Like most places, Massachusetts uses elections to insure accountability in government. Don’t like how things are being run? Vote’em out. So, it’s interesting to note that some of the most egregious breakdowns in public accountability over the past few years have occurred in that netherworld between bureaucrats and elected officials — the board of directors. To be sure, the private sector has struggled with how to insure the accountability of boards of directors, but the public sector seems to be far behind in this area. What are the key indicators of weak governance? Review the peformance of the Essex Country Regional Retirement Board, the Chelsea Housing Authority Board, and the Merrimack Special Education Collaborative Board. In each case, a board […]

(What, you think we can only do policy?) There’s been a proliferation of reality cooking shows — Top Chef, Kitchen Nightmares, Iron Chef, Chopped, and so on — as well as spinoffs and brand extensions. For those aspiring chefs seeking to success on these shows, some pointers: 1. Always cook something. Seems obvious, but every competition has some person who makes a crudo or carpacchio. It’s not a slicing-and-marinating competition, folks; you need to cook. 2. Never do a duo. The indecisive or overly ambitious chef will decide to take a main ingredient and go for multiple preparations on a single plate. The problem is that you are competing against yourself — one preparation is going to be better than […]

If you deal with budgets regularly, you know the pain of trying to get through those last final steps of balancing spending and revenue to the penny. But our friends at the State House may have delivered a new innovation — the negative expenditure. What’s that? It’s a spending account with a negative number, which has the virtue of canceling out actual spending. If you download the FY12 budget line items from the state’s website, you find an account — 1599-0015 Intergovernmental Secretariat Budget Team Savings Reserve — with an amount of -$25 million attached to it. That account doesn’t exist in the budget the Legislature posted on-line nor does it exist on the initial detail page on the State […]

Participate in the transportation conversation long enough and you hear a familiar refrain: Why can’t we be more like Europe? Europe being shorthand for an enlightened land of high-speed rail, pervasive bike use, and public transit everywhere. (There’s notable less interest in the widespread use of private concessionaires for roadways, but that’s another post.) With the MBTA’s current financial struggles in mind, a recent study by two scholars — Ralph Buehler from VPI and John Pucher from Rutgers University — of the German public transit system yields some interesting results. During a period where US transit systems expanded their coverage area faster than ridership, German systems reduced their coverage area while seeking to increase ridership on higher volume routes. They […]

The Massachusetts state lottery has made news the past few weeks for two things — a $20 holiday raffle that lost money and a proposal to allow gamblers to use their debit cards to buy tickets. The stories might seem only vaguely related but, at root, they highlight the Mass Lottery’s ongoing challenge — sustaining revenue levels and trying to grow in a stagnant market. And that market is going to get more crowded once casinos start operating, with expert opinions forecasting a 5 – 10% drop in lottery revenues initially. As previous studies have shown, Massachusetts has one of the most successful lotteries in the country, particularly on a per capita basis. But it has been difficult work keeping […]