Reauthorization Next Year — Maybe

Reauthorization of federal transportation funding, scheduled for 2009, will probably be delayed until 2010, says Senator Mark Warner. Apparently, Congress has too many higher priorities to take care of this year.

Congress historically authorizes transportation funding (most of which comes out of federal gas taxes) for six years. This gives it an opportunity to change direction and gives members of Congress opportunities to raise campaign funds from interest groups whose businesses depend on federal funding.

One reason for the delay, as reported in Congressional Quarterly (on-line version not available), is that the House Transportation Committee’s computer can’t handle all of the earmarks that members want to put into the bill. The computer keeps crashing.

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Is Performance-Based Budgeting the Answer?

The state of California faces a $42 billion budget deficit, and a writer for the Sacramento Bee suggests that the solution is performance-based budgeting. In other words, set “clear and measurable goals and objectives” for each government program and “hold managers accountable” to those goals.

Sounds like a great idea . . . except the federal government already tried it and it didn’t work. In 1993, Congress passed the Government Performance Results Act (GPRA). In essence, GPRA directed every federal agency to set “results-oriented goals” and then to write annual reports revealing how well they met those goals. The only practical effect of this law is to add to the red tape that agency officials must deal with every year.

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The Next Boondoggle

A Washington Post writer observes that a roundtrip Amtrak ticket from DC to New York is $140 or more, while there are buses that go the same route for only $20 each way. Unlike Amtrak, the buses have leather seats and free WiFi, and they take only an hour longer than the train.

The Antiplanner made much the same point in an op ed recently published in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer: All American taxpayers will share the cost of a national high-speed rail network, but its use will be limited mainly to the wealthy and those whose employers pay the cost.

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“Interstates paid for themselves out of gas taxes, and most Americans use them almost every day,” says the op ed. “Moderate or high-speed rail would require everyone to subsidize trains that would serve only a small elite.” Is it ironic or just inevitable that the Democratic Party, which likes to to think of itself as the party of the common people, supports policies that take from the poor and middle-class and give to the rich?

Portland Developer Challenges the Political Class

At 70, developer Joe Weston has seen it all in Portland, and done much of it himself. In the 1960s, he noticed that many east-Portland single-family neighborhoods were actually zoned multi-family. So he started buying two or three adjacent homes, which he ripped down and replaced with “Weston specials”: two-story, apartment buildings that resembled cheap motels.

Today, he owns 2,800 units of such apartments. But he is also one of the main developers of the heavily subsidized Pearl District. He just opened one of Portland’s newest condo towers, and he owns many office buildings. Before the crash, his real estate empire was valued at $300 million.

With his focus on dense housing, you would think he would be in the thick of Portland politics. So it was surprising to read a recent letter castigating Portland’s mayor and city commission for being out of touch with the public.

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CDC: Don’t Panic, Just Send Money

Joe Biden, the man who used to take Amtrak to work, tells people to avoid mass transit, passenger trains, and airlines during the swine flu epidemic. No doubt under pressure from the airline and transit industries, Biden’s office hastily reinterprets Biden’s message to mean people should “avoid unnecessary air travel to and from Mexico.”

This whole swine flu epidemic reeks of political correctness. Budget-maximizing bureaucrats at the CDC and various public health agencies, aided by a media that knows that panic sells papers and news broadcasts, fan the flames of worry. But they don’t want to offend the pork industry, so they change the name of the virus. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security either ordered its employees not to wear surgical masks “because they are too intimidating,” or it didn’t, because the “health of our employees is of utmost importance.”

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The H1N1 virus, to use its politically correct name, doesn’t appear to be a repeat of the 1918 Spanish flu. But Biden was only saying what a lot of people (including many school administrators) are thinking: that concentrating people in dense cities and making them dependent on mass transit makes them more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, more susceptible to communicable diseases, and less able to evacuate from hurricanes and other natural disasters. Fortunately, America has lots of low density suburbs filled with people who travel by personal automobile, so we are relatively immune from such problems.

Bank Demolishes Foreclosed Homes

Land-use regulation caused the housing bubble. Now, in at least one city, other regulations have forced a bank to demolish brand-new homes.

It would be easy to say that this shows that builder constructed a surplus of homes. But the truth is that these houses, like their builder and our entire economy, are simply victims of overzealous regulation.


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Among the many rules in the city of Victorville is one that imposes daily fines on the owners of homes not brought up to code within so many months after construction begins. The builder of these homes nearly completed them, then went bankrupt. Given a choice between paying the fines, bringing the homes up to code, or tearing them down, the bank decided to bulldoze them.

According to one of the comments on this site, the “code violation” was some windows broken by local vandals. Another story says it was due to the builder’s failure “to finish roads, walls, and other improvements that bring the community into code.” Whatever the details, this waste — from beginning to end — can be blamed solely on stupid land-use rules.

The Going Rate for Lying

It would be nice to think that Denver Regional Transit District (RTD) General Manager Cal Marsella is feeling pangs of guilt for lying to the public so often about the virtues of rail transit. That would explain why, even though he is one of the highest-paid public officials in Colorado, he just announced that he is quitting that job to take the “opportunity of a lifetime” by going to work for a private company that operates buses (update:and would like to operate trains) for public agencies including (by an amazing coincidence) RTD.

One reason why transit officials like trains is that the top officials of rail transit agencies get paid more than the leaders of agencies that only run buses.

In 1995, RTD paid Marsella $112,000 to run RTD, which was then mostly a bus system. He was picked for the job partly because he and the then-chair of RTD’s board of directors, Jon Caldara, agreed that rail transit was a waste of money.

Within a few years, he had changed his tune, overseeing construction of two new light-rail lines and pumping interest groups for their support for a 2004 measure to raise taxes to build six more.

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Obama’s Painful Plans

Ron Utt, the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, has uncovered the first steps of President Obama’s plan to force smart growth on those parts of the country that managed to escape the housing bubble. The departments of Transportation and Housing & Urban Development have signed a joint agreement to impose smart growth on the entire nation.

Under the agreement, the departments will “have every major metropolitan area in the country conduct integrated housing, transportation, and land use planning and investment in the next four years.” Of course, nearly all of the metropolitan areas that already did such integrated planning suffered housing bubbles, while most of those that did not did not have bubbles. The effect of Obama’s plan will be to make the next housing bubble much worse than the one that caused the current financial crisis.

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Obama’s Recycled Moderate-Speed Rail Plan

The Obama administration believes in recycling, as shown by the so-called high-speed rail plan it announced last week. Below is a map of the plan, and below that is a map of the Federal Railroad Administration’s 2005 high-speed rail plan. As you can see, the proposed routes are identical. (The grey lines on the first map represent conventional Amtrak trains.)

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