Category Archives: Government

More Proof That Times Have-a-Changed

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Check this out: The Supreme Court is losing its only Protestant to retirement.  Of course he might be replaced by another Protestant, but I don't think that's going to be one of the criteria that the Obama administration looks at when nominating a new justice.

According to the article, of the Supremes that Justice Stevens leaves behind, six are Roman Catholic and two are Jewish.  It's hard to believe that just 50 years ago it was a HUGE deal that Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic to be elected POTUS. From the article:

It was not ever thus. Presidents once looked at two main factors in picking justices.

“Historically, religion was huge,” said Professor Epstein of Northwestern. “It was up there with geography as the key factor.”

There is, for instance, no official photograph of the justices from 1924. The court had to cancel its portrait that year because Justice James C. McReynolds, an anti-Semite and a racist, refused to sit next to Justice Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jewish justice.

The fact that William J. Brennan Jr. was Catholic seemed to figure in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision to nominate him to the court in the election year of 1956.

But when Justice Abe Fortas resigned in 1969 from what was considered the “Jewish seat,” President Richard M. Nixon saw no political gain from replacing him with another Jew, settling instead on Harry A. Blackmun, a Methodist.

As that progression suggests, religion, which once mattered deeply, has fallen out of the conversation. And it seems to make people uncomfortable on the rare occasions it is raised.

(h/t to Lex for the link)

Summerfield Town Council Has an Interesting Perspective on Marriage

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According to The Northwest Observer the Summerfield Town Council has decided that the spouses of Council members may serve on town committees but they can't be voting members.  From the article:

Council began discussing the issue after Town Manager Michael Brandt recommended that council members’ relatives be allowed to serve only as nonvoting committee members. Brandt said because of their relationship to council members, relatives might carry more weight on committees and it might be difficult for the town manager to discipline them if they did something wrong.

The Council applied the recommendation to spouses but not to other relatives, which leads me to think that they have a different point of view on marriage than I do.  I can guarantee you that of all her relatives I'm the least influential on my wife.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall when someone tries to tell my wife she can't do anything just because she happens to be married to me.  Actually, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near that explosion because I'd definitely catch some shrapnel, but you get my point.

Winston-Salem City Council Needs to Be Aware of the Law of Unintended Consequences

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According to this story on WXII's site the Winston-Salem city council is considering a new set of fees for Internet cafes.  From the story:

The city of Winston-Salem could stand to generate more than a $500,000 if City Council members approve new taxes on Internet cafes.

The City Council has proposed a $2,500 license fee and a fee of $500 per machine for the nearly 50 new locations operating inside the city. Currently, the businesses pay no taxes to the city or state.

"We're getting no revenues from these very rapidly growing businesses that are in our communities," Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines said. "Our budget is very difficult right now, so any revenue enhancement we can come up with that will not really impact a business, we're trying to look at. We believe these are very lucrative businesses and could easily afford this fee we are proposing." 

I haven't seen the actual proposal so I can't speak to the specifics, but what worries me about this is the definition of "Internet cafe".  If the definition is too loose then here are some of the businesses that could get sucked into this:

  • Any business that charges for wi-fi access – for instance Starbucks – could conceivably be charged for each person that pays to access the network.
  • Hotels that charge for internet access in rooms, or that provide internet access on computers in their business centers and lobbies.
  • Even coffee shops that provide free wi-fi could get hit for $3,000 – $2,500 for the fee and $500 for the computer/router.  They aren't making a dime off the wi-fi, but if the proposal isn't worded correctly they could get hit with the fee regardless.

It sounds to me like the City Council is trying to target a specific type of business (essentially legal gambling parlors), but sometimes when fees or ordinances are adopted to target specific types of businesses then other "innocent" businesses get caught in the crossfire.

I can guarantee you this: if every company that offers free wi-fi learns that it's going to be hit with a $2,500 fee then you can bet your bottom dollar that free wi-fi will disappear in Winston-Salem.  Paid wi-fi might survive, but you'd have to sell a LOT of daily access passes to justify it.  As for hotels that charge $15.95 a night for internet access in your room?  I'd like nothing better than to say "Hit 'em with your best shot!" since that's one of the most annoying business practices in the hospitality sector, but if you do they'll just pass it along as a higher daily rate.

That Winston-Salem is looking for additional sources of revenue is not surprising, and neither is the fact that the targeted industry is a "sin" business, but let's hope the City Council is smart enough not to tax itself.  After all, this is the city that just a few years proudly unveiled its own free wi-fi on Fourth Street.  The description of the free wi-fi service from the city's own website sounds to me suspiciously like what the rest of the world considers an Internet cafe:

Fourth Street Wireless Internet access is a free service provided by the City of Winston-Salem. Citizens in restaurants and businesses along Fourth Street can access the Internet through high-speed connections and enjoy browsing the Web, checking and sending e-mail, or chatting through instant messaging services.

Like I said, I just hope the City Council is very careful with this thing.  

One last thought: Can anyone think of other fees that are targeted at specific industries?  I'm sure there are some out there, but my fatigue-fogged mind isn't hitting on any right now.

Census Response Rate Map – Forsyth County’s Response Better Than Guilford’s

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If you're interested in how many people are actually sending in their completed 2010 Census forms there's a handy-dandy map to use right here. FYI, 16% of US citizens have sent the forms in so far, but in NC only 10% have done so.  In 2000 72% of US citizens completed the Census when all was said and done, and 66% of North Carolinians did so it looks like we're keeping to our underachieving ways.

FYI, according to the map Forsyth County's response rate is currently 15% while Guilford County's is 13%, Mecklenburg County's is 12% and Wake County's is a paltry 4%.

Planning Board Meetings Could Get a Lot More Interesting

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This post at the NC Legal Landscapes blog has me thinking that when development starts to pick up again we could be in for some far more interesting planning board meetings. (Granted I might be dead and buried by the time development starts to kick into gear, but that's another story).  An excerpt:

When the economy returns, when developers begin to develop and builders begin to build, local governments will wake up to fair housing legislation passed last August.  The bill created legislative handcuffs that will affect affordable housing zoning and land use decisions in interesting ways, and you won’t need to see Paul Revere’s lanterns hanging in the church belfry to tell you that the lawsuits are coming…

Under G.S. 41A-5(a)(3), a local government will be found to have intended discrimination against affordable housing if “the government was motivated in full, or in any part at all, by the fact that the development contains affordable housing units . . .”

If I were a city or county attorney advising my board, that language would make me nervous.

The way the author, Tom Terrell, goes on to explain the situation it seems to me that planning boards and other land use governmental bodies will need to be very concerned about how they discuss a project.  In essence if the governmental body denies a zoning for a project for any legitimate reason like, say, density yet any one board member even appears to dislike the project simply because the project contains an affordable housing component, even if it's a small part of the project, then the developer can sue the board for discrimination.  Simply put the implied bias of one member on a nine member board, even a board that voted unanimously, that votes down a project that is even 10% affordable housing could be sued, probably successfully, for discrimination even if the discrimination had no real impact on the decision.

Yep, it's a safe bet that members of the boards and commissions will be much more circumspect during their debates.  If they're not I imagine there are going to be quite a few attorneys either hitting the bottle or looking for another line of practice.  Divorces probably look mundane by comparison.

About That Census Data

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You know how we read articles about the results of studies and carrying headlines like "In 2020 Number of Octogenarian Turtle Farmers Will Outnumber Septuagenarian Muskrat Herders."  Many of those studies use data sub-sets of the US Census that are made publicly available by the US Census Bureau for exactly that purpose.  The problem is that those data sub-sets have some glaring errors:. 

The errors are documented in a stunningly straightforward manner. The authors compare the official census count (based on the tallying up of all Census forms) with their own calculations, based on the sub-sample released for researchers (the “public use micro sample,” available through IPUMS). If all is well, then the authors’ estimates should be very close to 100% of the official population count. But they aren’t...

These microdata have been used in literally thousands of studies and countless policy discussions. While the findings of many of these studies aren’t much affected by these problems, in some cases, important errors have been introduced. The biggest problems probably exist for research focusing on seniors. Yes, this means that many of those studies of important policy issues—retirement, social security, elder care, disability, and medicare—will need to be revisited.

It's kind of hard to make good policy decisions if they're based on inaccurate information.  Still, no one is disputing the accuracy of the census itself which is important to remember as we gear up for the 2010 count.  Hopefully The Census Bureau will be diligent in making sure that the data sub-sets that are generated from the new count are far more accurate than the 2000 versions.  

Priorities

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One thing that truly gets my goat is the debate over taxes.  For too long our leaders have engaged in a simplistic, name-calling exchange in which supporters of lower taxes get labeled as mean-spirited robber barons looking out for the rich and those in favor of higher taxes on more government services get labeled as the expletive du jour, socialists.  It's overly simplistic and it doesn't get to the heart of the matter, which is that we will always have to pay some taxes because we will always need the government to provide some services.  The rub is that we need to agree on which services the government provides and then somehow create a tax structure that will fund those services.

Unfortunately our leaders have been totally negligent in, well, leading us in the essential debate on the role of government.  It's easy to blame one side or the other, but in the end it's a two way street and all of our leaders are responsible, as are we for not calling "BS" on them a long time ago.  

I bring this up today because of a couple of news items that Ed Cone pointed to.  One is about Greensboro's budget gap, and the other is about the drastic service cuts that "tax averse" Colorado Springs is having to make. From the second article:

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.

I don't know what the leaders of Colorado Springs have been saying about taxes and city spending over the last couple of years, but if that city is like the vast majority of the country the issue was framed as a choice between paying higher taxes so that "welfare mothers" could soak the system and lower taxes that would spur a dynamic business environment.  I'm simplifying, but hopefully I'm also making a point.  


For too long our leaders have failed to do the hard work of explaining the relationship between taxes and services.  I'm sure that if you asked the citizenry you could pretty quickly come up with a list of "must have" services like fire departments, police departments and public works departments.  The harder part is getting citizens to agree on what's more important; health clinics for the poor or one more park;  a new library or a homeless shelter; adding more lanes to the roads or starting a light rail system.  


That's where leadership comes in. Explain to us the consequences of choosing the library over of the homeless shelter, or if we choose both explain to us how that will affect our taxes.  We won't all agree on the priorities, but if we're engaged in a serious discussion and treated like the adults that we are, then maybe, just maybe, we'll re-elect you even when you make the unpopular but necessary decision to raise our taxes and give us a community to safely and happily live in.

Ethics in Government

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Ethics have been on my mind of late.  One reason is a hot story in Greensboro involving government, developers and stimulus funds and another story about Gov. Easley's right hand man being indicted for a multitude of crimes. The main reason, however, is the time that I'm spending on the Lewisville Planning Board.  

Tonight the Planning Board will be holding a joint public meeting with the Town Council to kick off the five year Comprehensive Plan review process.  Over the last several weeks we've been preparing for the meeting and in doing so we've spent a lot of time and energy making sure that we don't create the impression that this is a plan we're putting forward to be rubber-stamped by the citizens of Lewisville.  We want them to understand that this is their plan, their process and their recommendations to make and our role is merely to be available for feedback and, eventually, to enact what they give us.  We're painfully aware that some people think we're there to somehow game the system at their expense and to our benefit.  Whether or not there's a basis for that belief (I don't believe there is, or I wouldn't serve on the Planning Board), the public attitude towards government, whether it's local, state or federal, is one of great distrust.

Unfortunately the day-to-day business of governance is, quite frankly, boring as hell.  Want proof?  Just try and read a proposed tree ordinance and stay awake (I've tried and have yet to succeed).  That's why most people don't pay attention to governance issues and leave it up to someone else to do it for them.  That's great IF that someone else behaves ethically and in the best interest of the people, but it's trouble when that person puts his personal interests before the interests of the people.  Sadly, you can legally do that in some cases, but ethically/morally you tread a very fine line.  Let's just say the gray area is huge, and if I were to identify one area that most governing bodies could improve upon it would be in the area of creating a culture of strong and emphatic ethical governance. 

I recently came across a blog called Legal Landscapes that is produced by a partner at Smith, Mooore, Leatherwood LLP and the following quote from the post Of Bribery, Extortion and Racketeering sums up the ethical issue as well as anything I've read:

Whether a public official operates on a local, state or federal level, the precepts of ethical conduct remain the same.

In cities, hamlets, counties, congressional districts and states across the country, we entrust average citizens with great power to look after the rest of us.  The operative word is “entrust.”  An elected or appointed official is a fiduciary of that power just as a bank officer is a fiduciary of customers’ money.

The power to control the levers of government is the most sacred power a democracy bestows.  Abuse of that power is not defined by the stupidity of an official’s decisions or the repercussions of his or her actions.  Abuse of entrusted power is marked, foremost, by whether the action was intended for self benefit.

I think we have a culture of governing ethically in Lewisville, but I'm certain that there are people in Lewisville who would disagree.  That's why I think it's important to be emphatic about ethical governance. It's okay to act ethically, but I think it's better to do it and let the world know loud and clear that's how you roll. 

So What Are You Trying to Say?

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Greensboro's City Manager sent a memo to the Mayor and City Council members that had the following item noted by an alert commenter at Cone's blog:

1. Guilford County will host an Ethics Training Class for Elected Officials in the COG region on February 16, 2010 from 8:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. at the Guilford County Agricultural Center, 3309 Burlington Road, Greensboro. The cost is $10.00 per attendee and includes a continental breakfast, materials and a certificate of completion. Resignation is attached for your convenience.

I can't laugh too hard; I've had my fair share of uncomfortable typos.