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Dirty Politics in Lane County

By | | News commentary
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In Oregon’s primary election this past Tuesday, Andy Stahl, who frequently comments on this blog, lost his bid to become Lane County (Oregon) commissioner. It is hard for me to tell this story, as I am one of the reasons he lost.

His opponent was Pete Sorenson, a four-term incumbent. I’ve known Pete for about as long as I’ve known Andy (meaning 35 years), and while I can’t say we were friends, we were always friendly. In the late 1970s he worked for Oregon Congressman Jim Weaver and I worked (as a very low-paid consultant) for the Oregon Wilderness Coalition (now Oregon Wild) helping Weaver’s staff justify their boss’s support for wilderness even though he represented the congressional district that cut more national forest timber than any other.

In the early 1980s, Sorenson went to the University of Oregon law school, and I frequently saw him on campus when I was studying economics. Over the next several decades, we would meet at conferences or bump into each other in Eugene and exchange war stories about various environmental issues. When I started proposing free-market reforms of the Forest Service in the late 1980s, he always listened politely and expressed sympathy with my growing fiscal conservatism.

Recently, however, Pete got in trouble over Oregon’s open meetings law. Apparently, he and one or two other county commissioners conspired to make certain budgetary decisions in private against the advice of the county attorney. In a sharply worded decision, an Oregon judge found that Pete and another commissioner “willfully violated” the law, though he found the third commissioner innocent. Neither of the guilty commissioners ever expressed any contrition or remorse, instead insisting they were being persecuted as the most liberal members of the commission.

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Obama Plays Hardball with California

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Obama administration is threatening to take back the $3.3 billion high-speed rail grant to California if the state legislature fails to approve the state’s high-speed rail plan by the end of June. Legislators had planned to hold some hearings this summer so they could base their decisions on actual facts rather than politics. Ironically, when California Republicans in Congress proposed to rescind the money, they were told there was no legal way to do it.

The High-Speed Rail Authority’s latest plan cuts Anaheim and Orange County out of the picture, alienating another group of voters and officials. Despite these cuts, the agency still expects to spend $68 billion building from San Francisco to Los Angeles. This is far more than it told voters it would cost when it asked them to approve the plan in 2008, and even if the legislature allows the authority to sell bonds to match the federal grant, the agency has less than 10 percent in hand.

A reporter at the Los Angeles Times did a little arithmetic and calculated that, to complete the first 130-mile segment in the Central Valley by 2017 as planned, the authority will have to spend $3.5 million per day. With the possible exception of war time, this is probably more than any one entity has ever spent on one project before. The implication is that the authority, which hasn’t been able to adequately manage anything yet, doesn’t have the capability of effectively spending that much money.

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Why Didn’t He Take a Stand on Pot?

By | | News commentary
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When a president takes a stand on a highly controversial issue like gay marriage in an election year, you know he is doing it solely to motivate his base. How so? The job of the president has nothing to do with who can and cannot get married, so in announcing that he supports gay marriage, President Obama is not announcing that he will or can actually do anything about it.

The Antiplanner thinks of gay marriage as one of three litmus sets for whether someone is a libertarian. Are you fiscally conservative but you support gay marriage and drug decriminalization? Then you are libertarian. Some libertarians disagree with one another on other issues such as abortion, immigration, and the war on terror. But I don’t think anyone would call themselves libertarians if they opposed gay marriage or drug decriminalization.

Drug decriminalization–especially for minor drugs like marijuana–is also supported by most of those on the left. Here is an issue the president can actually do something about, as he commands numerous agencies–the FBI, BATF, DEA, etc.–that enforce federal drug laws. At the very least, he can order those agencies to respect state laws in states that have legalized medical marijuana.

Yet Obama has “massively escalated the federal government’s attacks on medical marijuana businesses,” says the director of the Marijuana Policy Project in the Washington Post. His administration has ramped up the war on pot in Colorado despite the fact that even most Republicans in Colorado support medical marijuana.

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Transportation Notes from All Over

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The city of Detroit decided not to build a light-rail line down Woodward Avenue, so some private foundations are trying to raise the $137 million to build it instead. Are they nuts? Do they really think this is the best use of their money?

In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union forced the county transit agency to restore bus service that had been cut in order to pay for rail service. The Bus Riders Union strongly believes that buses work better than train, but the injunction expired a few years ago and the agency has cut service again. However, the FTA has ordered the transit agency to restore the service.

Tampa voters rejected a light-rail ballot measure in 2010, but the rail nuts think it was only because voters were “confused” about the proposal. One thing that’s clear: the main reason many Tampa officials want rail is they hope it will bring billions of federal dollars pouring into their city.

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Breaking Promises

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The high-speed rail ballot measure that California voters approved in 2008 made two promises: first, that fares would cover operating costs; and second, that trains would carry passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just two hours and forty minutes. The first promise will be hard to keep but no one will know for certain until and unless a rail line is actually built.

But the state seems ready to break the second promise right now. The High-Speed Rail Authority has proposed to save $30 billion by using existing tracks, at conventional speeds, in the LA and Bay areas, leaving the trains to operate at high speeds only between the metro areas. This means the fastest trains will still take far longer than two hours and forty minutes.

Of course, saving $30 billion means the rail line would still cost at least $25 billion more than the estimates published when voters cast their ballots.

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Brinkmanship

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Having failed to pass a reauthorization bill, Congress has only a few hours to extend the current law, which expires on Saturday. On Tuesday, however, the House failed to pass a 90-day extension to the law. On Wednesday, it failed to pass a 60-day extension to the law.

Supporters of an extension are are making all kinds of dire predictions of what will happen if the law isn’t extended: states won’t get federal dollars, so they will have to cancel or postpone projects, which will put people out of work, etc. No doubt these claims are exaggerated: states typically borrow money and eventually repay it with their share of federal formula funds. A delay of a few days is not going to make much of a difference.

Curiously, the main opponents of an extension are Democrats who are holding out for the House to support the Senate bill. But, as Ken Orski describes in two articles, the Senate bill is unsustainable and Congress will have to face budget shortfalls by raising taxes, increasing deficit spending, or reducing spending.

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Hiding in the Bills

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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One of the special-interest provisions in the transportation bill that passed the Senate a couple of weeks ago is a requirement that operators of passenger trains be licensed by the Surface Transportation Board. There is one and only one exception: Amtrak.

Supposedly, this could give Amtrak an edge when it competes with other companies for contracts for local commuter-rail service. Since Amtrak has lost business to Veolia and other private rail contractors in many cities, some people think this provision was written to support Amtrak and the transit unions that represent Amtrak employees.

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It isn’t enough that federal control or funding has made Amtrak and the transit industry some of the least productive parts of the nation’s economy. Now they want to ruin the freight sector as well. That alone made it worthwhile to kill the bill.

Crony Infrastructuralism

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
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Last night, the Antiplanner dreamed that Apple, the company with the highest market capitalization in the world, was spending some of its $97 billion in cash on roads, bridges, and other local infrastructure. A crazy idea, I know, but then, in the dream, some politician says, “What a great idea! Let’s create some TIF and special assessment districts so other corporations can help our infrastructure too.”

Somewhere between dreamland and waking up, I tried to explain why this was a bad idea. Suppose a town has two business districts, I said, and one is doing poorly compared to the other, possibly because it is older. Shops, restaurants, and other tenants turn over frequently, vacancy rates are high, and the shops that do exist tend to be downscale, including thrift stores and antique malls. The other district, perhaps because it is newer, is doing much better.

Suppose the city creates a special-assessment district around the older area and uses the funds to update the infrastructure. Unfortunately, the assessments, i.e., taxes, paid by the property owners in the district force them to raise rents, which causes even more turnover. The other district will probably complain and demand its own infrastructure improvements, which the wealthier property owners will more easily afford and thus give that district an even greater advantage over its rival.

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FTA Questioned Honolulu Rail Boondoggle

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Internal emails reveal that Federal Transit Administration officials were skeptical of Honolulu’s plan to spend $5.3 billion on a 20-mile rail transit line. City voters approved this line only after an expensive and hard-fought campaign. One FTA email accused the city of Honolulu of “lousy practices of public manipulation” and argued that the FTA should not only avoid being associated with it, it should “call them on it.”

This and other documents were turned over to plaintiffs in a lawsuit arguing that the city’s environmental impact statement (EIS) failed to consider a full range of alternatives. In a 2006 comment on the city’s plans to write the EIS, FTA staffer James Ryan noted, “We seem to be proceeding in the hallowed tradition of Honolulu rapid transit studies: never enough time to do it right, but lots of time to do it over.” Another FTA official, Joseph Ossi, replied, “This isn’t an FTA issue. Let the city deal with it. They have produced 3 failed projects and are well on their way to a fourth, so why is FTA wasting time on the City’s problems?”

“This is different,” a third FTA staffer, Raymond Sukys, answered. “This time [thanks to a tax increase] they have a huge cash flow which will build something. It seems likely that we will get involved in litigation again especially since we have an erroneous NOI out there. I do not think the FTA should be associated with their lousy practices of public manipulation and we should call them on it.” The “NOI” is the “notice of intent” to prepare an environmental impact statement, and Sukys apparently thought Honolulu’s NOI was insufficient because it failed to identify a full range of alternatives.

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Shooting Themselves in Their Feet

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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After fiscal conservatives successfully scuttled a House transportation bill that would have ended pork and allowed Congress to minimize deficit spending, the Senate has passed a bill that is full of pork and will practically mandate deficit spending. The good news, such as it is, is that the bill only reauthorizes federal spending for two years, meaning–if the House passes a similar bill–the whole debate can begin again in a year-and-a-half.

The Washington Post calls this bill an “overhaul” of federal transportation programs, but the Huffington Post points out that it is hardly “transformative.” Instead, it is basically the 2005 bill with a few minor tweaks here and there, none of which should please fiscal conservatives. These include disincentives for states to lease their roads to private toll concessionaires, increased funding for “TIFIA” loans, and greater federal safety oversight of public transit and tour bus companies.

Most importantly, the bill keeps continues to fund most transit programs out of gasoline taxes, which means transit agencies will remain almost completely divorced from transit riders. When 80 percent of your funds come from taxes, not user fees, you just don’t have much an incentive to cater to users. Despite claims of “soaring transit ridership, ridership has essentially been flat for the past six years (compare 2010 and 2011 with previous years on p. 10).

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