Local restaurant closes, shop opens

Published: Thursday, September 2, 2010

Updated: Thursday, September 2, 2010 01:09

Local restaurant Il Spazio has closed its doors for good.

Owner Steve Collins said he closed the restaurant July 1, planning to reopen in August, because July is usually slow and he wanted to clean throughout the month.

"After two weeks of not being down there, I decided to close for good," Collins said.

Collins said the commitment required to run a full-time restaurant was taking time away from his other businesses, such as the Washington Street Java Co.

"I didn't want to be married to the restaurant," Collins said. "If [Il Spazio] was the only thing I had, we'd still be open."

Collins said he is not sure if the next lease-owner of the building will continue Il Spazio or will start a different business.

Collins said he took over Il Spazio in January 2009, but he was not making much profit from the business due to the sagging economy

He said owning a small business in today's economy is difficult.

"It's tough," Collins said. "Expenses are up and people just don't have … as much to spend anymore. For a person or a family to ratchet their budget down, they have to cut things."

Collins said he thinks the annual arrival of students at Truman and A.T. Still in the fall will help other local businesses to stay afloat.

"Students are a big plus for Kirksville and for Kirksville businesses," Collins said.

Sandra Williams, executive director of the Kirksville Chamber of Commerce, said students are very important to local businesses, but she has not observed more businesses opening and closing during summers in comparison to the rest of the year.

"I think we've probably seen as many new businesses as we have closing businesses," Williams said.

Several businesses have opened since the spring semester, including Sweet Expressions Coffee House, Near & Far Downtown Grocery Store and the ticket office for Cape Air, the new airline at Kirksville Regional Airport.

Williams said Kirksville Regional Economic Development, Inc. which was formed to attract new businesses to the city in order to create jobs, does not have a hand in small businesses. Rather, it recruits industry and big business. She said K-REDI's work is separate from small business recruitment because industries have specific needs and are looking for certain features that Kirksville might or might not have.

"If we think something didn't come to town, we think that it's [K-REDI's] fault, but we have to have what [big businesses] are needing," Williams said.

Sweet Expressions owner Sarah Mitchell said her coffee shop opened more than two months ago. She and her mother, both Kirksville residents, own the store together. She said business has been strong despite the challenges of a sluggish economy.

"There are difficulties," Mitchell said. "But you adapt your menu [prices]."

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Immigration bill meets opposition

"The Equal Protection Clause in the 14th amendment guarantees equal protection of law to any person within the state's jurisdiction, not specifically legal citizens."
Actually, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment guarantees, according to Supreme Court jurisprudence, equal protection of the law for people similarly situated. The US and state tax codes are a case in point; hugely different tax burdens based on income, source of income, deductions, etc., etc. If the Constitution really did require what is claimed above, once someone was able to get to the US, they would be no different than a US citizen as far as the law was concerned. That clearly is not the case, nor should it be!
In Plyler v. Doe, one of the rationals for this wrongly held decisions was that the Court, found, "... while the "exclusion of all undocumented children from the public schools in Texas would eventually result in economies at some level," ... funding from both the State and Federal Governments was based primarily on the number of children enrolled. In net effect, then, barring undocumented children from the schools would save money, but it would "not necessarily" improve "the quality of education. The court further observed that the impact of {the Texas law} was borne primarily by a very small subclass of illegal aliens."
Assuming the Court was correct in 1982, which I do not, that the cost to taxpayers was negligible and the numbers of illegal alien children in K12 school was very small and their impact on the quality of education had little or no consequence, it's clearly not correct today. The number of children is huge, the costs in dollars is astronomical and the negative impact on the quality of education for the children of American citizens is likewise huge.
The purpose of these laws, in part, is to gather irrefutable evidence of the terrible consequences to the American people and their children of the wrongly held Plyler v. Doe decision so that it maybe overturned. Of course the amnesty open borders crowd will fight tooth and nail to block any and all efforts to quantify the extent, costs, and all other consequences of illegal aliens and their children in our country.
Make no mistake, massive immigration, legal and illegal, is not a partisan political issue. Both the Democratic and Republican parties not only support it but have passed the laws to effectuate it. They both talk about it from the perspective of their special interests, but neither has or will do anything to stop it until their election to office is sufficiently threatened.
That is why the voters of this country must make it clear that their vote first and foremost is conditioned on the removal of all illegal aliens and the drastic reduction of legal immigration.

posted by: Paul Cartier