THE PIONEER BLOG

Steve Poftak

A Few Wrinkles in the DiMasi Indictment

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Former House Speaker Sal DiMasi was indicted today. You can read the indictment itself here. I won’t belabor the obvious, but a few secondary points stuck out to me: – COGS at Cognos — Cognos agreed to pay one of the other indictees, Joe Lally, a 20% commission on sales. Is that standard in the industry — to pay a middleman 20% of the deal? Maybe it is standard, but it doesn’t make me feel great about our IT procurement process if that’s built into the price of a typical deal. – Conflict of Interest Laws — Part of the allegations involve DiMasi receiving a kickback for referrals that went to his law partner. I’m not sure how you fix […]

Jim Stergios

We will be able to do this soon

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My favorite Education Intelligence Agent Mike Antonucci had this news out of California: There are 3,000 retired educators receiving a six-figure state pension. And that’s out of a total of just over 5,000 for all types of state employees. Pretty outstanding performance for educators in the Golden Parachute State. Now the good news. Pioneer is building MassOpenBooks.org as well as a number of other government transparency sites for release this summer and fall. We’ll be able to pull out all kinds of gems like that back here in the Bay State for folks who are interested in understanding how the numbers stack up.

Jim Stergios

Will MA forfeit education stimulus dollars?

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EdNews.org passes on this AP report on US Ed Secretary Arne Duncan’s threat to stonewallers on charter schools. As part of the federal stimulus package, there is a $5 billion fund to promote innovations, and President Obama is a clear proponent of charters. So what if a state does not promote charters, has caps, makes excuses, and all the rest? Ah, so glad that you ask a question pertinent to our dear Bay State. States will hurt their chance to compete for millions of federal stimulus dollars if they fail to embrace innovations like charter schools, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Thursday. Duncan was responding to a question about Tennessee, where Democratic state lawmakers have blocked an effort to let […]

Steve Poftak

13 is not the right number

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Reading about the investigation into misconduct at the MBTA Police Academy jogged my memory to a story earlier in the week about little-used police academies. Let’s look at the list of police academies: State Entities — MBTA, State Police State-Run for Localities — Randolph, Springfield, Reading, Boylston, Plymouth, New Bedford, and Foxborough Locally-Run — Boston, Lowell, Springfield, and Worcester Does this make any sense, particularly in this period when few new officers are being hired? Wouldn’t consolidation lower costs (for the state and municipalities) and improve the level of training? My favorite part of the story is the chief from Walpole stating that they don’t use the Randolph training center because the drive is too long in the mornings. I […]

Liam Day

About Time

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After ten long years, Time Warner has finally made the decision to kick AOL to the curb. All I can say is about time. The best analogy I can come up with is if Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra lasted 10 years instead of the two weeks they did. At its height, AOL’s dial up served roughly 26 million customers. I believe that number is now somewhere around 6 million. In a truly frightening display of the speed with which Schumpeter’s creative destruction works in the digital age, who would have guessed that dial up internet service would go the way of the buggy so quickly?

Steve Poftak

My Earthfest Pet Peeve

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Earthfest is this Saturday on the Esplanade. If past practice is any guide, DCR will once again allow folks to park along Storrow Drive, creating a massive traffic jam that can easily stretch all the way up the Leverett Connector onto I-93. So, the convenience of a few hundred folks wins out over the thousands who use that road (average daily (probably weekday) traffic volume of 66,000, as of 2006). In the past, DCR has claimed that the cars act as a safety barrier, but I’m skeptical of that explanation. My two questions: 1) Is deliberately congesting a road and putting tens of thousands into stop and go traffic really making a great “Earthfest” point? 2) If DCR was more […]

Steve Poftak

Raising the Symbolism Bar

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Sure, our local politicians have their symbolism — who can forget Bill Weld diving into the Charles River or Deval Patrick’s ongoing struggle to move past the drapes and Cadillac brouhaha. But Canada’s Governor General has taken this to a whole new (pretty gross) level. In an effort to show solidarity with indigenous seal hunters (who are facing an EU ban), she helped gut a seal and ate a slice of its raw heart.

Liam Day

Questions Michael Flaherty, Sam Yoon and Kevin McCrea should be asking

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The Globe this week ran successive stories (here and here) regarding Boston’s new computer tracking system for city services. In this morning’s article, the three candidates challenging Mayor Menino were unsurprisingly critical of the new system – that it took too long to get up and running, that it still isn’t a true CitiStat program like the one Somerville uses and Baltimore pioneered, that posting the data to the Boston About Results website every quarter doesn’t give either residents or city managers real time data. All of that might be true, but I want to pose some questions of my own. 1) Why does budget data on BAR still only include the appropriations for FY08 and not the actual expenditures? […]

Jim Stergios

I am about to toss my cookies

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That was my dad’s self-edited way of expressing his disregard for stupidity. Granted my dad was a marine and therefore knew other ways to express his disgust. He was also a Greek immigrant and, because he went to war as a young guy, largely self-educated. He understood how essential it was to know math and English and U.S. History to succeed in a country where the haves have a red carpet out for them. Well, when a friend passed on this morsel — a video with Cookie Monster peddling 21st-century skills — there is little else I could say… especially in a blog post where I cannot employ spicier words for these donkeys. The lack of critical thought and faddishness […]

Jim Stergios

Wet, Wetter, Wettest

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Jack Butterworth reported in the Daily Item on a recent town hall meeting with the Governor and Secretary of Education S. Paul Reville in the library of Marblehead High School. Among some good proposals such as pension reform for public employees, the speakers also called for “a graduated income tax which will take four years to achieve” and “MCAS testing reform.” Longtime tax foe Barbara Anderson of Marblehead spoke against the graduated income tax after seeing hands go up in support of it, calling the proposal a plan “to pick us off, one tax bracket at a time.” “The harder you work the more they steal from you. That’s why the voters defeated it at the ballot,” she said. Butterworth […]

Steve Poftak

Interesting Wrinkles in New GIC Study

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A new study, published by the Rappaport Institute and Collins Center, examines Springfield’s experience with the transition to GIC. The author, Bob Carey, provides a lot of interesting details. My observations: 1) High Out-of-Pocket — one of the typical objections to the GIC is their (deliberately) high out-of-pocket costs. It turns out that Springfield had moved to a new health insurance plan two years earlier that had some of the highest out-of-pocket costs I have seen. That made GIC a lot more palatable to municipal workers. 2) Shedding 5% of Insureds Helps to Cut Costs — By tightening criteria (e.g. no more coverage for the Symphony) and requiring documentation (thereby reducing fraud), Springfield reduced the number of subscribers by 5%. […]

Liam Day

Strategic Debate is Good for the Country

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President Obama and former Vice President Cheney delivered competing speeches yesterday, addressing the broad issue of national security, with specific reference to the issues surrounding Guantanamo, indefinite detention of suspected terrorists and the use of waterboarding. Whatever one thinks of either our current President or former Vice President, they are both serious men and, wherever one stands on these issues, publicly debating them is only good for the country. As our executive director Jim Stergios wrote in an op-ed that ran this past weekend in both the MetroWest and Milford Daily News, we seem to have proved ourselves incapable of engaging in serious, strategic debates. At the federal level, passing an appropriations bill now amounts to action. Money is great. […]

Steve Poftak

Can He Say That?

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Treasurer Tim Cahill went down to New Bedford and told them: the chances that Massachusetts will build [South Coast] commuter rail by 2016 are “bleak” and that “it is virtually going to be impossible” for the state to build it in the foreseeable future. Wow, that’s quite a mouthful, considering that our current Governor publicly threw his then-Secretary of Transportation under the bus for even suggesting that the South Coast rail line wouldn’t be paid for by revenues created by new jobs.

Liam Day

An absolute must read

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Again, I have to give Michael Graham his props. As a colleague of mine wrote in an e-mail this morning, Mike absolutely nails it. I would go so far as to defy anyone to find a better summation anywhere of the parochial, retchingly chummy nature of Boston’s politics. Actually, check that. It is possible that Kyle Cheney’s coverage of the special commission on pensions on the State House News Service (subscription required) is in the running. Watching the commission in action Monday, or lack of action I should write, I was reminded of a high school cafeteria and its division between the nerds and the cool kids, in this case the unions and their legislative representatives on the commission, who […]

Jim Stergios

Harry Lime in Africa

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Remember Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in The Third Man (1949, dir. by Carol Reed)? For a reminder of this classic noir based on Graham Greene’s novella, check out the sewer chase scene (sublime notwithstanding what he is wading through). Or, perhaps, you might enjoy the American trailer with its quaint marketing of Anton Karas’ haunting score – “He’ll have you in a dither with his zither…” Many of you will remember the horrible racket that Harry Lime was involved in. Lime stole penicillin and diluted it, reselling it at astronomical profit. In the process he maimed and killed thousands. I write all this because a colleague Franklin Cudjoe, who directs the IMANI Center for Policy & Education, has found very […]