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BELTON State Rep. Hugh Shine visited the Central Texas Tea Party Monday night to talk property taxes and the impending special session of the state Legislature.

The monthly meeting of the Central Texas Tea Party was held at the Harris Community Center in Belton, and much of the meeting involved passionate discussion about property tax reform.

Shine outlined his proposal for a new property tax notice that property owners would receive. His proposal is to create a spreadsheet that outlines how each taxing entity effects the taxes paid by an individual.

This is the first process of reform, Shine said. This would be a required statement across the State of Texas so that people can look at this and make an informed decision about where there was rates could be.

Shine also discussed his proposal for additional training and scrutiny of appraisal review boards.

We were going to require training and require a local administrative judge to appoint the appraisal board chairman. We had about seven different items to address that, Shine said.

One member of the audience said he believes the focus should be on the actual appraisers, not the review board.

The appraisal districts are out of control, he said. The problem isnt the review board, its the appraisers. Those guys can do whatever they want. Theres no control over them with these huge increases.

Landowners in Bell County have seen increases in their property tax valuations this year. Residents in Harker Heights recently protested increases they said were substantial and excessive.

Shine said he proposed a 10 percent cap on increases for residences, which wasnt well received.

I got no support. I heard from the Realtors immediately when I proposed it, Shine said. They believed if there was a cap, property values wouldnt raise much and it would prevent them from selling homes.

One resident voiced his displeasure with the amount of inactivity that happened during the legislative session. Shine responded by saying the process of getting a bill passed involves a lot of moving parts.

Youve got 183 people in the process. How many of you agree on everything with your spouse? Trying to get 183 people to agree is really a challenge, he said. There are people who dont like certain legislation and they will find ways to kill it.

Shine said property tax legislation will be revisited during the upcoming special session that starts next month. Shine said his first priority is to protect the interests of his constituents.

Im going to support Bell County and the folks that live here. Im going to vote the best I can always to support the people in Bell County and our economy, Shine said. Im just like you. I pay property taxes. I want to see something happen with this so that when people get their tax statements, they understand them and they know who to go talk to to find out why their tax rate didnt change if their appraisals went up.

Tea Party member Judy Brady said asked Shine to reach out to the Republican Party to help spread the word about property taxes and similar issues.

When you get into a situation where you need us to take this door to door, let us know, Brady said. Were not here to oppose you on everything. Were here to support you as well.

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Shine discusses property taxes at Tea Party meeting - Temple Daily Telegram

We never originally intended to be an instrumental band; when we started, we auditioned a load of singers and some of them were f**king awful!We wrotesomedemos in order to entice a vocalist into the band and stuck them up on the Internetandgot offered a support with ...And so I Watch you from Afar and Adebisi Shank on the strength of some instrumental demos that were never actually intended to be instrumental. When we got slots like that, we figured there might be something in this and its spiralled out of control into the fiery ball of hell that it is now!

Founding member and guitarist of Alpha Male Tea Party Tom Peters there on how his band, one of the most beloved and respected to come out of the instrumental just-dont-call-us-post-rock wave that has been fiercely bubbling away in the underground in the past decade. The band have firmly established themselves as one of the countrys premier instrumental math rock acts in a nascent yet hysterically dedicated scene. Their third album Health is due to be releasedvia Big Scary Monsters on Friday 23rd June, but you can stream the record in full 3 days beforehand,exclusively with The Independent.

Alpha Male Tea Party originally began as an escape from the drudgery of full-time employment for Tom. He started putting demos of s**tty songs together on Logic and posted a Gumtree advert to find like-mined individuals to help produce seismic tectonic-plate-shifting math rock riffs. The band took a short while to cement its line-up but solidified with drummer Greg Chapman and bassist Ben Griffiths, a person Peters asked to join the band despite never seeing him play bass on the strength that he was "a funny man".

Humour has been an essential thread through Alpha Male Tea Partys career to date; whether it be the outrageous Devo-inspired outfits or their acerbic on-stage wit. Its tended to be a characteristic that has marked them out from a scene that produces a lot of great bands with little to distinguish between them but its also been used as a noose for clueless critics to hang the band from.

I guess Health is a bit more lofty in theme than where we've been before says Tom. For all our jocular silliness and stupid humour, I think the core of what we're doing is a lot more serious than people think it is. I know we always have stupid song titles and we have a silly band name, but when it actually boils down to what we do creatively and artistically, we take it incredibly seriously. Theres a bit of a misconception about the humorous aspect of Alpha Male Tea Party; it isn't merely a pointless element. It's a very important and intrinsic part of who the three of us are as individuals and if that doesn't come across in what we do artistically, then we are f**king lying. I'm the sort of person who'll be cracking jokes in any situation; I was cracking jokes at my Grandad's funeral because that's how I cope with stuff, I have to do it like that. I'm not an insensitive person and I care very deeply about people and the world, but there comes a point where you actually have to find a way to reconcile yourself with the many s**tty things that happen and humour, for me, is pretty much the only way I can do that. If there's ever any level of criticism about us, it's always relating to the humour, as if there were a pre-scribed idea that humour and music should never cross paths.

But all music is a product of the circumstances in which it was created and Alpha Male Tea Partys third album is no different. The jubilant, major-key melodies are still scattered all over the record with abundance, and the band still show a fondness for naming some of their songs with absurd track titles, such as "Carpet Diem", "Dont You Know Who I Think I Am?" and"Nobody Had the Heart To Tell Him He Was on Fire". But the badinage is soaked in an altogether more sombre tone than what weve come to expect from the three-piece.

If we did have an agenda going into this album it was we wanted to do something a little bit darker says Tom. I think that was just a natural reaction to the personal circumstances that we were all going through. I was struggling to come up with up-beat major sounding riffs and it wasnt feeling natural either. I don't want to churn out 10 songs of buoyant, cheery riffs because that's what people think we do. As f**king pompous as this sounds, music to me is all about capturing how you are actually relating to the world individually as a person. For me, I need to be able to take those emotional things and translate them into something on my instrument; if I can't do that then nothing happens. It took us a while to get going with this album; we've had a pretty tough couple of years individually in between Droids and Healthso getting creative juices flowing when you're dealing with complicated personal issues can be pretty difficult. But as we got towards the end of the writing process, I feel like we probably could have written s**t-loads more; we were feeling really good about it.

As the album began to emerge, the band started to notice themes converging and forming a cohesive through line that came from their personal stresses and enriched the material they were working on. I think when we actually decided to call it Health, that was when the bigger, deeper definitions started to pop into our heads says Tom It was definitely harder to write this album than DroidsGreg picks up on that thread, When we did Droids there was a theme about the monotony of life which was illustrated on the cover and through the song titles. We wanted this album to be thematic as well as opposed to merely a collection of songs. There was a multitude of things that happened along the way that gave us false starts, people who we love have been ill during this process, and it wasnt until we got the name actually on to the record that it all started to make some kind of thematic sense.

Whilst Health might contain darker themes than previous records, the jollity and effervescence that usually greets ones ears when theyre wrapped around a phat Alpha Male Tea Party riff still coils its way around your pleasure centres; that tension between technicality and melody that has served the band so well is still very much present and correct. It's a very important part of what we do says Tom I think we wouldn't ever sacrifice melody across a song for the sake of being technical. We like to have moments where it's sounds f**king horrible, but then it will break into something that's quite beautiful. We always try and do it sonically and with a bit of individual character.

The litmus test tends to be 'can we sing back?' says Ben. There'll be bits that are stuck in our heads for days and it sounds clich but thats when we know weve got it right. But we never try to incorporate a particular mode or scale or time signature or anything like that. We might try and make things more interesting if something sounds a little bit too meat and potatoes, says Greg but we're not really massively uber technical players. There are a lot of math bands out there that are 100% chops but with no tunes or melody and it bores the crap out of us!

Despite this, since they formed in September 2009, Alpha Male Tea Party have very much crashed the math-rock party and are proceeding to drink everyone elses booze. Initially christened Safe in a Shell, the band changed their nom de plume to their equally ludicrous current moniker, a name that would still cause trouble with misguided dimwits who completely misunderstood the appellation is tongue-in-cheek. When the band started, Tom admits he was naive to the size of the scene they infiltrated.I didn't really even know math rock was a thing until I formed this band he admits. I'd never come across Don Caballero or American Football or any of those bigger math-y bands at that point. I've always had this leaning towards writing these sort of like proggy sounding things but I always kept them as a bit of a dirty secret.

Toms dirty little secrets soon became 10 fully-flourished songs on the bands debut release AMTP released in 2012. Though he was initially unfamiliar with the instrumental math scene, it became apparent pretty quickly to him that there was little in the way of personality injected into some of the most established and well-loved bands of the movement. He intended not to fall into the same pit-trap himself. We're quite aware of our sound and how we want to portray ourselves musically he says. There are a lot of bands in this scene that are doing cool things but theyve been covered fairly substantially already and we've always been very conscious of that. So we're really keen to always maintain an obvious sense of personal identity in our music.

I realised when I was putting Alpha Male Tea Party together, the only thing that was actually really important was if it had a sense of self to it. If you can convey who you are through the music you make, then you're doing something right. That was a real penny drop moment for me; there are things that I look back on in the early days of the band and I shudder a little bit; some of the things I posted on the internet, some of the things that we used to wear on stage. But in my defence, I was 21 years old, I was still trying to work out who I was as a human being. It's mad to think this band's 8 years old now and it has been an unbelievable personal journey for all of us. Weve had moments where weve considered getting other people involved, like a manager or something to make use seem a more professional band, but what this band really boils down is who we are in a creative and emotional, personal sense. If we try to dilute that or feel we need to change that, then why would we be doing it?

Health, the third album be Alpha Male Tea Party, is released through Big Scary Monsters on Friday 23rd June.

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Alpha Male Tea Party Health: Exclusive Album Stream - The Independent

I respond to the Saturday letter Republicans started rise in partisanship from Jacquelyn Thompson.

There was never any terror or harassment by the tea party. Most of the violence was performed by the leftist Occupy Wall Street group. The only gun spotted at a tea party rally was found by one photographer who published a close up picture of a mans hip sporting a holstered revolver. He neglected to show that the man was a uniformed guard hired for protection.

Poor Gabby Gifford was shot by a mentally deranged individual with a perceived grudge against a congressional representative. However, Sarah Palin (way up in Alaska) was blamed by the media. I would agree, that neither Giffords shooter nor the deranged Bernie Sanders supporter who recently attempted to massacre Republican ball players in Washington, D.C., should have had access to guns.

Norma Dorfner

Columbus

Read more from the original source:
Letter: Tea party doesn't deserve blame - The Columbus Dispatch

Last week I was re-reading Alice in Wonderland (yes, the requisite child was present), when I was struck with how many of the events depicted in the story present strong parallels to my experience in Savannah over the last decade.

The Mad Hatters Tea Party in particular stood out. Remember that these characters did no maintenance or clean-up clean plates move down.

It seems every time I pick-up this newspaper, I read a new story about how the city is faced with tough choices because they do not have enough money to fund the vast new public works projects the Council is constantly talking about.

Meanwhile, I learn that the Property Maintenance, Parks and Trees and even the Department(s) which mow the lawns and clean out the canals and drains in Savannahs public spaces are under-staffed and under-funded.

A large part of the chronically neglected infrastructure/upkeep issues are located within neighborhoods which were annexed in the decades of the 1950s-80s. I understand that prominent citizens will not be able to put up a plaque memorializing their contributions to attractive well kept neighborhoods or clean, flood-free streets but the efforts of the above named city departments are second only to the efforts of Metro police in establishing and maintaining the quality of life in our neighborhoods. I believe that most of these large projects, which I have read about, will add substantially to the workload of these departments and our history teaches us that they will not be given the required additional funding.

I very much agree with the gist of recent comments from City Manager Rob Fernandez (to paraphrase) Savannah must establish a short list of manageable priorities and stick with them. Before we undertake any vast new public works projects we must look to keeping-up the quality of the lovely and elegant neighborhoods we have inherited and built over the last several hundred years. The alternative is Philadelphia or Baltimore or any number of other cities, which have focused on building new, new, new while neglecting the existing neighborhoods, which were responsible for their unique character. As a result no one wanted to live in these neglected areas and property values crashed and many of them look like they were carpet bombed.

I love Savannah; I do not want to live in those other cities.

ALAN BOULTON

President

Paradise Park/Oakhurst Neighborhood Association

Arrivederci Firenze

I was sad to hear and to read about the closing of The Florence but not at all surprised.

Because we live in the neighborhood, we truly wished this Hugh Acheson restaurant a long and prosperous existence, but from the moment we first started visiting Savannah three years ago, it always seemed doomed to close for a variety of reasons.

Perhaps overlooked in the postmortem will be what really was the restaurants main issue. Sure, the portions were small and the prices were high, as was to be expected with the name attached to the establishment, but the quality of the food was undeniable. The pizza may well have been the best in the city. Lord knows small portions and high prices are not enough to conspire to kill a restaurant, as evidenced by so many survivors in the fickle Savannah culinary scene.

What hurt The Florence more than anything was its frontage. Unlike Atlantic, Elizabeths, and so many other (lesser) eating venues in the Starland-Victory area, The Florences monolithic facade gave no impression that a handsome restaurant was right there. Had the original architects designs called for removing a portion of that wall along Victory to create a raised patio a few steps above the sidewalk and a noticeable entryway, there is no telling what might have been. Imagine that same space with a wall of glass along Victory something to entice the see-and-be-seen crowd and enable them to be, well, seen.

Oh and the parking. Somehow, reconfiguring an entrance to an actual parking lot on the east end of the building would have helped matters, too.

Again, I am disappointed to see the best pizza in the city go, not to mention a place so close to our address, and it is a shame that a flaw in the physical space is more to blame than perhaps any other factor in its demise.

NEIL W. GABBEY

Savannah

Fathers Day, Phil Mickelson style

Phil Mickelson was not the winner of the 2017 U.S. Open Golf Tournament this year, again. Instead, he withdrew from the tournament to attend the high school graduation of his daughter Amanda, and at which she will also, as class president address her fellow students, faculty and families. Most golfers know that this title, the U.S. Open, is the only one that still eludes him after a record six times. Earlier in his career, despite demonstrated great prowess as a player, some sports journalists questioned if he had the mettle to withstand the heat of a tight finish in a major championship. His close finishes were famous.

One was the time he came in second to Paine Stewart in the 1999 U.S. Open. But what happened moments after the final shot on the 18th green was, for me, one of the finest moments in golf that I have witnessed. Paine approached Phil, still stunned from his loss, and before the cameras and the golfing world, grasped Phil with both hands on either side of his head, reassuring him, essentially that you will win this tournament someday but you are about to be a father and you will see how much greater that is than winning a tournament.

Phil took those words and that moment to heart. And so, Phil has shown his metal in winning tournaments and three majors since then, but he has demonstrated his true values by putting himself at the side of his wife and children in their times of need as well as marking passages and celebrations in their life as a family and individuals.

WAYNE H. WELCH

Savannah

See more here:
City like the 'Mad Hatters Tea Party' - Savannah Morning News

Back row from left, Voncille Harris, Tavonna Harris Askew, Tamika Harris, and front row, Chandler Askew and Kennedy Askew attend the tea party. (Submitted photo)

By Desiree Williams

In honor of National Cancer Survivors Day on June 4, Donna Blackmon hosted a tea party at Serenity in Zionsville to benefit her philanthropic efforts through the Power in Purple campaign to fight cancer.

Throughout May and June, 20 women are participating in the American Cancer Societys Power in Purple campaign to raise funds for and awareness of the resources offered from the ACS for cancer patients and families.

Blackmon manages communications and marketing strategies in the Indianapolis Suburban Region for the Womens, Obstetrics, Pediatrics and Cancer service lines at IU Health. Although she heard about the Power in Purple campaign opportunity through her contacts at work, she was motivated to participate for personal reasons. Blackmons mother died of lung cancer in 2013.

Just working with the service line I work with and working with the ACS and learning about all of the great programs they offer, its one of those things I wish wed known a little bit more about at the time, she said. So, thats kind of been my driving force is to make sure others are aware of all the resources that they offer.

Each candidate has a target goal of $2,500, and the ACS wants to raise $52,500 by the end of the campaign. Candidates must also wear purple every day during the month of June to raise awareness.

The overall goal would be to erase the pain and suffering of cancer for future generations, which is part of the reason why I hosted the tea party at Serenity, Blackmon said.

She chose to use a Mommy & Me theme to include her two young daughters and their friends. The event included a photo booth, an etiquette lesson from owner Karin Glass, games, crafts, food and tea.

It was so cute, Blackmon said. It just turned out so very well.

Blackmon is still working to reach her fundraising goal before the campaigns closing ceremony in July.

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Tea party benefits American Cancer Society's Power in Purple campaign - Current in Zionsville