Public Dollars Going to Bike Sharing in Saint Louis?

Posted on by Joseph Miller

Bike sharing is growing in popularity across the country. In cities like New York, Miami, Chicago, and Kansas City, bike sharing allows pedestrians to explore the urban landscape without having to use a car, public transportation, or walk. Right now, Great Rivers Greenway (supported by Saint Louis sales taxes) is spearheading a study on bringing a bike share program to Saint Louis.

The study estimates that the cost to implement bike sharing in Saint Louis would range from $12.4 million to $14.7 million over five years. However, they also want to be able to use federal and local taxes to fund the system. That is both unnecessary and unfair.

It is unnecessary because many bike share programs across the United States are funded almost entirely by users and private sponsors, including the Kansas City B-Cycle. Far from being controlled by the city in a top-down fashion, Kansas City residents have taken to crowdfunding bike share stands they want to use. That kind of bottom-up, voluntary approach not only is innovative but it means no one pays for the bike share who does not choose to.

Supporters of public subsidies for bike share make arguments very similar to those made for public transportation, such as reducing congestion and helping people without cars. But while transit’s main beneficiaries are commuters and the economically disadvantaged, bike share’s benefits mostly accrue to the well-off engaged in recreation. As we wrote previously:

A survey of riders using Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C., found that 95 percent of users held a college degree (56 percent had a masters or doctorate). As for income, 80 percent made more than $50,000 per year and 45 percent earned more than $100,000 per year. For perspective, per capita personal income in the district is about $45,000 and less than half of all residents have college degrees. . . . Furthermore, from data collected in Kansas City, we know that most riders use the bikes on the weekends in the downtown core. In short, a city-supported bike share uses public dollars to support the weekend excursions of highly educated, upper-middle-class residents.

Bike share programs are a great way for cities to provide residents and tourists with a fun and healthy way to see parts of town. However, residents should remember that spending public resources on bike shares is a subsidy to the wealthy and, thankfully, unnecessary.

Why a Teaching Degree Is Easy as 1-2-3

Posted on by Brittany Wagner

Having experienced firsthand the ease of a teaching program, I wasn’t surprised by the results of a recent National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) study, which examined the demands of teacher training programs. Like many pre-service teachers, I knew that if I was to become an effective teacher, it wouldn’t be due to the rigors of my program. Here is an example of an assignment I completed during graduate school.

The assignment was to explain some differentiated instruction techniques I planned to use in the classroom—by drawing a cartoon. This is what I turned in:

mat blog picture

Clearly, I’m not an artist, but still, this is absolute nonsense—I received minimal points off. This is the kind of assignment the NCTQ would refer to as criterion-deficient. Criterion-deficient assignments are broad in scope and may be difficult for instructors to give high-level feedback. Unlike assignments that allow instructors to measure mastery of knowledge or skills, criterion-deficient assignments are subjective. How could an instructor give high-level feedback to the above garbage?

The NCTQ found that on average 71 percent of grades in teacher preparation courses rely heavily on criterion-deficient assignments. The study also found there is a correlation between the percentage of criterion-deficient assignments and high grades—teacher candidates are 50 percent more likely to receive honors at graduation than candidates with other majors.

I hope these embarrassing findings are a sign to universities that they should stop focusing on reflective assignments that are subjective in nature and, instead, build an environment of rigor that will ultimately draw more quality students to the teaching profession.

North-South MetroLink Line Wasteful, Unnecessary

Posted on by Joseph Miller

A group of Saint Louis officials and former regional planners are again making the case for a north-south MetroLink line, this time running from Ferguson to Bayless Avenue in South Saint Louis County. While we have consistently argued that public transportation investments are best made around this corridor, the light rail option is many times the cost of Bus Rapid Transit or other improvements.

So how much will the proposed line cost? According to the Post-Dispatch: “The original north-south proposal was initially estimated at $1 billion in 2007 dollars. Members of the coalition would not venture a guess this week at the current price tag.”

nsmlr

The latest plan actually goes further north than the $1 billion plan suggested by East-West Gateway (EWG) in 2008. According to East-West Gateway’s Vision 2040 (released in 2011), the cost for a route from Florissant Valley Community College to Butler Hill (going further south than the current proposal) was more than $1.6 billion. It is therefore safe to assume that the plan will cost between $1 billion and $1.6 billion, probably closer to $1.6 billion when adjusted for inflation. To put that in perspective, this MetroLink expansion would cost between $2,700 and $4,406 for every person living near the proposed line.

Proponents hope, and likely require, that the federal government will pay up to half of the costs of building the new route. Even allowing that, the city and county would be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in capital costs and additional annual operating costs likely to exceed $20 million per year. That will mean tax increases in the city and county, all to add 12,000 to 15,000 transit riders per day. For perspective, Saint Louis City and County combined have more than 630,000 daily commuters.

There exists a much more cost-effective way of increasing transit service along the city’s north-south corridor: Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). BRT can, and does in other cities, provide the speed and comfort of light rail service for a fraction of rail’s price. Metro is in the process of implementing BRT in Saint Louis right now, and we have argued that BRT routes serving the city and North Saint Louis County make the most sense. According to EWG, running BRT on Grand from Natural Bridge to Chippewa would cost a total of $24 million to implement. That’s less than half the cost of one mile of the proposed MetroLink expansion. In fact, Metro could afford to implement all five of its preferred BRT routes for less than 20 percent the cost of the north-south MetroLink proposal.

MetroLink proponents make the same ungrounded claims about the rail transforming marginalized communities as they did two decades ago (remember the golf course in East Saint Louis?). Now, just as then, it is not rail, but rather improved transportation that raises living standards. And in terms of improving transportation, the relative merits and incredible cost differential between BRT and light rail should be the end of the argument.

Veil Lifted from Teacher Collective Bargaining Negotiations in Colorado

Posted on by Brittany Wagner

Colorado voters said YES to Proposition 104 last week at a ratio of 7 to 3. The ballot initiative will open collective bargaining negotiations between teachers’ unions and school boards to the public. Supporters say the new law will bring transparency to local government, allowing parents and taxpayers a look into what teachers’ unions ask for during negotiations.

Should Missouri pursue similar reform?

Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) are subject to Missouri’s Sunshine Law. Many existing agreements can be viewed on Show-Me Sunshine. Here are just a few of the hundreds of items teachers and school boards have bargained for:

  • Salary

  • Benefits

  • Sick days

  • Student behavior

  • Parent communication

  • Amount of time a parent may spend in the classroom

  • Paid release days for union activity

  • Hiring policies

Parents may not be aware of the restrictiveness of some of these contracts. A study by USC Associate Professor Katharine Strunk found that in school districts with more union power school boards had less flexibility in decision making. This is unnerving, as school board members are elected by citizens; teachers’ unions are not.

Perhaps if Missouri’s Sunshine Law was expanded to include collective negotiations, school boards would be less likely to give in to cumbersome demands in the presence of taxpayers and parents. In the absence of a collaborative policy, this would bring parents and taxpayers a step closer to having a place at the bargaining table.

Star Survey Results Actually No Surprise at All

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

The Kansas City Star‘s Yael Abouhalkah seems surprised that voters in the Star‘s unscientific online survey rejected the question, “Should taxpayers build a downtown stadium for the Royals?”

  • Strongly agree — 26 percent

  • Agree — 9 percent

  • Disagree — 14 percent

  • Absolutely not — 51 percent

That’s a pretty strong vote of 65 percent opposition to the idea. Readers offered several dozen comments.

We at Show-Me had some immediate comments too. The least of which not being that you’d certainly have to work at the Star to be surprised by this result. Kansas City has had ruinous results in building big projects like this. For example:

Furthermore, just as mega-events such as Republican Conventions and Super Bowls fail to generate economic benefits, stadiums and arenas fail as well. (Read here for studies by The Brookings Institution and The Atlantic.) Kansas City voters are wary of such promises, and they are either defeating such efforts as translational medicine taxes and streetcars or are demanding sign-off on efforts to build new airport terminals. Why this well-founded skepticism is surprising to anyone is itself a surprise. The city should focus on delivering basic and necessary services and leave the economic speculation to others.

Loop Trolley Hits $11 Million Speed Bump

Posted on by Joseph Miller

The implementation of the proposed Loop Trolley, to run from the Missouri History Museum to the historic Delmar Loop neighborhood, has encountered frequent delays in recent years due to design finalization and legal concerns. Now it can add cost overruns to its list of problems. Bids to build the trolley have come in $11 million over the original $43 million cost estimate. That’s almost a 26 percent cost overrun before construction has even started. While trolley planners hope that lower estimates will come in later this month, if they do not, the trolley backers will have to alter their plans or find new revenue sources.

mysterybox

 

Current funding sources for the Loop Trolley are multifarious, including a 1 percent sales tax in the Loop Transportation Development District (TDD), tax credits, congestion relief funds (despite the possibility that traffic may get significantly worse due to the trolley), MoDOT, Great Rivers Greenway (funded by sales taxes), and private money. By far the most important contributor is the federal government, which granted the project $25 million.

While sources are diverse, they tend to be both rigid and highly contingent, with little room to generate an extra $11 million. The federal government already is unhappy with the progress of the trolley and, far from considering further subsidies, has previously threatened to remove the grant. Tax credits and TIF revenue only go so far, and private donations, congestion relief funds, and state aid were never guaranteed in the first place, when less was required. The oft-mentioned 1 percent sales tax in the TDD is supposed to fund the operation of the trolley, not its construction.

If the Loop Trolley comes in $11 million over budget, existing funding mechanisms (which could only maybe cover $43 million) would be overwhelmed. But Loop Trolley planners remain confident. We can only hope that confidence is based on cost-cutting measures or private support, not more public subsidies.

MetroBus System Changes, 2009-2014: More Miles, Fewer Stops, Higher Price Tag

Posted on by Joseph Miller

Saint Louis MetroBus service has undergone many changes since the success of 2009’s Proposition A, which increased sales taxes in Saint Louis County to fund Metro. Metro reversed earlier service cuts, changed many bus routes, introduced new service, and promised the eventual implementation of Bus Rapid Transit. This post will explore these changes in terms of route miles, bus stops, and cost efficiency.

From 2009 to 2014, the MetroBus system totaled more than 1,500 routes, 100-plus miles more than in 2009. While Metro actually cut the length of most bus routes over that period, the addition of 14 new routes has meant an overall increase in route lengths. A map of routes cut and added between 2009 and 2014 is below:

routes added

At the same time, MetroBus stops have receded over the same period, from more than 10,500 to 9,615. Reduction of stops may be a good cost-control strategy. However, the reductions have not been even across all areas. Most portions of the system within the city and near suburbs saw a large decrease in stops while those further away from the city tended to gain stops.

stops added

Together with the information on route miles, it is clear that Metro service now has wider total area coverage, but it has fewer stops and fewer route miles in most areas close to the city core.

Contemporaneously, the costs of operating MetroBus have increased faster than inflation, from $131 million to $151 million from 2009 to 2013. While Metro justifies increased service, the bus system is no more efficient than it was in 2009, with the percentage of system costs covered by fares still hovering at 22 percent. The routes Metro added since 2010 have, for the most part, garnered lower-than-average ridership. On October weekdays, when Metro records its highest ridership numbers, added routes averaged less than 700 riders per day with a farebox recovery of 24 percent, lower than the system average of 1,300 riders per day and 35 percent, respectively.

routesnamed

This result is predictable, as half of the added routes serve South and West Saint Louis County, which rarely supports cost-efficient, high-ridership routes.

With Saint Louis County’s increasing support to Metro, it is perhaps unsurprising that they receive more service. But whether that makes for an efficient bus system is more in doubt. More on this to come.

The Beef With Kemper Arena

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

Kansas City heavy hitter Tony Botello of Tony’s Kansas City is not exactly a bashful guy. In a recent blog post on his website, he strongly criticized Show-Me for not weighing in on recent events involving the future of Kemper Arena, KC’s 1970s-era multipurpose sports facility. I’m happy to step on the scale.

For those unfamiliar with the Kemper situation, the shortest of the short stories is one of a contract dispute. The American Royal—a century-old nonprofit and scholarship-granting organization focused on agriculture—has a lease with Kansas City to use Kemper but doesn’t think the city has maintained the facility at the level the city promised.

Why the city would neglect Kemper is straightforward enough; the arena has operated in the red for years now, and with the Sprint Center now online downtown, the public face of the city for many concerts and sporting events is no longer in the Bottoms, but on the Bluff. Rather than continue to operate in what it says is a poorly maintained facility, the Royal wants the arena bulldozed and replaced with a new facility that more closely accommodates the Royal’s mission and substantively fulfills the requirements of their lease, which extends amazingly until 2045.

In light of the maintenance requirements and duration of the lease, how much does the Royal say the city is liable for?

Based on the numbers that the American Royal received and validated with the city, [American Royal attorney Chase] Simmons said, the city has $150 million worth of obligations to the organization, on top of the $2.5 million it’s losing on average each year.

In other words, this was a dumb lease by the city for an older facility, whose subsidies we have criticized before. Our longstanding objections to city-ownership of sports stadiums still stands, but it’s accentuated here by what has happened in Kansas City with Kemper Arena. The city has a money pit on its hands and, on top of that, appears to have done a poor job of honoring its remaining lease obligations.

But that doesn’t make the American Royal a victim or a hero in all of this. (Disclosure: I am a Governor with the American Royal.) When the city balked at the Royal’s plan to bulldoze the arena, another group proposed turning Kemper into a multipurpose community sports facility, leveraging . . . historic preservation tax credits. Just two years ago I criticized not only Missouri’s practice of throwing historic preservation incentives around, but I was specifically critical of throwing them at Kemper Arena. The “Foutch Plan” (as it was called) was an alternative, and as a matter of policy it wasn’t “better,” but it did have the positive effect of forcing the Royal to try to make its proposal more attractive.

When it appeared the city may accept the Foutch Plan over the Royal’s, the Royal did something really, really sad—it floated the possibility that it would move out of Kansas City entirely, a nuclear option presumably intended to shock the city back to the Royal’s side. In my view, an American Royal outside the West Bottoms is not the American Royal, and I think most civic leaders would agree with that view. In any case, such a move by the Royal would almost certainly rely on subsidies provided by someone else in the region, probably in Kansas, which would  run afoul of Show-Me’s longstanding opposition to border war incentives.

Ultimately the idea of moving didn’t tip the scale to the Royal, but litigation threatened by the organization against Foutch did, and Foutch dropped its proposal. That threat, while effective in pushing out the competing plan, exacerbated the PR nightmare that got rolling after the Royal’s leadership threatened it could move. But that’s where things stand today: The Royal’s plan appears on track to prevail, and Kemper appears on track to be bulldozed.

The most basic reaction we would offer here is that Kansas City shouldn’t have been in the arena business anyway. Moreover, the overly generous terms of the lease goes to show that trusting government to act as a fiduciary for taxpayers in financial matters is hardly ever prudent. We rejected historic preservation tax credits to save Kemper and also reject border war incentives that would subsidize the Royal so that it could possibly move out of Kansas City.

However, we support contract rights, and to the extent that an agreement was made between the Royal and the city, the terms of that agreement have to be substantively performed. Taxpayers deserved a better deal than the one the city made, but they got a lot of bull instead. And like the city’s predicament with the money-hemorrhaging Power & Light District, what taxpayers deserve does not change what taxpayers are on the hook for. Yes, the Royal may eventually “win” the question of what happens to the Kemper Arena property, but that win will have come at a price—for the organization, and for the city.

There has to be a fundamental shift in the political and policy culture of Kansas City if we are to avoid debacles like this in the future, and that means fighting bad ideas before they are implemented and educating taxpayers about better development strategies that will make them, their families, and their communities better off by empowering them, not the government.

Gone Girl, Gone Jobs

Posted on by Jessica Stearns

Gone Girl brought a frenzy of excitement to the Cape Girardeau area and the state of Missouri, but was the $2.36 million tax credit worth the 15 minutes of fame? Stating that “the production hired 116 Missourians, including more than 20 off-duty law enforcement officials,” proponents of the film tax-credit program tout its success in creating jobs for Missourians.

These figures, however, fail to acknowledge that the jobs are temporary and part-time. Even more troubling, most of the higher-paying jobs used in the production of Gone Girl went to nonresidents who were brought in from LA. Now that the production of the film has finished, these so-called “created” jobs are gone.

Despite the reality of failed promises of job creation, many legislators and supporters are calling for the reinstatement of the film tax credit (which expired in November 2013) to entice movie producers to film in Missouri. The tax credit, which reduces the production companies’ tax liability, is intended to generate substantial economic activity and jobs as a result of the productions.

There is little evidence to support the notion that these tax credits are successful. A 2010 study by the Tax Foundation, however, shows that film tax credits don’t create long-term jobs, nor do they create sustainable economic growth for the state.

Most film production jobs are filled by out-of-state residents specializing in particular areas of audio or visual production. Additionally, producing a film is a relatively short-term venture in comparison to other investment projects. Since most of these positions are not permanent, “workers are left unemployed” after the production ends unless a steady stream of films is present.

The ugly truth of film tax credits is that they bring an industry into a state that doesn’t have the proper infrastructure to support said industry, and thus they do not produce long-term, well-paying jobs. Missourians deserve more than a brief moment on the silver screen. Instead, Missouri policymakers need to invest in ventures that will bring long-term economic growth to the state.

Support Us

The work of the Show-Me Institute would not be possible without the generous support of people who are inspired by the vision of liberty and free enterprise. We hope you will join our efforts and become a Show-Me Institute sponsor.

Donate
Man on Horse Charging