In October 2022, San Francisco raised eyebrows when the city budgeted $1.7 million for a single-stall public restroom in the city's Noe Valley neighborhood. The high price tag, according to city officials, was due to the steep price of construction in San Francisco, as well as remaining supply chain issues.
But the state stepped in shortly after, scrapping the planned bathroom after outrage spread over its high cost to taxpayers. Fifteen months later, the public plaza where the restroom was originally planned still doesn't have a place to pee—and it doesn't look like it will get one any time soon.
"Why isn't there a toilet here? I just don't get it. Nobody does," one resident told The New York Times last week. "It's yet another example of the city that can't."
San Francisco has the most expensive construction costs in the world—and it's hardly surprising. In order to build a public bathroom in Noe Valley, at a location that already had the necessary plumbing to add a restroom, builders would have to pass a dizzying number of regulatory stops. These include seeking approval from the Arts Commission's Civic Design Review committee, passing review under the California Environmental Quality Act, and getting the go-ahead from the city's Rec and Park Commission and San Francisco's Board of Supervisors. If that isn't enough, the project would also be subject to a period of "community feedback."
Even after gaining approval, the city wouldn't be free to simply find the cheapest acceptable bathroom—likely a pre-fabricated option—and connect it to city plumbing. According to a 2022 San Francisco Chronicle article, pre-fabricated bathrooms violate the city's Public Labor Agreement. Adding to costs, the city would also be required to use union labor to construct the bathroom.
While the $1.7 million price tag was rightfully criticized, should the project have been allowed to go forward, the budget might not have been an overestimate. San Francisco's regulatory burden on new construction—even something as simple as a single-stall bathroom—is just that high.
Even San Francisco's own government has conceded that the Noe Valley bathroom fiasco was a sign that the city has too much regulation. "It's worth changing the laws that are in place around construction projects like the restroom that slow things down," a spokesperson for Mayor London Breed told the Times.
But this is far from the first time that local governments have earmarked absurdly large sums of money to pay for public bathrooms. In 2017, New York City spent $2 million on a public park bathroom. And last year, Philadelphia caused controversy when it announced that it would spend $1.8 million on six modular Portland Loo bathrooms over the next five years—a model that cities across the country have spent millions on in recent years.
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]]>The city of San Francisco put almost five years and over half a million dollars into an effort to design and deploy
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]]>When Los Angeles officials were looking to set up a new homeless shelter where residents could have their own space, they decided speed was the priority. For that reason, they declined to build the typical tiny home village in favor of an easier-to-assemble "safe sleeping" tent encampment. At a price of $44,000 per tent, one would hope the site went up pretty fast.
All told, Los Angeles' East Hollywood encampment, complete with showers, fencing, and staff facilities, cost $4 million to build. The city-contracted nonprofit Urban Alchemy spends another $3 million operating the site each year—with most of the operating expenses going toward 24/7 staffing and catering.
Other cities' "safe sleeping" sites are similarly expensive.
Supporters of safe camping sites stress the quick set-up times and improved safety, hygiene, and independence they provide occupants compared to unmanaged tent encampments. Nevertheless, delivering some of the benefits of sleeping inside to an open-air parking lot is an inescapably expensive endeavor. Actual buildings are more cost-effective. In all of the aforementioned cities, the yearly costs of renting an average-priced apartment are cheaper than the per-tent costs of a safe camping site.
"What we found in the early iterations of safe sleep is that some people preferred tents because it gave them a sense of ownership." —Kirkpatrick Tyler, Urban Alchemy's chief of government-community affairs, in the Los Angeles Times
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]]>What is already arguably America's worst public transit project is about to get a whole lot more expensive.
The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) is moving ahead with plans to build a 2-mile extension to the city's 2.7-mile streetcar line, with an estimated price tag of $230 million. The Center Square reports that the first batch of that new spending—an $11.5 million contract awarded to a firm that will design the extension—was doled out last week. The project is being funded by a half-cent increase in the Atlanta sales tax, and the extension is scheduled to open in 2028.
Even if the extension doesn't go over budget, $230 million for two miles of new streetcar track works out to a slobber-knocking total of $21,700 per foot.
And that only covers the construction costs. If the current Atlanta Streetcar is any indication, most of the operating costs for the extension will be covered by people who never ride it. The existing 2.7-mile loop through downtown Atlanta gets about 158,000 riders per year. Even if all of them pay the $1 per ride fare—and there is ample evidence that many do not—that wouldn't come close to covering the system's $5 million annual operating cost.
City officials say the extension—which will connect the streetcar to a nearby series of walking and biking trails in the middle of Atlanta—will increase ridership. But that shouldn't be a sufficient justification for dumping another $230 million into a project that has plainly failed.
As Reason's Zach Weissmuller detailed in a documentary last year, the Atlanta Streetcar is comically out of date. It moves at 5 miles per hour and stops every quarter mile, making it no faster than the horse-drawn railways that crisscrossed cities in the 19th century.
And that's when it runs at all. "It's often stuck in traffic. Ridership has been anemic," reports The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "In November, MARTA took the streetcar vehicles out of service because of safety concerns, though it began restoring rail service along the route last month."
With a plethora of cheaper, faster, better transportation alternatives now available, it's no wonder that so few people are choosing to ride the Atlanta Streetcar. Dumping another $230 million into a pointless extension of a useless service won't change that.
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]]>Should New York City force rich people to pay higher parking tickets than poor people? That's the question at the heart of a bill before the City Council right now.
City Councilmember Justin Brannan, who represents Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, and Bath Beach (all in south Brooklyn), is proposing the creation of a pilot program to implement a day-fine system for civil offenses. Day-fine systems are used in several European countries and have been tried stateside in places as disparate as Maricopa County, Arizona, and—briefly, in the 1980s—the New York borough of Staten Island.
"First, the court sentences the offender to a certain number of day-fine units (e.g., 15, 60, 120 units) according to the gravity of the offense, but without regard to his or her means," explained the Vera Institute of Justice's Judith Greene in a 1990 report assessing the efficacy of Staten Island's program. "Then the value of each unit is set at a share of the offender's daily income (hence the name 'day fine'), and the total fine amount is determined by simple multiplication."
"During [Michael] Bloomberg's time as mayor of NYC, fines became just another way to raise revenue rather than a way to deter or change bad behavior," Brannan tells Reason. "Fine amounts are arbitrary as it is so why should a public school teacher and a billionaire pay the same fine? For instance, a $115 ticket for a working family of four could be a real hardship whereas a $115 ticket for an individual making $500K is a joke and does absolutely nothing to change their behavior."
Brannan is just proposing a pilot program and says many of the details have yet to be worked out, but he anticipates only applying higher fines to people making over $500,000 in income annually—who he deems as the 1 percent. As for the poorer people who receive fines, lower amounts might mean they're more likely to pay their tickets in full. "For once, this is about the little guy," he says, adding that he's "tired of working families and the middle class getting squeezed."
It's an interesting idea, but it raises questions of efficacy, fairness, and whether the city would actually be able to assess such fines at scale.
"Overall, the 'enforcement rate' for fine sentences during the pilot year appears very strong," wrote Greene of Staten Island's experiment. "The bulk of fines imposed have been paid in full; 84 percent of fined offenders have been successfully 'punished' (that is, they have paid, or have been returned to court and resentenced appropriately)."
It's hard to say whether a larger, citywide program would be as effective as the small-scale one in Staten Island, which was designed essentially to give judges another sentencing tool as part of reform efforts to divert people away from incarceration and applied only to felonies and misdemeanors, not civil offenses. Perhaps state-capacity libertarians would be optimistic about this new program, but the rest of us might recoil, anticipating that bureaucrats will botch this or that those most affected will find means of evading it.
"This isn't about class warfare—it's just about fairness," Brannan tells me.
But it's arguably a bit of both.
On one hand, the point about fines being made proportional is a compelling one. On the other, one of the benefits of being rich—one reason I am personally motivated to get rich—is that the little things don't hurt as much. A $200 speeding ticket bothers me a bit now, but I want to have enough excess so that such amounts feel trivial. Other things we buy, like food and clothing and utilities to power our homes, aren't subject to a sliding scale of price based on income. What benefit to being rich would there be if everything was priced in proportion to how much we earn?
Rich New Yorkers aren't just cash cows who can be exploited without consequence; after all, 42.5 percent of all city income tax was paid by the 1 percent—or households earning $900,000-plus annually. Capital flight isn't a far-off risk, but a post-pandemic reality: 300,000 New Yorkers fled the city during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic (along with their $21 billion in reportable income), a hefty chunk of change never to return. Snowbirding—and the creative tax filing that sometimes accompanies it—is a time-honored New York City tradition; why stay in a city that tries to get its cut of every last dollar when you could establish Florida residency or flit back and forth between the two? ("A Snowbird Must Carefully Plan Its Flight," reads a headline from The CPA Journal, predictably naming Florida and New York in its subheading.)
But city officials are ostensibly balancing the risk of driving the rich away with their goal of upping revenue. The city's Independent Budget Office reports a roughly $2 billion budget shortfall since 2017 from unpaid fines. Half of that is due to parking violations and speeding or running red lights—all of which would likely be subject to the day-fine proposal—but $627 million comes from Department of Buildings violations and the like. So it's not as though the day-fine program, if it became law, would fully fix that shortfall.
Nor do city officials know precisely how much of a beating the rich will take before Central Park Westers long for the shimmering waters of Florida.
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]]>To hear conservatives describe the state of affairs in San Francisco, you'd think the City by the Bay is a harrowing dystopia along the lines of San Salvador, Juarez, St. Louis or Detroit. I can't tell you how many people have warned me against spending time there—or talked about the "poop app" that helps visitors avoid human feces on the sidewalks.
"San Francisco is sunk in a rancid drug-ravaged pit of human misery and city leaders have no idea how to pull themselves out of it," wrote David Marcus in his Fox News column last year. He knows why: "(B)ecause the progressive lunatics running the city believe that every criminal is a victim."
This week, I read a Twitter debate about which American city would essentially collapse under the weight of its own lunacy. Predictably, San Francisco topped the list. "Look what's happened to San Francisco," Donald Trump said during a 2020 campaign stop in Bakersfield. "It's worse than a slum, there's no slum like that."
I suspect that many of the San Francisco doom-tellers haven't been there, but even many who have joined the chorus. Bay Area native Michael Shellenberger's well-known book is called San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. He makes some solid points—progressives do wreck everything they touch and San Francisco has tons of problems—but his title promotes the "it's a nightmare" theme.
I travel to San Francisco regularly and have visited almost every corner of the city. I spent most of last week there for a wedding on Nob Hill and traipsed around several neighborhoods: Chinatown, North Beach, Alamo Square, and South of Market (SoMa). Not only did I live to tell about it, but left with warm fuzzies even after wandering its streets late at night.
San Francisco remains (arguably) the most beautiful city in the country. Its parks are lovely and mostly orderly and clean. On Sunday, we played miniature golf and frequented food trucks, along with hundreds of young families. People were generally friendly and the restaurants and nightlife were fabulous. Most neighborhoods are surprisingly quiet and safe.
The city's critics aren't entirely wrong, of course. Locals warned us not to leave anything in our cars given surging property crimes. The Tenderloin—the notoriously downtrodden downtown neighborhood—is an open sewer of drug dealing and panhandling, just as critics say. Homeless tents line a portion of Market Street near the main shopping drag. But is it fair to define an entire city that way?
Whenever I mention this, people misunderstand. Yes, some portions of the city are a mess. Yes, the city faces major property crime and homelessness problems. Just this week, the National Guard and California Highway Patrol were sent in to shut down open-air drug markets. Major retailers are exiting because of the theft problem. But conservatives undermine their case when they overstate things.
Simply put, conservatives bash San Francisco because of the city's progressive politics, just as liberals portray Republican states such as Texas as redoubts of sexism and racism. For instance, California lawmakers have banned official travel to 22 supposedly backward states. In both cases, politically minded people embrace stupid narratives that confirm their biases.
The San Francisco Chronicle looked at San Francisco's crime data in 2022 and found that crime rates soared after lockdowns temporarily turned the city into a ghost town, but overall rates have been in a downward trend over five years. The murder rate has increased since the end of COVID, but the city's murder rate is "towards the bottom for major cities," Police Chief Bill Scott told a local CNN affiliate.
It's a mixed bag, but my sense is the city government's lackadaisical approach toward lower-level crime and homelessness has created a real sense of civic disorder. Many property crimes aren't reported, so the crime problem is deeper than the data suggest. Residents understandably are feeling jittery about their overall safety.
So after a high-profile killing—such as when tech entrepreneur Bob Lee was stabbed to death this month on a downtown street—it feeds the narrative of a terribly dangerous city, even if this might not have been a random attack. None of my caveats are meant to downplay the seriousness of the crime problem but to put the matter in perspective.
I lived in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s and 1980s—when the murder epidemic was so severe that local newspapers published a death toll on the front pages every day. Crime rates have fallen dramatically nationwide since then, but have increased in recent years. Crime and homelessness partly explain why San Francisco has lost so much population, but crime isn't nearly as bad as those days.
Marcus lives in West Virginia, which has endured an appalling opioid overdose crisis. Yet that hardly defines an entire state. Isn't it better to figure out how to deal with these problems rather than just score partisan political points? My sense in San Francisco's critics despise the city's politics, so they jump on every bad event to conform to their narrative.
San Francisco is unlikely to ever become a conservative paradise, but even the politics there is self-correcting. Last year, voters recalled their soft-on-crime district attorney Chesa Boudin. The newly appointed DA has vowed to clean up the streets. Note the National Guard intervention mentioned above. If you don't like San Francisco, that's fine, but don't spread tall tales about it.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
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]]>California's public-transit systems are facing a crisis, as already-declining ridership levels fell another 80 percent in the midst of COVID-19. They have only rebounded to 60 percent after the end of the shutdown. Most agencies are facing fiscal calamity and, predictably, state lawmakers are seeking to infuse them with additional cash now that federal pandemic-related subsidies are subsiding.
With the state government now staring down a $25-billion deficit, there's no extra general-fund cash to prop up struggling systems. That may be a silver lining. Transit's problems have little to do with inadequate subsidies, so perhaps this challenge will force policymakers to rethink the fundamental problem: Our transit systems are so unpleasant that people don't want to use them.
State planners have been dumping record amounts of money into transit for years in the hopes that Californians will abandon their cars, but to no avail. The Southern California Association of Governments found that the region's "median" resident made zero transit trips in a year—and that transit ridership is concentrated in a fraction of the area's census tracts.
"Without the state stepping in," transit agencies "say they may have to cut service or increase fares," according to a CalMatters report. That's the definition of a death spiral. Because of less revenue, the agencies will reduce and charge more for their already shoddy service. As a result, fewer people will use the service and that will lead to more cutbacks and higher fares. Transit's problems predate the pandemic, by the way. Per-capita transit use plateaued in 1970.
If you peruse California's transportation documents, you'll find little focus on the nuts-and-bolts of transportation. Instead of improving the roads that most of us rely upon and building quality transit for those who depend upon it, the state is devoted to a policy of planned congestion that seeks to make us so miserable we abandon the cars that we rely upon. Just check out the trendy "road diets" that eliminate vital traffic lanes in favor of bike lanes.
The transit systems we're supposed to hop aboard ultimately operate as jobs programs for government workers and schemes that battle climate change. On the former point, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system has a janitor who earned $270,000 in total compensation in a year. They view the rider—or potential rider—as an afterthought. That undermines their own stated goals.
"Getting more people out of their own gas-powered cars is essential to meeting the state Air Resources Board's goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 48 percent below 1990 levels by 2030," the CalMatters article added. The state has been underinvesting in freeways given that it perceives transit as the future—and lawmakers are busy trying to re-order development patterns so that more of us live in high-density, transit-dependent neighborhoods.
But no one stops to ask, "How are we going to entice (rather than force) Californians onto these mass-transit systems? And they plow ahead with a $100-billion "high speed" train that might one day take a handful of residents from Merced to Bakersfield.
Meanwhile, those people who take transit complain about constant delays, long travel times, uncomfortable and dirty buses—and crime. BART is enduring a crime wave. An L.A. Metro survey last year found that ridership among women has fallen off a cliff—with the key cited reason being crime and a lack of cleanliness. After that system experimented with free ridership during the pandemic, vagrants overran their buses and trains. Go figure.
Such mundane consumer-oriented concerns explain why people increasingly avoid transit, yet the California Department of Transportation's main planning document is preoccupied with promoting "vibrant communities," advancing "racial and economic justice" and bolstering "public and environmental health." Those goals are fine, but the agencies can't even manage systems that commuters feel safe to use.
Transit agencies face a conundrum. Because they view transit ridership largely in equity terms, they design the systems largely as social-welfare programs designed to provide poorer residents with a means to get around. Yet when they dump billions of dollars in boutique rail lines, they inevitably cannibalize funds from the bus routes that serve the bulk of their riders—and few drivers end up taking those rail lines, anyway.
The state's progressive leaders seem to disdain cars, so they prefer hectoring drivers about their climate footprint and punishing them for driving pickup trucks. They forget that the bulk of lower-income people also rely on their cars—and that car ownership remains a key stepping stool into the middle class.
Instead of thinking like business-people who need to meet the needs of customers, California transit officials act like government bureaucrats who are married to high-cost government and union solutions, and mainly want to impose their preferences on us—rather than lure us into transit by offering high-quality transportation alternatives. Until they change their thinking, Californians will continue to vote with their gas pedals.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
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]]>The latest construction project straining San Francisco's city budget? A single-stall public restroom that's expected to cost an eye-popping $1.7 million to build.
Last Wednesday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a new, 150-square-foot public restroom in central San Francisco's Noe Valley was expected to cost $1.7 million by its completion in 2025. The story sparked outrage from local citizens and state officials alike who balked at the high price tag. While city officials have attempted to chalk up the price to high construction costs, the shockingly expensive budget estimate for one restroom shows the pitfalls of a city where construction is nigh impossible—and the local government is more than willing to overspend.
How did the $1.7 million figure get estimated? Well, according to San Francisco Assembly member Matt Haney (D–San Francisco), who secured the funding, he went with the figure that the Recreation and Parks Department gave him. "They told me $1.7 million, and I got $1.7 million," Haney told the Chronicle. "I didn't have the option of bringing home less of the bacon when it comes to building a toilet. A half a toilet or a toilet-maybe-someday is not much use to anyone."
But why such a steep price tag on something as simple as a single-stall restroom—especially considering that the plaza on which the restroom will be built already has the necessary plumbing for a bathroom? A statement from the San Francisco Department of Recreation and Parks and the Department of Public Works argued the bathroom's exorbitant price tag is driven by the high cost of construction in San Francisco—the highest in the world—as well as increases in construction costs due to inflation and supply chain issues.
"It's important to note that public projects and their overall cost estimates don't just reflect the price of erecting structures," officials wrote in the statement. "They include planning, drawing, permits, reviews and public outreach." Officials also stressed that their estimate is deliberately high in order to account "for the worst-case scenario due to the onerous demands and unpredictable costs levied by PG&E."
Further, actually building the bathroom will involve a dizzying number of roadblocks, notably "community feedback," to ensure that the bathroom's "design is appropriate to its context in the urban environment." After passing community muster, the design will head to local officials for approval, as well as review under the California Environmental Quality Act. Only then can construction start.
While the city government is convinced that their $1.7-million figure is a reasonable, if deliberately high, estimate for a public restroom, other experts disagree. The San Francisco Chronicle spoke with Tom Hardiman, the executive director of the Modular Building Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia. When asked to guess San Francisco's budget for the bathroom, he told the Chronicle, "I'm going to guess high, I think, and say $200,000." When told the real cost, he replied "What are they making it out of—gold and fine Italian marble? It would be comical if it wasn't so tragically flawed."
While Hardiman told the Chronicle that a prefabricated bathroom would be much cheaper, San Francisco law might stand in the way of a much more sensible option. Why? In 2019, the city supervisors reached a Project Labor Agreement, which required union labor for all "covered projects." According to the Chronicle, Noe Valley's single-stall bathroom shouldn't apply under this agreement "because it's not worth $10 million and it didn't come from bond funding."
However, Haney seems to believe that the bathroom project is constrained by the agreement, thus ruling out cheaper, prefabricated options. The Chronicle reports that "he'd be open to modular bathrooms if they didn't violate the Public Labor Agreement." Unfortunately, even if this bathroom is exempt from the law, mistaken city officials are more than enough to effectively rule out this cheaper option made by non-union labor. Another fact making a prefabricated option less likely: The city of San Francisco is barred from doing business with 30 states, due to anti-abortion, anti-LGBT rights, or "voter suppression" laws.
Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has even waded into the controversy. "A single, small bathroom should not cost $1.7 million," a Newsom spokesperson wrote in a statement to the Chronicle. "The state will hold funding until San Francisco delivers a plan to use this public money more efficiently. If they cannot, we will go back to the legislature to revoke this appropriation." However, Newsom's office hasn't seemed to have had trouble approving such expensive projects before. According to the Chronicle, two other single-stall bathrooms were recently constructed in San Francisco, costing $1.6 and $1.7 million respectively.
The price tag for Noe Valley's single-stall public restroom is outrageous. However, so is San Francisco's needlessly complicated process for approving new construction—and its laws restricting who and where this construction can come from. It simply should not be this complicated to build a public bathroom—or just about anything, for that matter. San Francisco's city government has a long and storied history of erecting bureaucratic roadblocks to new construction—from much-needed apartment buildings to a trash can. Blame for such a ludicrously expensive bathroom should thus primarily lay at the feet of an incompetent, regulation-happy city government.
A $1.7 million toilet is a uniquely San Franciscan tale. It's a story of fiscal irresponsibility, yes, but also a story of government ineptitude—and it shows what can happen when bureaucracy and regulation clouds common sense.
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]]>California Gov. Gavin Newsom could withdraw state funds from a planned public toilet in San Francisco that is expected to cost $1.7 million and take two years to build. That includes the time and costs of permitting, reviews and public comment, as well as the actual construction. "A single, small bathroom should not cost $1.7 million," said Erin Mellon, Newsom's communications director.
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]]>Police budgets are up in cities across America. It's a tale as old as time that politicians benefit by whipping up crime panic and accusing opponents of being soft on the issue. And so it goes in 2022, with candidates—mostly conservatives, but also some Democrats trying to position themselves as centrists—insisting that 1) crime is rising, and 2) it's the fault of criminal justice reform policies. Both claims are highly suspect (see this recent Roundup for more on crime data), and especially so the flavor of blame that suggests this mythical crime wave is the fault of liberals and progressives "defunding the police."
Yes, "defund the police" became a popular rallying cry in the summer of 2020, as people all over the country took to the streets to protest police brutality. And, yes, it can still be heard as a refrain in some activist circles. But even as some mainstream politicians briefly flirted with this rhetoric, it's never been a serious policy proposal, nor one that many (if any) leaders—local or national—have acted upon.
President Joe Biden—long a friend of the police and proponent of dubious crime panic policies—recently proposed in his Safer America Plan some $37 billion in federal funding for cops. "President Biden's fiscal year 2023 budget requests a fully paid-for new investment of approximately $35 billion to support law enforcement and crime prevention – in addition to the President's $2 billion discretionary request for these same programs," noted the White House.
Cities and counties, too, have been raising police budgets. ABC News "examined the budgets of more than 100 cities and counties and found 83% are spending at least 2% more on police in 2022 than in 2019."
The ABC News analysis included most major big and mid-size metropolitan areas, including Albuquerque, Anchorage, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boise, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Honolulu, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Louisville, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York City, Newark, Oakland, Omaha, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Washington, D.C., and Wichita, among others.
Of the 109 areas examined, 49 raised law enforcement funding by more than 10 percent and 91 raised it by at least 2 percent. Only 8 places cut funding to law enforcement by more than 2 percent.
Nonetheless, politicians, pundits, and police persist in spreading the politically convenient myth that law enforcement agencies have been massively defunded. "Despite what the public record shows, an analysis of broadcast transcripts reveals that candidates, law enforcement leaders and television hosts discussed the impact of 'defunding the police' more than 10,000 times the last two years and the mentions aren't subsiding this campaign season," ABC found.
Take scandal plagued Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva. He claims that crime is up because "defunding has consequences." Meanwhile, "his agency's budget is up more than $250 million," according to ABC. In Los Angeles County, the police budget was up to $3.6 billion in 2021–2022, from $3.3 billion in 2018–2019.
"Even if the cuts were real, the premise that lower police spending leads to increased crime (or the other way around) is counter to decades of evidence, according to public data and criminal justice experts," ABC points out:
An ABC OTV analysis of state and local police funding and violent crime data in the U.S. overall between 1985 and 2020 found no relationship between year-to-year police spending and crime rates. (An analysis by the Washington Post found similar results from 1960 to 2018.)
Further analysis of Los Angeles County's own crime data show violent crime numbers don't move up or down with any relationship to money spent on law enforcement or the number of officers on patrol.
But lately, budget cuts are resolutely not the case in many places.
In Chicago, the police budget was $1.9 billion in 2021–2022, up from $1.7 billion in 2018–2019. In Phoenix, the police budget in 2021–2022 was $786.7 million, up from $687.8 million in 2018–2019. And even in places where there have been some drops, the budgets are still massive. For instance, in New York City, the 2021–2022 budget was down to $5.4 billion from $5.6 billion in 2018–2019. This year's budget is still up from $5.2 billion in 2020–2021.
Baby bump seems to be continuing. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper from Martha J. Bailey, Janet Currie & Hannes Schwandt drills down into the data on the COVID-19 baby bump. Here's the abstract:
We use restricted natality microdata covering the universe of U.S. births for 2015-2021 and California births from 2015 to August 2022 to examine the childbearing response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although fertility rates declined in 2020, these declines appear to reflect reductions in travel to the U.S. Childbearing in the U.S. among foreign-born mothers declined immediately after lockdowns began—nine months too soon to reflect the pandemic's effects on conceptions. We also find that the COVID pandemic resulted in a small "baby bump" among U.S.-born mothers. The 2021 baby bump is the first major reversal in declining U.S. fertility rates since 2007 and was most pronounced for first births and women under age 25, which suggests the pandemic led some women to start their families earlier. Above age 25, the baby bump was also pronounced for women ages 30-34 and women with a college education, who were more likely to benefit from working from home. The data for California track the U.S. data closely and suggest that U.S. births remained elevated through the third quarter of 2022.
What happened to the starter home? It's been squeezed out of existence in large part by government regulations and policies, suggests Emily Badger in The New York Times. American builders used to construct "starter homes"—small-ish but enough for a family, "no-frills homes that would give a family new to the country or a young couple with student debt a foothold to build equity"—that would sell for around $100,000 or so in the 1990s and $200,000 in today's dollars. But "the affordable end of the market has been squeezed from every side. Land costs have risen steeply in booming parts of the country. Construction materials and government fees have become more expensive. And communities nationwide are far more prescriptive today than decades ago about what housing should look like and how big it must be. Some ban vinyl siding. Others require two-car garages. Nearly all make it difficult to build the kind of home that could sell for $200,000 today."
"Nationwide, the small detached house has all but vanished from new construction," notes Badger. "Only about 8 percent of new single-family homes today are 1,400 square feet or less. In the 1940s, according to CoreLogic, nearly 70 percent of new houses were that small."
The price of land is one problem. Permits and fees from local governments are another.
In Portland, Ore., a lot may cost $100,000. Permits add $40,000-$50,000. Removing a fir tree 36 inches in diameter costs another $16,000 in fees.
"You've basically regulated me out of anything remotely on the affordable side," said Justin Wood, the owner of Fish Construction NW.>>
The issue comes at a time when smaller homes are in high demand.
Badger followed up the above piece (published in late September) with another on starter homes, asking "If America needs starter homes, why are perfectly good ones being torn down?"
This is outrageous. A 72-year-old U.S. citizen was sentenced to 16 years in prison and subject to torture in *Saudi Arabia* for years-old tweets he posted while in the United States. His son is accusing the State Department of mishandling the case. https://t.co/RiUEvKZ1lC pic.twitter.com/x1bFuHkQsN
— Sarah McLaughlin (@sarahemclaugh) October 18, 2022
• Don't blame migrants and "open borders" for fentanyl entering the country, writes Reason's Fiona Harrigan.
• GloriFi, billed as a conservative alternative to the likes of PayPal and traditional banks, is off to a rocky start.
• Student loan debt relief ranks low on the issues that young voters are concerned with:
Only 8 percent of 18-29 yo voters list student debt relief as a top issuehttps://t.co/4don2sfhq6 pic.twitter.com/fuVWIXslNk
— dylan matthews (@dylanmatt) October 17, 2022
• Abortion pills are increasingly being smuggled across the U.S. border, reports The Washington Post. "Those interviewed described a pipeline that typically begins in Mexico, where activist suppliers funded largely by private donors secure pills for free as in-kind donations or from international pharmacies for as little as $1.50 a dose. U.S. volunteers then receive the pills through the mail — often relying on legal experts to help minimize their risk — before distributing them to pregnant women in need."
• "The trend that Substack is part of is not a newsletter trend, or even the much-hyped creator economy. We are part of a seismic shift in the media economy that is all about writer and creator ownership and independence," the platform suggests.
• Inside the identity crisis at The New York Times.
• The myth of the omniscient authoritarian.
The post Don't Believe the People Blaming Crime on Defunded Police appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell has been living in an apartment in a city-owned building without paying rent, and city officials said that appears to violate no policies. The apartment in the historic Upper Portalba building has a rent of $2,991 a month. But no rent on the apartment was paid from September 2021 through July 2022.
The post Brickbat: Living Large appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>New Orleans city policy requires employees flying on city business to take the lowest airfare possible or to reimburse the city the difference if they upgrade. But so far this year, Mayor LaToya Cantrell has run up $29,000 in first- and business-class airfare costs above what it would have cost her to fly coach. She said the city policy does not apply to her, and she will not refund any of that money to the city. Cantrell said she flies first class because it is safer. "Anyone who wants to question how I protect myself just doesn't understand the world black women walk in," she said. Her aides fly coach.
The post Brickbat: Flying High appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As Major League Baseball on Thursday takes to a remote Iowa cornfield for its second annual Field of Dreams game in commemoration of the nostalgic 1989 Kevin Costner film, it's worth reflecting that at least five different governments are cobbling together a deal to spend a combined $45 million in taxpayer money on a proposed 3,000-capacity stadium to be built on the site of the movie and game.
And, if politicians get their way, the finishing touches on the financing will come from the federal government's coronavirus relief fund.
The details, as laid out last week in a terrific Des Moines Register article, are, with the exception of the COVID-19 twist, distressingly familiar for anyone who has followed the $20 billion sports-facility-welfare building boom that began almost immediately after Field of Dreams wrapped its theatrical run. There's the tax increment financing, the gauzy promises of future economic development ("a very good investment in the future"), the hand-waving at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the extraction and proposed expenditure of hotel taxes, and the hand-over-heart appeals to the hoariest of Americana.
"We have to fund projects that can bring us together," Dubuque Mayor Brad Cavanagh told the newspaper. "We have to find things that are going to lead us in a direction of unification rather than tearing us apart."
As you read the dizzying Register passage below about the overlapping governmental shovelings into this heartland sinkhole, here are some contextual data points to keep in mind: Dyersville, Iowa, the site of the project, has 4,000 residents; its annual budget in fiscal year 2021–22 was $9.5 million. Dubuque, the nearest city (25 miles away) of any size (60,000), had an operating budget that year of $139 million. The government of Dubuque County (pop. 99,000) spent about $70 million in 2021–22.
So that's around $220 million a year the relevant local administrations spend, compared to a price tag of $50 million for a stadium whose main projected revenue would come from one (currently non-guaranteed) baseball game per year.
We may be talking Iowa here, but the governmental financing package is positively Byzantine:
In an application to the Iowa Economic Development Authority, submitted in May and adjusted in June, the city of Dyersville asked for $12.5 million in funding through Destination Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds' $100 million pool for tourism projects, funded with federal American Rescue Plan Act coronavirus relief money. …
A Destination Iowa award is only one piece of potential taxpayer funding for the project. The city of Dubuque committed $1 million. Dubuque County committed $5 million. The city of Dyersville committed $1 million and plans to offer another $13 million in tax increment financing.
The U.S. Economic Development Administration granted Dyersville $1.5 million to build water and sewer lines last September. The state of Iowa kicked in another $11 million of federal funds for the same purpose in January.
All told, the Destination Iowa grant would raise the amount of public funding to $45 million—90% of the budget for the $50 million stadium. That does not count $500,000 contributed by Travel Dubuque, a local tourism nonprofit largely funded with hotel-motel tax revenue.
Remember when politicians used to complain about austerity?
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, enacted in March 2021, was sold as helping the country and the economy to recover from COVID-19, not building sparsely-used entertainment venues years in the future. (In actuality, the money has been used to bail out government-run golf courses and hand out bonuses to state employees, among other boondoggles.)
Instead of rescuing America, the proposed repurposed Rescue Plan funds would greatly help the bottom line of Hall of Fame White Sox slugger, television personality, and testosterone-booster pitchman Frank Thomas, who earned more than $100 million during his playing career alone.
The stadium would be owned by This is Iowa Ballpark, a new nonprofit controlled by the city of Dyersville, Dubuque County, Travel Dubuque, the Dyersville Economic Development Corp. and Go The Distance, a development group helmed by MLB Hall of Famer Frank Thomas.
Go The Distance, which owns the movie site, announced in April that it plans to spend $80 million to develop the area surrounding where the stadium would stand. Its plans call for nine baseball and softball fields, dorms, a fieldhouse, a fishing pond, walking trails, an RV park, an amphitheater and a 104-room hotel.
According to Dyersville's application for Destination Iowa funds, This is Iowa Ballpark would lease the stadium to Go The Distance.
The history of local governments building sports facilities and then leasing them to private (and oftentimes, rich) owners is filled with sorrow. Especially in smaller towns.
"These partners have heard the message from the movie Field of Dreams: 'If you build it, they will come,'" New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman said in 2000, paraphrasing the movie's most famous line while breaking ground on a $24 million minor league ballpark in Camden, one of seven the Garden State financed from 1994 to 2001. "Soon we will see a field of dreams right here in Camden, and my prediction is they will come."
By 2015, Whitman's taxpayer-financed stadium stood empty. (Read Eric Boehm's 2019 article about New Jersey's calamitous stadium welfare binge.)
All of this wasted human effort has been depressingly predictable and exhaustively documented, for decades. Back in 2000, economist Raymond Keating made the stone-obvious yet apparently still elusive point that, "Another major downside to government-built and -owned ballparks is that clubs are transformed from owners to renters. It is always easier for a renter to move to get a better deal. So, government officials who advocate taxpayer-funded sports facilities to attract or keep a team virtually ensure that teams will continue issuing threats and moving."
Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury (who wrote for Reason about Atlanta Braves stadium welfare back in April) collaborated with fellow academics Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys on a paper earlier this year surveying more than 130 studies of the economic effects of subsidized sports-venue construction over the past three decades. Conclusion?
"Nearly all empirical studies find little to no tangible impacts of sports teams and facilities on local economic activity, and the level of venue subsidies typically provided far exceeds any observed economic benefits," the authors wrote. "In total, the deep agreement in research findings demonstrates that sports venues are not an appropriate channel for local economic development policy."
But also: "Despite the consensus findings of economic studies that the benefits of hosting professional sports franchises are not sufficient to justify large public subsidies, taxpayer funding for these subsidies continues to grow. This paradox reveals a disconnect between findings in economic research and policy applications that requires correcting."
Bradbury's Twitter reaction to the Register article (in which he's quoted): "Another nomination for the Hall of Terrible Ideas."
When grown men choke up as they recount Field of Dreams, no doubt they are thinking of the film's final scene, where Kevin Costner, in the ballpark he irrationally plowed a cornfield to build after listening to the voices in his head, is finally able to play a restorative game of catch with his long-dead dad. As the camera pans out we see a line of cars in the distance, heading toward the Dyersville ballpark, in fulfillment of a prophecy given just minutes before by the novelist character played by James Earl Jones:
People will come, Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up in your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it.
If baseball fans and cineastes want to cough up $20 ($48 in today's money) to feel the magical realism up close, I'm all in favor. But taxpayers with all manner of entertainment tastes have for too long been unwittingly passing their money to subsidize rich people profiting off the nostalgia industry. There is nothing "innocent" about this racket; it's morally obscene.
As Dan Moore concluded last week in an outstanding retrospective of Camden Yards, the heavily subsidized and deeply influential Baltimore Orioles stadium that just celebrated its 30th anniversary: "At a certain point—stretched too far, tested by too many unignorable, ignominious costs—the hypnosis becomes untenable, and losing yourself earnestly in a game, a season, or in the longer-tail travails of your favorite team becomes impossible, no matter how beautiful or beloved your surroundings. You find yourself thinking, instead, about how much the person sitting in the owner's box behind home plate or above the 50-yard line has profited from the one-sided partnership that you, as a taxpayer and fan, have unwittingly borne the economic brunt of."
BONUS LINKS: I critiqued Field of Dreams last week on the Gutting the Sacred Cow podcast. And Nick Gillespie interviewed Bradbury in 2013 about why stadium subsidies always win:
The post Field of Welfare: How COVID Funds Might Build a Money-Losing Ballpark in a Cornfield appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Pandemic funds used to hire parking cops, pay for prisons, build hotels. At a time when many residents were struggling due to job losses and loss of business, the District of Columbia ramped up efforts to wring money out of them—and spent federal pandemic aid to do so.
The city spent $2.5 million in federal relief funds to hire more parking cops, according to new reporting from the Associated Press.
Alas, D.C. is far from the only jurisdiction that used money meant to help people to police them instead.
For instance, the city of Los Angeles received $639,450,464 from the American Rescue Plan last year and spent 50 percent of it on Los Angeles Police Department payroll, according to Kenneth Meija, an accountant running for L.A. Comptroller.
In cities around the country, pandemic relief funds went to either ordinary police costs or to increase policing capabilities—sometimes in questionable ways.
"Albuquerque spent $3 million on a gunshot tracking system that isn't actually effective," notes Mic. "Honolulu bought its cops a $150,000 robot dog to monitor unhoused populations. In Wisconsin, Republican lawmakers pushed to use federal funds to create $5,000 signing bonuses to recruit new officers."
Police spending is only one way cities misused pandemic funds:
Thanks to a sudden $140 million cash infusion, officials in Broward County, Florida, recently broke ground on a high-end hotel that will have views of the Atlantic Ocean and an 11,000-square-foot spa.
In New York, Dutchess County pledged $12 million for renovations of a minor league baseball stadium to meet requirements the New York Yankees set for their farm teams.
And in Massachusetts, lawmakers delivered $5 million to pay off debts of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate in Boston, a nonprofit established to honor the late senator that has struggled financially.
The three distinctly different outlays have one thing in common: Each is among the scores of projects that state and local governments across the United States are funding with federal coronavirus relief money despite having little to do with combating the pandemic, a review by The Associated Press has found.
The expenditures amount to a fraction of the $350 billion made available through last year's American Rescue Plan to help state and local governments weather the crisis. But they are examples of uses of the aid that are inconsistent with the rationale that Democrats offered for the record $1.9 trillion bill: The cash was desperately needed to save jobs, help those in distress, open schools and increase vaccinations.
Pandemic relief funds also went to building new prisons (Alabama), remodeling a City Hall (Woonsocket, Rhode Island), overhauling a tourism website (Alexandria, Virginia), golf course irrigation systems (Colorado Springs), and a museum to honor cyclist Major Taylor (Worcester, Massachusetts).
A number of cities and states have used funds to purchase "gunshot detection" tech. It isn't actually effective, but cities and state are still spending millions in pandemic relief funds on ShotSpotter devices.
"Officials in some jurisdictions have been nothing short of gleeful over the prospect of using pandemic relief funds to expand carceral infrastructure," notes The Appeal:
In February, administrators of the Oklahoma County Jail were caught on a voicemail recording calling COVID-19 "our friend" and "the greatest thing that has ever happened to us." The jail had already received $10 million in federal funding under the 2020 CARES Act, and during the recorded conversation officials expressed hope that they'd receive "another $150 million" from ARPA. More than a dozen people died in the custody of the Oklahoma County Jail in 2021, and several more have died so far this year.
Keep all this in mind when the Biden administration and federal lawmakers talk about needing to dole out more money to help with pandemic-related problems (or high gas prices, or climate issues, or whatever the current crisis/excuse might be). These are effectively programs to make politicians look good, not to funnel funds to where they're actually needed.
Lawyer Ken White—aka "Popehat"—tackles the recent New York Times op-ed on free speech:
We should have a thoughtful conversation about whether modern American culture encourages us to react excessively and even cruelly to speech we don't like, how that impacts people, and what we should do about it.
The New York Times' Editorial Board did not offer such a thoughtful conversation in its piece "America Has a Free Speech Problem," which discusses oft-invoked "cancel culture." It's vexingly unserious.
The problems begin in the lede, which the Editorial Board used on social media to promote the piece:
For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.
This is sheer nonsense from the jump. Americans don't have, and have never had, any right to be free of shaming or shunning. The First Amendment protects our right to speak free of government interference. It does not protect us from other people saying mean things in response to our speech. The very notion is completely incoherent. Someone else shaming me is their free speech, and someone else shunning me is their free association, both protected by the First Amendment.
White stipulates that he's not denying "that there are ever any unfair, disproportionate, or evil responses to speech," but he thinks we need to get more serious in defining what we mean by cancel culture. "Simply complaining about it in the abstract, without attempts to define it, without actionable responses, and without taking the rights of 'cancellers' doesn't ease the culture war. It inflames it," he suggests.
Read the whole thing here.
A Tennessee court has ruled that the state letting game wardens enter and inspect people's property without a warrant is unconstitutional. "The ruling is not just a victory for Benton County landowners Terry Rainwaters and Hunter Hollingsworth, who sued with the Institute for Justice (IJ) after the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) ignored their 'No Trespassing' signs by entering and installing cameras on their land," notes IJ. "The victory also applies broadly to private land across Tennessee."
Earlier this week we covered proposals—some better than others—to help people pay for gas. Would it surprise you to hear that California has gone the bad way?
BREAKING: @GavinNewsom unveils gas relief package:
-$400 rebate per registered car, max 2 cars. Payments could start in July
-$750M for 3 mos free public transit
-Up to $600M to pause part of diesel sales tax for 1 yr
-$523M to pause inflation adjustment to gas, diesel excise tax— Emily Hoeven (@emily_hoeven) March 23, 2022
NEWS: US is now officially alleging war crimes by Russia.
.@SecBlinken: "Today, I can announce that, based on information currently available, the U.S. government assesses that members of Russia's forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine."
— Josh Lederman (@JoshNBCNews) March 23, 2022
• "The White House has quietly assembled a team of national security officials to sketch out scenarios of how the United States and its allies should respond if President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — frustrated by his lack of progress in Ukraine or determined to warn Western nations against intervening in the war — unleashes his stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons," reports The New York Times.
• Airline CEOs want an end to pandemic rules for flights. "Now is the time for the administration to sunset federal transportation travel restrictions – including the international predeparture testing requirement and the federal mask mandate – that are no longer aligned with the realities of the current epidemiological environment," wrote the heads of 10 U.S.-based airlines, including Delta, in a letter to President Joe Biden.
• Male birth control pills get a step closer to reality: "In new preliminary research, a team says they've developed a non-hormonal form of male birth control, one that kept lab mice sterile for four to six weeks with seemingly no side effects. Early human trials of the pill are expected to begin by the end of the year."
• Belgium is decriminalizing selling and paying for sex, making it the first European country to officially do so.
• RIP Madeleine Albright.
• "Turns out marijuana really is a gateway drug — for America's statehouses, anyway": Politico looks at the spate of measures to decriminalize hallucinogens.
• New research looks at the economic costs of rejecting refugees:
"Trump-era refugee restrictions permanently reduce the US economy by $9.1 billion each year." https://t.co/s1a7nSU7cs Near 300,000 fewer refugees multiplied by their net contribution to the economy.
New, jaw-dropping research from Michael Clemens (@M_Clem)
— David Evans (@DaveEvansPhD) March 23, 2022
The post D.C. Spent $2.5 Million in Pandemic Relief Funds on Parking Cops appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>At a time of rising food inflation, food taxes are increasingly in the news. And while some cities and states have seen fit to reject taxes on foods sold by grocers or restaurants, others are going in exactly the wrong direction.
Food taxes have made headlines recently in Minnesota, Oregon, Utah, and Kansas. In Sartell, Minnesota, for example, residents will vote in a special election in February that will determine whether the city will impose a tax on foods sold by restaurants and bars there.
A pair of similar votes took place in Oregon this month, with mixed results. Last week, voters in Newport, Oregon, rejected a proposed five-percent tax on prepared foods and beverages sold by restaurants and bars. Supporters claimed the proposed tax would have added more than $2 million to city coffers in its first year.
While Newport's mayor had touted the tax as a way to address an "impending structural deficit," the city had proposed to use the money to hire new staff, including a parking-enforcement officer, and to spend around $200,000 "for one-time grants to assist businesses in implementing collection of the new tax."
Opponents, on the other hand, explained why the proposed tax was unfair—citing everything from the impact of food inflation on residents' abilities to feed themselves and their families to the effects of COVID-19 and related restrictions on the restaurant industry, which is struggling still to recover.
"No industry was more negatively impacted by COVID-19 than the hospitality industry," Mike Franklin, owner of Newport Chowder Bowl, told the Newport News before last week's vote.
"Massive layoffs of employees, complete shutdowns or limited hours of operation, limits on indoor dining and increased prices or shortages from suppliers have all contributed to devastate the restaurant industry."
In Cannon Beach, a couple hours up the Oregon coast from Newport, voters chose to adopt a similar 5 percent food tax by a narrow 52-48 margin. Funds raised from the tax will be used to build a new city hall and police department offices.
Before the vote, Shelly Crane, who owns local business Oil and Vinegar Bar and opposed the measure, questioned both the tax and how funds raised by it would be allocated.
"Do we need a new city hall, probably[. D]o we need it now? No," Crane told the Cannon Beach Gazette. "The timing of this is horrible, they are not thinking what affect this will have on restaurants. We have all been hit hard due to the pandemic."
While Oregon municipalities went in different directions on restaurant food taxes, in neighboring Utah, lawmakers are considering abolishing that state's grocery food tax altogether.
According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a nonpartisan group in Washington, D.C. that opposes food taxes, Utah is one of 13 states that taxes residents' grocery purchases. State Rep. Rosemary Lesser (D–Ogden), who's pushing to repeal the state's food tax, said she's worried about the regressive nature of such taxes.
"For people who are living paycheck to paycheck, the food demands don't change, and people sometimes have to choose between a roof over their head and finding food from whatever sources they can," she told Utah Public Radio last month. In a separate op-ed last month, State Rep. Lesser also noted that a food tax "disproportionately hurts low-income Utahns and contributes to food insecurity."
In Kansas, similar arguments have been raised as part of efforts to repeal or reduce that state's food tax. And it's also become a campaign issue in the state's looming gubernatorial race.
While current Democratic Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly campaigned in 2018 on a promise to cut the state's food tax, the current leading GOP candidate for the state's top job, Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, said last week, in remarks reported the Topeka Capital-Journal, that Gov. Kelly has dropped the ball on repealing or reducing the state's food tax, which the CBPP says is the nation's second-highest, after Mississippi's.
"This issue has had bipartisan support since long before Laura Kelly was governor," Schmidt said. "It's true that then-candidate Kelly campaigned on this in 2018, and it's also true that three years into her administration she has completely failed to deliver on that promise."
Food has long been a popular target for those seeking to squeeze more tax dollars out of consumers. "The same factors that make food taxes so attractive to lawmakers are what make them so odious to many consumers: they're all-but-impossible to avoid," I opined in a 2017 column. "Everyone buys food; food taxes punish everyone who buys food."
As I've also noted, when governments claim higher food taxes somehow won't impact prices paid by consumers, critics who disagree are inevitably proven correct. When food prices are sky high and countless restaurants are struggling to survive—both the case today—food taxes are particularly unjust and unwelcome. That's why any discussion of food taxes today must focus on the need to reduce or eliminate them altogether.
The post Government Officials Hunger for More Revenue Through Food Taxes appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Voters in Denver, Colorado, approved ballot measures on Tuesday authorizing the city government to issue bonds to spruce up parks, renovate homeless shelters, and upgrade public transit.
They rejected just one portion of Mayor Michael Hancock's five-part, $450 million bond proposal: the one that would have directed $190 million of that borrowing toward the construction of a new multi-use stadium near the city's hip River North neighborhood. While the first four parts of Hancock's proposal won support from at least 60 percent of voters, 58 percent rejected the stadium subsidy, according to The Denver Post's election tracker.
The stadium project was the most contentious of the bond issues. Hancock trotted out the usual claims, arguing that the new stadium (and upgrades to the neighboring National Western Center, a rodeo complex) would "create year-round jobs and provide funding for community programs and projects important for the well-being of surrounding communities." But the election results would suggest that the residents of the city disagree. If it had been approved, the stadium project would have soaked up 35 percent of the funding in the mayor's proposal, and many people felt "the money would be better spent elsewhere," Colorado Politics reports.
Indeed, there are few more effective ways to waste $190 million than by throwing it into stadium projects, which almost always underperform the lofty promises made about how they will generate jobs, tax revenue, and business opportunities. And when given the opportunity to block those projects, voters seem less likely to be duped these days.
Denver's proposed new stadium was one of three similar projects to get a resounding thumbs-down from the public during this week's elections. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, a proposal that would have spent $50 million in public money on a $70 million stadium for the city's minor league soccer team was rejected by 65 percent of voters. That happened despite Mayor Tim Keller—a vocal proponent of the project—winning reelection and despite voters approving all the other bond measures on the ballot, Field of Schemes blogger Neil deMause notes.
"The people of Albuquerque also made it clear they want public resources used on other community and social priorities," Stop the Stadium, a group that led opposition to the Albuquerque project, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, 65 percent of voters in Augusta, Georgia, rejected a similar bond issue that would have seen the city take on debt to fund the construction of a $235 million stadium for a yet-to-be-determined future occupant (possibly a minor league hockey team). The cost of the new stadium was projected to add about $100 to the average property tax bill in the city—all to create "a handful of new permanent jobs," according to The Augusta Chronicle. Who wouldn't vote for that?
But voters in Augusta might not have the final say on whether their wallets get raided for the project. Brad Usry, vice chairman of the county authority that would run the new stadium, told the Chronicle last month that a "no" vote would "only delay the project so the authority can find other means of funding it."
So voters were asked to give their approval for the stadium project, but rejecting it apparently doesn't count? Cool democracy you have there, Augusta.
For the proponents of stadium boondoggles, however, Tuesday's results are probably just one more reason to prefer backroom deals—like the super swampy agreement that brought the newly crowned World Series champion Atlanta Braves to their home in Cobb County, Georgia—over an open, democratic process. And that's why more cities should embrace an idea pioneered in Boise, Idaho, two years ago and mandate that stadium projects get a public referendum.
If stadiums really were the cash cows that cities promise they are, there would be ample private funding for them. After all, cities don't need to use public funds to build commercial properties like warehouses and office buildings—because those projects can be reliably trusted to turn a profit.
Tuesday's results demonstrate once again that taxpayers are generally unwilling to hand over their money (or be on the hook for borrowed funds) to finance the sportsball dreams of politicians and team executives.
The post Voters Don't Want To Pay for Your Dumb Stadium appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The City of San Francisco is almost three years and half a million dollars into an effort to design and deploy the perfect garbage can. The Board of Supervisors has voted to spend $427,500 to build five prototypes each of three models designed by a firm it hired in 2018 and test them. Why not use models already in production and used by local governments across the nation? They aren't pretty enough. In the meantime, the estimated cost to mass produce whichever model is chosen has risen from $1,000 each to at least $2,000 and possibly as much as $5,000. "The idea that San Francisco is so unique that we need a separate trash can from anyone deployed in any city around the world is preposterous," said Supervisor Matt Haney. "It's something that reflects a broader and deeper brokenness of city government and the services it provides." Haney nevertheless voted to approve the money to build and test the prototypes.
The post Brickbat: A Load of Garbage appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The first person to qualify for an Inglewood, California, program that subsidizes the purchase of a first home just happened to be a city employee. In fact, Jazmine Covington just happened to work for the city's Housing Authority when the guidelines for the program were being developed, though she left to work in another department late last year. Oh, and her mother is the acting city budget manager. But Housing Manager Roberto Chavez doesn't want you thinking anything funny went on. "The City maintained strict compliance with the rules and regulations of the housing lottery at all times," Chavez said in an email to a local paper. "There have been no violations of its policies nor special exceptions made for any entrant, including Ms. Covington."
The post Brickbat: It's Who You Know appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Everybody knows about those infamous speed traps where small-town law enforcement officers lurk in their vehicles, ready to pounce on anyone going even slightly over the legal limit and to fine the unlucky driver hundreds of dollars.
Many folks understand that the police often do this not to protect public safety but to empty people's wallets, but it's not easy to see how extensive these practices are and how dependent cities and towns have become on this money. So Data Editor Mike Maciag at Governing (a magazine sadly soon to be defunct) embarked on an extensive national analysis to determine which communities' budgets are overly dependent on fines.
He found that in nearly 600 jurisdictions across the country, fines are used to fund more than 10 percent of the general fund. In 284 of those cities and towns, revenues from fines account for more than 20 percent of the budget.
As the stereotype suggests, many of these places are rural towns in southern states such as Georgia, Texas, and Louisiana. But others are scattered across the country, and there are fairly high concentrations in New York, Ohio, and Illinois as well.
Some cities' tendency to try to fine their way to solvency got a lot of attention after Michael Brown's fatal shooting by police in Ferguson, Missouri. The anger there was driven not just by Brown's shooting, but also by an environment where the police were keeping their paychecks coming by constantly finding reasons to levy fines on its primarily low-income African-American residents—and then jailing people when they couldn't pay, which just further compounded the citizens' problems.
Ferguson wasn't the only town in St. Louis County with such issues. The Institute for Justice sued nearby Pagedale for a regime of petty citations so extensive that the local government had fined more than a third of its own citizens. The town literally handed out more code enforcement citations in a year than it had households. The town agreed in 2015 to reform its ways, but it still shows up on Governing's list. Still, things have improved there. Back when the Institute for Justice sued, it was getting a quarter of its revenue from fines. Now it's getting 11.2 percent.
The towns most dependent on fines are in Louisiana, the state with the second-highest incarceration rate in the United States. Places like Fenton and Georgetown—tiny villages with populations measured in the hundreds—get more than 90 percent of their revenue from fines. This happens because these towns are often poor and don't have an actual tax base to serve as a foundation for revenue. And so the police resort to speed traps and fines. In some locations, the goal is to hit travelers from outside of the community, but in other towns and cities, the citizens themselves are subjected to harsh punishments for small offenses.
But it's not all small towns. The largest city to appear on the list is Chicago, where fines and forfeitures account for 11 percent of the city's general fund—nearly $340 million. That shouldn't surprise anybody who has read Reason's coverage of Chicago's operations, particularly C.J. Ciaramella's reporting on the city's vehicle impound racket, which was followed by yet another lawsuit by the Institute for Justice.
While many local leaders insist that they're merely protecting public safety by preventing speeding and drunk driving, some of these towns actually include projected revenue from fines and forfeitures into future budgets, creating obvious incentives for police to levy fines and for courts to show no mercy. In Oklahoma, for example, the money from fines gets routed directly back into police and public safety funds. That's quite an incentive. And as Governing notes, there are consequences:
Some of the most problematic practices are found in small municipal courts with little state oversight. New York is home to approximately 1,300 town and village courts that, unlike the larger state-run city courts, keep most of their revenues from fines and fees. That means those judges have an incentive to show that their courts earn back the money spent on them, given that they're funded almost entirely by the locality, says Amelia Starr, chair of the Fund for Modern Courts, which promotes access to justice in New York state courts. "Almost any state that has courts that generate money for their locality in small towns is vulnerable to exactly these kinds of pressures," Starr says.
This arrangement carries serious ramifications for those facing charges. A Fund for Modern Courts survey of defense attorneys and public defenders reported that courts in 43 New York counties, or most of the state, "rarely" or "never" took a defendant's ability to pay into account before issuing a bench warrant.
Criminal justice reformers are now pushing reforms to reduce the use of fines and forfeitures as a revenue-generating tool. For more about the extent of the problem and how some towns are trying to make changes, read Governing's report here.
The post Is Your Hometown Balancing Its Budget by Fining Everybody It Can? Here's How To Find Out. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There were many problems with how Amazon's search for the site of its new "HQ2" corporate offices went down.
There were the over-the-top subsidies that state and local governments offered to entice the tech giant to their borders. Then there was the general lack of transparency for the taxpayers footing the bill. And who could forget the sometimes-nauseating press for this torrid competition in corruption, as if an extension of government privileges to a favored mega-firm was some kind of fairy tale love story.
All of this has served Amazon quite well. The downsides, when they did crop up, were minimal.
There was a good amount of criticism over how public officials slavishly courted Amazon with favors and favoritism. No matter: the company merely leveraged its position to muzzle officials of the 20 regions that made the shortlist.
What have gone less discussed are the many indirect ways in which policymakers were unknowingly deputized to bolster Amazon's bottom line. It really was ingenious on Amazon's part. They have been able to not only have their pick of the nation's plum and primed office space, they will be able to monetize the resulting data too.
On the simplest level, consider the company's last minute decision to split its satellite offices (are they really "headquarters" anymore?) between two cities.
Despite the dramatics of its national sweepstakes, Amazon reportedly is about to announce it has selected two early-anticipated locations: Queens, N.Y. and Crystal City, Va. (located right outside D.C.). This puts the company close to the levers of financial and political power.
Choosing two locations benefits Amazon more generally. First, the company can enjoy two incentive packages at the same time. This maximizes the company's taxpayer-funded benefits while possibly minimizing taxpayer-lodged complaints.
How? Well, fear of increased resident costs was a big NIMBY argument against any HQ2 move to their town, subsidized or not. The tens of thousands of jobs that Amazon would bring might be a feather in officials' caps, but they would not all be manned by locals. An incoming horde of highly-paid techies would raise rents and stress local infrastructure.
Splitting the offices could split the pressures, and therefore take some heat off Amazon. Leaders in Queens and Crystal City may be disappointed to not be the "only" HQ2. But they are not exactly in a place to complain. To save face, they may end up promoting Amazon-preferred public narratives. And it is doubtful that they will amend their incentive package to reflect the new reality.
The double-dipped tax goodies and dispersed costs for these two towns are just the start. Really, each of the 238 regions that participated in the search was taken for a ride.
The Amazon HQ2 search was not about HQ2: it was market research.
The mayors and governors and councilmen and commissioners and local developers of America handed priceless information about their plans, investments, and reserve prices to Jeff Bezos for free.
What could Amazon do with this data?
For starters, Amazon now knows exactly what each area is willing to pay for a shot at some sweet tech investment. This gives the company a nice, fat Rolodex for the next time it needs to open a suite. And we can be sure they'll be jonesing for more treats on the next round.
There is a competition angle as well. Think about what Amazon does. It is an e-commerce company, responsible for almost half of all online retail in the US. This means it is also a logistics company, and may soon specialize further in innovative transport methods. It is a cloud computing provider, powering some 40 percent of application workloads with its global server network. And it is a consumer product company in its own right, offering branded merchandise, gadgets, media, and even credit as part of its sprawling empire.
Amazon is now privy to information about where different municipalities are going to direct investment and infrastructure in the near future. The company can exploit this information.
Use your imagination. Maybe Amazon just happens to purchase a new fulfillment center right around a soon-to-be-developed locale which would see increased demand for Amazon products. Maybe it simply decides to squat on land for a while, knowing that it will soon be smack dab in a hive of activity. A new brick-and-mortar store? They'll have the option. Or maybe knowing where news roads will be built will make it easier for Amazon to plan transit routes. There's profit to be extracted from this data that you and I could not even conceive.
This can be defensive, too. Perhaps Amazon knows something that Wal-Mart does not, so it makes a loss-leading move in that area just to knock the other guy out.
The possibilities are as imposing as Amazon's ambitions.
Perhaps most remarkable is how Amazon's gambit pushed government functionaries to do all of this for free. Actually, it was sometimes better than free: Officials tried to shower Amazon representatives with gifts and even vanity names. All Amazon had to do was dangle the promise of an already-needed office park before public officials, who then scrambled to deliver the goods. Fear of missing out lead officials to offer more than they otherwise might have, and Amazon ended up picking two cities (and two sweeteners) anyway.
Other mega-corporations are surely studying this affair closely. Will they follow Amazon's lead? It must be very tempting. Of course, not everyone is an "Amazon," able to make people divulge how high they can jump before even being asked. But for those who can—why not?
A very destructive kind of precedent is being set here that might exceed the potential damage to municipal budgets and market competition. We apparently find ourselves in a culture that is not only okay with the idea of a corporate hunt for data and privilege—it is downright cheered on.
Our recourse looks scant, and Amazon can't exactly unlearn what policymakers fell over themselves to reveal. So the task is to prevent this from happening again.
We cannot rely on corporations to not push for government perks where they can be gleaned. Nor can we apparently rely on our politicians to abstain from costly and counterproductive toadying. They must be tied to the mast: An interstate compact against these arrangements may be just the ticket.
Unfortunately, coordinating these leaders to cooperate for everyone's eventual benefit is easier described than achieved. The unceremonious conclusion of the HQ2 con will ideally give impetus for reform.
The post HQ2: How Amazon Made Governments Do Their Bidding for Free appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Nashville officials spent $7.4 million in federal funds that were supposed to go to victims of the 2010 flood to design a downtown concert venue. At least two members of the City Council at the time say they were unaware of that decision, and a local TV station reports the project was not mentioned in the "action plan" council members voted on nor in the analysis prepared for them. Instead, it was listed as "civic open space with improvements" in that plan.
The post Brickbat: Raining Money appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There's a simple solution to the nation's poverty and inequality problems, an acquaintance told me several years ago. He suggested that the federal government simply give $1 million to every citizen and, voila, we'd all be rich and happy. After some quick math (323 million x $1 million = more trillions than even the U.S. Treasury can print), he realized that he didn't add enough zeroes to his cost calculation. Turning the United States into Zimbabwe, where a $1 trillion note won't even buy a soda, isn't much of an idea.
But while the above thought experiment is zany, a number of politicians and economists are proposing a similar idea—but on a much more modest scale. In fact, one of California's most impoverished cities, Stockton, is working on a proposal that would provide a "Universal Basic Income" to a small number of residents. Instead of a million bucks, the city—thanks to a grant from some Bay Area tech entrepreneurs—wants to hand out $500 a month for two years without any limits on how it's spent.
It's not as controversial as Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs' proposal last summer "that pays people not to commit crimes," as KCRA reported. But now Tubbs is back with this latest "let's just pay people" plan. The income idea is backed by a group that believes "cash is an effective way" to rebuild the American middle class. It's a pilot project that will help evaluate how this type of program works.
Tubbs makes some good points about the poor way in which his city traditionally has been trying to boost middle-class jobs and incomes. "We've overspent on things like arenas and marinas and things of that sort to try to lure in tourism and dollars that way," he told KQED News. But bad ideas shouldn't be replaced with worse ones.
I own a bungalow in Stockton and know the city well. Indeed, Stockton officials have been models for doing things the wrong way. Over the years, they've dumped redevelopment subsidies in fancy downtown projects, which remain surrounded by run-down neighborhoods and blocks of largely vacant buildings. The city also spent lavishly on compensation for city workers, which helped drive it into bankruptcy.
In general, the universal income concept is designed to replace current assistance programs. It's been touted by leftists, but even free-market economist Milton Friedman supported the concept as a means to reduce bureaucracy and end the "welfare trap." Current programs phase out as people get jobs, and the goal is to incentivize work. You can receive your payment and still work.
But analysts are downplaying crucial points. For starters, there's little chance direct payments would replace existing programs. It's like other ideas that might appeal to some people on a philosophical level. Some libertarians like a mileage-based road tax rather than the gasoline tax because it would charge people based on how much they use the freeway system. The political reality is we'd end up with a mileage tax and the gas tax.
Government does not often shutter its bureaucracies. The same holds true for these universal income proposals. Furthermore, it's foolhardy for individual cities to embrace these programs, especially since it eventually will involve oodles of public funds. Stockton's budget is crumbling under the weight of misguided past financial decisions. It can't even provide a decent level of public services as is—let alone after it starts handing out payments to people. And incentives matter. If the city subsidizes its residents, then Stockton will become a magnet for people who most want such subsidies.
Realistically, 500 bucks a month isn't much to live on anywhere in California. If this idea takes hold, it will be followed by demands to increase the payments. I can envision the "Living Wage Coalition" that would rise up to demand more money from City Hall, the legislature or Congress. It's dangerous to make larger swaths of people dependent on the political process to secure their living. This already is the case to some degree, but this idea will make it far worse.
But my biggest fear is what it will do to the already eroded concept of work. Many people prefer to do nothing if someone else will pay their bills. "A UBI would redefine the relationship between individuals, families, communities, and the state by giving government the role of provider," wrote Oren Cass in a National Review article last year. "It would make work optional and render self-reliance moot." It's one thing to provide a safety net and another to reward sloth.
Stockton should focus on the basics. If officials keep their budget in order, rein in compensation packages for city employees and provide first-rate services and a friendly business climate, it could lure the jobs that are the key to a middle-class lifestyle. Giving away "free" money—whether it's a million bucks or 500—is a terrible idea.
This column first appeared in the Orange County Register.
The post Stockton's 'Basic Income' Plan Diverts City From Its Real Duties appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In our government's ever-escalating war on prostitution, U.S. cops continue sinking to new lows in executing sting-ops and other ploys designed to punish people willing to pay or be paid for sex. With too many recent examples to cover individually, I've decided to round up a few that have stuck out over the past month. So behold: here are a few of the foolish, counterproductive, and outright cruel ways in which U.S. authorities are spending public-safety resources to further a futile crusade against consensual commercial sex between adults.
Making Women Agree to Fetish Requests Before Arresting Them
One disturbing new trend I've noticed of late is undercover cops posing not just as vanilla sex-buyers or women looking to get cash for sex but as prostitution clients with unusual kinks or women demanding payment in things like cheeseburgers. Then, after a sex worker or would-be client is arrested by undercover officers, the police—and the media segments that parrot them—are sure to highlight the more "weird" (read: mockable and attention-grabbing) elements of the bust. For instance, in one November prostitution sting in Ohio, a woman asked an undercover cop she thought was a potential customer to bring some nachos to the appointment. She also requested a cash payment along with the snack. Guess what the police, and headlines above her photo (which is now plastered all over the internet), emphasized? Woman has sex for nachos, of course.
What makes this latest example especially egregious is that police didn't just publicize a true, albeit inconsequential and potentially embarrassing, detail that did at least originate in the real request. In this case, they set up a sting wherein sex workers advertising online were asked to oblige an undercover cop's fetish request, which involved gummy worms in some way. But the gummy-worm fetish part has no bearing on whether the elements of the crime of prostitution are satisfied, so it's hard to see why officers would include it but for their own amusement or to ensure that the sting would be irresistible to the press afterward (or both).
After one woman, whom the police-report classifies as "a known prostitute in the area," agreed to indulge the request and told the "client" to bring the gummy worms with him, she was arrested for prostitution as well as "possessing criminal tools"—her cellphone, since she used it to arrange her date with the undercover officer.
The woman spent the night in the Mahoning County (Ohio) jail and has a court date set for January. Local news headlines about the bust made it seem as if she had requested the gummy worms as payment for sex.
Arresting Teens for Interfering With Pre-Crime
Three Michigan teenagers have filed a lawsuit against Detroit police officers, after they were arrested in August for distracting a relative who was meeting a woman—an undercover police officer he thought was a sex worker—in a CVS parking lot to pay for sexual activity. Police said the teens, who had been parked outside a fast-food restaurant across the street where one of them worked, interfered in an official investigation when they flagged down the older man with shouts and arm gestures, prompting him to head over their way.
The cops contended that the teens had been yelling "don't do it," and "appeared to be discouraging the older Arabic male from talking with the decoy," according to the police report. The young men, 17-year-olds Hassan Abdallah and Ibrahim Bazzi and 18-year-old Ali Chami, claim they had simply seen Abdallah's relative and reacted like anyone might to get his attention. But even if the teens had somehow known that by pulling into a CVS parking-lot, the older man was intending to meet a sex worker, "so what?" asked defense attorney Amir Makled. "The objective of any law-enforcement official is to deter crime." And if the young men "were helping deter crime… what's going on? What's the problem?"
Makled and fellow attorney Nick Hadous suggested at a press conference that maybe the cops were "offended" that the teens had inadvertently thwarted their sex sting, or maybe their was more to the story we didn't know. But in any event, they and their clients wanted answers, and accountability—hence the lawsuit. "They charged these guys with interfering with police activity," Makled told the Detroit Free Press. "In essence, they were accused of stopping prostitution in the making … these officers were just out of control."
With Makled and Hadous' help, the teenagers got the criminal charges against them dropped in August. In November, they filed the federal lawsuit alleging "false arrest" and mistreatment. According to their lawsuit, police officers swarmed the teen's car and forced them out, searching it and placing them in handcuffs before impounding their car. One of the officers allegedly took a Snapchat photo of Bazzi in handcuffs. The officers then drove the teens around for a bit before dropping them off at a random Detroit street corner, "instead of a police station where their parents could safely pick them up," and allegedly laughed as they told the teens to walk the five miles home.
Hadous called the whole situation outrageous, nothing that the teenagers could have been hurt or "had criminal records as a result of nothing—an imaginary crime."
Arresting Teens for Something They Can't Legally Consent To
Under federal law, a teenager cannot consent to sex for money, even if they are above the age of sexual consent in the state they live in; the federal criminal code defines anyone under 18 who is involved in prostitution as a sex-trafficking victim, even if no on else is involved and they are simply "trafficking" themselves. But this doesn't stop state and local law-enforcement from routinely arresting teenagers for engaging in prostitution.
The latest examples comes out of Southport, New York, where the local NBC affiliate recently reported that two 17-year-olds, one male and one female, had been arrested for prostitution. Why this story was important enough to make TV news is beyond me, but it's notable that NBC reported on the story with no hint that this action might be at all controversial.
Funding a Ministry of Prostitution Prevention
El Paso officials have approved $31,000 in public funds to help pay the salary of a "prostitution prevention advocate" at the Center Against Sexual and Family Violence (CASFV). A statewide law pass in 2013 requires every Texas county to take a "non-adversarial" approach to prostitution, and El Paso authorities say they are complying with that law.
"A lot of people think of [prostitution] as a victim-less crime, and it's not," said Teresa Chavira, a retired police officer who now works at CASFV in a position partially funded by the city.
In total, El Paso received $150,000 from the state to hire prostitution prevention staff. "The County received the grant to establish a structured nine-month program benefiting approximately 25 women," according to KVIA.com.
The post 4 Incredibly Dumb Ways the Government Is Spending Your Money to Punish People for Having Sex appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Cincinnati's long-time-coming and controversial streetcar line officially launched last Friday, and it's already been plagued by problems and bad omens. First, a car was nonoperational on opening day. Then, a bomb threat forced the line's shutdown. And this week, the streetcar manager demanded an extra $20,000 from the city if it wants more than two cars to run during Cincy's huge annual Oktoberfest festival this weekend.
That running extra cars during extra-busy periods should prove an issue is especially damning for the streetcar, which is opposed by Cincinnati's mayor (along with much of the local business community) and was panned by Ohio Gov. John Kasich. If the streetcar is ever to be profitable, or at least cover its own operating costs, it should be on one of the rare nights of the year when Cincinnati residents are actually flocking en masse downtown. But apparently even this is too much to ask.
During most times, it's unclear who exactly the streecar—which covers a scant 3.6 square-mile portion of downtown—is meant to serve. The 18-stop route now connects areas where downtown residents and employees can either easily walk or bus or have little reason to travel between, and where visitors from the suburbs (who will already have to drive in) can find ample parking. The route was initially supposed to expand uphill toward the University of Cincinnati campus, but that plan was scrapped after Kasich pulled state funding.
With the original route, Cincinnati had originally estimated a building and prep cost of $110 million. The project was to be completed in three years. Nine years later, the ultimately much smaller route wound up costing the city $148 million, of which around $45 million came in the form of grants from the federal government.
Going forward, Cincinnati will pay the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA) a base rate of $4.2 million per year to manage the streetcar, which is operated and maintained by French company Transdev. Ramping up service during special events will cost extra—something city officials were surprised to learn earlier this week, when SORTA demanded an additional $20,000 to operate five cars, instead of the usual two, during Oktoberfest this weekend.
SORTA said its contract stipulated that it would run extra cars during special events as needed but that the city must also pay extra in such situations. City Council members said this had not been their understanding.
On Wednesday, City Manager Harry Black announced that a compromise had been reached that would not incur "any additional cost to taxpayers." But it still involves SORTA getting extra funds from the city to run an additional two (but not all five) cars this weekend. The city plans to give SORTA $7,000 in money that was leftover from its streetcar-opening budget. Advertising Vehicles, the company that sold ads on and in the streetcars, will make up any operating expenses not covered by the city money or this weekend's ticket revenue.
Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley said the city still believes that SORTA is contractually obligated to run extra cars on busy weekends, but it will work out this issue at a future time.
SORTA, a taxpayer-funded state agency whichalso runs Hamilton County and Cincinnati bus systems, is facing financial issues independent of the streetcar. The agency projects a $1.3 million budget shortfall this year, amid declines in bus ridership and fare revenue, and has begun firing staff and postponing projects in preparation.
So far, SORTA's management of the streetcar isn't inspiring much confidence in its ability to manage this public-transit option any better. Other problems faced by the streetcar in its first week include credit-card machines not working at some ticket kiosks; a fight over where to put the SORTA sticker logos on cars; and passenger-count sensors failing, leaving SORTA to merely estimate the number of opening-weekend riders.
Cincinnati officials have offered little in the way of estimated economic impact from the streetcar, which is officially called the Cincinnati Bell Connector. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, they repeatedly refused requests to talk about property values along the streetcar line, which an Enquirer analysis found had changed little since 2007.
Cincinnati's streetcar experience is looking sadly similar to streetcar boondoggles other cities—including Atlanta and Washington, D.C.—have seen recently. The Obama administration has given more than $500 million in federal money to streetcar projects over the past eight years.
The post Cincinnati Streetcar Is Exactly the Spectacular Shitshow Everyone Expected It To Be appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>San Francisco will be hosting Super Bowl 50 on February 7. More accurately, Santa Clara, where the San Francisco 49ers play at Levi's Stadium, will host the game, and San Francisco will host three related, official events in the nine days prior. The National Football League (NFL) chose the Bay Area over South Florida (Miami) back in 2013 after accepting bids from both places.
The bid for the 49ers to host the Super Bowl was actually part of the 2012 deal that let the team move out of Candlestick Park in San Francisco and to Santa Clara in 2014 in the first place. That deal promised that a "Super Bowl bid committee will be formed and jointly led by the City and the Forty Niners to work with the NFL to bring a Super Bowl to the Bay Area as early as 2016," as well as nearly $5.3 million in payments for the early lease termination.
Now, less than a month before the Super Bowl, some members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (their city council) are drawing attention to how much "hosting" the Super Bowl will cost San Francisco—$4.8 million. They are led by John Avalos, who was also on the board in 2012 that voted unanimously in favor of a deal that let the 49ers leave the city in exchange for nearly $5.3 million in payments and help getting the Super Bowl to the Bay Area.
Avalos requested the city budget analyst review the costs associated with hosting the Super Bowl after stonewalling from the mayor, whose limited numbers were ballooning. That report (PDF) estimates the cost to the city by department, with the municipal transit authority at nearly $2.4 million and the police at exactly $1.5 million, and recommended the city seek reimbursement of those costs from the NFL.
That report points to the agreement Santa Clara arrived at with the bidding committee, which mandated the committee pay a number of the associated municipal costs of hosting the Super Bowl. That agreement also waived parking fees and ticket surcharges for the game, and the hotel tax for NFL employees. This fact, however, was not in the report released by the San Francisco budget analyst, and no such exemptions by San Francisco were in the report.
The city of San Francisco, the report notes, did not make any agreements with the NFL, only with the bidding committee the city helped put together. The report concedes the city did sign letters of assurances that promised not to seek reimbursement from the NFL for police, fire, or emergency services.
The report and the supervisors who asked for it also mentions that the NFL has a larger revenue ($9.2 billion) than the city ($8.9 billion) a number of times. More importantly, only the fire department and the department of emergency management included Super Bowl associated costs in their budgets. Other departments, according to the report, were told to find the money, and did a "non-disclosure" the report calls a "disservice" to the city council. The city is facing a $100 million shortfall in the coming fiscal year, which is also mentioned a number of times by the report.
Now city supervisors are finding a convenient scapegoat. "I've said it from the beginning and this report confirms my fears: taxpayers are being sacked to pay for a party for billionaires and special interests," Supervisor Jane Kim offered in a statement. "The NFL is a multi-billion dollar corporation and can pay for its own marketing and should absolutely reimburse San Franciscans for every single cent."
Like Avalos, Jane Kim was also on the board in 2012 when it voted to get the NFL to bring the Super Bowl to the Bay area. There had been 46 Super Bowls to that point. The event hasn't transformed radically in the years since the board of supervisors approved a deal that included trying to get San Francisco to host a Super Bowl.
And how did Santa Clara avoid falling in the same trap of politicians seeking the glory of hosting "international events" (as Mayor Ed Lee "gushed" when the Bay Area was announced as the host of the 2016 Super Bowl) and then seeking to disassociate themselves from the additional costs they agree to take on when they spend taxpayer money? Voters in Santa Clara passed Measure J in 2010, which approved construction of the new 49ers stadium under several conditions, including that the city would not spend money from its general fund on stadium-related activities. Voters can demand such measures to prohibit politicians from interfering in sports without even having to approve spending on money-losing stadiums in the process. Some might say that's just the purpose of city charters, and all constitutions.
Watch Reason TV on why no smart city would want the NFL:
The kicker to our story: When San Francisco won over Miami to host the 2016 Super Bowl, the decision was credited in large part to the Florida legislature refusing to commit to public funding for a new stadium for the Dolphins.
The post San Francisco Politicians Don't Like the Deal They Made to Host the Super Bowl and Want to Blame the NFL appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Government Internet is coming to a city near you. The only question is if anything can be done to stop the politicians scheming to bring it.
Across the country, there's been an explosion in what are euphemistically called "municipal broadband" projects—government-funded and operated broadband services that are competing with community service providers that have been operating for years. All across the country, from Newark, Delaware, to Seattle, Washington, government officials are exploring the possibility of sinking hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into these projects.
This isn't a new fad: Government broadband networks have been pursued by officials since the late '90s, when smaller locales like Ashland, Oregon, and Marietta, Georgia, built out their own government-run networks. There are lots of reasons that they've proliferated in the last decade—politicians get glowing national press for their support, for example—but an important ruling by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this year has incentivized them to spread further.
In February, the FCC issued an unprecedented order, unilaterally overturning laws in 19 states that had prevented local governments from attempting to build out and compete with their own broadband networks. The given reason for this was to try to tear down barriers to competition and expand access to "advanced" broadband technology.
This was the latest in a string of FCC actions that enhanced the incentives for politicians to pursue these new projects. Just one month earlier, the FCC redefined what they meant by "advanced" broadband by more than tripling those benchmarks. And even by these new standards, 83 percent of Americans had access to advanced broadband, up from 80 percent one year earlier.
So, because a vanishingly small percentage of Americans did not have access to what the FCC determined to be sufficient internet speeds, the FCC found it necessary to unilaterally strike down state laws that were passed with overwhelming legislative support. In a statement of dissent from the FCC majority that passed this order, Republican commissioner Ajit Pai called it "unlawful" and that the FCC "usurps fundamental aspects of state sovereignty."
For now, it is the law of the land. And the sexiness of "infrastructure investment" and the ability for local bureaucrats to play like they can run a business just as well as the private sector means that the odds are pretty high that there's a taxpayer-funded local broadband network being considered near you.
Consider what's happening in Newark, Delaware, where local politicians are building a network that seems superfluous at best. The current market has 98.9% broadband penetration, and residents in Delaware enjoy the fastest average speeds of any state in the country. Broadband customers already have a choice of 16 providers. A taxpayer-funded 17th seems unlikely to increase either network penetration or speed, which are the stated goals of the FCC. In fact, the only possible justification that a project like this could have is, as their exploratory report stated, as a "revenue generator."
A committed federalist may look at some of these government broadband schemes and tell them to go for it—after all, local governments can be laboratories of democracy, and as long as they're only gambling with their own constituents' money, those constituents can vote—both with their ballots and with their feet.
Notwithstanding that making money by operating a business in a service industry has never really been a good justification for new expansions of government, it's unlikely that municipal projects like Newark's are going to function as revenue generators for local governments. The track record simply isn't there.
Take Provo, Utah, whose city-run broadband scheme was supposed to be a model for the entire country. Provo built out and launched a public-private fiber-optic broadband network that broke ground in 2001. By as soon as 2006, the network had thousands of subscribers. Yet it was steadily losing money anyway, to tune of almost $10 million per year. City officials panicked; the boondoggle was hemorrhaging money, and they were still on the hook for $39 million in loans the city took out to pay for its initial construction. After multiple rounds of proposed buyouts, Provo sold its entire fiber-optic broadband infrastructure to Google in 2013—for one dollar.
The end result was that a corporate behemoth benefited by acquiring a massive taxpayer-funded infrastructure for nothing. In the end, this cutting-edge project meant to turn Provo into a tech industry leader was just a big corporate welfare project for Google.
Marietta, Georgia, spent over $30 million on a government-run broadband network that was later sold to a private developer for only $11 million. Burlington, Vermont's network went $17 million into debt on improperly borrowed taxpayer money that contributed to a Moody's downgrade of the city's debt rating. MI-Connection, a joint government project undertaken in 2007 by multiple Charlotte, North Carolina, suburbs, racked up almost $90 million in debt in the first four years of its operation and has yet to get on sound financial footing—all while continuing to float by on taxpayer subsidies.
These are just a few of the most egregious examples. But despite project after project proving that local bureaucrats can't effectively run these private networks and despite the millions and millions that keep getting flushed, the projects keep getting planned. They're in search of a holy grail that would be well-run and provide optimal service at low prices universally and at a profit to the government.
So far, that doesn't exist.
The go-to for government broadband advocates so far has proven to be the Chattanooga EPB fiber network in Tennessee. And give them this: Unlike other government networks that have struggled to even provide service equivalent to the private sector, the Chattanooga project has actually provided competitive service to a good portion of the potential market. Local government officials tout the project as a form of stimulus, bringing jobs to the area and transforming it into a tech hub.
"It's really altered how we think of ourselves as a city," Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke said.
"We're a model for the nation and I'm proud of it," Chattanooga City Councilman Chris Anderson said.
Officials in other cities no doubt salivate at the possibility of being able to tout their own high-tech projects in such glowing terms to the press.
What goes unmentioned is the cost. Chattanooga didn't build the network cheaply, nor did they even pay for it themselves. No, it took $111 million in federal tax dollars to get the network off the ground. This was doled out to Chattanooga as a part of President Obama's stimulus program. The success that Chattanooga has had in putting federal tax money to work was actually the impetus for the FCC's unilateral, unprecedented overturn of state-level municipal broadband laws; the Chattanooga EPB wants to bring its service beyond the lines of its current authority.
We can see the folly in using Chattanooga as a model for how other municipal broadband projects could work. Not every city can use the federal government to extract money from taxpayers in other cities and states to pay for their government broadband projects. The money has to come from somewhere; the feds can't redistribute hundreds of millions to every city in the country, and the cost for these networks in larger cities would be much, much higher. A proposed network in Seattle, for example, has been projected to cost up to $660 million.
And considering how so many government infrastructure projects see cost overruns, it's likely that these estimates are all going to run on the low side. It might be the case that a successful government-run broadband service can't subsist on its own, or even with the subsidies of its own taxpayers. It might have to be paid for with the money of people who will never even have the possibility of subscribing to it.
Despite the failures, local government bureaucrats around the country are still trying to press ahead, lured by the prestige of having their own broadband networks. But there may be hope on the horizon: honest reporting and government officials who are willing to believe it.
In Seattle—a bastion of progressivism whose belief in government may usually be enough to carry the day—a report that was commissioned over the summer put their own government-run broadband network plans on ice. The report put the price tag for the network between $480-660 million merely for the infrastructure alone. Then they estimated that they'd need to own 43 percent of the broadband market in a city that Forbes ranked in 2010 as the third most-wired city in America. (Chattanooga, the "success", has a 33 percent take-up rate in its market.) These are just absolutely untenable numbers for a local broadband start-up to be looking at. Activist groups have promised, however, that this isn't the end of the government project in Seattle. A group called Upgrade Seattle has promised they won't give up the fight.
This most recent study was the seventh time in the last decade that Seattle has explored the possibility of establishing a government network. It cost the city $180,000 to commission.
We've seen failure after failure, and we've seen governments hope to live up to completely unrealistic expectations when it comes to running a competitive service in what has traditionally been a private marketplace. Unfortunately, the FCC didn't acknowledge the limitations that have caused these projects to be failures when they unilaterally overrode state laws that had governed the growth of these projects. They've now incentivized more governments to explore the idea of setting up their own boondoggles. The FCC's policy used to focus on expanding access to high-quality broadband to those who didn't have it. They've now explicitly advocated for government-owned networks—akin to the health debate's "public option"—not to expand access, but to compete on speed and price with incumbents. The truth is that these networks can only hope to exist with the support of taxpayer subsidies, and that the scales are heavily weighted towards historical failures.
Government at all levels, from the FCC to your local city hall, is conspiring to bring you the service of Comcast with the experience of the DMV. It's one of the sexiest projects that a local government can undertake. There are lawsuits in the works to overturn this year's unprecedented FCC order, but in the meantime it's the law of the land, and there may be very little to stop them as they repeat the failures that dozens of others have made, over and over again.
The post City-Run Broadband Internet Is a Disaster in the Making appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Who's responsible for those cracked sidewalks across Los Angeles? Property owners, says City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana in a new city report that suggests shifting liability and permanent maintenance of sidewalks to residential and commercial property owners. From the Los Angeles Times:
The report by City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana offers the first road map for managing a $1.4-billion, 30-year sidewalk rebuilding program required under a pending settlement of a lawsuit filed by attorneys for the disabled.
The West Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce isn't taking the news lightly. The group's president, Roozbeh Farahanipour, told the Times that local businesses would likely not support the recommendation.
"Because the businesses are paying taxes, they are assuming local government is taking care of their needs," Farahanipour said.
If only that were true. According to the report, the city doesn't even know how many miles of sidewalks exist in L.A., let alone what condition the sidewalks are in:
Previous estimates put the total sidewalk network at more than 10,000 miles, with more than 40% needing repair. There also is no centralized record-keeping on the location or condition of curb ramps.
"Without this information, it will be difficult to measure progress as the city implements its new sidewalk management strategy," the report states.
In 2013, Reason TV looked at a decentralized approach to locating these treacherous sidewalk cracks. At the time, Adrian Moore, vice president of policy at Reason Foundation, said the cracks were indicative of the kind of bureaucracy L.A. has become known for.
"One of the problems bureaucracies have, and LA in particular has, is nobody who manages these departments actually invests the management effort in saying let's be ruthless about prioritizing what's most important," said Moore. For more watch "L.A.'s New Crack Epidemic: Sidewalks":
The post Who Should Pay to Fix Cracked L.A. Sidewalks? You! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Just about every state and local government is in a financial bind because they're spending more than they take in. Public sector pensions are a major factor here. They already represent a big part of spending and they're underfunded by somewhere between one and five trillion dollars.
As those shortfalls come due, either taxpayers are going to get screwed through higher taxes and reduced services, or public sector employees are going to take a hell of a haircut. Here are three reasons to reform public sector pensions now.
Unsustainable pension payouts played a large role in the municipal bankruptcies of Detroit and Vallejo, California. In the 250 largest cities in the country, pensions on average soak up 10% of budgets, a 30% increase over just the past five years. As retirees start outnumbering workers – and the NYPD already has more former cops drawing a pension than active ones walking a beat – the amount of money spent on pensions is only going to skyrocket.
Public employees typically get to retire earlier and they pay less into their retirements than their counterparts in the private sector. On top of that, many workers game the system through often legal tricks such as "spiking" which is the act of artificially boosting the salary level on which the retirement payments are calculated. For instance, by cashing in unused sick days and vacation, Phoenix, Arizona's former city manager was able to jack up his annual retirement pay by almost $90,000 to a whopping $234,536.
Most government pensions guarantee payouts based on unrealistic investment returns. California said the investments in its pensions would return 8% every year, while actual returns have been far lower.
The result is that California's pension fund is only 42% funded. Taxpayers ultimately pick up the difference. As more public sector workers retire, pensions are only going to become a bigger and bigger issue. It's time to reform public sector pensions by reigning in lavish promises, closing loopholes, and switching over to 401k style pension plans that most private sector workers have.
Produced by Todd Krainin. Narrated and written by Nick Gillespie. Camera by Meredith Bragg.
Runs about 2:42.
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]]>This story was originally released on September 16, 2014. The original write-up is below:
Fees, fines, and petty law enforcement: Little ticky-tack violations can pile up quickly and are enough to drive even the most civic-minded citizens crazy. But they can also create an undercurrent of hostility between citizens and the government officials who are supposed to serve them. Former Reason writer Radley Balko uncovered a pattern of overzealous fee-collection in the suburbs of St. Louis county forThe Washington Post and speculated that the overbearing law enforcement helped create a pressure-cooker environment that finally exploded in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting.
"When you have towns like those in St. Louis county that get in some cases, 40 percent of their municipal revenue in fines and fees, they have chosen a very expensive way of taxing their population, one that creates maximum hassle and maximum hostility," says Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and publisher of the blog Overlawyered.
Watch the video above for Reason TV compilation of America's 3 Most Fee-Ridden Cities, listed below:
3. Detroit, Michigan
In the wake of the largest municipal bankruptcy in history, Detroit launched a variety of revenue-generating schemes, such as raising the prices of parking meters in a downtown with a rapidly dwindling population and workforce. Unfortunately for the city, about half their meters are broken, making it one of the only cities to actually lose money on parking enforcement. But what really grants Detroit this honor is "Operation Compliance," an initiative pushed by former mayor David Bing aimed at bringing all of Detroit's small businesses up to code through costly permitting. The initiative launched with the stated goal of shutting down 20 businesses a week.
2. Ferguson, Missouri
Ferguson has stayed in the news for the massive protests over the police shooting of Michael Brown and for the militarized response of law enforcement to those protests. But tension between the citizens and the government run deep in Ferguson and the other nearby St. Louis suburbs. Citizens report of being constantly harassed by law enforcment over minor violations and then being forced to navigate through an overrun court system. The Washington Post reported that one courthouse in St. Louis County had issued five arrest warrants per citizen.
1. Bell, California
Residents of this tiny California town just south of Los Angeles rose up against the local government after learning that their city officials were robbing them with high property taxes and ridiculous parking fines and city fees in order to pay themselves exorbitant salaries. The ringleader was City Manager Robert Rizzo, who paid himself $1.5 million in annual salary and benefits in a town with a per capita household income of $24,800. Rizzo is now rotting in federal prison alongside his accomplice, former Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia, but the town is still on the hook for the $137 million in debt left behind. Locals call it the "Rizzo Tax."
"Ideally, the local population would rise up and say, 'It's time to take back our town. Government is not just a revenue source. It should be an engine of justice.' Until that happens, we've got a much wider problem," says Olson.
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Paul Detrick, Tracy Oppenheimer, and Weissmueller. Approximately 4 minutes.
The post America's 3 Most Fee-Ridden Cities appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"When you have towns like those in St. Louis county that get in some cases, 40 percent of their municipal revenue in fines and fees, they have chosen a very expensive way of taxing their population, one that creates maximum hassle and maximum hostility," says Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and publisher of the blog Overlawyered.
Watch the video above for Reason TV compilation of America's 3 Most Fee-Ridden Cities, listed below:
3. Detroit, Michigan
In the wake of the largest municipal bankruptcy in history, Detroit launched a variety of revenue-generating schemes, such as raising the prices of parking meters in a downtown with a rapidly dwindling population and workforce. Unfortunately for the city, about half their meters are broken, making it one of the only cities to actually lose money on parking enforcement. But what really grants Detroit this honor is "Operation Compliance," an initiative pushed by former mayor David Bing aimed at bringing all of Detroit's small businesses up to code through costly permitting. The initiative launched with the stated goal of shutting down 20 businesses a week.
2. Ferguson, Missouri
Ferguson has stayed in the news for the massive protests over the police shooting of Michael Brown and for the militarized response of law enforcement to those protests. But tension between the citizens and the government run deep in Ferguson and the other nearby St. Louis suburbs. Citizens report of being constantly harassed by law enforcment over minor violations and then being forced to navigate through an overrun court system. The Washington Post reported that one courthouse in St. Louis County had issued five arrest warrants per citizen.
1. Bell, California
Residents of this tiny California town just south of Los Angeles rose up against the local government after learning that their city officials were robbing them with high property taxes and ridiculous parking fines and city fees in order to pay themselves exorbitant salaries. The ringleader was City Manager Robert Rizzo, who paid himself $1.5 million in annual salary and benefits in a town with a per capita household income of $24,800. Rizzo is now rotting in federal prison alongside his accomplice, former Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia, but the town is still on the hook for the $137 million in debt left behind. Locals call it the "Rizzo Tax."
"Ideally, the local population would rise up and say, 'It's time to take back our town. Government is not just a revenue source. It should be an engine of justice.' Until that happens, we've got a much wider problem," says Olson.
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Paul Detrick, Tracy Oppenheimer, and Weissmueller. Approximately 4 minutes.
The post America's 3 Most Fee-Ridden Cities appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yes, that's probably the most obvious headline I have and possibly will ever write for Reason. But an audit from the city controller's office actually quantifies it: The street department for Los Angeles is a mess that isn't repairing streets properly, isn't keeping decent records, and isn't collecting some fees it's supposed to be collecting, costing the city $190 million over 16 years. The Los Angeles Times gave Controller Ron Galperin space for a commentary explaining why things are so terrible:
The streets bureau also does not always prioritize its repair work based on common-sense criteria such as traffic volume, heavy vehicle loads and mass-transit loads. So despite the slurry work that's taken place, some of the city's busiest and most important thoroughfares remain in the worst condition, impeding traffic and commerce, making bike riding unsafe and turning bus rides into bumpy, uncomfortable journeys.
Our auditors also found that the Bureau of Street Services has undercollected $190 million in fees from utility companies that cut and dig into our streets, money that could have been used to perform miles of repairs. Likewise, between 2011 and 2013, it did not fully utilize its budgeted funds. Auditors found that $21 million earmarked for street repairs was returned to various funding sources unused. And the city has also spent more to produce its own asphalt than it would have if it had paid a vendor for it.
I can personally vouch for the weird road repair priorities. My own street and a few others in my neighborhood were resealed with slurry work last year. But the most traveled streets nearby that were in much worse repair remain completely untouched, so I have to drive several blocks navigating crumbling, bumpy avenues, only to turn onto my lovely street and drive about 100 smooth feet before hitting my driveway.
And note who the city isn't getting fees from? This isn't a case of blaming truck drivers for tearing up roads or other anti-private transportation arguments. Nor is it rich, evil tech corporations not paying their "fair share." It's because of utility companies not paying fees back for literally tearing up the roads to do work. (And you have to wonder what sort of work they're doing given the massive water main disaster that struck Los Angeles this week and flooded UCLA.)
As for the asphalt production, a companion news story at the Times notes that the difference in price between the city and a private asphalt producer is more than a 50 percent increase: $66 per ton versus $40 per ton.
Oh, and some of that unused $21 million was apparently federal stimulus funds. You know, for those "shovel-ready" projects?
In March, city advisors wanted to try to push through another tax increase to try to generate more revenue to repair the roads. That idea has been abandoned for now:
"Right now, people want to know with a sense of confidence that the money that we are spending is being properly spent," Galperin said Thursday at a news conference announcing the audit's findings. "And until that happens, I think people are going to be very reluctant—and correctly so—to say, 'Let's just throw more money at it.'"
The post L.A.'s Terrible Streets Are Because of Bad Management, Not Lack of Money appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Two policy analysts with the city of Los Angeles have recommended elected officials put a half-cent sales tax hike on the November 2015 ballot to pay for the repair of LA's worst sidewalks and streets. They say the tax hike would generate $4.5 billion over the next 15 years, with $640 million for broken sidewalks. Reason TV took a look at LA's crumbling sidewalks in LA's New Crack Epidemic: Sidewalks. Here is the original post:
Ever walk down a Los Angeles city sidewalk? It may feel like climbing the Himalayas.
Tree roots have uplifted many city sidewalks across L.A., turning a quick walk around the neighborhood into a treacherous experience. According to The Los Angeles Times, the city receives about 2,500 claims a year from people who hurt themselves on these cracks.
"People get hurt and people can die from falling down on and hitting their head on the sidewalk," says Los Angeles resident Peter Griswold.
What's the city's solution to this problem? A three-year, $10 million survey of all of the city's sidewalks.
Residents like Griswold say that price tag is too high. He has come up with a plan of his own that involves photographs, GPS devices, and—most importantly—volunteers. Griswold is confident that his ragtag crew of sidewalk cartographers can find and report trouble spots more quickly—and cheaply—than city workers.
"What Peter Griswold is trying to do with volunteers, the advantage that has is that it's decentralized," says Adrian Moore, vice president of research at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason TV.
Moore grants it may be hard to implement on a large scale but you have to stack that up against the usual way city governments fix local problems. Namely, writing a fat check to a contractor so they don't have to deal with it anymore. Hence, the $10 million.
Moore points out that these uplifted sidewalk cracks are indicative of something bigger: bureaucracy run amok.
"One of the problems bureaucracies have, and LA in particular has, is nobody who manages these departments actually invests the management effort in saying lets be ruthless about prioritizing what's most important," says Moore.
Written and produced by Paul Detrick.
Music by Lee Maddeford.
Approximately 4:23 minutes.
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]]>If we need the government to pave the roads, then how come government can't actually seem to pave the roads?
It's a question to ask a lot in California, where citizens pay significant amounts of taxes, and yet the roads are often disasters. On the state level, the Reason Foundation notes, California spends more per mile than the national average for its highway system, yet ranks near the bottom of the list for road conditions.
On the local level, residents may see the same problems. Los Angles has high state and local taxes (sales tax in the city is 9 percent) and yet more than a third of the streets in the city's streets are get failing grades for road repair (the Los Angeles Times has an interactive map here).
What's the solution to the problem? Not shifting resources and rethinking priorities, obviously. Los Angeles just needs more taxes! From the Los Angeles Times:
One year after Los Angeles voters rejected a sales tax increase, the City Council is looking at trying again — this time by tying the money to the repair of the city's deteriorating network of streets.
Two high-level City Hall policy advisors recommended Tuesday that lawmakers place a half-cent tax hike on the November ballot that would generate $4.5 billion over 15 years. The proceeds, they said, would pay to fix the most severely damaged roads and sidewalks.
Passage of a tax could add momentum to Mayor Eric Garcetti's "back to basics" campaign, which focuses on upgrading basic services. The proposal also could help city leaders resolve a potentially costly disability rights lawsuit filed by wheelchair users who say buckled sidewalks block their access.
That last tax that failed required a simple majority. This one would require a two-thirds majority to pass, so to say its chances are as rough as pushing a stalled car up one of the city's pothole-covered hills is an apt if rather labored simile. Why should anybody trust the city would spend its current revenue for road repairs when it's not currently spending its revenue for road repairs?
Jack Humphreville, who writes about L.A.'s budget for the website CityWatch, said city elected officials have used money that should have gone to road repairs to fund excessive employee salaries and benefits. "They were grossly negligent over the last two decades in maintaining our infrastructure," Humphreville said.
Gary Toebben, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, said his organization is concerned about the burden a new tax could place on businesses and consumers. Toebben said he also wanted to know whether the Metropolitan Transportation Authority would pursue a separate sales-tax hike for transit services in 2016. "If you keep adding taxes, eventually you reach a point where people say that's just too much," he said.
And let's not forget, the city encouraged voters to pass a referendum that caps the number of legal medical marijuana shops in town and is planning to shut hundreds of potential taxpaying businesses down.
The post Los Angeles Cannot Find Funds in Its $7-Plus Billion Budget to Care for Roads appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Citing the need for more public parking, the City Council of Seattle made a unanimous decision this week to force a 103-year-old woman to sell a plot of land that is already a parking lot.
The Puget Sound Business Journal argues that the situation seems like a boondoggle. There is contradictory information that officials have not clarified about whether the city intends to turn Myrtle Woldson's 134-stall parking lot into a multi-level garage or if they simply want seize the lot and operate it themslves:
"It makes no fiscal sense to me to have the city condemn a parking lot to make more parking," said Gary Beck, president of Republic Parking Northwest, which operates Woldson's lot.
[…]
City Council spokeswoman Dana Robinson Slote said that Seattle doesn't want to build anything on Woldson's lot and plans to keep it a surface parking lot "for the foreseeable future."
That contradicts city and state documents that call for building structured parking along the central waterfront, including specifically on Woldson's lot. The entities have set aside $15 million to acquire existing garages or build new ones, where short-term parking is to be be offered at $3 to $4 an hour.
Woldson has repeatedly declined selling the lot. The city council issued the exasperated statement that "there are no alternatives" to providing the public with parking. The council's bill frames the situation in a way that suggests not only does the government, instead of the individual who paid for and developed the lucrative piece of property, deserve the first chance at making a profit, but also that the government will actually sustain a loss by not taking that property. "Without this legislation," they write, Seattle's government "miss an opportunity to address the limited supply of public, short-term parking," which "will result in lost revenue to the City." Although the document dances around specifying the cost, it insists that tourism and commerce in the area will be suffer without the seizure of Woldson's land.
The city has not yet stated what they will offer Woldson, who still has the opportunity to challenge the decision in court.
The Freedom Foundation's Glen Morgan believes this is a case of eminent domain abuse. He writes that "in Seattle, central planning takes priority over people," and that "The desire of the Central Planners for control is once again permitted to outweigh the people's need for government to make rational decisions that benefit taxpayers and citizens."
Both the Business Journal and Morgan expressed skepticism about the government's ability to even manage a parking lot. They pointed to the case of the Pacific Place parking garage that the city bought in 2011. Earlier this year, the city owed nearly $60 million ($10 million more than an appraisal deemed its value when Seattle bought it) on construction bonds and was steadily losing $30,000 every month to mismanagement and theft.
The post Seattle Seizes Private Parking Lot to Build New Parking Lot appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Under the measure, charter cities that refuse to adopt prevailing wages, which are generally in line with union scale pay, would lose state dollars for public works project contracts signed after Jan. 1, 2015.
The post Gov. Brown Signs Bill Mandating 'Prevailing Wages' for Charter City Projects appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Prison is crazy expensive in New York City – perhaps another reason to celebrate the end of stop-and-frisk and call for the end of the drug war. Some want to lay the blame of the cost to shuttle prisoners back and forth to Rikers Island and the various expenses of keeping such an unusual prison open, but there's more than that. The Associated Press reports:
New York is indeed an expensive place, but experts say that alone doesn't explain a recent report that found the city's annual cost per inmate was $167,731 last year — nearly as much as it costs to pay for four years of tuition at an Ivy League university.
They say a big part of it is due to New York's most notorious lockup, Rikers Island, and the costs that go along with staffing, maintaining and securing a facility that is literally an island unto itself.
"Other cities don't have Rikers Island," said Martin F. Horn, who in 2009 resigned as the city's correction commissioner, noting that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent a year to run the 400-acre island in the East River next to the runways of LaGuardia Airport that has 10 jail facilities, thousands of staff and its own power plant and bakery.
But after letting Horn go on (and pointing out that New York City does pay much more per prisoner than Los Angeles and Chicago), only then does the Associated Press note that according to the Department of Corrections, the brunt of the cost is to pay employees, 86 percent in fact:
Nick Freudenberg, a public health professor at Hunter College, said the latest city figures show that declining incarceration rates haven't translated into cost savings.
In 2001, when the city had 14,490 inmates, the full cost of incarcerating one inmate at Rikers Island for a year was $92,500, or about $122,155 adjusted for today's dollars — that means the city spent $45,576 more in 2012 than it did 11 years ago.
The above paragraphs were buried down toward the end of the story, as is the fact that many prisoners have to wait ages, even years to see trial in New York City. Earlier in September, WNYC made note of the case of Donovan Drayton, who was arrested for murder at age 19 and waited for five years for his trial. He was found not guilty.
WNYC reported:
Over the past decade, as New York City's backlog of felony cases has grown, so too has the time defendants are spending behind bars before trial. The average pretrial detention in a felony case was 95 days in 2012 — up 25 percent from a decade earlier, despite a drop in new felony cases, according to a recent report from City University of New York researchers. And some defendants spend significantly longer behind bars. Of the people who spent time in jail during 2012, about 3,200 were behind bars for a year or more awaiting their day in court, according to city data.
The post Send a New York City Criminal to College Instead and Save Money appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A pair of Detroit Free Press stories over the weekend highlighted the pretty large gap between how union leaders see the nature of the city's municipal crisis and how everybody else sees it.
On Friday, union leaders visited the White House to stump for help:
Labor leaders took their turn visiting the White House on Friday to talk about what can and should be done for bankrupt Detroit, while also cautioning the Obama administration that the financial problems experienced in southeastern Michigan may soon be felt in many other metropolitan areas across the U.S.
Calling for a plan that would not only address Detroit's concerns but also serve as a playbook for future crises, the group — which included the UAW's Bob King and others — left the hourlong meeting touting few specifics but saying the groundwork was laid for a response that could help address Detroit's issues by attracting new jobs and development.
"They are very much aware of the problem," Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said after the meeting. "This is not only a Detroit problem. … This is an issue that confronts urban centers across the country."
Yes, this is absolutely true. Some folks (like Paul Krugman, for example) may want to paint Detroit as an extreme outlier, but many of Detroit's fiscal problems are present in many municipalities. Unfortunately, these people seem to think the loss of jobs and development are the cause of the problem and not a symptom.
The meeting was one in a series that administration officials have been engaged in as they attempt to give voice to the various groups impacted by the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. While a federal bailout has been ruled out, the Obama administration has still been trying to coordinate a response to the crisis.
Agency and department heads have been asked to scour their grant programs for those that could help the city, while administration officials try to coordinate efforts between local politicians, business leaders, charitable organizations, labor and more to help stimulate economic investment and job creation in hard-hit Detroit.
Don't call it a bailout! It's just federal money from grants being directed toward the city! That's totally different.
Then on Sunday, the Free Press used math and graphs to get to the real root of Detroit's fiscal nightmare: runaway debt, high taxes, and uncontrollable pension costs. Some highlights:
Read (and view) the whole thing here. The graphs are illuminating, and the lengthy explanation of how ex-mayor (now convicted of corruption) Kwame Kilpatrick's award-winning plan to borrow money to pay down the pension debt went terribly wrong is too complex to summarize with a bulletpoint.
The post A Tale of Two Detroits: What Union Leaders See Vs. What History Shows appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Who you should address your thank you letters to—should this dream become a reality? Newly installed L.A. City Councilman Bob Blumenfield. As head of City Council's Innovation, Technology and General Services Committee, Blumenfield introduced a motion last week asking staffers with the city's Information Technology Agency for a report on setting up free citywide WiFi service, reports City News Service. The councilman says the program would benefit not only government officials, businesses and visitors, but also people who "cannot afford private high-speed services."
The post Los Angeles Considering Free Citywide Wi-Fi appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"This rail project is our bridge to nowhere", says University of Hawaii law professor Randall Roth. "We are convinced that it will be billions of dollars over budget and we think they will try to get the federal government to bail them out."
Hawaii has some of the worst congestion and roads in the country and studies consistently rank its major city, Honolulu, among the worst cities for traffic. The INRIX Index has estimated that Honolulu drivers waste an average of 58 hours in traffic every year during peak travel times.
Yet there's no reason to believe the Honolulu's rail project will do anything to improve traffic congestion. In fact, it's likely to divert resources from more-affordable solutions.
"The one thing about these projects [is that] they are very inviting politically," says former Hawaii Gov. Ben Cayetano. Along with Cliff Slater of Honolulutraffic.com and University of Hawaii's Roth, Cayetano has filed a federal lawsuit against the rail project that's held up construction. They claim the city misled the public about the total cost of the project and didn't deliver fully on a required review of alternative solutions to a rail line.
Panos Prevedouros, one of the state's leading transportation experts, says the rail plan that the feds approved will siphon off state funding for the area's bus system. The project's own report, which Prevedouros says is filled with overly optimistic estimates of rail ridership, still shows that Honolulu's congestion will be worse in the future with rail. "The point of doing any cost effective type of analysis is out of the window," says Panos, "the benefits are not there."
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered an expedited hearing for the federal rail lawsuit on August 15th.
Go here for Reason Foundation analysis of mass transit.
Produced by Sharif Matar. Camera by Matar and Zach Weissmueller.
About 8 minutes.
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]]>What, might you ask, was Pennsylvania's capital city (pop. 50,000) doing in possession of a document signed by Wyatt and Mattie Earp (which fetched $55,000), a coat belonging to Annie Oakley ($6,000), Wild Bill Hickok's knife in a box ($14,000), and Doc Holliday's dental chair ($40,000)?
During a disastrous 28 years in office that earned him the title "mayor for life," Reed mortgaged the city's future to finance a wide array of misconceived schemes and projects. While crime soared, the middle class fled, and schools deteriorated, Reed focused his attention on buying a hotel, building a baseball stadium, buying a baseball team, erecting many failed commercial developments, and throwing good money after bad in an attempt to repair a garbage incinerator that was never necessary in the first place. Sound familiar?
A history enthusiast, Reed treated himself to taxpayer-funded junkets in which he traveled the country buying Old West artifacts of questionable authenticity. He paid for these goodies out of a slush fund carved into the budget of the Harrisburg Authority, an agency charged primarily with maintaining the city's water supply.
Reed's vision was to create a Wild West museum—one of five cultural institutions that would help turn Harrisburg into an international tourist destination. Reed's longtime press secretary, Randy King, described his bosses' ludicrous plan when I interviewed him in 2012: "Much as Washington, D.C. and its many museums draws millions of people to the city each year, or New York City, that's what Stephen Reed's vision for Harrisburg was."
Last year, I covered Harrisburg's woes for Reason TV, "Is Harrisburg's Nightmare America's Future?"
The post Broke City of Harrisburg Says Goodbye to Wild Bill Hickok's Knife, Doc Holliday's Dental Chair appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's Chicago, of course. And this is what the city gets after a bribery scandal pushed one contractor out of the bidding process. The Chicago Tribune reports:
Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration finalized a $67 million, five-year contract to install up to 300 cameras to catch speeders around city schools and parks, but a slow rollout could mean as few as 50 locations operating this year, the city and vendor confirmed Wednesday.
The program sold by the mayor as a child-safety initiative could eventually mean hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket revenue for the city. But Emanuel reduced his initial projection of $30 million in ticket revenue this year to $15 million, due to a combination of technical delays and the bribery scandal that engulfed the city's red light camera vendor amid a series of Tribune stories that began last year.
That contractor, Redflex Traffic Systems Inc., was considered a prime contender for the new speed camera program before the Tribune disclosed allegations that it won the red light deal as part of a $2 million bribery scheme involving a former City Hall manager. Emanuel disqualified Redflex from city contracts, and his administration eventually settled on a prime competitor, Arizona-based American Traffic Solutions Inc., as the preferred bidder for speed cameras in February.
You have to love how they barely mention the goal of protecting the children as the excuse for the cameras, but really it's all about the revenue. Somebody has to pay for those recent raises for those teachers who do such a terrible job teaching those same children.
And it wouldn't be Chicago if taxpayers had absolutely no idea whether they were getting a good deal or if this program even worked:
The city declined to release the bids of eight other companies that competed for the contract, as well as data from test cameras that ATS and contract finalist Xerox State & Local Solutions Inc. operated in Chicago. Territo also declined to identify how many potential speeders ATS cameras caught in the monthlong testing period but said the data showed "there's no question there is a significant problem with speeding in the city of Chicago."
But no doubt everything will turn out okay:
ATS agreed to pay $4.2 million in partial refunds on a half-million New Jersey tickets that might have been issued in violation of state law. While not admitting fault, the company said it wanted to support its client cities to cut short a series of class-action lawsuits alleging its red light camera systems weren't properly inspected or certified by 11 municipalities before citations started being issued in the state in 2009.
Territo said Wednesday that the New Jersey problem was tied to certification of timing problems that were not the company's fault, and he said ATS' speed camera program has "multiple layers of review to ensure that violations are being issued to actual speeders."
The post $67 Million for 300 Traffic Cameras: Guess the City appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>the law firm hired to oversee Detroit's restructuring has already racked up a $1.4 million bill…."Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr approved the fees totaling about $1.4 million, but what makes this even more controversial is that the law firm getting the money is Jones Day – that's Orr's former law firm. Oh, you want some more controversy? That $1.4 million is just for six weeks of work," [local radio station WWJ legal analyst Charlie] Langton said.
….. has defended the expense, saying top lawyers are needed because of what's at stake….
Orr is a bankruptcy expert hired in March by the state to fix Detroit's finances, which are running a $380 million deficit this year. He says long-term debt could top $17 billion and is asking bond-holders to accept steep markdowns on what they're owed.
….Orr said Detroit is "tapped out." He said there's still a 50-50 chance the city will file for a municipal bankruptcy.
Reason on Detroit. Reason's advice to another fiscally troubled midwest city, Cleveland.
The post Detroit's "Emergency Manager" Approves $1.4 Million Payout to Bankruptcy Lawyers–His Old Firm appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Tuesday that Vallejo let residents over the age of 16 vote in May on how to spend about $3.2 million.
The post City of Vallejo to Ask Residents to Vote on Portion of Budget appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The money was allocated by city officials over the years to help fund costs of various projects. It should have been returned as federal, state and other grants arrived, according to Department of Transportation General Manager Jaime de la Vega.
But from 1995 to 2011, the funds were only returned to the city's general fund twice, according to a City Council memo. The money grew in a fund that was not audited or examined.
The post LA Transit Officials Find $42 Million that Should Have Gone Back to City Budget appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Buoyed by an extra $111 million in revenue, Villaraigosa's plan closes the budget deficit without layoffs or furloughs and provides money to add 65 firefighters, purchase 533 new vehicles at the Los Angeles Police Department and trim an additional 35,000 trees.
With less than three months in his term, Villaraigosa called on the two mayoral candidates in the May 21 election—City Controller Wendy Greuel and Councilman Eric Garcetti—to eliminate a 5.5% salary increase for civilian city workers that he and the council negotiated, which goes into effect Jan. 1. He also urged the next mayor to show fiscal discipline, saying the city would have a $15-million surplus in 2017 if no raises were given to police officers, firefighters and other city workers during the next mayor's first term.
The post Outgoing LA Mayor Urges Canceling City Employee Raises appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"How To Save America's Zoos: Privatize Them" is the latest offering from Reason TV.
Watch above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV clips.
The post How To Save America's Zoos: Privatize Them appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For six years straight, notes Leonard Gilroy, the Reason Foundation's director of government reform, cities have seen declines in overall revenues—and that situation isn't expected improve dramatically anytime soon. In such an environment, says Gilroy, city governments rightly focus on core activities such as law enforcement and infrastructure. Given that public zoos on average get 40 percent of their budgets from taxes, shrinking public dollars means reducing operating hours, deferring maintenance, raising ticket prices, cutting education programs, and laying off workers.
The best solution? Privatize the zoos by turning over most or all of their operations to nonprofits and other groups that generally have more interest, resources, and expertise in caring for animals and drawing crowds. Tulsa, Oklahoma provides a case worth looking at. Between 2007 and 2009 the operating budget of the Tulsa Zoo had been cut by almost 50%. During a budget crisis in 2009, newly elected Mayor Dewey Bartlett faced a zoo with declining attendance and ticket sales; it was also about to lose its accreditation. One option would have been to simply close the zoo and sell off the animals. Bartlett decided instead to draw down the city's subsidy of the zoo's annual budget to a management fee and turn over its operation to a nonprofit that would be responsible for all aspects of the zoo.
The shift has allowed the nonprofit Tulsa Zoo Management to raise more money, make overdue improvements to exhibits, and focus on providing a better experience not just for the animals but the increasing number of human visitors walking through the entrance gate. Despite the rotten economy, attendance is up 14 percent from last year alone, says Tulsa Zoo Management CEO Terrie Correll.
As city-owned or operated zoos in every city from Los Angeles to New York struggle to keep their doors open, they would do well to look at the way that Tulsa has managed to craft a solution that's better for taxpayers, zoo visitors, and even the animals themselves.
About 5 minutes.
Produced by Sharif Matar.
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]]>At Reason Weekend 2013, Reason Foundation's annual donor event, Moore and Reason Foundation vice president of research Julian Morris presented five case studies highlighting Reason's work in alleviating traffic, improving waste management, privatizing city services, reforming public education, and averting municipal pension meltdowns.
About 50 minutes.
Filmed by Alex Manning and Meredith Bragg. Edited by Joshua Swain.
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The post Cutting Back City Hall: Reason Foundation's Adrian Moore and Julian Morris appeared first on Reason.com.
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