Ahhh, Room To Stretch Out!

Syracuse’s population has fallen to a record low according to a new report by the U.S. Census. There are 139,000 folks in my town now. That’s a decline from 147,000 in 2000 and 225,000 in the 1950’s.

Two things jump out at me, one good and one bad.

GOOD: If Syracuse falls below 125,000 people NY State will consider us a small city and all future school board budgets will have to be approved by a public vote. This would be great. The school board would never pass another budget and the district would be in open revolt against its own residents. Why would this be great? You don’t think that the school district would prioritize hiring city residents and getting current employees to move back in to the city, just to keep us above the magic 125,000 figure? They have over 4,000 employees. If they think its tough dealing with the Common Council, try marketing ever-increasing school budgets to residents already hard pressed by fuel and heating costs, property taxes and water rates.

BAD: Will the Feds consider us too small to merit our very own entitlement grant under the Community Development Block Grant? That’s currently a guaranteed $7-$9 million a year (and with Barack taking over maybe a bump from the lean Bush years.) City’s too small for their own grant compete for funding out of NY State’s CDBG allotment. It’s an application process and some years you may get a grant, some years you may not. And it will be nothing close to millions of dollars. Goodbye to all the housing non-profits and the community centers.

Update: My typically snarky response to our population loss, with its legitimate cup half-full/cup half-empty policy implications is totally blown out of the water by Sean Kirst’s excellent column in today’s Post Standard. For the non-snarky, humanistic and tug-at-your-heartstrings perfect take on our situation, walk in your bare feet across your porch, pick up the copy of the Post that you paperboy tossed there this morning and read Sean’s column.

Regulation: It’s Not Just For Liberals Anymore

Former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart recently wrote an op-ed piece in the NYT predicting that the upcoming election will present the winner with the opportunity to create a new cycle of American history, an age of reform.

Hart dusts off the idea that American politics does run in cycles, or shifts between poles of conservatism and innovation, perhaps most prominently championed by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Hart identifies the most recent cycles as the FDR New Deal cycle from 1932 to 1968 and the Reagan conservative movement from 1968 until now.

If we are indeed moving into a realignment and a profound restructuring of our politics, one of the keys to the coming cycle will be undoing one of the Reagan revolution’s major victories, the demonization and rollback of government regulation of corporations. Ralph Nader may have become a laughingstock due to his electoral crusades, but the message is still sound. Corporations have gone hog wild and need to be reined in.

An example of this coming new age rolled into my e-mail box this morning, a press release from U.S. Representative Barney Frank, chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services. The Committee announced a hearing where Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson will testify on the restructuring of regulations governing financial markets.

Viva la revolucion!

New York State, A Creepy Big Brother

New York State, A Creepy Big Brother

Governor Patterson is hosting a
series of Town Hall meetings
around the state to gather information about the fragile economic security
of low income families in New York.

In order to register our folks to testify at the Syracuse hearing
I had to go to the website and send an e-RSVP.

This is what I got back in response:

“Thank you for making an RSVP request. The request has been sent and
will be looked at by the appropriate people. “

It’s Not About The Money. It’s Public Service.

Mayor Driscoll Skips Both SUN Meetings On Vacant Houses

Originally uploaded by Phil At Sun

According to today’s Post-Standard, the Mayor’s pay raise is a sure thing. I was quoted in the article, but I managed to merely paraphrase our member’s opinions. I avoided pontificating on the issue as if I spoke for the organization. That is not my role as an organizer.

However, it is my job as a blogger! And I’ve got issues!

The rate increase is retroactive. If this were truly not about the current occupant why not make it apply only to the incoming Mayor?

No one becomes Mayor because of the nice pay packet and the health insurance. If people are discouraged from running for the office because they may have to take a pay cut–we don’t want them. This isn’t a company manufacturing widgets , this is public service.

Executive compensation is an upper middle-class racket. The talking points are always the same–we will not be able to attract the really talented and gifted people we want for these top spots unless the pay is astronomical. Well I’m calling bullshit on that. Plenty of well-qualified candidates spend a lot of their own money competing for this job at every election.

Some people are concerned that the name at the top of the organizational chart doesn’t have the highest salary. I’m not overly concerned with that situation. The Mayor has a lot of institutional power that ensures his authority will be respected down through the ranks. Besides, people doing jobs like cops, firefighters and DPW workers SHOULD make more money than the Mayor. They do hard, dangerous and unpleasant jobs that merit top compensation.

Syracuse is a city that is perpetually cutting services while simultaneously raising people’s taxes and fees. In this kind of climate, it is wrong to raise elected officials’ pay.

Gas Taxes & Strawberry Statements

A favorite book of mine has always been James Simon Kunen’s account of his experiences as a student at Columbia, especially during the 1968 student uprising and takeover of administration buildings. The Strawberry Statement was one of my favorite books as a young high school and college student. It’s a great meditation on how events, even major ones like the Vietnam War and a campus riot, effect ordinary people. Kunen even referred to himself as a “single revolutionary digit.”

The current brouhaha over the Clinton-McCain gas tax holiday reminds me of two points in Kunen’s book. The title of the book was a reference to a statement made by a Dean at Columbia. Dean Herbert Deane allegedly said that students’ opinions about University policy had as much effect on his thinking as if the students told him they enjoyed eating strawberries. In other words, their opinions were irrelevant. Hillary Clinton’s “Strawberry Statement” is her recent declaration that she didn’t care if not one professional economist could be found to ratify the fiscal sanity of the gas tax holiday: “I’m not going to throw my lot in with economists.”

So now Hillary has changed the rationale for her campaign. Out is Hillary’s earnest appeal to well thought-out policy (as opposed to Obama’s ethereal and detached rhetoric). Clinton’s new rationale is her steadfast support of real folks, despite what those elitist always-did-their-homework-on-Friday-nights economists think.

Clinton justifies her position by declaring that a lot of well-thought out policy (and a lot of awful Bush policy) does nothing but make it harder for middle class families to eke out a living. This reminds me of another thought from Kunen’s book. During the disturbances at Columbia classes were cancelled and radical activists started offering “liberation classes”, sort of glorified teach-ins. Kunen mused that liberation classes weren’t going to do any good for say, the student studying classical music. Kunen noted that a lot of people get screwed by events over which they have little control and no say.

Clinton is correct when she notes that middle class families are being screwed and often public policy does nothing to help them, and possibly makes their problems worse. However, even the beleaguered middle class doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Their lives exist in a world of choices and decisions. Real leadership often requires elected officials to tell people that the decisions they have made cannot be sustained if the entire nation is to prosper.

America cannot continue to claim 25% of the world’s non-renewable energy resources. America cannot expect to see oil prices significantly decrease in a world where oil company production is falling every year and demand is booming due to the increase in the number of motorists in India and China. It is irresponsible and the opposite of leadership to tell middle class families driving SUV’s and living in the sprawl cities of the exurbs that their way of life (dependent on cheap gas) is in any way sustainable. Minimize the damage now instead of kicking the can down the road.

Stupidest.Policy.Ever

The gas tax holiday proposal by both John McCain and Hillary Clinton has been widely derided both by economists for its total ignorance of basic supply and demand theory and by environmentalists concerned that Americans are continuing to live in a dream world where 5% of the world’s population can continue to consume 25% of the world’s non-renewable energy.

The best rant on this policy is by Tom Friedman in a New York Times article entitled “Dumb As We Wanna Be.”

The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.

However, the sheer stupidity of the gas tax holiday proposal has fostered an interesting contest. James Fallows, the wonderful writer for the Atlantic, asked readers of his blog to nominate the stupidest bipartisan public policy enacted by the federal government.

Among the worthy submissions:
farm bill and its subsidies to wealthy factory farm corporations
Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which declared Iran’s standing army a terrorist group
1986 Anti-Drug Abuse act, set up sentencing distinction between crack and powder cocaine
Patriot Act

The winner was mandates and subsidies for ethanol production and use.:

“I think bi-partisan support for ethanol is more stupid [than the McCain-Clinton 'gas tax holiday' plan], because it’s actually harmful and because it not only panders to the public … worse it panders to a special interest group (Midwest farmers and their regional politicians).
It’s harmful because: 1) it helped to catalyze higher levels of food inflation, 2) it consumes as much energy to make and distribute as it provides, 3) it deflects attention from developing trying sound policies to enhance our energy security, 4) it didn’t allow for removal of taxes on the import of truly energy efficient ethanol produced in Brazil from sugar, and 5) it’s a such an extreme example of government disfuntionality it causes people like me to become truly disillusioned with the political process.”

I’m not quite sure if my choices were bipartisan, but it’s hard to beat the stupidity of the Savings and Loan deregulation in the 1980’s and the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The former, combined with the Reagan administration’s hatred of government oversight and regulation allowed S & L ’s to be looted by corporate pirates, forcing taxpayers to bail out the system to the tune of $5 billion. The latter repealed the provision forbidding bank holding companies from owning other types of financial companies. many economists feel that this created the corporate climate that has resulted in the current meltdown of the mortgage market. That $5 billion S & L bailout will seem like peanuts when we’ve come through the worst of the credit mess today.

What’s Mine Is Mine And What’s Yours Is Open To Negotiation

Last night, I went to the Common Council’s public hearing on the city’s proposed 2008-09 budget. Unlike some hearings in past years, there were few people in attendance (perhaps a dozen) and the whole thing wrapped up in about a half hour.

However, the tenor of the meeting remains the same. People from the school district and various groups affiliated with teachers and parents of schoolchildren came to ask the city to spend more money on the school district.

The appeals came in two forms. The more savvy or connected speakers hewed to the school district’s party line and asked for a specific amount–$1.2 million. The less discriminating came and asked the city to fund the school district “fully.” Both groups alluded to the undeniable truth about the students in the city school district–students in abject poverty, many with little fluency in English, cost the district more to educate than do affluent children from the suburbs. When you start from so far behind, it takes more effort and more investment to catch up.

Unfortunately, no one speaking up for the school district has even an elementary grasp of the city’s economic structure and many speakers hold a thinly-veiled contempt for the city. The speakers constantly allude to the historic underfunding of the school district by Albany, lumping the city into the mix as an unindicted co-conspirator, questioning the Mayor and the Council’s commitment to our children.

Syracuse is a city where twice the amount of the local tax levy goes to the school district than to all other city services combined. Yet speakers for the school district seem to believe that the city is holding out on the schools, withholding money. The reality is that the city’s tax levy is now a small percentage of the both the city’s budget and the school district’s budget. The city and schools rely on transfer payments from Albany to survive. In fact, the structural deficits faced by both bodies–in the form of contracts with their unionized work forces–and the pensions, health care and other benefits that go along with those contracts–are insoluble without massive infusions of state aid.

Therefore, it is rather unseemly to go before the Council to beg for an additional $1 million, threatening to cut jobs if your budget isn’t increased by less than half a percentage point–particularly given the very large increase of state aid received this budget year. Is the school district so mismanaged that over 70 jobs are left to dangle in the wind unless an additional 0.3 % is added to the school budget? (An addition that was added at the very last meeting of the school board’s discussion of their budget?)

At least no one got up and asked the Council to please raise my taxes and give the money to the school district. Do these people even understand basic economics? Do they think that these costs are only born by those with the ability to pay? If the city raises its property taxes, it will fall disproportionally on the poorest neighborhoods and those least able to afford increases. The elderly on fixed incomes. Poor tenants paying higher rents. The poor students that you claim to care so much for will just have another stone thrown into their sinking boat.

Disaster Averted, Roy Bernardi Passed Over As New HUD Secretary

OH, THANK GOD! Roy Bernardi, currently Assistant Secretary at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, has been sidestepped by the Bush Administration for the top job. GW announced today that Steve Preston, director of the Small Business Administrationhas been named to succeed the disgraced and retiring Alphonso Jackson as the next Secretary at HUD.

Preston is evidently competent, working diligently to remake the SBA. Most governmental agencies run by Bush appointees feature a steel cage match between incompetence and corruption to determine standard operating procedure. Preston apparently prizes competence and results. The signature accomplishment of his tenure at SBA was cutting through the languishing backlog of assistance requests at SBA for small businesses wiped out by Hurricane Katrina. Preston pushed $6 billion in aid out the door in a matter of months.

Our nation has been spared the incompetence of Roy Bernardi, a political hack whose signature accomplishment as mayor of Syracuse was mismanaging the Finance Department so badly that the city had no idea what its accounts receivable balance was on any given day. This led to charges of fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission because when the city issued a bond, the information provided to investors on the city’s finances was just a guess.

A Bernardi-directed HUD would be unable to tackle the pressing problems facing our country in the mortgage foreclosure/credit crunch/undefinable derivative financial product /Wall St. land grab (take your pick) crisis. Wow, it is certainly a new day in Bushland–competence over cronyism.

Nuisance Abatement

SUN is pleased to see the city use the Nuisance Abatement law to order the closure of Zak’s Market on W. Newell St. SUN helped create the law in 1991, as well as make several amendments to the law, including a provision allowing residents to file written impact statements and give oral testimony at Nuisance Abatement hearings.

The idea that landlords are responsible for their property and share responsibility for the conduct of their tenants has been a feature of common law since the 16th century. Many books and articles have been written about nuisance abatement, but a member of SUN put it best when she said: “Your right to throw a punch ends at the tip of my nose. Anything after that and I’ll see you in court!” If an owner allows his property to interfere with other people’s rights to the quiet enjoyment of their property, your property is a public nuisance.

Properties owned by absentee landlords and corner stores business owners are terrorizing Syracuse neighborhoods. Rowdy tenants and loiterers around stores blast music, drink alcohol and use drugs, vandalize property, urinate on adjoining property and lawns and start fights. The worst places also have blatant drug dealing and gun violence.

In Syracuse, public nuisance properties are hauled before an administrative hearing and asked what they plan to do to end the problems. If they do not show or do not have a realistic plan, the police chief has the option to issue a closure order for a period of time, up to one year.

The most recent case, Zak’s Market has dragged on for several years. The most recent hearing was the store’s third. Police have made 9 arrests in the past year at the store–well over the threshold of 3 arrests in a 2 year period. The store even has been accused of exchanging money immediately after drug deals, a manuever done to rid drug dealers of any marked money passed to them in undercover sting operations.

However, there are still neighbors that will complain bitterly about the closure of the store. The owners have created many supporters in the neighborhood by extending credit to poor families, misusing food stamps by allowing them to be used for tobacco and alcohol or by buying them for 50 cents on the dollar, cash. However, Zak’s Market deserves its penalty. Many businesses on the Southside operate without losing control of their property, refuse to cooperate with drug dealers and still do a decent business.

The store can appeal this decision to State Supreme Court, so this issue may still not be over.

Teaching Kids To Think, Rather Than Kill

I must admit I’m a sucker for this kind of thing.  The state of Idaho announced that it is establishing a state-wide chess curriculum for second and third grade students. Teaching kids in school some relatively esoteric skill that promotes thinking and mental discipline is something that I believe is a great way to promote lifelong learning.

Anything to keep kids away from freaking video games. Now we learn that video games are the premiere manner to introduce war and combat to the next generation of military cannon fodder, as the New York Times points out in a terrifying article “Facing the Horrors of Distant Battlefields With a TV and Console”:

“an entire postdraft generation of young men has had its perception of war shaped in some measure by video games. Games are perhaps the final mass-entertainment medium that regularly includes portrayals of modern war; gamers may be the last audience ready to consume them. The military figured this out a long time ago. Since 2002 the Army has developed and distributed a game called America’s Army that is explicitly meant as a recruiting tool and which now has more than eight million registered players.”