By Steve Poftak
March 28th, 2012
As a sometimes commuter rail passenger, it’s depressing to contemplate that a plan to replace almost 20% of the commuter rail’s passenger cars is now at least a year or more behinds schedule.
The need for an upgrade to the fleet was brought home to me in sharp relief during a recent trip to the Danbury Railway Museum. Among the old trains from the golden age of rail on exhibit was a passenger coach whose interior would have been indistinguishable from some of the older commuter rail coaches (that date back to the ’70s and ’80s).
In procurement, hindsight is always 20/20. The MBTA took a much lower bid from a far less experienced manufacturer. And it looks like at least some of the ’savings’ from the lower bid is going to be eaten up in millions of dollars in costs to oversee the contractor.
What’s frustrating is that MBTA has a track record of major procurement snafus. The installation of the automated fare collection system was marked by controversy and lawsuits.
The closest parallel to the current situation is the procurement of the Breda Green Line cars in the ’90s. These cars were the first of their kind to be built by the winning bidder and they quickly developed a harrowing derailment problem that took another state agency’s intercession, millions in repairs, and years of negotiations to fix.
Big capital purchases run into the hundreds of millions and should make a huge difference in service quality for riders. I’d feel better if the MBTA didn’t have such a struggle with procurement.
Crossposted at Boston Daily.
By Joshua Archambault
March 23rd, 2012
Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal($) wrote on Pioneer’s health care book today, and she highlights a very important historical point. Major entitlement reform is only possible when some level of national consensus has been achieved around end goals. In The Great Experiment: The States, The Feds and Your Healthcare we examine welfare reform in the mid-1990’s as a perfect example of this paradigm.
Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal column:
The more conservatives have been forced to think about health care, the more they’ve understood the merits of state experimentation. Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute—a free-market think tank in Boston that has published a book on ObamaCare and RomneyCare titled “The Great Experiment: The States, the Feds, and Your Health Care”—argued in a recent conversation that the fundamental mistake of ObamaCare was in imposing a giant, untested law on an unwilling nation.
He contrasts this to the 1990s welfare reform, which came only after 20 years of state experimentation. By the time the federal law was passed, politicians on both sides of the aisle, he says, had come to a sort of “settlement” as to what generally worked. “The Great Experiment” argues that the GOP “alternative” to ObamaCare needs to be federal steps that give states the maximum flexibility to innovate and experiment with free-market health care.
By Steve Poftak
March 23rd, 2012
(Co-authored with Pioneer’s partner, Muckrock, which has extensive experience with public records requests at the federal, state, and municipal level)
Hot on the heels of “Sunshine Week”, when MassPIRG celebrated the Patrick Administration’s commitment to transparency, we thought we’d collect some best practices in transparency we’ve learned over the years from the Administration.
Massachusetts’s Public Records Law was created to allow citizens to access important government documents and provide another avenue of government oversight. After all, the documents are paid for by our tax dollars and in some cases, such requests are the only avenue to provide public accountability. But over the years, Commonwealth bureaucracy has developed increasingly “creative” interpretations of transparency, saving the public the trouble of having to study the issues by ensuring that government data leaks out only sporadically and as uselessly as possible.
While we’re impressed by the state’s dedication to insuring the public doesn’t have to bother with double checking their work, we thought that compiling “best practices” we’ve observed over the years might help others emulate Massachusetts’s success.
Without further ado, the Administration Guide to (Avoiding) the Public Records Law:
1. Ignorance is Bliss The most common initial response to requests in Massachusetts? Silence. Train employees to pretend that annoying slip of paper never came in the mail, or that the e-mail inbox was full that day, or that someone must be breaking in at night and stealing all the incoming public records requests. The less plausible, the better, because until one of your staff messes up and acknowledges the request, the Public Records Division will refuse to consider any appeals of the request, no matter how long you delay.
2. We Hide, You Seek. While having a dedicated public records contact person is commonplace in many federal agencies and in many states, it’s much simpler to keep bouncing around requests between departments. The clerk says it’s the press relations job; the press relations flack kicks it to legal; legal kicks it to the secretary; the secretary promptly loses it. For bonus measure, make sure that the only contact information on the site is an arcane HTML form that doesn’t actually send the messages. Providing an e-mail address would only encourage constituent interaction.
3. Freedom of Information isn’t Free. And it shouldn’t be cheap. Yes, tax dollars paid for the originals documents, but now that they’re maintained by the department, your imagination is the only limit on how much you can charge. Several of Pioneer requests were greeted with estimates of $50,000+ to comply with. One agency claimed that the six figure-salaried Director of Communications at the Connector would work, personally, on the request for two straight weeks. We think they could have gone farther, requesting a new building complex on the waterfront dedicated to fulfilling the request in a multi-year project.
4. It’s too easy being green. Still searching for ways to drive up costs? For the uncreative departments, a favorite (and almost universal) tactic is to insist documents are printed out and mailed. You can charge per page that way, add extra delay, and add on the hourly rate of the poor intern – or better yet, seasoned executive – who has to walk back and forth between the computer and the printer.
5. I see nothing, I see nothing. If you can’t find it, they can’t have it. So ensure that your internal record keeping uses such an arcane, inscrutable system that once a working paper gets filed, it stays filed – forever. If it was referenced by a politician or even seen at one point by the requester herself, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have it now and they can’t prove otherwise.
6. Creative Exemption Making 101. Claiming the request is outside the purview of the public records law is easy: Take a definition in the law and claim the document is outside that narrow definition. Our favorite was a state employment report that the Comptroller’s Office posts every two weeks. Their response: It’s “not a standard report and therefore not available.” Another agency, in denying a request, simply cited the public records act itself as the exemption, an act of such beautiful circular logic we couldn’t help but be impressed – and appeal.
7. Apples and Oranges. Sending irrelevant information is a great way to show good faith while not actually obeying either the letter or the spirit of the law. For a request filed almost a year ago, Economic Development responded by sending two unsigned copies of a draft contract from sometime in the 1990s, plus some pages from various bills mentioning the program in question and a few memos.
8. Data wants to be jailed. If you must send information, use burdensome formats. When the Human Resources Division finally produced a response to our request, they produced a spreadsheet internally then converted it into a PDF. We’ve seen an enhanced version of this tactic where agencies produce tons of data, which appears to have copied multiple times, then scanned into a PDF. This creates a lengthy document with poor resolution which cannot be searched electronically. Better yet, do all the above and then combine with #4 for extra uselessness.
9. Hide the Bacon. Claim the information requested is at another agency, thus steering the requester towards the bureaucratic mess that entails. The highpoint of this tactic had to be the Administration’s response to our request for details on preparation for federal health reform. Health and Human Services said it wasn’t them, as did the Connector. Turned out the planning was being done by an ‘interagency working group’ with no formal name or staff but involving both departments, thus virtually inaccessible to record requests when both agencies should have responded.
10. Appeals? We don’t need no stinking appeals. Count on the Secretary of State to do nothing. Requestors under the public records law can turn to the Secretary of State with their grievances. That office’s typical response is no response, as few appeals get ruled on and there is almost no repercussion for agencies that don’t comply with the process
We hope this simple, 10-step guide to public records reform is helpful to other states looking to follow the Administration’s lead on transparency, and possibly even to help the (very) few compliant Massachusetts agencies understand that releasing data may be the law, but it doesn’t have to be the reality.
Crossposted at Boston Daily.
By Michael Morisy
March 22nd, 2012
As Pioneer’s Steve Poftak has pointed out, the Office for Administration and Finance has been crowing about an “A-” transparency rating given to it by the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, which applauded the state’s Open Checkbook portal. But while Open Checkbook is a great initiative, saying it makes Massachusetts transparent is a bit like saying your toddler’s the next Tom Brady because he can throw his food on the floor. The Bay State has a lot of growing up to do.
Earlier this week, WBUR invited me on to talk about the “C” grade the State Integrity Investigation gave Massachusetts in its “Corruption Risk Report Card.” I told reporter Deborah Becker that I thought that grade was still too lenient: Given the seemingly endless supply of kickbacks, secret contracts, nepotism and other scandals that emerge, I think we’ve moved past risk and into certainty. But the report card also singled out Massachussetts’ “Access to Information” as an “F”, and I think it’s assessment were relatively spot on across the board:
The State Integrity Investigation, run jointly by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International, deserves commendation for studying the fundamentals that underpin transparency rather than gimmicks that distract from it, and extra praise for outlining specific best practices that could be followed.
Groups like MassPIRG don’t do themselves – or the public – any favors when they sugarcoat the situation by applauding skin-deep transparency, but it’s a model that seems to be catching on. When he took office, President Obama promised “the most transparent administration history,” and launched Data.gov, a central portal for government data sets. Data.gov collected data sets from across the federal administration, and was hailed as a “new era” in open governance.
But Data.gov also had harsh critics that it was too selective about what it released, while the administration’s Recovery.gov has been blasted for inaccurate, misleading and missing data. The debate about how meaningful these “transparency” portals are was made more urgent as budgets to keep the sites running was slashed: What government giveth, government can taketh away.
Which brings us back to public records laws, which are (in theory) in effect regardless of what technology platform is in vogue that day, regardless of whether the government is comfortable releasing the data, and regardless of whether a fickle congress is currently funding the initiative. Things are not pretty there, either: Recent looks back at the Obama administration’s transparency record has shown the administration has been even more willing to fight FOIA requests and that the Department of Justice might have “cooked” its FOIA books.
So it’s disheartening when opaque governments are rewarded for throwing up single-use transparency portals that may or may not be around in a year, that may or may not be used today, and that give the administration hollow talking points about how transparent it is. Transparency isn’t transparency if the only thing shown is what they want to be shown.
True transparency starts with consistent enforcement of the rules on the books, and in particular giving the public access to public documents. Data portals, interactive graphics and embeddable widgets are great, but unless government agencies are willing to share their most uncomfortable documents as the law requires, everything else is window dressing.
But there’s a message of hope in this to Bay Staters: Out of all 50 states, New Jersey scored the highest in the study, showing there is a chance at reform. It’s just going to take a lot of work.
By Steve Poftak
March 22nd, 2012
Our next adventure in accountability and transparency in state government starts with the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, helmed by Greg Bialecki.
That office (or at least one of its subunits) oversees the Capital Access Program. The intriguing thing about this program is that a single private entity, the Massachusetts Business Development Corporation (”MBDC”) is named in statute as the manager of the program (and recipient of funds). The state retains oversight through a contract that is renewed every two years and a statutorily-mandated “annual review and assessment of the performance of the MBDC.”
So, we were curious what the program was achieving with the millions it has received from the state over the years.
On January 20, 2011, we submitted a public record request for the annual review noted in the statute. What followed was sadly predictable — Economic Development ignored the request, then when we followed up, said it had not been received (until we produced the fax receipt), then said they were working on it.
Finally, on December 22, 2011, more than 11 months after our first request, we got some documents. And those annual reviews we wanted? Well, “those reviews [of millions of dollars in state funds] have not resulted in written results.” (N.B. MBDC appears to have created its own ‘report’, but its unclear what period it covers — since 1953? — and specific activities for that year are not covered. And, of course, a vendor self-evaluation shouldn’t suffice as a review.)
So, Economic Development’s position is apparently that a review of a multi-million dollar loan program using state funds is done verbally. That seems impossible, but there it is, in black and white from the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development.
And state officials wonder why we are skeptical about giving them more money?
Crossposted at Boston Daily.
By Steve Poftak
March 21st, 2012
(See correction/clarification below)
In an effort to aid in the Governor’s quest for greater accountability in state government, Pioneer turned its transparency efforts towards the UMASS Law School.
Pioneer has long been a critic of the law school project but let’s see how the school’s own data grades it.
First problem: Neither UMASS nor the Board of Higher Education ever laid down any initial performance benchmarks in any of their planning documents. They told us where they would go in the future, but not where they were starting from.
Second problem: UMass was not wild about releasing the information on these benchmarks. 10 separate follow-ups were required to get what we wanted. And the Public Records Law? Treated as a joke. Five follow-ups and almost two months just to get them to acknowledge the request with the legal requirement to respond in 10 days was ignored. All told, the initial request was submitted last June, and only answered substantively on March 13.
A
fter the first year of operation, the Globe’s Tracy Jan, the Patriot Ledger’s Jon Chesto, and the Standard-Times Brian Boyd were quick to declare victory for the law school. But a look at the data relevant to ABA accreditation shows the school is still years behind its own schedule.
On college GPA averages, UMASS promised a 3.2 average by academic year 2012-13. Their entering class for this year had an average GPA of 3.0 and they now project hitting this benchmark by the 2015-16 academic year.
Turning to LSAT scores, UMASS projected an average of 150 by the 2012-13 year. It achieved an average of 144 this year (from a base of 141 in 2009) and, once again, has pushed back the delivery date to the 2015-16 year.
Another important area of achievement is the bar exam pass rates. UMASS was shooting for 80% by next year and hit 76% last year. This number may not be conclusive (in either direction) as only 29 students from the school took the bar this year (from a school that has had an enrollment of 200+ over the period).
The point of trying to raise all these scores has been to get ABA Accreditation. The initial goal was provisional accreditation this year — that also didn’t happen.
[Correction/Clarification: A commenter responds that the law school is still awaiting word from the ABA on provisional accreditation. There initial milestone was to receive that approval by this current academic year so, to be fair, they still have several months to reach that goal. Will post if they do. I had assumed, incorrectly, that the lack of any public announcement meant that provisional accreditation was out of reach for the year.]
And the school is clearly lagging behind its benchmarks. A transparent accountability system for the UMASS Law School would disclose this and detail the school’s strategy for addressing the problem.
Crossposted at Boston Daily
By Michael Morisy
March 19th, 2012
For over a year now, the Pioneer Institute has been pursuing a series of public records requests on a variety of issues, from school performance to the state’s fated investment into Evergreen Solar. It’s largely been an exercise in frustration, denials misdirection, but I have learned some things about the state of public access in Massachusetts, and given the state’s been crowing about a recent A- transparency report card , it seemed like a good time to share it with a handy infographic (Click to enlarge).
By Steve Poftak
March 19th, 2012
The Boston Foundation has put out an interesting document, City of Ideas: Reinventing Boston’s Innovation Economy. In it, they conclude that that state lottery (run by Treasurer Grossman) is a drain on poor communities, returning far less in local aid then their citizens pay in.
In Saturday’s Globe, Op-ed writer Renee Loth picks up the theme, noting that
Exacerbating the trend [towards disproportionate taxation of the poor] is the state lottery — basically a kind of voluntary taxation. The top 20 communities in lottery sales — mostly low-income towns like Chicopee and Lynn — contributed $1.25 billion more in 2011 than they got back in unrestricted local aid.
What’s missing from this analysis is an understanding of how the Lottery works. For every dollar the lottery collects, approximately 74 cents is paid out in prizes. A few cents go towards administration and the remainder is paid out in state aid. Therefore, no municipality is likely to get an aid allocation that is close to what its citizens paid in.
Lottery aid is allocated on the basis of the inverse of per capita property value, in an (occasionally misguided) effort to allocate benefits equitably. The detail of the Boston Foundation report acknowledges as much — saying the top 20 communities for lottery sales (who are below the median per capita income for the state) account for 40% of lottery purchases yet they receive almost 50% of the aid. Its hard for me to see the gross inequity in that arrangement.
So, is the Lottery a horrible plot by Steve Grossman to drain poor communities of money? No. Its always going to pay out in aid less than it takes in, but players are going to get some portion of that 74 cents on every dollar that is returned in prize money. The formula based on property wealth as opposed to some other measure might bear some scrutiny but the position of the Boston Foundation report reflect a misunderstanding of how the Lottery works.
Crossposted at Boston Daily.
By Jim Stergios
March 18th, 2012
We all want high-quality teachers, right? What are we doing about it? The state has started to push teacher evaluations across the state, and that is great. Especially great because for far too long school managers and supervisors did not perform regular evaluations, which at the very least are useful for professional feedback and growth.
I do have my doubts that a bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all evaluation system is terribly useful besides the obvious fact that it will require more people to fill out paper. My doubts are practical ones. If you are running a school and seeking to peg its performance at a very high level, there are times when you want your teachers to focus on improving their individual performance; and there are times when you want to build the sense of team. No bureaucratic rule is going to get you there. In addition, any performance pay scheme has to start at the top. At the very least, this new system has to be implemented for superintendents, administrative professionals, principals and supervisors first; if not, it will again feel like something that is being done to teachers.
So, if we want high-quality teachers, let’s start with some basic, well-known facts:
- The intellectual capacity of individuals seeking to join the state’s and the nation’s teacher corps is too low. We’ve known this for a long while, but the 2006 report Educating School Teachers led by Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College, Columbia University, does a pretty good job of making the case. The report notes that not only are teachers unprepared in technology, curriculum development and assessments, and dealing with ELL and special needs students, but “the SAT and GRE scores of aspiring secondary school teachers are comparable to the national average, the scores of future elementary school teachers fall near the bottom of all test takers, with GRE scores 100 points below the national average.”
- Teacher quality is the one of the most important elements in improving the quality of our schools.
- There is no way to attract aspirants to the profession if starting salaries are not higher. Starting salaries can often be in the $30,000+ range. That’s not enough to attract the top tier of young, ambitious and smart graduates, which is what we need in our classrooms. That is especially so for math and science graduates, who have many more high-paying prospects in the private market.
- We are arguably investing a lot of money for teacher compensation but have the compensation built in a way that is not attracting high-quality teachers. The current compensation system maintains low initial salaries and rewards “system” people. The average teacher in Massachusetts now makes $70,000, a good salary (especially given that many pursue summer work in July and August) which is part of an extraordinarily rich benefits package well beyond the reach of mere private sector mortals. In 2010, Wisconsin teachers were estimated to have an average salary of $56,000, but when their benefits were included the average annual compensation package calculated out at just over $100,000. I’ll look up the Massachusetts benefits overall later and share, but the WI numbers are likely not terribly richer (perhaps 20-25% richer if that?) than our own. Then there is the fact that the benefits schedule truly kicks in around 20 years of service, when the proverbial hockey-stick effect is observed and future benefits skyrocket in value.
So here’s a question: Why can’t we “frontload” some of the overall compensation by reducing the richness of the benefits package in order to make room for salaries for starting teachers?
One objection is that surveys of current teachers suggests that they like the make-up of their compensation package. Yep. I get that, but the objection misses the point. The point is not to ask the current teacher corps what got them into the business and how they like it. The point is to attract a significantly different group with different career options into the profession. Why not survey graduating students who are significantly above average in terms of SATs, GREs, and collegiate accomplishments? That would be more meaningful.
Another objection is that teachers self-fund their pensions and therefore it is up to the current teacher corps to do whatever the heck it wants with their pensions. OK. Two things I would like to bring out: (1) That ducks the question of how to attract high-quality teachers to the profession, and (2) it is absolutely untrue. On the first point, even if teachers did self-fund their pensions, the current compensation schedule stinks as a way to recruit high-quality teachers to the profession. On the second point, teachers don’t self-fund their pensions.
The state has a multi-billion dollar unfunded pension liability for a reason, which is that teacher pensions are not self-funded. Here are the figures from the state’s Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission report for 2011. Please see the chart on page 11 (Section 5, labeled ‘Audit Information: Part B / GASB Statement No. 27′) showing the Massachusetts and Boston Teachers’ share of the ‘state pension fund payment;’ i.e., the annual required contribution by the state to ensure that pensions are whole.
Of the state’s annual obligation of $1.35 billion for state and certain local pensions, the Massachusetts and Boston Teachers make up the lion’s share of the total. In the chart, teacher pensions are broken out into “normal cost” and “amortization cost.”
- The “normal cost” of $107 million is what the state’s pays into the pension fund this year to properly fund what is expected to be paid out in future pensions to Massachusetts Teachers. For Boston Teachers the number is $8.5 million. So in 2011, the state is paying over $115 million to make the Massachusetts and Boston Teachers’ pensions whole. That’s not fully-funded.
- The “amortization cost” is this year’s payment to pay down the unfunded liability. For Massachusetts teachers the number is $661 million; for the Boston Teachers it is $86.2 million. That’s a total of $747.2 million that the state, again, is paying in.
All tallied up, payments on teachers’ pensions make up $862.7 million of the annual $1.35 billion the state pays down on pensions.
That’s quite a bit short of “self-funded.”
What I am arguing for is decidedly not a 401(K) plan for teachers. Teachers should be treated fairly and in fact attractive retirement benefits is of course helpful in attracting high-quality people to the profession. What I’d suggest is that we create a defined benefit package that is more in line with what Social Security provides and then when a teacher makes above a certain salary, s/he can additionally buy into a 401(K) with matches from the state. That’s what we do in the private sector — and it would allow greater ability to flow to and from the teaching profession.
It would also allow us to pay starting teachers quite a bit more. I think that’s a good thing. How to do it? For now, here are some things you might want to read to get some perspective on the issue. This piece by Jacob Vigdor in EducationNext is a great overview on the topic. This EdWeek piece from 2009 points at many of the challenges and the thinking of some superintendents and unions. This study tries to take a look at both backloading (current system) and frontloading. More to come on the topic.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
By Steve Poftak
March 16th, 2012
Got your attention? The Metropolitan Area Planning Council got mine earlier this week with their finding that implementation of the MBTA’s two deficit reduction scenarios would cause “roughly 10 avoidable” to “about 15 avoidable deaths per year”. That’s right, 10 – 15 death per year.
Digging further into the report — what’s causing most of the deaths? Almost all of them are caused by the possibility that service cutbacks will move people from transit to driving, resulting in a decline of 8.3 minutes per day in average walking per new commuter.
That 8.3 minute decline in daily walking becomes….wait for it… 9 – 14 deaths per year.
So I guess the desired conclusion is that the MBTA should be funded in order to prevent people’s poor choices around physical activity.
As a wise man once said, you can torture numbers until they confess.
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