FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
State Rep Jennifer Fidler - Jeff Poor Show - Monday 7-08-24
All right, let's take it on to have some muscle shells through your cateons. Mmm, burling half. Ooh, my girlfriend! Right above the Spanish fort into Mobile, my hometown, Mr. Teen. Welcome back to the Jet Force show with a big talk with 065. Thanks for staying with us on this Monday morning. Text lighting would be a touch of the program. Two, five, one, three, four, three, zero, one, zero, six. That's how you get in touch with the show. Silly Cup, Will Ainsworth, about an hour from now. Steve Livingston, the majority leader in the Alabama Senate. And Speaker of the House, Nathaniel Ledbetter, all coming up on the program over the next, let's say, two and a half hours. So stick around in the meantime. Joining us now, we do this every other Monday. My state representative here in Ballway County. State Representative Jennifer Fiddler is with us. Representative, good morning, are you? I'm doing great. How are you doing, Jeff? Do it well, do it well. Thanks for making time for us. Thanks for coming by. Well, how you been? It could be a couple of weeks, but everything's been OK. Yeah, good. We celebrated the fourth. I always enjoy Mr. Renfro's fireworks down on Fish River. And so, although for many years, we were there at the Fair Hope Pier, celebrating there on that side of the bay. But this year, we were on Fish River and got to attend the parade down in Magnolia Springs. They have the biggest little parade over here, anywhere. So patriotic. Got to see a lot of horses that were all painted up in red, white, and blue. Got to see a lot of tractors. Had flags all over them, about 70 plus entries and a little town of Magnolia Springs. And I always end up at the fire department with hot dogs for everybody and a cold slice of watermelon served up by the mayor of Magnolia Springs. Sounds a small town on Maricopa right there. Well, let's get right into it. Let's start here. And you and I are talking off here about this. You've got the shoreline bill and kind of figuring the logistics of that out. But wanting to give you input. But it was kind of a carryover from Representative Faust. And now here we are. Where are we with that? The shoreline bill, we call it the Faust Living Shoreline Bill in honor of Joe Faust who worked diligently trying to get this bill passed. It is something for every landowner who lives along the coast and that has to do something to manage their eroding shoreline. It encourages natural living shorelines which are made with rock or grasses or a way to encourage the sediment to build up instead of erode away your neighbor's property. So we encourage a natural living shoreline installation versus a bulkhead installation. So the bill cuts permit fees in half by the Department of Natural Resource Conservation Service. And in this process, I worked with Alabama Department of Environmental Management as well. And as we worked out, and this is, I want to have a call for the people, the constituents out there that may have input. If you have input in this, please reach out to me or my office. We, Alabama Department of Environmental Management has a permit, a general permit that we actually have to apply for when you're installing any type of shoreline installation. So ADM has these different criteria for the shoreline installation and they're modifying that permit. And so that we want to make it easier and less expensive for the people to install a natural living shoreline. So those of you who have been through this process, you know more than I do, probably as much as some of our counterparts in Montgomery. And I'd like to hear from you, we want to try to modify that permit. ADM really wants to work on it, has given me their promise that they will modify it and will help our coastal Alabama landowners in doing these types of installations, a little bit less expensive, trying to encourage natural living shorelines and doing them the right way, doing these installs the correct way so that we can build up our shorelines and not create any more erosion with bulkheads. I hope that makes sense, but if you guys out there that have experience in that and have knowledge about how to make that permit less cumbersome and that it would be less expensive that we could have several techniques that fall under the general permit, please reach out to me or my office, 990-4615 is my office number. So I kind of understand this, it makes more sense in combating erosion if you just let the shoreline build up like a wall or whatever at the shoreline, that people do that for time to time, you see it on their property and you're trying to discourage them from doing that. And in some instances, you're going to have to put in a bulkhead, I mean, I may just do. But a lot of instances you can put in a different type of wall, like a vertical wall that comes out from the shoreline, that's a small, not very long wall, but when you do that, it can catch the sediment as the water leaves out and the tide comes back in and the sediment settles down. And you can also create berms and grasses and that is just a cleaner environment for our water, for grasses and sea life, and that sort of thing to flourish. And so that is what we want to encourage. And in some instances, no, we're going to have to put a bulkhead up, I mean, there's just no other means of protecting your property. But we want to encourage these natural living shorelines where we can, and ADM has offered to make it easier for landowners to get a permit, less expensive if we have some general guidelines in that general permit. And so they're modifying that permit, and that's, they promised me whenever we were working on this bill that if we didn't mess with the fees, that they would help figure out how to make this permit easier for our landowners along the coast to get a permit, less expensive, try to do it the right way. So I am, I'm going to be working on that. So if you could call the office, 990-4615, let me know your ideas. I do want to kind of meet, institute like a way to meet with ADM so that we can start putting those ideas together and help, you know, for just help our coastal landowners with that. And the bill signing with the governor is Thursday at two o'clock in Montgomery. And it's just a ceremonial bill signing, just commemorating. We hope to have all the fouls up and celebrate in honor, representative fouls for all the work that he's done. Representative Chip Brown was instrumental in moving this last year, did a lot of work on modifying the bill and getting it to a spot, you know, where we could have worked with several different agencies, got it out of the house, didn't get taken up in the Senate. And then of course, Senator Chris Elliott did take it up in the Senate this year, sponsored it and was able to pass it a couple of weeks before session ended. Joe, a bi-state representative, Jennifer Fiddler here on the program representative listen to us, say that we got a chance to go by the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. We're talking about that a lot on this program, but it's one of these things. I guess a lot of people around the state probably outside of this local listing audience don't aren't aware of. The Dauphin Island Sea Lab, if you get you guys over here, you have not been there, you need to go. It is a beautiful island, much different than Orange Beach and Gulf Shores, much more laid back, much more casual. It's say the aquarium itself is a great exhibition of what's in our, the Gulf, the sea life that's in the Gulf. It's small. It's a beautiful day after noon and just really learn a lot. We had a, we always have a network update, it is a coastal update, our Director of Natural Resource Conservation Service Director Chris Blankenship comes down. We get a report from the Port of Mobile Director and we, and Beth lines actually lines that whole thing up over there. But we get to go out, we get to see the, the pilot ships, the pilots that actually go out and get our ships from every ship that comes into the Port of Mobile has to be piloted in. So these bar pilots are out there and we have an office for them and I've got a couple constituents that are bar pilots and it was good to meet and talk with them over there. But they are just pilot, those ships out in the Gulf of Mexico, they're out there waiting, I think, you know, some of you may have seen them and they're out just waiting on our bar pilots to pilot them in and make sure they have a safe entry into our harbor. So we get to see that, we, all our representatives are invited down to get this coastal update. It's just a real good representation of what we've got going on on Dolphin Island and I encourage anybody that hasn't been over there in a while, you'll go visit it. So just to lay back atmosphere, it's a beautiful beaches. You can make it over to Dolphin Island a whole lot, I mean either, I mean a few times a year, but it's always been on like the list of things to do but I never get over there at the right time to go see the sea lab. Yeah, and then we have a ferry that you can take over, it saves you a lot of time if you're traveling from Fort Morgan to Dolphin Island. The Alabama Department of Transportation actually is our group that moves people back and forth from the ferry. We got to do that last year on our joint transportation committee, headed up by Representative Marche Wilcox. She organized a trip, you know, back and forth from Dolphin Island to Fort Morgan. Got to do that, got to hear from Al Dot and how they maneuver that. And we have two ferries that I know of in the state of Alabama, one in Gee's Bend. That's right, yeah, to get the Wilcox County, the way they drew the Wilcox County line is to keep this goes back to segregation and Jim Crow, but they kept black folks eluded Gee's Bend from voting because they had to make like a long trek all the way around to Camden, the county seat in Wilcox County from getting from Gee's Bend to Camden so they could vote. Now, things have changed since then, but they put money aside and they put that ferry in at Gee's Bend. Have you been on it? I did, I was able to do that again with Representative Wilcox's roadshow she did last year and was able to, it's an electric ferry. And we went up the river again, the Alabama Department of Transportation is the entity that moves people back and forth and runs the ferry there. It's quiet, it makes no noise, but it's, yeah, it's a way to connect the folks. Because that area has a very rich history. Yeah, the quilts that they do there are the like, the staple of why you would go to Gee's Bend, but it's really, I mean, I don't know, Wilcox County is a place of very many fascinations if you ever get to spend a lot of time there, sort of governors from Joe Bonner at the University of South Alabama, just be our congressman here, it's from Camden, Jeff Sessions, right? Therefore, again, Maro County is from Wilcox County, but that is, I took the ferry going the other way, I suppose, from Camden over to Gee's Bend and then on up from there. But yeah, you're right, we got two ferries in this state and a lot of people don't know about the Gee's Bend ferry. Yeah, and then who, you know, what state entity actually runs it? So the Alabama Department of Transportation has the, you know, I think you mentioned some of the gas tax money, you know, we, we take off so many millions off that gas at the first revenue coming in every year off the gas tax money and then we actually use that to dig out and widen the ship channel and what we know as a port of mobile, but it's actually Alabama's port and it has increased our revenue stream over there and has been a really great benefit for the state and the revenues coming in. Yeah, that was one of the deals. When they passed rebuild Alabama in 2019 to widen the ship channel, the dredged the channels there, Shelby put a bunch of money aside and the state had come up with the matching and the matching came out of the rebuild Alabama. Now there's a lawsuit saying that that wasn't constitutional because when you gas tax money must be used for roads and bridges and can't be used, but they made some kind of legal maneuver to suggest that it was actually a buy away from, I guess, wherever the ship channel begins into the port of mobile and anyway, I don't know if it came with that. Tom Frederick's up in North Alabama had that lawsuit, but yeah, I can say something. I did talk to one of the Supreme Court justices and he regarding this and he says it's plain in the Constitution. What are ways are a means of transportation that falls under and it is according to their interpretation. When they passed rebuild Alabama in 2019, I was on the air in Huntsville and people up there were really put off that you would take gas tax money and put it towards something like the port of mobile to widen that ship channel and it was a big deal to a lot of people up there, but you know, like you said, it is what it is now. Well, I mean, if the Constitution says it's modes of transportation or navigable waterways, then I mean, and that's how they interpret it. Let's get a quick break here. We've got Jennifer Fiddler, a state representative from my part of the world in Syria with us in the Para Bureau, a very back, as soon as the Jeff Moore showed up to talk 106.5. I'll fly a starship across the universe divide and when I reach the other side, I'll find a place to risk my spirit if I can. Welcome back to the Jeff Moore show that for talk 106.5. Nature is sticking around on this Monday morning, still with us, a state representative from Fiddler's Robbie Colocci's into the bureau today, right? Figs. I was like, I don't even know. We had fig trees in Bali County. She's like, you probably got one in here. You are. Well, you know, fig trees are used to be a staple in our area. And so on the farm, we have a huge picture. It's almost like if you don't pick it every day or every other day, you can't maintain it. You know, the birds come or the bees come. And so we have been picking figs on the farm. And so just to try to do something with these, I've decided I was going to make my grandmother's colocci's. And I'm half check, my daddy's check. This silver hill's got a lot of Czechoslovakian immigrants. And so I grew up eating these colocci's until she passed away in the 80's, but she would always have them. It's a special event just we'd always go over, have these colocci's. And it's just like a pastry with a fruit or preserved filling in the middle. So I did the figs, did the crumble on top. And yeah. So I had Jeff. Thank you for trying them out. You have to be getting any pig, right? That's right. A couple of other things before we had to part ways, you got, you're on the ag advisory board real quick. I am on the United Bank Ag advisory board. I want to give everybody just a little update of what I heard lumber. I heard from the four street association. And they are saying that we do have 10 lumber, just the large inventory and all our warehouses. And right now that is at an all time low, believe it or not, you know, with us the last couple of years, and you're not seeing it in the stores, the prices go down, but they are saying that they are flooded with lumber right now, inventory is very, very high. Cattle prices are at all time high, so they've been high for the last year, the foreseeable future they're going to stay high. Good for our cattle farmers out there that if you want to sell, this is a good time to sell. One of the other issues that came up, and it's one that I am concerned about, and that's are farmland being, you know, you gobbled up prime agricultural farmland, gobbled up by a lot of development is the best place to put homes, buildings, it's cleared, it's ready to go and if it's draining well, then, you know, that's a good spot to put your, your new. That's the story of Baltimore County right now. We are seeing it in Baldwin County, but we're also seeing it in Escambia County and according to the farmers, you know, on that ag advisory board, I heard it a couple of times, it's something that I've been very concerned about, Homeland Security, I'm on that committee at the state level, and it to me, it's food security, it's national security, it's the local security. Well, isn't it this, though, representative, that it's just, it's hard to be a farmer. I saw the David Sessions about this, and he's just like, it's not worth it. It's a gamble. Why not sell off and go cash out and get your, you know, sell it to build the subdivision. I think there's like five country songs out right now talking about this phenomenon and people just sell it off farmland to go, go to develop or build subdivisions. I mean, that's like what's going on in America. Well, logically, you know, and these farmers, they're, you know, they're hardcore. They think about that and yeah, they're losing it and it's hard for these tractors to get up and down the roads. This is clean. We have part ways, but we'll pick this conversation up again and we'll talk about it in a couple weeks. We'll have it on the agenda. We're going to get a break here. We'll be right back. This is Jeff Moore, show with a food talk from '65. Have a great morning. Thank you. Bye.