Wonder if Middleboro will notice?

This case seems to have potential in Middleboro if the Board of Assessors chose to act.

From Kopelman and Paige, P.C. :

Assessment cases involving mobile home parks are rare, and there is little precedent for municipal officials to follow. Now, in the case CJD Real Estate Limited Partnership v. Board of Assessors of the Town of Chelmsford, et al., (Appellate Tax Board Nos. F298316 & F304236) the Appellate Tax Board (“ATB”) has rejected a mobile home park’s claim that its property was worth $3,880,500, and valued it at $10,000,000 and $9,938,300 for fiscal years 2008 and 2009 respectively. The subject property consisted of approximately 37.75 acres, improved with roads, 254 site pads, and other infrastructure necessary for the operation of a manufactured home community. The park owner, CJD, claimed that it was entitled to the benefit of the exemption from taxation enjoyed by the individual mobile home owners. At trial, the Town presented facts and law that clearly demonstrated CJD’s position on its supposed entitlement to an exemption was meritless.

The Town’s case proved the value of the Appellant’s property by using the income approach to valuation. This was consistent with CJD’s witnesses’ testimony that CJD derives income from the rental of site pads on which manufactured homes are parked. The ATB concluded that the use of the income approach to valuation was proper in assessing the park, and consistent with the manner in which mobile home park owners themselves value such properties for investment purposes.

Celebrate Earth Day: April 22nd

Consider learning about the Earth, learning about the issues.

Consider the Appliance Rebates.

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org was interviewed on WBUR - worth listening to.

Finding Ways To Mark Earth Day's 40th

Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben talks about small steps people can take to reduce carbon emissions. Climatologist Kevin Trenberth discusses research suggesting that the Earth's atmosphere is trapping more heat than before, and the mystery of where excess heat is being stored.

Environment Massachusetts
MassCleanEnergyCenter
thedailygreen


Maybe consider where your energy comes from.

Few people were aware of Massey Energy until its most recent mine explosion that killed workers because of safety problems.

Read about Massey's union busting tactics here

Massey Energy is one of the largest coal companies in the United States, and certainly one of the most controversial. In April 2010 the company received a great deal of negative attention when an explosion at one of its mines in West Virginia killed 29 workers. It later came out that the mine in question had been cited more than 1,000 times for safety violations, and that Massey had similar problems at many of its other facilities. Massey, which for two decades was owned by the engineering giant Fluor, is also notorious for its aggressive anti-union stance and for environmental problems such as a massive coal sludge spill and its reliance on terrain-destroying mountaintop removal projects.

Think about speaking out to expand the bottle bill

As you likely know, the Bottle Bill -- the 5 cent redeemable deposit on some beverage containers -- has been the law for more than 25 years in the Bay State. It is the single most successful recycling program in the state, if not the country, with more than 70% of these containers being recycled.

E-mail your representative today and ask him or her to help pass the Updated Bottle Bill.

But beverages have changed over the years, and the original law needs an update. The reason that bottled water, iced teas, vitamin waters and similar drinks don't have the 5 cent deposit is simply because they were not on the supermarket shelves back in the early 1980s when the law passed. If we had the Bottle Bill deposit on those kinds of drinks, we'd catch 1 billion containers each year, which now end up on the ball fields, the beaches, the playgrounds, or in landfills and incinerators.

Seems like a no-brainer, right? But the bill has been bottled up for years. At the most recent hearing on the bill, there were well over 100 supporters in the room, including the League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club, the Mass Municipal Association and more. The opponents? Lobbyists for Pepsi, for the bottled water companies, for the liquor stores. It looked and sounded to all of us in the hearing room like the public interest versus the the powerful special interests. So we just have to make the public interest voice louder. And that's why I'm asking you to e-mail your legislator today and ask them to get the Updated Bottle Bill out of committee and moving along towards passage.

http://www.masspirg.org/action/healthy-communities/all-legs-bb?id4=es


“We Are Tearing Down Our Mountains”: Photojournalist Antrim Caskey on West Virginia’s Fight Against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining


The Environmental Protection Agency took a significant step last week toward blocking one of Appalachia’s largest and most disputed mountaintop removal coal mines. On Friday the EPA proposed a veto of the Clean Water Act permit issued by the Army Corps of Engineers for the Spruce No. 1 Mine in West Virginia. Earlier this month, we interviewed Antrim Caskey, a photojournalist who has been chronicling the nonviolent fight against mountaintop removal coal mining. Her new book is Dragline.

Greenpeace:

Report: Global Warming Skeptics Bankrolled by Koch Industries
A new report from Greenpeace has identified a privately owned US company with ties to the oil and chemical industry as the paymaster of global warming skeptics in the United States and Europe. According to Greenpeace, Koch Industries has spent nearly $48 million since 1997 to fund groups that question global warming.

Where have you heard that name before? Maybe here ?

Arctic Methane on the Move?

Methane is like the radical wing of the carbon cycle, in today’s atmosphere a stronger greenhouse gas per molecule than CO2, and an atmospheric concentration that can change more quickly than CO2 can. There has been a lot of press coverage of a new paper in Science this week called “Extensive methane venting to the atmosphere from sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf”, which comes on the heels of a handful of interrelated methane papers in the last year or so. Is now the time to get frightened?

Twenty Ethical Questions that the US Press Should Ask Opponents of Climate Change Policies.

If the Road to a Clean Energy Future Seems Too Long, Check Your MapIf the Road to a Clean Energy Future Seems Too Long, Check Your Map

Maybe the best way to celebrate Earth Day is to think about the Earth.