Category: News and Opinion

Want To Get Revenge on the New York City Transit By Cutting Its Funding? Too Late: Everyone Already Has

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The National Transit database is out for 2007, and this time there is data that is either new or at least new to me. For selected items, time series data is presented for each year from 1991 to 2007, showing how the MTA (and perhaps other transit agencies) got into this mess. I’ve analyzed the data for two MTA subsidiaries: New York City Transit (NYCT), my main concern and former employer, and the Long Island Railroad (LIRR), for comparison’s sake. The “download” portion of the attached spreadsheet also contains the same information for other MTA subsidiaries and New Jersey Transit, for those who want to go further. The expenditure detail doesn’t include such relevant items as pension costs, borrowing, debt service and retiree health care expenditures, which can be used by those skilled in political deception (or perhaps self-deception) to shift costs to, and suck revenues, from the future.

What the data does show, however, is that during the 1990s the amount of revenue provided to NYCT, both in fares and subsidies, was drastically reduced adjusted for inflation, both per-ride and per hour a revenue vehicle was in service. In 1993, just prior to the start of the administration of He Who Must Not Be Named, the NYCT had $2.92 per unlinked trip in revenues (operating and capital), including $1.30 from the fare, in 2007 dollars. By 2000 that had fallen to $1.90, a decrease of 35 percent, including $1.01 from the fare. For each hour it operated a revenue vehicle (bus or subway) in1991 NYCT received $264.65, including $94.50 from fares. By 2000 that had fallen to $155.64, a 41.2 percent decline, including $82.87 in fare revenue.

The Coming Political War City Residents Get To Sit Out

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What will happen to all those excess McMansions built in recent years across suburban and exurban America, as energy costs rise and household sizes and incomes continue to shrink? From the American Planning Association comes a report with a suggestion — why not covert these houses, built for the affluent, into multiple dwellings less well off households could afford to rent and maintain? Here is the kicker — the report was written in 1949, and the subject was older Victorian-era houses in central cities. Many urban homes were in fact converted to multiple dwellings and rooming houses in the post-war era, as the housing units reached 50 years old, were no longer attractive to the affluent, and were passed down the economic ladder. Indeed it is passing down of housing built for the affluent, not subsidized housing newly built for the less well off, that has been responsible for much of the improvement in housing conditions for the less well off in the past century.

Having nearby homes within one’s taxing jurisdiction become affordable to the less well off, however, is not the typical suburbanites idea of a good thing. Particularly in the balkanized Blue States, where local government jurisdictions are many and small, and tax burdens and public service quality vary greatly depending on local success in getting business taxpayers in and keeping less well off service recipients out. That will be one side in the coming political war. The other will feature desperate homeowners seeking rental income to help with the mortgage, former residents who moved away but couldn’t sell and need to rent instead, speculators seeking profit, and working families and increasingly less well off seniors living on Social Security only (once Generation Greed finishes with us) seeking affordable housing. In some places, the battle is already underway.

The Paterson vs. DiNapoli Pension “Disagreement”

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Those who follow the news might have read of a report by the State Comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, that the state pension plans have lost lots of money over the past year. In 2011 (after the current members of the state legislature have been re-elected) local governments will have to pay more into the pension plans as a result. And as a consequence, residents of those localities would face soaring taxes, deteriorating public services, or a combination of the two. In response Comptroller DiNapoli proposes that such localities be allowed to defer the additional required pension contributions, in effect borrowing from the pension funds at eight percent interest per year, and thus shift the cost to future taxpayers, perhaps those around after current taxpayers have cashed in and moved out or died off. More off the books debt to add to the massive on the books debt. Governor David Paterson responded that what the state really needs to do is reduce pension benefits for future public employees which, if as a result of lower total compensation those employees are less motivated and qualified, would reduce public services for future state residents.

In the press, this was presented as a conflict between the two, but to me Paterson, DiNapoli, and all politicians of their generation, regardless of party, have more in common than they have differences. Neither Paterson nor DiNapoli is willing to call out those who received the past benefits associated with our current predicament. And note the word in common to both proposals with regard to sacrifices: future. For Generation Greed, that is what (and who) has been sacrificed over and over again.

Rationales To Extend Term Limits

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I’m sure most readers of this blog have probably heard that Mayor Bloomber called Azi Paybarah of the NY Observer a disgrace because Azi had the gall to ask him a question about term limits. 

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/

But I think the most interesting thing about the exchange between Mike & Azi is what Mike actually said was the reason why term limits were extended;

“The rationale for extending term limits is the City Council voted it, and the public's going to have a chance on Nov. 3 to say what they want, and I don't think we have to keep coming back to that.”

Residency Requirements: Something Else Unsaid

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At one time all localities in New York State were allowed to limit their desirable local government jobs to local residents. Beginning in the late 1950s, however, a series of state laws have gradually prohibited New York City from excluding suburban residents from taking city local government jobs, while continuing to allow the suburbs to exclude city residents from suburban local government jobs. Often New York City’s own elected officials, as part of contract or political deals with public employee unions, specifically requested the very state laws that discrimnated against the city. In part because their backers were moving to the suburbs and wanted to keep their city jobs in the family. Now, according to the Daily News, unions and members of the City Council are proposing lifting the remaining restrictions, including those on managers.

Whether residency restrictions in public employment make sense in general is debatable as far as I’m concerned. Whether it is fair to permit them outside New York City but not for New York City is not. But I have never once, in all the years I’ve followed public policy, read about a single NYC politician demanding that local governments in the suburbs also be forced to open up their civil service jobs to New York City residents. Not once. Ever. Have I missed something? And if not, how can it be explained that this gross inequity is among the unsaid?

Is Ed Towns about to face his Waterloo?

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Everyone knows that I worked on the re-election campaign of congressman Ed Towns last year; and most of you on the blogging scene also know that I have had a long friendship with him, which has helped shield him from some of my wicked political slap downs.  Although I have taken one or two parting shots at him whenever I felt he wasn’t on the right side of an issue or political race (Ken Evans v. Diane Gordon or Inez Barron /for examples), I have been pretty easy on Ed, when compared to say Charles “Chucky B” Barron, Al Vann-winkle or Darlene Mealy-mouse. In some Brooklyn political circles, I have taken big flack for not going after Ed much harder: and probably rightly so. But there are things I do know that are about to show. I suspect that Ed won’t be around in this seat too much longer. For years now there have been forces wanting to replace him. The forces are gaining momentum folks. 

Days of Whines and Rosie

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The Gate/Domestic Partner clan solemnly remembered Memorial Day by helping six-year old Dybbuk construct a diorama memorializing his early childhood walk to the Kane Street Synagogue pre-school, and then drinking far too much at a barbeque attended mostly by natives and foreign stock from Poland, Israel, Sweden, Japan, Korea and Arizona, thrown by the family of Dybbuk‘s fiancé (yes, it is an arranged marriage; Dybbuk arranged it himself.

Three Years On Room Eight: An Offer and Request

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I posted for the first time on this site three years ago today. During that time I’ve written about 470 posts, generally three to four typewritten pages long, or about three per week, many with extensive spreadsheets based on data I had downloaded, tabulated and analyzed. More recently I’ve been slowing down. At this point, anyone who has read my posts from the beginning should be able to understand how I think, what my values are, and what the information is that informs my opinions on a variety of subjects in great detail. If someone has been reading right along, it should begin to seem repetitious, as a comparison between my first post and this one shows.  It isn't because I don't have an open mind, it is because the same pols backed by the same interests remain in charge in Albany, the therefore same things keep happening. And some things that have and will happen are pre-ordained by irrevocable decisions of the past. More and more in my new posts I summarize, and back link to more detailed posts I have already written. For anyone not familiar with what I have to say and show, on the other hand, I don’t want to leave things out. Particularly things I’m not reading elsewhere, as I explained last year. My Room 8 writings, however, are an extension of a mostly losing battle going back far longer than three years, and that gets discouraging. And thus my offer and request.