Boston vs. Buffalo

The Patriots rolled to victory again last night. The victim this week - the Buffalo Bills.

Football, however, is not the only field in which we appear to have a distinct advantage. It seems, at least according to msn.com, that Boston and Buffalo will be the most and second most expensive cities in which to heat your home this winter. Msn.com surmises that Buffalo comes in at no. 2 on the list because, well, because it’s quite simply a godforsakenly frigid city.

Boston, however, is a different story. We top the list because we rely much more on heating oil than natural gas, whose price has inflated only 72% in the last decade compared to oil’s 234% increase. This obviously begs the question. Shouldn’t the market be responding to such a large discrepancy, more and more homeowners switching from oil to natural gas?

It should be, but it’s not. The reason - though on average natural gas is considerably less expensive than oil, in Massachusetts (and the Northeast generally) natural gas is only marginally less expensive, making the switch, which would require a significant upfront investment by a homeowner, less appealing.

Okay, then that leads to the next obvious question. Why are natural gas prices in Massachusetts higher than in the rest of the country. The answer, according to Msn.com anyway, is

Regional cost differences are governed by the ability of local utility companies to add capacity and meet demand, and how the suppliers are regulated and taxed by the states.

A lack of capacity, combined with regulation and taxes. Hmmm?

Add comment November 19th, 2007

Stopping the Drip, Drip, Drip

I posted a few weeks ago, regarding the quiet, unchecked potential expansion of legislation that would greatly increase pension costs.

So, its only fair that I give credit to the Joint Committee on Public Service for putting a severe limit on this type of behavior. They are requiring that all ‘reclassification requests’ (the practice of changing the classification level of an employee or class of employees, thereby increasing their pensions through statutory action; one of the many gaming techniques detailed here) come with an estimate of the cost and a written opinion from the Retirement Board that actually has to pay out the money.

Its apparently angered at least one of their colleagues, but we salute their common sense request to stop this type of wasteful behavior.

Add comment November 15th, 2007

Ummm, ahhh, the number is 617-723-2277

Heh, heh, still waiting for the Patrick Administration to call.

Did you feel a palpable shift in the oversight of state government last month? Sure you did.

October 18th marked the expiration of my term on the Commonwealth’s Finance Advisory Board.

Still waiting for that reappointment phone call from my friends in the Administration.

Add comment November 15th, 2007

Or you could just give the money back to ratepayers

Tuesday’s Globe had a story on the tug of war going on regarding the Renewable Energy Trust with some legislators seeking to move it out of the quasi-autonomous Mass Technology Collaborative (with its… ahem… own loyalties) and into the Environmental Affairs Secretariat.

The Trust, like many well-meaning programs, suffers from the Ginsu Knife effect (remember - it slices, it dices, but wait, there’s more….). It offers grants, rebates, technical assistance, equity investments, debt financing, and marriage counseling. (OK, I made that last one up.)

The net effect being that its almost impossible to figure out if the program is doing any good. I’m all for clean energy, but taxing our utility bills then shuffling the money off to a quasi-state agency is not the way to do it.

Add comment November 15th, 2007

Some ugly numbers on deficient bridges

The Reason Foundation has posted up some data on the number of deficient bridges across the nation. The feds track this stuff for obvious reasons (mobility across states, an understanding as to how states are doing and what they are doing with fed money, and also because bridges that are rated ‘deficient’ become eligible for federal funding for repair.
Overall, Reason notes that

The condition of the nation’s highway bridges continued to improve from 2004 to 2005. Of the 596,980 highway bridges in the current National Bridge Inventory, 147,913—about 24.52 percent—were reported deficient for 2005 (see table), a slight improvement from 2004. In 1998 about 29.0 percent were rated deficient. However, progress is slow; at the current rate of improvement, it would take 50 years for the percentage of deficient bridges to be eliminated.

So how do individual states do? New England as a whole does poorly, and Massachusetts is no exception, coming in at 45th out of 50 states. A whopping 36+ percent of Mass. bridges are rated deficient according to Reason. Even discounting states with relatively new infrastructure, like Arizona and Nevada, there are old infrastructure states like Illinois (17+ percent) and Virginia (22+ percent) that perform so much better than we do. The Reason table follows:

Add comment November 9th, 2007

Thoreau, he most certainly is not

This is priceless.

David Wasserman, a Madison, Wisconsin middle-school teacher, recently refused to administer the state assessment to his students. It appears he was protesting No Child Left Behind’s mandatory testing requirements. As the controversial law’s first “conscientious objector” he received a fair amount of press coverage. In fact, he recently gave Newsweek Web an interview in which, when asked why he took his stand, he responded:

I feel that the tests assess academic achievement in biased ways, with a challenging and confusing format of questions and answers.

Shoot. I just hate that confusing question and answer format.

Add comment November 8th, 2007

People v Place

In the High Court of Common Sense, the people will always win. Consider Youngstown or Buffalo. Both have seen a complete collapse in their populations. Youngstown is half the city it once was in terms of population. As Ed Glaeser points out in the Autumn 2007 City Journal, Buffalo hit a ceiling of 580,000 in the 1920s and has gone to 300,000.

Noting the “billions upon billions” spent by the feds since the 50s on Buffalo and other failed “middle cities”, Ed lists out the usual suspects–Urban Renewal funds, HUD money, and lots of dough for the metropolitan rail system, even as ridership went down, down, down, as people left, left, left.

Ed’s money quotes:

All this spending aimed at resurrecting Buffalo as a place–very different from government aid that seeks to help disadvantaged people, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit–was destined to fail.

Yup. And:

As for state and local politicians, reducing New York’s unnecessary taxes and regulation would be a good idea, since if Buffalo is ever to rebound, even somewhat, private innovators, not government projects, will be the primary reason. Better schools and safe streets would also be key to improving Buffalo’s chances of survival.

Yup. See the same argument and a plan for getting it done in Massachusetts in Pioneer’s Rehabbing Urban Redevelopment. And finally:

The best scenario would be for Buffalo to become a much smaller but more vibrant community–shrinking to greatness, in effect.

It’s odd how urban revitalization thinking for so many years was schizophrenic in, on the one hand, taking a sort of “neutron bomb” perspective: You had to keep the buildings in place at all costs. If you built it, they would come, and you kept believing it even if the buildings and streets were windswept empty. And then, on the other hand, there was the chest-thumping view that any city worth its salt had to keep growing. Small, when it comes to smaller cities, may be very good indeed.

Size does not matter. And buildings, and cities, matter only if people want to live in them.

Add comment November 8th, 2007

To gas tax or not to gas tax

Kathleen Hunter’s piece, The Long and Taxing Road, in the July 2007 Governing magazine has some good information on Oregon’s experiment to understand the ability to replace or supplement the gas tax with technology (also a big theme here at Pioneer, see the transcript from our 2006 event Creating Mobility). Hunter notes:

Every time [motorists’ odometers] blipped up by a mile, they owed the state of Oregon a tax of exactly 1.2 cents. The trip to Eugene from Portland, a 100-mile journey on Interstate 5, would cost $1.20. And that’s not counting for gas.

The technology in place outside Portland counts miles traveled, avoids counting roads outside of Oregon, and can charge different amounts based on where in Oregon the travel occurs. New York is showing with its congestion pricing proposal one very logical use of new technology, which is to price roadways based on traffic flowthrough.

So, 260 motorists from spring 2006 to spring 2007 volunteered to test the Oregon pilot program. The report on outcomes is, I have heard, out. More on this soon.

1 comment November 7th, 2007

Too much house

I’ve heard people comment that there must not be a market for modestly sized single-family homes, or they would be built. Easton Developer Nick Mirrione does not see it that way. He is trying to build cottage homes in Easton, and he’s been knocking on doors to recruit supporters. In a presentation he did for us at Pioneer, he noted that for the first time in history, more than half of the households in the U.S. are not married couple households. He would like to build homes for the more than 50% of MA households that either do not have children or are single parents with children. The McMansion is often too much house for this demographic. Try as he might, though, getting communities to allow construction of cottage homes is no easy task.

With MA communities prohibiting this kind of housing, Mirrione had to go to Washington state to find examples of it. The Cottage Company in WA has built lots of it, and the homes are very appealing. I wish we could find homes like that around here.

Add comment November 6th, 2007

Hats off to the land of the Yanks

New York may have fast fallen off the playoff charts. But the drumbeat of school reform is incessant these days, as incessant as the creaking rails and sounds of truck deliveries in Times Square. The Times, again this morning, brings glad tidings from a Mayor who is, as far as I am concerned, pitching fast balls as Mayor Menino and all of our mayors stand there with bat still firmly stuck on their shoulders.

There are dozens of new charters, there is a Deval-style merit pay system, a focus on AP… And so it is this morning, where the Times reports on the Mayor’s new accountability system which gives an easy to digest grade to each school. The idea is to get folks to focus on what works and share that. It is also to tell those folks who aren’t getting it done that there will be consequences.

With the whopping title, 50 New York Schools Fail Under Rating System, the Times article opens:

Under a blunt new A through F rating system that judges schools not just on performance but also on progress, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg designated 50 New York City public schools as failures yesterday, saying they were so dismal that their 29,000 students would be allowed to transfer elsewhere.

More:

A “not insignificant number” of those F schools, and even some of the 99 schools that received D’s, could be closed or have their principals removed as soon as this school year, Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference announcing the grades. He added: “Is this a wake-up call for the people who work there? You betcha.”

And hats off to Whitney Tilson for highlighting the pro-accountability message coming from the principals. Ernest Logan, head of the principals union, sent this email to his members on the Mayor’s new report card:

Dear Colleagues,

We all support accountability. CSA members make tough decisions every day, knowing full well that their choices profoundly affect students and teachers alike. We also understand that as a result of this latest reorganization, more and more emphasis is being placed on bottom-line results. From the Mayor and the Chancellor on down, we are all being held accountable for the success or failure of schools.

The letter grades released today by the Department of Education represent the next step in the DoE’s efforts to hold schools accountable for improving student achievement. I am supportive of the concept because we need an accountability tool that accurately evaluates our schools. However, in the last month, we have been troubled by reports from the field about inaccuracies with student and demographic data, and inappropriate school groupings that led to unfair comparisons. To their credit, DoE officials worked with us to fix some of the problems and they also withheld grades for schools where the data is still being reviewed. Still, we cannot endorse this initiative until we properly analyze the progress report results and determine that they are accurate, equitable, transparent and understandable. The ramifications are too great, especially for students in schools that may be mislabeled and the people whose jobs may be on the line. To that end, we want to hear from you. If there are issues that we need to be looking into, please let us know by emailing brian@csa-nyc.org.

Controversy aside, these progress reports and the enormous amount of data now being collected open new doors for the CSA, UFT and DoE. We have a unique opportunity to develop solid, specific and meaningful solutions for each individual school. A big part of that will mean flooding struggling schools with additional resources and support. We look forward to playing our part and working together to bring about positive change.

Yours sincerely,

Ernest

Our sports-mad city may be pleased with itself, rightfully so, with the Sox, Pats and Celts. (Sorry, but hockey is not a sport; it is a form of padded madness on ice.) But, folks, NY is kicking our butts over and over again in education reform. Why is it we are so content to rest on our laurels? Is it because we are still so old money?

Add comment November 6th, 2007