So the other day, I found myself watching the local municipal channel and saw the hearings on the Metro board decision to railroad Richmond and Wheeler Avenues. This is part of the proposed 30.1 mile expansion of the current Main Street rail line, which itself cost $520 million and not the advertised $324 million (and of which Frank Wilson immediately asked for another $104 million to upgrade). The advertised price of the expansion is $2.2 billion, but other documentation I have in my possession (and of which I will write about below) states that another cost estimate will be $2.6 billion (including the estimated 300 million for the Northside Intermodal temple). Either way, for further purposes, I will go with the $3 billion for the 37.5 miles of rail since nearly all transportation infrastructure projects have cost overruns.
So what to make of all of this? The point of this article is to make some rough back of a napkin comparisons of what the opportunity costs of spending $3 billion on 37 miles of rail verses what could be done with that amount of money with alternative forms of public transportation. It is also to air my thoughts on this whole mess.
Addendum edit - December 8, 2007: Please read my updated entry on Metro's $3 billion $4.7 billion limousine.
On August 8, 2007, the Examiner News, one of the Houston Community Newspapers, carried a story about a transportation solution that was implemented for the needy (one day access can be purchased to access the story) which are served by the Spring Branch Family Development Center of Houston and interviewed its director, a man by the name of Richardo Barnes. As it is, the SBFDC services immigrants studying English to improve themselves, single mothers and those who are otherwise struggling financially.
Mr. Barnes tells of how he has been on a crusade to get Harris County Metro to implement a series of bus routes to better serve the Spring Branch area. He correctly notes that the agency - scandalously in my view - does not run a regular bus route along Hillcroft, which turns into Voss road as it goes through Memorial, and into Spring Branch. Hence the agency does not even have a way to connect would be patrons from the heart of the Galleria to Spring Branch. It also does not have a direct route running along Chimney Rock, which turns into Wirt Road as it reaches Spring Branch. More to the point, Mr. Barnes believes that the Spring Branch area would better be served by a circulator route. I grew up in Spring Branch and cannot agree with him more. Instead, the agency makes sure that the routes in the area make it to the nearby transit center.
So what has Mr. Barnes done instead? Well, the Examiner article goes on to say that his Center received an anonymous donation of $60,000 to purchase a bus from Texas Bus Sales. Said Barnes,
The bus goes where people need to go and the schedule is made up based on their needs. "Sometimes they have to compromise a bit," he said. "If several people need to go grocery shopping, we ask that they go at the same time."
Barnes illustrates what some of his clients are up against by pointing out that a woman who lives in an apartment near Interstate 10 and Gessner must take three Metro buses in order to bring her baby to the WIC clinic.
"The trip takes about three hours," he said. "Our bus can pick them up and have them here in 20 minutes."
Barnes went on to say that there are more than 250 people who have signed up for the bus service and that they pay $10 per month. Their monthly fee barely pays for gas, however one might ask how much does it cost per month to maintain the bus?
The question of what to do here could use some reasonable framing. In Metro's National Transit Database profile for both 2004 and 2005, the agency states that the 7.5 mile MetroRail line costs $14 million per year to operate. This is more or less in line with the annual operating costs of other rail lines, which often take about 2-5 percent per annum of original capital costs to operate. Or, I should say that they do in their early years, until it comes time to do major maintenance of switchgear, signaling, wear out on rail cars, and so on. Still, a reasonable estimate will be that in its early years of operation, the 37.5 miles of trains will cost some $60-70 million - give or take some millions - per year to operate. Bear in mind that the agency has been stating that the ticket revenues for the train have been less than $2 million per year. This matters because that implies the agency has not been even coming close to collecting the annual operating expenses needed to operate the Main Street train, much less having those same passengers pay for the capital costs of building the train. This in turn leaves open the long run specter of the agency having to break its 2003 Metro Solutions bond election promise that it would not have to raise taxes in order to implement its plans. However, what rail fans are counting on is that once the rail tracks are in place, there will be - how shall I say - facts on the ground, which will force matters in the future and for which people will say that we have sunk those costs, we can't just tear them up now!
Moving onwards. The same NTD profiles state that for Metro to operate its 1,000 buses (the agency has over 1,400 buses in its fleet, 20% plus of which are spares), cost $263 million in 2005. This implies that the annual cost per year to operate a bus is some $250,000. This might seem outrageous, but maybe not. If you pay a bus driver $50,000 - $60,000 total compensation (wages, benefits, health care, 401k) per annum, that it would take 2 bus drivers to operate a bus for 18 hours per day, then thrown in fuel costs and maintenance, then that figure may well be accurate. I do have it on good word that "typical" buses operated by mass transit agencies get about 3.5 miles per gallon, bearing in mind that buses are the ultimate stop and go vehicles when operating in urban areas. Throw in the fuel costs have gone up about $1 per gallon since 2004-2005 and you are probably looking at another $20,000 per year (for $270,000), assuming that the bus runs 180 miles (10 mph for 18 hours) per day at 3.5 mpg.
Now then, believe it or not one of my biggest complaints against Metro as it has been run all these years has nothing to do with rail. It has to do with how it spends money on buses. The latest transit industry hybrid fuel buses cost $450,000 - $550,000. They do get some 20-30 percent better fuel economy, but that is absolutely absurd to think that this is a bargain when you can look at the Texas Bus Sales website and find used buses for as little as $4,500!
And where would you deploy such buses? This is another part of my complaint. Going back to the 2004 and 2005 NTD profiles for Metro, one will notice another metric. This one is the unlinked passenger trips per vehicle revenue mile metric. For the year 2005, one notices that Metro has 81.546 million unlinked trips for buses, while traveling 41.555 million miles. This equates to Metro buses carrying an average of 1.96 passengers per vehicle revenue mile traveled. That is statistical language for saying that Metro's buses run empty most of the time, something that should be obvious to anyone who spends time watching those buses go by. What makes the issue even more scandalous is to then view double attached buses run empty.
Moreover, even the 1.96 passengers per vehicle revenue mile is statistically skewed, probably with a very interesting kurtosis, by the fact that the agency does have a number of very productive bus routes, such as the #82 and #53, both of which operate on Westheimer and which I often see with nearly full buses everyday since I live right off of Westheimer. The #2 Bellaire is another route which gets good boardings. This anecdotal evidence should leave little room for doubt that a handful of very productive routes achieve much higher passenger per vehicle revenue mile metrics.
I also should bring up the Main Street rail line here, while on the passengers per vehicle revenue mile metric. One might notice that the Main Street train achieves much higher (about 14) passengers per vehicle revenue miles than does the bus fleet. Bearing in mind what was said about the bus fleet above, one also has to remember that the Main Street train was placed on the corridor which had the heaviest concentration of buses and boardings patronage. As far as I can tell, there were some 25,000 - 30,000 boardings along the Main Street corridor (some argue much differently) before the train was implemented. It would therefore make sense that the train would get high levels of passengers per vehicle revenue mile because the agency already knew that the Main Street corridor represented its highest and best corridor for ridership. In other words, the agency picked off its lowest hanging fruit. Now, in wanting to build out trains to other corridors, it will be spending vast sums of capital on successively lower performing routes, including the #50 Harrisburg whose entire route achieves a mere 4,500 boardings per day and which has few other routes around it which can be truncated towards it. I should state here that some people I know who live or work along the corridors have tried spending entire days counting the number of people on bus routes and have told me that these numbers are full of - well, you know what.
What would make vastly more sense for agency bus operations would be for Metro to actually match bus vehicles to the demand curve for its services. Small cheap buses could be deployed on vast majority of routes which have fewer than 5,000 boardings per day. According to my spreadsheet, only 17 of Metro's 133 bus routes (including shuttles and local routes) achieved an average of more than 5,000 boardings per day in FY 2006, the year of Metro's highest ever ridership. Such vehicles would most certainly get much better fuel economy than the massive buses that the agency operates today, indeed my research into the matter indicates that many of these vehicles can get 12 or so miles per gallon. The agency should continue to operate the current bus fleet on its routes of heaviest patronage and in fact could consider the idea of operating double decker buses on its heaviest routes such as Westheimer. However, as we shall see, even that idea might not even be needed if I were in charge.
So let us circle back to the question of what the opportunity costs are of spending $3 billion on rail, along with an estimated $60-$70 million per year on basic maintenance. An alternate idea of what we are looking at looks something like this. The agency could otherwise (but cannot as we will see below) purchase 500 buses and add them to the existing bus fleet. Of these, 70 (or 14 percent) could be used to augment the existing buses that are on Metro's bus routes of more than 5,000 riders, giving them four more buses running on them. The other 430 could be used on all other routes. The 70 buses on Metro's heaviest routes could be similar to those running already, costing the above mentioned $450,000 apiece. The other 430 could be from a company like Texas Bus Sales or other fleet vendor and could purchased at a cost of $60,000 each. This would result in a capital outlay of a paltry $60 million.
So what to do with the other $2.94 billion? One idea would be to take that sum of money and have Metro invest in 30 year U.S.Treasury bonds, which are currently yielding 4.6%. Investing $2.94 billion at 4.6 percent would yield $135.2 million per year, which could be employed for bus operations. The agency collects a mere $50 million from bus fares. If improved bus services were to yield a mere $15 million in additional bus fares, that would bring us up to $150 million for bus operations. Since we have estimated that bus operations are some $250,000 per bus per year (and which we could bump up to $300,000 per year), then we should be able to sustain the estimated extra 500 vehicles on the road.
So what could we do with those extra 500 vehicles? One of my favorite pet peeves is what happened to the #18 Kirby route. The #18 Kirby is one of the casualties of the hugely expensive rail centric transit system. The #18 used to get some 1,500 boardings per day in the late 1990's, but that figure dropped to the current 1,000 boardings per day after the frequency of bus service was sliced in half when Shirley Delibero burned through Metro's cash horde to build the Main Street rail line. All routes could get more frequent service, cutting down some of those horrific wait times that people have to suffer through. Many routes now have bus service that runs every 45-60 minutes during off peak hours. Entirely new routes could be devised, including ones which run from the Galleria along Voss and Chimney Rock to Spring Branch. Mr. Barnes would get his circulator routes with very little fuss, but he won't get a thing anytime soon by dumping all that money to run rail down streets like Wheeler, a street which Metro, in its entire history, has never had a bus route run down. Having never, in its entire history, run a crosstown bus which connects the University of Houston and TSU directly to Westheimer, West Alabama, or to Richmond, the agency and rail fans now politically demand that a $800 million train be laid down which does this. The agency loudly proclaims that college students are a big market of users for public transportation. If that is the case, then why has the agency never bothered to run a bus route directly across town before?
Are you worried that the world is about to run out of oil soon? Great! With $3 billion on hand, why doesn't the agency go out on a limb and ask the Tesla Roadster folks to manufacture 24 seats buses which run on lithium ion electric batteries? Surely they could do such a thing for less than $500,000 per vehicle? We may have cellulose ethanol available to us soon anyway, but if you are someone who believes that civilization is about to come crashing down because we are exhausting economical oil supplies (and for which you believe that there are absolutely no substitutes), then you might want to ask yourself why are we spending billions of dollars to run light rail to airports of all places?
Other benefits of a bus based public transportation scheme would include not having to tear up streets and roads along the corridors, which have deeply upset those who live along them. Residents who happen to live within a 1,500 feet radial of a proposed train stop would not find the deeds to their homes under the shadow of future condemnation because of their proximity to a Metro train stop. Metro may or may not condemn their property, but one needs to remember that Metro is not the only player in this game. Metro has formed a public private partnership with Washington Group International and I have some very good intelligence that WGI has made some - how shall I say - very interesting proposals to Metro regarding what might go on around the Intermodal Transit temple and around train stations. Without going into too much detail, there is a very strong argument to be made that this entire project has absolutely nothing to do with transportation, but does in fact have quite a bit to do with the politicizing of land use via real estate redevelopment. The building of rail lines represents, from the view of the economist in me, a massive concentration of capital along narrow strips of territory. The only way in which one can justify doing something like that would be because there already is a massive concentration of other capital directly in the area.
But I digress. What would ridership have been like with all these extra vehicles on the road? That is a good question. Metro achieved 68 million boardings in 1982. The agency achieved 82 million boardings in 1990 and 101 million in the year 2000. This steady increase of ridership over time was snapped after the light rail line was built. The latest 2007 figures show Metro with 97-98 million boardings even after 500,000 residents have been added to the county population.
It is quite likely, in contrast, that given population increases that the agency would have continued to slowly but steadily improve boardings. As things are, the agency is projecting to have some 120 million boardings after rail is built, but spending a whopping $3 billion to get a mere extra 60,000 net boardings per day (about 3 freeway lanes of passengers in SOV vehicles) is quite a feat. Indeed it is conceivable, based on past trends, that the agency could have achieved 115-120 million boardings by now without ever having spent a dime on rail.
The reason for the relatively paltry 20 percent gain in overall boardings for having spent this kind of money is because of what I wrote about above concerning the fact that Metro is not even collecting operating costs of the rail line, much less capital costs. Since the operational costs of the new rail lines will not be covered, that will force another truncation of bus routes towards the trains, cutting bus service to the wider area. My back of the napkin calculations are that Metro will have to cut back bus service by some $50 million in operational monies per year, which makes me think that about 20 percent of current bus service will be slashed after the trains are built. One also might think that Metro promised in the 2003 Metro Solutions ballot that it would improve bus service by 50 percent, but Metro stated a while back that there was no demand for an increase in bus service. That in turn makes one wonder why it was that the agency made such a promise and how is it exactly that the agency "knows" that the demand curve for extra bus service has been saturated? Read further down for what I say about politlcal markets and real world markets.
I have a story to tell about Metro telling the public that there is no demand for more bus service. Metro used to run a bus route, the #54 Aldine - Hollyvale Circulator. As one can notice from reading my boardings spreadsheet, the Aldine-Hollyvale route used to take in nearly 1,000 passengers at its peak in 2000. However, the Aldine-Hollyvale was one of the victims of Metro's cuts in bus service. Boardings went down in the early part of this decade, reaching a low of 510-690 patrons per day in its last months of operation in 2004 - 2005. In December 2004 (as part of its service improvements), Metro announced that the route would need to achieve an average of 855 boardings per day in order to justify continuing running the bus route - and I still have the publicly issued pamphlet in my possession to prove it. What the agency did not tell the public was that the route once upon a time actually was getting that kind of patronage! So in effect, the agency, having doomed the route to "fail" to begin with by cutting frequency of bus service, self justified its decision to shut the route down because of its supposed lack of success in drawing patrons and because of high operational costs.
Unfortunately, since we are going to a rail centric network, Mr. Barnes still won't get his routes even after we have spent $3 billion on rail transit, and we should investigate why that is so. The big problem with having the federal government diversion of the 2.8 cents per gallon gasoline tax diverted to transit is that because the way that the rules are written, the New Starts grant money can only be used for capital expenditures. Federal money is not to be used to operations expenses. Moreover, only public transit agencies are eligible for the start up grants. This in turn creates the following, warped incentives:
1) Local governments all over America had huge incentives to buy out any privately operated transit companies which still might have been around in the 1960's and 1970's. In their place, government transit agencies would be created and chartered, if for no other reason than to be eligible to get in line for federal handouts for transit. Who cares whether anyone bothered to take public transportation? What really mattered (and still matters) is that local interest groups get the grant money.
2) Since Congress has geared FTA programs towards capital expenditures, essentially the rules say that "we will give you big capital grants, but its up to you to come up with operating funds." This state of affairs completely warps the incentives facing local political elites,transit agencies, and transit supporters. The game is tilted towards spending huge sums of money on expensive rail lines which may cost dozens of times more money to build, but don't cost quite as much to operate. That in turn creates a ripple effect because very few transit agencies cover their operating expenses. That means that bus service usually is cut and reconfigured towards rail lines since doing anything else makes absolutely no sense at all.
I should say, in the light of what was said regarding Stephen Kleinberg's most recent transit survey, that there is a very big difference between political markets and real world markets. Someone participating in a real world market must come up with ideas that will pay their way on their own merits, otherwise, they are forced to exit the field. That, gentle readers, is a good thing. On the other hand, in political markets, ideas only have to win 50% plus one voter and the idea wins, regardless of what the conseqences are and regardless of whether the idea actually succeeds in doing what people think it will actually do.
If the current Main Street rail line were built in a real world market by a private operator, a good idea of what the train would take to be built would look something like this. Since the train cost $520 million and is costing $14 million per year to operate, the estimated annual carrying costs of capital (at 5% interest) would be $26 million. Add $14 million in operating expenses and you get $40 million per year. A private operator would probably have to pay off a loan at 2-3% per year, so the private train operator would need to collect some $50 million per year (if not more) for the idea to be viable in real world markets. Since the train had 11 million riders in 2007, that would equate to a private operator needing to charge about $5 per person per boarding (Metro would need to charge about $6 per boarding to fully pay its own way in the world instead of $1). Very few would be willing to pay that price to ride the train, ergo that is why you do not see rail being built by the private sector. But what you do see is the Houston Chronicle and rail fans in the political markets cheering on rail building while saying that "there is no demand for the increase in bus service".
One issue hanging out over the horizon concerns the 25 percent general mobility monies that Metro pays out to its constituent municipalities for road building and other transportation projects. This arrangement is set to expire in 2014. In theory, the agency could devote all of the money to improving bus service as promised which could fulfill the 50 percent bus service improvement aspect of the 2003 bond election vote, but that is contingent on the idea that the member cities and Harris County are going to actually come to an agreement that the current arrangement will end. That, ladies and gentlemen, is not a done deal. That issue also cropped up in Metro's Westpark rail line DEIS, as well as the FEIS's for the North and Southeast Corridors. In those documents, Metro claimed to the FTA and to the public that it would have $8 billion in cash on hand in the year 2030. Now let me tell you gentle readers something about myself and that is that I have read an awful lot about politics. If there is one thing I know, that is that no politician or group of politicians are going to let $8 billion in cash pile up without spending it. I do not know what will happen, but that money will be spent somewhere. So why did the agency make such a claim? Let just say that we already have covered that. It's because there are all of those all important federal grants to chase after and who gives a damn about what the consequences of that really are.
So we could have (or could have had) one of two things. We could have $3 billion in rail lines, with about 20-25 percent of the entire year 2000 bus system service cut and truncated. That would have offset any (if there were or are any) benefits which might have been gained from rail. Or were could have added 500 bus vehicles to the year 2000 fleet which was already in existence, which could be deployed anywhere - including some for Spring Branch which would help Mr. Barnes and those disadvantaged souls at the Spring Branch Family Development Center.
More Fireballs, Lightning Bolts, and Hell Storms to follow.
Wizard
On Friday, November 16, 2007, the Houston Property Rights Association welcomed retired governmental auditor Bob Lemer, author of the TABOR inspired Proposition 2, to give an update on what is happening with the various city charter amendments concerning finance issues.
Before Lemer took to the podium, several HPRA members brought news on a few fronts. One said that he attended a John Culberson related function where the Congressman has lately been active on the immigration front. Culberson flew to El Paso a while back and watched incognito as border patrol personnel waved vehicles to go on by. Eventually Culberson himself stepped in and identified himself, at which point the bureaucrats predictably called out extra personnel and dogs to beef up security. This same person went that Wednesday to a League of Women Voters meeting where Stephen Kleinberg and Gordon Quan complained that the opposite was good - that immigration led to diversity and that diversity is good. Quan said that there are 20 million illegals in America now and that deporting them would take years. Some states of drivers licenses for illegals. Incidently, the idea that racial and cultural diversity is good for civic engagement has taken a very serious hit recently. Not only that, the hit was delivered by one of its longtime stalwarts, Professor Robert Putman.
Talk also drifted to the Astrodome proposal. One HPRA member who is politically well connected, talked to Oliver Luck. Apparently Dome Development officials were hoping for a $750 million redevelopment proposal on the Dome, but that a proposal has not materialized. This gentleman, who has been working with Mike Roselle and Mr. Luck, has reminded them that you cannot do anything to destroy a prospectus on a business deal, which seems to be the strategy that the Houston Texans and Rodeo are trying to do. Instead, this gentleman suggested that the easy way out of Harris County would be to do an economic impact statement showing that the Dome costs $5-7 million per year to operate and to let the impact statement do the talking that the Dome needs to be demolished.
The fellow in question also said up front that bonds are still in play for refurbishing the Astrodome! The claim is that the hotel and motel tax can cover it, but there probably isn't enough money in that fund to float a massive bond for Dome redevelopment - read here for some refresher history about previous public funding of Dome upkeeping. A question was raised as to whether the Houston Texans and Rodeo could actually stop new redevelopment and the contention is that yes, the tenants could do it through their agreements.
HPRA President Barry Klein, who recently completed cancer treatments, attended the gathering today. He took briefly to the microphone to say that there have been polls cited recently saying that the public supports keeping the Astrodome and maybe redeveloping it, but he pointed out that the polls in question do not ask such questions as whether taxpayers were willing to see their taxes go up to support Astrodome maintenance or redevelopment. He also went on to say that Metro's current market share of transportation trips is only about 2 percent of all trips and that the massive light rail build out would not make any dent in this overall pattern of development. Metro's own numbers show that its share of trips is still going to only be 2 percent of trips in 2025. Klein says that what is needed is a public education campaign that tells people about the fallacies of transit, including that it can relieve congestion. He pointed out that he has a file on Metro's commuter rail plans, which they have been planning away on since 1979 and for which they still won't make any sense.
But onto Bob Lemer. Lemer's talk concerned Propositions 1 & 2, as well as City Charter propositions G and H from 2004. All were approved, but all of them are also now in court. Lemer said that Proposition 2 was an outgrowth of something called TaxVote 97, which he contends had a flaw in that it applied the idea of rate of increase in allowed governmental expenditures to inflation and population growth, but did so to all rate structures. According to Lemer, this would have resulted in complex accounting problems. The Proposition 2 initiative was a refinement of that original idea.
Lemer went on to stress that Proposition 2, what he calls the Houston TABOR, does not prevent anything! It merely said that if the City of Houston wanted to increase expenditures by a rate greater than that of population growth and inflation, then the City needed voter approval. But oh my goodness! From the belly aching you heard from the City, the Houston Chronicle, and the allied interest groups, this was just preposterous and absolutely unacceptable!
On the other hand, Proposition 1:
1) Supposedly capped property tax increases to either the lower of 4.5% per year, or to population growth rate plus inflation.
2) Supposedly extended the homestead exemptions which were already in place, and
3) Supposedly kept growth in water and sewer rates at a level below population and inflation rates.
Lemer went on to say that Carroll Robinson, Jeff Daily, and Bruce Hotze joined together and went to an appelate court, first having to ask that the City report the result that Prop 2 passed to the Secretary of State. Then these men had to go back to court asking the court to tell the City to put Prop 2 into the City Charter. Mayor White has not done this. This in turn leads to the question as to whether Proposition 2 will be operative? Mayor White and City Council asked for a summary judgment saying no it doesn't have to be, but the judiciary said no. Robinson, Daily, and Hotze asked for a summary judgment in favor of putting Proposition 2 into effect and the judiciary agreed. Naturally the City has appealed.
Now here was the interesting part of Lemer's presentation. According to Lemer, under Proposition 1 and Proposition 2, the City owes taxpayers money. However, under Proposition 1, the City owes taxpayers about $129 million, while under Proposition 2, the City owes taxpayers only $30 million! That's right gentle readers. The Mayor's plan actually backfired and is turning out to be better for taxpayers than the plan put forth by the opposition.
However before everyone starts celebrating their good fortune, there is a problem with Proposition 1. Namely, Proposition 1 does not have a provision for refunding money and there is no remedy available to enforce the Proposition. This was one of the issues that Lemer was trying to stress during the 2004 elections. CM Toni Lawrence brought this issue up in City Council and the Mayor asked in public, "Do we have to replay money? No! Then we don't do anything." Lemer expects the matter of refunds and enforcement of Proposition 2 to go to court soon. This is not good for a city whose pension bond obligations are seen as being under stress.
A question was asked why it was that Proposition 1 has been more effective so far than Proposition 2? Lemer replied it was because that, though the airports were exempt, as well an enterprise funds (i.e. franchise fees, hotel / motel occupancy taxes), those taxes have been flat over the past few years, whereas property values have been going up.
Another person asked whether it could be construed that Mayor White's actions could be seen as having a fraudulent intent? In other words, if the Mayor put the Proposition on the ballot and did not intend to give any monies back if it were deemed to do so, then could the Mayor be charged with something? Lemer said he did not know. The Proposition was presented as a relief act to be incorporated into the Charter as an amendment. It would be up to the lawyers to see if anything could be filed.
One member of the audience, an attorney, mentioned that the true remedy is actually political in nature, namely that the voters are in theory supposed to vote out the current Council which is reluctant to implement these propositions and to vote one in that will. This gentleman expressed the idea that these Propositions are aspirational in nature. There was also a question of who has standing, but I do remember that Proposition 2 actually said that any Houstonian could claim standing when it came to enforcement of it.
The City has no obvious incentive to enforce both propositions, indeed Lemer told the audience that the City had given Vinson and Elkins $150,000 to fight the appelate battle, a figure V&E blew through very quickly. White will be out in two years, and Lemer thinks that the City will not approve any more money to contest appelate rulings on the propositions, and it is important to remember that City Council as a group is party to these suits.
Barry Klein interjected at this point to remind the audience that when the City goes out and hires a law firm like V&E, the City is also buying whatever influence the law firm can wield because V&E is tied into the establishment and such a big contributor to both political and judicial campaigns.
Mr. Lemer went on with discussing the situation involving Propositions G and H. Lemer pointed out that neither of these propositions acknowledge Proposition 2. They also remove so called "enterprise funds" - meaning money reaped at the airports, water and sewer fees, and other infrastructure from the revenue cap. Proposition H asked for an increase of $90 million regardless of any other caps which may exist. Lemer said that the City is also trying to get drainage monies back into general funds.
Lemer explained to the audience that when it came to the City airports, Hobby and George Bush Intercontinental, that the City is effectively a landlord only. Outside of a few police officers, the vast majority of people who work at the airports work for either the airlines or for other government agencies. What the revenue cap would have done with regards to the airports is that it would have forced a public vote on any airport expansions and the airlines did not want that. Lemer stated that the airport bonds are effectively junk bonds. An obscure piece of legislation allows for the City to authorize up to 5 cents per $100 property tax valuation to pay for airport bonding in the event that the airport system gets into trouble. Meanwhile, Lemer says that the City has been hitting up John Culberson for money to expand and refurbish the airports - while simultaneously demonizing Mr. Culberson about rail at the same time I might add.
Lemer stated that the Mayor's actions effectively say that propositions G&H are in effect, but that Propositions 1 and 2 are not. Logically you cannot have both. Lemer said that Proposition 1 is a hoax on taxpayers and that the Mayor should not continue pretending that it is not. Meanwhile the Mayor has received, without his asking, a substantially lowered valuation on the price of his property, allegedly because he lives in a flood plan. That however only goes to prove that property taxes at the local level are no different than corporate or income taxes at the federal level when it comes to lobbying and favoritism in order to be relieved from their burdens.
On a final note, Lemer recently received a confidential email from auditor at Deloitte and Touche, stating that "the City of Houston has material weaknesses in its internal audit controls", which is layman's language for saying that the financial sector thinks that you have been doing Enron Accounting and cannot effectively trust your books. Lemer stated that if this were to happen In the private sector, heads would start rolling. Lemer asked the auditors for more information on why they stated this, but D&T said that the City was determining the scope of their auditing. Moreover, the City has said in response to recent enactment of tighter GASB and GAAP controls on governmental entities that the City will interpret whether its own books are in compliance with these measures.
As Marshall Sam Gerard once famously said of one train wreck, "My, my, my, my - what a mess!"
Addendum: If blog readers want to listen to the podcast from which this blog entry was transcribed, they can download it here. The podcast is approximately 80 minutes in length and is 18mb in size. I will keep it available until December 1, 2007.
Wizard
It was front page news the Wednesday before Thanksgiving on Houston's paper of note that Archbishop Daniel DiNardo will be vested into the College of Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church. Somehow it seems appropriate that the good Father will receive his appointment into the august body the weekend after that most American of holidays.
I was raised in a house of Protestant Lutherans. I was an occasional church goer as a kid, but I've had many people tell me that despite my cranky acerbic attitude towards a lot of things that I really am a sweet heart. So my religious upbringing might have done some good after all.
But one thing that attending 9 years of Lutheran school, nor 4 years of public high school tell me was that all that schooling really didn't give me a truly rounded understanding of things like faith and how religious beliefs had riveted human societies from time immemorial. It wasn't until I had gone through some long conversations with some of my school friends (who were raised Catholic), had watched some amazing History Channel programs, had traveled to other parts of the world, and done an enormous amount of reading on the ideas and doctrines of religious faith that I truly began to understand what the Roman Catholic Church meant to the world and why it is the way it is today. So I write this entry about Archbishop DiNardo's elevation to the Cardinal hood as a somewhat interested outsider, a wide ranging and curious layman if you will.
I have no special insider knowledge of the the ideas, troubles, or counsels of the Catholic Church of today. For some, most likely very secular lawyers, the Church has been only of interest when the some sexual abuse scandal erupts. For others the Church is a target of historical anger, whether because of forced conversions to the Catholic faith from their own indigenous beliefs or because of the Crusades it led to recapture the Holy Land. But what many people short change or overlook is the quiet piece of mind the Church has given literally billions of people over the past 2,000 years. It may never cross the minds of the Church's detractors of the countless newborn or infant children who were left abandoned to die by anguished parents, but were rescued by the Church believers. Even to this day, by the Church's own account the American branch of the faith alone assists more than 7 million people. Despite what many readers of this blog might imagine, I would far rather have dinner with someone like Cardinal DiNardo than with any computer programmer or politician.
So what to make of the Archbishop's promotion to the College of Cardinals? Well, what is of interest is that the College itself was expanded by Pope John Paul II when he was alive to 120 members (others say 180). The Catholic Church of America has some 70 million members, but already has 13 ordained Cardinals. Considering that this hoary Church has over 1 billion adherents, and that it becomes quickly clear that America is overrepresented in the College of the Cardinals and Europe is even more so.
Does this lack of democratic representative fairness matter? Well, one could argue both yes and no. The Cardinals choose who shall be the Pope, who in turn chooses who shall be in the College of the Cardinals. The yes side of the democratic fairness argument says that the Eurocentric focus of the Cardinals detracts from where the attention of the church should be, while the no argument says that Pope Benedict has made it expressedly clear that a substantial focus of his papacy is going to be to shine a light on the - if you will - spiritual impoverishment and to combat what he sees as the dangers of moral relevantism of today's Europeans and Americans. As such, who said we were talking about having a Democracy here anyway, given that that Church was a European faith whose aspirations were universal? What was interesting is that when Pope John Paul passed away, it did not take very long for the Cardinals to choose Cardinal Ratzinger as the new Pope. That could be seen as a signal that Church leaders were largely united in their deliberations on where they wanted to go and focus their energies on. DiNardo's appointment can be seen as a continuation of the struggle against moral relativism and as a nod to the fact that Hispanics in America are often Catholics. I attended the funeral of the mother of a Hispanic former co-worker last year, who was given Catholic rites, including a rosary.
I've traveled to Brazil, the Phillipines, Argentina, and to France, all of which are nations with substantial populations of Catholics. I've been inside some cathedrals in places like Rio de Janeiro which are hundreds of years old and are nothing short of works of art. Despite all of the concerns about the affairs of the West, it would have been interesting to see the election of a Brazilian Pope, or a Pope from Africa or Asia. I suggested this to a Catholic girl I used to work with who was from Trinidad. She went bananas, telling me that it wasn't right that a Pope be anyone but from Europe.
To me, what made John Paul so successful was that he was seen as an every man's Pope; a man who came from a modest background and whose life was colored by the fact that his homeland was under the thumb of Communism. People from all over the world loved him. A successful Pope has to not only have convictions, but also has to have a kind of identifiable charisma which John Paul had in spades. So far, Benedict seems not to have that magic touch that his predecessor had.
So I suppose one might say that yes, in the larger scheme of things, DiNardo's appointment makes some kind of sense. If the church allows some creativity for DiNardo's role, one could see him as a kind of ambassador for Americans to those south of our borders, strengthening the bonds of the Church throughout the Americas.
Enough musings for now about the affairs of the world's largest religious faith. I'm watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade as I finish this. Y'all have a Happy Thanksgiving!
Wizard
On Friday November 2, 2007, the Houston Property Rights Association welcomed Harris County Judge candidate Charles Bacarisse. I've been lying down on the job on posting on HPRA meetings, but I will try to make up on this by following up with a meeting held on November 16, 2007 with Bob Lemer soon after this one.
The meeting with Mr. Bacarisse actually started with news on the latest happenings with the Floodway Coalition. HPRA members heard of stories from the Floodway Coalition's townhall meeting where that group has filed lawsuits against the City of Houston for unconstitutional regulatory takings stemming from the enacting of the ordinance. One person, who has land near downtown Houston, and which had planned to construct a parking garage, can no longer construct that parking garage due to restrictions placed on his property by the ordinance. That man has experienced a property value loss of $25 million from not being able to improve his parcel of land by construct that garage.
But on to Mr. Bacarisse. Mr. Bacarisse served 12 years as the Harris County District Clerk. He says he gave money back which was budgeted to his office 11 out of the 12 years he was in office, as he was able to hold his budget within line. he also started a criminal collections unit to go after criminals who had not paid fines imposed on them during punishment sentencing. This unit collected $60 million during his tenure in office.
Bacarisse thinks there is a big disconnect between voters and local government, with many in local government showing considerable arrogance once in office. He cited the Wayne Dolcefino stories on KTRK-TV showing County Commissioner Jerry Eversole living an indolent days while collecting his six figure salary as a commissioner. He said that the County is complicit with the City of Houston with regards to the Floodway Ordinance, though the County did not enact it. He thinks the Floodway Ordinance is bureaucratic arrogance at work.
With regards to Metro, Bacarisse has it in his campaign platform that Metro either abides to the clear terms of the 2003 Bond election (50 percent increased bus service, 25 percent of general mobility monies be paid, clearly defined train routes, amongst other things), or that a new election should be held. In retrospect, the group did not ask Bacarisse about the troubling issue of Metro's 1,500 foot radius condemnation power around rail stations.
In continuing with talking about his platform, Bacarisse told the audience that County revenues were up $175 million, 12 percent, in 2007 over 2006. He asked for a 5 cent per $100 property tax valuation at the Court, which would return $125 million to taxpayers. Bacarisse's opponent, the appointed Judge Ed Emmett, fired back "where are you going to cut?" Bacarisse told the audience that we need to keep the foot off of the accelerator and the way he wants to do this is through the enactment of a taxpayer bill of rights (or TABOR), to hold growth in spending to a combination of population growth and inflation. Bacarisse told the audience this can be done if he can get two of the other county commissioners to sign on to this. It does not have to be done by initiative or referendum, nor through permission from the State Legislature.
Bacarisse told the audience that the number of County administration personnel are up 90% in the past decade. There are now 51 members of County Judge staff, up from 25. He charged that Judge Emmett has added more than $200,000 in staff costs since being appointed.
Bacarisse said that the Harris County Toll Road Authority has $700 million in cash reserves, as well as having collected $358 million in tolls in 2006. The authority needs to make sure it spends money strictly on projects that alleviate congestion. He has been talking with David Hutzelman about such issues, noting that the Houston Texans practice facility was about to go into default. The bonds for the project were bought out by toll road revenues. Bacarisse said this was illegal, since the laws which created the authority forbid toll road monies from being used for non-transportation purposes. He said he is opposed to a State wide toll road authority, a regional toll road authority, the Trans Texas Corridor, as well as converting already paid for roads to toll roads. Bacarisse thinks that the County should stay in control of the toll roads.
Since this meeting was held before the 2007 elections, Bacarisse talked about the numerous bond proposals on the ballot. He noted that the advertisements for the County bonds told voters that they would not cost you a cent. The phone number on the bonds led to former Judge Robert Eckels' phone number at Fulbright and Jaworski. Bacarisse pledged that contributions to his campaigns would be posted to his site.
More with regards to the bonds, Bacarisse says that a big problem with bond issues is that would be issuers too often say, "give us $100 million" for parks, roads, etc. However, they do not spell out in a line matter what exactly the bonds are supposed to be used for. Bacarisse says this amounts to governments wanting a blank check instead of telling voters exactly what those bonds are supposed to be used for.
Astrodome: Bacarisse asked the audience "when was the last time you have seen a situation where the that the tenants on a property tell the landlord what will go on there?" That is what he sees happening with the Astrodome. We the peasantry are still paying $36 million in bond debt for the new seats that were put in so that Bud Adams would keep the Houston Oilers in Houston. Bacarisse says this is a lack of leadership on deciding what to do.
One HPRA member asked Ed Emmett a while back if he could tell him what the County debt was? The Judge couldn't tell him that. He asked Bacarisse if the County could put together an easy to read website which would tell taxpayers who we owe money to and how much. Bacarisse replied that the Harris County Auditor's site was somewhat useful, but that more could be done to make reports less confusing, more user friendly, and detailed.
Another member asked what could be done about County taxpayers having to pay for health care given to illegal immigrants. This woman asserted that 50 percent of those in intensive care in the Harris County Hospital District were illegals or those from other countries. Bacarisse replied that the federal government have said that we have to provide treatment. Bacarisse said he would like to look into stopping non-critical treatment, as well as having them pay something for their care. He mentioned that trying to get data out of the HCHD for 7 weeks concerning sponsored immigrants working legally, but cannot even get that much less data on illegal immigrants. Bacarisse supports Commissioner Sylvia Garcia's idea to attach a fee on wire transfers to pay for immigrant health care.
One attendee asked what Bacarisse was going to do about the evacuees from Louisiana. Bacarisse said that 2/3rd's of the evacuees have been absorbed into Houston successfully. The remaining 1/3rd are still a problem. The District Attorney has added 25 prosecutors since 2006. Bacarisse told the audience that if the next hurricane comes within the next 5-10 years, he intends to hang a no vacancy sign out, saying that Houston has done its part to alleviate the problems caused by other cities. What if the same thing happens to us? Will others do the same for us that we did for them? He also mentioned that the County has set up a secure website for illegal criminal case files, which can be accessed by anyone in law enforcement at any level of government. The feds now have an immigration person at the time of booking because they know where to go to look for information.
A final question was asked about the amount of taxpayer money that is paid by Houston residents, but that the County spends a disproportionate amount on areas outside the City, as well as in unincorporated areas. Bacarisse said he did not know exactly what the figures were for how much money was paid by various areas verses how much they received in benefits. Another member mentioned that it may be that Houston residents get more health care at the County hospitals, while areas outside of Houston get roads and more parks.
And so it was. The Wizard thinks that the County Judge race, mega money Democrat David Mincberg notwithstanding, is still Ed Emmett's to lose, though I will be voting for Charles Bacarisse in the primary. I think Bacarisse is more of a straight speaker than Ed Emmett and I also think that Emmett is too much the establishment man to effect anything meaningful. At least Robert Eckles would tell people no sometimes.
Next up is Mr. Lemer.
Wizard
One thing that I've kept promising myself about over and over again, but never actually do, is write more book reviews. One of my ambitions in starting this site was to write lots of book reviews instead of posting them to Amazon or elsewhere. I do get plenty of views for my Karen Armstrong book reviews (which I will be transferring to my blog page), so there are people out there who are interested in such things.
This review is of course about the book Sprawl: a Compact History, by University of Chicago historian and Architecture professor Robert Bruegmann. I actually was loaned a copy of this book from a fellow activist, which saved me the immediate trouble of ordering my own copy. I still think I will get around to purchasing a copy sometime soon.
I've certainly gone through my share of academic tomes over the years. Bruegmann's book clocks in at 230 pages, along with 50 pages of footnotes and reference pages. For an academic publication, Sprawl is a fairly easy read, with no dense calculus equations, a mere 10 graphs and 23 images of various cities and urban layouts, along with replications of various plans of cities and models. The book is simply laid out, with three parts. The first describes sprawl from a historical perspective and looks into ideas as to why sprawl takes place. The second part covers the various anti-sprawl political campaigns which have occurred over the past century. Last, Bruegmann looks a prescriptions and remedies for the alleged problems.
Amongst items I noted were the following:
1) Early in chapter 1, Bruegmann notes that there is no agreed upon definition of what constitutes sprawl. His footnote on the topic is over a page long. In the footnote, Bruegmann argues that "it has been the non measurable, especially aesthetic aspects of sprawl that have constituted the emotional heart of the debate on the subject."
The term sprawl has a negative connotation, much like the terms elitism or conspicuous consumption, but what's funny is that the target of that negativism has been rather ephemeral. An implied undercurrent is that sprawl is caused by other people and that it results from the poor choices by which others have decided to live their lives.
My comment: The definition issue should be of no surprise since we are largely talking about the study of social sciences and of urban settings. The entire field of urban studies is rife with definition problems, which often contribute to spill over problems such as having to control for data comparisons and mismatches. In case you want to debate the point, try determining what the population of the Houston metropolitan area is. Do you want to determine the population of the City of Houston, Harris County, the SMSA, the PMSA, or the H-GAC metropolitan area? Bruegmann notes that frequently when the urban population spreads outward, it triggers the addition of a new county to the metropolitan area by the U.S. Census Bureau. Metropolitan density may appear to plummet simply because of the addition of the new county, no matter whether the density of the actual urbanized portion of the area was rising and falling.
Since we don't have a firm definition of what exactly sprawl is, then anti-sprawl campaigners find themselves falling back on the old saw that I know it when I see it.
2) Bruegmann says that many of the things that anti-sprawl campaigners fear is based upon outdated data or evidence. For example, there is a pervasive fear amongst some that sprawl is accelerating and spiraling out of control. Bruegmann shows where the rate of new sprawl in most metropolitan areas is actually slowing down and that many cities are slowly growing denser. That statement is in fact true for Houston.
Bruegmann states that lot sizes reached their peak in the 1950's and 1960's, while houses built on newer lots since then have been getting larger. He says that quite a bit of newer development at the edge of urban areas consists of row housing and apartments.
3) Bruegmann writes that distant "exurban" sprawl, what could be described as very low density development in rural areas past the urban periphery, has been accelerating. This is mostly because the parcels of land are very large and there are more people (often very wealthy) moving out to those areas who still want to be within striking range of towns and cities to access their amenities. At the same time, we have seen the creation of affluent, distant work areas far away from cities where people make very long commutes to get to them.
4) If you are a James Howard Kunstler fan, it may be of interest to you (I already knew this) that the large cities of the ancient world, such as Rome, had population densities of 150,000 people or more per square mile. It's possible to imagine that Mr. Kunstler, who lives in a town whose density is less than 1,000 people per square mile, would be thrilled to live in such a city.
5) The first sprawl in ancient cities and those of the Middle Ages was due to activities which were performed that were often objectionable within the city walls, such as smoke arising from metal working or burial of the dead. Bruegmann correctly notes that historical cities faced the crushing economic burden of building and maintaining walls around their perimeters. As Barton Smith told us in class one day, there were economies of scale in defense, so sprawling outside of city walls was a problematic issue in a world where your enemies could come from out of nowhere. Suburbanites of the ancient world lived outside the walls of cities because they could not afford to live in them. They gave up access to services and protection of the walls in return for living in tiny hovels near roads. Meanwhile the extremely wealthy of the ancient world lived in extravagant villas near the seaside or other desirable country areas.
Intriguingly, Bruegmann notes that London was the first modern city in the sense that it abetted sprawl because for many decades it was the only city in Europe which did not have a wall around its perimeter.
6) Bruegmann says that many of the wealthy in today's American cities live in areas which were already inhabited by wealthy people at the turn of the 20th century. Unlike other places in urban settings where neighborhoods may rise, fall, and perhaps redevelop and rise again, wealthy areas stay wealthy.
7) Bruegmann describes the massive sprawl away from urban cores which happened all over Europe and America in the early decades of the 20th century. Until that time, it was the rich who had moved out of urban cores. Now the masses were rich enough to follow them. The availability of public transportation was augmented by the automobile. Curbs, gutters, sewers, street lights and electricity, which we take for granted today, were all installed and completed in this era. Contrary to the belief that it was people moving outwards, it was often the case that jobs in factories and manufacturing that moved outwards first, then families followed the jobs. This in turn left lots of cheap, empty space behind in city cores which later on were often used by new residents or enterprises that in turn helped to revive the cores of some urban areas. (My note - this just goes to show how complicated cities really are).
8) While writing about the central cities of Europe and America, Bruegmann states that he thinks that an average of 10,000 people per square mile seems to be a threshold whereby very extensive use of public transportation takes place. The two cities in America that have higher densities than this are Chicago and New York (I think Bruegmann may be getting a bit sloppy here as San Francisco also has density above 10,000 per square mile). Even then, use of public transportation is mostly a strong force only for transportation into central business districts. Or as Wendell Cox might put it, its all about downtown.
9) Tirades and battles against sprawl are often triggered in periods where there are large economic booms, such as in Europe and America during the 1920's, America in the 1950's, and in numerous places in the world during the 1990's. Those are times when the numbers of people with the means to move grow rapidly. Bruegmann writes that campaigns against sprawl often occur in the largest and fastest growing cities, which strangely enough are often much denser than smaller towns, cities, and villages. Brugemann notes that anti-sprawlers are much more active in Los Angeles than they are in Little Rock Arkansas or Lubbock Texas.
10) European cities have rapidly been approaching American and Canadian levels of automobile ownership and use, but I already knew that.
11) Bruegmann looks at the possible causes of sprawl. Anti-urban attitudes and racism are examined, but Bruegmann notes that minorities are just as likely to move to the suburbs as white people are if they have the money. As for "anti-urban attitudes", Bruegmann says that:
It is probably only possible to call Americans anti-urban if one accepts a specific set of assumptions about urbanity made by members of a small cultural elite. This group likes to think of urbanity as the kind of life lived by people in apartments in dense city centers that contain major high brow cultural institutions. In these dense centers, the believe, citizens are more tolerant and cosmopolitan because of their constant interaction with other citizens unlike themselves. Bruegmann goes on to say that most Americans, and increasingly people around the world, are rejecting or simply ignoring such ideas for an idealized city.
My note here - from my time of having spent 9 weeks in London, I can confidently say that having people live in dense areas does not make them any more tolerant or cosmopolitan than anyone living in low density areas.
Bruegmann writes about the idea that sprawl is "the inevitable unhappy result of laissez-faire capitalism." Bruegmann goes on to say that this assertion is a complete turn around of the thoughts of urban reformers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who believed that unregulated private real estate markets would inevitably lead to massively high densities. Benjamin Marsh, an advocate for the working poor, wailed that it would be logical for developers to crowd as many people into a single acre of apartment housing, as that would maximize their profits.
Bruegmann says of various government created causes of sprawl, such as tax deductions for home ownership, that other countries do (or do not) have such deductions as does America, but sprawl is still taking place. He correctly notes that the home owner tax deduction primarily benefits the rich and not those in the lower or middle class income brackets. Yet people with lower incomes buy homes anyway.
As for the "Americans do not choose to live in the suburbs because they would obviously choose a hip urban lifestyle over the dreary suburban life" argument, Bruegmann writes that this seems to point to an idea that greedy developers are in cabal with politicians to deny what people really want. Bruegmann notes that if developers were really to possess as much fiendish guile that is attributed to them, then they should be able to make as much money developing high density lots in cities as they do in the suburbs.
He also discusses the Who framed Roger Rabbit urban myth, where the demise of rail and streetcars was allegedly because General Motors supposedly bought up all the rail and streetcar lines to put them out of business. More to the point, Bruegmann notes (quite correctly) that motorized automobiles and trucks did not replace rail, trolleys, and street cars. What the automobile replaced were horse drawn wagons and carriages and it is important to note that the first automobiles were known as horseless carriages. It was buses that replaced rail and streetcars.
To get a visual look at this, I consulted my copy of Historic Photos of Houston by Betty Trapp Chapman. For the first 85 of the 216 pages of her book, there are very few photographs of automobiles or trucks. There are many photos showing groups of people who have neatly parked in front of buildings in their horse drawn wagons and carriages. There is a photo of a mule train of men and equipment moving along a road in South Texas going towards the oil fields. There is another photo, taken circa 1890, of volunteer firemen in a horse drawn service truck that looks to be about 40 feet long. When President William Howard Taft visited Houston in November 1909, he had a public procession where he was taken by horse drawn carriages and not in a street car. There are only 12 photographs with streetcars, including one where streetcars are jostling for road space with horse drawn carriages and pedestrians circa 1900 (it looks like the streetcar is going to hit a crowd of them!). In the next to last photo, there is a photo of a street car taken in September 1924 which has the caption, "Please step inside and look me over. I am one of your 15 new Houston street cars. I cost $13,000." That streetcar in 2006 dollars would cost $153,263. After the 1910's, there are no more photographs of horse drawn carriages or wagons.
12) The anti-sprawl campaigns: Bruegmann notes that aesthetic tastes of urban development amongst critics changes over time. When London continued to sprawl extensively in the early 20th century, architect critics at the time raged about the row housing that is a feature of London suburbs like Acton Town. They demanded that such development be stopped on grounds such as that Britain's farmland was being consumed. Fast forward to the turn of the 21st century and the spiritual descendants of those urban planners and critics rave these days about how wonderful those same suburbs are and that this is how developers should build cities because it economizes on space.
Bruegmann also says that the first anti-sprawl campaign in Britain witnessed the idea that building new roads filled up, ergo the argument of later anti-sprawlers "we can't build our way out of congestion" is actually far older than many assume it to be. As a side note, Julius Caesar banned wheeled vehicles from the streets of ancient Rome during daylight hours due to traffic congestion. No wonder when your city has population densities of over 150,000 people per square mile.
13) The anti-sprawl campaigns in the America of the 1950's came about, as noted above, because of the increases in affluence and population. William H. Whyte, he of the Organization Man fame, sponsored what was perhaps the first conference on sprawl and targeted Los Angeles as its epitome. Interestingly, Bruegmann says that Los Angeles has densified, but he says that the cost of transporting sufficient water to the L.A. metropolitan area has acted as a curb to more sprawl.
New arguments emerged, such as the costs of sprawl, social and environmental problems, arguments in the 1970's were advanced about the limits to growth, and attacks on the automobile became more and more shrill. Bruegmann states that the economic problems of the late 1970's such as stagflation, drove such concerns off the public agenda. However when Western advanced economies recovered and sprawl continued.
Bruegmann then goes on to list the latest wave of anti-sprawl complaints, which now include social concerns and equity problems, sustainability, and global warming. However the old aesthetic issues crop up again, which Bruegmann thinks is because societies have solved basic problems such as food production, shelter, water, and so forth. Since those problems have been solved, then people have time to - well - look for more issues to complain about.
The last part of Bruegmann's book covers various anti-sprawl remedies which have been attempted during these anti-sprawl campaigns, including a sharp analysis of the bizarre political marriage between Britain's Labour Party and the conservative aristocratic landowners of Britain which resulted in the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. He covers regional planning, environmental impact statements, anti-road building and highway crusades, and the case of the highly successful anti-sprawl efforts employed in building Moscow. I will leave it to the reader's imagination as to why it was that the Soviets were successful in curbing sprawl in the nation's capital. He also notes that the most recent anti-sprawl campaigns have now drawn a backlash in which there are now people who are willing to speak up for benefits that are produced by sprawl.
This has been a long entry, but it hope it provokes interested parties into reading the book and mulling over what Sprawl has to say.
Wizard
On the eve of election day 2007, I found myself tonight going over to pay a visit to my fellow Houstonian Tory's blog and reading about his ideas for what to do with Houston's original grand temple to the Sports gods, the Astrodome. I also digested commentary from others who visited his blog.
This of course put the Wizard into contemplative mode. Hmmm. So what to do about the Dome?
We all know the story. This past week the politically powerful Houston Texans and Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo stuck a fork into the idea of reusing the Astrodome as a $450 million massive convention center and hotel. It should go without saying that both parties probably want the Astrodome demolished and I'd have to say that I cannot agree with them more. I have come out before saying that the Dome should be demolished, possibly either for parking space or for possible construction of some sort. Moreover both parties probably saved we peasantry from having to shoulder yet another levy being slapped on our backs by the political classes via having to taxpayer finance such a ridiculous scheme.
But despite of my Libertarianism, I am also enough of a political realist to know that the Dome will not be torn down anytime soon, mostly because the Harris County Commissioners are scared to death of being accused of demolishing the Dome. At the same time, we the peasantry are paying for a $1.5 million per year levy just to keep the Dome in modestly environmentally usable condition.
So what to do? Tory's ideas are going along the right path, along with his back of a napkin financial analysis of any massive hotel complex. The problem is that this is politics and for decades there has been this desperate hope amongst the political classes in this city that somehow they can turn Houston into a convention city. Never mind that the convention business has been dominated for years by Orlando, Las Vegas, New York and Chicago, and that the political classes in dozens of other cities in America have all been building convention facilities in a desperate battle over the convention market scraps despite the fact that trade show attendance has been dropping off.
Tory suggests turning the Dome into a speakers facility in addition to opening up the Dome for festivals. The speaker idea probably isn't too bad, though there are lots of places where speakers can be heard. As for the idea of holding festivals in the Dome, my intuitive feeling about festivals (in addition to those comments made in his replies) is that festivals are more of an outdoors type activity. There is also a kind of ritual to holding festivals. Most festivals are held annually (or semi - annually) at set times during the year. They serve as a kind of marker that we have come full circle reached another season in the cycle of our lives.
However it is along the right track. The idea is a low risk, low cost idea. If it fails, then Harris County taxpayers are not left with an even larger white elephant hanging around their necks. Moreover, we can say that we tried the idea and if it doesn't work out, then we haven't lost all that much.
Which brings me to my idea. What if the Dome authorities were to simply throw the doors to the Dome open to holding weekend bazaars at the Dome? Perhaps they could be held Friday nights, Saturday all day, then Sunday afternoons? They would not be held when the Texans were holding their football games, when other sporting events would be scheduled, nor when the Rodeo was in progress. And come to think about it, isn't the Rodeo itself a festival?
Running with the shopping bazaar idea, parking could be charged at a nominal fee, say $2-3 (or even free), to encourage attendance. Booth fees could be collected, in addition to beverages, though one might think of being careful about this and simply collecting sales taxes on lower priced items. The organizers themselves could be held responsible for cleanup after each weekend. Other ideas would include the possibility that if this idea were to become successful, then expansion would simply be done through allowing new booths to operate outdoors.
The beauty of this idea is similar to Tory's. The bazaars could be held nearly every weekend. Marketing the idea would probably not be too much trouble as everyone knows where the Dome is. This also would have the added attraction of being a low risk idea, which if it were to not be successful financially, then the operation could be shutdown quickly and taxpayers would not be left on the hook for a massive sum of money.
On the downside, I can imagine that some would object to turning the Dome into a marketplace simply on emotional or symbolic grounds. Their hearts might break at the thought of their cherished Dome being used for such tawdry commercial reasons, though it was exactly for commercial reasons that the Dome was put to during the glory days of Nolan Ryan and Earl Campbell. So what's the difference?
Another possible downside might be objections from other flea market or open market operations around town. More tellingly, maybe the Dome authority and the Commissioners themselves might not be happy, on the grounds that they might not be able to reward their campaign contributors with fat contracts from the building of some new fancy facility.
While stewing over this idea tonight, I was struck by the issue that the Dome (despite the fact that I think it should be torn down) at least symbolically means a lot to people in Houston. I have to admit that one of the most special days of my life when I was growing up happened at the Dome. On December 3rd, 1982, when I was a teenager, I along with a few of my friends attended my first rock and roll concert at the Dome. And Who was the band that we went to go see that night, the ones who initiated me and my friends into the joys of concerts and the nightlife? Let me give you a hint - I've already told you the name of that band.
Ah yes. One cannot imagine how emotional that night was for me. In fact I can still remember it nearly 25 years later as though it happened yesterday.
So what is all this nostalgia leading to? Well how about this. If people are so tied up emotionally in a mere building, then if we Houstonians are going to keep the Dome in operation for symbolic or emotional reasons, then why not use the Dome for emotional reasons? How is this for a suggestion: Why not allow Houstonians buy space along the walkways of each of the levels of the Dome where they can put momentoes of their most cherished memories of their times that they spent in the Astrodome? For example, for $200 why not allow a person or a family to purchase a 2 square foot wall area of the Dome walkways where they can etch images or hang photographs along the walls where they can tell stories of their experiences? Why not allow for larger spaces for a higher price, say a 5x5 foot mural space for $1,000? In my case, I would tell everyone of what happened to myself and my friends that night and why the Dome means so much to me. Others might tell of watching the Oilers play the Pittsburgh Steelers during the days of Luv ya' Blue. Maybe some of the old Olier legends like Dan Pastorini or Earl Campbell could add their own memorabilia. Maybe fans could see the famous Monday Night Football footage where a solitary Oliers fan gave the camera the finger on national television.
In other words, why not turn the Dome into a kind of museum where the people of Houston would share their fondest memories of what happened there? Proceeds from the sale of mural spaces could be put into a fund which would be invested in bonds which would draw interest that in turn could be used to help offset the costs of operating the Dome. Since the Dome is 710 feet in diameter, that would mean that each level is 2,230 feet in circumference. I could see 5,000 or more murals decorating each level of the Dome, maybe more if we would allow the concrete walkways to be decorated. I could easily see $5 - $10 million being raised by such an idea. Augment that with parking fees, sales taxes from weekend bazaars and you may actually have a viable operation which would pay for itself.
Enough for now. It's time for me to lie down and face another day.
Wizard
On Friday, October 26, 2007 the Houston Property Rights Association hosted a trio of speakers to talk about several of the ridiculous number of bond issues which have been placed on the November 2007 ballot. Some talk was also given over towards discussing the 16 or so State of Texas constitutional amendments, some of which are also bond and finance related.
Before going any further, from my own personal perspective, I've decided already to go ahead and vote no on all of the bond proposals. Some regular readers of my blog will probably note this as a kind of knee jerk anti-government reaction to all of these proposals. And, I will say that largely you are right. It is quite disturbing to see so many of these things being put on the ballot all at once. That in turn reminds me of a proposal that Tom Bazan made a while back. He suggested that there be a minimal level of registered voter participation in an election for a bond proposal to pass. For example, if there are 100,000 voters in a school district, there should be a requirement that 25 percent (25,000) of all voters participate or else a bond issue automatically fails, regardless of whether a majority of those participating voted for it or not. As things are, it is quite possible for low voter turnout (see final paragraph for more) to cause as few as 3-5 percent of voters in a political subdivision to commit the other 95+ percent of voters to paying for a bond issue.
I have yet to spend a few hours of time wending my way through all these constitutional amendments. As always, even for a knowledgeable, tuned in guy like me, there are, how shall I say, informational issues involved in trying to keep up with all of these matters. Now then, for those of you who fervently believe in Democracy, if a guy like me has a hard time keeping up with all of this, then how do you expect the average Jane or Joe to do so? More to the point, what does that mean for how decisions are made in republics and democracies?
But we will leave these issues and my own voting plans aside for now. What follows is what transpired at the HPRA meeting.
The first speaker was Larry Tobin, speaking on the Port of Houston Authority's $250 million bond proposal.
As can be seen by looking at the links above, Mr. Tobin, a Taylor Lake Village Council member, has long been a watchdog of the Port and has been speaking out against port, or pork bonds. Tobin started his talk by asking the audience if anyone knew the primary difference between the PoH and most of the rest of the ports in America? When nobody raised their hands, Mr. Tobin then told them two things. First, the PoH has mostly liquids as its main source of cargoes, and second that the PoH is the only port in America that does not pay the bulk of its capital costs. Instead, the PoH lives primarily off of the levies of Harris County taxpayers. He stated that, in his view, the Port has practically no accountability. It is not a component of the City of Houston, Pasadena, or any other entity. He said that, "the board is composed of a bunch of flunky appointees that are running this thing."
Tobin told the audience that the really tough questions should come to heel at the Harris County Commissioners Court, but our esteemed Commissioners do not ask the tough questions needed to really turn things around. Tobin continued, saying that we could run the port with private terminal operators, with leaseholds which could cover debt service. He then noted that every time there is a new bond issue to be voted on, the campaigners for the bonds always talk about the jobs, jobs, jobs that will be created if we pass the bonds. Tobin asked the audience, who pays for all this? It's the pigs feeding at the trough.
Tobin told the audience that the cruise terminal operations cannot find new passenger ships for the immediate future, as Norweigan has left and only two ships call every week. However, these terminals can make for nice meeting facilities. Go figure.
Tobin told the audience that the Bayport terminal is not being served by rail, nor will it be for quite some time. He says he has $12 million worth of cranes that are idle and that the Bayport facility is poorly designed. Tobin said we are shipping freight to Barbours Cut to get cargo to rail heads. Additionally, Tobin told the audience that Long Beach has private operators who pay their own way. If they can, then so can the PoH.
Tobin said originally the PoH came before the Harris County Commissioners and asked for a $500 million bond issue, but the commissioners apparently didn't ask the PoH exactly what all this money was needed for. They seem to have simply gotten scared over the price tag of that bond request at an election where many other bond issues were on the ballot. The Commissioners simply cut the bond issue in half to $250 million and put it on the agenda. Tobin said we need to remove the levy off of the Harris County property owners who have $586 million in debt service to carry for 30 years, along with this bond issue.
Next came a debate over the 2007 $805 million HISD bond issue between City of Bellaire Commissioner Bill Borden and Ron Brunner, two Republicans active in local politics. Borden told the audience that the Harris County Republican Party formed 4 committees for studying the various bond proposals on the 2007 ballot. The HCRP came out neutral on port bonds, in opposition on SBISD bonds, in opposition on Cy Fair bonds, and neutral on HISD bonds. After going on with making normative statements concerning public schools in general, Borden then asked why HISD does not have in its budget money set aside every year for repairs or maintenance? Does it ever have intentions to set up a reserve fund for repairs?
Borden told the audience that HISD does not do this, but instead accused HISD of letting schools fall apart, then hitting up the public for bond issues for grand reconstruction projects. He noted that HISD keeps telling the public that there will be no tax rate increase, but asked what about the levels of taxes due to rising appraisals?
Borden asserted that HISD has a credibility problem. One issue he brought up is that HISD has a few schools where there are few nearby students living in the neighborhood. Borden suggests that HISD sell land if possible and use the proceeds to help build schools somewhere else. Borden also raised the issue of whether property owners should be the only ones who are allowed to vote in such bond elections.
Addendum: I should take a moment out here before going any further to address an issue which has plagued the HISD bond election. One prominent group which has been fighting the bond issue is the black community, I think for reasons that more than a few of schools in areas of town which have predominantly black residents are slated to be consolidated or closed.
I knew this was going to happen. I can tell a story here which happened in 1985 in SPISD. At the time, the SPISD district was experiencing declining enrollment of students because of the demographic passing of the baby boomer generation into young adulthood and the raising of the Generation X group, which was a much smaller cohort. I am one of those so called Gen-X types.
The result of this was that the sitting SPISD board of the day decided to close two public high schools for reasons that they were more expensive to operate. This reasonably rational decision was greeted with threats of lawsuits on the part of various parent groups whose kids went to some of the schools because the parent groups whose kids went to those schools were going to do everything within their worldly power to make sure their school did not get shut down! The result was that the district ended up closing two schools whose parent groups had not organized very effectively. You ended up with two public high schools that were only about one mile away from each other, while others were bussed for miles to attend their school.
This is the sort of stuff you get when you decide to use politics and the arm of government as a means of educating kids. The usual fighting over who is going to get what breaks out, and that is exactly what leaders in the black community are fighting over. They might understand that demographics is a reason for shutting down schools since HISD is expected to see a modest decline in enrollment, but people are forgetting that this rational fact is running straight into politics. "Go shutdown or consolidate some schools, but what? Y'all are going to shut down my school? You people are not going to shutdown my school!" And so the fighting starts, with possible lawsuits to be seen over the HISD plan until it gets resolved.
Continued: Ron Brunner, a local GOP precinct chair, spoke in favor of the HISD bond proposal. He first started off by saying he has no kids in HISD schools, but went into the debate open minded. He spoke with Diane Johnson, Harvy Moore, Sylvester Turner, Carol Mimns Galloway, and HISD Superintendent Abe Savedra.
Brunner stated that the bond issue is for capital improvements and cannot be used for teaching funds. In 1997, the HCRP rejected the first of these massive HISD bond proposals, which helped lead to its defeat. What the HCRP said was that the 1997 proposal was massive and that HISD was asking for a blank check. Brunner noted that HISD said nothing in the 1997 proposal about where the district intended to spend the bond monies.
Brunner then went on to tell HPRA that HISD came back in subsequent bond proposals that denoted line items where and which schools were to get rebuilt and refurbished. The first $678 million proposal passed and in 2002 the district asked for another $700 million, which passed without too much controversy. Brunner noted that there has not been mismanagement of funds. He challenged the group to name news scandals or corruption in HISD bond monies. He said that HISD has not been spending $80 - $100 million on football or athletic fields as has Cy Fair ISD.
Brunner stated that the real key to these proposals is to hold the bond issuers' feet to the fire. The schools that were listed have been the ones getting redone. The schools (sadly) are getting security mechanisms installed, new science labs and computers. The current HISD policy is when repair or renovation costs come near the costs of outright replacement, then they replace the school. 134 schools are on the list.
Brunner contrasted the HISD approach with the SPISD approach which he says is a band aid approach. He stated that HISD's maintenance budget is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is questionable for a district of this size.
Brunner went on to talk about the upcoming State Constitutional amendments, stating that State amendments 2, 4, 12, 15, and 16 should be voted against. This includes the Proposition 15 $3 billion Cancer Institute vote. Brunner stated that this should not be construed that we are against cancer or cancer research, but that this allows the Legislature to get into the cancer research business which there is plenty of work going on to begin with. He noted this is a grant and not a loan, ergo it will never get repaid. The monies are also not line itemed, as it is an open grant. Brunner also noted amendment #12 is a $5 billion open check to Tx-DOT for which there is no prohibition for use in the Trans Texas Corridor.
Questions were raised by the audience, such as why is HISD letting the schools fall apart, then asking for the authority to issue bonds? Another interesting question was whether it is necessary to build new schools to have a quality education? In other words, when has a particular building been the driving force in a great education? Another person mentioned that there seems to be a very contestable assumption that more money means a better education, which in putting that money into buildings takes away from the stress behind education.
Bill Borden mentioned that the cost to educate an HISD student is $4,200 per student which he says is higher than that of a private school. HISD has boasted that it has greatly increased the number of advanced placement student, but failed to mention that 70% of those advanced placement students come from two schools - Westside and Bellaire. He advocates looking into breaking up HISD and also looking into how HISD handles its statistics. He also was critical of the issue that HISD does not budget very much money for maintenance.
The meeting ended with more commentary by Mr. Tobin. Tobin said in response to a question that the Port of Houston wants general obligation bond issues. That way, if they can float a general obligation bond, then he asserted that the Port Authority can build down on Pelican Island, as the island is not within the navigation zone. Tobin said that we may be seeing a changing set of economics in the Port soon, since he characterized the Port as being in the cul de sac of the Gulf of Mexico. In 2005, Kansas City Southern purchased controlling interest in Grupo Transportacion Ferroviaria Mexicana, possibly for use with the Trans Texas Corridor. Ships would not sail to Houston, but rather land in western Mexico, then transport overland.
And so it was. It was an interesting meeting, but early voting ended this evening as I was writing this. The turnout during early voting was light and turnout on election day is also expected to be light. Meanwhile we await the fate of those bonds, bonds, bonds.
Wizard
