Ditching City Hall: A Kansas City Development Story

Posted on by Joseph Miller

Kansas City has a low population density for a city its size. How low? According to the Census Bureau, Kansas City had a population of around 2 million in 2010, making it the 29th largest city in the United States by metro population. However, in terms of population density, Kansas City had roughly 2,326 residents per square mile, making it the 129th densest city in the country, just ahead of Poughkeepsie, N.Y. (population 670,000).

In terms of population distribution, only around 216,000 residents live less than five miles from city hall, whereas the average city of Kansas City’s metro population has close to 400,000 residents living within the first five miles. Cincinnati, the 27th largest city by total metro population, has more than double the total population density of Kansas City within the first two miles outside of city hall, with just over 316,000 residents living within five miles of its city hall.

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Kansas City’s low population near its city hall results in low population density at the city core. Similar to Saint Louis, Kansas City’s average population density is lower within two miles of its city hall than it is slightly further away from downtown, as the map below demonstrates:

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Also like Saint Louis, the story of Kansas City’s development is actually one of decreasing density. Aside from the area right around city hall, Kansas City’s core (within eight miles of city hall) lost both population and population density on average between 2000 to 2010. Steady population growth only accrued in the city center and in low-density areas further than eight miles from city hall.

Map_kc_denchange

Many individual areas close to downtown are doing well. However, much like Saint Louis, those gains are outweighed by losses in other areas equidistant from Kansas City’s downtown. Furthermore, they are decreasing in precisely the areas where residents most rely on transit.

These types of population movements are not exclusive to Kansas City. City governments (especially Kansas City) often spend hundreds of millions adding amenities and subsidizing development downtown. And while the most visible parts of the city show modest improvement, structural problems in the city’s competitiveness and broad economic forces continue to erode population in traditionally poor, working-class, and middle-class neighborhoods.

Whether city hall can alter these trends is debatable. What is not contested is that, despite some increased density right downtown, Kansas City has a comparatively low population density that shows little evidence of rapid, or for that matter any, increase. When it comes to providing public services that depend on high densities to function efficiently, like transit, if the city plans under the pretense that it is as dense and centralized as, say, Cincinnati, it may end up providing worse service to the vast majority of residents, even as it favors certain sections of the city.

Teachers’ Union Gets Collective Bargaining Wrong

Posted on by John Wright

Last week someone forwarded me this pamphlet from the Missouri National Education Association (MNEA) on collective bargaining for teachers. It’s a well-put-together brochure that explains the MNEA’s position on a pretty complicated issue. While I applaud the union for producing a primer on an area of public policy I think most people do not know a whole lot about, I take issue with a few of the points they make.

1. The MNEA’s pamphlet argues that the only way for teachers to successfully achieve an enforceable labor agreement is when one union acts as the exclusive representative of all the teachers subject to the labor agreement. This requirement is nowhere to be found in the constitution. It was not mentioned by the Missouri Supreme Court when it created collective bargaining rights for teachers in 2007. And the Missouri Supreme Court failed to mention the necessity of exclusive representation in any further decisions.

Furthermore, there are school districts in Missouri, such as Hillsboro and Warren (see below), where the school district has a labor agreement with multiple teachers’ unions. The fact that both the Missouri State Teachers Association and the MNEA already represent teachers in multiple multi-party labor agreements proves that a single exclusive representative is unnecessary.

2. The MNEA’s pamphlet suggests that collective bargaining through an exclusive representative is a democratic process that results in fair representation for all teachers subject to the labor agreement. Ordinarily, once a government union obtains the privilege of acting as the exclusive representative for employees, it never has to run for re-election. There’s hardly anything democratic about a representative winning a lifetime appointment after a one-time election.

Worse still, when one union wins the privilege to act as the exclusive representative for a group of government employees, other employee groups often lose out. We’ve seen this with both teachers and police.

3. The pamphlet fails to mention the history of teacher collective bargaining in Missouri. Instead, it simply alludes to a couple of Missouri Supreme Court cases in the late 2000s. In fact, the Missouri Supreme Court imposed collective bargaining on teachers in those cases. Prior to 2007, the courts had long held that the Missouri Constitution did not give government unions the right to collectively bargain with the government. Indeed, when collective bargaining language was added to the Missouri Constitution, collective bargaining with the government was seen as impossible and potentially unconstitutional.

Teachers’ unions, like the MNEA, may now collectively bargain with the government. However, this is not some long-established right. The court created teacher collective bargaining law only eight years ago. Whether you consider this an activist decision or the product of a living constitution, the law is still in flux. There is no reason for the MNEA to assume that principles used in the private sector, such as exclusive representation, have a necessary place in collective bargaining with the government.

The Future of Education in Kansas City

Posted on by James V. Shuls

Kansas-City-Missouri-Downtown_at_Twighlight

On Monday, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion on the Future of Education in Kansas City. This event is co-sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Show-Me Institute. Check out the details below and then come check out the event on Monday night.

Should your ZIP code determine your educational choices? Do charter schools improve academic outcomes? What do local public schools need to succeed? Should tax credit scholarships be used to help students attend private schools? Should residents in struggling public schools get to transfer to neighboring districts?

These topics and more will be explored as our panelists debate the future of education in and around Kansas City, Mo.

The panel will feature the following influencers in the local education landscape:

  • James Shuls, Ph.D., distinguished fellow, Show-Me Institute, and Assistant Professor at University of Missouri–St. Louis

  • Dr. Amy Hartsfield, member-at-large, School Board, Kansas City Public Schools

  • Andrea Flinders, president, Kansas City Federation of Teachers, Local 691

  • Douglas Thaman, Ed.D., executive director, Missouri Charter Public School Association

  • John Murphy, public policy committee chair of the Missouri Catholic Conference

Admission is FREE, but please register so we can ensure there is enough seating. The event is scheduled from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 23, 2015, at the Kansas City Club, 918 Baltimore Ave., Kansas City, MO 64105.

Shock and Audit: St. Joseph School District Out Tens of Millions Because of Staff “Stipends”

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

Missouri has seen its share of boondoggles. To name a few in recent years, Moberly was taken in on a $39 million sucralose scam that downgraded the city’s credit rating, left bondholders hanging, and resulted in jail time for one of the masterminds. In Kansas City, officials had to settle with a developer for millions over the failed Citadel redevelopment project, which saw criminal prosecutions of its own.

Now enters the St. Joseph School District. As reported by the St. Joseph News-Press:

“We went back about eight years and found there was over $25 million worth of stipends either not approved, unauthorized or improper. That $25 million worth of stipends is what we found to be problematic,” [State Auditor Tom Schweich] told the crowd inside the Oak Grove Elementary School commons area.

Since there was not full documentation going back further than 2001, Mr. Schweich added, that number could be in excess of $40 million paid out in stipends over that period.

“That is a startling amount of money,” he said, followed by a collective groan from the audience.

“Startling” is an understatement. The questionable stipends account for, on average, over $3 million each of the last eight years that could have gone toward substantive and proper investments in the education of St. Joseph’s children. Instead, according to the News-Press, it appears the money went to a wide array of cronyistic efforts,

including $45 for a Sam’s Club membership for [Superintendent Dr. Fred] Czerwonka, $1,500 for a painting for [Chief Operating Officer Rick] Hartigan’s office and $7,650 in free Internet service for 16 individuals, including an individual the district claimed they did not know.

In the auditor’s words, the stipends operated much like a “slush fund.” Throw in $3.4 million in overpayments from the state to the district because of inaccurate reporting and a swath of closed district meetings that should have been open to the public, and you have the makings of a full-blown scandal in northwest Missouri. It remains to be seen whether criminal action will be taken in the matter, but that seems to be very much on the table at this point.

Frequent readers of this blog know about our positions on transparency (for) and cronyism (against), so I won’t belabor those policy prescriptions in light of the district’s failures. The sheer magnitude of the district’s blackbox behavior is a better argument for vigilance and reform of state and local government than my words alone could offer.

It also goes without saying (though I’ll say it anyway) that “per pupil spending” remains a meaningless statistic, a fact emphasized here. How much you spend “on” a student doesn’t matter if the line items are $1,500 on administrators’ art, rather than $1,500 on the art department.

And yes, there will be many important story lines that will be worth talking about as the district’s actions are fully vetted, but one story line that has to remain front and center is how shameful it is that it took more than a decade for these problems to fully come to light—and the risk that St. Joseph’s scandal is just the canary in the coal mine statewide. That this school district was insulated so long from critical oversight makes me wonder whether similar behaviors might be taking place in one of the other 519 districts (!) in the state . . . and we simply don’t know it yet.

More to the point: If Missouri’s school districts are going to tell the state they have funding problems, then it’s fair for the state and the taxpayers to take a fresh look at how each district spends, or misspends, the state’s tax dollars. That is especially true in light of St. Joseph’s present troubles.

Education funding should be for the children, not for the districts, and it’s time district books were cracked open and thoroughly reviewed. For the state to deliver a quality education for our kids, it needs to hold every district accountable not only to stop problems like this from happening again, but also to ensure that they’re still not happening someplace else.

Towards Market Orientation: Funding Transportation Infrastructure in Missouri

Posted on by Joseph Miller

Policy Analyst Joseph Miller discusses the issues confronting transportation funding in Missouri at the ACEC Conference in Kansas City, Missouri. After discussing some of the problems of the current state highway funding, he discusses how user-fees and market-based transportation provision can lead to better, more efficient state infrastructure.

Change On the Way for Rideshare Regulation in Missouri?

Posted on by Joseph Miller

The Mardi Gras celebrations that took place last week in Soulard were met with extremely cold weather, with temperatures dropping into the teens after nightfall. I was driving through the area later that night, directly behind an empty cab. As we neared an intersection, a woman came forward to hail the cab. It drove right by and left her in the cold.

Maybe that cab driver had someplace to go or was simply done driving that day. I do not know. But what I do know is that woman could have used a convenient, inexpensive ride home. The same is true of the 60 drivers who were cited with DWIs before 8 p.m. Unfortunately, the supply of taxis in Saint Louis is strictly controlled by a regulatory body that thinks it knows how many cabs Saint Louis should have and how those cabs should serve customers.
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That body is known as the St. Louis Metropolitan Taxicab Commission (MTC), and they have decided that new ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft should not be able to provide needed transportation to Saint Louisans on nights like February 14. Instead, they tightly control the supply and business practices of for-hire vehicles, as we have detailed in previous blog posts. That includes UberBlack (Uber’s expensive black car service), which can only partner with a limited supply of MTC-licensed premium sedans.

But change may be in the air for Missouri cities, including Saint Louis. Other cities, like Kansas City and Columbia, have or are in the process of changing their taxi codes to allow ridesharing. However, Columbia’s changes ask for insurance that is reportedly 20 times the dollar amount they require for cabs, perhaps to make Uber too expensive to operate.

At the state level, two bills in the Missouri Legislature, SB 351 and HR 792, would set a statewide standard for the regulation of Uber, Lyft, and other ridesharing companies (officially transportation network companies) given certain license payments and insurance coverage. If these state standards pass, it would be a dagger to the heart of the MTC, as it would preclude that body from regulating ridesharing companies in any way. The MTC’s significant barriers to entry and management of ridesharing company driver supply would be eliminated. That would open the door for cheaper, more plentiful transportation in Saint Louis.

In the many states where ridesharing companies are allowed to operate, thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of for-hire vehicle drivers have entered the market. Even during peak hours, they pick up passengers quickly and offer the ease of app-based payment, all for prices competitive with regular cabs.

Just think, next time it might be you on the street corner in the freezing cold after a big event. Would you want to rely on a few passing cabs to decide whether your fare was worth the trouble? Or would you rather rely on a competitive market that includes cheap, responsive ridesharing services at the touch of a button? Not a hard choice, unless of course you’re a taxi regulator.

Transparency Would Shine Some Light

Posted on by Jessica Stearns

The essence of a well-functioning democracy includes transparency and a right to information. When fire protection boards, such as the O’Fallon Fire Protection District, make crucial decisions in closed-door meetings, they are violating a critical tenet of democracy.

file0001605429169Former Fire Chief Mike Ballmann, who claims that the firefighters union pressured the board to fire him, believes that the union has overstepped its role in the affairs of the fire district. When asked about union involvement in the management of the fire district, Ballmann said that the Fire Protection District Board of Directors was “packed with union people so the shop gets what it wants without any grief.” With the union’s heavy involvement in deciding who will run for the board positions, has the government union overstepped its role?

Since the district is funded by taxpayers, its business should be conducted with the interest of the taxpayer in mind. However, when board meetings are closed, interested taxpayers do not get to see how government unions involve themselves in district affairs. Furthermore, according to Ballmann, there are instances when the union shop steward is invited into the closed board meeting, which not even fire chiefs are allowed to attend. The problem isn’t the existence of a union, but rather their conspicuous control over the fire protection district.

The obvious and sensible solution is for fire districts like O’Fallon to follow in the footsteps of the Monarch Fire Protection District and initiate an open collective bargaining process. This would make sure that any changes made to district operations, union contracts, and decisions to hire or fire employees are free from ambiguity. However, despite efforts to gain the O’Fallon Fire Protection District Board’s insight on this issue, the inner workings of the district seem as ambiguous as ever.

Taxpayers are aware of the great importance firefighters play in protecting their community; their concern, rather, lies in the fact that their fire district is lacking representative leadership and sufficient oversight. Transparency is essential to guarantee that the taxpayer interests are being met. Once open collective bargaining becomes the norm for all government unions, we can ensure that both the worker and the taxpayer are being represented and considered in the political process.

Ditching City Hall: A Saint Louis Development Story

Posted on by Joseph Miller

We’ve said it on this blog many times before: Saint Louis has low population density. The population is widely spread among multiple counties in Missouri and Illinois, with a much-reduced core city and growing population and employment centers far away from downtown.

We have shown census tracts representing Saint Louis’ population distribution before. However, a different way to view the data is to consider metro population within certain distances from a central point (in this case city hall), allowing easier city-to-city comparisons. When we compare Saint Louis to cities of similar population, we observe that the city has abnormally low population density in its core. According to 2010 Census figures, Saint Louis had the 18th largest MSA population (2,812,896), but only the 31st largest population within 10 miles of city hall. For example, compared to Baltimore, with a slightly smaller population than Saint Louis (2,710,489 in 2010), Saint Louis has a larger metro area but much lower densities close to the city center.

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In fact, the area within a mile of the Saint Louis city hall has a lower population density (5,020 per square mile) than most of the rest of the city. This is atypical among peer cities, which have their highest densities downtown (averaging 9,000 per square mile). The map below shows population density in Saint Louis in concentric one-mile rings radiating from city hall:

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In addition, contrary to the narrative of a rebounding core, the city’s population density fell most in Saint Louis City from 2000 to 2010, as the map below demonstrates:

Pecentage change Pop_dens

Population did increase in certain neighborhoods in the central corridor and in the heart of downtown Saint Louis. And the growth downtown is somewhat misleading because of the incredibly low base it grew from: in 2000, the population density less than one mile from the courthouse was a mere 3,870 persons per square mile. And in the city as a whole, notable neighborhood gains are more than made up for by loses in areas to the north, south, and east of those improving neighborhoods. Looking at the region as a whole, outside of the heart of downtown, population density only showed steady growth in areas further than 25 miles away from city hall.

Saint Louis’ low population density and abnormal population distribution has important implications for the provision of public services. For example, when the type of service provision relies on density (such as with transit), it may be better for the city to model its service on other cities with similar densities rather than ones with similar MSA population totals. In addition, the pretense that Saint Louis’ downtown is (or should be) the dense economic engine of the region that drives much of regional planning may be inappropriate and result in misaligned public services.

However, the abnormal situation of Saint Louis’ downtown is also a reason to hope. Other cities show that there is a market for downtown living, and perhaps if the officials focus on safety and service instead of big-bang projects, organic growth will take hold. Or maybe they’ll build a new football stadium instead.

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