Charles Chieppo: Olympics bid has a Big Dig ring

  This piece was first published in The Boston Globe. We use it with the permission of our friend Mr. Chieppo.

BOSTON The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has yet to restore normal service after cold and snow that was the straw that finally broke the system’s back. Yet proponents of hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics are already pushing a proposal that harks back to the expansion policies that helped bring about the T’s  severe troubles.

At first, Boston 2024 organizers claimed that transportation improvements already in the pipeline would be the only Olympic-related cost to taxpayers. But when pushed, it became clear they meant any projects included in a $13 billion bond bill then-Governor Patrick signed last year. The problem is that bond bills only authorize the commonwealth to borrow money; just a fraction of the projects in them actually fit within state borrowing limits. A recent Globe story showed that some of the projects in Boston 2024’s successful bid to the U.S.  Olympic Committee aren’t even in the bond bill, and only a portion of the included projects are funded. Completing them all would roughly double the $4.5 billion that proponents claim taxpayers would have to kick in to host the games.

How quickly we forget. In 1991, the commonwealth committed to build a laundry list of transit expansions as environmental mitigation for the Big Dig. But no funding source was identified for any of them. As a result, building, operating, and maintaining the mitigation projects ran up more than one-third of the $9 billion the T owes in debt and interest.

Redirecting money from maintenance to expansion to pay for the projects is one reason for the authority’s maintenance backlog, now estimated at a stunning $6.7 billion, and for the recent systemwide meltdown.

State leaders must avoid letting organizers turn the Olympics into Big Dig mitigation 2.0. Among the many projects included in Boston 2024’s bid are South Coast Commuter Rail, extending the Fairmount commuter line to Newton, and expanding South Station. For those projects alone, more than $3 billion is currently unfunded.

Commuter rail featured prominently in the 1991 mandates. Required expansions included extensions to Newburyport, Worcester, and Plymouth, and construction of the Greenbush Line to the South Shore.

It is up to state leaders, not Olympic boosters, to plan the region’s transportation future. But a recent Pioneer Institute study by former state Inspector Gen. Greg Sullivan (full disclosure: I am a senior fellow at Pioneer but was not involved in preparing the report) revealed the folly of allowing mandates to dictate transit policy.

Sullivan looked at 18 American commuter rail systems and found that the T’s was the only one that lost ridership between 2003 and 2013. Despite all the expansion, MBTA commuter-rail ridership fell by a stunning 13 percent over a decade. The finding reiterates the direct relationship between investing in maintenance and the reliable on-time service that attracts riders.

No project captures the madness of transit policy by mandate better than Greenbush. Since the federal government wanted no part of it, the entire tab of nearly $600 million was picked up by the Commonwealth.

Greenbush was projected to take eight passengers off highways for each one that had previously used the MBTA’s South Shore commuter-boat service. Instead, about the same number of the line’s riders were lured from the ferry as from area roadways. When those who previously rode other commuter rail lines are added in, more than 60 percent of the line’s meager ridership was already using public transit.

Common sense dictates that new lines should be added only when there is enough money to build, operate, and maintain them without cannibalizing existing assets. To be sure, a number of the projects Boston 2024 organizers tout are important maintenance investments, including MBTA signal and power system upgrades. But it is up to state leaders, not Olympic boosters, to plan the region’s transportation future.

Those boosters are backpedaling furiously in the wake of revelations about the real cost of Olympic-related transportation upgrades. The group’s CEO, former state transportation secretary Richard Davey, told the Globe that the only transportation enhancements really needed to host the games are new Red and Orange Line cars that are already slated for delivery beginning in 2018. That’s quite a departure from their official bid.

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Let’s not run the risk of repeating Big Dig mitigation’s devastating impact on the MBTA by allowing Olympic dreams to dictate the next generation of area transit policy.

Charles Chieppo is principal of Chieppo Strategies, a public policy writing and communications firm.

David Warsh: The high-speed bailout of 2009

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

I spent some hours last week browsing the newly released transcripts of Federal Open Market Committee meetings in 2009.  Mostly I relied on the extraordinary “live tour” and subsequent coverage by The Wall Street Journal team.

I was struck by how greatly the action had shifted to the incoming administration of President Barack Obama.   The acute-panic phase of the crisis was past, and relatively little of the drama of that troubled year is captured in the talk of monetary policy.

On Jan. 15, President George W. Bush asked Congress to authorize the incoming Obama administration to spend $350 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program funds.  Obama was inaugurated Jan. 20.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Feb. 10 announced a financial stabilization plan consisting mainly of stress tests for the nineteen largest bank holding companies.

In a conference call, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke explained to the Federal Open Market Committee that the details were hazy. “It’s like selling a car: Only when the customer is sold on the leather seats do you actually reveal the price.”

On Feb. 17 Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a stimulus package of around $800 billion in spending measures and tax cuts designed to promote economic recovery.

In March the Fed announced it planned to purchase $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed securities in 2009, expanding the “quantitative easing” program it had begun the previous November.   Also the administration’s bailout of the auto industry was completed.

In May, Geithner reported that nine banks were judged sufficiently well capitalized to have passed the stress tests. Ten others would be required to raise additional capital by November.  Gradually the stabilization was recognized to have been a success.

And in August, Obama nominated Bernanke to a second term as Fed chairman. Senior White House adviser Lawrence Summers had been unsuccessful in his efforts to replace first Geithner, then Bernanke.  He would try again.

Bernanke’s book-length account of all this is expected in the fall. About the same time, U.S.  Court of Claims Judge Thomas Wheeler likely will have delivered a verdict in a lawsuit against the government alleging that Bernanke acted illegally when the Fed took control of insurance giant American International Group at the height of the crisis.

Meanwhile, Summers has been repositioning himself, perhaps hoping to return to the White House in a Hillary Clinton administration.  In a New York Times piece, ''Establishment Populism Rising,'' Thomas Edsall interviews the Harvard professor for an update on Summers’s thinking.

.                              xxx

I continue to get my news of Russia from even-handed Johnson’s Russia List – five issues last week alone, containing 188 items from the U.S., European and Russian press, most of which, needless to say, I did not read.  Two that I did stood out.

Jack Matlock, ambassador to the disintegrating Soviet Union under George H.W. Bush,  wrote  on his blog that the “knee-jerk” conviction that Vladimir Putin  was directly responsible for the deliberately shocking murder of Russian dissenter Boris Nemtsov overlooks other possibilities. “So far nothing is absolutely clear about this tragedy except that an able politician and fine man was gunned down in cold blood,” he concluded.

Peter Hitchens, in The Spectator, argued that It’s NATO that’s empire-building, not Putin. His principal authority, George Friedman, founder of the high-end publisher Stratfor, dates the current phase of the conflict from Putin’s refusal to go along with US policy in Syria in 2011.

.                         xxx

I was struck that when the Club of Growth asked Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker about his foreign- policy credentials, he replied that he considered Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire striking federal air-traffic controllers in 1981 “the most important foreign-policy decision of his lifetime.”

{Added by New England Diary overseer: Walker said of the firings; "It sent a message not only across America, it sent a message around the world'' that "we weren't to be messed with.''}

When you’re a kid with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.

(Reagan speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan offered Walker some half-hearted backup and The Washington Post zeroed in on Walker’s  cram course in foreign policy.)

I mention it mainly ir to say that, having spent most of my life covering economic development, one way or another, I’d say that the skein of events more important to U.S. foreign policy than any other were those in which the march in Selma, Ala.,  commemorated this weekend played an important part.

David Warsh is proprietor of economicprincipals.com and a longtime financial journalist and economic historian.

Pre-rock memories

 

"Dance to the Music,'' by JUDY ROBINSON-COX, at Alperts Fine Art, Andover, Mass. The increased interest in pre-rock, Great American Songbook music shown by older Baby Boomers these days, and even by the likes of  the pre-Baby Boomer Bob Dylan, shows how as you head into old age, memories from childhood tend to come flowing back.

The music referred to here is a song from "South Pacific,'' the  Rodgers & Hammerstein musical that premiered in 1949 and was based on James  A. Michener's book Tales of the South Pacific, which stemmed from his Navy service in World War II.

Another woe from tough winter: road salt in steams and ponds

By ecoRI News staff

The salt and sand used to treat roadways during this snowy winter are likely to have a negative impact on the water quality in local lakes, ponds and streams this year.

“All that salt is going to lead to increased chloride in our waterways, which isn’t good for the critters that live in our streams and lakes,” said Elizabeth Herron, the University of Rhode Island’s Watershed Watch program coordinator. “It’s increasingly becoming an issue across the entire northern tier of states, and it’s liable to be very evident this year.”

The runoff of sand from roadways poses a different kind of problem. It creates what Herron calls “sand fans” in water bodies, changing the depth of lakes and providing habitat for invasive plants that prefer shallower water. Sand also can smother the eggs of bottom-dwelling creatures.

“The big storm events that we’ve been seeing in recent years are also generating more runoff and more chances for pollutants to get into lakes, streams and Narragansett Bay,” Herron said.

About 350 Watershed Watch volunteers monitor the water quality in 220 lakes, ponds, streams, bays and other water bodies in Rhode Island. They play a critical role in helping scientists understand the effect that weather and land use have on water quality.

Analysis of the 27 years of data collected by program volunteers has identified changes in water temperature, nutrients, bacteria, algae and other factors that affect the health of aquatic ecosystems.

“Temperature is a particularly important factor,” Watershed Watch director Linda Green said. “Things happen faster at higher temperatures, and certain plants and animals can’t survive when it’s too warm. And certain algae, especially the bad ones, love the high temperatures. So being able to document temperature trends may help us predict problems in the future.” Classroom training for new volunteers will take place at URI’s Kingston campus on March 25 at 6 p.m. and repeated March 29 at 1 p.m., with field training scheduled for Saturdays in April.

Volunteers come from all walks of life and are of all ages, occupations, educational backgrounds and interests. Each volunteer is matched to a specific location that they will be in charge of monitoring. Once a week on a day of their choice, volunteers monitor for water clarity and temperature. Every two weeks they also monitor algae concentrations and dissolved oxygen.

On several designated dates, volunteers collect water samples that are analyzed at URI for nutrients, acidity and bacteria. Many volunteers work in teams to share their monitoring duties.

Ponds, lakes and some saltwater sites are monitored at their deepest point, so access to a boat, canoe or kayak is necessary. But few river and stream sites require a boat.

“The water quality information collected by our volunteers is used by conservation organizations, policymakers, regulators, and state and local officials to make decisions that improve and protect the health of local waters,” Green said. “It is also used by the Rhode Island Health Department to study the connection between increased water temperatures and the health of Rhode Islanders.”

For more information or to register for the training sessions, contact Elizabeth Herron at 401-874-4552 or at emh@uri.edu.

You shouldn't go home again

 

From the ''Home Court Crawl'' series  (acrylic. graphite. archival digital prints), by LISA SIGAL, represented by Samson Gallery, Boston. She works to express the sensibilities of place, and looks for the soul of a home, including an abandoned one,

Formidably farm-fresh

 

"Locally Grown" (photo of tableaux arranged by the artist), by JUDY ROBINSON-COX, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

Social animals

 

"Crowding'' (photo modified in PhotoShop),by DAVID STONE, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass. He shot this from a balcony overlooking the front plaza of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston.

Cold morning but snow melts

  The power of the sun even on a very cold morning is heartening as spring approaches. It was about 10 above  early this morning but a couple of hours later the snow and ice on the larger roads had melted and had slid off cars in the full sun on this brilliant day -- fastest on black cars, which makes them good to buy in New England. We could do a lot more with solar energy in little ways.

The terror of spring

"Ornatus"  (C-print on acrylic), by YSABEL LeMAY, in her show at Lanoue Gallery, Boston.

The gallery says:

"LeMay’s unique creations are the result of an innovative technique called, “Photo-Fusion”. She takes hundreds of photographs, manipulates the light and visual properties and assembles one detail at a time in a painter-like fashion to form the large composition.''

Waiting to spring out at you

"The Skeleton in the Closet'' (hand-made quilt, bleached denim, leather, fabric), by BEN VENOM, at Samson Gallery, Boston, this month.

Sarah Savage/Erin M. Graves: 'Financial capabilities' for college

BOSTON

Community colleges have traditionally responded to the financial needs of their students by removing or minimizing financial barriers to attending. Efforts to make community college tuition free fit with this philosophy. But where efforts to minimize or remove financial barriers to attending community college fall short is in empowering students to navigate the next financial crossroads they encounter, to make well-informed financial decisions that will decrease their vulnerability as students and to position them with the tools for achieving financial wellness as they progress through life.

Empowerment work that helps students manage their financial lives can be described as building their "financial capabilities." The intention of this work is to teach students effective money management, savings and planning techniques but also to provide opportunities to apply what students learn, which is critical to developing positive financial habits. More commonly referenced "financial literacy" remains relevant but is more often associated with knowledge transfer and skill development than application and behavior change. Empowerment work is intended to build students’ capacity.

While engaging with students in this way is new territory for most community colleges, it is an emerging area in which some institutions have already developed expertise and observed significant benefits. To illustrate, the Boston Fed’s Financial Capabilities Group describes the experiences and insights of eight community colleges from around the country in its new Community College Handbook, released as part of the group’s Community College Initiative.

The need to help students develop skills and confidence to manage their financial lives effectively, to provide real ways of doing this and to deliver services when students are most likely to have opportunities to put what they learn into practice is evident from the institutions’ experiences.

In one example, a financial aid staff member at a community college in Florida helped pilot a peer-to-peer effort over concern that while financial aid was relatively easy to come by, students lacked clear guidance on how the aid could best be utilized. The pilot began on a small scale, with three work-study students approaching peers leaving the financial aid office with their refunds, engaging them in discussions about plans for their refunds, and encouraging them to divide purchase decisions into “needs” versus “wants.”

This pilot grew to include a multicampus, well-funded Financial Learning Ambassador Program that delivered timely and tailored guidance on money management techniques through a peer-to-peer model. By identifying times when students are most likely to make financial decisions, staff and students implementing the program could ensure the relevancy and timeliness of content (e.g., demonstrating “shopping on a budget” and setting up resource tables around the time when financial aid refunds are dispersed).

Motivated by similar concerns for financial well-being, community colleges based in New Mexico and Baltimore County sought to address students’ financial needs beyond educational costs and identified comprehensive financial coaching as part of the solution. Staff at one institution observed that in addition to academic challenges, students were already struggling with day-to-day financial needs and therefore less able to plan for the future.

Likewise, many students attending community college in Baltimore County not only live below the poverty level but also lack tools to manage their finances. While one institution offers financial coaching as part of a comprehensive financial stability center model that bundles education and employment services, work and income supports, and financial and asset-building services, the other offers coaching only. The Handbook’s case studies go into depth on how the respective institutions decided which services to offer.

Two community colleges in Oregon and Arizona took a different approach. In an effort to address their students’ unmet financial needs and to help them develop positive financial habits, these institutions offer educational matched savings programs that match student savings at an established rate (e.g., 1 to 1 or greater). After meeting program milestones such as making a specified number of consecutive savings deposits and completing a certain number of hours of financial education classes or workshops, students can use their savings and matching funds to cover approved educational expenses such as tuition, fees, books, and supplies.

These programs have required concerted efforts by external partners, funders and institutional staff. In these cases, administrators and staff members committed to this level of collaboration because they saw the value in not only helping students pay for educational expenses but also to complete the program with much higher quality financial decision-making abilities than when they started.

These case studies along with others featured in the Boston Fed’s Handbook provide examples of new ways of responding to the financial challenges community college students face. The studies demonstrate how previous approaches to minimizing challenges—while well-intended—have not historically enhanced a student’s ability to independently overcome the next challenge they are likely to face.

The case studies describe just a handful of models for building students’ capacity for managing their financial lives. While we hope this might generate discussion and ideas among institutional personnel and potential partners, we also want to emphasize the need for more research to determine additional best practices. This is why the Boston Fed is evaluating a two-year multi-institutional pilot that combines educational matched savings programming, financial coaching and support systems to help students navigate the financial aid process.

We want to know if students who receive services demonstrate stronger educational outcomes, such as higher rates of persistence; and financial outcomes, such as improved decision-making surrounding paying for school and managing their financial lives, versus those who do not receive any services at all. We also want to understand the interplay of these outcomes and the extent to which a model of this kind could be scaled up.

In the meantime, we continue to advocate that community colleges commit to helping their students to manage their financial lives effectively. We have hosted a series of events that brought together expertsin-person and online, and we will be actively engaging community colleges in discussions tailored to their unique institutional contexts and student needs through on-site visits. One of our recent visits to an institution in Massachusetts, for instance, included a broad cross-section of institutional staff, faculty and students, and resulted in a rich discussion of possibilities for applying what we have learned to this institution’s unique context.

Institutions and the students they serve will be better positioned when students are knowledgeable, well-informed stewards of their financial lives and able to navigate financial systems as students, workforce participants, and members of society. The Resource Handbook is intended to make this case, demonstrate actual examples and observed benefits, provide insights into how to achieve effective delivery, and ultimately, to foster a shared belief of how working with students in this way is integral to their educational progress and future financial wellness.

Sarah Savage is community-affairs manager and Erin M. Graves is senior policy analyst in the Financial Capabilities Group at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. This piece originated on the Web site of the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org).

Swiping from Vermont's old quaintness pitch

  Here's an entertaining Page One story  in The Wall Street Journal about other states trying to horn in on Vermont's industrial-strength rural quaintness.

Pardon me

 

"Intrusion" (mixed media on canvas on panel), by JULIE GRAHAM, in her show "Julie Graham: If it's not one thing...'', at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through March 29.

In the market

Chris Powell: Connecticut's no-stakes testing

Connecticut's biggest and, after the liquor stores, most venal special interest, the Connecticut Education Association, the teachers union, is spending $250,000 on a television advertising campaign urging elimination of "high-stakes" testing of students in the state's public schools.

By "high-stakes testing" the union means any testing that might have consequences for students and especially for teachers. The union argues that there's now so much testing that it severely distracts from teaching and learning. The union wants to replace "high-stakes" testing with what it calls "progress tests" whose scoring would diminish right and wrong answers -- measures of knowledge -- and instead measure things like how students get along with others.

That is, tests would not be standardized, their results would not be comparable across schools and school systems, scoring would be arbitrary, teachers would be in charge of it and in charge of determining how the performance of their students was presented, test data would become meaningless or misleading, and what remains of accountability in public education in Connecticut would be destroyed.

Still, the union is right about "high-stakes" testing but for the wrong reason.

For despite the CEA's complaints, there really isn't that much federally or state-mandated standardized testing in Connecticut's schools, just one annual test for grades 3 through 8 and then just one test in high school. While high school also involves college admission tests, these are discretionary and not numerous anyway.

If a single "high-stakes" test every year is convulsing Connecticut's schools, it may be because students are not learning much. In 2010 a state study found that two-thirds of the freshmen in the state community college and university systems were being required to take remedial English or math or both. Last year a test of Connecticut high school seniors, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, reached a similar conclusion -- that half had not mastered high school English and two-thirds had not mastered high school math. Yet nearly everyone was given a high school diploma anyway.

That's because the unacknowledged policy of public education in Connecticut is never to hold students to standards but to promote them from grade to grade even if they fail to learn and to keep them in school even if they are disruptive or dangerous. (Educators lately have been celebrating a decline in arrests of students in school as if this equates to a decline in disruption rather than its acceptance.) Educators have decided that eliminating standards and dumbing down everything is better than hurting anyone's feelings, that awarding diplomas that are only embossed lies is better than education.

Students know this -- know that their learning has no bearing on their advancement in school, that their tests are polite fictions, and that they will be graduated no matter what they do short of manslaughter.

Teachers know this as well and don't want to be judged by the performance of their students when students themselves can't be judged by it. But teachers lack the courage to protest the destruction of standards. Instead with its new advertising campaign the CEA proposes concealment of the disaster.

Connecticut's "high-stakes" testing system should be scrapped not because it is too much of a burden on students and teachers, as the CEA pretends, and not because teachers object to serious and independent evaluation, but because it is a deception, implying standards that were discarded long ago.

Of course state and federal law will still require administering to students every year something posing as a test, but teachers could be assured, as students already are, that the results will not be held against them. Education in Connecticut then can remain what it has become, the problem of employers -- if any stick around. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

'Health-equity zones' for Rhode Island

  Rhode Island is creating "health-equity zones,'' reports The Providence Journal

“Health is not possible without community. Health-equity zones give communities the resources they need to focus on creating collaborations and building health through relationships,” said state Health Director Michael Fine, M.D.

Mass. health-insurance transformation

  See this Boston Globe story on a transformation of health-insurance payment system in Massachusetts led by Blue Cross.

Maple tree tapping gone wrong

Untitled pastel and charcoal work by SCOTT AUSTIN and KELLIE WEEKS, in show "Collaborative Dreamscapes by Scott Austin and Kellie Weeks,'' at Fountain Street Fine Art, Framingham, Mass.

Katherine McFate: What we lose with privatized mail

Last year, the U.S. Postal Service delivered 1.4 billion packages for FedEx and UPS. In fact, it delivers the last mile for almost a third of FedEx packages. The 618,000 Postal Service workers also delivered nearly 66 billion pieces of first-class mail — that’s more than 100,000 pieces per carrier.

The Postal Service can reach all 150 million American households because it’s a publics ystem that we’ve been investing in for over 200 years. Our Constitution tasked the federal government with creating a national postal system and told the postmaster general to report to the president.

But in 1971, Congress made the service into an “independent agency” managed by a board of governors. And since then, it’s been under attack by politicians who never met a public program they liked.

Yes, the rise of UPS, FedEx, and the Internet has created new challenges for your local post office. But the purported “fiscal crisis” is a manufactured one.

In 2006, Congress required the Postal Service — known as USPS for short — to “pre-fund” 75 years of its retirees’ health benefits. This added $5.7 billion to its costs last year.

No other private company or federal agency has to pre-fund retirement health-care benefits. If they did, many corporations would run huge deficits or tumble into bankruptcy. Without these retiree health payments, USPS would actually turn a profit.

Using the deficit created by this requirement as an excuse, the USPS board of governors is closing distribution centers, cutting worker hours, eliminating delivery routes, and slashing jobs. Over the past five years, USPS has cut 94,000 positions.

The job loss alone is a travesty, but a bigger principle is at stake.

Our nation’s founders understood that a universal, affordable, and yes, public postal system helps knit us together as a nation. They recognized that commerce requires a common infrastructure and public institutions that belong to and benefit the entire country.

Instead of shrinking the Postal Service, we should build on it. That means, first of all, appreciating that the USPS can be much more than a delivery service.

In many small towns, the local post office continues to be a community hub, a place to meet neighbors and get news. And postal carriers don’t just deliver letters — they often keep an eye on the elderly and homebound, and alert first responders if things look amiss.

They could do even more. The Postal Service’s fleet of vehicles — the largest in the country — could be equipped to detect air pollutants and report potholes, water leaks, and other infrastructure repair needs.

Why stop there?

The USPS could raise tens of billions of dollars each year by reinstating post office savings accounts and banking services, which it efficiently provided for 55 years in the first half of the 20^th century.

Customers received 2-percent interest on their savings accounts, and the post office loaned their money to community banks, which then made loans to local businesses. This virtuous circle benefitted the entire community. At its peak, 4 million Americans took advantage of these services, saving $36 billion in 2014 dollars.

Today, 34 million American families live in places without traditional banking services. High-interest payday lenders and check-cashing services charge low-wage working families in those communities an average of over $2,400 a year. Experts estimate that low-cost banking services could save American workers a trillion dollars a year.

Instead of selling off the assets we built together over two centuries, let’s invest in our Postal Service — a public system that has served our nation since its birth.

Katherine McFate is the president and  chief executive of the Center for Effective Government in Washington (foreffectivegov.org). This article was distributed via OtherWords.org. This article was distributed via OtherWords.org. 

Local democracy in Vermont

  Town meeting day in Vermont, where citizens are heavily  engaged in their own governance and politics are generally very honest.