Out of Control

Traffic is getting so bad that chief executive officers are coming to regard congestion as an obstacle to doing business.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group released results last week from a December-January survey of 107 area CEOs on the regional business climate.

Asked to pick the top five "business challenges" in Silicon Valley, high housing costs topped the list — just like last year — with 88 percent of the vote.

Traffic shot to second place, up from ninth the year before.

Mike Langberg column here.

SVLG survey here.

Table 4 lists traffic congestion as the second biggest business challenge, ahead of perennial business headaches like regulations, health care costs, and taxes.

Back to Langberg:

[M]ass transit is a poor alternative in the valley, where offices are spread across the landscape. Perhaps the best hope is the very thing Silicon Valley is good at: technology.

High-speed Internet access and inexpensive computers are making it practical for more people to work at home, at least part of the time.

Sun Microsystems is a leading example. Half the company's 31,000 employees worldwide participate in a program called iWork. They work at home or at company-owned drop-in centers.

Sun, based in Santa Clara, Calif., estimates it saves $69 million a year in the United States alone on real-estate costs. Sun says employees participating in iWork are happier and that they give 60 percent of their saved commute time back to the company.

For more on the business benefits of telecommuting, see p. 22 of my study, The Quiet Success: Telecommuting’s Impact on Transportation and Beyond.

In 1997, Donald Trump made headlines and 20/20 when he tried to take private homes and businesses for a limo staging area and parking lot for one of his Atlantic City casinos. The New Jersey Supreme Court told him to park on someone else's property, despite the support of the city. Now, the Institute for Justice reports Trump has just completed negotiations to voluntarily purchase one of the properties. Has The Donald turned over a new leaf?

Vincent and Clare Sabatini, owners of a small Italian restaurant, report they have completed negotiations to sell Trump their property. They are ready to retire. Clare Sabatini, 73, said, “The time is right. It’s right for us, and it’s right for Mr. Trump. We’re happy and they’re happy.”

This is more than just a happy ending scenario. It points to a critical element of economic development that is almost always ignored during eminent domain proceedings--with time, circumstances change. An unwilling seller today may become a willing seller tomorrow.

Too often, cities let themselves be bamboozled by big developers who convince them they need all the land now, as if their project were going to be built overnight, even though their own proposals anticipate a build out of 10, 15, or 20 years. With a little creativity and patience, the so-called "hold outs" can often become satisfied sellers tomorrow. With a little tact, sometimes small property owners can be incorporated into the development plan itself.

Unfortunately, elected officials too often take the easy way out--why negotiate when you can take the land by simply getting they city attorney to file a few papers?

If you want to read more about eminent domain and economic deveopment, check out the Reason Foundation policy study here. Our Amicus Brief filed in support of homeowners in Norwood, Ohio can be found here.

The Tax Foundation released their 3rd Annual State Business Tax Climate Index today:

The ten states with the most business-friendly tax systems this year are: Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Texas, Delaware, Montana and Oregon.

This ranking comes from the third edition of the Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index, by Foundation economist Curtis S. Dubay and Scott A. Hodge, President of the Tax Foundation. The study ranks the 50 states on how “business friendly” their tax systems are, providing a roadmap for state lawmakers concerned with keeping their states tax-competitive. [...]

“Every one of the best tax systems raises sufficient revenue without imposing at least one of the three major state taxes—sales taxes, personal income taxes and corporate income taxes,” said Dubay.

The ten states with the least hospitable business tax climates are: New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Ohio, Vermont, Maine, Kentucky, Nebraska, Iowa and Arkansas.

“States do not enact tax changes in a vacuum,” said Hodge. “Every tax change will affect a state’s competitive position relative to its neighbors, as well as globally.”

The press release is here, and the full report is here.

Goodbye conventional media? Not exactly.

Most of us still get our news from the likes of Elizabeth Vargas and Ron Burgundy.

Seventy-seven percent of U.S. adults watch local broadcast news, while 71 percent watch network news, compared to 18 percent who read a national newspaper.

A Harris Interactive poll of 2,985 U.S. adults also found 64 percent get their news several times a week or daily by going online, while 63 percent read a local daily newspaper. Fifty-four percent listen to radio news broadcasts, 37 percent listen to talk radio and 19 percent listen to satellite news programming.

Article here.

Articles like this one might give that impression.

As gas prices hit record highs during the third quarter of 2005 — reaching an unprecedented $3.05 in California on Sept. 9 — Americans jumped on public transit, 3.3 percent more than they did the year before, according to the American Public Transportation Association.

APTA’s report also found a decline — albeit a small one — in how much people used their cars during that period, reporting a 0.2 percent decrease in miles traveled and the amount of times Americans parked their cars.

Every year we hear about studies like this. This 2002 article from Brookings’ Anthony Downs looks at a different study from a few years back:

A new day has dawned in American travel: Transit is gaining sway over highway travel.

That's what some public transit advocates have been claiming, based on a Surface Transportation Policy Project report in December 2000 that showed public transit boardings rose 4.8 percent in 1999 while vehicle miles of driving rose only 2.1 percent. Then, after reporting last November that there were larger percentage increases in transit usage than highway travel in 2000 and 2001, STPP said, "No precedent exists for this massive shift in travel behavior."

A less partisan view shows these claims are exaggerated.

Downs gives two background facts:

First, a significant percentage of all public transit travel occurs in the New York City area and on its MTA, which accounts for 20 percent of all U.S. transit passenger miles and more than 27 percent of all unlinked passenger trips. So, although about 5 percent of all commuting is done by public transit, that fraction is only 2.2 percent outside New York.

Second, the absolute amount of total travel in private automobiles dwarfs public transit's totals: In 2000, transit provided about 46.6 billion miles of movement while passenger miles traveled in the same year on highways totaled about 4 trillion—2.5 trillion in cars and another 1.5 trillion in small trucks and SUVs. That's 86 times greater than passenger miles on transit. In fact, transit's share of all passenger miles traveled in the U.S. from 1985 through 2000 averaged only 1.26 percent.

Consequently, even very small percentage gains in highway travel involve vastly larger absolute increases in miles traveled than much larger percentage gains in transit travel. In 1999, a year about which STPP said that "growth in public transit exceeds growth in driving," total transit travel grew by about 1.7 billion passenger miles. But growth in car passenger miles was at least 51 billion miles and that in small private vehicles (excluding motorcycles and buses) was at least 80 billion miles. (These totals may be low because I adjusted the official data downward to reflect STPP's estimates of percentage gains.) Thus, the annual increases in highway passenger miles traveled in 1999 exceeded those in transit passenger miles by ratios of either 31 or 48 to 1. That hardly indicates that growth in transit was exceeding growth in driving.

True, transit usage has had a notable recent growth spurt. Between 1985 and 1995, transit usage declined in every year but 1989, falling overall from 8.6 billion trips to 7.8 billion, or by 10 percent. Then in 1996, transit usage began rising, reaching 9.3 billion trips in 2000—a gain of 20 percent over 1995. But driving travel was also increasing in that period. Although auto gains were smaller in percentage terms--11.9 percent--they were massively larger than transit gains in absolute terms: 425 billion passenger miles versus 9 billion. Thus, even during this period of transit's resurgence, 98 percent of the increase in total passenger miles traveled occurred on highways.

Transit advocates may hope that if transit continues to grow faster than highway travel in percentage terms, transit may eventually attain a much greater share of total passenger miles. But transit has two handicaps in this "race." It starts with a very low share—1.15 percent in 2000—and total passenger travel on highways is rising all the time.

A simple simulation model shows that if both types of travel start with their 2000 absolute levels, and transit usage increases 5.36 percent per year (its highest recent annual rate of gain) and highway travel gains only 1 percent per year, then the share of transit in total ground passenger miles would not reach 5 percent until 2036. Even if highway driving did not rise at all while transit did, transit would not reach 5 percent of all ground passenger miles until 2029. If transit usage rises at its actual compound annual growth rate from 1995 to 2000 (3.74 percent) and highway travel rises at its similar rate (2.27 percent), transit would not reach a 5 percent share until the next century.

Another bit of perspective on the ongoing transit revival: Telecommuters outnumber transit commuters in 27 of the top 50 metro areas, and that's with roughly zero public dollars going to telecommuting.

This book review from 1994 holds up well in our post-Kelo world:

The disputes about growth involve the issues of property rights, taxation, and government planning for public works such as transportation and water. But the growth issue opens a window on some of the larger and more ominous ailments of modern political economy, the nature of which is hinted at in the main title of Alan Altschuler and Jose Gómez-Ibáñez's recent study, Regulation for Revenue: The Political Economy of Land Use Exactions.

The phrase "regulation for revenue" refers to the recent but now widespread practice of imposing large "impact" fees, special assessments, and exactions on new residential and commercial real-estate development. Only about 10 percent of American localities imposed exactions before 1960, the authors note, while by the mid-'80s about 90 percent did. Regulation for Revenue is the most thorough survey to date of the surprisingly limited amount of economic literature that has been produced on this subject. And although the authors do not set out to be partisans on one side or another, they clearly recognize that crafting regulatory systems explicitly to produce revenue, as opposed to a traditional "compelling state interest" such as health and safety, represents "a dramatic power shift...from the owners of property to government officials."

The other notable feature of this book is its recognition that "relevant market signals are almost entirely absent" from most aspects of urban planning today. The discussion of the virtue of road pricing and other market-based policies shows how ideas once confined to the pages of REASON have become part of the mainstream discussion.
The use of impact fees and exactions--as high as $40,000 for a single family home and $30 per square foot for commercial development in California--soared in the '80s, ostensibly as a way to get around anti-tax sentiment and voter-imposed tax limits such as California's Proposition 13 or Massachusetts's Proposition 21/2.
…

For goo-goo ("good government") types, impact fees have the obvious attraction of being even more thoroughly hidden than their first cousin, the value-added tax. "They do not show up on anyone's tax bill," Altshuler and Gómez-Ibáñez write, "and while they are likely to drive up developer prices they remain imperceptible even to purchasers as a distinct cost item." Together with the enhanced regulatory regime to which impact fees are ineluctably linked, this new way of governing development has led to huge new opportunities at the local government level for socialist-minded reformers and has contributed to the bureaucratization of local government across the country.

Whole thing here.

Fore more examples of government greed, go here, here and here.

The inmates haven’t taken over the asylum in Minneapolis, at least not yet.

The city council there voted Friday to proceed with its original plan to select a private company to finance, own and operate the proposed citywide Wi-Fi network, in spite of a recommendation from the council’s Ways and Means committee that the council delay the contract and re-examine a $25-million taxpayer-funded, city-owned alternative.

Most council members feared (correctly) that any delay at this stage could be fatal for the entire project. The city has already completed an RFP process and narrowed the finalists to EarthLink and US Internet.

Still, the sudden activism from one-time muni wireless supporters must have given council members pause. No information yet as to how close the vote was.The Minneapolis Star-Tribune covers the story here.

The San Francisco TechConnect project faces similar protests from the Left. For a look at the new controversy over municipal wireless, click here.

As a former 718-er, this report caught my eye.

It’s from the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (Mental Hygiene?) and it examines diet and nutrition options in two relatively poor Brooklyn neighborhoods.

The report finds that bodegas are extremely common, much more common than supermarkets. Why does the Health Department care?

Compared to supermarkets, bodegas have higher prices, a narrower range of products, and fewer healthy food choices (e.g. about 28% of bodegas carry apples, oranges, and bananas, compared to 91% of supermarkets).

Related: Queens to WM: Stay Away

The City of Provo, Utah, will have to transfer $1 million from its utility reserve to cover shortfalls in the iProvo municipal fiber service, Salt Lake City’s Deseret Morning News reports. Although the project is ahead of schedule in terms of construction, it has only half the 10,000 subscribers its business plan had called for at this point.

The original breakeven point had been December 2005. It has now been reset for August 2007. City officials expect ongoing shortfalls into 2008 that may require additional transfers of up to $2 million.

We’ve heard this all before. Like Provo, most municipal broadband systems fail to achieve anywhere near their projected numbers and must turn to transfers, cross-subsidies or new loans. Most municipalities get so far behind, they can never dig out.

“The people paying their energy bills faithfully are now the ones paying for the iProvo shortfall,” said Councilman Steve Turley, who was assured by [Provo Energy Department Director Kevin] Garlick that the reserves would be replenished when iProvo breaks even.

iProvo is a city-owned fiber optic backbone and cable TV headend. The city sells bulk bandwidth to itself and to large users. Retail partners market voice, Internet and cable service to residences and small businesses.

That’s the theory, at least. The iProvo shortfall is primarily due to the disastrous performance of HomeNet, the only retail service partner to sign on with iProvo. After barely a year and no gain in customers, HomeNet in July 2005 abruptly closed up shop, leaving iProvo scrambling to find replacements. Veracity and MStar, two local ISPs stepped in. While iProvo’s numbers have been increasing steadily since then, they largely represent a migration of existing Veracity and MStar accounts onto the municipal backbone.

Until now, municipal proponents, including the American Public Power Association, have pointed to iProvo, which launched in mid-2004, as a successful model of municipal ownership. Provo mayor Lewis Billings has been a popular spokesman for the cause in policy circles and has endorsed municipal broadband programs in other cities, including Lafayette, where voters last year approved a $125 million municipal fiber-to-the-home system.

No, not here in the US...but in Jamaica!

"The Government must keep some land for strategic purposes, but as new chairman of NIBJ, I will suggest to the board that we need to sell the rest...we will invite the private entrepreneurs to buy excess land."

Another north Fulton County community has taken the first step toward cityhood. On Wednesday, the state House approved the measure for John’s Creek - the second new community to reach this step since Sandy Springs was incorporated in December...while privatizing most of their services too!

What's more interesting though is that a bill in the state Senate could also create two additional new cities in south Fulton calling for the creation of two cities south of Atlanta. One would be Chattahoochee Hill Country, the other, South Fulton City. That would be four new cities - while they all might not follow the Sandy Springs model of governance, it is an interesting dynamic that is forming in the Atlanta metro area....

Oh, but wait, its moved beyond Georgia into Orlando, Florida (ok, not exactly the same conditions and they're probably not related) but a movement to create East Orlando is afoot.

The City of London Corporation is all set to have Wi-Fi network in place covering the entire city (The square mile). The project is being undertaken by the corporation in partnership with a private Wi-Fi firm, The Cloud. It is expected to be implemented in full in the next few months.

The Cloud, which will install the hardware and equipment, will make use of street furniture like the lamp posts and street signs for the purpose.

The network will make the city Wi-Fi-enabled and workers as well as visitors within the square mile will be able to make use of wireless devices to access the internet on streets and in open spaces. The project will support high speed internet access, email, music and video downloads and voice over Wi-Fi services.

As the article notes, the City of London is much smaller than the area most of us think of as London. So the coverage area will be quite a bit smaller than most of the U.S. muni-wifi plans. Even so the London network plans to reach many people:

The system will facilitate connectivity to as many as 350,000 workers while on the move through their laptop or palmtop computers. Users can opt for business subscriptions or pay-as-you-go accounts.

Article here.

Thanks to Meredith for the link.

For more on muni wi-fi, go here.

BTW, speaking of Brits, have you seen Footballers Wives? Saucy!

We’re often so focused on what people drive we might overlook that their driving habits can make their cars more or less green. From a Chicago Tribune columnist:

As a telecommuter, I consume much less than my share of transportation energy. Even though I drive a big old man's car, I use less gasoline than those hybrid cars.

When they do drive, maybe telecommuters should also get those special perks given to hybrid car owners (kidding, kidding).

Chicago Trib article here.

"I want to be the innovative-oriented community," [Mayor Bill White] told the officials from about 70 Houston companies who had come to eat box lunches and hear how some area companies overcame employee concerns, soothed customer worries and taught managers how to work from afar.

Direct Energy Texas, for example, had to deal with the stigma attached to signing up for a "nine-80" shift (10 days of work crammed into nine workdays) or working from home.

Only 10 percent of the 220 employees who worked in what the company had identified as eligible jobs signed up for the program when it was launched, recalled Phil Tonge, Direct Energy's president.

"People were very worried," he said.

But Tonge knew employees wanted a compressed workweek or to telecommute because of their responses to a 2004 survey. They were frustrated with the time they spent in traffic getting to and from work, and with White's mobility campaign to Get Houston Moving, it was a perfect opportunity to put the two ideas together, he said.
So Tonge held a series of meetings to encourage employees to sign up. He emphasized it had his full support, and he put pressure on managers to sign on to the idea.

To make telecommuting easier, the company bought laptops for some workers and provided them for departments to share.

As a result, 65 percent of its eligible employees in Texas are participating, and the company is looking for ways to include more job classifications in its program.

Article here.

Another example of an organization warming to telecommuting here.

My most recent telecommuting article here.

The muni loonies in Minneapolis have succeeded where thousands of incumbent dollars and hundreds of hours of incumbent lobbying have failed. They’ve derailed a municipal wireless system just as it was getting set to award a contract.

Bowing to pressure from the misnamed Institute for Local Self-Reliance (Institute for Local Government Reliance is more appropriate), the Minneapolis City Council’s Ways and Means Committee voted to delay selection of a commercial wireless partner in order to reconsider whether the city itself should fund, operate and manage a citywide network. The motion is expected to go before the Council’s Committee of the Whole today.

ILSR is opposed to Minneapolis plan to contract with a commercial wireless service provider who would take responsibility for the estimated $25 million network in return for an end-user contract from the city as well as discounted access to city right-of-way. ILSR makes its case by claiming that Philadelphia is a municipal-owned system, when, in fact, it is not. EarthLink will own the network. Further clouding the issue, ILSR cites the example of Corpus Christi, Tex. While that city indeed plans to own its municipal wireless network, it is designed for city IT applications and will not support retail Internet access, as the Minneapolis and Philadelphia networks plan to.

Minneapolis has already gone through the lengthy RFP process, naming EarthLink and U.S. Internet, a Twin Cities-based service provider, as finalists. If ILSR gets its way, the project will likely return to square one.

As noted in earlier entries, the backlash from one-time supporters of muni broadband, just as they appear to have gained an upper hand at City Hall, demonstrates they are far more anti-business than pro-broadband. Indeed, in Minneapolis, their goal seems to be government-run broadband or no broadband at all.

Fascinating press release.

Irvine, CA February 22 2006

Joseph Vranich has been involved with rail service for 35 years, serving as an Amtrak public affairs spokesman, president of the High Speed Rail Association, and U.S. Senate appointee to the Amtrak Reform Council. End of the Line is his third book about rail service.

Petitioners in Maine have gathered enough signatures to put a Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) on the November ballot:

Supporters of a citizen petition known as the Taxpayer Bill of Rights learned today that the Office of Secretary of State has verified enough signatures of registered Maine voters (50,519) to put the measure before the voters in November.

Petition organizer Mary Adams of Garland said "This is great news for the people of Maine because they can now vote in November to create a friend called the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. The Taxpayer Bill of Rights puts money in taxpayersí pockets each year and gives them control over all future tax and fee increases."

Adams, who led the petition drive which successfully repealed the state property tax in l977, stated "There is nothing to fear and everything to look forward to under a Taxpayer Bill of Rights. No jobs will be lost or programs cut, because this spending limit allows government to grow at a reasonable rate of inflation plus population growth."

She pointed out that government at all levels can exceed the limit only if voters approve. Most of the money collected beyond the limit (80%) goes back to the taxpayers in some form of tax relief each year. The remaining portion (20%) is retained annually in a savings account to smooth out inevitable economic downturns. "At last, government will have to live on a budget like the rest of us."

Maine's not alone...the South Carolina Senate is currently considering a TABOR. Be sure to check out our TABOR update from last year's Annual Privatization Report for more info.

Houston Strategies blogger Tory Gattis has an excellent post on the relationship between New Urbanism and mobility. He makes a great point that it's a matter of scale:

I think New Urbanism needs to realize it is a great paradigm at the neighborhood level, but that those neighborhoods need to be linked together with a freeway and arterial network across a larger region if you want an integrated and cohesive metro economy. The pedestrian and the car operate at totally different scales (3mph vs. 30-60mph), and therefore the right form factors for each are different. You don't build a city around just the pedestrian or just the car, but for both. Getting militant about one over the other makes about as much sense as asking "should our country be built around the car or the airplane?" Well, the answer is both: the car for shorter distances, and the airplane for longer ones - and that means interstates and airports. The same logic applies at the scale of a city/metro-region: you need freeways for longer distances, arterials for medium distances, and narrow streets with sidewalks for very short distances (i.e. the pedestrian district/neighborhood). New Urbanism makes the very valid point that we've sort of forgotten about that last category over the last few decades - and we're now rediscovering it - but that doesn't invalidate the other two scales any more than they invalidated the pedestrian scale.

The value of mobility gets lost in a lot of the rhetoric. Mobility is generally defined as the ability to get from point A to an arbitrary point B in minimal time, but the real-world definition for cities is "I'm willing to travel up to X mins for Y activity - what are my options?" That might be 30 mins for work, 15 mins for a restaurant, or an hour for a museum, concert, or sporting event. Mobility means more job opportunities for citizens and potential employees for employers (which translates into upward career mobility and higher productivity as skills better match jobs). Mobility means me or my spouse can take that new job without uprooting my family and moving, which makes for stronger communities and stronger families. Mobility means retail shops and restaurants can draw on a larger pool of customers, therefore supporting more eclectic diversity. Mobility means more access to affordable housing within a reasonable commute. Mobility means I'm more likely to volunteer at a charity or nonprofit, or attend classes at a local college to work part-time towards a degree.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. And be sure to check out Reason's Mobility Project page for more info on our work to develop and implement a framework for removing congestion as an obstacle to mobility.

THE man hired by Bob Carr two years ago to oversee the state's development has been dumped. Professor Peter Newman, whose appointment as the NSW Sustainability Commissioner was announced to great fanfare in April 2004, received a call from the Planning Minister, Frank Sartor, on Thursday to say his services were no longer required.

Newman is regarded as one of the international founders of smart growth. Look what he’s doing next:

He plans to travel to the United States in June to speak to state governments about sustainability.

Lucky us.

Article here.

The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday on the Rapanos and Carabell wetlands cases, which challenge the Feds' overly expansive interpretation of the Clean Water Act. At the heart of the issue lies the question of whether the Fed's power to regulate "navigable waters" extends to wetlands and small streams. The broad interpretation of "wetland" has effectively allowed the Feds exercise significant power in the traditionally state and local domain of land use and development regulation. From the Washington Post:

As enacted in 1972, the landmark environmental legislation gave federal regulators the power to control the discharge of pollutants into "navigable waters." On the theory that what gets dumped upstream eventually winds up downstream, the government has interpreted that phrase to include not only large lakes and rivers, but also their smaller tributaries and wetlands near those tributaries.

The Bush administration, backed by environmental organizations and more than 30 state governments, says that any narrower interpretation would cripple the Clean Water Act. States alone could not do the job, the administration argues.

. . . .

But property owners, backed by homebuilders, developers, farmers, ranchers and some water districts from the arid West, say that view would federalize every drop of water in the country, effectively putting Washington in control of development miles away from any recognizably navigable waters.

One such property owner is John Rapanos of Michigan, who filled in 54 acres of wetlands, some of which were 20 miles from the nearest navigable water, without asking for a permit. Rapanos has been slapped with a $185,000 fine and three years' probation as a result. He also faces civil penalties.

His lawyer, M. Reed Hopper of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a property-rights organization, told the justices yesterday that "this is a case of agency overreaching," in which the federal government "had claimed jurisdiction over an entire watershed from the remotest trickle" on up.

To the layperson, this may sound like an arcane issue, but the outcome of the Court's rulings on these cases will have significant economic implications. Shikha and I had a column on this topic in Monday's Washington Times. Here's an excerpt:

Setting aside the serious constitutional issues involved, what are the economic costs of such federal mandates?

Existing federal wetland regulations already cover 111.5 million acres of land -- an area that is bigger than the state of California. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, if the government were to compensate landowners (which, of course, it doesn't) for the development potential they have lost or stand to lose on just this land, it would have to cough up $162.6 billion.

This is equal to the combined 2005 profits of the top 15 Fortune 500 companies. It is also more than three times the value of the total exports of India's information technology industry, much reviled in recent years for "stealing" American jobs due to outsourcing.

It is not possible to wipe out this kind of value and not have ripple effects throughout the economy.

And Case Western law professor Jonathan Adler offers a rebuttal to those who argue that a ruling against the feds would result in ecological havoc and destruction:

An amicus brief filed by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) argues that the Court should uphold the federal regulation of the Carabells’ and Rapanos’ wetlands because states cannot be trusted to protect the environmental resources within their borders. According to ELI, without federal regulation states will engage in “destructive interstate competition,” and slash environmental safeguards in a short-sited effort to attract industrial development. Yet the history of wetland protection efforts suggests otherwise.

Federal regulation of wetlands did not begin until 1975. State wetland regulation had begun over a decade earlier, when Massachusetts adopted the first statewide wetland conservation measures. Other states quickly followed suit. Instead of a “race to the bottom,” the historical record suggests a “race to the top,” as the pattern of state regulation prior to 1975 was precisely the opposite of what “destructive interstate competition” should have produced. Many states were eager to protect their environmental resources, and they were not going to wait for the federal government to do it. There is further evidence that states learn from the environmental innovations of their neighbors. That is, when one state adopts environmental measures, neighboring states are often likely to follow suit.

Today states remain on the cutting edge of wetland protection, developing innovative conservation strategies. Were federal regulatory power curtailed, there is good reason to believe that many states would step forward to fill the void, much as some enacted explicit protections of isolated waters after the Court’s decision in SWANCC. Equally important, there is more than one way to save a bog. Various non-regulatory programs and private conservation efforts have proven enormously successful at restoring wetlands and related ecosystems and protecting them from destruction. In short, federal regulation is not all that stands between America’s wetlands and their destruction.

Excellent point. Stay tuned for more on this topic as we get closer to the final ruling.

It’s a rule of thumb these days that nothing’s really a success unless someone wants to ban it.

Well, I guess that means WiFi’s finally arrived!

Equating the 2.4 GHz radio signals WiFi radios use with second-hand tobacco smoke and asbestos, Fred Gilbert, the president of Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, has banned WiFi on campus. Studies on the health effects RF are “inconclusive,” he’s declared. But, as WiFiNet News notes, while the data Gilbert cites comes from the California Public Utilities Commission, those studies did not pertain to the 2.4 GHz band used by WiFi at relatively low power, but to other types of electromagnetic radiation that is both stronger and more focused. Admittedly, WiFi has not been around that long, but there is no study that has found low power radio to be any risk to health. Meanwhile, more and more data shows RF at levels used by most wireless handheld devices is harmless.

No word on whether Gilbert will order the removal of all microwave ovens from dorms and faculty breakrooms, or prohibit students from playing with radio-controlled model cars and boats, or disconnect any automatic garage door system he may have at home. All this equipment emits radio waves on the same frequencies as WiFi.

The City of Lompoc, Calif., plans to use a municipal wireless as a spearhead into municipal fiber to the home. Too bad trials have found that network can’t support high-speeds or download an attachment or even maintain a connection for long. Launch of the network has been on hold since Jan. 17 as city officials scramble to engineer the system, which has cost the town $1.5 million so far, according to the Pacific Coast Business Times.

“We’ve had some network issues that the manufacturers are trying to resolve,” said City of Lompoc Network Manager John Greenly.

“From the subscriber standpoint, the biggest issues are drastic fluctuations in speed, and difficulty downloading large files.”

After blaming his vendors for supplying technology that was not “mature” enough, Greenly then blames his predecessors for the problem, a sure sign that the Lompoc’s muni system is never going to deliver on what was promised.

“The expectations that were set before my arrival were, I think, too aggressive,” Greenly said. “Once they’re moving in the right direction to resolve these issues, then we’ll look at setting a new launch date.”

When that will be? Well at this point, we don’t know.

Watch Lompoc’s officials dance as fast as they can here.

For more about how cities have begun to manage expectations, see my entry from yesterday.

In an editorial today and an investigative piece from Sunday, the Los Angeles Times takes on Rob Reiner's use of taxpayer dollars to run an advertising campaign for his "Preschool for All" initiative on the June 2006 ballot.

A sample from the Times feature:

Reiner heads the First 5 California Children and Families Commission, a panel of seven members appointed by the governor and legislative leaders. It was created by an initiative Reiner sponsored in 1998 to promote early childhood development.

• Paid $206,000 of the tax money to three political consultants, though they had no contract. One of them — Benjamin Austin, a former Los Angeles deputy mayor — said they helped coordinate the government activities of Reiner, the First 5 commission and the media consultants. Austin and the others subsequently joined the Proposition 82 effort, with Austin as campaign manager.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc's German unit will close an additional 3 stores and drop its presence in the country to its lowest level since Wal-mart entered the German retail market in 1997/98, according to a report in Financial Times Deutschland.

Article here.

Assuming the store closures are the result of lack of patronage, here’s an example of the democracy of the market at work. When Wal-Mart wants to open a store in a particular community there’s often endless debate over whether the community wants Wal-Mart. The market test is the best way to figure out the true will of the people, as each day shoppers vote for or against the biggest box with their dollars. How’s that for participatory democracy?

Market democracy also avoids some of the “tyranny of the majority” problems that arise when the issue is decided with a vote of the public. Why should 51 percent of voters tell the other 49 percent where they can shop? In the marketplace no business has to please everybody or even a majority of people. It just has to please enough customers to stay in business.

Related: Germans find romance at “Luv-Mart.”

Intel consultant Esme Vos posts some interesting notes at Muniwireless.com from a roundtable she hosted Feb. 14 in Itaska, Ill., near Chicago.

The event brought together 38 people, mostly municipal officials who were at some stage of deploying municipal wireless. From her summary, much of the discussion seemed to revolve on the ways of using municipal wireless to improve city operations – public safety, parking enforcement, automatic meter reading. Consumer broadband, while still on the table, seems to have been reduced to a secondary objective.

City officials may be at last realizing that they are setting expectations too high when they position municipal wireless as an effective competitor for the commercial broadband services offered by the phone companies, cable companies and wireless companies.

Although municipal RFPs currently emerging, most recently Suffolk County, N.Y., and Houston, still call for wide area 1 Mb/s coverage, as these RFPs make it through the comment and reply stage, it will not be surprising to see some of these consumer provisions scaled back in favor of internal operational objectives, such as reducing costs, extending “desktop” functions to the field and creating wireless portals for Web-based transactions with the city (auto registration, tax payments, license and permit application).

Although Vos can’t resist taking a shot or two at the incumbents, her report dispels the common notion that telcos and cable obstructionism is the only thing standing between a city IT department and a successful municipal broadband system. When it comes to making these projects work, there’s a lot more on the minds of municipal officials. Not surprisingly, wireless network security led the list of topics attendees wanted to know about.

Among the other challenges:

• Coming up with a consistent approach with other cities in a county
• Departmental coordination
• Finding the right technology
• Clarity in the legal and regulatory framework in deploying wired and wireless networks
• Funding

When municipal wireless is presented in the context of city IT, goals are much easier to manage, measure and control than competitive gauges like market share and revenues, where municipal systems routinely fall short when they try to compete for consumers. Instead, low-priced, low-speed, no-frills wireless broadband access can be positioned as a side benefit of city IT upgrades, not a full-blown alternative to 3G wireless, DSL or cable modems. If the effort comes up short, the city can cover itself by pointing to IT-derived efficiencies and argue that commercial broadband was never the intent in the first place.

Great news from Oregon this morning...the Oregon Supreme Court just reversed Marion County Circuit Judge Mary Mertens James' ruling on Measure 37. Judge James had ruled last October that the property compensation measure was unconstitutional and invalid, but the Supreme Court didn't agree:

In sum, we conclude that (1) plaintiffs' claims are justiciable; (2) Measure 37 does not impede the legislative plenary power; (3) Measure 37 does not violate the equal privileges and immunities guarantee of Article I, section 20, of the Oregon Constitution; (4) Measure 37 does not violate the suspension of laws provision contained in Article I, section 22, of the Oregon Constitution; (5) Measure 37 does not violate separation of powers constraints; (6) Measure 37 does not waive impermissibly sovereign immunity; and (7) Measure 37 does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The trial court's contrary conclusions under the state and federal constitutions were erroneous and must be reversed.

The full text of the Supreme Court's opinion is here. More info to come later...

UPDATE: The Court's press release is here

Otis White comments on San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders' plan for the city, which includes pension reform and managed competition:

First, about the pension fund: Sanders wants to stomp on the benefits brake by limiting the pensions of new hires and making it much, much harder to award additional benefits to existing workers. He hasn’t announced yet what kind of pension system he’d like for new employees — that will be the subject of union negotiations this year — but it must be “affordable,” he says. To restrain city hall from handing out new benefits in the future, he’s pushing for a charter amendment requiring a referendum before any increases could take effect.

Now, about the management changes: Sanders wants to bring “managed competition” to San Diego. What’s that? It’s the management system Stephen Goldsmith pioneered when he was mayor of Indianapolis in the 1990s. (Goldsmith wrote about his experiences in a book titled “The Twenty-First Century City: Resurrecting Urban America.” You can find an outline of his ideas, from a 2001 New York Times op-ed piece, by clicking here.

As mayor, Goldsmith championed two ideas, privatization and competition. Privatization alone didn’t work, Goldsmith wrote, because private monopolies weren’t that much more efficient than public ones. So simply turning the water department over to a private company wouldn’t accomplish much. But if you could carve up the city into zones and let a number of providers (including city workers themselves) compete to haul garbage, tow abandoned cars, fix potholes and so on, wonderful and surprising things happened, Goldsmith found. Services improved, work processes were streamlined, productivity soared and costs declined dramatically.

Amazingly, city workers often turned out to be the high-quality, low-cost providers, once they were allowed to compete. “The problem,” Goldsmith wrote in his book, “is that [municipal employees] have been trapped in a system that punishes initiative, ignores efficiency and rewards big spenders.” A system ... well, like San Diego city government.

The full article is here (scroll to the bottom of the page). For more on these topics, check out Reason's study on pensions, as well as our How-to-Guide on managed competition.

And Houston blogger (and friend) Tory Gattis thinks managed competition would be great for Houston:

The internationally-read Economist magazine recently noted that unions are getting traction in Houston. They also seem to be making inroads in city government. While I sympathize with people's desires to increase their compensation and benefits, doing it through monopoly power seems like a bad idea (I've never understood why it's bad for a company (i.e. "capital") to abuse monopoly power to increase profits but good for labor to do the same thing). It distorts what should be a simple supply-and-demand market of jobs and labor: the organization offers a job at a market pay rate, and you can choose to take it or look elsewhere.

. . . .

...[Managed competition] seems like a great way to accomplish two objectives at once: better and cheaper city services in a structure that is far less fertile for unionization. I know Mayor White is a Democrat - which tends to be a pro-union party - but he has to realize this system would be far healthier for Houston in the long-run. How about giving it a try?

I fully agree with Tory here, and I think that it would dovetail nicely with Mayor White's goal of continuing to improve the efficiency and responsiveness of city government.

(hat tip: Tory Gattis/Houston Strategies)

John Blundell, head of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, sings the praises of our Privatization Watch.

A new study from the University of Illinois at Chicago contradicts the "sprawl causes obesity" meme promoted by the anti-sprawl advocates:

Obesity is not directly associated with urban sprawl, according to a Chicago-area study presented by University of Illinois at Chicago researchers to the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council.

Body-mass index scores in most city neighborhoods differ little from those in the farthest outlying areas, the researchers said.

Their findings contradict the conventional wisdom that city dwellers are thinner because their dense, centralized environment encourages walking, while suburbanites and rural residents tend to drive to widely scattered destinations.

The lowest body-mass index scores were found among residents of inner-ring suburbs -- residential areas in the middle ranges of density and distance from the city center.

"This research responds to the suggestion that highway construction causes sprawl, and in turn, sprawl contributes to obesity," said Siim Soot, director emeritus of the Urban Transportation Center in the UIC College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs.

"Obesity is a national problem, and poor diet and insufficient exercise are recognized as the primary causes," Soot said. "But observers increasingly have pointed to our culture and our built environment as possible contributing factors -- specifically, the relationship of residential setting and urban sprawl to obesity."

The year-long study builds on earlier UIC studies showing that factors other than expressways cause urban sprawl, Soot said.

The researchers calculated body-mass indices from height and weight data on the driver's licenses of about 7 million anonymous residents in more than 300 ZIP code areas. They correlated these data to each area's population density, distance from downtown Chicago, modes of commuting, number of streets and intersections, household income, and a variety of personal and household characteristics.

Among the findings:

--Residents of high-income areas with high percentages of college-educated residents and high home values are less likely to be obese.

--Inner-ring suburbs have the lowest body-mass index scores, followed by most city neighborhoods and distant suburbs.

--The highest body-mass index scores were found in city neighborhoods with predominantly ethnic or racial minority populations.

--Use of pubic transit in commuting and ease of walking are not associated statistically with obesity.

The full study is here.

From the Replacing Amtrak blog comes an update on the impressive state of U.K. rail on the tenth anniversary of privatization:

In marking the 10th anniversary of the first British passenger train services to run in the private sector, the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) says that improvements include thousands of new trains, more passenger journeys, increased numbers of services and much greater choice. Passenger traffic has grown more than 40% since 1996, and freight continues to grow, too. By comparison, Amtrak and other publicly run railways don't come close to matching Britain's growth.

Read the whole post for many more details....

(hat tip: NTU's Government Bytes blog)

Space Adventures, the company that has sent tourists into space on Russian rockets, is teaming up with Prodea, an investment firm founded by the Ansari family, to develop a fleet of suborbital, reusable spacecraft for space tourism. The Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation will also participate, by supervising the development of the vehicles.

Article here.

For more, go here and here.

William Easterly argues that Africa won’t be saved by Bono, Bob Geldof, or even Angelina Jolie:

Everyone, it seems, was invited to the "Save Africa" campaign of 2005 except for Africans. They starred only as victims: genocide casualties, child soldiers, AIDS patients and famine deaths on our 43-inch plasma screens.

Yes, these tragedies deserve attention, but the obsessive and almost exclusive Western focus on them is less relevant to the vast majority of Africans -- the hundreds of millions not fleeing from homicidal minors, not HIV-positive, not starving to death, and not helpless wards waiting for actors and rock stars to rescue them. Angelina, the continent has problems but it is not being destroyed.

Easterly highlights this story:

Kenyan Robert Keter, a former world-class runner, is busy investing the proceeds of the telecom venture CDR, which he co-founded in 2000 and ran profitably until the Kenyan government abruptly shut him down for no apparent reason. Keter was recruited into business by Monique Maddy, a Liberian entrepreneur with a Harvard MBA (who is now offering advice to Google on global anti-poverty programs). CDR was offering customers voice over Internet protocol long before the service was made mainstream by Skype and Vonage. The company did so well during its brief operation that Keter and his U.S.-based partners decided to raise money to help rebuild a school in his home village of Kericho, located in the tea-growing region of the Kenyan highlands. Keter also used part of his earnings to purchase a tea farm, where he employs more than 400 workers.

The West's focus on sensational tragedies obscures the achievements of people such as ... Robert Keter, who are succeeding even against tremendous odds. Economic development in Africa will depend -- as it has elsewhere and throughout the history of the modern world -- on the success of private-sector entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs and African political reformers. It will not depend on the activities of patronizing, bureaucratic, unaccountable and poorly informed outsiders.

Development everywhere is homegrown. As G-8 ministers and rock stars fussed about a few billion dollars here or there for African governments, the citizens of India and China (where foreign aid is a microscopic share of income) were busy increasing their own incomes by $715 billion in 2005.

Column here.

Some thoughts from Kenyan economist James Shikwati here.

And if you prefer to get global economic perspectives from celebs, check out Minnie Driver.

All 535 members of Congress get Hustler for free:

Not that most members want it. It usually gets thrown in the circular file marked “trash.”

But like clockwork, it keeps coming, despite efforts to have it stop.

The spokesman for Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, recently tried to halt the mailing. Nope.

Several members of Congress have sued to make it stop, only to lose.

…

[Publisher Larry Flynt] doesn't feel bad that the ones who are actually opening the envelopes aren't the members of congress but young interns.

“I'm sure the interns are over 18,” Flynt says. “Those guys need some help getting through puberty anyway.”
Interns for Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, are trained to distinguish the nudie magazine's envelope from the other mail and throw it away, says Chief of Staff Scott Parker.

“So every time we happen to get one, it ends up in the trash pretty instantly,” Parker says.

Just how instant is "pretty" instant?

Article here; via Fark.

In what may be another watershed moment in the redefinition of municipal broadband, the wireless industry’s major trade group, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), has backed off active opposition of government wireless projects.

It could be because there is less and less municipal in municipal wireless. Even as more cities contemplate wide area wireless coverage, they are more reticent to fund it, turning instead to franchise-like agreements with major players with whom they once thought they could compete. Hence, we see companies like EarthLink reorganizing their entire business strategies around a burgeoning market for municipal outsourcing, and Cingular Wireless, the country’s largest wireless service provider, buzzing around San Francisco’s TechConnect project.

Meanwhile, CTIA has other pressing issues – including streamlining diverse state regulations, which micromanage carrier operations to the point of specifying fonts they must on their bills. CTIA also has an interest in furthering franchise fee reform.

Anyhow, from a competitive standpoint, the industry has technological leg up on anything municipalities can attempt. Verizon Wireless is offering video. Sprint Nextel is close to marketing a handset that can automatically switch between WiFi and cellular systems.

Municipal broadband is rapidly becoming a matter of semantics. Although there has been a lot more interest in the concept, since Philadelphia announced its deal with EarthLink last fall, every major project put forth since has explicitly called for no direct city funding. Some, like Milwaukee’s call for non-exclusive access to city right of way. The only exception might be New Orleans, where Mayor Ray Nagin called for upgrade and expansion of an existing city-owned low-speed wireless system. That project, like many others in the post-Katrina Crescent City, faces formidable hurdles.

The current focus on wireless also eclipses another fact: ever since Lafayette, La., voted to fund its own municipal fiber to the home system in July, there has been no municipal FTTH systems proposed anywhere. Portland, Ore., has come the closest, floating a $470 million plan for a citywide fiber optic backbone that would support retailer service providers, but from the news coverage, even city officials aren’t gung-ho about funding it and would rather see a private company take on the cost.

We hear that line all the time. And at first glance it seems to be true.

Manufacturing employment represents a shrinking share of total employment and even the absolute number of manufacturing workers has fallen dramatically from its 1980 peak.

And yet all this can be misleading, argues Russell Roberts:

We still make stuff. A lot of stuff. A lot more stuff than we did 20 years ago. We're just doing it with fewer people. How? Productivity. We've found ways to make workers more productive so even though fewer people are doing the manufacturing, they're producing more. Technology and innovation, spurred by the carrot of profits and the stick of losses has allowed that transformation. It makes us richer. It frees up a very scarce resource, people, to go do other things creating new products and services.

More, including some telling BLS charts, here.

Might the flying car finally make the jump from fantasy to reality?

Flying cars are technically feasible; [start-up company] Terrafugia points out that inventor Molt Taylor built prototypes in the 1950s and 1960s--but they haven't been practical from an economic perspective.

The picture has changed, however, with the development of lighter and stronger construction materials and more efficient engines. Terrafugia is aiming to build a vehicle that will fly at 120 miles per hour and get 30 miles a gallon in the air. (It will also get 40 miles per gallon on the freeway and 30 in the city).

The Transition vehicle will carry a payload of only 430 pounds, far less than cars, but how many cars can take flight after 1,500 feet of takeoff space?

Demand also has finally begun to emerge. Today's clogged freeway traffic and dispersed suburban living patterns have created an audience for these types of vehicles. Regional airports are also somewhat plentiful and underutilized. In addition, Federal Aviation Administration regulations passed in 2004 have made it easier to get a sport pilot's license.

The Transition is a "personal air vehicle," basically an SUV with retractable wings that will be designed for 100 to 500 mile jumps. Terrafugia tells us to expect a fully operational prototype by 2008 or earlier and the company says folks will be able to buy them by 2009 or 2010.

Article here.

See this brilliant editorial cartoon...its so true.

Pity the EPA, their long-running effort to protect us by mandating oxygen additives to gasoline is bust--it turns out it hurt us. MTBE poisoned the groundwater. Ethanol increases harmful emissions. We’ve known this for years, but EPA is only now getting around to pulling the plug. See the story in the LA Times.

Of course, Pres. Bush is flogging ethanol as a means to free our selves of mid-east oil. Alas, that strategy is as bust as oxygenates, and probably will take longer to kill.

"Cities use eminent domain most often as a negotiating tool with property owners," explained [Indianapolis Mayor Bart] Peterson, who was speaking for the National League of Cities. "Just having the tool available makes it possible to negotiate with landowners." Sure it does—in the same way just having a gun available makes it possible for a bank robber to negotiate with a teller.

Read Jacob Sullum’s latest column here.

Wal-Mart News:

Massachusetts Forces Wal-Mart to Carry “Morning After Pill”

Washington’s Force-Wal-Mart-to-Spend-More-On-Health-care Bill Appears Dead

Euros Love Anti-Wal-Mart Film

Berlin's European Film Market became the backdrop for yet another verbal battle between Wal-Mart and its filmmaker nemesis Robert Greenwald on Tuesday. The Greenwald-directed film "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" made for hot sales but heated words at the market.

The verbal clash followed a similar series of jousts in the U.S. when Greenwald's film came out last year utilising grassroots distribution, promotion via the Internet and home screenings to rack up DVD sales of more than 110,000 units.
…
The documentary's claims of runaway capitalism make it a natural for many European territories. Wal-Mart stories have been front-page news in such places as Germany, France and the UK.

UCLA Professor Randall Crane (who serves on Reason's Mobility Project advisory board) has launched an interesting urban planning research blog. This recent post on Smart Growth research caught my eye:

[S]mart growth has 3 distinct parts. One is comprehensive, integrated, forward looking planning. (Old news to us but a refreshing concept to laypeople who think the problem is its absence.) A second is a menu of compact development/new urbanist design features, such as mixed land uses, better pedestrian amenities and orientation, higher densities, etc. (This is the public face of smart growth, the basis of its appeal to antisprawl groups.) And the third leg of the smart growth stool is a somewhat different approach to land use governance, in that the environmental community in particular is invited to participate up front via negotiation and mitigation, rather than delaying or blocking things via litigation. I argue it is this last element that got the builders and developers on board -- a revised process -- rather than Seaside esthetics or function.

On to research. One could start with the big framing questions, as Boarnet and I did in our book TBD: (1) will it work, (2) is it a good idea, and (3) is it feasible? As examples of the 1st, will compact development relieve traffic problems or will different rules and procedures for community participation facilitate project goals and timelines? Regarding the 2nd, who wins and loses and how are these tradeoffs managed? Finally, if the answers to (1) and (2) are yes, what obstacles to smart growth are found in the standard practice of urban development and planning?

There are published treatments of all these, none particularly satisfactory. [...] The details of (2) and (3) especially are only barely documented, let alone explained. I say this partly to justify my wonder that smart growth is rarely questioned as means or goal, even in academia, when our scholarship is so thin that our confidence in any one of its constituent parts is shaky. Each of these larger questions contains a variety of more detailed hypotheses, where better data and methods would help move our understanding of things along. There is much yet to know about what does and doesn't happen and how and when and under what circumstances. We can agree on this even if we all want to grow smart.

Researchers who raise such questions are often called skeptics, as though faith should be our guide on empirical questions. If we don't know the answer to basic questions, and have no axe to grind, aren't we merely curious?

Crane's articulates a frustration that a lot of us in the planning community have about smart growth. Smart growth is somewhat akin to the topic of global warming in a general sense: diehard advocates of global warming policy adhere strongly to their faith and mock those who come along to question it. And, similar to global warming policy, the evidence compiled on smart growth to date calls into question whether it can actually fulfill the lofty promises advocates routinely make. Kudos to Crane for bringing this subject to our attention. I hope the SG advocates are listening.

Legislation by Sen. Sheldon Killpack, would allow the state to enter into partnerships with private entities to build toll roads. It passed its first Senate vote 22-5 and faces one more vote before clearing the chamber.

Utah will become the 23rd state with a public-private partnership law.

According to the Federal Times, federal budgeting is becoming more tightly integrated with program performance:

Much like an eighth-grader looking for extra allowance around report card time, federal managers are finding that good grades pay off, even when the money is tight.

Nearly three quarters of the programs rated effective by the Office of Management and Budget are slated for budget increases in the president's fiscal 2007 proposal, compared with 60 percent in the 2006 proposed budget.
Those rated moderately effective also fared better in the 2007 budget proposal with 55 percent winning recommendations for increased funding, compared with 50 percent that were up for more money in the same category in 2006.

OMB measures a program's performance by asking managers to answer a series of questions on how well the program's goals are tied to overall agency goals and missions, how well the program is managed and to what extent the program is achieving intended results. That questionnaire is called the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). OMB scores the responses and ultimately gives each program a rating of effective, moderately effective, adequate, ineffective or results not demonstrated.

This growing correlation between a program's PART score and the budget proposal should come as no surprise from an administration whose mantra is "what gets measured gets done."

For more on PART, see Adam's article in the latest Privatization Watch.

The Defense Information Systems Agency is moving from Northern Virginia to central Maryland. The news didn’t sit too well with DISA’s 4000 employees:

In the summer, DISA polled its employees, 75 percent of whom live in Northern Virginia, and found that at least half said they would not move to Fort Meade and that the rest were split between going and being undecided.

To avert an exodus, the agency two weeks ago started allowing employees to work from home up to two days a week with permission from their supervisors. Previously, workers could telecommute only one day every two weeks, said Michael Thiem, a spokesman for DISA.

The goal is "to get people used to the idea of telecommuting," Thiem said. "What we hope to do is make Fort Meade more attractive for our workforce to stay with us."

Good news since the feds have been particularly slow to make use of telecommuting.

Article here.

My article on using telecommuting to keep and attract good employees here.

Factoid here:

The Office of Personnel Management, a longtime supporter of "teleworking," said the number of federal employees who telecommute has been steadily rising, jumping to 19 percent in 2004 from 4.2 percent in 2001. In the Washington area, it rose to 22,522 workers in 2003 from 14,621 in 2002.

Just weeks away from a primary election, [Gov. Rod Blagojevich] will propose a five-year "Preschool for All" initiative that recommends spending an additional $135 million in the first three years. It is one of several marquee programs Blagojevich has rolled out as the election draws near, raising questions from critics about where the money will come from.

…
"The whole idea behind funding education is to make sure we help our kids learn, and the evidence is very persuasive that if we invest in early education, children will learn better," the governor told the Tribune.

And the benefits of preschool will carry them all the way through the spring of first grade. Maybe all the way to third grade.

Shikha Dalmia and Lisa Snell break it all down here.

More on the Illinois plan here.

Bush angered conservationists again last week with his budget plan to sell off some 300,000 acres of national forests and other public lands worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The author of a Georgia bill that will create a new city in the same vein as Sandy Springs explains himself.

Stadium subsidy plan will bypass Legislature.

a Missouri state agency is poised to approve $50 million in public funds for renovations to professional sports stadiums in Kansas City...last year, a Senate plan to use tax money for the overhaul died in the House amid complaints that the state had more pressing needs.

The Cardinals took the same path after legislators balked in 2002 at subsidizing a new ballpark to replace Busch Stadium. The board then gave the Cardinals $29.5 million in tax credits as part of a financing package.

Nothing like transparent government!

The Wall Street Journal is rightfully skeptical of Rep. Richard Baker's plan to let the feds take the reins of the New Orleans housing market:

[...] Mr. Baker is normally a free-market advocate who has been brave enough to challenge the bad practices of such politically powerful institutions as Fannie Mae and the New York Stock Exchange. So it's surprising that he is now proposing a new Fannie Mae-type entity called the Louisiana Recovery Corporation (LRC).

Under the Baker plan, as many as 200,000 properties would be purchased by the LRC. Current homeowners in these areas would receive 60% of the "pre-Katrina value" of the house, and banks would receive 60% of the unpaid mortgage. Uncle Sam would clean up debris, rebuild homes and whole neighborhoods, then put the refurbished properties up for sale. Mr. Baker tells us he expects revenues from these sales would recoup some of the costs. Given the government foulups so far in New Orleans, the idea has a superficial appeal. But the closer one inspects the details, the more it looks like a potential long-term disaster of its own.

In a single stroke, the Baker plan would make the U.S. government the largest property owner/real estate agent in New Orleans. And property development is not the federal government's strong suit, to say the least (think HUD and Cabrini-Green in Chicago). By paying out at pre-Katrina values, the feds would also deter private investors from going in and buying up properties and thus creating a new market floor. Who knows what prices should be if Uncle Sam is setting them at what might be inflated pre-Katrina values? This is a recipe not for a rapid turn-around, but for making the feds the Donald Trump of New Orleans for a decade or more.

Given their track record in property development (and Cabrini-Green is a perfect example), any plan to let the feds -- or even the State of Louisiana for that matter -- take over the New Orleans real estate market would be inviting disaster. The private sector is in a far better position than the government to determine appropriate land values and make decisions on where it makes sense to reinvest.

For Reason's take on rebuilding New Orleans, see here and here.

These are some of the more salacious procedures that taxpayers in Washington State pay for.

In his most recent review of state Medicaid expenses, Auditor Brian Sonntag found thousands of questionable expenditures in the 2004 fiscal year … Each year, the state and federal government spends more than $3 billion through Medicaid to pay for health care of the poor and disabled …Sonntag said the evidence in the report's small sampling of the entire Medicaid budget indicates that the state could be spending tens of millions of dollars on questionable procedures.

State Medicaid Director Doug Porter responds:

“[M]edical necessity is a term that is, as we speak, is undergoing revision. ... There are many things that we have traditionally paid for that were deemed medically necessary that we are calling into question on a more frequent basis."

But a sex-change operation still could be covered by Medicaid.

"Gender dysphoria is the diagnosis, the treatment for which is gender reassignment," Porter said. "Some physician has determined that it's a man who really should be a woman and they are suffering psychological effects of this condition, and the only correction to restore them to a higher function is a sexual reassignment."

Article here.

Check out the rebroadcast of John Stossel’s special Myth’s, Lies, and Nasty Behavior.

Tonight at 10pm on ABC.

Topics include: sprawl, offshore outsourcing, gas prices, littering and sharing.

More info here.

When free-market libertarians and big-government liberals gang up on you, you might as well give it up.

If you think that the $353 million dollar public tax giveaway for the proposed Twins stadium is a sweet deal for billionaire Carl Pohlad—the richest owner in major league baseball—and a raw deal for the public, then you will cringe at what is poised to be an even more blatant act of corporate welfare: Minneapolis’ plan to outsource a citywide wireless (Wi-Fi) broadband network project that will provide internet access everywhere in the city.

Fresh from having to defend the Minneapolis WiFi plan against a St. Paul Pioneer Press editorial that questioned why the city government should be meddling in a functional market, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Ryback now must fend off attacks from the Left.

Ryback countered Pioneer Press criticism by stating the Minneapolis plan is a public-private partnership. No taxpayer money will fund it. The $25 million project will be managed by either EarthLink or U.S. Internet, the two finalists.

That’s precisely the problem, writes Aaron Neumann in Pulse, who’d rather see the City of Minneapolis shoulder the whole project itself, even though he freely admits in the article that, under the current plan, the city won’t have to battle bigger, stronger commercial Internet players, and, besides, has nowhere near $25 million lying around to fund such a venture.

But when you’re a muni loonie, practicalities don’t matter. We’ve already seen big-government liberals gang up on the San Francisco municipal wireless plan, which also seeks to outsource construction, management and ownership. It’s a growing trend. Municipal governments have considered the independent studies of the cost of ownership, like JupiterResearch’s finding that WiFi costs $150,000 per square mile over five years, the security liabilities inherent in wireless data networks and the competitive picture, and have wisely punted.

That’s what appalls the Left the most: they are losing another opportunity to increase the size and intrusiveness of government. For all they talk about bridging the digital divide, increasing broadband penetration and making cities “hip,” for the true believers such as Neumann, if the government isn’t doing broadband, they’d rather not see it done at all.

As with all forms of dogma, irony is lost. The reasons Neumann lists to fight the project – that it amounts to corporate welfare, that its finances won’t be transparent, that there will be no accountability for quality service, aren’t reasons to increase government involvement. They are reasons why governments should not be involved at all. I don’t think these "public-private" muni wireless franchises are a great idea, either, but they are far better than creating another city bureaucracy. In the end, I hope that most cities realize these broadband networks will expand without (or despite) cozy city arrangements.

I’ve spent time with state and local legislators, and even officials from muni wireless consultants such as Civitium. While we disagree on the fundamental principles behind municipal wireless and broadband, there is no question that their motives are driven by a desire to expand cheap, reliable Internet access. Still, as cities study the empirical costs of these ventures, most are wisely backing away from direct government ownership.

This has forced the muni loonies to raise the volume and, in the process, reveal their real agenda – and it has nothing to do with broadband. At heart, like much of the environmental movement, the “nutrition” police, and the anti-Wal-Mart “low-prices-hurt-the-poor” crowd, muni broadband activists are driven by an emotional, dogmatic antipathy for business. But such radical rhetoric doesn’t play well in City Hall. Dare we mention that Philadelphia, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., which along with Minneapolis, have outsourced “municipal” wireless, all have Democratic administrations. You can’t blame pro-business conservatives and libertarians for this one.

Not too long ago, I took my WiFi-enabled iPaq to Sugar Land (Tex.) Town Square. Given the Road to Paradise nature of this post-modern Houston exurb where I live, Town Square is a planned mixed-use development incorporating the new Sugar Land City Hall building, a Marriott Hotel, a smattering of condos, two dozen or so retail shops, pubs, a wine bar and the requisite Starbucks. In testimony to the changing nature of our communities, Town Square lies adjacent to the First Colony mega-mall and some three miles distant from the old Imperial Sugar refinery, around which the city was originally built.

Town Square is a popular hangout day and night. Sometime last year, the city government began free WiFi service. Best described as an amenity, coverage is pretty much limited to the pedestrian plaza around City Hall, but it certainly qualifies as an example of low-key “municipal wireless” that has been floated elsewhere.

So, in the interest of field research, I drove over, parked and ambled over to a bench and turned on my iPaq.

My handheld immediately detected six signals, defaulting to the hotspot at Starbucks, about 100 yards away. I also picked up a Marriott hot spot as well as a number of unprotected home networks from the nearby condos. My iPaq also detected the Sugar Land city’s WiFi service set identifier (SSID), but its signal strength was low and when I manually selected it, the connection was spotty and data speed slow. It was utterly useless.

I’ll grant that this is anecdotal, but is still raises an issue with public WiFi that I r