Airports across the country are experiencing longer security lines, but is there a solution? Yes. Several U.S. airports, including Kansas City International Airport, have privatized their security, resulting in shorter lines and lower costs.
Unions’ Orwellian “Takings Clause” Argument
Unions in Idaho and Wisconsin have filed federal lawsuits claiming that employees who don't want to be in their unions are violating the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause by not paying for union representation. For those unfamiliar with the section, the Takings Clause says that "private property (shall not) be taken for public use, without just compensation." The unions' claim is that the act of collective bargaining is a union's "private property," and that employees who are subject to the union's agreements but reject the union are not compensating these unions for that property interest.
The irony is that a straightforward reading of the Takings Clause should actually protect individual employees from having their paychecks bitten into without consent. These lawsuits use the reverse argument—requiring the Court to believe that the paychecks of employees are fundamentally union property to begin with, and that nonunion employees are “taking” money away from them by withholding their support.
In the past the Supreme Court has found that "unions have no constitutional entitlement to the fees of non-member employees," so the odds of success in these lawsuits do not appear high. But even if the law wasn't in favor of the rights of individual workers, the idea that unions have a constitutional right to the paychecks of laborers who reject them seems not only undemocratic but also, frankly, immoral.
Workers – whether union members and not – deserve better than that.
Deathblow to St. Louis Charter Schools?
Saint Louis Public Schools are suing the state for 42 million dollars, claiming this money was improperly sent to charter schools. If charter schools have to turn over this money, they will be financially crippled. Click on the link to see the video.
Saint Louis Should Learn from MetroLink’s Disappointing Past
Mayor Slay is talking up plans for a billion-dollar-plus expansion of Saint Louis’s light rail system, the MetroLink. This means that the region’s residents will soon, in all likelihood, be asked whether they're willing to pay for it. In convincing Saint Louisans to vote yes, rail backers will (as they have in the past) promote the supposed benefits of light rail, including everything from getting people out of their cars to boosting urban development. But before residents buy into the claims of train enthusiasts, they should consider the disappointing performance of the existing MetroLink routes.
First, let’s analyze MetroLink’s effect on public transportation usage. It is true that people (including myself) use the MetroLink; the system handles an average of about 44,000 trips per day. However, MetroLink’s effect on total transit ridership has been modest. Despite the immense expenditures (around $3 billion) and multiple expansions, total bus and rail ridership today is lower than bus ridership alone was in 1991, three years before the MetroLink opened. Even worse, not all MetroLink expansions have even resulted in sustained higher MetroLink ridership. Take the case of latest expansion, from Forest Park to Shrewsbury, which opened in 2006. While the addition initially pushed rail ridership to new heights, ten years later total MetroLink ridership is lower than it was the year before the expansion opened.
The increasing supply of light rail, along with flagging enthusiasm for its use, has meant that in terms of passengers, MetroLink now has the lowest rate of use it has ever had, with only 2.55 riders per vehicle revenue mile.
Next let’s evaluate the MetroLink’s impact on development in Saint Louis. Consider the expectations of MetroLink’s proponents when the initial line opened in 1994. They hoped rail would generate urban renewal, with specific hopes that it would save Saint Louis Centre and bring life (and even a golf course) to East Saint Louis. Far from rejuvenating areas that were down on their luck, the MetroLink failed to prevent decline in areas of its route that appeared on the ascendency in 1994, like Union Station and Laclede’s Landing. Some areas near MetroLink stations have done well, like the Central West End or the Loop, but in these places development seems to be happening near the MetroLink, not radiating from it. With few exceptions, MetroLink platforms remain areas of quiet repose, far from businesses, residences, and crowds. It’s ironic, given the claims of rail advocates, that the true success stories of urban renewal in Saint Louis City are places like Soulard, South Grand, the Grove, and now Cherokee Street, located far away from any MetroLink station.
With regard to increasing transit usage in Saint Louis and spurring urban revitalization, the MetroLink has, to this point, been an expensive disappointment. There is no reason to think any MetroLink expansion will create different results. It’s time for the region to start looking for better, more cost-effective ways to achieve progress toward public transportation and development goals.
Waiting for VanLoh
The last three years of Kansas City aviation policy is much like Samuel Becket’s play, “Waiting for Godot.” We the audience sit and watch the characters who, according to one synopsis,
quarrel, make up, contemplate suicide, try to sleep, eat a carrot and gnaw on some chicken bones. Two other characters appear, a master and a slave, who perform a grotesque scene in the middle of the play. A young boy arrives to say that M. Godot will not come today, but that he will come tomorrow.
One doesn’t need too much encouragement to see the parallels. We’ve seen a petition to require a public vote on a new terminal, a show trial of advisory group meetings, a group of airlines who seem to change their views, an ineffective public relations campaign, and then finally we are told that the VanLoh Plan will not come this year. Maybe next year.
The former Aviation Department director and architect of the new terminal plan, Mark VanLoh, did not survive this effort. His career ended as a result of the mismanaged new terminal campaign. Mayor Sly James said in a tweet recently , “VanLoh is not here to kick anymore.” But make no mistake, even with a new department director, the $1.2 billion new terminal plan before us is very much the VanLoh plan. And despite claims that supporters have put the matter on the back burner, the Mayor and City Manager are still active in pushing for a new terminal. It even has its own hashtag: #NewKCI.
Architectural design company Crawford and Associates have their own solution for the airport. While they have not been permitted to present to the City’s Airport Committee, they did present to a meeting of the Urban Summit with several members of the committee in attendance. The Crawford Plan is compelling; it would preserve much of Terminal A while providing the amenities that VanLoh Plan proponents demand. Importantly, it is one-third of the cost of the VanLoh plan. Yet it allows for the same renovation to be done to a second terminal if air traffic continues to increase.
That last part may be why fans of the VanLoh plan don’t like it. Where they seem to prefer one big billion-dollar bet, the Crawford Plan is measured. One might even call it fiscally responsible.
In the meantime, supporters who loudly declared that, “doing nothing is not an option,” have themselves opted to do nothing; not even renovation. They just want a new terminal, and so we’re all still waiting for VanLoh.
Kansas City Plans for Autonomous Buses
According to Startland, “Kansas City’s Home for Innovation News,” city leaders proposed a few ideas they would pursue if they received a $50 million transportation award from the federal government. One of them, interestingly, is an autonomous shuttle to the airport.
We at the Show-Me Institute have been writing about the great potential of driverless cars for years, writing about their potential as the future of transit. We’ve also been critical of the city’s oversized spending on the streetcar, exactly because it is the opposite of the future of transit. As if to underscore that point, Startland writes of the city’s plan,
An autonomous shuttle system would be deployed along 11th, 12th and 18th streets, according to the plan. The shuttle system will connect the current 2.2-mile streetcar line and the downtown smart city project to the 18th and Vine Jazz District and the West Side community.
“The 20-mile corridor from KCI Airport to the downtown area will serve as a highway test corridor for connected and semi-autonomous vehicles in addition to connecting passenger terminals at KCI to the downtown area, and provide state-of-the-art transportation to visitors and residents,” the plan reads.
How ridiculous is this? New, state-of-the-art autonomous shuttles are going to pick people up from a 2.2-mile fixed-rail streetcar line and take them around town and to the airport. How much cheaper would it be to scrap the streetcar altogether and have those same autonomous buses run that same 2.2 mile streetcar route themselves?
Our fear is that Kansas City really isn’t serious about planning for its long-term transportation needs, but prefers instead to hop aboard the latest trend in an attempt to secure federal dollars. Streetcars just aren’t a forward-looking transit solution. By planning for autonomous buses, are city leaders admitting as much?
Light Rail a Losing Proposition for Saint Louis
As the Post-Dispatch recently reported, Mayor Slay is starting to throw his weight behind a long-awaited expansion of the MetroLink, Saint Louis’s light rail system. The expansion plan, dubbed the North–South line, would operate on a north–south axis from North Saint Louis County, through downtown, and into South Saint Louis County. The push for light rail expansion in Saint Louis began directly after the last expansion was completed in 2006, and the region is currently conducting multi-million dollar studies on how to construct such a project. But with project costs likely to be anywhere between one to two billion dollars, is more light rail worth it in Saint Louis?
Assuming other types of public transportation service (such as buses) are unaffected, the addition of a North–South MetroLink line could increase the speed and quantity of public transportation in the Saint Louis region. Light rail is generally much faster than standard buses, so more rail can mean faster transit and more riders. However, light rail is not the only way to improve public transportation, and Saint Louis needs to consider light rail as just one option among many, perhaps not the most prudent one.
As we’ve discussed many times before, Saint Louis is a dispersed region, both in terms of where people work and where they live. Most residents live and work outside of Saint Louis City, and more people commute into Saint Louis County than Saint Louis City for work. The area in the region with the most employees and the highest payroll is not downtown, but West County. Nevertheless, the North–South MetroLink plan would route riders in and out of downtown Saint Louis, as if the year were 1904. In terms of population density, most of Saint Louis City (and nearly the entire planned route of North-South MetroLink) has less than 5,000 residents per square mile. Cost-effective light rail systems generally have population densities nearing 20,000 people per square mile around stops.
Saint Louis’s existing MetroLink lines already encounter ridership problems, despite serving areas with more employment and population than the proposed North-South line would. After spending more than $2 billion building the current system, a lower percentage of Saint Louisans use transit now than did in 1990. And, despite the hopes of transit activists, the situation is not getting any better. Both MetroLink and MetroBus ridership peaked in 2008, and even as better economic times have come to Saint Louis in the last few years, MetroLink ridership continues to stagnate. The result of this failure to draw more riders is that, accounting for all light rail costs since 1992, the MetroLink has cost Saint Louis nearly $10 for every passenger that has ever stepped on board, with a one-way fare of only $2.50. The bottom line is that the existing MetroLink has, despite the investment, failed to achieve meaningful progress toward promoting transit ridership or generating urban development. There is little reason to believe that an expansion will yield better results.
Fortunately for the region, adding more rail is not the only way to improve public transportation. Saint Louis could, for far less than a billion dollars, improve its poorly managed bus system or implement bus rapid transit, both options made much easier by the incredibly low traffic levels on Saint Louis’s highways and arterial roads.
However Saint Louis officials move forward, they would do best to consider public transportation plans that take the city as it is, and not how transit activists want it to be. If they don't the system will continue to operate as it does today: expansive yet inefficient, expensive yet resource-poor, overbuilt yet under-ridden.
Who’s Paying for $160 Million in Blues Upgrades?
The Saint Louis Blues had a very successful season, making it deep into the playoffs and just two wins short of the Stanley Cup finals. And the team is likely to remain in the news during the offseason, even if it isn’t for their play on the ice. Instead, the topic will be stadium financing, as Blues ownership seeks $160 million in upgrades to the Scottrade Center. How much of that Saint Louis residents, rather than the Blues themselves, will cover is a troublingly open question.
The Scottrade Center, originally Kiel Auditorium, cost $135 million to build and first opened its doors in 1994. While private interests covered most of the price tag, the city of Saint Louis provided $15 million in construction subsidies (the city also built the stadium’s western parking lot at a cost of nearly $10 million). Aside from direct handouts, Saint Louis worked to reduce the stadium’s tax liabilities. Like Busch Stadium and the Dome formerly known as Edward Jones, the Scottrade Center sits on public land, shielding the Blues’ ownership from standard tax rates. In addition, the LCRA (a city body), and not the stadium’s owners, issued all the bonds for the stadium’s construction, making those bonds tax-exempt.
Now, a little over two decades after the Scottrade Center opened, the Blues no longer find their accommodations adequate. They want a larger scoreboard, better seating, and an expanded team store. Perhaps with a jealous eye toward Ballpark Village, the Blues hope to build a year-round beer garden at the stadium. They estimate that these upgrades will cost $160 million, which, adjusting for inflation, is slightly more than the original cost estimate of the Scottrade Center when financing got underway in 1990 (yet more evidence that cities should only expect about 20 years out of their stadiums before they have to pay for them all over again). But who will pay this time around?
All we know right now is that, like in the ‘90s, the Blues expect the city to issue the bonds for the stadium’s construction so they can avoid taxation. But for the city’s bottom line, who will pay those bonds back is the most important question. Last time around, the city covered about 10% of those costs and stadium owners paid 90%. There’s no guarantee that the Blues won’t ask for more support this time, especially after the city last year showed itself willing to spend well over $100 million to keep the Rams in town. Of course the Blues could pay the whole cost themselves, although the fact they are negotiating with the city to come up with a financing deal likely means that’s out of the question.
Still, it will be better for Saint Louis residents if the Blues pay for the costly upgrades themselves. The proposed improvements, from a larger team store to a “Blues-park Village,” are clear examples of nice-to-have amenities that would greatly add to the Blue’s assets. The impact of the improvements on city’s bottom line or its economy is difficult to determine, but given the evidence, it’s likely negligible. It’s time the city focused on getting the basics of civic governance right instead of involving itself once more in how Saint Louisans spend their spare time.
Taxpayer Dollars and All That Jazz
The Kansas City Star reported over the weekend that the City Council will soon decide whether to spend more on the 18th and Vine District. The amount was originally $7 million in December, then quickly grew to $18 million before reaching the current $27 million mark. The Star’s piece tells us that that this last investment would allow the city to “declare victory once and for all,” but doesn’t specify how victory will be achieved.
This is the latest effort to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on a problem that stubbornly refuses to be solved. The original effort to build something at 18th and Vine corresponded to the release of Robert Altman’s 1996 movie, “Kansas City.” The movie was a flop, and the efforts since to return life to the so-called district haven’t been any more successful. As KCUR pointed out in 2011, the effort to return the area to its Pendergastian heyday has lasted longer than the heyday itself.
This is what we should expect when the government pushes something that the people do not want. Even former City Councilman Ed Ford recognized that no one supports the District. “The marketplace has not embraced 18th and Vine,” he told KCUR before saying that the city is committed to its success. “Committed to success” likely means that city leaders will continue throwing good money after bad. The Council voted Thursday to direct the City Manager to find a way to give the district $18 million more.
In two pieces for CityLab, a publication of The Atlantic, Brandon Reynolds argues that government will never succeed at propping up jazz, and he points to the success of Memphis’ Beale Street as an example. The man who made Beale Street a success, John Elkington, argued that only private investment will work. A 1998 Los Angeles Times piece compared Elkington’s reliance on private investment to former Kansas City Mayor Emmanuel Cleaver’s desire for public dollars:
Some black leaders point to Kansas City’s revival of its jazz district as a preferable alternative to Elkington’s Beale project—a community renovation project overseen by a black mayor and tied to public funding that guarantees a role for black businesses and opportunity for neighborhood residents. In fact, Elkington and Kansas City Mayor Cleaver have toured each others’ projects—and both men argue that theirs is the only way to restore blighted black business sectors.
Twenty years later, we have a clear and irrefutable conclusion: Cleaver was wrong. Beale Street is a success, and 18th and Vine is a failure. While some may point to past mismanagement or insufficient funding for 18th and Vine, the point is that jazz is not as popular today in Kansas City as we want to believe. Kansas City was the top market for the Women’s World Cup in 2015, but it didn’t make it into the top 10 markets for the PBS documentary “Jazz” by Ken Burns. We’re just not that into it. Kansas City isn’t alone. Jazz pianist and blogger Bill Anschell wrote that, “People who want to play jazz actually outnumber those who enjoy or even tolerate it, let alone pay to hear it.” The plan in Kansas City is to force people to pay for it.
The jazz heyday was a product of seedy bars, corrupt politics, segregation, and prohibition. Jazz musician and band leader David Basse said,
You can’t start a string of bars and have them owned by the city or corporations and make them fun. You can’t do that. You’ll open one little corner dirty place and you sweep the floor and you start selling booze.
Despite the best intentions, it’s unlikely that the same city government that banned smoking in bars and restaurants, raised the age to buy tobacco products, and regularly closes down bars and restaurants for small violations is going to be able to fund a resurgence in speakeasy-era entertainment. We have 20 years of failure to make that point.
