The House passed a limited version (more to come, they promise) of pension reform last night. I note one particular amendment that got added on the floor: FAGAN AMENDMENT – EFFECTIVE DATE: Rep. Fagan offered amendment # 48 providing that only employees hired after July 1, 2010 will be affected by provisions of the bill prohibiting public officials earning less than $5,000 from crediting that time toward their pensions. The amendment was adopted. [Provided by State House News, sub. req.] As our 2006 paper noted: According to the legislators’ biographies on the General Court website, at least 62 out of 200 representatives and senators served in one or more of these local positions [i.e. local positions at no or low […]

Yesterday’s Globe covered the expansion of the Green Line into Somerville and Medford. The article talked to newcomers to that community (who generally wanted the subway) and ‘old-timers’ (who generally opposed it). One quote stood out: “It will be that much more connected to civilization,” said Elizabeth Bolton, a real estate agent who moved here in 2005. Eh, I don’t think the negative space around that comment are great for building coalitions. The notion that Medford is somehow disconnected from ‘civilization’ will not endear you to the ‘old-timers’.

An eye-opening quote from the CBO’s analysis of the proposed Truth in Writing act (my emphasis added): S. 574 would amend federal law to require all federal agencies within one year to use plain writing (clear, concise, well-organized, and readily identifiable to the intended reader) in all documents except for regulations. Thus, we are lead to believe that regulations will continue to be written in opaque, lengthy, disjointed, and obscure bureaucratese.

City Councillor John Tobin has proposed a sliding taxi fare scale tied to gas prices. Given that fares were just increased (in response to $4/gallon gas prices), this seems logical but hard to implement. Careful readers of this space will recall that we pointed out this issue in January — that taxi fares were raised in response to high gas prices but no cuts were implemented after gas prices moderated. Very careful readers will note that Councillor Tobin has a (laudable) history when it comes to vehicular issues. He led the effort to put GPS monitors on all Boston Public School buses as well.

To: Hilary Chabot, Matt Viser and whomever else is writing on pension reform. Pension reform plans put forward by the Senate and the Governor each have provisions to stop local officials serving in largely voluntary positions from receiving pension service credit for time in those positions. The problem is that each of the bills restricts this reform to “unpaid local officials” (in this case of the Governor) or “municipal officials” who served in positions with “no compensation” (in the case of the Senate). Why shouldn’t this count towards state positions and those local positions that receive a nominal salary, as many moderators and selectboards do? No offense to those providing those important services, but credit towards a state pension should […]

This space has long been in the tank for Paul Levy. His leadership of BIDMC has recently been much praised — he put the issue of a budget deficit to his staff and they responded with a collection of salary cuts and budget savings that allowed the lowest wage workers to keep their jobs and lowered layoffs by the hundreds. I’m curious how this will affect a certain union’s efforts to demonize his leadership and the institution itself. (There is a link, but I’m not posting it.) I’m guessing that their perplexing (and costly) approach of convincing BIDMC employees that their institution was corrupt and nefarious is over.

Even those nesting Russian dolls are getting some of the action — Russia is buying $28 million worth of the stuff to compensate for reduced demand.

Obama Administration Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood opines on a recent federal commission’s call to raise the federal gas tax by 10 cents: With the economy the way it is right now, trying to propose a 10-cent a gallon increase in the gasoline tax is not going to fly anywhere in America, including Washington, D.C…Ten cents a gallon increase is not modest, it’s impossible…We are in one of the worst economies we’ve been in since 1982. I was a staffer on Capitol Hill in 1982 and I know how bad it was because I was working for a guy who was representing Caterpillar and things were bad. We’ve got to be talking differently than raising taxes.

Pension Obligation Bonds were one method that a number of municipalities used to ‘fund’ their unfunded pension liabilities. The thinking was that issuing bonds at a fixed rate, then putting that money into the pension fund (where it hypothetically earned a return higher than the fixed rate) made sense. There is some logic here — it turns the somewhat malleable notion of the yearly pay-in to the pension fund into a hard number owed to bond holders. And, over the long run, most pension funds earned in excess of the typical bond interest rate. But, we are in a brutal short-term (we hope) downturn with massive losses across almost all investment classes. Bloomberg has an article on a number of […]

My friends in the business community came out yesterday for a 25 cent increase in the gas tax to pay for needed infrastructure. Of course, given that consumers (by and large) will end up paying the tab, this was not a particularly risky announcement. And not a particularly popular one outside of 128 — see here and here.

Ouch. The BPS has already pulled its first proposal for altering the school zone system off the table. Not because of a backlash or political pressure, but because the proposed Zone 4 lacks a needed 616 seats for grades 6 – 8. That’s a pretty material number in a system with less than 60,000 kids and equivalent to an entire school. Its an embarrassing screw-up for the school system. The attempt to increase the number of zones (of which I am generally supportive) has flushed out a number of interesting items: 1) Integration, the initial impetus behind busing all those years ago, is largely irrelevant. Click on the various zone configurations (current and proposed) that the Globe has helpfully put […]

The title above is accurate — these are simply musings because there’s very little specific data available beyond the Governor’s speech and a few powerpoint slides on the You Move Massachusetts website. What really matters is what gets filed. 1) 19 cents is too much, too fast for me. But you might already know that. 2) I can’t believe that heavy rail expansion (including the South Coast Rail Link) gets funded before the MBTA’s State of Good Repair. This is exactly how we got into this mess — expanding the system without the means to maintain it. I understand the politics of the pledge to expand heavy rail, but I’m flabbergasted at the open disregard for what got us here […]

Its clear that the occasional side conversations are entering the mainstream. Heck, even Lindsay Graham, John McCain, and Alan Greenspan seem to be on-board. There are four assumptions you need to buy into to think this is the ‘least bad’ option: 1) Speed trumps ideology — Part of the nationalization argument says that in order for recovery to begin, we need to flush out the bad loans as soon as possible. The Japanese experience is the lesson here — you can let zombie banks hang around and they will, for a long time, but they won’t provide the capital the economy needs to grow again. 2) Counterparty Risk is primary — This crisis was initially termed a ‘liquidity crisis’, so […]

I’ve written previously on the Boston school lottery and last week was an eventful one. In 2004, a blue ribbon panel looked at the Boston School Assignment system, floated a few proposals (like six zones), but ultimately decided not to make wholesale changes. (The chair of that panel, incidentally, called for a complete end to busing, and thus the assignment zones by my reading, a few weeks ago in the Globe. In last year’s State of the City address, Mayor Menino called on the school department to reexamine the zone assignment systems for savings. And then, with no lead up or hearings, the School Department released its FY10 budget cutting plan with a five zone school assignment proposal. It’s interesting […]