It takes a village to make our Rotary Club successful My thanks to Bill Secord for making sure newsletters got published while I was away during June and July! I enjoyed reading the news of the Club from Germany, Italy, Greece and then Canada. Kudos to Bill....Again, Thank you, Marilyn
We were a small group of 16 this morning. We hope this means that many are out and about enjoying summer vacations. Here's to playing hard and having fun!
Program:
Speaker Shaun Mulholland, City Manager, City of Lebanon and our fellow Rotarian
Shaun Mulholland
Shaun has been our City manager for the last year and a half. Previously he served as town administrator for the town of Allenstown. Prior to that, he retired as the Town’s Chief of Police after 23 years. He is retired from the US Army Reserves having deployed to Bosnia and the war in Iraq. He earned a master’s degree in Public Administration from the University of New Hampshire. He is the father of two daughters, one of whom is a registered nurse and the other is in law school. He is married to Diane. She serves as the tax collector in the Town of Derry, NH.
Shaun provided an overview of issues facing the City of Lebanon
- Taxes, sewer fees and landfill fees are or have been increasing. We will double our capacity of sewage by 1/1/20.
- The good news is that we are becoming more environmentally friendly.
- We are also trying to get more affordable (for working people) housing. We are currently short 6,000 units in the Upper Valley.
- It has cost $71,000,000 to separate runoff water from our sewer system. This has caused a backup of road repairs. $13,000,000 in improvements are scheduled this year for all of the City’s capital projects including roads. The roads in Centerra will be fixed in August.
- Looking ahead we can expect about 2 ½-3% increases in property taxes the next few years.
- The landfill needs to expand within the next 7 years. Phase 3 & 4 will carry us over the next 60 Years.
- There are 22 communities currently using the landfill.
- The federal government requested $38,000,000 in runway safety improvements to the airport that are not arguably not needed. That has been postponed until 2021 because no one in this country can supply the materials.
- There are currently 153,000 people in the Upper Valley.
- No one was able to tell Shaun what condition the roads were in when he arrived. He has hired a firm to do that on 100 miles of city roads.
- The separation of sewer and water runoff on Mechanic and Mascoma is expected to be completed by November of 2020.
- The city is working on installing solar panels at 8 City sites with 5 more planned.
- There has been no progress on the Westboro rail yards.
Brags
- Bill Secord said there was an error last week in Currants, something about him giving the wrong amounts for weight lifting. He also read a quote about nose hairs from the book we are giving to the library this week.
- Ron Bedell said that he missed the meetings in June and July due to his being at the RI Convention in Hamburg and going on a cruise for 21 days from Barcelona to Rome, Athens, and the Greek Isles etc. This past two weeks he was on a Friendship Exchange to Calgary. He also donated to the Lebanon Charities Account because he has a birthday.
- Bob Gasser noted that when he was in New Jersey the secretary forgot the combination to their safe. He caller a safe-cracker he knew and got it opened. He also got something from another criminal who said it “fell off a truck.” He was told not to worry about it because birds never s_ _ _ where they nest
Announcements
- We are not doing the Mascoma River cleanup this year but, the Mascoma River Advisory Board is on Saturday, August 3rd. They will meet at Riverside Park. Mascoma River LAC
- Hank Clarke reminded everyone that the next Listen Dinner is coming up on August 13. We would like more members to participate in this very rewarding service project. If you haven’t signed up for any of the remaining dates for this year, please enter your name in the Doodle at this link: https://doodle.com/poll/tycgvnmcguabcww7.
- Last weeks newsletter indicated that Marilyn Bedell agreed to serve as Treasurer...not the case..that is still Bill Babineau's job
. Marilyn agreed to serve as club secretary.
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The North Conway Rotary Club is doing a Hunger Project on September 14th and could use our help.
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The board decided to have more of a social media presence so Liss set up both a Twitter and Instagram account. So far we have had quite a few hits.
We have a booth at the Farmers Market from now until Brew Fest. It will be an opportunity for us to showcase Rotary in Lebanon and to promote the Brew Fest. Farmers Markets are on Thursdays from 4:00 p.m. to approx. 7 p.m. Two to three Rotarians are needed each market. See Don MacMeekin to Sign Up.
Posters and tickets for Brew Fest are available. See Marion or Suellen if you have places you can hang them.
Polio Cases Surge in Pakistan and Afghanistan
False rumors that children are fainting or dying have led parents to turn away vaccinators, threatening the campaign to eradicate the disease.
The global drive to eliminate polio, which has gone on for 31 years and consumed over $16 billion, has been set back again by a surge of new cases in Pakistan and Afghanistan. As of July 10, there were a total of 42 polio paralysis cases in two countries. They comprise a single large outbreak, because most cases are in the tribal areas along the border, where local people easily cross back and forth. Pakistan had 32 of the cases, compared to only three by the same date last year, and the situation is expected to get worse because hot summer weather favors the virus. There were only 12 cases in the country in 2018 and eight in 2017.
For each paralyzed victim — usually a child below age 5 — there are about 200 others who are infected and shedding the virus in their stool, the World Health Organization estimates. About 20,000 children are born each day in Pakistan. In cities with open sewers, and where other pathogens may attach to the same intestinal receptors that the vaccine does, it can take many doses to fully immunize a child.
Last year’s hotly contested national elections temporarily threw the program off track as local officials were replaced, said Aziz Memon, head of Rotary International’s polio campaign in Pakistan. Cases have typically spiked during elections and moments of political turmoil, according to an article in The Diplomat, a current affairs magazine focused on Asia. Earlier this year, Pakistan announced that it would streamline its national vaccination drive in June in order to make the campaigns faster and less intrusive. Teams would try a friendlier approach and gather less data on the families they visited, the prime minister’s office said. But false rumors spread on social media saying the vaccine had triggered fainting spells — or even that it had killed dozens of children — and many families locked their doors to vaccinators or hid their children.
The issue has split families; The Times of London recently described a Pakistani man returning from work and divorcing his wife on the spot after finding their children’s fingers marked with the indelible ink used by polio vaccinators. Islamic law allows a man to end a marriage by merely saying “I divorce you” three times; he threw his wife and children out of the house.
As in other countries, like Italy, vaccines have become politicized, with opposition parties spreading anti-vaccine rumors. Babar bin Atta, the prime minister’s special assistant for polio eradication, said in a letter to The Dawn newspaper that population movements and increasing numbers of refusals were hurting the effort. The country, he said, would try to fix continuing problems with routine immunization, safe water and sanitation, and the high incidence of malnutrition. Eradicating polio from Pakistan “may take longer than we hoped for," he said.
The virus is threatening to spread to other countries. In May, a sewage sample in a bordering province in Iran tested positive for the strain of virus circulating in Pakistan; Iran had its last case of polio paralysis in 2001. A further threat to the eradication campaign is that a few countries — mostly in Africa — have been unable to eliminate some mutated strains of the polio viruses used in live vaccines. Those strains have reverted back into forms capable of causing paralysis.
In the last two years, there have been outbreaks of “vaccine-derived polio” in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and Somalia. Last week, a sewage sample in western China tested positive for a vaccine-derived polio strain, meaning the virus must be circulating there although no cases of paralysis caused by it have yet been detected. Xinjiang, the province where it was found, borders on both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Historically, such outbreaks have always been eliminated by the use of injectable killed vaccines, which cannot mutate, and live vaccines that protect against the mutated strains. But the outbreaks in some countries have gone on for many months.
