If you haven’t heard my rant about how your federal tax dollars are being spent on “community” gardens for refugees see my most recent post on the topic here.
It is one thing if some truly charitable organization wants to help refugees grow fresh food, it is another for the US taxpayer to be supporting such efforts.
Here is the latest news from Burmese over-loaded Ft. Wayne, Indiana, headline (hat tip to an Indiana informant): ‘No more gardens for Burmese at Fort Wayne apartment complex’ in the News-Sentinel:
Burmese residents living in Autumn Woods, 1004 Fayette Drive, will no longer be able to grow their own vegetables behind their apartments.
Due to a large number of citations from the city in 2012 to the management company, residents were told no more gardens were allowed and their plots were removed last fall.
Current management at Autumn Woods was asked to comment but said it was not at liberty to do so at this time.
According to Cindy Joyner, of Fort Wayne Neighborhood Code, a large portion of the gardens were built in ditches, which is against city code, because it can block water flow. The department also found pieces of indoor furniture, which had been re-purposed for use in the gardens, which also is against city code. There was a lot of debris including animal cages that were also found in the ditch, another code violation.
“It was the amount of debris that really drove the citations,” said John Urbahns, director of Fort Wayne’s Community Development department.
Urbahns said the city has these codes in place to protect the values of the adjoining property.
John Perlich, city spokesman, said the city took a closer look at Autumn Woods after some concerns about the condition of the property had been raised in the community.
Some of the items that were removed from the complex were small swimming pools that had been donated to the residents through a program at the Catherine Kasper Place to be used as container gardens.
“Some of these were removed because they were not being used as functioning garden spaces; they had been left to deteriorate,” Joyner said.
It is not clear to me whether this Autumn Woods failed project received federal grants, but other Burmese gardens did as we see here at the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program (be sure to see quote from Michelle Obama–a model for the Nation, for the World!) Go there and note that Holly Chaille, quoted in this News-Sentinel story, did get $75,000 of your tax dollars for her project(s).
Of course it would never be mentioned in a mainstream media piece but there has been some information leak out that the failed gardeners might be from a certain religious persuasion. Ft. Wayne has “welcomed” both Burmese Christians and Burmese Muslims, a sure-fire way to build tension in a community.
Related: I had been meaning to post on the State Department visit to Ft. Wayne, here, last month but didn’t get to it. Clearly everything is not copacetic in Ft. Wayne or the head guy for admissions, Lawrence Bartlett, wouldn’t be visiting in an obvious effort to smooth feathers and repair damage. The State Department needs to hang on to every “welcoming” city they can get.
Here is our entire archive on problems in Ft. Wayne going back to our earliest posts in the summer of 2007 when we discovered the problem that the Allen County health department was having treating all the TB cases. The Ft. Wayne garden controversy is explained in a guest post here in 2010.