100 Innovative Ideas For Florida's Future

We don’t provide links to other websites unless we determine they relate and contribute to the topics on our Politically Homeless blog. We are highly recommending one such website to you:

http://www.100ideas.org/

We have also added this site to our Home Page “Links” so that you can view it when you visit our Politically Homeless blog.

State Representative Marco Rubio, incoming Speaker of the House (2006-08), has initiated a new website: “100 Innovative Ideas For Florida’s Future”. The site provides all Floridians an opportunity to give their input in developing the 100 most innovative ideas that will help lead the direction of Florida government over the next ten years.

We encourage you to visit the “100 Ideas” site and share your innovative ideas:

Then give us your comments on our blog concerning your evaluation of the website’s objectives and usefulness.

We can make a difference!

Our Public School System: Teachers Speak Out

We recently read an eye-opening magazine article titled: “Parents Behaving Badly”. The article highlighted horror stories of the problems created for teachers by today’s parents. Being a teacher in any school system is a thankless job, and that’s a major reason many college students are not becoming teachers.

There have been suggestions to reserve a section of our blog for our local teachers to express their opinions about the parent/teacher relationship, and conditions in our school system and how to improve them.

Some of the comments on our blog threads have, at times, been critical of our teachers, the school board, administration, and the system in general. We want to give our teachers a chance to perhaps present a different side of the situation.

A few people discouraged us from establishing this section, saying that teachers might be reluctant to comment. We don’t agree with that point of view, and decided to give our teachers a chance to voice their opinions. The confidentiality of our blog is one of the “protections” of free speech.

Here is our November question of the month for our teachers:

What would you encourage parents do to help improve the performance of our local public school system?

Please encourage teachers to visit our blog and give us their point of view.

Countywide Services: A High Priority?

During the recent City of Ocala elections there were several comments on our blog about consolidating some of the city and county departments for more efficiency and cost savings. Some of the governmental functions mentioned for consolidation on a countywide basis included: police, fire, planning, and zoning and building. As you know from some of our bloggers, this is not a new idea.

Most of those who were elected to city council have said they want to pursue the possibilities. Additionally, there is at least one county commissioner who has supported the idea. We imagine there would be others who would also see the potential of consolidating some functions.

With a commitment to smaller government by most all of our elected officials, we believe the countywide services concept has much merit. The test will be putting politics aside and doing what is best for the taxpayers; something that isn’t happening as much as it should at the national, state and local levels.

Here is our question for you:

Should the consolidation into countywide services of certain City of Ocala and Marion county functions be given high priority by our elected officials? Why or why not?

Elected Officials’ Media Releases

We are testing a new section of our blog. We will provide space, via the “Comments” thread, for our elected officials to post Media Releases submitted to other media sources. Frequently we, the citizens, never get to see information our elected officials submit (especially to newspapers) because the media release is never used or is used but with major editing.

We will focus primarily on state and local releases of interest to Marion County citizens. We want Media Releases that are a normal part of the work of representing and better informing citizens. We encourage all elected officials to take advantage of this communication opportunity, particularly our state legislative delegation. Please keep the Releases short and to the point, and include staff contact information on the Release for any follow up required.

We will not edit any Releases posted to the blog. However, the Blog Master will reserve discretion to remove any Releases posted that are judged: (1) excessive in length, (2) topically not relevant, (3) blatantly political, or (4) duplicates a release already posted. Those are our only guidelines.

Posting a Release is easy: (1) just click on “Comments”, (2) copy and paste the Release into the “Leave your comment” block; if necessary, do some minor editing to better fit the text into the block, (3) select “Other” on the “Choose an identity” section, (4) in the “Name” block, type in MR # and the sequence number your Media Release will be on the thread, (5) click on “Publish Your Comment”. Simple as that!

Alternatively, you can click on “E-mail us” on the blog home page, send the Release and we will post it for you. However, it may not be posted in as timely a manner as doing it yourself.

We will see how this section works out over the next few months.

BLOGGERS NOTE: We encourage you to offer you comments/feedback to any of the Media Releases posted in this section.