"States rights", block grants, and community development and transportation

The reason that you need federal policies, rules, and regulations for how transportation or community development monies are to be used at the local level is because states, depending on their needs and agendas, may decide to spend the money on something else.

With regard to transportation, upwards of 15% of all trips nationally are made by walking or biking.  While the national percentage of transit trips is low, about 5%, in center cities this percentage can be much higher--in DC, the number is between 30% and 40%, while in New York City the number is even higher.

So you can argue that transportation monies should be spent, depending on the state, upwards of 15% to 30% on walking, biking, and transit.

Of course that's not how it is, most of the money is spent on roads.  Nationally, 1.5% of transportation funds are spent on walking and biking infrastructure (called the "Community Transportation Enhancement Program").

So biking and walking advocates are seriously concerned about provions in the proposed re-authorization of the federal transportation bill to strip out basic requirements to spend a certain percentage of federal transportation monies allocated to the states on walking and biking.  See "House Transportation Negotiators: Cut Funds for Biking and Walking, Then We’ll Talk" from Daily Kos.

Similarly, transit advocates--supported even by Republican lawmakers from transit cities--are fighting reductions in funding for transit infrastructure.  See "House raid on gas-tax fund would devastate mass transit on Staten Island" from the Staten Island Advance.

Anyway, the example of why states should not be given leeway on walking, biking, and transit funding that they claim that they will use responsibility comes to us from Louisiana, where Republican superstar Governor Bobby Jindal has redirected federal funds provided to the State of Louisiana for mitigating the destruction of property and economic activity as a result of Hurricane Katrina, to the funding of 1/2 of one years worth of pre-K education throughout the state. See the Associated Press story "Hurricane recovery money to fund pre-kindergarten."

Of course, this is an example of the misuse of funds for local economic and community development matters too, and an illustration of why funds appropriated to "community development" often don't have the impact that people expected.

(Also see "County officials fight to keep transit funds loophole" from the Ventura County (CA) Star.  In California, counties over 500,000 in population receive a portion of sales taxes that are supposed to be used to fund local transit services.  Ventura County got an exemption, and so they don't spend the money on transit, but on roads.  Since local redevelopment agencies have been dissolved, and these agencies had paid for a wide variety of local government positions and services, the County wants to maintain their authority to use this money for non-transit services.)

 

Cook County and City of Chicago partner on certain operations: Save $20 million

See "Emanuel, Preckwinkle tout $20 million saved in city-county partnership" from the Chicago Sun-Times.

From the article:

Chicago and Cook County will save $20.5 million this year by joining forces on everything from elections, some purchasing and revenue collection to custodial services and workforce development, but the next round of cuts will be tougher, officials said Tuesday.

“It is easy to migrate back to your respective silos and not cooperate, not collaborate and not coordinate. [But], the goal is not to spike the ball on the 30-yard line and say, ‘We’ve got $20 million.’ We have much more work to get done, much more culture to break down,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said.

It is true that in DC, initiatives starting under Mayor Fenty to coordinate deliver of certain kinds of services (such as lawnmowing) for multiple agencies (parks, schools, general city government) into master contracts make sense and save money (although the Washington City Paper suggested something like this in a cover story in the mid-1990s, in discussing systems like maintaining boilers, and how the schools, public housing agency, and other divisions of city government all had different people doing the same thing).

I can see this being a problem though between jurisdictions at times. Montgomery and Prince George's Counties have a "joint" water and sewer authority, the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. It has an equal number of representatives from both jurisdictions. The PG County reps have been more interested in contracting and getting their share of the work for businesses in their county, and keeping rates down, rather than investing in rebuilding crumbling infrastructure. See "Prince George's Fixation with WSSC Minority Contracting Never Ends" from the Maryland Politics blog.

So it goes both ways. (There are many examples of cross-jurisdictional water and sewerage organizations across the country, the suburban Maryland organization is not unique.)

News from Oregon

1. "Oregon exceptionally generous with green-energy subsidies" from the Portland Oregonian

2. Oregon's own economic stimulus plan, "To battle recession, Oregon Democrats reach for credit card ," from the Portland Oregonian

3. Bicycling is a $150 million/year industry in Oregon, and bicycle commuting makes the cover of Oregon Business magazine, "Bicycle Industrial Complex."