American Dream

Muskogee County, OK - If you were wondering how bad an eminent domain law suit would be, take a look at this court docket (hot linked in the title). 'Excessively long' doesn't really capture how scary it is. The latest, but not the final, opinion can be viewed here if you dare: http://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/deliverdocument.asp?citeid=445996

RALEIGH, NC — State House lawmakers unanimously approved legislation Tuesday that slightly toughens the state’s eminent domain laws - expecting to grab headlines in their home counties. Specifically, the House bill repeals the right of local governments to take private property for economic development purposes or to bolster its tax base and no longer allows governments to use condemnation procedures to take property from one owner and give it to another private owner. The proposed law, which can be over turned during the next session, or over ruled in the courts, does not provide just compensation provisions. At least eight municipalities, including Asheville, since 1981, received permission from the General Assembly to use eminent domain to acquire property, and that number is expected to increase. The bill now goes to the Senate for consideration.

Dexter, MO - Missouri Farm Bureau president Charles Kruse isn't pleased with the eminent domain legislation being proposed. He stated that the language in the legislation was not strong enough and asserts that legislators "chosen to listen to special interests, lobbyists and people other than those who voted to send them to Jefferson City."
The bureau had assurances, Kruse said, from the leadership in the Missouri House that the bill was going to strengthen landowner notification by requiring condemning authorities to provide information to those impacted by their plans. "I don't think that is too much to ask," he said. Read his entire official statement on the matter here.

San Jose (Santa Clara County) voters solidly rejected the idea of raising sales taxes another half cent to pay for an extension of the BART rail transit system to San Jose. Voters had approved the five previous sales tax increases for transit, but the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has suffered deep financial problems, and voters decided not to reward mismanagement with more money.

The actual vote was 57.4 percent no (scroll down to measure A). The ballot measure included an unspecified amount of money for social services as well as transit; supporters believed that this would contribute to the measure's passage because VTA has such a bad name now. But now that the measure lost, no doubt some supporters will claim it was because the measure was not purely for transit.

The BART extension is estimated to cost $4.7 billion and is projected to carry so few riders that the cost of every new ride will be $100. Yet voters enthusiastically supported a sales tax increase in 2000 based on a political campaign that claimed BART would reduce congestion.

The 2001 recession changed everything, however. Sales tax revenues that VTA was counting on to operate its light-rail lines (and pay its debt) declined, forcing VTA to drastically cut both rail and bus service. The result was a 33-percent decline in patronage, charges of mismanagement, and even a grand jury investigation into VTA. Now VTA says it does not even have enough money to operate new light-rail lines that are under construction, much less help build and operate a BART line.

Measure A's proponents spent $1.7 million flooding voters with flyers and radio and television ads. Opponents managed to raise enough money for one flyer sent to 45,000 households -- less than a quarter of the number that voted. But it was enough.

I am not going to say much about this ... except ... is this evidence of something being wrong someplace or somewhere?

For those that do not know, Chevy Chase is one of the older suburbs of Washington, D.C., and one of its more affluent. This property, at 3704 Thornapple St is located in the municipality of Chevy Chase Section 5 (unusual for Maryland, the Chevy Chase area is divided up into several relatively small municipalities - though some of the area is also unincorporated, and the area of the District of Columbia on the other side of Western Avenue is also considered Chevy Chase).

See also this article in the Washington Post:

Panel Says House Is Over the Line
Unhappy Neighbors Want Walls Moved

Over at the Washington Post's Get There blog, Steve Ginsberg has posted a new entry entitled Environmental Group Says Toll Highways Okay.

Added on 10-Jun-2006 from the N.Y. Times: The Next Thing in Tolls?

And there is a letter from a group calling itself the Green Democrats in the Montgomery [County, Maryland] Gazette which asserts that HOT lanes can be green lanes - even though Montgomery County has a rather limited system of High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes that could be converted to HOT (HOV/Toll) lanes.

Both of these articles miss one crucial point, apparently by design - the groups promoting tolling of existing "free" highway capacity are almost invariably opposed to the construction of any new highways, even if they are priced, as Maryland's InterCounty Connector will be (the environmental groups discussed in both stories have been vigorous opponents of the ICC, a highway that has been on the planning maps for over 50 years).

Now I have no problem with tolled highways. None at all. There are compelling reasons why tolling (and time-of-day tolling to maintain free-flow conditions) is, on some congested highways, a good idea - and it's correct that tolls can, in many cases, replace or supplement motor fuel taxes as a source of dollars for building and maintaining parts of the highway network.

But these stories are not really about toll highways (and absolutely not about expanding highways with tolls), but about a way to extract more dollars from motorists (through conversion of existing "free" highway capacity to toll roads), so that the revenues can then be diverted to old-line urban mass transit agencies (as a few carefully-chosen words in this link make clear):

Smart use of tolls can also help finance a broad range of transportation choices, from new buses to subways and roads, at a time when public tax dollars are scarce.

Lower-income transit users and carpoolers can get access to otherwise inaccessible suburban jobs if toll revenue is used to improve transit and enhance mobility.

Hartford, CT - Governor Rell has asked a mediator to broker a possible settlement with the two remaining New London homeowners who have refused to vacate their homes to make way for a riverfront redevelopment project. Her comments come days after the City Council voted to begin eviction proceedings against the residents. Rell suggested the city move the homes to one location on the Fort Trumbull peninsula and allow the homeowners to retain deeds to the properties, but the City Council rejected that idea.

West Palm Beach, FL - Residents sued the city of Riviera Beach to overturn a contentious contract with a developer who plans to build a multibillion-dollar waterfront project that could displace hundreds of citizens by alleging the city violated state Sunshine laws which call for advance public notice of city meetings. A day before Gov. Jeb Bush signed a restrictive eminent domain bill into law, Mayor Michael Brown called a special meeting so the city and Viking Inlet Harbor Properties could sign the contract to develop the project that called for some residents to be removed from their properties if they refused to sell.As part of the deal, the city agreed to use eminent domain to make way for the project. But the new law makes such seizures of personal property for private use illegal.``We're going to continue to move forward. We're going to use the law for the benefit of Riviera Beach,'' Brown said Wednesday.

In search of tickets to ride
MTA battles malfunctioning fare-collection machines at light rail stations

By Michael Dresser
Sun Reporter

Originally published June 5, 2006

As passengers at the Woodberry light rail station waited for their ride to work, a sign over their heads bore a stern warning: "Ticket or Pass Required Before Boarding Train."

But riders at the station couldn't buy a ticket from either of the two ticket vending machines on the platform. One flashed the message "Out of Service." The other just didn't work.

It's been that way a lot lately at Woodberry and apparently other stations along Baltimore's light rail line. In a spot check last month, a reporter found malfunctioning machines at more than half the stations visited - including Patapsco Avenue, Cherry Hill and North Avenue.

There's a lot of vacant land in the southern and western portions of Loudoun County, Virginia - it's home to Washington Dulles Airport, the largest and most-important international airport in the Washington region, America Online, and quite a few other large employers.

Some want to "preserve" this land in its current state - others want development, though there are plenty of points of view about the nature of that development. This is going to be interesting to watch.

Boston, MA - Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, agreed to spend $310 million improving access to trains and buses, in part because of a study by Ross Koppel. The Penn researcher found that while bus drivers usually try to accommodate people with disabilities, passengers face problems. The results showed that lifts failed 19 percent of the time and boarding denials—where the bus did not stop, the driver stated the bus was full or stopped to allow others on the bus but did not acknowledge the person with a disability—occurred in another 11 percent of cases. In sum, a person with a disability had a 20.5 percent chance of not being able to catch the bus for which they were waiting.
“The culture has to be modified to be more accepting of the needs of people with a disability,” he says. “I hope the technology is used by other transit systems to find out if they are doing what they are legally obligated to do, but also [it’s] what they should want to do for this increasingly large community.”

Charlotte, NC - With Charlotte's future rail and transit projects facing significant competition for federal dollars, Charlotte Area Transit System executives are studying how to tap local and private sources if necessary. CATS Chief Executive Ron Tober says he has talked with Bank of America Corp. and other parties about helping structure a financing arrangement that wouldn't include federal money. He remains confident that Charlotte has a good shot at attracting federal mass-transit funding. But he also stresses that competition from other cities is intensifying, while the Federal Transit Agency's criteria is becoming stricter.
The feds are paying nearly half the $427 million capital cost for the south corridor light-rail project connecting uptown with Interstate 485 in south Charlotte. The funding followed years of lobbying by local and state politicians, including U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick, Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory and former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms -- all Republicans. The state is paying slightly more than 25%, with local government supplying the rest, financed by a half-cent sales tax approved by Mecklenburg County voters in 1998. The local tax generates about $50 million annually for transit projects. Relying on local funds for light rail is rare, but not unique. Houston built its $350 million, 7.5-mile light-rail system in 2004 without federal funds.
David Hartgen, a UNC Charlotte transportation professor and longtime critic of CATS' rail plans, says local officials should delay a second line until the south corridor opens. Moreover, he thinks CATS greatly underestimates the north corridor line's cost. "Ron is the only one in the world" who thinks the line will be completed for less than $300 million, Hartgen says. Hartgen, in a recent report on the state's 10 biggest transit systems, cites a new study by Danish transportation planning expert Bent Flyvbjerg noting that most urban rail projects have, on average, overestimated ridership by 66% and underestimated costs by 200%.