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February 2007
Barack Obama and race
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
During one of last week’s discussions about the Presidential candidates, the conversation turned to Barack Obama. the first-term U.S. Senator from Illinois, whose candidacy causes most of the camp-with-the-Democrats media to gush with the adoration of American Idol groupies. If we don’t very promptly annoint him President, it’s a sign of America’s lingering racism. On the Right, meanwhile, he’s seen as a defintion-lacking celebrity. Commentator Ann Coulter, who can turn a phrase, refers to him as “Jonathan Livingston Obama” and opined that “his speeches are a run-on string of embarrassing, sophomoric Hallmark bromides.”
In the discussion here, a contributor who posts as rarringt, offered insightful commentary on Obama and race. Here’s the relevant part of rarringt’s post:
“As an African-American, I don’t sense a whole lot of concern in our community about Obama being “black enough.” As you well know, it’s not a function of melanin content. “Blackness,” for lack of a better word, is about being able to relate to various common threads in our culture, having an understanding of our accomplishments and challenges, and exemplifying a willingness to work to leave things better than the way we found them.
“It’s not meant to be some obtuse, mysterious thing. Obama, and the vast majority of other people of color, fit well into that description, thus taking the question (as far as we are concerned) off the table.
“Besides, as a practical matter Obama’s not a stupid man, and won’t fall into that same “where do his real priorities lie” trap WASPs tried to set for a Catholic JFK.
“The real question, of course, is how white America feels about his ethnicity, and to what extent that will affect the choices of moderate America. I think they’ll like what they see. The dems have a very strong field this election, and there’s a sense of, given current affairs, this election is the most critical in the last 3 or 4 presidential cycles.”
Obama has been careful not to make his success or failure a referendum on race in America and in politics. Is it?
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Let vouchers help kids, not pain schools
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lanetta Estrada is a special education teacher in the public school system of Miami-Dade County, Fla.
She came to Georgia last week to tell state legislators why they should pass the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Act, which is being fought here by the alphabet-soup organizations that congregate to defend their public school turf.
She stood before a House education subcommittee as a teacher — and as the mother of a 10-year-old autistic son. Her story of his journey through public school, and of her growing awareness that despite her “utmost respect and admiration” for her fellow teachers, “my school was not the best place for my son.”
Like most special education parents, she devoted enormous time and effort to finding out what her son needed. Her research led her to the decision to remove her son, Lucas, from “the school I loved.” She applied for one of Florida’s McKay scholarships, the program on which the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Act is patterned. “I was scared,” she said. “I loved my school. After all, this is my job. I prayed that this was the right decision.” She enrolled her son in a private school specializing in disabilities. “At this school, he is now reaching his full academic and emotional potential,” said Estrada.
“The bottom line is that the Florida McKay Scholarship program has been a blessing for me and my son and for 17,000 other children and families in Florida,” she said.
Estrada was one of a string of teachers, parents, alphabet-soup lobbyists and others who argued for and against bills sponsored in the Senate by state Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) and in the House by schoolteacher and state Rep. David Casas, (R-Lilburn). Casas and Johnson have different ideas about the extent to which private schools should be subject to state regulation in taking special needs students on scholarships or vouchers, whatever one prefers to call these and the HOPE stipends that currently go to private schools.
This effort, along with charter school legislation initiated by Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and state Rep. Ed Setzler (R-Acworth) and a bill by state Rep. Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs) to offer educational tax credits to individuals and corporations, marks this as the most reform-minded legislatures yet.
Nothing being offered is revolutionary in the sense that it is particularly daring. It’s patterned, by and large, on programs elsewhere. It’s noteworthy simply because Georgia has been so resistant to altering the status quo, except by the means endorsed by the traditional interests that dictate public policy — the unions and alphabet organizations representing public school groups. None of them are bad people or bad organizations. They are, like every other industry confronted by a changed marketplace, eager to limit and manage the competition — and for decades, they’ve done that.
The trick now — and it was evident in last week’s debate — is to avoid planting poison pills in the special needs scholarship act. On regulation, for example, the alphabet organizations know that the quickest way to eliminate the appeal of scholarships to potential private sector competitors is to package them with paperwork, with rules and regulations that make it too time-consuming and expensive to admit scholarship kids. It’s paper choice — existing on paper, but not in reality.
That was part of the problem with No Child Left Behind’s choice provisions, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings acknowledged here earlier this month. Parents of poor children in persistently nonperforming public schools could go elsewhere. They had choice, but some systems made that information difficult for parents to access or understand. Choice, then, was chance.
As the House and Senate work together to advance reform, it is essential that choice and scholarships for parents of special needs children not become, or be seen as, an indirect way of regulating private schools. The intent should be to actually give parents options and to trust them to buy the education services they believe their child needs from any willing and able provider.
It’s up to the parents, not the government, to decide — just as Lanetta Estrada did — which approaches will best serve the needs of their children. The goal here is to empower parents, not to regulate the competition.
* Jim Wooten is associate editor of the editorial page. His column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
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Fat city — that’s Atlanta
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A much under-appreciated citizens’ group in this city is the Fulton County Taxpayers Foundation, Inc., headed by John S. Sherman, the former mayor of Bal Harbour, Fla. The group has just issued an analysis that compares the number of employees and per capita operating cost of the City of Atlanta with cities of comparable size across the country. Guess what. “Atlanta’s number of employees per 10,000 population is 53 percent higher than the average of comparable cities,” the foundation reports. Atlanta is compared to Portland, Oklahoma City, Tucson, Albuquerque, Long Beach, Sacramento, Cleveland, Missouri’s Kansas City, Mesa and Omaha.
The foundation’s March newsletter notes that a 2002 “turnaround plan” for the city, prepared by a management consulting firm, indicated that Atlanta’s workforce was 7,428 employees “21 percent to 37 percent larger than the average for comparable cities.” Rather than reducing employment, or holding even, the city has increased the payroll by 1,204 to “a whopping 8,632,” the organization reports. Population growth, meanwhile, is expected to remain relatively flat over the next five years, it said.
The foundation recommends privatization of city services as a way to reduce costs 10 to 20 percent. I’d not put too much energy in trying to get Atlanta to reduce its spending or bureaucracy — though I do admire the Taxpayers Foundation for its steadfastness in attempting to get the city and the county to be more mindful of the pocketbooks of the flock. Sherman, in particular, reminds me a geat deal of the people in Sandy Springs, who played the game responsibly for years, always getting blown off by the powers downtown, before they finally got their city.
Fulton County officials discovered too late — after the City of Sandy Springs was created — that it would have been smarter to pay attention to their pleadings years earlier. Will City of Atlanta officials make the same mistake? Yes.
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‘Your call is important to us’ - really
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Listening to Joe Doyle talk about his job is about like listening to a bubbly schoolboy — exuberant, innocent and unpretentious, seemingly unaware of the public’s cynicism about his work.
And who can blame them — the public, that is?
For up to 56 minutes some of them have sat on hold, awaiting a response to a simple telephone call to state government. More than six out of 10, when forced to wait an eternity for an answer, hang up and walk away. Such is the fuel of public cynicism.
“In three years, I have become very bullish on them,” Doyle says of state employees. “They are just as good, just as competent as those who work for any bank or any other company. They want to do a good job.”
Doyle is director of the Governor’s Office of Customer Service, charged with making parts of it more efficient and more consumer friendly.
The eternity some callers have been parked on hold is an example of what people hate about government and, frankly, many large corporations. The state gets 50 million calls a year. Of those, 10 million general information calls are handled by 27 call centers, most staffed by state employees. One, handling park reservations, is out of state, in Maryland. None is out of the country.
A 2005 study revealed that of the 10 million calls answered, 930,000 were misrouted. At one center, callers were placed on hold for up to 56 minutes. Up to 62 percent of all calls answered were abandoned while on hold. Taxpayers, meanwhile, were paying $8.17 per call handled, well above the industry average of $6.37. A year ago in January, Gov. Sonny Perdue decided to do something about it, creating the Office of Customer Service, a first in the nation.
The quick news is the success. When Doyle took the job in January of 2006, the average time to answer a call was 4 minutes and 42 seconds, though 17.3 percent of incoming calls were not answered at all. By December, the average to answer was down to 1 minute, 39 seconds, with 11 percent unanswered.
The standard is to get calls answered within 37 seconds, with no more than 7.5 percent missed. Across the 27 call centers, time on hold has been reduced by 65 percent, from an average of 5 minutes to 2, saving callers 3 minutes per call. Some 600,000 calls previously abandoned while parked on hold are now handled.
The improvement has come with the same money and the same staff. By working with existing employees and managers, without asking them to perform any more tasks, Doyle has made significant headway, prompting him to rave about the quality of state employees. “The way to envision the call center project is that we are creating an enterprise approach to managing calls, as opposed to having 26 different approaches,” says Doyle. Standardizing the system will improve efficiency, lower costs and permit data collection that allow Georgians to know how well their government is performing.
Conservatives are often accused by their critics of hating government because they want to create it in a new image. Nobody could ever accuse Doyle of hating it. There is, in fact, a kind of sweet innocence in his enthusiasm, and in his faith that government can be made permanently better by, in this case, training people to do a smarter job, collecting data and making it transparent.
It’s worked before. Doyle, over 30 years in business, helped to turn a struggling formal wear rental company, Mitchell’s Formalwear, into a prosperous nationwide chain, After Hours Formal Wear, with more than 200 locations in 15 states in 2000. Doyle was 53 when he and his partners sold the chain to May Co., a big department store chain, in 2002.
He had the same general impressions of government that most callers-on-hold do. He had never met Sonny Perdue. “I spent 30 years building the business we had and I spent 4 days a week traveling, so I wasn’t connected to the Atlanta business community,” says Doyle. But he did know Tommy Hills, the state’s chief financial officer. Or at least they had met 30 years ago, when both were in the Jaycees.
He dropped him a note and volunteered to help. “I didn’t want to go to my grave just being a critic of government.” He’d take a job without concern for salary. “I would just be doing it for a love of Georgia and for the sense of accomplishment.”
His conversation is part business geek, part ’60s idealist.
“I don’t see this as a program that costs government money; it is using the same money to do a better job. It’s not building government,” he said. It’s making it better.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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Iran’s nuclear stance; Hank Williams Jr.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Universities looking for a community outreach project should organize classes for Georgia’s voters on “Picking a Sheriff 101.” Voters clearly don’t get the hang of it. Start with Fulton and Clayton counties.
• How quickly the new guys become the old. State Sen. John Douglas (R-Social Circle) and state Rep. Mike Keown (R-Coolidge) introduce proposed constitutional amendments calling for four-year terms. From Rabun Gap to Tybee Light, the little people are demanding relief from the high burden of voting for legislators every two years. And a compliant Legislature hears and heeds their voices.
• Again. If it takes gas and fertilizer to produce it and if you can eat it, you can’t afford to put it in a gas tank. It’s a dead rush for me between believing that man causes global warming and that food-based fuel is a ticket to energy independence. Get back to me when a commercially viable cellulosic ethanol plant comes on line.
• Hank Williams Jr., divorcing his fourth wife, declares it “one of the toughest days of my life.” Shouldn’t that be “one of the four toughest days of my life”?
• Georgia’s 34 technical colleges may have to lay off faculty because the number of students — and, therefore, revenue — is dropping.
“When a program declines, there may be a situation where you need to do away with faculty,” said Ron Jackson, acting commissioner. “We can’t have people on staff for a program that doesn’t meet the need for their community.” Can he say that? It would pass for common sense in the private sector. But in the public, it could be considered to be “slashing” education and hurting the unemployed.
• Salmonella in sushi, no problem here. But salmonella in peanut butter should be a jailable offense.
• Max Burns, give it one more try. Please. The former congressman was defeated by incumbent John Barrow in the 12th Congressional District that runs from Savannah to Augusta to Milledgeville by 864 votes in November, 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent. Barrow is one of the Surrender Democrats who joined 17 White Flag Republicans in voting to oppose the troop surge in Iraq. He should be defeated. Other Georgians, all Democrats, who voted with Barrow should, too, but — with the possible exception of U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop in the 2nd — all are completely safe politically in sending their message to the enemy to sit tight, we’re beat. Rep. Jim Marshall (D- Macon) was thinking and voted right.
• Headline: “Franklin starts partnership for rights center.” Partnerships for nonprofit ventures, when mentioned by the public sector to the private, mean “you pay, I partner.” Partnerships for profit-making ventures, when mentioned by the private sector to the public, mean “you pay, I partner.” I’m a stakeholder, so I know these things.
• Get your credit cards out — or somebody’s. Delta Air Lines plans to start nonstop flights later this year to Nigeria.
• Iran skipped Wednesday’s U.N. deadline to freeze its nuclear enrichment program. Talk to follow. And talk. Until, one day, Iran has nuclear weapons and a madman at the trigger. The matter, said Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki “has to be decided peacefully with the United States.” No. The world. If the world fails, then it’s our problem.
• Is it clear now? Federal courts have no jurisdiction over habeas corpus petitions by Guantanamo Bay detainees. Congress can and did decide jurisdiction. Move on.
• Four months is a long time to wait to fill a congressional seat. On the other hand, the 10th Congressional District of Georgia will elect a Republican — and so it’s not like the district is missing an opportunity to influence Nancy Pelosi.
• A Democrat’s my new hero — and it’s not Joe Lieberman, either. It’s state Sen. Robert Brown of Macon, who has filed legislation to prohibit the state or any other government from naming “any public building, site, structure, road, highway, street, intersection, interchange, bridge or other public property” after him. Well, limited hero anyway. Until he introduces another misguided bill like the one to raise the state minimum wage. Again: the minimum wage is zero.
— Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column runs Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
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Overscripted Hillary?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hollywood mogul David Geffen, who helped Bill Clinton raise $18 million before falling out with him over who the President did and didn’t pardon, is now supporting Barack Obama and trashing Hillary. “She is overproduced and overscripted,” he said. “She’s so advised by so many smart advisers who are covering every base. I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms.”
I’m inclined these days to agree. As Newt Gingrich said last week, a year to get the nomination and a year to run is far too much. Stupid, as he put it. Georgia, meanwhile, is debating whether to move the presidential primary up to Feb. 5 next year to join other states in creating something close to a national primary. That could essentially give both parties a nominee by Valentine’s Day.
While I’ve never slept in the Lincoln Bedroom nor contributed to the Clintons, Hillary does not strike me as “overproduced and overscripted.” Her run to the candidate pack on the war in Iraq was probably necessary, since it’s unlikely the party’s base will permit otherwise. Bigger government and opposition to the war seems to be the ticket to success, for the nomination at least.
Does anybody care whether Georgia moves the primary date to Feb. 5? It’s a free, no-consequence vote, anyway. I am, however, beginning to agree with Geffen that less would be more and smoke-filled rooms have their place in the process.
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Act before you’re them
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Most state legislative sessions are pretty hum-drum — and this one is, too, so far. But one of this session’s most exciting discoveries is the rise of young conservatives, many from outlying areas near Atlanta, who come to the General Assembly with an agenda for making government more manageable, responsive and efficient. One 40-day session won’t be sufficient to judge their effectiveness — bills introduced this year remain for consideration next — but the markers are there.
State Rep. Charlice Byrd (R-Canton), who was first elected in 2004, is an example of the group of conservatives who will make a mark on Georgia. She’s introducing a bill to set up a 14-member Legislative Sunset Committee to periodically review state agencies, departments, commissions and authorities to determine whether they should continue in existence. Her plan is that they would be reviewed every two years. The idea is patterned on a Sunset Advisory Commission in Texas that, she says, has saved taxpayers $784 million and eliminated 52 agencies and consolidated 12 others since 1978. Florida has a similar review.
Georgia, on a limited scale, has done something similar within the Secretary of State’s office. Regulatory commissions, like those that license barbers and beauticians, were to be reviewed and eliminated if found to be outdated. Not much ever happened — one reason Georgia needs at least a decade of strong, conservative leaders with bold agendas. They all get co-opted eventually, so they have no time to be timid.
Georgia needs a reasonable cap on spending. It needs the kind of fresh-look review that Byrd proposes, and that Gov. Sonny Perdue has launched internally in setting up the budget so that programs can be reviewed for effectiveness. And, with good information and transparency, taxpayers and legislators can set priorities and channel available money to where it does the most good. It’s not brain surgery. But it does require lots of active, creative conservatives in government with determination and staying power.
The good news: They’re there and more are coming. Many are young, many are transplants, lke New Orleans native Byrd, who bring ideas and experiences from elsewhere, and many are new to elective office, meaning they’re not mired in the can’t-do status quo or beholden to the special interests that have long owned the Gold Dome. The trick: Do something meaningful before you’re them.
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Spending bill details right state limits
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The spending lid state senators reconsider Tuesday is far from the draconian measure critics contend.
In last week’s floor debate, clear distinctions emerged between those who believe Georgia’s problem is that it “invests” too little in programs — the politically correct marketing term for spending — and those who recognize that politicians always succumb to pressure when the money’s there. The politician’s only discipline, the only one, is their belief that the money’s not there — or is, at least, inaccessible.
State Sen. Chip Rogers (R-Woodstock) has proposed a constitutional amendment that is hardly draconian. “At the end of the day, it would not limit flexibility or take away the powers of the General Assembly” to spend as they see fit, said Rogers. It would, however, add transparency and accountability, and therefore draw attention, to budget creep.
When Rogers brought the amendment to the floor last week, 33 Republicans and one Democrat — State Sen. J. B. Powell of Blythe, whose district runs from suburban Augusta through the rural counties between there and Macon and there and Savannah — voted in favor. Powell’s support, which I had failed to acknowledge in this column on Sunday, is telling. He was re-elected last November with 51.4 percent of the vote in a district that should be a walk-over for a Democrat. Yet, Gov. Sonny Perdue won it with just more than half the vote in 2002 and President Bush carried it with 54.5 percent of the vote in 2004.
His support is evidence that politicians who represent districts where a voting majority is concerned about the cost of government recognize the need for discipline. Until at least three more Senate Democrats agree that voters should be given a chance to decide whether flexible boundaries should be applied to most government spending, Georgians won’t have a say. The question before the Senate, as Rogers noted, is “should the people who pay the bills have an opportunity to have their voice heard?”
Georgia is in danger of falling into the partisan split that exists in Washington — the split that cost Max Cleland his seat in the U.S. Senate. Before Cleland, most Georgia Democrats managed to draw distinctions between their votes and those of the national Democratic Party. Cleland, however, chose to vote the party line, thus succeeding in making himself a central-casting national Democrat — a lesson, incidentally, absorbed by U.S. Congressman Jim Marshall (D- Macon), who was one of two Democrats in the U.S. House to break ranks with his party in last week’s Iraq resolution.
For candidates with statewide political ambitions in Georgia, it is dangerous to establish a brand identity that merges the locals with the nationals, when the nationals fare poorly here.
The “draconian” label applied to the Rogers bill came from state Sen. Nan Orrock (D-Atlanta), who offered a litany of “investments” Georgia needs to make in education and social programs.
Clearly, liberals will never agree that limits, however loose, should be applied to state spending. But that discipline is precisely what the executive and legislative branches need now. Rogers’ resolution excludes revenues derived from the lottery, from motor fuel taxes, from tobacco settlement funds, from genuine user fees and from other specified categories.
The General Assembly could always spend more this year than last and, in emergencies, could waive limits. If the state collected excess revenues above the rate of government inflation plus population growth, it would have four options: pay down debt, save it for hard times, spend it on education or return it to taxpayers.
“If I gave you $100 this year, and next year I said I was going to give you $107, and you can spend $105 in any way you want, but you can only spend $2 in these four areas,” said Rogers, “you always get to spend more this year than last year in any way you want.”
Needs should compete for available revenue. Legislators won’t make tough choices until it’s forced on them. The system now is that every available dime is spent. With spending comes turf-protecting special interest groups that complain, when they are insufficiently rewarded with more spending, that their programs are being “slashed” by mean-spirited legislators who would kick the sick and disabled kids and grandmas to the curb.
The only cure for that ailment is to make certain that programs compete for limited cash so those that have outlived their usefulness and those that are ineffective face a day of reckoning. Rogers’ amendment is that tool.
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Weekend’s news: illegals, pit bulls and Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Notes from the weekend:
Item: U.S. Rep. William Jefferson (D-New Orleans), reelected despite an ongoing federal probe into whether he took bribes in connection with a telecommunications deal in Africa, will likely be appointed to the Homeland Security committee by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. As noted by U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), Jefferson couldn’t be trusted to serve on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee after the FBI found $90,000 in cash in his home freezer, “so why should he be given access to our nation’s top secrets” or make national defense policy?
Item: Local law-enforcement officials, including the Cobb County Sheriff’s Department, are being trained by the feds to start deportation proceedings against illegals jailed for felonies or for driving under the influence. The critics are said to be worried that the program involving state and local police and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency will “damage the trust between police and immigrant communities while opening a door to racial profiling.” That’s the thinking that caused immigration laws to be massively ignored in the first place. Cobb Sheriff Neil Warren is having none of it. “If someone is here illegally and commits a crime, whether a misdemeanor or felony, they need to serve their sentence and be deported,” said he. I’m with Neil.
Item: Pit bulls should be banned from urban areas — and kept in cages in the country. A 2-year-old girl in DeKalb was mauled to death Friday by two dogs that escaped from a fenced yard. One was a pit bull. Potential owners should be required to show proof of million-dollar insurance coverage. Pit bulls are the animal equivalent of rapid-fire weapons. I really don’t see a need to own either.
Item: If Democrats who controlled the purse strings subsidized excursion and freight trains in rural areas when they were in control at the Statehouse, Republicans should subsidize MARTA and commuter rail — or so it is argued by rail supporters. Huh? I tell you what Statehouse Republicans should do. They should pass the bill by State Rep. Steve Davis (R-McDonough) to shut down the Georgia Rail Passenger Authority. Advocacy groups shouldn’t be on the taxpayers’ tab.
Item: Newt’s right, twice. Once in observing that “the current process of spending an entire year running [for a party’s presidential nomination] in order to spend an entire year running in order to get sworn in in January 2009 is stupid.” He’s staying out at least until November, by which time he could be the fresh face sought by a public exhausted with the candidates. That’s once right. The second time was when he observed on Fox TV that Democrats are playing a cynical game with Iraq. “They want the ability to undermine the President, the ability to cripple the Defense Department, while disclaiming all responsibility,” he said.
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Senate ought to reconsider spending limits
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Amid the clutter, little noticed in the shuffle, important ideas take shape under the Gold Dome. State Sen. Chip Rogers (R-Woodstock) brought one to the floor Wednesday, a crucial piece of what should be the fiscal conservatives’ small-government revolution in Georgia. It failed while gaining but a single Democratic vote, State Sen. J.B. Powell of Blythe.
Rogers’ proposed constitutional amendment would have given Georgians a chance to impose reasonable controls on state spending — reasonable and flexible controls that don’t so much cap spending as make it transparent. In the spirit of almost all reforms that conservatives are proposing here and nationally on health care, education and personal retirement planning, change starts with giving people information and the means to act on it.
That’s the core of Rogers’ SR 20, which would have limited the growth in state spending to “an amount equal to the fiscal year spending in any of the three immediately preceding fiscal years; or an amount equal to the immediately preceding fiscal year spending adjusted for state government inflation and population change.”
Excess revenue collected could go only to pay down debt, build a rainy-day fund to cover future economic downturns or fund increases in student enrollment. Or it would be returned to taxpayers. “When we do overtax, we have priorities for where that money should go,” Rogers explained.
Future legislators are not without flexibility. When reserves are gone, the governor can declare an emergency and legislators by two-thirds majority can agree to higher spending.
Opponents are quick to point to Colorado, and problems that arose in 2002, a decade after voters capped spending at inflation plus population growth.
Rogers, at 38, is one of the new wave of young conservatives who are coming into their own. They come to power with philosophical certainty but, as he demonstrated last year on immigration, without the rigidity that sometimes destroys new ideas before they are fully vetted.
He listens to critics, revises legislation without gutting or derailing it and then argues from the certainty of examined beliefs. The Colorado bogeyman is an example. To critics, a voter-imposed spending limitation was a disaster, prompting voters to agree to a five-year moratorium in 2005.
State Sen. Kasim Reed, a quite capable Democrat and future mayor of Atlanta, challenged Rogers on Colorado’s experience and the impact of spending limitations on Georgia’s AAA bond rating. Weak-willed and uncertain conservatives die here, completely cowed by the suggestion that Georgia’s triple-A bond rating could be jeopardized.
“I find no inherent connection between the two,” Rogers replied. In fact, he argued, the existence of a rainy day fund and a long-stable, predictable budget, should reassure creditors.
“I have addressed all the problems that were brought to us,” he said. Colorado had no reserves. Voters had, too, approved a conflicting requirement that education spending increase by 1 percent over inflation, despite collections. As a result, other services took an inordinate hit.
“In 2001, Colorado had the greatest drought in 240 years,” said Rogers, and tourism tanked in the aftermath of Sept. 11. The two caused state revenue to drop 12 percent in one year, he noted.
The Colorado spending limitation required legislators to go back to voters for permission to raise taxes. Rogers’ doesn’t. Georgia’s governor could have declared an emergency. He provided a spending option for education. And he provides the reserve fund option that would have carried Georgia through the Colorado downturn.
Budget experts have looked at Georgia’s experience over the last 20 years. About half the time, Georgia would have been over the cap and about half the time under. Putting aside money in the good years would have carried the state through the lean. As Rogers pointed out repeatedly, legislators always get to spend more money than they did the previous year. “Under the plan the limit would always go up,” said Rogers. “To suggest that there would be draconian cuts flies in the face of reality.”
Transparency. Accountability. It is not draconian. It’s the discipline politicians need in spending other people’s money.
It failed Wednesday because only one Democrat supported it. On Tuesday, the Senate has a chance to reconsider. It should.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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Townships, Iran, Norwood, PeachCare
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• OK, this is it: The last first. Harvard University has named its first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust. Such a tired old story. Must we go through another generation of First This and First That.
• Any Georgia Republican or Democrat who supports the House resolution opposing the deployment of additional troops to Iraq should be defeated. For most Democrats in the delegation, it’s a free-ride, a no-consequence vote. At the voting booth, anyway.
• You become an old-timer around Atlanta when you can remember the plan that preceded the latest announcement of a grand vision to save/revitalize Peachtree Street, Underground, Fairlie-Poplar or Auburn Avenue. No old fogy stuck in the past here, I’ve been for them all — including the just-announced $1 billion, 20-year plan to put streetcars back on Peachtree Street. Unless, of course, they tax me for their fantasies.
• If Fulton County Sheriff Myron Freeman inspired just a little bit more confidence, I’d be completely in his corner in demanding that U.S. District Court Judge Marvin Shoob’s agent at the county jail be withdrawn. Georgia law needs to change so that county commissions, and not judges, take over jails when sheriffs fail. Judges have no expertise and no business running them.
• Townships, a government form common elsewhere, is being proposed for Georgia by state Sen. David Adelman (D-Decatur). His zoning-only concept of local control may be too limited, but the key is to give people the ability to control their communities.
All of this drive to incorporate and to break away got started because Fulton commissioners treated north Fulton like dirt, taking their money while completely disregarding their concerns about density and development. We can love and identify with the brand Atlanta, but need to relate to a government with which we can connect.
• Wasn’t it important to honor the living and the dead figures of the civil rights era when Democrats controlled the Statehouse? Odd that the package deal was never mentioned then. Or maybe not. The Statehouse is the place of politics.
• Uh, Mr. Sims, Mr. Chuck Sims, state representative from Coffee County, your attention please. You’re a Republican now. The proposal to raise taxes on food to pay for PeachCare is your Democratic impulse reasserting itself. Switching parties sometimes requires switching perspectives.
• Bills providing opportunities to raise our transportation-related taxes have been introduced, too. Without big-name sponsors. That’s a clue as to their future. Don’t tax me any more until we see the thrust and scope of tax revision proposals next year.
• Yes! State Rep. Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs), chairman of the House Rules Committee, offers legislation to allow individuals and corporations to get a significant tax credit for contributions that allow low-income or disabled children to attend private schools. Love this new Big Idea Legislature. They’re talking about things that matter — in addition, of course, to the usual things that don’t.
• Home-school students who score in the top 10 percent on a national test, such as the SAT, could get HOPE in their freshman year of college under a bill proposed by state Rep. John Lunsford (R-McDonough). Do it. How and where they prepare for college doesn’t matter, if they demonstrate they can do the work.
• This president won’t be the one to launch war against Iran — and not because the public has lost confidence on Iraq, as suggested by U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Macon) — but because Iraq should be far more settled before the United States acts decisively to counter the nuclear threat that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad represents. The United States cannot leave the region, however, with Iran and Syria emboldened.
“There are weapons in Iraq that are harming U.S. troops because of [Iran’s] Quds Force,” the president said Wednesday, “and I intend to do something about it.” That’s a declaration of intent, not war. Sealing borders is a start.
• Only two things would have kept voters in the 10th Congressional District from returning Charlie Norwood to Congress: This and his name not being on the ballot. Only one thing would have kept them from choosing him again: His name not being on the ballot. He knew his mind and spoke it.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
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Bulldoze public housing
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the great under-told stories of revolutionary change is the progress the Atlanta Housing Authority has made under Executive Director Renee Glover in ridding the city of those hell-hole public housing projects. Since 1995, 11 of 42 projects have been revitalized or converted into mixed-income, mixed-use complexes under the federal HOPE VI program, a failure in many places, but a real success here. Over the next few years, the AHA will bulldoze nearly all of the rest, razing 3,000 units occupied by 9,600 people.
Public housing, except for projects serving special-needs populations, like the elderly, are a great idea gone bad. Three-quarters of a century ago, when poor people lived in shantytown neighborhoods and lacked the job and education opportunities to get themselves out, project housing was a life-saver. One generation lived there but their children moved on. Over time, though, public housing became a generational affliction — children born there stayed to become mothers and grandmothers — a place that anchored them for the men to drop in and out of their lives. Some of the tenant leaders, meanwhile, became political powerhouses for their ability to deliver the vote. Bad scene.
The federal program offers vouchers to tenants to rent the housing they want elsewhere, in Cobb, Clayton, DeKalb. Or they may be readmitted, paying reduced taxpayer-subsidized rent, to the upscale, mixed-income apartment complex built to replace the one torn down. Good behavior is rewarded.
HOPE VI is one of the federal poverty programs that works. It breaks up the generational cycle of the massed poor, while giving them options and rewarding those who stay for choosing to live responsible lives. When my band of right-wingers take over, Renee Glover is a top candidate to the the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
A Mormon in the South
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Repetition of the words “innovation and transformation” didn’t do much for me, but that appeared to be the theme as Republican Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, launched his 2008 White House bid Tuesday.
His announcement came at the Henry Ford museum in suburban Detroit, a decision that was criticized earlier by a group of Jewish Democrats who said Ford was a well-known anti-Semite. Romney tooled on, arguing that he offered to Washington the kind of “innovation and transformation” that Ford brought to American industry.
One question that lingers is whether Romney can appeal to evangelicals and others who share the Mormons’ family and ethical values but have significant differences over doctrine. The concern strikes me as overblown. Southerners are comfortable with religious diversity and would welcome a President whose religious beliefs are non-threateningly different, especially a mainstream conservative. “I believe family is the foundation of America — and that it needs to be protected and strengthened,” Romney said in his annoucement, and “I believe in the sanctity of human life.” Both assertions should further enhance his appeal in this region.
The question to be resolved, though, is whether being a Mormon hurts his chances in the South. I say no.
Time to cap gas-guzzling programs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Almost seven years later, the warning issued by state Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) when the 2000 General Assembly expanded eligibility for PeachCare is seen as prophetic:
“The money from Congress [for PeachCare] is sun-setted,” Johnson warned as the state Senate considered expanding the household income eligibility. “So once we have everyone addicted to free health care, we may have to take it away from them.”
Not to worry, said then-Senate Majority Leader Charles Walker, an Augusta Democrat now serving more than 10 years in prison on a variety of charges, including evading the federal income taxes he was confident would forever flow. “We’re confident President Al Gore will continue it,” said Walker. On such assurances, the bill passed 51-0 to expand eligiblity from about $34,000 for a family of four to about $40,000, or 235 percent of the federal poverty level at the time.
Similar assurances were given in 2003 when the state passed the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council indigent defense system — one of which was that the cost would be $60 million to $80 million per year when it was up and running in 2005. The costs to counties and the state for indigent defense have topped $100 million, notes state Sen. Preston Smith (R-Rome), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
A nightmare murder case that has yet come to trial in Fulton County reveals so many flaws in the system’s design that it would be irresponsible for the Georgia General Assembly to go home this year without fixing them.
Legal fees in the Brian Nichols case in Fulton County had topped $1.2 million by the end of December. Nichols’ three private lawyers — he also has a public defender assigned to represent him — are paid fees of up to $174 per hour. To cover a projected $9.5 million shortfall in the council’s budget, fees paid to private lawyers in other death penalty cases were cut from $125 to $95 per hour last month.
The Nichols case is alarming to legislators and others concerned about runaway costs for entitlement programs. If every judge can generate bills to be paid by taxpayers as he sees fit, it’s Katie bar the door. It’s not entirely certain, says state Sen. John Wiles (R-Marietta), that judges have that authority — but legislation to clarify that gray area is among a number of bills being introduced. “If there’s no accountability to the fund, if the state is a blank check, then why should you limit your costs at all?” asks Smith. “If the Brian Nichols case can generate 4,000 hours of legal fees, then why can’t the same thing be done in Gwinnett County or Telfair County? Pretty soon, people will have the right to an O.J. Simpson defense on the taxpayers’ dime.”
Wiles and Smith have introduced another bill that would move the indigent defense system from the judicial branch into the executive, largely to get a handle on future costs. Now, says Wiles, the judiciary’s budget is routinely added into the governor’s request and passed along to the General Assembly. It should be measured in the executive branch against competing needs, he argues. He and Smith think taxpayers are providing sufficient funds. “It’s not a funding issue; it’s an expenditure issue,” says Wiles.
Smith believes a structural problem exists “that is going to lead to an inevitable recurrence of the same situation” the public is seeing in the Nichols case. “Attorneys are bound by oath to zealously represent their clients,” he says. “Now you have the state … picking up the bill, whatever that bill would be.” In the past, in both the state and federal system, judges controlled fees and hours in providing defendants what was affirmed to be a “constitutionally reasonable defense,” says Smith.
Because judges managed fees, hours and cases, lawyers had incentive to move them along and to settle. That incentive is gone, or at least considerably diminished, in the new system. Case volume generates state funding. And in court, lawyers and judges are relatively free to run up the tab.
While the General Assembly’s attention is repeatedly drawn this session to matters of little import — Sunday beer sales, for example — it should not leave town without substantially capping the growth potential of two spending programs, PeachCare and the Public Defender Standards Council, that have the potential to spin out of control.
Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor.
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Lexus lanes, celebrities and resignations
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Notes from the weekend:
Item: The general manager of the Cartoon Network, Jim Samples, resigned on Friday “in recognition of the gravity of the situation that occurred under my watch” — that beingthe marketing campaign gone awry in Boston. With his resignation, I immediately join the Jim Samples Fan Club. At last, a key figure in a bad scene takes responsibility genuinely. He was in charge of an embarassment that cost his company big bucks and he paid the price. I’d hire him tomorrow.
The first day’s treatment of the network’s Boston scare was to poke fun at police for failing to recognize a marketing prank. But in the age of shoe-bombers and liquid explosive devices, I prefer cops who over-react and suppose the worst until convinced otherwise. Turner Broadcasting’s apology and $2 million payment to Boston authorities as compensation for costs incurred in dealing with the marketing dummies was warranted.
Item: Does the Anna Nichole Smith age of celebrity — famous for being famous — suggest that a first-term U.S. Senator famous for a speech he made to the Democratic National Convention have a shot at being elected President of the United States? U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) declared Saturday. The media loves this guy and, for the moment at least, he’s the beneficiary of its uncritical adulation. The suggestion here is not that he’s another Anna Nichole Smith, but to note that the public develops a fascination with some personalities and rewards them for being “famous.” I still think Hillary’s the Democratic nominee, but her capitulation to the party’s anti-war left in the face of Obama’s challenge erases any question about whether she has the strength of character to be President. She doesn’t. Like her husband, she’s a Poll Mold.
Item: I’ve never understood why any of us should get agitated about the so-called “Lexus lanes” on interstates, or by an airport security sytsem that allows frequent flyers to pay for a background screening check that would allow them to whiz through airport security lines. The idea that somebody could use their wealth to buy “special treatment” infuriates most Americans. Neither bothers me. Anything that shortens my line in traffic or in waiting to pass through airport screening suits me just fine.
Item: The Dixie Chicks win three top Grammys Sunday night. The judging standard for the Chicks is 20 percent music, 80 percent politics. In your eye, George Bush!
Real progress in the works at state Capitol
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When he entered Emory University as a freshman from Miami almost three decades ago, state Sen. Judson H. Hill (R-Marietta) was determined to become an orthopedic surgeon.
Once there, though, he found himself drawn still to the passions of his youth, to political activism. “My family was very involved in political discussion, and in civics and in giving back to the community,” said Hill, whose mother was area director in Miami for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Beginning in grade school, and while at Emory, he volunteered in Republican presidential campaigns. “I became involved and it essentially came down to a recognition that I enjoyed politics more” than medicine.
So he got a degree in economics and followed his father and grandfather into law.
The confluence of interests in health care, economics and public policy has drawn him into one of the major debates confronting the nation — the quality, cost and availability of medical care. Legislation he’s sponsoring is among the “Big Idea” bills that are starting to flow from the work of study committees.
Without question, this is one of the more exciting sessions of the Georgia General Assembly — and next year will be, too — because critical mass is forming on big idea proposals, with health care, education and taxes among them. The critical mass is not around radical ideas, but around the concept that consumers with information, incentive and choice will behave rationally, and everybody will benefit, including taxpayers.
The nuts-and-bolts proposals are not radical, either. On Monday, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation will bring together U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt, Gov. Sonny Perdue and CEOs of major corporations to sign an agreement to work together to make information available on hospital outcomes, costs and other concerns that consumers have.
The model exists in Florida. As former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Hill’s study committee in September: “Knowing which hospitals have the highest and lowest death rates — and the highest and lowest prices — allows the consumers to choose the best-performing, highest-value hospital.” High quality and low prices often exist in the same facility, said Gingrich, whose ideas show up everywhere, including the White House.
“I think you finally have critical mass on this idea,” said GPPF’s Kelly McCutchen. “We’ve been pushing consumerism for some time now,” he continued. “It is not surprising that education and health care are the two parts of our budget that are most out of control, because both are paid by third-party payers.” Hill’s bill, available on-line, is Senate Bill 28.
Action on big ideas can come very quickly. Think tanks like Georgia Public Policy Foundation, and those formed earlier nationally, like Heritage, Cato, Hoover, Pacific Research, Reason, Friedman and others have been idea mills. Organizations like the National Legislative Exchange Council, which state Rep. Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs) recently headed, disseminated ideas and model legislation. And then, of course, bold governors experiment.
On issues like transportation options, health care, education and taxes and other ways of checking the growth of government, legislators are far better informed and ideas are far more quickly refined than was the case in years past. So when a conservative majority forms, it’s not necessary to stumble around acting on hunch and impulse.
The process benefits, too, from party-switchers, especially in the House. On health care, for example, there’s nobody in the General Assembly with more detailed knowledge of Georgia’s programs than state Rep. Mickey Channell (R-Greensboro). The same is true of state Rep. Richard Royal (R-Camilla) on the state tax code. Both men are former Democrats.
The combination of legislators like Hill and others, good conservatives who know their mind and who can stand up and argue the big ideas, when combined with the expertise and institutional knowledge of those who have been around and in leadership positions as Democrats, bode very well for Georgia.
Hang tight. The next few years could be among the most innovative and important in decades.
• Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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Speeding fines, FEMA fraud and Wal-Mart
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Honest John Edwards acknowledges his proposed $120 billion per year health care proposal will require higher taxes. Former presidential candidate Walter Mondale was honest, too. “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.” It was a very popular admission in Minnesota and the District of Columbia, but nowhere else.
• Local schools have enough trouble without returning to elected school superintendents, as proposed by state Rep. Clay Cox (R-Lilburn). Having a school board and a superintendent each with an independent base is a formula for friction.
• On portraits in the Capitol and statues on the grounds: Portraits should include governors, 20-year Speakers, 50-year legislators and notable chief justices of the Supreme Court or members of Congress. Statues should include Nobel Prize winners, Georgians who became president, U.S. senators or congressmen who served for 50 years and did something, governors dead for 25 years and deemed by historians to have been historically significant, justices of the U.S. Supreme Court from Georgia, and Georgians who led the armed forces in time of war.
• I’m rebuilding a national Democratic Party to my liking. So far, its leaders are U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and … well, I guess it’s just Joe.
• Still don’t understand the connection between the NAACP’s mission and no-knock searches. Wonder if the AARP has a position.
• President Bush’s plan to “slash” spending for Medicare and Medicaid? Never heard of that. Only in America is a budget increase of 5.6 percent a year considered a “slash.” Get used to the word, though. You will see and hear it often.
• FEMA Can’t Win Department: The Associated Press reports that an “analysis of government data obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act suggests the government might not have been careful enough with its checkbook. …” Duh. More than $1 billion in claims were filed and paid for at least 162,750 homes that didn’t exist, the AP reports.
• I really don’t think we should call a Barrow County woman accused of killing her two children a “mother.” Or an Alpharetta man imprisoned for the sexual abuse of his three daughters a “father.” Mother and father are honorifics that should be used for adults who mother and father the children they cause. Use instead “the woman who bore” and “the man present at conception” or some such.
• Public education continues to advance in Georgia. Headline: “People outsmart plants.” Next up: fish. The outsmarted plants are forced to bloom for this weekend’s Southeastern Flower Show. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Agriculture surely objects.
• Life’s good in Cobb County. The Shih Tzus Gone Wild case closed without bloodshed, lawyers or counselors. And bike riders on Columns Drive agree to ride single-file, without same.
• Nashville adopts an English-only ordinance. Southern English?
• Gov. Sonny Perdue proposes an additional $200 fine for speeding in excess of 75 mph on two-lane roads or 85 mph on others. His estimate is that the fines and traffic-related add-ons could generate up to $30 million a year to help finance a statewide network of trauma centers. These are the kinds of false “user fees” that Republicans often like. A genuine user fee, though, levies on a limited group using a government service — golfers, for example, on state-owned courses. If a statewide trauma network is needed, the state should levy the taxes on all potential beneficiaries and fund it. Add-ons grow government while hiding the cost.
• Students and faculty in Greece clash with police over a plan to allow privately run universities. Here, k-12 vouchers frighten the establishment just as much.
• Shut my mouth. Tip me over with a feather. A school superintendent, J. Alvin Wilbanks of Gwinnett County, opposes competition individually, just as the organization that represents superintendents did collectively.
• A telling sentence in a Washington story about Wal-Mart and the unions that use the courts, the media and politicians in its campaign to unionize the company’s 1.3 million employees. The sentence, referring to Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union: “Stern’s union funds a nonprofit group, Wal-Mart Watch, which leaks damaging documents about the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailing giant and pressures it to change its practices.”
• How many liberals would diaper up and drive 900 miles if they thought Barack Obama was courting the GOP? Most, I’d say.
• Jim Wooten is associated editor of the editorial page. His column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
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I know what’s best for you
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A feature common to many of the Big Idea reform efforts showing in Congress and in the Statehouse stems from the belief that people given sufficient information to make an informed choice will make responsible decisions that they consider to be in their best interests. That’s the premise of education vouchers, health savings accounts and Social Security reform.
The Internet has changed dramatically government’s capacity to quickly gather and disseminate information that will allow sick people, for example, to compare prices and outcomes for needed surgeries. If consumers had financial incentive — which they don’t now — to shop for services, they’d be better off, and so would taxpayers and employers. Allowing consumers to pocket some of the savings would be the incentive.
Much of the opposition, in addition to those folks who are simply terrified by anything unfamiliar or new, comes from those on the left who have built careers and belief systems on the notion that the poor can never be expected to make rational choices — so therefore that responsibility falls to government and to the kinder souls in the ivory towers who know what’s best. That condescension has defined their solutions for the last 40 or 50 years.
The nation witnessed all of the failings of that approach in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. People had become so passive that when politicians failed to send the buses or to give them instructions, they sat below sea level awaiting the arrival of a category 5 hurricane.
The question today is whether the poor and those who shun responsibility and persistently make bad choices in their lives can be induced, with financial incentives and penalties, to take charge of their lives and their families’ well-being? I say yes. Not overnight — and maybe not for a decade or more. But we saw in New Orleans and Katrina’s aftermath the consequences of over-reliance on politicians and government.
Stop political games on Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thwarted in the U.S. Senate, anti-war Democrats take their stage show to the U.S. House next week with another nonbinding resolution, as yet undeveloped, expressing thier opposition to a troop surge. The real test in the House, if a vote comes, will be the 44 Blue Dog Democrats. Many of them, like U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall of Macon and U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop of Columbus, represent districts with large military installations or where the President’s support remains strong. Marshall has been careful not to join his party in jumping off the cliff on Iraq.
For the more liberal Georgia Democrats, it’s a free vote. But for others — and I’d throw U.S. Rep. John Barrow of Savannah into that mix, too — it’s high stakes politically. Marshall and Barrow barely squeaked by last November. Unless the war and this President become far more unpopular here, this is the kind of vote for Georgia Democrats that will virtually guarantee that their political career caps out in the House.
A nonbinding resolution is of no legal importance. It is, however, a direct signal to the enemy that with patience victory is within their grasp. This is a defeated party looking for any semblence of a door out of Iraq.
The door exists. Congress has the authority to defund the war effort. Partisans can make statements, hold hearings and pass meaningless resolutions in the hope that cultivating the division on the home front will give them a working majority and the White House in two years. Or they can bring the troops home — and live with the consequences of their decision.
Rail reversal may point us to better ideas
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Since Republicans came to power under the Gold Dome, the question has lingered: What difference does it make?
Transportation — and metro Atlanta’s gridlock — is one example.
When Mac Collins was in the U.S. House, and before congressional earmarks became a cause for rage, he and perhaps others in the Georgia delegation earmarked $87 million for the 26-mile Atlanta-to-Lovejoy commuter rail line. Had the proposed train been faster and gone farther, and had it been accompanied by a shift in state government agency offices to the south out of Atlanta, and had there been a targeted job creation zone between Atlanta and Macon, it might have been a worthwhile idea.
But instead it remained a slow train to nowhere that never really made any transportation sense and would never have advanced as far as it did without the lure of earmarked money — which, frankly, was just enough to get the state in trouble.
That project is now reeling from what an AJC story describes as “a stunning reversal of fortune” that “has sent the project careening off the rails.” The “stunning reversal” is prompted by two events. One was the wise decision by new members of the Clayton County Board of Commissioners to rethink the county’s open-ended commitment to cover the line’s operating deficits. The other was a state auditor’s report that cost projections are out of date and that as much as $10 million in engineering costs should have been included but weren’t.
U.S. Rep. David Scott, whose district includes Clayton, thinks the potential loss of federal money “a catastrophic failure of leadership” that’s both “baffling” and “shameful.”
Now to the difference the change in power makes.
The auditor’s report comes because the new chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, state Rep. Ben Harbin (R-Evans) asked for it. And because a Henry County legislator, state Rep. Steve Davis, has championed the interests of taxpayers by raising questions about potential costs and benefits. Their persistence, combined with reservations expressed by cost-benefit conservatives on the state Department of Transportation board, may have brought the state to its senses.
The Georgia Department of Transportation is a projected $74 billion short of the $160 billion it will need through 2035, says DOT Commissioner Harold Linnenkohl. Obviously, undertaking projects that buy no real congestion relief is a luxury — or a waste — the state cannot afford.
There’s some evidence that the inquisitiveness that bodes ill for commuter rail could expand the search for solutions to gridlock.
Robert W. Poole Jr., the director of transportation studies for the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based free-market think tank, made a presentation last week to a joint gathering of the House and Senate transportation committees. It is novel in and of itself that a free-market think tank would be invited to pitch alternatives to legislators.
Poole noted that after Georgians spend $26 billion on transportation infrastructure between now and 2030, congestion will get worse. The transit/carpool model being undertaken here doesn’t work to reduce congestion because metro Atlanta’s density is too low for public transit to be viable, jobs are increasingly not in downtown Atlanta and most commuting is suburb-to-suburb, as demonstrated by last week’s AJC story on long commutes.
“The places that have done the best at keeping congestion under control are those that continued to add capacity,” said Poole. We stopped adding capacity in the 1990s, but traffic didn’t stop growing, he told the committees. About half the traffic congestion that metro Atlanta experiences, said Poole, is caused by weather, accidents, construction and other unusual occurrences and about half is more traffic than the roads can handle.
He offered innovative approaches that would involve the private sector in closing the needs gap and in getting traffic moving, financed mostly by tolls.
The most dramatic would be a tunnel under downtown from Georgia 400 to below I-20, and then above ground to I-675 south of Atlanta, at a projected cost of $6.39 billion. He proposes, too, a separate toll truckway for long-haul trucks that would cut an hour off the trip through Atlanta, extension of the Lakewood Freeway to I-20 east and west, and conversion of HOV lanes to express toll for buses, vanpools and paying customers, with congestion pricing. About 75 percent of the total cost of new congestion-relief improvements could be financed through tolls, he projected.
The ideas are clearly out of the box. And that is good. The answer to metro Atlanta’s traffic congestion problems can’t be 19th-century rail solutions or that congestion is always destined to get worse.
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I apologize for…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“I apologize for…” “I take responsibility for…” We seem destined to live in the Age of the Empty Gesture — grand apologies for actions that occured in another era, actions that no living American perpetrated and no living American suffered. The emptiness of that gesture is matched by the “I take responsibility” mea culpa that comes without penalty — former U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno for the Branch Davidian disaster being among the most noteworthy.
A Georgia State University law professor, Paul Lombardo, has done a superb job of calling public attention to one of his interests, the involuntary sterilization of about 3,300 prisoners, mental patients and others in state custody between 1937 and 1970. He has persuaded State Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, a Decatur Democrat, to introduce a resolution he drafted that calls on the General Assembly to apologize. The resolution has been sent to a House committee chaired by State Rep. Sharon Cooper, a Marietta Republican, who offered three perfectly rational observations: One is that the eugenics movement was “unconscionable.” The other is that people should be aware of history so they don’t repeat its mistakes. And the third is that “I’m not sure I agree with” one generation apologizing for another generation’s actions “when all the parties that were involved are long dead.”
I’m with Cooper. One man’s crusade serves the useful purpose of reminding us that policy decisions, even those thought at the time to serve some desirable public purpose, can have harmful consequences. They were wrong. Don’t repeat the mistake. Do apologies matter? Not when made for the dead to the dead.
True education reform takes bold actions
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Three events of enormous importance to the future of education came together on two days last week.
• On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings came to the region of the country that she identifies as the national leader in education reform to promote renewal of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The trick, for conservatives, is to retain accountability and choice in a Congress now controlled by the party of teacher unions. That sudden turn of events in one election cycle is a screaming message to education reformers in Georgia: Act boldly and decisively — or return to the throw-money-at-it status quo.
• On the day Spellings announced to the Georgia Public Policy Foundation that in Georgia “you all are already doing the things that are so important to improving our schools, like inventing and chartering new schools,” a committee of the Georgia State Senate passed Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle’s proposals to allow up to five of Georgia’s 180 school districts a year to become charters and to create five career academies — a type of charter for students to pursue job skills. Both the districts and the academies would be largely exempted from some state and federal regulations. Both passed the full Senate on Friday, one 52-3 and the other 53-2.
• On Wednesday, the full Senate passed a bill by State Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) that would offer scholarships — or vouchers, whichever terminology you would apply to grants for HOPE and pre-k — to parents of special needs children in public schools.
The NCLB law, charter schools and districts, and special needs scholarships are revolutionary in that they begin the essential process of shifting decision-making authority for a child’s education to parents. A terribly important feature of NCLB, as spelled out by President Bush in his State of the Union message, is an offer of Promise Scholarships that would give parents the federal money allocated to educate their children, money that they could then use to buy better education services from other public school districts or from private schools.
“There has to be a day of reckoning,” Spellings said in an interview after she spoke Tuesday to the conservative think tank. “When kids get to five or six years of being trapped in chronically underperforming schools, something more drastic has to happen.”
The president, she said, “has answered the question in three ways. … The three things on the president’s agenda are real private school choice, the opportunity for real chartering where it has been impeded now — like in New York and Illinois and Michigan, among others. And the opportunity to put our best educators in our most challenging places.”
Georgia is on the right track in developing and testing a standard curriculum. Public schools are being upgraded. The best thing the rest of us can do is to give state School Superintendent Kathy Cox and other education experts time and resources to do their jobs.
The point is that we have no reason to be gloomy about public education or to look at competition as retreat. The reality is that the traditional reforms — lower class size, better pay, bigger or smaller schools — are all approaches based on a world that existed 50 years ago when a pent-up demand existed, when education had a virtual monopoly on the talents of women, when two-parent families provided schools with children reasonably prepared to learn and supported teachers in that effort.
That’s not the world today. There’s no pent-up demand for education. Educators are chasing parents trying to get them to recognize its value. Some parents are better educated than their parents were, but are more adversarial with the children’s teachers. Other parents are producing children who pose greater academic challenges, including an inability to speak English. Children, too, have short attention spans and a frightening number are from broken or never-formed unions.
About 70 percent of black children, almost half of Hispanic and 25 percent of white children are born to unmarried women. Imagine the baggage they bring to school. It’s impossible to create a single model, whatever the pay or classroom size, to address the voids or the damaged lives.
Time is of the essence. Every child has one shot at the sixth grade — and every majority is eventually lost, as the nation just saw in Congress. Don’t be timid with reform.
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Vouchers, transit alert, Sen. Obama
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• This week’s AJC look at how drivers cope with long commutes identifies the problem of creating a useful mass transit system: Briarcliff Road to Sandy Springs, Alpharetta to Duluth, Barrow County to Alpharetta, Locust Grove to Morrow, Cobb County to Atlanta, Cherokee County to Perimeter Mall, East Cobb to the airport. You get the picture. A handful here, a handful there. Now design an affordable transit system. We missed that bus about 60 years ago.
• State Rep. Bobby Franklin (R-Marietta) proposes to ban those infernal cameras to ticket motorists who dash through caution lights. Here’s a suggestion: Require a roll-back in property taxes equal to revenue from the red-light tax. If the purpose is safety, the cameras shouldn’t be used to generate revenue for cities and counties.
• Hmmm. “Macaca,” when used by a U.S. senator with presidential ambitions, is a crime warranting public execution. When a U.S. senator with presidential ambitions declares Barack Obama to be the first African-American candidate who is “articulate and bright, and clean, and is a nice-looking guy …,” the excuse-makers pour forth. Imagine the reaction if a Republican, say former U.S. Sen. George Allen of Virginia, had used the same language as Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.).
• President Bush signs an executive order requiring each agency to have an appointee acting as gatekeeper to analyze the cost and benefits of proposed new rules and regulations and to make certain agencies act on his priorities. Absolutely. Gov. Sonny Perdue should do the same. There’s nothing radical about applying cost-benefit analysis to proposed laws and regulations. Congress and legislatures should, too.
• Did anybody notice that Fulton County just sent out 3,500 summons to potential jurors in the Brian Nichols case using current voter lists. Of those, 630 were returned as “undeliverable.” Wonder how many of those voted less than 3 months ago.
• Legislation to exempt the older-than-65 population from state income taxes is good policy, if … if it is part of a plan to eliminate the state income tax altogether. If it causes something desirable to happen that wouldn’t otherwise — the repopulation of rural Georgia, for example, with self-supporting people who have money and who need services and not jobs. Otherwise I’d exempt, say, one-income married couples younger than 30 with children younger than 10. Their need is greater.
• The correct number may not be 9, as proposed by state Rep. Barry Fleming (R-Harlem) in his bill to allow the imposition of the death penalty with less than unanimous jury agreement, but his bill should pass. A unanimous verdict of guilt would still be required, but some jurors flatly opposed to the death penalty do lie to get on the panel. Their deceit shouldn’t succeed. Let’s compromise. Ten of 12.
• No wonder radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr appears to be reining in his supporters. He thinks he’s won. Here, in Congress, not there.
• Men don’t matter. The Atlanta Women’s Foundation touts a fund-raiser with this question: “How would you stretch $28,000 into $40,500?” It explains: “The average salary for a woman in Georgia is just $28,600, yet the basic budget for a family with one parent and two children in Atlanta is $40,500.” A hint: Get married. Another: Marry a man who will pay child support. Another: Raise the minimum wage to a sum sufficient to eliminate men from the equation altogether. Another: Don’t have the first or second child with deadbeats. Just some helpful suggestions.
• State Rep. David Casas (R-Lilburn) has a poison pill for the Senate-passed bill to provide scholarships, or vouchers, for special needs children in public schools. He’s introduced legislation to apply a host of regulations to private schools that take public school children. Democrats are perfectly capable of sabotaging choice without Republican help. Several efforts were rebuffed by the Senate.
• I too would join Democrats in opposing Gov. Sonny Perdue’s proposed constitutional amendment to limit lottery spending to HOPE and pre-k. The Legislature should never create a trust fund, a lockbox or a constitutionally protected kitty that limits the ability of future governors and legislators to set priorities and apply the state’s resources to the state’s needs.
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Delta stays my Delta
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Toward the end of Wednesday’s State Senate debate on vouchers for special education students, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle interrupted the proceedings to announce the breaking news: US Airways had dropped its hostile takeover bid for Delta Air Lines. The chamber erupted in cheers. Later in the afternoon, at a joint Transportation Committee meeting, most legislators were sporting “Keep Delta My Delta” buttons.
Without question, yesterday was a great day for Atlanta and for Delta’s employees. Books undoubtedly will be written about how the airline survived bankruptcy and takeover, but nobody can look back at the bullets it dodged without acknowledging the leadership of Delta CEO Gerald Grinstein and his management team. I thought it was brilliant. Management and employees sent all the right signals, telling creditors with their actions — recalling workers, planning new hires and announcing the purchase of new planes — that Delta management had it under control. All of their signals reassured creditors. To be honest, I thought Delta was a goner when US Airways bumped up its takeover offer by 20 percent.
Delta’s happy day prompts two observations. One concerns executive pay. The other is the role of government in promoting, blocking or taking sides in mergers.
President Bush, speaking Wednesday in New York on the “state of the economy” warned corporate boards to “step up to their responsibilities” to tie executive compensation to performance. “Government should not decide the compensation for America’s corporate executives,” said Bush. “But the salaries and bonuses of CEOs should be based on their companies and bringing values to their shareholders.” New federal rules to give investors more and clearer information on executive compensation and perks took effect last month.
No question some compensation packages, like that for former Home Depot chief Bob Nardelli, who was paid an average of $25.7 million a year, are obscene. But I agree with Bush. It’s not government’s role to write a formula or to set a number as a compensation ceiling. To my mind, Delta’s Grinstein and other executives have earned big bonuses in saving Delta. I don’t have a number in mind, but their work is clearly deserving of generous compensation. As with campaign finance, clear and timely disclosure is all I ask.
As for government’s role in mergers: It should be neutral, of course, determining that mergers don’t create monopolies and aren’t significantly anti-competitive. Otherwise, it’s a bystander. Using public money, either through tax incentives or exemptions, to influence the outcome is generally undesirable, though I don’t fault company officials for attempting to use government to send signals to the suitor that Georgia prefers the hometown gal.
It is, in any event, a super day for Delta and for the home team. Congratulations to managment and to employees for pulling this one off.
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