The captain has locked the armored cockpit door, the engines whine, and the plane pushes off, rolling away from the gate so another can take its place. Then it stops. After the safety briefing the pilot tells you the bad news — there are 40 or 50 planes ahead of you, all waiting their turn to slip the surly bonds of earth. As if the uncomfortable flight weren’t enough, you are now condemned to spend another hour or two waiting on the ground. Who’s surly now?
For the year ending August 2007, a third of scheduled flights left the John F. Kennedy airport more than 15 minutes late. The average delay for late departures was just over an hour. That’s the average, so for every flight that leaves a tolerable 30 minutes late there is another in which passengers sit and fume for 90.
Government can not grow an economy—only private enterprise can do that in our market-driven system. The role of the public sector is to facilitate and guide private sector development by creating a fair and functional business environment and by removing obstacles to growth. Governor Spitzer’s promise of $50 million for the demolition of Midtown would remove a very significant obstacle to Rochester’s development. The private sector had reached an impasse on this complex problem. With market rents per square foot in the low double digits, neither renovation nor demolition made financial sense. For a less significant property, the buildings might properly have been padlocked and allowed to slowly decay until some change in circumstance presented a solution that did not require taxpayers to foot the bill. Midtown Plaza, however, is rightly “too big to fail,” a property so large and so central that it holds downtown’s future hostage.
Governor Spitzer has a big task ahead of him: He’s campaigned on the idea that the state can do something for the Upstate economy. We elect governors whom we believe can fix things, right?
So it was with great interest that many of us read the study by consultancy A.T. Kearney aimed at developing an agenda for the state’s economic development arm, Empire State Development. No, this wasn’t presented as state policy, but we all assume that Kearney would be shrewd enough not to issue a report that was seriously at odds with administration thinking.
The Kearney study made a number of good points. But I was disappointed to see them fall into the familiar trap of focusing much of their attention on “sexy” sectors, groups of firms based on technologies that hardly existed a generation before, sectors that every state and nation is chasing like a Labrador after a ball: “New York’s best hope for the future is to focus both statewide and regional investments on emerging sectors—especially nanotechnology, bioscience and cleantech.”
It seems you can find out just about anything you want to know about schools in New York — at least when it comes to searching for data.
The state provides information collected from the school districts on everything from attendance to suspensions to dropouts to graduation to test scores. You can find out the demographic breakdown of the student body and how many students come from families poor enough to qualify for free or reduced school lunches. Now, with the federal No Child Left Behind requirements, the state goes beyond reporting aggregate test scores to give the pass rates for subgroups, including low-income and minority students.
The regularly scheduled session of the New York State Legislature ended this year with no last-minute deals, a lot of unresolved issues and bitter recriminations from Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.
It wasn’t that much different from legislative sessions past, except that in some years lawmakers are able to cobble together more in the way of 11th hour agreements. The bitterness is generally part of the package for whatever matters weren’t resolved.
Except, of course, that Spitzer as a first-term governor had promised to change everything about how Albany operates. That might have produced visions in some people’s minds of a well-oiled legislative machine proceeding in a productive and orderly fashion toward the end of its work.
There wasn’t much press coverage statewide of a recent big decision by the state Senate – all but one of its 62 members voted for a bill to eliminate school property taxes.
What?! Isn’t this a huge deal? School property taxes are the bane of many a homeowner, and the Senate wants to get rid of them. Shouldn’t that be front-page news from Buffalo to Long Island?
It seems many in the Capitol press corps chose to let this story go by because the legislation is what’s known in Albany parlance as a “one-house bill.” That is, it doesn’t have a sponsor in the other house (the Assembly, in this case), and it’s not going anywhere, practically speaking.
Nearly half of schools in New York were recently recognized by the state Education Department as high performers. Why that was so was not immediately clear from the news coverage of the event.
Most of the stories repeated the language from the Ed Department’s news release. The schools were designated, they said, “for meeting all applicable state standards and showing adequate yearly progress in English and math for two years.”
OK, but what are the state standards, and what constitutes “adequate yearly progress”? I decided to find out. Now I understand why the reporters didn’t bother trying to explain the answers in the space allotted by their newspapers.
Just how many men (and women) should be in the room when state leaders try to negotiate a budget, or anything else?
For years, we New Yorkers have been complaining about Albany’s “three men in a room” custom, which brings together the governor, Assembly speaker and Senate leader into a back room to negotiate deals out of the public eye. The sense has been that these three make all the decisions in secret, and legislators and the public have nothing to say about it.
Even before Gov. Eliot Spitzer took office, leaders began making small changes in this practice, occasionally gathering for public leaders’ meetings covered by the press. Spitzer has taken the changes a step further, inviting the leaders of the minority parties in each house and a few other legislators to take part.
The result was a session on May 16 described by reporters present as full of sniping, fingerpointing, grandstanding, taunting and giggling. At one point, Spitzer felt it necessary to assert his authority by saying, “This is my room and we’re going to play by my rules.”
An article published in the current issue of Health Affairs reports on pricing for self-pay patients, one of the only parts of the health care business that is largely “unregulated.” The author, Gerald Anderson, reports that people who pay their own hospital bills get charged more for care than those whose bills are paid by insurance companies or have Medicare or Medicaid coverage.
That’s not a surprise, of course. We’re accustomed to bulk discounts and buying clubs—the “membership has its privileges” sort of thing. Yet the magnitude of the difference should capture your attention: on average, patients without public or private insurance pay three times the Medicare-allowable cost. Anderson doesn’t report the average for New York but in New Jersey self-pay patients are charged a whopping 4.56 times the Medicare-allowable cost. Pennsylvania is right behind with a charge-to-cost ratio of 4.33. California, Alabama and Nevada round out the rest of the top five. At the other end of the scale Wyoming and Maryland hospitals charge self-pay patients 1.85 times and 1.23 times the Medicare-allowable cost. Note: Let me suggest that “cost” is in the eye of the beholder (or, at least, the beholder’s accountant). I don’t claim here that the Medicare number is the right way to define cost—hospitals don’t think so—but I do want to call attention to the discrepancy.
The article isn’t describing a new problem, but it is getting worse. In 1984 the average ratio was 1.35.
Talks on reforming New York’s campaign-finance system recently fell apart in Albany. No surprise there. Of all the possible government reforms, campaign finance could be the most unpopular among legislators, perhaps running even with nonpartisan redistricting.
The reason is obvious. These two powers – to raise buckets of campaign cash and to draw the borders of legislative districts (including those you want and excluding those you don’t) – form the heart of incumbent power in the Legislature. Getting them voted into law by those very same incumbents will be a neat trick.
Yet Gov. Eliot Spitzer promised during last year’s campaign to work to fundamentally change how state government works, and in the past week he has made a slew of proposals following through on that pledge. Not only did he propose to lower various types of campaign contribution limits, he also proposed legislation to overhaul the court system and to revamp election law, including, yes, establishing a redistricting process independent of (though influenced by) the Legislature. (He also introduced a bill to allow marriage between gay people – it was a busy week.)
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The captain has locked the armored cockpit door, the engines whine, and the plane pushes off, rolling away from the gate so another can take its place. Then it stops. After the safety briefing the pilot tells you the bad news — there are 40 or 50 planes ahead of you, all waiting their turn to slip the surly bonds of earth. As if the uncomfortable flight weren’t enough, you are now condemned to spend another hour or two waiting on the ground. Who’s surly now?