Standard unit of risk

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health has determined that Amherst is at "High" risk of mosquito-borne illnesses, and recommends that we all stay inside at dusk.

Yeah... but I like going outside at dusk.

The incentives for the Health Department are to exaggerate the risks, because when somebody gets Eastern Equine Encephalitis and dies they can (correctly) point to their High Risk Warning and say "not our fault, we told you so."

But maybe the risk really is high, and we ought to slather ourselves with DEET before walking downtown for dessert.

I wish there was a standard, easy-to-understand unit of risk, so the Heath Department could say something like "We estimate spending an evening in downtown Amherst with no mosquito repellant is 4-10 RUs (risk units)."

Where 1 risk unit is something we can all understand-- maybe "the risk associated with driving 100 miles on the highway."

Or "1 risk unit is the overall risk of dying in an accident in any given year."

I don't know what the right baseline would be; it doesn't really matter what is chosen, what matters is making it easy to compare the risks of things relative to each other.  The Health Department says we're at High risk... but High compared to what?

Bully Petition

I can't help it; it seems like I always look at things a little sideways.

Case in point: the petition to get the MPAA to give the movie "Bully" a PG-13 rating.

The argument is:

Because of the R rating, most kids won’t get to see this film. No one under 17 will be allowed to see the movie, and the film won’t be allowed to be screened in American middle schools or high schools.

My first thought is "Darn Right! Bullying is bad! Where do I sign?"

But then I start to wonder: is that true? Does an R rating really mean it won't be allowed to be shown in schools?

Maybe the real problem is inflexible school policies that rely exclusively on MPAA ratings instead of letting teachers decide whether or not their classes are mature enough to hear the "f-word."

So I sent an email to the Amherst schools administration and got a very helpful response:

Teachers are asked to check in with their principals before showing a movie that has not been shown in the past as part of a unit of study. You can go to the arps website under school committee policy manual to read them.

And, indeed, the policy for Amherst Schools has nothing to do with MPAA ratings. Bravo! I'm glad we don't have one-size-fits-all policies.

Of course my third thought on all of this is:  I wonder if showing movies about the bad effects of bullying is an effective way to decrease bullying. It sure seems like it should, but without data from a controlled experiment, I wouldn't bet that it does.

Zoning. Lots of Zoning.

Tomorrow night Amherst Town Meeting takes up Article 17, which rezones a couple of "Village Centers" to encourage more mixed-use, walkable, environmentally-friendly development.

The Sustainable Amherst website has a great summary of the reasons it is a good idea.

There are a couple of different things going on in the Article-- first is the proposal to change the zoning. That will bring out the NIMBYs who are afraid of change (which, as I've said before, is completely rational). I hope they can overcome their fear and think about all the nice things that might get built. I really enjoy being able to walk to coffee shops and restaurants and Captain Candy and the Farmer's Market, and I would think people living in North Amherst would enjoy more places to hang out and shop, too.

The second thing going on in Article 17 I'm not so enthusiastic about-- "Form-based zoning." The idea is to write zoning rules to encourage the creation of neighborhoods that 'feel' a desired way.

I'm not enthusiastic just because I would rather take a 'creative destruction' approach-- I believe that if you make it easier to redevelop, then neighborhoods will evolve over time towards whatever their residents most desire. I worry that adding Even More Pages to our Zoning Bylaw will just make redevelopment more difficult and expensive, and will give Nimby neighbors more opportunities to nit-pick a project to death.

But maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe Form-Based Zoning is a really good idea and will speed the process of redevelopment along, so you get fewer strip malls along the way towards tomorrow's quaint, historic village centers that everybody adores. I'm willing to give it a try, and plan on voting for Article 17 tomorrow night.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (tree)

We're hosting Christmas for Michele's siblings; this is an email she sent them a couple of days ago.


Ok so I learned something this year.  Don't pick out a tree during a torrential rain storm.
The only day we had enough time to get a tree and set it up was last Sunday.  So even though it was raining -- off we went.

Well the heavens pretty much opened up the moment we arrived at the tree lot. Fine.  "We won't melt" Robin declared.  Fine.  Now I'm shamed into being a trooper by my 10 year old.   Except she has a hood and I cleverly forgot a hat. 

So off we went up and down the aisles of trees in the pouring rain.  You know what?  In the pouring cold rain all trees pretty much look the same.  So when you've forgotten a rain hat you tend to make the tree picking out process go as quickly as possible.  Robin's one constraint was that the tree be nice and bushy, so you can't see the trunk.

Upon spotting the first bushy tree
"That one looks good" says me
"OOoo" says Will (for the record he said this about every tree)
"This one is nice and bushy" says Robin
"Ok look there is daddy coming back from the ATM, let's get this one" says me as I scurry to the boy scout hut. 

The boy scouts were not out in the lot selling the trees and assisting in the customers' decision making as they normally do.  No. They were smart. They were in the boy scout hut huddled next to the wood burning stove.  Our declaration to the scouts that we'd picked out our tree was not met with joy over another sales, the benefits of which would go into the smore fund for the summer's camping adventure.  No, I believed that one of them actually groaned.  You see they were obligated carry the tree to our car and secure it to the roof with twine. 

Skip ahead a few hours.  We put the tree in the garage to 'dry' off a bit and now Gavin has carried it into the house and to the living room.  He is positioning it while I turn the dang little screws on the stand to secure the tree.

One screw isn't meeting resistance. 

me: "Gavin. There is a hole in this tree."
Gavin: "A hole?"
me: "yeah part of the trunk is rotted or something"
Gavin "well let's turn it 45˚ so the screw can bite into wood"  <-- a problem solver that Gavin!

We did and the stand is stable but the hole is still there.  And... the tree dropped two dustpans' worth of needles within a few hours.  I've never seen so much debris from a fresh tree.   Then I noticed several dead branches.  Also, if you touch the back side of the tree the needles readily fall.

No, we are not getting another tree.  This one will just have to tough it out.  We've got the lights up and the decorations and no one is to touch the back side of the tree.

And so you are all welcome for Christmas but don't make fun of our tree.  It looks fine.  It is doing its job of holding up lights and ornaments. A tree doesn't need needles to do hold up lights and ornaments, just branches.  Our tree has branches....

So don't make fun of our Christmas tree.
It isn't half dead it is..... health impaired.

-Ish

Fall Town Meeting : done in two!

We bravely forged ahead Wednesday night, and finished Fall Town Meeting in two nights.

I did something I usually don't do at Town Meeting-- I voted for a symbolic, advisory, "we the people of the Town" national-policy-interfering warrant article.

Yup, I voted to "Bring our War Dollars Home."   The rational side of me says I should have done what I usually do-- abstain, because I don't think national political issues belong at Town Meeting.

But I'm really pissed off at how much money the United States spends on the military in general and wars, and troops, overseas in particular.  If you look at polls of unpopular government spending, "foreign aid" is always near the top of the list.  And if you think about it, most of the military budget is really foreign aid, "defending" countries that are perfectly capable of defending themselves.

So, since I'm really pissed off, and since the warrant article specifically related national military spending to the Town's budget... I voted with my heart.

The only other controversial article this time around was Article 8, which tried to make some concrete changes to our zoning laws so developers are given incentives to do what the new Master Plan says people in Amherst want (and disincentives if they don't).

I hated it when I first saw it.  16 pages of new zoning regulations... bleuch!

But then I read it, and couldn't find a single thing in it that seems like a bad idea.  And the general approach is exactly the right idea-- encourage more of what we want (affordable housing, infill development, environmentally and historically sensitive development, etc) and discourage what we don't (McMansion subdivisions sprawling into open space).

Most of Town Meeting also thought it was a good idea, too... but it failed to get the required two-thirds by ten votes.  The BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) minority defeated it.

I hope a modified version comes back before Town Meeting.  It would be tragic if the current Master Plan suffers the same fate as our last master plan (the Select Committe on Goals, which I wrote about a couple of years ago), and we continue with "business as usual" for another 40 years.

S.A.F.E. statistics

So I get this letter sent home in Robin's backpack:

TO: Parents and/or Custodians of Fourth Grade STudents

The Amherst Fire Department, ... blah blah blah... will be presenting a fire safety awareness program to your child. This program is funded through a state grant knows as S.A.F.E. (Student Awareness of Fire Education).

OK... cool, I suppose. I don't like the cutesy government acronym, but that's just me being cynical. I would kind of like to know how much school time was going to be spent (hours? days?) on Fire Education and the letter doesn't tell me that, but OK.

Then they push several of my pet peeve buttons:

Please consider the following tragic statistics:

1. Nearly 10% of the 52 fire deaths in Massachusetts in 2005 were children unde r the age of 18.
2. 75% of fire victims died in the so-called safety of their own homes.
3. Nearly one-quarter of these deaths occurred in homes with no working smoke detectors.
4. Unsafe disposal of smoking materials was the leading cause of residential fire fatalities in 2005, just as it is every year

"Nearly 10% of 52?" Why not just say "5 kids were killed in fires in 2005"? Even better, how about telling me how many kids were killed last year, or maybe the average number of kids killed over the last 5 years? Was 2005 a really bad year for fires?

I guess these statistics are supposed to make me appreciate the importance of Fire Awareness Education, but I'd summarize them as: A handful of kids die in fires in Massachusetts every year, mostly because some parents are careless with their cigarettes.

We don't smoke and our house has working, hard-wired smoke detectors on every floor. Phew, looks like there's approximately a 0% chance we'll have a house fire.

Fewer people are killed in fires these days than ever before-- maybe because of programs like S.A.F.E. But I doubt it; I bet if I dug out the long-term trends of number-of-kids-killed-in-fires in states with programs like S.A.F.E. versus states without student fire education programs I'd see exactly the same trends.

But what's the harm? S.A.F.E. only costs about a million dollars a year, if it saves just one life every few years it is worth it.

Then again, if it distracts parents from the real risks to their kids maybe it is doing more harm than good.

Progressive Doom and Gloom

Last week the Pioneer Valley chapter of MassBike celebrated bike-to-work week by showing off a bunch of cool bikes and screening some cool videos at the Jones library.

One of the videos they showed was a compelling little video by Annie Leonard called The Story of Stuff.

"The Story of Stuff Project’s mission is to build a strong, diverse, decentralized, cross-sector movement to transform systems of production and consumption to serve ecological sustainability and social wellbeing."

I agree with their mission; who wouldn't? I even agree with their premise-- that parts of our current system are broken; we've got plenty of laws and regulations that harm the environment and create social ills-- and I agree with their conclusion: that we're overly obsessed with "stuff."

But... the video gives me the skeptical willies. I've seen enough propaganda videos to have a pretty good sense of when I'm being manipulated with cherry-picked facts and carefully worded half-truths that reinforce my pre-existing beliefs and fears.

For example, in the first minute of the video, the narrator claims that we're running out of resources-- "the truth is it’s a system in crisis. And the reason it is in crisis is that it is a linear system and we live on a finite planet and you can not run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely."

Ummm, no, that's a straw-man argument. We're getting better and better at creating better and better things with the stuff we have. We're not going to run out of trees or atoms or electrons or ideas any time soon.

The capitalist materials production system adapts. It is not linear; price signals move up and down the production chain, creating feedback loops that make the whole thing wonderfully efficient at giving people what they want.

I'm with Russ Roberts; I think a lot of things people spend money on are dumb and wasteful and useless. I don't spend money on beanie-baby collectibles or fine art or fancy cars, and I think we'd all be better off if people spent less money on sports memorabilia and donated more to worthwhile charities.

But claiming that our consumerist culture is headed for a crisis because we're subjected to too much advertising or because we're not recycling more is wrong.

Electronic voting Luddite

After Town Meeting ended Monday night I stayed for a demonstration of an electronic voting system. The idea is that maybe investing some money in high-tech gadgets will make Amherst Town Meeting faster and will save the Town Clerk the work of recording the paper ballots we use for Tally votes.

That's a good idea, and I'm glad electronic voting is being considered. But like a lot of good ideas, I think it might be destroyed on the rocks of reality.

First, it took something like 20 minutes to get the electronic voting software up and running. Not a good start!

Once running, I thought the system was pretty darn spiffy, and easy to use. But a few people had trouble, and managed to be confused even after what I thought was a clear explanation of how the voting works (press the button to vote: your name on the screen changes color. Press an invalid button: your name turns yellow, otherwise it cycles
through a rainbow of colors every time you push.)

Once people understood it, it is extremely fast; we completed a test vote in 30 seconds.

If the system was going to be used for dozens of votes per year, then the costs might justify the benefits. The first one or two TM sessions would likely be chaotic as people are trained or re-trained on how to use the clickers, but after using them a few times I think people would figure them out.

If it's used to just to replace Tally/Standing votes, then I think it's a bad idea. We're more likely to spend more time fussing with the technology ("Point of Order: my battery is dead") and training new Town Meeting members how to use the clickers than the time saved. If I recall correctly, we had just one Tally vote and three (or was it two?) standing votes at the past Town Meeting.

And the up-front cost isn't trivial ($12,000-$22,000).

I was going to write about possible security concerns, but assuming all vote results would become public (just as tally votes are made public), I don't think that would be a problem. What WOULD be a problem is people accidentally pressing the wrong buttons on their clickers, and then suspecting that the system got hacked (or that there's a bug) when they see the vote results and their vote is the opposite of what they intended. With no paper trail, it will be impossible to know what happened, and it will take just a couple of incidents for people to lose confidence in the system.

So I guess I'm an electronic voting Luddite. Keep the paper ballots, and instead of spending more time on electronic voting spend some time figuring out how to make the sound system at Town Meeting better.

Real-time captioning would be wonderful, too-- that'd give us a transcript of the meeting, accessibility for the hearing impaired, and closed captioning for the ACTV broadcast...

To Solar or Not to Solar...

Last week Town Meeting approved giving Community Preservation Act money to Habitat for Humanity to help build affordable housing. $20,000 or so will go towards solar panels on the roof.

I've been tempted to install solar panels (either photovoltaic or hot-water or maybe both) on our roof, so the fact that Habitat decided it's a good idea caught my interest.

It is definitely a good idea for them; it is a very clever way of pre-paying the electricity bill for the lower-income homeowners. Pay $20,000 now in capital costs (which, because solar panels are "stuff" and not a "service", are eligible for all sorts of subsidies) and save the homeowners $X-thousand dollars in electricity bills over the next Y years. Even if it doesn't make economic sense (if the net-present-value of X is less than $20,000) it fits their charitable mission to make home ownership more affordable for lower-income folks and it gives their donors the warm fuzzies to know their money is building green houses.

I don't know if it is a good idea for me. Should I spend a bunch of money and install solar panels on my roof now? Lots of people who will tell me "Yes! Absolutely!" ... but they're either well-meaning-but-possibly-misguided environmentalists or companies that want me to pay them a bunch of money to do the installation. Maybe I'd pay $20,000 to a company who will go out of business in a year or three, and maybe the system I buy is obsolete or breaks in a year or three. Maybe I won't save as much in electricity costs as they claim because most of our electricity usage is at night.

Maybe I'll end up paying an extra couple thousand bucks in a few years when we need to reshingle our roof because the roofers have to disassemble and then reassemble the solar panels.

If solar power is a slam-dunk financial win, they why isn't every Wal-Mart in America covered in solar panels?

I'm a technological optimist, and I think that solar panels will be a slam-dunk financial win pretty soon. They probably already are in sunny places like Arizona. The fact that companies are springing up with "residential solar lease" plans is a really good sign, and if I can find a residential solar lease company that operates in Western Massachusetts, offers leases of less than 10 years, and can point me to some satisfied customers I'd definitely sign up.

The Pension Problem

So we've promised our public employees pension packages that were supposed to be funded with profits from AAA-rated, regulator-approved investments.

Oops.

The Town of Amherst (and Hampshire County and just about every other public pension system around the country and the world) has a big, looming pension problem. Last week at Town Meeting we were urged by the chair of the Select Board to support a bill that gives towns ten more years to fully fund their pension plans (from 2030 to 2040).

I'm a "pull the band-aid off fast" kind of guy, so my first reaction is that's a bad idea. If we've promised benefits that we can't afford, well, tough cookies! A promise is a promise, and we should cut spending now to ensure we can fulfill our long-term obligations.

But the very fact that this is a widespread problem makes me wonder what is really going to happen. It is great to be fiscally responsible, until you're forced to take your hard-earned savings and give it to your irresponsible neighbors.

So I wonder: maybe Massachusetts should push off the day of reckoning until 2040. If I had to bet, I'd wager that the next major financial crisis and Federal bailout will involve public employee pensions, and I'd wager that the more irresponsible states (California, I'm looking at you) will benefit more.

Bravo Mr. Shaffer!

The most controversial issue on this season's Town Meeting warrant is sure to be the "Patterson property."

Mr. Shaffer, Amherst's Town Manager, wants to spend up to $120,000 to jump-start the development of some land in North Amherst. This is controversial for at least two reasons: first, there's a minority of town meeting that is against any development anywhere in Amherst. And then there's another group of people who just don't like the idea of giving tax money to a private landowner to help them sell and develop their property.

I might be in that second group-- I haven't entirely made up my mind. I'm generally skeptical of top-down, "if we build it the tax revenue will come" plans, but I do think that a big research park on this property would be good for the Town (it is a good location, near the University and highway 116, and would diversify the Town's tax base, which I suspect we'll find out is important if the State budget gets worse and Beacon Hill decides to drastically cut the UMass budget).

But even though I might vote against the warrant article, I'm glad the Town Manager proposed it. He's consistently shown an entrepreneurial streak that I think is great for the Town:

• He got lambasted a few years back for questioning the Boy Scout's use of Kendrick Park to sell Christmas trees. Messing with a cherished Amherst tradition was probably a bad idea, but I think it is OK to experiment and fail, and it is OK to ask hard questions like "what's the policy for private use of public spaces?"
• Speaking of Kendrick Park, he's had the department of public works create an ice skating rink by flooding a flat spot in the winter. That's after a failed experiment to create a rink on the Town Common (turns out the Common isn't flat enough for a rink).
• He's actively working on developing or redeveloping places in Town where it makes sense, like the former "fraternity row" on North Pleasant Street.
• And, best of all, he's implemented rewards for Town employees who come up with ideas that generate revenue, save the Town money, or improve services.

So: Bravo, Mr. Shaffer! Keep experimenting; I think you've done a great job trying out low-cost ways of making Amherst a better place.

---

UPDATE 12 May: I'm wrong again! The Patterson property isn't the most controversial issue, because the Town Manager (wisely, I think) saw the confusion and controversy and decided to withdraw it from consideration this time around.

Three cool tools

1. Localocracy. Email lists, blogs and online bulletin boards are all used to talk about local politics, but they're all less-than-ideal forums for ideas. Discussions easily wander off topic, anonymous people can make nasty personal attacks and the people with the most time on their hands (or who are the most willing to spend hours reading blogs or mailing lists) can overwhelm the discussion.

Localocracy is an Amherst start-up that's trying a new approach for discussing local issues, and they're using Spring Town Meeting as a "beta test." Any registered Amherst voter can sign up for free and give their opinions, and anybody at all can go and see what people in Amherst are talking about.

2. Dropbox. Create a folder that's shared on all of your Windows, Mac and Linux machines (and on your iPhone, if you like). Michele tried a couple of solutions before settling on Dropbox-- she'd email herself files before heading home (WAY to easy to get confused about which was the latest version) and she tried carrying an external USB disk back and forth to work (inconvenient and losing or dropping the disk or thumb drive would be a minor disaster). Dropbox has been working perfectly for her; it's easy and the first two gigabytes of storage is free.

3. LastPass. One of my technical interests is computer security, but until recently I was pretty lazy about passwords. I used one "low security" password (easily guessed, something like "password123") for all the websites where I didn't really care about security. I'm not terribly worried about somebody guessing my hulu.com password and adding "The Bad Girls Club" to my viewing queue. And I used a "high security," not-easily-guessed password for everything else (banking sites, online stock broker, etc).

OpenID is starting to solve the "every website in the world wants me to create a new username and password" problem, but until OpenID is supported everywhere I'll be using LastPass. It lets me have a different, super-secure password for every website I visit, all protected by one super-secure password that is all I need to remember. It works on Mac, Windows and Linux (and on your iPhone or BlackBerry if you upgrade to the $1-per-month Premium version), and even though all my passwords are stored encrypted on the Lastpass servers, my master password never leaves my computers so it's as secure as possible.

They even make it easy to export all of your passwords so I can back them up into my safe-deposit box (or in an encrypted folder on my hard drive) just in case LastPass ever goes out of business. Nice!

Why not a billion dollar override?

In 1980 Proposition 2½ was passed by Massachusetts voters.

But Amherst voters were against it by a 3 to 1 margin.

I wonder what would have happened if the 1981 Select Board had asked those same voters to approve a billion dollar override. That would have been an effective way of vetoing Prop 2½. A billion dollar override would mean the Select Board and Town Meeting would have to come up with budgets the way they did before-- decide how much money is needed, how much people were willing to pay, and then convincing a majority of Town Meeting that the budgets are justified.

For true public goods, that's actually a reasonably good process. But Prop 2½ screwed it up.

I wrote about one study that showed some unintended consequences a couple of years ago:

"It takes time for various levels of government to institute and implement changes, but following a brief lag, California and Massachusetts began to make up those lost revenues, largely through rapidly growing non-tax fees and charges. During a period of "tax revolt," these revenue sources were both less constrained and less visible to voters than taxes."
From: A tale of two tax jurisdictions: the surprising effects of California's Proposition 13 and Massachusetts' Proposition 2 ½ - property tax

I think another unintended consequence was the centralization of funding at the State level. Our schools and Towns are increasingly reliant on money from the State instead of local property taxes, and I think Amherst is worse off because of it.

Maybe that's OK-- maybe Holyoke is much better off because more education funding is funneling through the State education bureaucracy and being spread around from rich places like Amherst to poorer places in the state. Ummm, no, after 30 years: Holyoke, Springfield, ranked as 2 lowest performing school districts in Mass. (September 14, 2009)

So: why not a billion dollar override? I'm only half serious, although the more I think about it the more the idea appeals to me. Either we trust the Select Board, School Committee, and Town Meeting to be fiscally responsible... or we're screwed, because even with Prop 2½ they could decide to take all our property taxes and build a monorail to Belchertown.

Article 14

Should Amherst Town Meeting:

1) Urge Congress to repeal the ban on releasing cleared [Guantanamo] detainees into the United States and
2) Welcome such cleared detainees into our community as soon as the ban is lifted

I'd say No, and Yes.

"No" because I'm a big fan in individuals standing up for what they believe in. Not so much for a group of people to get together, vote, and then pretend that just because a majority of the people voted a certain way EVERYBODY agrees. Or, worse, that a whole town agrees.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's a grand Town Meeting tradition going back hundreds of years to express collective opinions on all sorts of issues. There are lots of grand old traditions that I disagree with ("marriage is for a man and a woman," for example).

"Yes" because if they've done nothing illegal then they should be free. I might not invite them over to dinner, so "welcome" might not be exactly the right word, but there are lots of people who live in Amherst already that I wouldn't invite over to dinner-- religious zealots of all flavors, obnoxious frat boys and 9/11 truthers spring to mind.

I'll miss Zone-A-Palooza 2009

Fall Town Meeting starts up in a couple of weeks, and I'll be unable to attend. I couldn't resist looking through the warrant, though.

There's a lot of stuff in there; 23 pages of mostly zoning changes. Lots of reasonable changes to Amherst's crazy zoning laws (including things that seem obvious to me, like saying that the surface area of a sign doesn't include the sticks you use to hold up the sign or that an office shared by two doctors is NOT the same as a "medical center").

I'm kinda bothered that the crazy zoning laws will get a little bit crazier; half of the warrant (12 pages) describes a brand-new zoning district ("Business-Neighborhood"). Do we really need another zoning district? We've got 15 already, including five different business districts. Maybe it's not completely crazy; Northampton's got 15 zoning districts, too; if the B-N zone passes, Amherst will be one better!

If I were at the TM vote on this, I'd probably abstain. I don't have any evidence that adding yet another zoning district would do any harm; maybe giving planners (and Town Meeting) lots of zoning options so they can pick exactly the right set of regulations for any given piece of land makes the Town a better place.

But I doubt it. I think making the zoning laws more complicated will just make lawyers richer and will decrease the number of people who understand what is allowed where. And will make Town Meeting even more annoying, as we all wonder "what's the difference between the B-N and B-VC districts?" for the seventeenth time.

Umass hotel taxes heading to Town Hall

The line-item veto documents are on the web, and it looks like the hotel tax changes all made it through unscathed. So next time your annoying relatives are in town, put them up at the Campus Center Hotel.

Keep your fingers crossed...

CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

So I grabbed the latest state budget document, mostly to see how the wording for the local-option meals tax ended up. Towns will have the option of adding an extra three-quarters of one percent tax on meals, with the money coming directly back to them.

Then I stumbled across this odd little bit of legalese:

SECTION 50. The first paragraph of section 2 of chapter 64G of the General Laws, as so appearing, is hereby amended by striking out clause (b) and inserting in place thereof the following clause:- (b) lodging accommodations, including dormitories, at religious, charitable, educational and philanthropic institutions; provided, however, that this exemption shall not apply to accommodations provided by any such institution at a hotel or motel operated by the institution.

Section 64G is the Hotel Tax law. It looks like the UMass hotel loophole is getting closed.

---

I wrote the above ten days ago, and have been sitting on this post since then, afraid that calling attention to the UMass hotel loophole might possibly mean that it wouldn't actually get closed. It still might not happen; I haven't seen the list of line-item vetoes in the budget that Patrick signed this afternoon.

Budget basics, Part 3 : Baumol's Cost Disease

My friendly neighborhood economist (and fellow town meeting member) thinks my skepticism on "Level Services" budgets is unwarranted, and that using inflation-adjusted per-capita spending as a metric isn't fair.

Here's the rationale: Government suffers from "Baumol's Cost Disease" -- it has to pay ever-higher employee salaries to compete with private industry. Private industry pays higher salaries (relative to the overall cost of stuff) because innovations (especially in manufacturing) make their employees more productive.

The government, and other service industries (Baumol's original 1967 study was of orchestras), can't use technology to be more productive, so the costs of government rise faster than inflation over time.

I'm biased; I'm a high-tech software entrepreneur. It's hard for me to put aside my belief that competition and technology inevitably leads to higher productivity and lower costs.

And not all economists agree that Baumol's Cost Disease is at the heart of increased government spending:

The bottom line is that governments have grown in recent decades, that they did not do so earlier, and that economists do not really know why. -- Gordon Tullock

Then there's this widely cited 2002 research paper:

We find that labor productivity in services industries has grown as fast recently as it has in the rest of the economy, and that the major contributor was an unprecedented acceleration in multifactor productivity. Baumol’s Disease has been cured. -- Jack E. Triplett and Barry P. Bosworth

That paper notes that our biggest local expense, "education", bucks the overall trend (productivity for the education sector declined from 1995-2000).

So I'm not sure what to think. Did the information technology revolution leave teachers behind because that's just the nature of teaching? Or did lack of competition in the education market make them less innovative than (for example) lawyers? Did college education productivity (where there are lots of private schools) fall as much as primary education productivity (where the government has a near monopoly)? Do countries with a more competitive education market (like Sweden or Chile) also suffer from declining productivity over time?

And does any of this really matter for Amherst? We're stuck with the system we've got, and we compete for teachers (and firefighters and building inspectors...) with the rest of the towns and cities in New England. Maybe in a perfect world government spending wouldn't rise any faster than inflation. But we don't live in a perfect world.

The Spaghetti Didn't Stick

Town Meeting last night was really painful.

We talked about potholes for a while. Whaddya know-- turns out people don't like them, but there's not enough money to fix them properly.

And then we talked about Pools. And recreation for poor kids. And how the Town should give money to private charities because that's just WHO WE ARE.

We saw barely-controlled outrage that closing War Memorial pool is basically a done-deal-- even if Town Meeting voted to keep it open, it's too late to repair it, hire lifeguards, and get it open for the summer. Fair enough, except that the outrage was directed at the Finance Committee, who were asked to do the impossible this year-- they had to come up with a budget when we have, even now, only a vague idea of how much funding we'll get from the State.

And then we got five different proposals to increase the Community Services budget from the Finance Committee / Select board recommendation (+$8,000, +$10,000, +$24,000, +$80,000, and +$175,000) and one to cut it in half. Talk about throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping some of it sticks!

I don't know if all of the motions to increase were some kind of coordinated strategy or not. If it was a coordinated strategy, it didn't work-- Town Meeting (and I) voted 'No' to all the proposed increases and passed the FC/SB recommendation.

Coordinated or not, the end result was a lot of tired and grumpy Town Meeting members.

Some friendly advice to the well-intentioned people who spoke so passionately last night: spend your political capital more carefully next time.

Budget basics, Part 2

Tonight is the start of Town Meeting Budget Bash, 2009 Edition. To prepare I've been looking at inflation-adjusted per-capita spending over the last five years (I haven't had time to go to the Jones library or Town Hall and dig out old financial statements).

Results are over there in the spreadsheet on the right. According to the audited year-end financial statements and the Census bureau's population estimates, between 2004 and 2008 the Town has increased real spending per resident about $200$130. Spending has gone up a little bit every year, even as the population in Amherst creeps down a little faster than the population is increasing (we'll find out next year how accurate the Census Bureau's estimates are; the population decline doesn't affect the bottom line very much).

High on my TODO list: get budget numbers going back before Prop 2 1/2 was passed, and figure out how this year's proposed budget fits in; are we looking at cutting services back to a 2004 level or a 1984 level? And where is that extra $130 per person per year going-- salaries? Health insurance? More services? Pensions?

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UPDATED 16 June: A few months ago the UMass Donahue Institute convinced the census bureau that they were underestimating Amherst's population.