Governing Magazine/August 2001 GLIMPSES THE FELINE FIX Instead of chewing on a shoelace or scratching the living-room couch, as their domestic counterparts would do, about 100 feral cats have been tearing apart screened-in porches, urinating in children's sandboxes and spraying shrubs in the backyards of Cohoes, New York. Faced with the problem of controlling these feline terrorists, the Common Council recently settled on a humane solution: a Trap-Neuter- Return program. The community-wide TNR plan is being coordinated by local officials and Whiskers, a no-kill shelter run by volunteers. The organization will train citizens to help animal-control officers round up the cats in Have A Heart traps. Each feline then will receive a full check-up, including sterilization, a rabies vaccination and a screening for leukemia, at a cost between $45 and $62 apiece. "Once they are sterilized, the behaviors and odors will disappear," says Mayor John T. McDonald III. Some residents, however, were concerned about the mayor's original proposal to release the cats back into local neighborhoods. So the city ultimately decided to provide the cats with their own colony in Sherwood Forest, a public park on the edge of town, where feeding stations and shelters will be set up. Councilman Daniel V. DeChiaro, who brought the matter before the council this spring, has volunteered to be the caretaker who feeds the cats daily at the outdoor shelter. He estimates the total expense, most of which he hopes will be covered by fundraisers, to be around $6,000. "Many people support the Trap-Neuter-Return program and its humane approach," says Mayor McDonald, "and then, much to my dismay, there are some people who want to use the cats for target practice. I find that deplorable and unacceptable." --Rebecca Edelman FLIMSY ADVICE Just when you thought good ol' boys were all but dead in the modern state legislature, South Carolina lawmakers have served up a scandal that sounds straight out of 1951, not 2001. A pair of memos--one legitimate and the other made-up--circulated around the state House of Representatives in June. The real one came from the clerk's office, reminding female pages, many of them college- age, to dress appropriately for work. Some female legislators, it seems, had complained that the pages were showing too much skin. A second memo, anonymously written, then surfaced from the fictional "Men's Caucus." It urged female pages and staff members to ignore the first memo and suggested that pages should save "valuable materials used in blouse construction," and that "dresses should be no longer than 4 inches above the knee." The same memo noted that "the terms `babe,' `honey,' `sugar' and `little missy' should be accepted as compliments and terms of endearment." The fake memo offended female and male lawmakers alike. Representative Vida Miller called for an investigation into the memo's authorship and asked for an apology. "I love a good joke," Miller says. "But this memo went so far as to say that underwear is optional. That crossed the line." The scandal, known around the statehouse as "Memogate," spiraled further out of control when the speechwriter for Governor Jim Hodges penned a satirical memo purportedly from the Women's Caucus saying that Men's Caucus members carry caveman clubs. Hodges gave the speechwriter three days unpaid leave and a reprimand. House Speaker David Wilkins, meanwhile, is pushing measures he hopes will prevent similar scandals. When the legislature reconvenes in January, House members and staff will have to go through workplace sensitivity training. --Christopher Swope DRAWING THE LINE Chuck Moss, a commissioner in Oakland County, in suburban Detroit, balking at a request that the county contribute money to Detroit's upcoming tricentennial, on the theory that without the city, the suburbs wouldn't exist: "Well, if there wasn't a France, there wouldn't be a Detroit. Should we send money there?" BAD HARE DAYS Lani Kian, of the Denver Dumb Friends League, reporting that her agency has been inundated by unclaimed pet rabbits, and that the problem will get worse because the animals breed so fast: "I think it's about every 10 minutes, depending on how much wine they've had with dinner." A CAP ON BEER BOTTLES IS LIFTED Bellying up to the bar in Florida just got a little more interesting. For more than three decades, patrons of watering holes and liquor stores across the state weren't allowed to indulge their taste for any beer that wasn't served in an 8, 12, 16 or 32-ounce container. The 1965 ban on any non-conforming container stemmed from competitive maneuvering between beer manufacturers. But Senator Tom Lee, who led the recent charge to repeal the law, says, "there was no compelling public purpose to regulate the size container that a malt beverage is sold in any more than we would regulate the size of a Coke can." Lee, who chaired the Regulated Industries Committee in last year's session, was prompted to introduce legislation after receiving correspondence from "connoisseurs" who wanted to have access to the roughly 2,000 off-limit beers, most of them specialty microbrews that only come in 22-ounce bottles, or foreign beers whose containers are measured in milliliters. Lee's bill to repeal the ban was unsuccessful last year because of strong opposition from distributors, who were wary of the costs involved in making logistical changes to accommodate new products and the possibility of losing market share. This year, the bill saw some resistance but was signed into law in May. "Basically," says Lee, the ban was "all about protectionism and restraint of trade at the expense of consumer choice." --Melissa Conradi THE ENFORCERS A Gallup Poll taken in May rated the confidence that Americans have in the following law enforcement agencies: LOCAL POLICE A great deal Quite a lot Some Very little None No opinion 34% 25% 25% 13% 3% * STATE POLICE A great deal Quite a lot Some Very little None No opinion 36% 27% 26% 10% * 1% F.B.I. A great deal Quite a lot Some Very little None No opinion 20% 18% 36% 21% 2% 3% RUNNING ON PINS AND NEEDLES Boasting that he had a doctorate didn't help Omar Bradley in his bid for a third term as mayor of Compton, California. But then, he wasn't exactly an Ivy League graduate anyway. Bradley holds an honorary Ph.D. from Yuin University, a school of acupuncture. Henry Yu, Yuin's founder, has long battled with the state to win full licensure for the school. Part of his effort has been the granting of honorary degrees to local politicians in hopes of building support. "When you're having brain surgery, you want the smartest, best- prepared doctor you can afford," Bradley suggested in a campaign brochure. "When you're running a city the size of Compton, you must have an adequate education to make the best-informed decisions." Bradley's favored candidate for a city council seat touted her own Yuin Ph.D. in campaign materials. A member of the city council not up for reelection this year also bragged about his acupuncture doctorate in ads endorsing Bradley. But Bradley and his entire slate lost. Eric Perrodin, a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles County and Compton's new mayor, had distributed a Los Angeles Times article about the Yuin-Bradley connection as a campaign flier. Perrodin, though, says the issue ultimately wasn't that important. Instead, Perrodin suggests that most Compton residents were less interested in academic credentials than charges of cronyism and nepotism in Bradley's regime. --Alan Greenblatt GROSS ANATOMY States are using graphic advertising to discourage people from smoking. Call it the ultimate backhanded compliment: "Your ads are distasteful, revolting," read a posting on the Web site getoutraged.com, "and they helped me quit smoking two years ago this month." This was in response to anti-tobacco advertising run by Massachusetts, one of several states that have turned to graphic imagery as part of their efforts to discourage smoking, particularly among teens. These campaigns sometimes feature TV ads that borrow their look and tone from reality shows and music videos and often include shocking, close-up images of body parts disfigured by smoking- related illnesses. "They're not home runs, they're grand slams," says Gregory Connolly, director of the Massachusetts Tobacco Prevention Program. "We found it really moved the needle on numbers of people deciding to quit." The idea of using shock advertising first took root in Australia. Now, the Iowa landscape is dotted with anti-chewing tobacco billboards that feature mouths with black and green sores where the lower lip should be and the tagline: "Going without dip is hard, going without a lip is harder." A California TV spot shows a close-up of a middle-aged woman named Debi who has been smoking since age 13. "They say nicotine isn't addictive," she says in a notably froggy voice. After taking a puff of a cigarette directly through a hole in her throat, she asks, "How can they say that?" Washington State is running a "Real World"- style series on the Web about five teenagers who talk about their feelings as they're exposed to evidence of the dangers of smoking, including lesion-pocked lungs in a hospital pathology lab. The states are largely funding their aggressive countermarketing campaigns with money they have received from tobacco companies as part of legal settlements reached in 1997 and 1998. Naturally, that doesn't stop the states from attacking tobacco companies for deceptive advertising that downplays the dangers of smoking and glamorizes the images of the companies themselves. California is running a series of ads, funded by an increase in tobacco taxes approved by voters in 1998, about a cynical tobacco marketing executive. He brags about getting tobacco companies "back on TV" by sponsoring sports events and demonstrates how point-of-sale advertising is placed carefully at counter level to build brand recognition among small children. Several of the state-sponsored ads have won national awards. Mississippi, the first state to sue tobacco companies, was a winner with an ad showing a lawyer being taken through a futuristic-looking prison to meet with a defendant who "killed 11,000 people a day." As a guard briefs him about the perp, the lawyer looks at several diseased faces and organs that appear even more fragile and damaged against the stark backdrop of the prison. Health officials working on these ads repeatedly emphasize that they are merely one weapon in their arsenal, part of comprehensive anti- tobacco programs that also include high cigarette taxes and restrictions on smoking in public places. Still, the graphic ads do seem to strike a nerve. One University of Massachusetts study indicated that people who saw the state's ads were 50 percent less likely to start smoking. Rates of teen smoking, which had been on the rise throughout the 1990s, began to dip a bit in 1998. It's impossible to separate out how much the drop is attributable to advertising, as opposed to other state anti-tobacco efforts. That may change, though, with the advent of the American Legacy Foundation. Established by the 1998 nationwide tobacco settlement, the foundation has $1 billion to spend over five years on ads that feature body bags and other graphic imagery (some borrowed from Florida's anti-tobacco "Truth" campaign). That's not much money compared with the tobacco industry's annual $6 billion expeditures on advertising and promotion. But if the foundation ads bring down smoking rates where there are no state-run programs, it will show that putting an ugly public face on cancer and emphysema was the right way to combat them. --Alan Greenblatt ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2001, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. 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