Well, well, well. I'll be adding addendums to this blog entry as the day wears on, but as gentle readers know, the Wizard was working the Houston Tea Party events as a member of the welcoming committee. It was my job to act as a crier, encouraging tea party attendees to sign up so that we could get an accurate head count of the number of people attending.
One of the members of our committee took all of our sign in cards and sheets home. She told us that there were so many people waiting to get in at the start of the event that two women volunteered on the spot to join our committee. She stayed up until 3:00am this morning counting the number of signatures.
We collected 8,532 signatures for the event. We filled up 248 single pages of 20 signatures, 31 pages where signatures filled up both sides of the sheet (40 signatures), and 139 sign in cards. The discrepancy between the numbers of sheets filled up and the total attendees is accounted for because some people signed in for themselves and their spouses, boy or girl friends, children, or other family members. Since some people indicated to us that they did not want to sign anything but rather just attend the event, we believe that there were probably about 10,000 people who attended the Houston Tea Party.
Incredibly, we had 389 people check off the "I want to volunteer" column, indicating they want to work for future events. We may well put them to work, as we are contemplating holding an event for July 4th.
More later. It's time to go back to work.
Addendum: Here is a photograph of the Wizard at work at the April 15th gathering.
Wizard
So, the Wizard is at it again...
The Wizard will be working the Houston Tea Party, to be held at Jones Plaza in downtown Houston. No, the Wizard will not tell gentle readers how it was that I got involved with the Houston Tea Party, as I did not even hear about the original Tea Party until some two weeks after it had occurred. How I got involved came about in a round about way anyway.
More to the point, I have gotten quite concerned about what has happened in Washington over the past 8 or so months, starting with the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac excitement. There has been quite a bit of reporting about President Obama's $3.6 trillion federal budget for fiscal year 2010. What a lot of people don't seem to realize is that this will represent some 26 percent of the U.S. GDP for this upcoming year. Before World War Two, federal expenditures were under 10 percent of overall economic activity. This jumped enormously during the Second World War. After a brief whittling down period between WWII and the Korean War, federal expenditures vascillated between 18-22 percent of economic activity since the start of the Cold War. Even after the Cold War ended, the Clinton Administration pared down the military by one third, but domestic expenditures expanded to fill in the breach. Still, Clinton was - gasp! - the most fiscally responsible president America has had over the past 30 years, largely thanks to facing a hostile Republican led Congress for his last six years in office.
The bottom line is, federal expenditures have now reached 26 percent of GDP, and that represents an enormous jump in overall governmental involvement in the economy.
* Just yesterday, a story came across the wires that the federal deficit for February 2009 was $192 billion! It used to be that people were outraged when that was the federal deficit for an entire year.
* Brian Shelly notes that Social Security is going to go into the red eight years earlier than was previously projected.
* The Bush Administration told the American public just months after invading Iraq that the army would be coming home in a few months. Well, here we are 5 years, and over $500 billion later, and we're still there.
* The Obama Administration wants to push through universal health insurance, at some completely unknown cost.
* The Bush and Obama Administrations have given AIG $180 billion. I have no idea where it went, other than some vague notion that it went to cover AIG's screw ups over credit swaps.
* The Obama Administration is bailing out the car companies and has fired GM CEO Rick Wagoner. Now, a better term for the American auto manufacturers would be to call them Government Motors.
Some years ago here in Houston, we had a big company that completely failed called Enron. Politicians couldn't run away fast enough from that debacle, other than to send in the prosecutors to witch hunt Enron's executives.
One thing to thing about is this. Will Americans not be able to buy cars or insurance if either GM or AIG fail? Were Americans not able to obtain natural gas just because Enron failed?
* State and local governments don't look much better, mostly because of massive pension obligations to workers on the government payrolls.
* Because certain interest groups and the media have whipped up the public into a lather over global climate change, the Obama Administration is contemplating either a carbon tax, or a cap and trade regime for carbon emissions. Notably, there's been no talk of how this is going to affect my pocketbook. But according to Reason magazine, a cap and trade regime could turn out to be nothing more than yet another monster of a corporate welfare program. Some 2,300 lobbyists have besieged Capitol Hill on the matter, a huge sign how much is at stake. It is also a sign that an awful lot of rent seeking is going on.
* Taxes from every level of government now take up about 35 percent of my money. Taxation is now my largest personal expense, far exceeding my second largest expense, which is mortgage and fees for my housing.
The Wizard, as usual, will not get to make any speeches. Others always seem to grab the spotlight, even though I am often able to evoke ovations when I speak and have been told countless times how articulate I am at the microphone, even though I have only 2-3 minutes to get my points across. Instead events like this always need people to do the dirty work, including whipping out the wallet to put up money for the event, which nobody ever seems to want to do. Some people I know are quite good at wanting to pass out stuff and committing others to do the dirty work on their causes, while running away as fast as they can when it comes to actually carrying the load of getting the job done. Others will also be pushing their messages, while I don't know how many times I've had to put up with old fogies who don't get off their rear ends to do a damned thing to organize events, to defend property rights, or liberty, tell me how we are to handle the problems that we will face in putting on this event. Instead, I will likely have to help pick up the trash after this thing is over. That's the dreary reality of working in the trenches of grass roots politics.
And yet, I am going to work this event on Wednesday because I am seriously starting to wonder about the financial stability of my country and because of what I perceive to be an immense grab for power by the Obama Administration to reach ever further into American life. I'll do the mundane things that the Houston Tea Party event will require to be successful because I don't want to live in an America that allows me to only have a little bit of pocket money left over at the end of the week. I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees.
So, the Wizard will be at the sign in tables, helping to distribute some of the 6,000 adhesive stickers for people's names that I've purchased for the event. I have a feeling that I'll be seeing some of you there.
Wizard
Addendum: To **** with you, Paul Krugman.
When Al Gore was Bill Clinton's vice president, the (non) - issue of urban sprawl could have been described as something of a second tier issue in American life. To be sure, urban sprawl had its usual detractors, but the matter was mostly something of a concern to certain interest groups.
This state of affairs has changed with the election of Barak Obama as President, where the New York Times noted that in February 2009 that the President said
"The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over,”, urging officials to employ “innovative thinking” when deciding how to spend their transportation money.
Moreover, considering where on the political outlook scales Mr. Obama sits, one can imagine that his administration would look to the Brookings Institution for ideas on many matters, including urbanization.
What a discouragement, therefore, it must be for many in the anti-suburbanization camp to read of a study that was just published by Brookings entitled Job Sprawl Revisited: The Changing Geography of Metropolitan Employment. The Brookings study, which compares the results of a spatial location analysis of private sector jobs across 98 metropolitan areas across the United States, denoting the differences in job locations between the years 1998 and 2006. Notably, private sector job decentralization occurred in 95 of the 98 metropolitan areas studied, and that does not bode well for central cities. Also, in 17 out of the 18 industries studied experienced job decentralization.
The Brookings study asserts a series of ailments that result from job sprawl, including higher water and sewer infrastructure costs, spatial mismatch where employees can have trouble reaching appropriate work, lower pace of innovation, and higher energy consumption.
Noting or complaining about all these issues is nice, but doing so begs one to ask a question that the Brookings study fails to ask, much less answer. If all of these ailments are (or were) occurring during this time frame, then why were private sector employers continuing to move away from central cities anyway?
One aspect of this issue is to look at the types of employment that are locating furthest away from the center. According to the study, it is the retail, construction, and manufacturing type jobs that are the ones that are most prone to moving outwards away from the central business districts (CBD's). The Wizard is willing to bet that these industries are the ones whose land use requirements are the largest. It would behoove them to locate where land is cheapest, which happens to be at the suburban fringe. Not doing so would put them at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis with their competitors in the marketplace. As far as retail goes, it also pays to move closer to their customers, and that happens to be in the suburbs.
One issue the Wizard decided to look into was the price of petroleum and of gasoline during this period. This chart shows that during the 1998 - 2006 time frame, the price of a barrel of petroleum rose from a post 1997 Asian economic crisis low of $12 per barrel to a high of $60 per barrel in 2006. The price of a gallon of gas went up from $1 per gallon in 1998 to $3 per gallon by the summer of 2006, yet the trend towards decentralizing of the spatial distribution of jobs continued to occur.
According to the study, Houston is one of the 53 metropolitan areas that is experiencing rapid decentralization of jobs, meaning that job shares were flat or declining in the CBD while growing in the outer rings. The report estimates that there were 1,750,155 jobs within 35 miles of downtown Houston in 1998 and 1,975,566 jobs within 35 miles of downtown Houston 2006. We can set up a table to see how many jobs were located where:
1998: number of jobs: 1,750,155
2006: number of jobs: 1,975,566
1998: percentage located within 3 miles of CBD: 14.2
2006: percentage located within 3 miles of CBD: 11.6
1998: number of jobs within 3 miles of CBD: 248,522
2006: number of jobs within 3 miles of CBD: 229,166
1998: percentage located 3-10 miles from CBD: 36.8
2006: percentage located 3-10 miles from CBD: 32.4
1998: number of jobs 3-10 miles from CBD: 644,057
2006: number of jobs 3-10 miles from CBD: 640,083
1998: percentage located 10-35 miles away from CBD: 49.1
2006: percentage located 10-35 miles away from CBD: 56.0
1998: number of jobs 10-35 miles from CBD: 857,576
2006: number of jobs 10-35 miles from CBD: 1,106,317
Now then, it should be noted that the City of Houston is approximately 640 square miles. A radius of 10 miles encompasses 314 square miles, ergo that is just under 50 percent of Houston's acreage, discounting the fact that there are some areas within this circle that are not under the City of Houston's jurisdiction, such as West University, the Memorial villages, and perhaps Bellaire and Pasedena. It should be noted that the number of jobs within 10 miles of downtown has, for all intensive purposes, stayed stable. Peter Brown told the ITE a while back that Houston was getting only 15 percent of new area population and 23 percent of new area jobs with the rest going outside city limits. If that were so, then that would infer that much of the new private sector employment that Houston is attracting is deciding to locate in the outermost areas of the City itself, with the rest of area job growth occurring outside City limits. Conceivably, the City Council may decide that the only way in which Houston can actually capture some of the tax monies associated with those jobs is to do so the politically unpopular, old fashioned way - via annexation.
This report also casts doubt upon the idea of using light rail as a method of capturing any job growth. Metro started operation of the light rail line in January 2004, a full 2-3 years before the termination of the study period. Yet according to the study, practically all of the job growth in the Houston metropolitan area occurred more than 10 miles away from the CBD.
The current economic downtown that started in late 2007 is not accounted for in this study. Unemployment across the United States has gone up from roughly 4.5% to 8.5%, while it is at roughly 6.5% in Houston. It might be surmised that there may be a gain in density once the economy recovers on the assumption that the cost of transportation fuels will once again go up. But even if there are gains in population density for reasons of continually rising fuel costs, it doesn't necessarily mean that gains in density will occur within the already heavily developed portions of the urbanized area, particularly if job sprawl continues to occur. Motor vehicles could adapt via a change in propulsion, where electricity becomes a preferred form of power. Households could also decide to trade within their indifference curves of their household budgets, giving up larger house sizes for holding on to the mobility offered by the automobile in the event that transportation becomes more expensive.
The Wizard awaits the next Brookings study on this subject. I suspect that the 2010 Census will tell much about these matters.
Wizard
KHOU-TV's Jeremy Desel ran a story this evening concerning the latest discrepancies about the cost of Metro Rail. It seems that business owner Paul Magaziner came across some information that contradicts what the unelected Metro board has been stating recently about project costs. Moreover, the source of the discrepancies is coming from none other than Metro itself.
Last month, the Metro board announced that it had approved a deal (though it had not signed a contract) with Parsons Transport Group where Parsons would lead a consortium to build four of the Metro Solutions Phase 2 rail lines, but not including the Wheeler / Richmond rail alignment. This deal would involve building a total 20 miles of Metro's planned 30 miles light rail for a price $1.46 billion. The costs of the North Corridor and Southeast Corridors were announced to be $387 and $441 million respectively. Desel's accompanying news story showed footage of last month's board meeting where Chairman David Wolff expressed optimism of falling costs, presumably due to a fall in materials costs resulting from the current economic downturn.
However, apparently in an FTA Letter of No Prejudice communication dated March 23rd 2009, the costs of the North and Southeast Corridors were stated at $896,797,000 and $911,211,000 respectively.
Desel's story quotes Metro VP George Smalley:
... in no way was there an attempt to mislead the public.
Smalley also says that the $900 million per line numbers mentioned in the Federal Transit Administration letters are likely the best estimate.
"The number that is in the FTA letter is the latest estimate. I’m not going to say it will be the final number. I don't think it will be," Smalley said.
Smalley says the cost of acquiring land, rail cars for the future and financing are what make up the difference between the contract cost and the actual cost.
Ergo, Metro has been telling the public and Parsons one thing and the FTA something entirely different concerning project costs. At $897 million, the 5.4 miles of the North Corridor will run $166 million per mile. The Southeast Corridor will run at $134 million per mile. At costs like this, the 30 miles of Phase 2 will run $4.5 billion plus, a figure the Wizard predicted 18 months ago.
Taxpayers deserve better than this. The discrepancies between both sets of numbers is between $2 - $3 billion, a figure so large that the entire Metro board and Metro President Frank Wilson all need to be fired, if for no other reasons that they have shown themselves to be incompetent and untrustworthy. And, this project needs to be shelved once and for all.
Wizard
On Tuesday March 31st, the Wizard traveled with some of his friends to the magical fantasy land of Oz the State Capital to pay a visit to see some of our esteemed State legislators. But the Wizard did not take the time out to make such a journey to make a mere house call. No gentle readers, the Wizard had some bidness (as we say in Texas) to attend to. In my limited spare time, the Wizard has been working to help try to get some eminent domain legislation passed in the 2009 / 81st Texas State Legislature.
To recap, the SCOTUS ruled in favor of the City of New London in the Kelo vs. New London case in 2005. In reaction, the Texas Legislature did pass some minor reform in 2005, but Governor Perry vetoed some very good eminent domain legislation in the 2007 session. Ergo, here we are in 2009 trying again to get some meaningful reforms passed.
The Wizard ended up seeing 6-7 legislative staff members over a period of 5 hours, while others whom I was with spoke to dozens of others. We also participated in a news conference. The vibe I got was that there is clearly a mood to address eminent domain, but as always the devil is in the details when it comes to how effective a piece, or several pieces, of legislation turn out to be.
Currently, there are at least 7 different bills in play. The best eminent domain bills that people need to get behind are:
1) H.J.R. 14. This is a House Joint Resolution which strongly defines eminent domain such that it would put an end to the practice for private gain. This bill has a provision to amend the Texas Constitution, and sends the matter to the voters come November 3, 2009 should 2/3rd's of the House and Senate vote in favor of it. This would bypass Governor Perry's veto pen.
2) HB 1483 and SB 18. These two bills complement H.J.R 14.
3) H.B. 417, which has strong language to address the issue of municipal abuse of what is blight, and using "blight" as a pretext for using eminent domain for private gain.
4) HB 4, which has some good buyback provisions in the event that the government doesn't actually put your land to use within a certain time frame after taking it from you.
As of this writing, the weak bills are SB 533, H.J.R. 31, and S.J.R 42. We cannot afford to have these bills pass, then have the legislature (and the Governor) turn and tell the people that - you see, we have done something about eminent domain. Don't support them!
This afternoon, KHOU-TV reminded us once again why Texans need eminent domain reform when the station carried the story of Irene Robles and her sons Ron and Mike. The Wizard knows the Robles family, indeed Ron and Mike were with me in Austin talking to legislators last Tuesday. I know that they have been fighting Harris County Metro and its plans to build Metro Rail in the North Corridor. I watched as the Robles brothers collected some 3,500 signatures of North Corridor residents who opposed Metro Rail that they turned in to Sheila Jackson Lee's office, but to no avail.
Metro wanted 178 square feet of the Robles' property, which is directly on one of the streets where Metro wants to build at - grade light rail. That doesn't sound like much, but the strip they want is going to put the street right of way directly up against the Robles' front door, and trust me, this isn't the only instance where this is happening. There is an argument that could be made that doing this would render the property undesirable or not useful for the purpose for which it is being put to now, which if Metro were to have any morals (as opposed to having any ethics), then it would be incumbent on Metro to simply offer Mrs. Robles and her sons a fair price for the entire property rather than simply taking a sliver of it.
Moreover, the KHOU story noted that Metro initially offered the Robles family $2,000 for their 178 square feet, an amount that adds up to offering a petty $11.24 per square foot for property that is within one and a half miles of downtown Houston. The parties went to a hearing, where Metro bumped up the offer to $12,000 (or some $67.50 per square foot), but it remains to be seen if the Robles's will take this or go to court for something else.
The problems faced by the Robles family are commonplace in eminent domain issues; that governments or agencies' swiping a portion of a property ends up rendering it unfit for its current use (and thereby kneecapping its current property owners via devaluing the property), the matter of low balling land owners and forcing them to spend money going to court, and so forth. Moreover, there is a question of whether Metro will in fact actually build the rail lines. The expectation is that they will, but what if the FTA doesn't grant Metro the money? Then the agency would find itself sitting on a bunch of parcels of land which it would otherwise have no use for. Or would they?
The group of good pending legislation (HB 4, HB 417, SB 18 / HB 1483, and HJR 14) would address all of these issues. The State would be forced to offer a fair deal up front. Blight would be much harder to use as a rationale for condemning land, and if governments take land but don't put it to use within a certain time frame then previous private owners could get it back at the price they were offered previously.
Eminent domain is one of those slippery slope issues that Americans have learned they constantly have to keep fighting with over time. The courts, whose job would otherwise presumably be to protect citizens from an ever overreaching Leviathan, have effectively abrogated enforcing the 5th Amendment over the past 100 years, leaving citizens to struggle with sub level governments over legislative remedies for rights that they otherwise should not have to be fighting for.
The war continues. Here are some links:
KFDA covers the news conference.
The Fort Worth Star Telegram's coverage.
Wizard
