{"id":158,"date":"2007-02-14T21:16:57","date_gmt":"2007-02-15T01:16:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/archives\/158"},"modified":"2007-02-14T21:17:40","modified_gmt":"2007-02-15T01:17:40","slug":"on-fire-in-cheshire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/2007\/02\/on-fire-in-cheshire\/","title":{"rendered":"On Fire in Cheshire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Globe wrote earlier this week about a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/local\/articles\/2007\/02\/09\/firefighters_windfall_comes_with_a_catch\/\">Homeland Security grant<\/a> to Cheshire, MA.  The town wanted a new firetruck, but instead got money for salaries &#8211; $626,000, to be more specific.  The Globe cites that as 26 times the annual fire department budget.  To put that in perspective, that would be like Arlington getting  $16 million, but not being allowed to spend it on rebuilding firestations &#8211; personnel only, please!<\/p>\n<p>I started several different paragraphs attempting to quantify and qualify how foolish the feds look and how little faith I have that my federal tax dollars are spent wisely, but they all fell short.  Just read the Globe article, including these quality excerpts:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Asked about Cheshire&#8217;s grant, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Val Bunting said yesterday that the town &#8220;presented a multifaceted project proposal.&#8221; She said the grant could be spent over four years, but she would not elaborate .<\/p>\n<p>Cheshire &#8212; the smallest town in Massachusetts to get a grant, but the recipient of the largest amount.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>But now that that&#8217;s off the wish list, Sweet said he might use some of the money to recruit high school students. Or he might put some of the windfall into a marketing campaign to lure volunteers to Cheshire.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;ll be on billboards, TVs, and radio stations, and that kind of stuff,&#8221; he said. &#8220;We&#8217;ll have to spend it wisely.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Globe wrote earlier this week about a Homeland Security grant to Cheshire, MA. The town wanted a new firetruck, but instead got money for salaries &#8211; $626,000, to be more specific. The Globe cites that as 26 times the annual fire department budget. To put that in perspective, that would be like Arlington getting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,19,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-massachusetts","category-national","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}