Fri, 30 Oct 2009

How many towns is the right number?

After years of talk, it seems like initiatives to consolidate municipal services and schools are actually moving, slowly, but perceptibly. The legislature has convened a commission to talk about it, which is interesting, though the kind of thing that only occasionally presages real action.

On the other hand, Senator Frank Ciccone, vice-chair of the Government Oversight committee, says he's going to introduce quite a dramatic bill in January, revoking all the city and town home rule charters in the state and creating five county-wide municipal and school administrations. I'm glad he's doing this, not so much because I agree with him that such a dramatic change is a good idea, but because change will only happen when someone proposes it. His efforts are far more likely to make a positive difference in your life than the commission's.

There are two reasons widely cited for consolidation. Actually, that's not quite true. There's one widely cited, but pretty questionable reason, and another seldom cited, but likely very important reason. They lead to very different conclusions about what needs doing, and I don't expect the commission to reach those conclusions.

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21:02 - 30 Oct 2009 [/y9/cols] link

Press!

Coverage of the book... Brown Daily Herald.

13:21 - 30 Oct 2009 [/y9/oc] link

Another take on binding arbitration

Read here

The rank and file rejection of the first contract proposal was a huge setback for school reform in Providence. It weakened the administration, helped trigger a decade long cycle of revolving door superintendencies, divided the union, and as the final contract included both a bigger pay raise and fewer concessions in work rules, reinforced the idea that intransigence by the union would be rewarded. Also, the entire conflict triggered a long period of "work to rule" right as a whole range of promising reform initiatives were ramping up.

If Rhode Island had binding arbitration in 2000, everything would have been different. No work to rule, and the orderly adoption of a contract that would have probably closely resembled the original agreement between administration and union leadership. This would have been followed by two more contracts that progressed in an orderly way toward more reasonable work rules, and we'd be working on the fourth in that series right now.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, a look at recent history confirms that binding arbitration would be good for school reform in Rhode Island.

13:04 - 30 Oct 2009 [/y9/oc] link

Fri, 23 Oct 2009

Why are people still losing their homes?

Reports out this month tell us that the foreclosure crisis facing our nation has not even peaked yet. Nationally, one property in every 136 were in some kind of foreclosure proceeding in July, August or September -- 937,840 properties. According to RealtyTrac, a private concern tracking them, foreclosures are up 5% from the spring quarter, and 23% from the same time last year.

The hardest hit places in the country are the places that have boomed the fastest over the past decade: Nevada leads the list with one foreclosed property for every 23. Arizona and California aren't far behind, with 53 in both.

To my great relief, our state appears to be bucking this trend, and foreclosures seem to be declining slightly in Rhode Island. We've seen the rate decline 6.3% since the spring, and about 2.75% since the same time last year. The rate here is still nothing to brag about: one foreclosure for every 290 properties, still high enough to be devastating to many neighborhoods.

In fact, the whole list is dismal, except way down on the bottom, one bright spot: Vermont. Last quarter, while Rhode Island was seeing 1,554 foreclosures, Vermont saw 62. This comes out to about one foreclosure for every 5,023 properties.

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21:55 - 23 Oct 2009 [/y9/cols] link

Fri, 16 Oct 2009

Book signing!

This coming Friday, October 23, I will give a talk and sign some books at Westerly's Other Tiger bookstore, 90 High Street, Westerly, from 5-7pm. Please come, and more important, tell anyone you know in Westerly. I don't know enough people there, so any help is welcome.

Also, I was on Channel 36's Lively Experiment last night. They re-broadcast it on Sunday at noon, so look for it this Sunday.

18:55 - 16 Oct 2009 [/y9/oc] link

Gambling with our future

I saw Michael Moore's new movie, Capitalism, A Love Story, a week ago. The movie was a little messy, but -- like his other movies -- is filled with interesting stories about our country that you never see on the news. For example, there were the companies run as cooperatives, like an industrial bakery in California and a robotics factory in Wisconsin. In those companies, decisions are made collectively, and both are profitable, despite decent pay for the workers, and relatively modest pay for the executives. There was the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, announcing that he would no longer evict people because of foreclosure just on the say-so of the banks. (He said he would still evict people for whom the bank actually had the paperwork.)

It's a good movie, partly because it's funny and partly because it's really not that funny. There's a lot of human tragedy portrayed in it, which isn't too surprising, since that kind of thing is pretty much everywhere you look. For example, there's plenty of tragedy to be found in the boarded-up houses in South Providence, not very far from the homeless shelters bursting at the seams. There's tragedy in the way our manufacturing heritage has been systematically dismantled by the very people in charge of it. High wages so often get the blame, but the behavior of the executives who closed profitable factories in order to open more profitable factories elsewhere is routinely disappeared.

America today is a land of contrasts like this, brought to us by free enterprise, and our collective unwillingness to moderate it. Free enterprise is an amazing and efficient way to organize an economy to produce things we all need, but there are good things -- affordable housing, clean air and water, public transit -- it just does not or cannot provide. Of course, it does provides the opportunity for an individual to amass unimaginable wealth, at least in theory, presumably why lots of us put up with the contradictions.

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18:03 - 16 Oct 2009 [/y9/cols] link

Fri, 09 Oct 2009

Arbiting arbitration

When the legislature comes back into session later this month, rumor has it they may pass a law saying that when teachers and school committees can't come to an agreement through negotiation, they can submit their dispute to arbitrators for settlement. The arbitrator's decision would be legally binding on both the committee and the union, so it's called binding arbitration.

This would be a welcome development to many. Right now, when there is no agreement in a labor dispute like these, things enter a kind of legal limbo, where there are essentially no rules. Thus you have the East Providence school committee declaring that if they simply refuse to negotiate, they can let a contract expire and then ignore it entirely. On the other side of the coin you have the impasse with the Providence firefighters, whose contract terms remain in force until a new contract is signed, according to a clause in their old Cianci-era contract. They therefore have an incentive to stonewall negotiations. (I'm not saying they've done that -- I don't know -- but I am saying the deadlock isn't entirely to their disadvantage.) Neither outcome seems particularly beneficial to me.

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23:37 - 09 Oct 2009 [/y9/cols] link

Disclosure?

It seems the FTC intends that all bloggers disclose the products and services they get for free.

Seeking guideline clarification, blogger Edward Champion interviewed FTC spokesman Richard Cleland on Monday. In Cleland's view, a blogger who kept a free book that he reviewed on his site would have to disclose this "compensation."

"If there's an expectation that you're going to write a positive review," Cleland told Champion, "then there should be a disclosure."

This is an odd reading of how reviews work. That is, "expectation" is a funny word. "Hope", "chance", "prospect" all seem more apropos. Plus, I don't see newspapers running to mention this in their articles. Why might they be exempt?

But be that as it may, let this note serve as full disclosure to everyone who cares to know that some publishers are generous (perhaps some would say unwise) enough to provide me with free copies of their books to review.

12:07 - 09 Oct 2009 [/y9/oc] link

Mon, 05 Oct 2009

The House By the Side of the Road

by Sam Walter Foss

Let me live in a house by the side of the road,
Where the race of men go by -
The men who are good and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not sit in the scorner's seat,
Or hurl the cynic's ban;
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

I see from my house by the side of the road,
By the side of the highway of life,
The men who press with the ardor of hope,
The men who are faint with the strife.
But I turn not away from their smiles nor their tears -
Both parts of an infinite plan;
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

I know there are brook-gladdened meadows ahead
And mountains of wearisome height;
And the road passes on through the long afternoon
And stretches away to the night.
But still I rejoice when the travelers rejoice,
And weep with the strangers that moan,
Nor live in my house by the side of the road
Like a man who dwells alone.

Let me live in my house by the side of the road
Where the race of men go by -
They are good, they are bad, they are weak, they are strong,
Wise, foolish - so am I.
Then why should I sit in the scorner's seat
Or hurl the cynic's ban?
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

Foss was born in New Hampshire, but, a graduate of Brown, is interred in Providence's North Burial Ground.

14:15 - 05 Oct 2009 [/y9/oc] link

Fri, 02 Oct 2009

The Real Structural Deficit

As we teeter back and forth between layoffs and no layoffs of state employees, it gets hard to keep track. Last week, the AFSCME Council 94 local presidents who rejected the Governor's offer relented and agreed to put the Governor's offer before their memberships for a vote. To recap, this offer would have some unpaid work days this year and next, but would offer extra vacation days further down the line, or compensation days upon retirement, and it would put off a pay increase. The more controversial part of the proposal involves allowing managers to reassign employees to different state departments where the employees might be represented by a different union.

The AFSCME local members are voting on the proposal this week. While we wait to see how this turns out, I think it's worth looking at part of the "structural deficit" that plagues our budget.

The structural deficit is just the fancy term for the deficit next year (and the years after). It's an acknowledgement that revenues and expenses do not match, despite what we may have done or not done to patch it together for the current year.

Obviously, the structural deficit is due to the decline in tax revenue. I've written before that this decline was first self-inflicted, and then made worse by the tanking economy. But part of the structural deficit that gets no attention is even more important and that's the unwillingness of your leaders to say what, exactly, we are sacrificing. It's sort of a candor deficit.

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18:09 - 02 Oct 2009 [/y9/cols] link

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