Public Policy and Governance – Page 319

Easy Answers are Rarely the Right Answers

The various contenders for the Republican Presidential nomination have been falling all over themselves to attack the Environmental Protection Agency, joining their congressional colleagues in a race to see who can call loudest for abolition of the agency. According to these critics, the continued existence of the EPA is a leading reason job creation has lagged the recovery.

It’s so nice to have a simple explanation for our current economic lethargy. Get rid of the tree-huggers! Everyone knows that scientists just made up stuff like global climate change anyway. (What no one seems to know is why they would do that, but let’s not think too deeply or we might get headaches…)

Let’s assume the EPA is really enforcing policies that hinder job growth. I’ve seen no evidence to that effect, but let’s play “what if.” Does that mean we should NOT protect the environment? Wouldn’t it make more sense to evaluate EPA regulations, to do a cost-benefit analysis to see how we can continue to protect the earth while taking care not to unduly hinder the economy? Of course, that sort of analysis is complex. It requires analytical skills. And it doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.

If we don’t emerge pretty soon from this era of stupidity, we’re doomed.

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TMI

I have been working on an upcoming speech on government accountability, and I have been mulling over a seeming contradiction. In our public management courses here at SPEA, we stress the importance of transparency–and the reason for the First Amendment’s specific grant of freedom to the press/media. It stands to reason that journalists need to watch government officials and activities, investigate possible wrongdoing, and then report what they find to the voters. Journalists–whatever their warts–were considered essential to accountability, because they supplied the information needed to keep citizens informed and government agencies accountable.

Today, we have more information available than ever before–and less accountability. Why? I think it is because we have lost what Clay Shirkey has called “the journalism of verification.” Yes, there are mountains, oceans of information available to us. But we have no uniformly trusted source to verify its accuracy. Between the journalism of distraction–who slept with whom, how to groom your pet, who celebrity X is dating now, etc. etc.–and ‘news’ that is really just political propaganda, the sheer volume of sources competing for our eyes and ears has drowned out the news that is both verified and necessary to our ability to hold government accountable.

As Shirkey also noted, “the transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of ‘news’–and each with its own set of ‘truths’–will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed upon set of facts.” Daniel Moynahan famously said that we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts. Evidently, he was wrong.

TMI–too much information. And much too much misinformation.

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Ballard Administration, Part 2

After my post yesterday, I got an email from a former Republican who is evidently no fan of our Accidental Mayor.

He had read the recent IBJ article–which he characterized as a “puff piece”–in which the reporter uncritically repeated the administration’s claim that the parking meters are “netting” additional revenues since they were privatized in a 50-year deal with ACS. As he wrote, the claim doesn’t hold up under even cursory scrutiny.

The IBJ wrote, in part: “Total revenue from meter operations grew to $1.7 million in the quarter ended June 30 from $1.3 million in the same time frame a year ago. The city’s share of that revenue totaled $498,273, compared with $108,265 it made from meter operations from March through June a year ago—a whopping 360-percent increase.”

As my friend pointed out in his email, the IBJ simply ignored a number of issues, most significantly that these numbers were “apples and oranges” and accepted the 360% “increase” at face value, without noting the following: (1) Hours were increased from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM every night and ACS added a day to the week (it used to be Mon.-Fri., now it is Mon-Sat.); (2) the rate increase by $0.25/hour in Broad Ripple and most of downtown. Clearly, these increases would yield substantially more revenue whether ACS or the City had increased hours and raised rates–and if we hadn’t privatized the meters, the City would keep all of the increased revenues after the relatively modest investment in new meter technology.

The final point made in the email was that the math makes no sense: As he wrote, “According to the IBJ, the administration claims that revenues increased a total of $400,000 (from $1.3MM to $1.7MM) – which is a total increase in revenues of 30% ($400K over $1.3 million) TOTAL; however, the IBJ reports that the City’s revenues went from $108K to $498K – something doesn’t add up here… I think the IBJ is comparing apples and oranges (i.e., comparing (A) the City’s old “net-of-all-expenses” revenues after all costs and before increases in rates and hours, against (B) the City’s gross revenues under the ACS deal after increases in rates and hours that they could have instituted without sharing revenue with ACS), and even more significantly, (B) not asking what in my mind is the most pertinent question: HOW MUCH HAS THE CITY HAD TO CREDIT OR GIVE BACK TO ACS DUE TO BAGGED METERS? Do the “totals” reported exclude the amounts the city is contractually obligated to remit to ACS as compensation for bagging meters under the terms of the contract?. ”

The email raises some pretty important questions, to which I’d add another. There is a rumor floating around that in addition to control of our parking meters, the City also handed over to ACS the collection of past years’ parking fines that remain uncollected. Does anyone know whether this is true, and–if it is–whether receipts from those collections are part of the reported numbers?

I do wish Indianapolis still had real reporters covering government……

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THIS is Troubling……

The Indianapolis Times posted a fairly lengthy piece today devoted to some troubling questions raised by the award of city contracts to Ballard’s largest contributors. For example, this paragraph:

“Ballard Raised More Than $1.3 Million From Contributors Who Have Received $300 Million In Contracts: Ballard has received $1,368,693 in contributions to his reelection campaign from businesses and/or the employees of those businesses contracted with the city while in office. The total sum of the contracts those businesses have had with the city is $309,476,510. (Marion County Election Board, Ballard Campaign Finance Reports, Indianapolis Contract Database)”

Now, the Times is a Democratic blog, and it can be expected to spin reports to make Republicans look bad, just as Republican leaning blogs can be expected to spin in contrary direction. But if these numbers–and others reported in the same post-are accurate, this behavior raises still more ethical issues for an administration that is facing several other allegations of impropriety. There’s the garage deal in Broad Ripple, the lease of space in Eastgate, and the shenanigans that allowed the parking meter deal to squeak through by one vote (cast by a member of the contractor’s law firm…).

Can we spell “appearance of impropriety”?

A Very Interesting Question

The New York Times reported today that well before their recent downgrade of the U.S. AAA credit rating, the Justice Department had begun an investigation into whether Standard & Poor had improperly rated dozens of mortgage securities in the years leading up to the financial crisis. As the Times reports, “In the mortgage inquiry, the Justice Department has been asking about instances in which the company’s analysts wanted to award lower ratings on mortgage bonds but may have been overruled by other S.& P. business managers, according to the people with knowledge of the interviews. If the government finds enough evidence to support such a case, which is likely to be a civil case, it could undercut S.& P.’s longstanding claim that its analysts act independently from business concerns.”

After the housing bubble burst, many of us questioned the ethics of a ratings system in which the issuer of the debt being rated paid the rating agency–to those of us uninitiated into the arcane processes of mortgage banking, this seemed to constitute a clear conflict of interest, a practice that suggested the agencies might be, oh, let’s just say “ethically insensitive.” This morning’s report raises the question whether that insensitivity, or ethical blind spot, might have played a role in the recent downgrade of the US credit rating.

Perhaps it was less a matter of acting on the basis of genuine concern (misplaced or not) and more a matter of retaliation for daring to launch an investigation?

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