The City of No

[Jefferson23]

Fremont, Nebraska, has voted to keep its anti-immigration ordinance — at a possible cost of millions

February 14, 2014
By Ted Genoways

Tensions in a long-running debate over immigration threatened to boil over in Fremont, Nebraska, on Tuesday, as voters went to the polls for a special election that would decide whether the city repealed key portions of its controversial Ordinance 5165, which requires renters to prove their citizenship in order to acquire occupancy licenses, and makes it a crime for landlords to rent to undocumented immigrants.

Poll workers at the Precinct 3C voting station — which had been relocated to the frozen-foods section of Brady’s Meats & Foods just before the election because it was the only wheelchair-accessible building on Fremont’s poor south side — told me they had been forced to ask several people to leave. One woman, upon discovering that she was disqualified from voting because her home was technically outside city limits, pointed at Hispanic voters waiting to cast ballots and demanded to know, “Why do they get to vote, and I don’t?”

But by the time the polls were set to close, the wind had picked up outside and temperatures plummeted, cooling tempers and reducing the flow of voters to a trickle. Bryan Lopez, who guts cattle on the kill floor at Cargill Meat Solutions in nearby Schuyler, filled out his ballot at a table next to refrigerator cases filled with ice cream, then dropped the form into the locked box. “I voted ‘Yes,’ ” he told me, but he wasn’t optimistic that a majority would join him in voting to strike down the ordinance. Of those intent on keeping it, he said, “I hope they’re making an educated decision, instead of just being on the bandwagon.”

His worry echoed concerns raised by ordinance opponents, who have long argued that anti-immigration fervor led Fremont voters to approve a measure that does considerable financial damage to the city and addresses none of its underlying problems. Before the 2010 ballot measure that approved the ordinance, many people didn’t know that the Hormel Foods plant, which attracts undocumented workers to the Fremont area, and the Regency II trailer park, where many of those workers live, both fall outside the city limits and would therefore be exempt from the employment and housing provisions in the ordinance. Nor did people know that the city would have to lay off employees and raise taxes to build a $1.5 million legal-defense fund.

http://harpers.org/blog/2014/02/the-city-of-no/

[Spitfire of ATJ]

1. Gotz to do sompten' 'bout all dem big busted Swedish women flockin' into town.

[pangaia]

2. "Cargill Meat Solutions"

" CARGILL MEAT......SOLUTIONS? "

meat... SOLUTIONS

SOLUTIONS did they say??


I didn't know meat had a problem..