Kansas City’s Poor Tax

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

In an effort to research the so-called food desert in Kansas City, I shopped around at some of the grocery stores on the east side. I found several grocery stores with well-stocked produce aisles. I even did some grocery shopping as I wanted to know what locals were paying in sales tax. What I found surprised me.

Aldi receipts for food desert & tax piece v2

The Aldi grocery store in Gladstone charged the least sales tax at 4.725%. The Aldi at 721 Paseo Blvd in Kansas City charged me 6.35% sales tax. The one at 6415 Troost charged me 5.85% sales tax.

While I expected Kansas City taxes to be higher than taxes outside the city in Gladstone, I did not expect the Aldis on the east side of Kansas City to tax so differently than one another.

This is troubling. A tax on food is bad enough as it is the most regressive of all taxes. Everyone must eat, and as the poor pay a larger portion of their income on food than the rich, this tax impacts them disproportionately. Add to this the apparent fact that grocery stores on the east side–in the middle of the so-called food desert–pay an even larger tax bill than grocery stores elsewhere, and you have a double whammy.        

Highway Funding Proposals Stall in Missouri Legislature

Posted on by Joseph Miller

When the legislative session began earlier this year, there was some hope that policymakers would be able to modernize the Missouri Department of Transportation’s (MoDOT) user-fee tax base to avert a growing funding crisis for Missouri’s highways. The session is now completed, and unfortunately lawmakers took no concrete actions in this area.

gas-pumpWhile this is a setback for Missouri’s transportation system, and will likely mean some loss in federal matching funds next year, the conversation in Jefferson City has moved in a positive direction. In previous years, policymakers essentially ignored the idea of having highway users pay for the roads (through fuel taxes as tolls), and instead put forward a general statewide sales tax as the only possible solution for MoDOT. This year, there were many bills in the senate and house that would have increased fuel taxes, changed the way fuel taxes were calculated, or even introduced tolling. The bill that made it furthest in the legislature, SB 540, would have both increased the fuel tax (1.5 cents regular and 3.5 cent diesel) and allowed tolling highways through public-private partnerships.

We can only hope that next year state policymakers will turn this positive momentum into policy. Because while MoDOT should have enough funds to maintain the state highway system in 2016, by 2017 this may no longer be the case. At that time the “325 Plan,” which would allow many heavily used highways in the state to fall into disrepair, will go into effect. That’s not a result anyone wants, and it’s unnecessary if the state raises highway user fees commensurate to the level needed to pay for highways.

Will HB 42 Hurt Alternative High Schools?

Posted on by Brittany Wagner

The Columbia Tribune reported that Columbia Public Schools Superintendent Peter Stiepleman and other superintendents across the state are telling Gov. Nixon to veto House Bill 42. If signed into law, the bill would allow students to transfer from an unaccredited school into another district or charter school at the expense of the sending district.

HB 42 also would create a new accreditation process, in which individual schools, not districts, are accredited, as is currently the procedure. This would allow students attending unaccredited schools to first transfer into an accredited school within their home district if there is space available. In short, school-level accreditation is going to affect more than just districts like Normandy and Riverview Gardens.

Stiepleman bases his concerns on the possible fate of a school in his district. Douglass High School is an alternative high school. Most alternative “schools” in Missouri are really programs carried out within a larger school, but Douglass is a stand-alone school. Under HB 42, the school would be accredited individually.

Stiepleman is worried that Douglass will not get a fair shake. As he put it, “Because of the population of fragile students at Douglass, the lack of Advanced Placement courses and other issues, it could become provisionally accredited. That designation is one step removed from being unaccredited, which could trigger student transfers.”

I recently reported on DeLaSalle Education Center, an alternative charter high school in Kansas City with similar fears. Like Douglass, DeLaSalle serves only at-risk students. As my video shows, students like senior K’ Von Williams are thriving at DeLaSalle.

Despite DeLaSalle’s low state standardized test scores, the charter school is delivering a quality service to both the community and students. If regulations are only based on test scores, they can miss the good things the school is doing.

Schools in Missouri should be held accountable for the quality of education that they provide for their students. But the mechanism by which those schools are held accountable has to be sensitive to different educational models (in the charter or traditional public sectors) and different populations of students across the state.

If HB 42 become law, DESE and the legislature will need to reevaluate the metrics Missouri uses to determine if a school is accredited or not. If they’re not careful, they could risk harming schools that are doing right by kids.

Douglass_High

If the Riverfront Stadium Plan Had Two Wheels, It’d Be a Bicycle

Posted on by Joseph Miller

Recently, Dave Peacock, the head of Missouri’s stadium task force, spoke at a Commercial Real Estate Women of St. Louis breakfast. He discussed changes to how a riverfront stadium would be publicly funded. He also talked about how a new stadium could not only keep the Rams, but also transform the North Riverfront.

Originally, the plan was for the state, the city, and the county to extend bonds meant for the Edward Jones Dome to raise about $350 million to fund a new stadium, with an additional $50 million in state tax credits making up the rest of the public support. This changed when Saint Louis County, which was threatening a public vote on the issue, was dropped from the funding plan. Peacock confirmed that with the county out it will be left to taxpayers statewide to pick up the $100 million bill—a bill unlikely to be offset by any economic activity generated by the team.

In a sense, the new funding plan is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; large public subsidies for sports stadiums do not make economic sense regardless of the city/state/county funding ratio. The growing list of contingencies—none of which local governments control—that Peacock’s plan relies on for everything from stadium funding to economic development is getting more preposterous. These include:

  1. Getting a team owner and the NFL to cover $450 million in costs for a new stadium. No team owner, especially the Rams’ owner, has expressed any inclination to do this.

  2. As things stand, a plan to fund a new stadium needs to go to a public vote in the city. Residents might vote no.

  3. Getting an MLS soccer team in Saint Louis.

  4. After getting an MLS soccer team, getting (and funding) a soccer hall of fame.

  5. Funding an entertainment center at the Union Electric Light and Power Company building.

  6. And finally, because Peacock thinks the Rams owner is committed to relocating to L.A., getting Kroenke to sell the Rams to another owner who will keep the team in Saint Louis.

You got all that? If city residents and the state government agree, against the advice of economists, to publicly fund a new stadium, and the Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority (RSA) uses eminent domain to bulldoze the North Riverfront, we can then hope the NFL will force/convince Kroenke to sell the Rams to an owner who, along with the NFL, may decide to fund half the costs of a new stadium, which in turn might just convince an MLS team to move to Saint Louis, which then might prompt the MLS (no doubt with some tax dollars) to locate their hall of fame at a new entertainment complex (funded by…someone) at the old power building. That’s some plan.

Private Buses: The Once (and Future?) Transit Option

Posted on by Joseph Miller

Imagine you thought that there was a lot of demand for express bus service between two or three locations in Saint Louis or Kansas City, locations that were not currently well connected by transit. You think you could make good money charging people a shuttle service between these locations. But would the government allow you to run such a business?

If you are in Kansas City, probably not. According to the city’s for-hire vehicle code, jitneys (fixed-route buses not otherwise regulated by the government) are illegal. City ordinances do not describe a method for getting the government to approve a private bus route.

jitney

In Saint Louis, the Metropolitan Taxicab Commission’s (MTC) For-Hire Vehicle Code expressly allows for private shuttles, which can travel from one fixed point to another (although likely not more complex routes). Unfortunately, the regulatory hurdles toward getting a commercial service shuttle are formidable. It requires applying for certificate of need and necessity (which the MTC can refuse to grant at will), along with a plethora of other regulatory requirements. Getting permits to operate just one shuttle will cost you more than $3,000.

These regulatory roadblocks, along with competition from the heavily subsidized bus services (subsidies pay for more than 80 percent of costs in Saint Louis and Kansas City), likely have much to do with the absence of private bus routes in Missouri’s cities. But it was not always this way. In the early 20th century, jitneys took most American cities, including Kansas City and Saint Louis, by storm. They were faster, cheaper, and more flexible than incumbent streetcar competition. Hostility from streetcar owners and the nascent taxi industry pushed most cities to make jitneys illegal; but in Saint Louis they morphed into “Service Cars,” which served parts of North Saint Louis until the 1960s. At that time, Bi-State (Metro) moved to buy out the existing competition that was “skimming the cream” off its customer base.

Today, transit in Missouri’s cities is the exclusive domain of public monopolies, with limited competition from heavily regulated taxi markets. The resulting waste, inefficiency, and poor service are the predictable result. However, there is opportunity for improvement. In the United States, and especially internationally, private bus routes still exist. Reducing government control to only essential transit services, and allowing the private sector to provide the rest, could create space for competition and innovation in the transit market. Of course, a necessary first step toward that opportunity is to actually make private bus routes a legal possibility; that’s a change Kansas City and Saint Louis can and should make right away.

Collaboration and Competition

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

On Friday afternoon, Ronald Garan Jr., a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and NASA astronaut, addressed about 40 students at a charter school in Kansas City, Mo. His talk featured plenty of pictures and videos of his time aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station. Garan’s talk was about cooperation and collaboration to solve the world’s challenges.

Garan_v2I had the opportunity to visit briefly with Garan after the talk. I wanted to know how he squared the principles of collaboration and cooperation with competition. After all, everything that made his career in the space program possible was accomplished through competition—whether a space race between nations or a bidding process among companies seeking to sell products to the U.S. government. That is when Garan distinguished between proper competition and destructive competition.

Proper competition gets us better good and services. It comes from having an even playing field; the company with the best product wins. A destructive competition does not bring us those things because it often lacks the necessary rigor, data, and transparency.

Without rigor and data, good intentions fail. To make his point, he offered an example from his experience working with developing countries. An organization might have a splashy website and a compelling celebrity endorsement. The company may show off the new wells they put in place, but if no one is focusing on whether those are working properly the whole effort is wasted. Garan said, “Sometimes there is too much emphasis on the new and shiny and not the tried and true.” No one wants to watch a TED Talk on the same old ways of doing things, he suggested, even if those ways are the most effective.

Therein lies the real lesson: Open yourself to rigor, data, and transparency. For governments it means fostering the productive competition that leads to legitimate innovation and improvement. For the taxpayers it means not getting caught up in new things simply because they are new; value what works, even if it is less flashy. And always make sure that government is transparent.

Can Normandy Be Saved?

Posted on by Brittany Wagner

Normandy (2)

They say those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. To better understand the seemingly intractable problems in the Normandy Schools Collaborative, I decided to head to the St. Louis Public Library newspaper archives to see what folks had written about Normandy in the past. I found this:

Hire more minority teachers, revamp the high school curriculum, improve discipline.

Sound familiar? These suggestions are quite similar to the comments Normandy’s most recent superintendent, Ty McNichols, made in 2013. In fact, what I found in the archives was written by former Normandy Superintendent Bruce A. Smith in a 35-page report about the status of the school district in 1988.

“Everything here is fixable,” McNichols had said. “It takes time. It can’t happen overnight. But it can be fixed.”

Nearly 30 years after Smith’s report, we seem to be no closer to improving the Normandy School District. The same old tactics will not lead to a better result.

A recent report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute points toward a more stark strategy—closing low-performing schools.

In School Closures and Student Achievement: An Analysis of Ohio’s Urban District and Charter Schools, researchers found that school closures have positive impacts on student achievement. Three years after schools closed, displaced students from urban districts, on average, gained 49 cumulative days of learning in reading and 34 cumulative days in math, relative to the comparison group.

The authors of the study also found that students who were displaced after a closure typically ended up in a higher-quality school. Fifty-nine percent of traditional public school students and 68 percent of charter school students transferred to higher-quality schools.

The evidence presented suggests that if policymakers are concerned about student achievement in low-performing schools, they should shut down those schools, instead of wasting more time, money, and patience trying to fix them. Resources then could be redirected toward starting new schools or expanding the capacity of existing higher-performing schools.

After decades of proposed “fixes,” are further attempts to improve Normandy Schools Collaborative misguided? Is closing down the district and allowing the students to be absorbed by neighboring districts the solution policymakers should really be thinking about?

These tough questions need answers. But one thing is certain, if we want to get serious about saving Normandy students, perhaps it’s time we stop trying to save Normandy schools.

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