More and more school districts around St. Louis refuse to let transfer students from Normandy come back this year even though its in their power to do so. Director of Education Policy, James Shuls, has a simple message for these districts: “let the students return!” and he’s not alone. Adolphus M. Pruitt, 1st vice president of the Missouri NAACP and president of the Saint Louis NAACP, joined Shuls in a joint statement asking area school districts to allow last years transfer students from Normandy to return again this year.
Beware The Jabberwock (And Downtown Streetcars)
In an iconic episode of the TV cartoon The Simpsons, a Music Man-type salesman convinces the town of Springfield to build a monorail. When one of the characters, Marge, laments that “Main Street’s still all cracked and broken,” her son Bart retorts, “sorry Mom, the mob has spoken.”
Back in the real world, Kansas City is caught up in a questionable transportation project of its own – joining the rush to become the latest U.S. city to build a super-expensive, super-trendy downtown streetcar system.
With an initial 2.2-mile line already under construction, the Kansas City City Council has unanimously approved the creation of a Transportation Development District (TDD) to expand the streetcar line to almost 10 miles. Kansas City residents need to consider the project’s enormous costs and questionable benefits of the proposed expansion.
Streetcars are an extremely costly form of public transportation. The Kansas City TDD aims to spend $472 million to build 7.6 miles of streetcar routes in Kansas City. That is a mind-boggling $62 million per mile to build a system that (as one critic puts it) “offers little more than a way to move downtown workers from their offices to lunch.” For no more money, Kansas City could add 100 buses to its existing fleet of 250 buses and greatly increase bus service throughout the entire Kansas City metro area.
It is always fun to spend other people’s money and supporters of streetcar expansion expect to raise more than half of the needed funds – or more than $250 million – from the federal government. That still leaves a substantial sum of money that will have to be raised in additional taxes on residents and businesses inside – and, it is important to note, outside – the transportation district.
People within the TDD will have the opportunity to vote in a special election (at a time yet to be determined) on whether to accept higher sales or property tax levies to support the project. Taxpayers outside the district will not get a chance to vote, but they will be on the hook as a result of the fact that the city of the Kansas City is a major property owner within the TDD. As such, the city will shoulder a significant portion of the tax load – and it will pass that burden along to at-large Kansas City residents through higher taxes or reduced services.
The whole project begs the question: What possible advantage can there be to building a new streetcar system, given the much lower costs and the much greater range and flexibility that buses provide?
NextRailKC and others describe the huge expense and extreme inflexibility of streetcar systems as a hidden asset – signifying a valuable long-term commitment on the part of government to provide reliable public transportation within a designated area. According to this argument, developers and investors see this commitment, and so they are inspired to build around streetcar routes.
As a favorite example, streetcar supporters point to Portland’s celebrated Pearl District. There, it is argued, is the proof that streetcars can spearhead incredible urban development that justifies the streetcar system’s out-sized expense. However, even streetcar proponents admit that Portland’s streetcar was only a part of a large-scale investment plan, involving more than $400 million in tax subsidies that supported growth in streetcar corridors.
Kansas City residents would be wise to reject Bart’s advice and listen to his mother’s more mature assessment. Better to improve what is already there – roads and existing public transportation – than to join the rush to be part of the latest urban planning fad.
Joseph Miller is a policy researcher at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.
Kansas City To Spend 27 Percent Of All Regional Transportation Funds On Streetcar
In a recent article, the Midtown KC Post reported that Kansas City officials reached an agreement with the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) to fund the proposed streetcar expansion with proceeds from a proposed 0.75-cent statewide sales tax. Under the agreement, the streetcar’s Transportation Development District (TDD) sales tax would be reduced to 0.25 percent. In return, MoDOT would provide $3 million a year in funding for the streetcar.
But anyone who has read the streetcar’s financial plan knows the math for that “swap” does not add up. The streetcar TDD’s sales tax is supposed to bring in almost $30 million a year. If it is reduced to 0.25 percent, the TDD would only raise $7.5 million per year. With an extra $3 million a year from the state, that leaves almost $20 million per year in lost revenue unaccounted for, or $200 million over 10 years. Because the streetcar needs every dime (and then some) of that sales tax money, where is the extra $200 million going to come from?
The answer to this conundrum lies in Resolution 140500, which Kansas City Mayor Sly James introduced on June 19. It proposes spending an incredible $210 million of the 0.75-cent statewide sales tax revenue to fund the streetcar expansion. To get just how incredible of a request that is, consider that the Kansas City region is only supposed to receive a total of $776 million for all of its road, bridge, transit, rail, port, aviation, and greenway projects. In the plan that the regional planning agency (MARC) released, that is almost every dollar the region planned to spend on transit. That original plan had $32 million for the streetcar, but millions more for improvements throughout the entire region.
This money grab for what is essentially a development scheme for downtown Kansas City should enrage not only residents in the Kansas City region, but taxpayers throughout the state. For parts of the Kansas City region not called downtown Kansas City, it essentially means no new funds for more cost-effective transit solutions or other more pressing projects. For the state as a whole, it underlines the incredible waste of a transportation sales tax supposedly needed to fix MoDOT’s highway funding problems. That 4 percent of all sales tax revenue raised over 10 years would go to support an incredibly expensive want with dubious development potential makes the proponents of the sales tax, who constantly argue that our infrastructure is crumbling, look like chicken littles.
If reports are accurate, MoDOT may already have made an agreement with Kansas City to divert this vast sum of statewide sales tax revenue, completely upending the open process through which MARC developed its regional plan and entirely contradicting MoDOT’s preliminary list of projects (which Kansas Citians have been asked to fruitlessly comment on) for the Kansas City region. That should indicate to Missourians just what kind of policy the transportation sales tax would create: wasteful, opaque, and catered to special interests.
Lovely Rita’s New Meters
Yesterday, I attended a town hall meeting that the Saint Louis Treasurer’s office hosted regarding citizen feedback on the parking technology field tests in downtown Saint Louis and the Central West End. The city is running these tests in order to modernize parking operations in the city. The vendors included T2 Systems, Aparc Systems, Xerox, and Duncan Solutions. All of the vendors gave impressive demonstrations.
The city should go state-of-the-art with its technological upgrades, no half measures. People have told me, and I agree, that it is annoying to have to go to a centralized meter, pay, wait for a printout, and then go all the way back to the car to place the printout. It is an added pain to go refill the meter when there is heavy rain or snow outside. If the city upgrades its meters, it should either have a meter at each individual space and/or allow people to pay through a smartphone app. At the town hall, all of the vendors stated that they will allow people to pay through a smartphone.
There also should be some flexibility in regards to charging different prices based on the time of day. During busier times, the prices for parking should increase. During quieter times, prices should be lower. This would allow the city to properly react to the demand for parking and hopefully reduce congestion.
However, no matter the appeal of state-of-the-art technology, the city needs to balance that against the costs of the upgrades. Added parking convenience is one thing, but the city should not break the bank for it.
Overall, it is good to see the city looking to upgrade its parking systems. With all that we can do with digital technology, it is about time parking meters join the 21st century.
Tell Taxpayers Where Their Money Went
The Republican Party has eliminated Kansas City as a potential host city for the 2016 convention, and with it went any reason for keeping the details of the bid a secret. In April we wrote:
The mayor of Kansas City, Mo., disclosed that the city is ponying up another $65,000 to woo the 2016 Republican convention. Jackson Co., Mo., Wyandotte Co./Kansas City, Kan., and Johnson Co., Kan., also are chipping in an additional $65,000 each. This $260,000 total is in addition to the $100,000 that Kansas City, Mo., already spent. We participated in a KSHB TV story about the spending and asserted that taxpayers ought to be told what is being promised in their name.
At the time, the mayor and the convention committee refused to tell taxpayers how much money the city was spending, where it was going, or how much more was promised. According to the Kansas City Star:
The Star filed a Sunshine Law request with the city and the Kansas City Convention Visitors Association asking for information from the proposal on the potential public cost of the convention.
Both declined, citing state law — and a concern about revealing details of the bid to competing communities.
“We will not be addressing specific questions related to the Finance section of our response,” said an email from Julie Sally, a spokeswoman for the Kansas City convention task force.
City spokesman Chris Hernandez also declined to provide the requested information, as did Mike Burke, the attorney for the KCCVA.
Now that there is no risk of compromising the bid, the city and the KCCVA should reveal what commitments they made, where the money went, and to whom. Their economic impact projections for the convention were pretty wild, too. We would like to see who generated those, and how.
Want Better Teachers In High-Need Schools? Fix Pensions
What if instead of busing students from failing school districts to accredited ones, we bused great teachers from accredited schools into the failing districts? That idea has won a fair amount of attention.
Last November, the Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis pitched the idea of providing high-quality teachers as instructional coaches in struggling schools. A similar idea was raised by CEE-Trust, the consulting firm that the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education hired to address problems in the Kansas City School District. The CEE-Trust proposal called on accredited school districts “to play a significant role in helping [unaccredited] systems improve.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch heaped praise on this idea, calling it among the “more promising ideas.”
However, there is one easily overlooked obstacle standing in the way of turning this localized version of a teacher peace corps into a reality in our two biggest cities: the incompatibility of different pension systems.
The suburban districts are a part of the Public School Retirement System (PSRS), as are all other school districts throughout Missouri – with the exception of Saint Louis and Kansas City, which have autonomous pension systems. If a teacher moves from PSRS to one of the city plans, he or she will incur a significant loss in pension wealth.
This is not a new problem, but a longstanding one. Saint Louis and Kansas City have been struggling with this for years. Research by University of Missouri economists has demonstrated that the separate pension systems create a barrier to recruiting school leaders into the two urban school districts. The separate pension systems also limit the pool of teachers who are willing to work in the cities. Jeffrey Kuntze, chief operating officer of the Confluence Charter Schools in Saint Louis, says “the separate pension systems make it extremely difficult for us to recruit veteran teachers from the county. We can get them when they retire, but not mid-career.”
These pension boundaries are not a problem for Normandy and Riverview Gardens, which are in PSRS, but they would make it practically impossible for high-performing school districts to operate a program, run a school, or loan teachers within the Saint Louis or Kansas City boundaries. They simply could not move teachers or school leaders across pension boundaries without making them suffer great financial penalties.
There is no easy way to solve this problem. Some have suggested we move Saint Louis and Kansas City into PSRS. This sounds like a good idea but is practically impossible because of Social Security. City teachers pay into it while PSRS teachers do not. Schools in Saint Louis and Kansas City cannot withdraw from Social Security. In effect, we have a Hotel California problem — urban schools can check out any time they like, but they can never leave Social Security.
The only real solution is to close the current systems to new entrants and place them in a new, statewide system that participates in Social Security. Before this idea causes mass hysteria, let me stress that this would not affect current employees’ or retirees’ pensions. They would remain secure in their current system. It would, however, remove the artificial pension boundaries and allow us to create a better pension system for teachers and students.
Opponents of this idea claim that closing the current defined benefit systems would be financially unsound, as it would lead to considerable “transition costs” that would far outstrip any benefits that we may receive. This is the very issue tackled in a recent Show-Me Institute policy study by Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Biggs examines the evidence for “transition costs” and concludes that the concerns are “largely mistaken and should not stand in the way of public employee pension reforms.”
Whether you believe busing teachers into failing schools is a viable solution or just another feel-good proposition, fixing this pension problem should be a top priority. Missouri should not have a system that puts our neediest communities at a disadvantage when it comes to recruiting talented teachers.
James V. Shuls, Ph.D., is the director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.
Allowing Normandy Students To Return Makes Sense To The Head And The Heart
A Joint Statement From Adolphus M. Pruitt and James V. Shuls
In the fall of 2013, students from the unaccredited Normandy School District stepped out in faith. They placed their hope and trust in the hands of nearby schools, sometimes more than 20 miles away from home. Over the course of the past year, these students have overcome great obstacles to get to school in their search for better educational opportunities. Now, area school leaders have a decision to make. They can choose to honor the decisions and sacrifices of these students or they can choose to deny them access to the schools they have worked so hard to attend.
It seems clear what the decision should be.
Financially, the transfer program is a winning proposition for accredited school districts. In most cases, the transfer students – even with the lower $7,200 tuition rate that the State Board of Education set – bring more money to the district than a student moving into the district would generate. Schools are funded primarily through local property taxes and state appropriations. The local property taxes are essentially fixed, they don’t rise when one new student moves into an apartment complex, and the state provides every area school district less than $7,200 per student. Most, in fact, receive less than $2,000 per pupil from the state.
Furthermore, the $7,200 is more than enough to cover the marginal cost of an additional student. That is, it does not cost a district $7,200 to add one student to an existing classroom. As the schools have demonstrated over the past year, they have the capacity to accept and educate these students. Few have needed to hire additional teachers or faculty. They simply have been able to assimilate the students into the day-to-day operations of the school. For many schools, it simply has been business as usual.
This decision, however, is not just about the bottom line. It is a decision that has a direct impact on students themselves. We recognize that most educators enter the profession because they want to make a difference in the lives of students. This is an opportunity to do just that.
Students transferring from the unaccredited Normandy School District are among the most disadvantaged students in the state. In Normandy, nearly half of the students will not graduate on time and among those who do, their future prospects are slim. With an average ACT score of 16.8, many of these students cannot even get into state colleges and universities.
Educators – teachers, principals, and superintendents – throughout the area have an opportunity to change these statistics for the transfer students. They have the opportunity to make a difference.
As representatives of the Saint Louis chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Show-Me Institute, a free-market think tank, it is not often that we find ourselves in complete agreement on an issue. On this, we stand in unity. Local school districts should reward the hard work and sacrifice of these students. Allowing them to return is a decision that makes sense to the head and to the heart.
Adolphus M. Pruitt is 1st vice president of the Missouri NAACP and president of the Saint Louis NAACP. James V. Shuls, Ph.D., is the director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute.
Co-Signers
Joe Knodell – Executive Director, Missouri Education Reform Roundtable
Courtney Allen Curtis – Missouri State Representative (D – 73)
Walkability In Saint Louis: My Feet Are My Only Carriage
Recently, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an article discussing the walkability of the Saint Louis area. The article focuses on a report from Smart Growth America, which insinuates that walkability drives wealth and development, and that the cities should create walkability with expensive rail projects and subsidies to developers in the urban core. But an examination of Saint Louis’ walkability scores and development patterns suggest just the opposite. Wealth and development drive walkability, and planners’ attempts to turn the process on its head are quixotic.
Smart Growth America promotes many common urban planning myths about demographic factors and magic millennials, with the main point being that people are abandoning cars and suburbs for cities and transit. But the facts are:
- Suburbs (and exurbs) are still growing faster than urban cores nationwide.
- Millennials are still driving and only using transit slightly more than past generations.
- Millennials are flocking to cities with high-performing economies regardless of their overall walkability or transit scores.
Like these myths, the idea that walkability drives wealth is likely a mirage, created by the metric for walkability itself. That’s because Smart Growth America gives higher walkability scores to areas where “…everyday destinations, such as home, work, school, stores, and restaurants, are within walking distance.”
That sounds reasonable, until one considers the type of areas that will not be considered walkable. One such type of area is suburbs like Ladue or Ballwin in Saint Louis County, with spread out single-family homes. But another is going to be poor inner city neighborhoods, such as areas in North Saint Louis. Despite the higher population densities, mixed housing stock, and narrow roads with ample sidewalks, the depressed economies and lack of safety in poorer areas mean fewer businesses, fewer restaurants, and fewer shops. Therefore, they have lower walkability scores. Use that definition of “walkable” nationally and one would erroneously conclude walkability means wealth because the definition of walkable precludes economically depressed areas.
North Saint Louis already has the infrastructure to allow residents to walk, bike, or take transit to nearby areas. It just does not have the wealth to attract enough shops, jobs, and restaurants into walking distance. The only way to fix that is to increase economic opportunity, or replace current residents with wealthier residents poached from the suburbs or other city neighborhoods. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which route the city has taken with Washington Ave., the Northside Development Project, and Cortex in midtown.
School Transfer: One Family’s Disappointment
The decisions of Missouri's State Board of Education, the Department Elementary and Secondary Education, and the Board of Francis Howell School District have left this family with few options.
