responses from 87,903 full-time RNs, 93 percent of whom were women.

In the raw analysis, the average salaries for men were $10,775 higher than for women, the researchers found. That discrepancy can be seen in every survey year going back to 1988. Though the gap appeared to narrow in the middle and late 1990s, it widened again after 2000.

Even after the researchers accounted for things like location, hours worked per week, years of experience and type of nursing degree, men still earned $5,148 more than women, on average.

For some nursing specialties, the gap was even greater. In cardiology, for instance, male RNs earned $6,034 more than their female counterparts. Only one specialty – orthopedics – had a pay gap too small to be statistically significant, meaning that the difference might have been due to chance.

Workplace mattered too. Nurses who cared for hospital patients took home $3,873 more per year if they were men, according to the study. In outpatient settings, men earned $7,678 more than women.

The researchers also found significant differences according to job type. The most extreme disparity was seen among nurse anesthetists, who were paid $17,290 more if they were men than if they were women. However, women who were in senior academic positions had slightly bigger paychecks than their male counterparts. (This difference was too small to be considered statistically significant.)

To see whether the situation had improved since 2008, the researchers compared the salaries of more than 200,000 RNs who took part in the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey between 2001 and 2013. In this sample, 10 percent of the nurses were men – and they averaged $9,562 more per year than the women, based on the unadjusted analysis.

The gender pay gap for nurses “is similar in magnitude to the salary differences found for physicians,” the researchers wrote in JAMA. Over a 30-year career, the pay gap adds up to a $155,000 bonus for men, Muench noted.

Male nurses are scarce but earn thousands more than women | The Kansas City Star The Kansas City Star#emlnl=Midday_Business_Report#emlnl=Midday_Business_Report

Labor gets early good news in legal battle with Rauner over dues - Chicago Business Journal

 

Organized labor got good news in an early legal skirmish against Governor Bruce Rauner over the governor’s attempts to curtail the fees non-union workers must pay for representation in collective bargaining.

Rauner had issued an executive order to end the practice, but unions sued and U.S. District Judge Staci Yandle has ruled that the dispute must be handled in Illinois state court, not federal court, according to a report by the Chicago Tribune. That’s important because Rauner had sought to move the unions’ suit to federal court, ostensibly a friendlier venue for his side of the argument. Separately, Rauner has filed a lawsuit in federal court with the hope of forcing the United States Supreme Court to rule on the matter, the Tribune noted.

This latest ruling comes on the heels of Democratic Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan issuing opinions that some of the Republican Rauner’s proposals for instituting “right-to-work” laws in the state would be illegal, mainly because they do not go through the state legislature.

Labor gets early good news in legal battle with Rauner over dues - Chicago Business Journal

Auto workers president rejects lower-tier of wages - Yahoo Finance

 

The leader of the United Auto Workers union has rejected a third tier of lower wages for members who make auto parts.

Speaking Wednesday at the union's national bargaining convention in Detroit, President Dennis Williams said the UAW already has too many tiers of lower wages.

Williams was responding to reports that General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. may propose a third tier of pay. He already is under pressure from union members to end a second tier of wages that's about half the $28 per hour made by longtime workers.

He told delegates that he heard people talking about the third tier, which would pay less than the $15.28 starting wage for second-tier workers, on their way in to the convention center Wednesday morning.

"I'm thinking they got too many damn tiers now," said Williams, who received a standing ovation.

Actually, a third tier of wages already is in place at several General Motors factories in the Detroit area for a small number of workers who build battery packs and place parts in the right sequence to be assembled on cars. Without the lower tier, the work may have gone to Mexico or another country with lower labor costs.

Williams told members about bridging the gap in wages, an apparent reference to the first and second tiers. But he also said they're competing in a global economy.

Many at the convention spoke in favor of pay raises for veteran workers. Longtime UAW workers have not had an hourly pay raise since 2007, although they have received hefty annual profit sharing checks. But there's no guarantee of getting checks every year.

Williams didn't address pay raises in his speech, but has said in the past that there are ways to give raises and keep the companies competitive.

In his speech, he said workers shared in getting the auto companies through bad times and "we must equally share in the good times."

Contract talks with between Fiat Chrysler, GM, Ford and the UAW start this summer. The union represents about 137,000 workers at the three companies. The current contract expires in September.

The convention, which takes place every four years, sets the agenda for the union's bargaining efforts with the auto companies and other industries.

This year's talks are the first to come after the auto industry fully recovered from the Great Recession, and could be contentious as the union seeks a slice of the industry's billions of dollars in profits. Auto sales are expected to hit nearly 17 million in the U.S. this year, close to historic highs. They fell as low as 10.4 million in 2009.

Auto companies, mindful of the recession, are reluctant to increase U.S. labor costs and once again be at a cost disadvantage to foreign companies. They actually want to reduce labor expenses, contending that their costs already have grown above competitors.

An analysis done by the Center for Automotive Research, a think tank based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, shows that to be true, at least for General Motors and Ford.

GM's total hourly labor costs, including wages and benefits, total $58 per hour, followed closely by Ford at $57. Both are more than $8 above Honda and Toyota, whose costs are below $50 per hour, the analysis found. Chrysler, with costs totaling $48 per hour, is below Honda and equal to Toyota, but higher than Nissan, Hyundai, BMW and Volkswagen, according to the analysis.

Mercedes-Benz had the highest labor costs in the U.S. at $65 per hour, while Volkswagen was the lowest at $38.

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Auto workers president rejects lower-tier of wages - Yahoo Finance

New Illinois Server Training Law effective July 1 State currently offering FREE responsible beverage server classes

For more information go to:  http://www.illinois.gov/ilcc/Education/Pages/BASSET/Training-Class-Directory.aspx

These Democrats Just Voted for a Weaselly Republican Budget Amendment on Social Security

Future Social Security beneficiaries may receive less?

 

During the budget "vote-a-rama" that began in the Senate last night, the Senate voted on two Social Security-related amendments: one good and one weaselly. I think you can guess which one passed and which one didn't.

The good one was an amendment offered by Ron Wyden (D-OR), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to create a point of order against legislation that would cut benefits, raise the retirement age, or privatize social security. This means that any proposal to weaken Social Security would automatically require a 60-vote threshold for passage.

The amendment failed with a vote of 51 to 49.

One Democrat--Mark Warner (D-VA)--voted with Republicans against it.

Five Republicans--Susan Collins (D-ME), Dean Heller (R-NV), Mark Kirk (R-IL), John McCain (R-AZ), and Rob Portman (R-OH)--joined Democrats in voting for it.

The second amendment--the weaselly one--was submitted by Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Hatch's amendment would direct the President to submit legislation to Congress "to protect current beneficiaries of the Social Security program and prevent the insolvency of the program."

Here is how Hatch spoke of his amendment:

“Every year we delay makes it more difficult to implement gradual reforms to Social Security that will allow us to avoid abrupt changes for future beneficiaries,” said Hatch.  “Delay makes it more difficult for hard-working Americans to gradually adjust their plans and makes it more likely that they will be hit with an uncertain blow to benefits or more taxes. This is an issue that can be best addressed through a bipartisan dialogue. And, this amendment will allow for bipartisan efforts to generate the long-term sustainability of the Social Security system and protect benefits for current and future beneficiaries. It’s a win-win.”

The language of "current beneficiaries," "gradual reforms," "bipartisan dialogue," and "insolvency" in his press release and his amendment text should signal his intent here. This is the language that Republicans, as well as too many Democrats, use to talk about cutting Social Security. (Remember the 2012 election?) In other words, it seems to be saying, "Obama, you should submit legislation to us to cut Social Security." It is somewhat vague, but that message seems to be the underlying one here.

This seems to have been Bernie Sanders's read of it as well:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) slammed the amendment, saying while it protects current Social Security recipients "if you're 63 years of age, 64 years of age, 65 years of age, watch out. They're going after you."

"This amendment [his own] is very clear, unlike the Hatch amendment, this amendment says we do not support cuts to Social Security," he said.

It is no surprise then that the Democratic caucus split, with more liberal Democrats voting against it and more conservative Democrats voting for it.

The amendment itself passed 75 to 24.

Here are the 22 members of the Democratic caucus who voted for it:

Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Richard Blumenthal (D-CT)
Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
Tom Carper (D-DE)
Chris Coons (D-DE)
Joe Donnelly (D-IN)
Dick Durbin (D-IL)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)
Tim Kaine (D-VA)
Angus King (I-ME)
Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
Joe Manchin (D-WV)
Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
Chris Murphy (D-CT)
Patty Murray (D-WA)
Harry Reid (D-NV)
Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
Jon Tester (D-MT)
Mark Warner (D-VA)

And here are the 24 who voted against it:

Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
Cory Booker (D-NJ)
Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
Ben Cardin (D-MD)
Bob Casey (D-PA)
Al Franken (D-MN)
Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
Martin Heinrich (D-NM)
Mazie Hirono (D-HI)
Pat Leahy (D-VT)
Ed Markey (D-MA)
Bob Menendez (D-NJ)
Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)
Bill Nelson (D-FL)
Gary Peters (D-MI)
Jack Reed (D-RI)
Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
Brian Schatz (D-HI)
Tom Udall (D-NM)
Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)
Ron Wyden (D-OR)

Budget amendments are all non-binding, but they are still intended for signaling.

These Democrats Just Voted for a Weaselly Republican Budget Amendment on Social Security

Italian-made version of iconic Jeep goes on sale in US - Yahoo News

 

Detroit (AFP) - US off-roaders seeking to rev up the four-wheel drive of a Jeep might soon find out that their American icon is made in Italy.

In a sign of what comes with the takeover of Chrysler by Italian giant Fiat, US auto dealers have begun selling the Italian-made Jeep Renegade.

The new Renegade, a small 4x4 SUV, was shipped to dealers last week, according to Todd Goyer, US spokesman of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA). The Renegade will hit showrooms nationwide in volume next month, with prices starting at around $20,000.

Jeep traces its roots back to 1940 when the US Army asked carmakers to design a utility vehicle that could be used for scouting and which could move quickly.

Willys came up with the best design and the "jeep" -- possibly a made-up word for "G.P." or "general purpose" -- became the workhorse of the US forces in World War II. It remained in production until 1982 and was used by armies all over the world until it was finally replaced.

For the motoring public the jeep morphed into offroad-capable commercial cars like the CJ-5 and pioneering sports utility vehicles like the Wagoneer and Cherokee.

Jeep, which was taken over by American Motors in 1970 and then came under the control of Chrysler in 1987, has since then benefited greatly from the overwhelming popularity of SUVs in the US market since the 1990s.

It is now a key element of Fiat Chrysler Automobile's plans to expand globally, and the Renegade is tapping one of the hottest market segments, small SUVs.

The Renegade was designed and engineered at FCA US in Auburn Hills, Michigan, but is being built in a refurbished assembly plant in southern Italy.

It shares a platform with other Fiat cars like the 500X and 500L and the Alfa Romeo MiTo.

It will also be built in Brazil with components from Italy and the US, for local and export markets.

Art Anderson, FCA US chief engineer, said the Renegade was designed to deliver the Jeep brand's traditional capability in a relatively small package that is bolstered by the latest electronics, which are used in the driveline.

The Renegade is capable of switching automatically from four-wheel to two-wheel drive, and offers optional driver's-assistance features such as a backup camera.

The Renegade is expected to augment US sales without cutting into those of the Jeep Compass, Patriot and Wrangler, all of which have benefited from a revival of Jeep sales since the end of the recession in 2009.

Overall Jeep sales were up 20 percent in the first two months of 2015 compared with a year earlier, despite criticism of its quality by one of Americans' favorite car-buying guides, Consumer Reports.

Italian-made version of iconic Jeep goes on sale in US - Yahoo News