FY 10 Gloucester County Budget

Gloucester County has published it's planned budget for physical year 2010. According to the submitted and published budget posted on the Gloucester County Government site, the budget is being cut by over $18 million dollars. The new budget is listed at over $104 million dollars for the county. With a county population of somewhere around 30,000 people, that is over $3,600.00 for each person in the county. Click here to get a copy of the 168 page PDF file. Under 1mb in size. Click Here to go to the site.


Okay, great we have a budget. My question isn't the budget, but instead, how much money does the county have that is well above and beyond the budget. Companies have budgets. People have budgets. It does not answer how much money is actually in the coffers and available. If school funds are being cut in the budget, why? It's a budget. How much money does the county actually have? This is the Billion dollar question. The state has been cutting the school budgets and now the schools are all crying and cutting back. It's a budget. Someone took money from somewhere and said this is what we are allowing you. Please do not explain simple economics to me. I'm aware of them and it would only be a diversion of the real question.

If I make $100 thousand a year and decide to live on a $30 thousand dollar budget, that's all it is. A budget. I still have that $100 thousand dollars a year coming in. There is still $70 thousand left unaccounted for. Anyone ever ask this question? I'm not saying or even suggesting that the county would ever even consider doing anything wrong, there is nothing wrong with the above situation.

Here is a point. During an economic downturn, if a state or a county has plenty of excess capital on hand instead of cutting the budget and funds to meet the economic situation, it would seem more logical for the state and local governments to increase spending to help fuel the economic situation. The government cutting back when capital is available just works against the people who elect the officials. If companies are laying off, if the state or county has the cash, bring some of those people in. Refuel the economy, not add to it's demise. When the economic situation reverses? Help those people back into the private sector.

Just a thought.

Double Video Clip of Awards At Abingdon Elementary School

For those parents that did not get a chance to attend the awards ceremony today. We only filmed two tiny video clips, but it gives you an idea.

Man Crashes Car In Gloucester While Running From Police in High Speed Chase

In case you missed this news from March 13th, 2009.

Major Drug Bust at the Encore Lounge in VA Beach

Abingdon Elementary School Awards

Today Abingdon Elementary School had it's awards ceremony at the Gym. The first set was for k through 2nd grade starting at 1:00 PM followed by 3rd through 5th Grade starting at 2:00 PM.

New Battle of the Hook Web Site

We just put up our new Battle of the Hook web site with 4 new videos and we just started adding our pictures to it. This site will take a while to complete as we have a lot of pictures to put on it and we are trying to keep the pictures a reasonable viewing size yet not to big or to small. Click Here to view the new site. We hope you enjoy the new site.

Battle of the Hook Teaser Video

This is our teaser video for the Battle of the Hook that was held back in October of 2008. We took somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 to 400 pictures that day. A few of those pictures were posted here on this site and are still on the site, but you have to use the search bar at the top of the page to get to them.

This is the first of many video slide shows we are producing from this event. We are also going to put up a web site for these videos as well as many of the pictures we took during the event. We will link the new site into this one once we have it up. We are estimating about 3 days from now.

Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum 10 Video Mini Series & Pictures Update

We have just finished adding the entire 10 video mini series of the Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum onto our expansion site and put them all on one page. We will soon be adding a number of pages of pictures that we just finished editing. Because of the lighting at the Abingdon Episcopal Church, the pictures had a heavy yellow hue to them that we had to clean up. There is also a few pictures that are a matter of interest. We will point them out once we have the pages up, so be sure to look for them. Click Here to go to the 10 video mini series page. From the site side bar, look for the picture pages for them.

Rodrigo Guitar Trio Pictures Link

In an effort to cut down on high end pictures and video, we are now using expansion sites to host the majority of our pictures, videos and slide shows. By using these expansion sites, we are also able to increase the amount of pictures, videos and slide shows as well as other content that we can offer. The best example of this starts here with 4 pages of pictures of the Rodrigo Guitar Trio who were recently at the Abingdon Episcopal Church on Friday night, April 17th, 2009. Click Here to view the pictures. We have put up 4 pages of pictures on this site.

We have also added links at the bottom of each page that will take you back here to the main site. Moving forward, we will be minimizing the amount of pictures, videos and slide shows on this site so that our friends on dial up will be able to access this site. Plus they should be able to access the pictures on the expansion sites as well as we are cutting down the size of the pictures yet they will be on the pages in larger size than they first appear on this site.

We hope you enjoy these expansion.