WEDNESDAY December 18, 2013
Shop With A Cop Page A3 Butler, Auburn planning charity events
Still Perfect Page B1 Unbeaten Garrett girls roll
Weather Sun and clouds today. High 30. Low 25. Chance of rain Thursday. High 40. Page A6
GOOD MORNING Fed considered likely to keep up stimulus WASHINGTON (AP) — Is this week when the Federal Reserve finally slows its aggressive stimulus for the economy? Or does it want to await more evidence of a consistently improving economy? It’s a close call. Yet most economists think the Fed will maintain the pace of its monthly bond purchases to keep long-term loan rates low to spur spending and growth. The decision carries high stakes for individuals, businesses and global financial markets. A pullback in the Fed’s bond buying would likely send long-term rates up and stock and bond prices down. Many analysts think the Fed will signal that it expects to slow the pace of its bond purchases from $85 billion a month, perhaps early next year, if the economy strengthens further. The Fed will announce its decision after its latest policy meeting ends Wednesday, just before Chairman Ben Bernanke holds his final quarterly news conference. Bernanke will step down Jan. 31 after eight years as chairman.
Survey says income back stunts economy WASHINGTON (AP) — The growing gap between the richest Americans and everyone else isn’t bad just for individuals. It’s hurting the U.S. economy. So says a majority of more than three dozen economists surveyed last week by The Associated Press. Their concerns tap into a debate that’s intensified as middle-class pay has stagnated while wealthier households have thrived. A key source of the economists’ concern: Higher pay and outsize stock market gains are flowing mainly to affluent Americans. Yet these households spend less of their money than do low- and middle-income consumers who make up most of the population but whose pay is barely rising.
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Classifieds.................................B7-B8 Life..................................................... A5 Obituaries......................................... A4 Opinion .............................................B4 Sports.........................................B1-B3 Weather............................................ A6 TV/Comics .......................................B6 Vol. 101 No. 347
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MetalX offered tax incentive Would occupy vacant Alcoa site BY AARON ORGAN aorgan@kpcmedia.com
AUBURN — The Auburn Common Council on Tuesday took first steps toward welcoming a second operation by metal recycler MetalX into the city, approving a tax phase-in plan on first reading. The council voted 6-1 in favor of a six-year tax phase-in for real estate improvements valued at $1 million and a five-year tax
phase-in for new machinery or manufacturing equipment valued at $7.7 million. Waterloo-based MetalX, which opened its first facility on Waterloo’s west edge in 2012, plans to launch an Auburn operation in the vacant Alcoa plant on Oren Drive, west of South Grandstaff Drive. MetalX president Danny Rifkin told the council the new operation
will be a consolidated metal recycling facility that will run three processes: metal extraction, wire reclamation and nonferrous metal recycling. Rifkin said he expects the facility will recycle 100 million pounds of scrap metal annually. Over a three-year period, the facility will employ 57 full-time workers with a payroll of $2.5 million, Rifkin said. “We’re glad you’re willing to locate here,” Mayor Norm Yoder told Rifkin and several represen-
tatives who attended Tuesday’s meeting. But the reading wasn’t entirely smooth. Councilman Mike Walter, arguing that the city’s tax abatement program does not include ways to recover lost taxes from noncompliant companies, said he wanted to vote for the tax phase-in, but only if it included stricter standards for compliance. Walter introduced an amendment defining a promised
SEE METALX, PAGE A6
Budget bill goes forward Avoids Senate’s filibuster threat
SUE CARPENTER
The Marvin Hall Recycling Center is marking its 25th anniversary this month. From left are
volunteers Herb Kleeman, Bill Norris, Chuck Lewis and Ed Utermark.
Recycling center marks 25 years BY SUE CARPENTER scarpenter@kpcmedia.com
GARRETT — A handwritten note on the wall marks Dec. 10, 1988, as opening day at the Garrett Recycling Center. Twenty-five years later, volunteers continue to greet motorists dropping off stacks of newspapers and magazines, buckets of plastic containers and used motor oil at the 150-by-35-foot concrete block building on North Cowen Street. Garrett’s recycling center is the only drive-through facility in the state, according to former Mayor Herb Kleeman, one of a handful of volunteers at the facility. Kleeman and Chuck Lewis are two of the original volunteers from 1988 who remain active at the center. New recycling programs have been added this year to encourage recycling in the city, including bins on the north side of the facility through the Northeast Solid Waste Management District and optional resident curbside recycling through Republic Services. These recycling opportunities have dropped the activity at the center by some 60 percent, according to Kleeman. The 24/7 bins and the fact that items placed in them no longer need to be sorted have contributed to the slump in customers, he said. Renamed after a longtime volunteer a few years ago, the
SUE CARPENTER
Volunteer Ed Utermark sorts plastics that have been delivered to the recycling center in Garrett.
Marvin Hall Recycling Center is open Wednesday evenings, Friday afternoons, and Saturday mornings year-round. Garrett held its first Recycling Day 25 years ago, when the notion of recycling on a large scale was in its infancy. The event was held at the city’s street barn on East Quincy Street. Mayor Charles Davis and volunteer George Talley pushed for the idea, according to
Kleeman. It was one of the first such events in the state. A committee comprised of George Talley, Norb Deuitch, John Hutton, Norm Best, Bruce Johnson, Charlie Simcox, Bob Bloom, Bill Dembickie, Gene Heckman, Charles “Cork” Martin, Marv Hall and Gene Graham joined Davis in making plans for the big day. SEE RECYCLING, PAGE A6
WASHINGTON (AP) — A bipartisan budget bill that would ease some but not all of painful budget cuts that would otherwise slam the Pentagon and domestic agencies passed a pivotal test in the Senate on Tuesday. The Senate advanced the measure over a filibuster threshold on a 67-33 vote that ensures the measure will pass the Democratic-led chamber no later than Wednesday and head to the White House to be signed into law. Top Senate Republicans opposed the bill but didn’t try to engineer its defeat. It won sweeping GOP support in the House in a vote last week. The measure would ease some of the harshest cuts to agency budgets required under automatic spending curbs commonly known as sequestration. It would replace $45 billion in scheduled cuts for the 2014 budget year already underway, lifting agency budgets to a little more than $1 trillion, and it also would essentially freeze spending at those levels for 2015. It substitutes other spending cuts and new fees to replace the automatic cuts and devotes a modest $23 billion to reducing the deficit over the coming decade. It would also stabilize a broken budget process after a partial government shutdown in October that inflicted political harm upon Republicans. The GOP has since rebounded because of the much-criticized roll-out of Obama’s health care law and the party wishes to keep the focus on that topic rather than Washington political brinksmanship. “This bipartisan bill takes the first steps toward rebuilding our broken budget process. And hopefully, toward rebuilding our broken Congress,” said Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray, D-Wash., who negotiated the measure with House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., his party’s vice presidential nominee last year. “We’ve spent far too long here scrambling to fix artificial crises instead of working together to solve the big problems we all know we need to address.” Twelve Republicans voted with Democrats to advance the measure over a 60-vote filibuster threshold demanded by GOP leaders. SEE BUDGET, PAGE A6
Snowden: NSA’s indiscriminate spying ‘collapsing’ RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden wrote in a lengthy “open letter to the people of Brazil” that he’s been inspired by the global debate ignited by his release of thousands of National Security Agency documents, and that the NSA’s culture of indiscriminate global espionage “is collapsing.” In the letter, Snowden commended the Brazilian government for its strong stand against U.S. spying. He wrote that he’d be willing to help the South American nation
investigate NSA spying on its soil, but could not fully participate in doing so without being granted political asylum, because the U.S. “government will continue to interfere with my ability to speak.” Revelations about the NSA’s spy programs were first published in the Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers in June, based on some of the thousands of documents Snowden handed over to the Brazil-based American journalist Glenn Greenwald and his reporting partner Laura Poitras, a U.S. filmmaker.
The documents revealed that Brazil is the top NSA target in Latin America, in spying that has included the monitoring of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s cellphone and hacking into the internal network of state-run oil company Petrobras. The revelations enraged Rousseff, who in October canceled an official visit to Washington that was to include a state dinner. She’s also pushing the United Nations to give citizens more protections against spying. In his letter, Snowden dismissed U.S. explanations to the
Brazilian government and others that the bulk metadata gathered on billions of emails and calls was more “data collection” than surveillance. “There is a huge difference between legal programs, legitimate spying … and these programs of dragnet mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye and save copies forever,” he wrote. “These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.”