Filed under: City Council | Tags: durham city council, emerging tar heel leaders, transit, transportation
Am I offbase in my comment in Railroaded, Part 1? Is that Libertarian throwing out crazy numbers? Well, lets have a look. I direct you to the Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro Metropolitan Planning Organization’s Long Range Transportation Plan (2035).
Specifically, page 80 of the Complete Report (page 87 of the PDF) contains a chart that discusses the costs of the current transportation plan. The projected cost of the bus system – and only the bus system – over the next 25 years is 1.935 billion dollars. Per year, that works out to $77 million a year for our MPO area.
Durham County’s population is 262,000. Orange County’s population is 126,000. If we assume that the population ratio will remain the same as the area grows, Durham County citizens will be paying roughly 2/3rds of that $77 million, or approximately $50 million per year. The next six years will result in $330 million dollars, or a $220 million share for Durham, which works out to approximately $36 million per year. So my comment of “tens of millions of dollars” is accurate according to the Long Range Transportation Plan – the numbers that the city governments put together.
Now, take a quick peek at the current city Budget for Transit, which is dominated by the bus system. Our total 2009-2010 planned transit budget is $13.5 million, with a projected loss of $5.5 million dollars (The Transfers from Other Funds line item, meaning General Fund support for the system due to expenses being significantly higher than revenues – note we’re ignored the Intergovernmental line item). This means that we’re about to triple the budget for our bus system in the next few years. If we assume that system efficiency remains the same, that means that by 2015 our bus system will be losing fifteen million dollars a year. By 2035, at $90 million a year in expenditures, we’ll be losing $37 million a year. Aha! You say, but the system will gain more ridership as it gets bigger, runs more buses, and becomes easier to use … right? It’s a chicken and egg problem, right? The system has to be comprehensive enough to be useful. Well, if you think that, look at page 52 of the LRTP (page 59 of the PDF). DATA ridership is projected to increase from approximately 13,000 riders per weekday to 47,000 riders per day in 2035. Accounting for 50% population growth and assuming that a similar percentage of new citizens will choose to ride the bus, the number shrinks to a doubling of ridership. There’s also another minor problem … as a percentage of trips, as outlined in the chart, the use of the bus system jumps from 2.6% of trips to … 3.1% of trips (section 2.1 of the chart, Mode Share Measures, Number Mode Choice – All Trips). For this, we will be paying seven times our current Transit budget. I think it’s much more likely that, by 2035, we’ll be subsidizing DATA by far more than $37 million a year; these numbers come from the people who support the plan, and you should know after the last thirty years or so that government plans have a habit of costing more than projected.
I dunno, does this sound like a good deal to you?
Filed under: City Council | Tags: durham city council, emerging tarheel leaders, transit, transportation
This is a post I wrote in response to a comment on the Independent Weekly endorsement story:
Yes, it might be a half cent tax, but it will extract tens of millions of dollars from the people in our city and our county. This money does not appear out of thin air, it comes from us – money that would have gone to jobs, businesses, housing and other useful economic activities. Instead of those useful things, you would have us expand a government-run mass transit system that consistently loses millions of dollars every year, not to mention strongly contributing to pollution by running mostly-empty buses that get about five miles per gallon of fuel. Most of the people you mentioned, like nurses, students, and retail workers do not ride the bus now – our ridership is pathetically low.
There are many other ways to get from point A to point B, many of which are cheaper than our subsidized bus system. Like I did for two years when I worked at IBM, you can ride a bicycle. It’s good exercise, doesn’t pollute at all, and is far cheaper than the bus; a useable bike can be had almost for free from the Durham Bike Co-op. Or, as I do now, you can buy a scooter for a small fraction of what a car costs and use that to commute. My scooter gets over 100mpg and I pay less than $5 a week in gas, which is cheaper than the bus, pollutes less, and is far more convenient.
This isn’t about making people walk, or putting them down because they don’t make a lot of money. This is about being responsible with the money we take from our citizens – all of them. The sales tax, despite the exemptions, is highly regressive and hits low-income citizens hard at a time when they can least afford it. This is also about integrity and being able to admit when we’re wrong – when we have created a program that simply doesn’t work and can’t work as designed, no matter how much money we throw at it. Either we need a system that can support itself, or we need to look at other alternatives.
If you haven’t noticed already, early voting is open. Go vote – I did today at the Board of Elections downtown. That is all.
Filed under: City Council | Tags: drew for ward 2, durham city council, durham news, frank hyman
This is a letter to the editor I sent in response to Frank Hyman’s Saturday column in the Durham News:
In Frank Hyman’s “Growing the Grapes” column on Sept 12th, he puts forward two assertions: that broad support is necessary to win office in Durham, and that an apprenticeship on one of Durham’s many advisory boards and commissions is likely the best path to obtain that support. He’s right about the need for broad support, but I must respectfully disagree with his second point. As Mr. Hyman noted, there are many ways to learn the various skills necessary to be effective on the city council. I hope that the citizens of Durham will take note of what my opponent’s decades of “civic apprenticeships” and multiple endorsements have brought us: sluggish response to our critical water supply issues, high taxes, an enormous volume of city ordinances, the constant expenditure of taxpayer money on spurious projects like skate parks and various forms of corporate welfare, the Rolling Hills development debacle, and numerous commissions and boards that seem to recommend a rule for nearly every aspect of our lives. “Deciding how high fences should be” is exactly the kind of micro-managing paternalistic petty bureaucracy that, as a Libertarian and a City Council member, I would be working to remove rather than participate in.
Filed under: City Council | Tags: durham city council, Republican Liberty Caucus, RLCNC
I received the endorsement of the Republican Liberty Caucus of North Carolina, which is a group of Republicans dedicated to libertarian ideals. My thanks to everyone I met and I appreciate the support!
Filed under: City Council | Tags: centerfest, durham city, durham city council, Libertarian
This week’s schedule:
Tuesday: 10:30 AM, NCCU Candidate Forum
Tuesday: 6:30PM, Mike Munger’s talk at Duke . Mike ran for governor in 2008 and is the main reason Libertarians have ballot access today.
Thursday: 5:30PM, Triangle Apartment Association Reception
Saturday: Centerfest
Sunday: Centerfest
If you’re interested in talking with me, please stop by – especially at Centerfest. I’m also available via email and phone at any time.
Filed under: City Council | Tags: durham city council, growth matters, pig pickin, triangle community coalition
I will be speaking at the TriCC Pig Pickin’ tonight at the Briar Creek Country Club, along with a lot of other local candidates. Tickets are still available. All I can promise is that my speech will be short. :)
Filed under: City Council | Tags: broken window fallacy, durham city council, economic incentives, the know bookstore
The Herald-Sun is reporting on the controversy surrounding the city financing of the building that houses the Know Bookstore on Fayetteville Street.
I found this quote to be quite interesting:
“Negotiations between a landlord and a tenant [are] a private matter,” said Larry Hester, Denise Hester’s husband and another backer of McLaughlin’s application. “Although Bruce has asked for more space, it’s a matter of negotiation between the landlord and the tenant, and not a public issue.”
He’s absolutely right, of course. The city has no business being involved in a landlord-tenant negotiation, unless there is a violation of the law. However, if you believe that, then it should logically follow that the city should not be involved in the financing of a private business either. Once you accept that it is okay for taxpayers to finance your private business, then you shouldn’t be surprised when the elected agents of those taxpayers start poking around.
Frédéric Bastiat was a classical liberal economist in the early 1800’s. One of his most famous writings was a story that described the Broken Window fallacy. In it, he described how some economic costs are things that are unseen – workers that are never hired, expansions that never occur, trades that are never made because of a previous cost.
There are unseen costs to the city subsidizing private businesses. This money is tax money, like most government funding. If it hadn’t been taxed, it would have been saved or spent by the citizens of Durham – perhaps at the very same bookstore that is the subject of this discussion. When you tax for economic development, you incur these unseen costs. You’re not actually adding anything of value to the economy, because you have to take to give. But because the taking is small, and the giving is large, it provides the illusion that this is “economic development”.
You also incur other costs that are not as obvious. This process of private business subsidies will of course generate contention for that money, and this is a process that is inevitably political – we’re witnessing that right now. The city council has a limited amount of time, and when it is considering a landlord-tenant dispute and the viability of subsidizing a business, it is not working on other things. Whether or not you think we have better things to be working on is your choice. I think we do. And those things are passing us by unseen.
Filed under: City Council | Tags: durham city council, durham ward 2, independent weekly, indy questionnaire, indyweek
My Independent Weekly interview is up. Many thanks to Walt Keay and Bill Pollak for comments on my first drafts, and Jeremy Thornhill again for that picture – I love it.
Filed under: City Council | Tags: David Price, health care reform, Libertarian, town hall
As I listened and talked last night at the Town Hall meeting with Congressman Price, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the rhetoric that was coming from the stage and the crowd. I was strongly reminded of why I became a Libertarian.
The reality of the situation is that there is nothing stopping us today from having universal health care. There are many free privately supported clinics that offer no-charge services, such as the one run by the doctor on the panel. There is nothing stopping people from donating money and time to these clinics; indeed, it is encouraged by our tax laws.
But the people arguing for this health care reform plan are not satisfied with voluntary support. They want everyone to support their program, even the people who disagree with them. And they are perfectly willing to use the law to force people to do so.
If a private citizen tried to do this, it would be considered theft. Does it suddenly become acceptable when the majority votes for it? If a crowd accosts you in the street and votes that you should pay for a meal for the whole group, is that not theft? Many people last night would say yes, that makes it all right to take by force in order to help people. They see it as enforcing a moral duty – everyone should give to charity, so we’ll make everyone give to charity.
Yes, we have a responsibility to help those in need. But this does not justify committing further injustice in our quest to make things better. No matter how you dress it up, many wrongs do not make a right.
EDIT: My wife pointed out that “free clinic” might be potentially misleading if the group receives public funds, so I edited that portion to make it clear that the panelists indicated that the clinic was supported by private charity.
