Kansas City’s Streetcar Continues To Undercut Busses

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

Last year we learned that the Kansas City Area Transit Authority (KCATA) was spending money on the streetcar that was meant for its bus system. At the time, KCUR reported:

Area Transportation Authority general manager Mark Huffer said diverting transit tax money for streets and streetcars is taking its toll.

“It’s going to be virtually impossible for us to sustain current service levels like things such as Max on Prospect or Max on North Oak that we hear a lot of people asking for – for the long run – if what is continuing to be allocated to ATA lessens every year,” says Huffer.

A year later and Kansas City has finally made that MAX bus line on Prospect a priority — but only if voters approve a huge sales tax and additional property assessment to support that same streetcar. KMBC reported on Tuesday that:

In August, voters must approve the new Prospect MAX bus line as part of the city’s second streetcar route proposal. The city grouped the two together as part of its strategy to expand its mass transit options.

The streetcar proposal continues to draw big crowds angry about its tax proposals. But the Kansas City Transit Authority admits the high price tag will be a hard sell.

This should bother people who are seriously interested in providing effective transit in Kansas City. The successful, well-run, and cost-effective MAX system is being unnecessarily linked to the streetcar.  That is just bad policy.

A Victory For Government Accountability In Kansas City

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

When the Missouri Legislature considered creating a land bank for Kansas City, the Show-Me Institute was opposed. We argued in testimony before the legislature that the existing Jackson County Land Trust was as effective as any similar agency across the country. We testified that:

There does not appear to be any evidence that the Jackson County Land Trust is doing a poor job of getting vacant property back into private, productive use.

Considering the Saint Louis example, any effort in Kansas City was likely to fall prey to Kansas City politicians who might direct the city to hold onto property on behalf of favored constituents or special interests. We are glad to report that the Kansas City Land Bank has addressed these concerns. On March 3, the Board of Commissioners adopted the following resolution:

The Land Bank supplements the Code of Ethics with the additional requirement, that any Commissioner that receives a contact from an elected official or staff lobbying for or against particular application for a property held by the Land Bank shall disclose such contact to the Land Bank staff within a reasonable time thereafter, and shall disclose that contact to the other Commissioners prior to voting upon the particular application for which such contact was made.

The board also will start listing the reasons for any application rejection in the minutes so that applicants and others can understand the commissioners’ decision-making process. This is a great win for transparency in government, and we congratulate the land bank board for taking this important step.

Education Needs More Money, STAT!

Posted on by James V. Shuls

If you believe the popular media outlets, Missouri schools are in dire need of more cash. They claim that Missouri is under-funding education and that our state ranks low in comparisons of education spending. If we would just get with the program and give schools more cash, we will reap the rewards. It is true that our state lawmakers are not fully funding the foundation formula for public schools. On principle, they should fully fund the formula, but I’m not convinced that fully funding the formula would really lead to better results for students.

As I have written on the Show-Me Daily blog, “Since 1992, Missouri has seen nearly a 40 percent increase in per-pupil spending. Yet we have seen little in terms of increases in academic achievement.”

A new study by Andrew Coulson, of the Cato Institute, adds more evidence to support this claim. Using school funding data and student scores from the SAT, he compared the increase in spending with changes in SAT scores for the past 40 years. Before anyone complains that most Missourians don’t take the SAT, it is important to note that Coulson takes this into account and uses statistical procedures to account for the different types of students who have taken the SAT.

He demonstrates that education funding has increase precipitously, while SAT scores have remained relatively flat.

Whether looking at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), as I did in my previous post, or the SAT, it is clear that student achievement has practically flat-lined. Evidence from the past four decades suggests that money alone will not cure these ills.

CATO 2014 Education Funding

Does Saint Louis Have Enough Transit Service?

Posted on by Joseph Miller

With the transit committee hearing in Washington this week, there has been a freight train of stories and blog posts on how public transportation is the future. According to transit boosters, the reason that transportation makes up a tiny fraction of total vehicle miles in the U.S. is because the system just isn’t good enough. One blog, on how to get millenials (my generation) to use transit, states:

[S]ervice time is very key. Whether it’s rail or bus rapid transit, the key word is “rapid.” If the service is quick, we will ride. One of the biggest issues I’ve seen is when someone has tried an “express” route that is express in name only.

That is all transit needs to do, take people from where they are to where they want to go, with speed. But in reality, that is easier said than done. My own experience trying to use the Saint Louis Metro system is a good illustration of this.

I am a millennial and I live in the Central West End neighborhood of Saint Louis. I do not own a car. Earlier this week, I was supposed to go to an Ultimate Frisbee scrimmage after work. We usually play at a park on the Hill, a 20-minute bike ride away. But this week, the location changed to Franz Park. I figured I might be able to take public transportation, but my hopes were quickly dashed.

map

If I owned a car or carpooled, the total trip would have been 9 minutes. To take transit, however, would have taken between 40 and 50 minutes. That was slightly faster than walking (1 hour 9 minutes), but quite a bit slower than biking on a safe bike route (30-35 minutes).

For people who support more transit, the lesson they would take from this is that Saint Louis needs more transit service. But that is the wrong lesson. The Central West End, where I live, has bus and light-rail service. Still, transit service was little better than walking. This is not an isolated case; I walk, bike, and carpool many more miles than I use transit.

Metro spent $300 million on transit last year, or $190 for every resident of the area it serves. How much more would have to be spent so that I could have express service to work, Franz Park, and everywhere else that I want to go in the Saint Louis area? As a car-less millennial, I have a greater incentive to take transit than the vast majority of Saint Louis area residents who own a car. Yet, transit is not my primary means of getting around Saint Louis. How much would have to be spent to make transit my primary means of transportation if I already owned a car?

More Than 500 Economists Oppose Minimum Wage Hike

Posted on by Rik W. Hafer

In an open letter released March 12, 2014, more than 500 economists voiced their agreement that increasing the federal minimum wage to $10.10 would not reduce poverty. The letter’s release coincided with hearings in the U.S. Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee to debate raising the federal minimum wage. The letter notes that poverty is a complex issue and simply raising the minimum wage is not “a silver bullet solution.” The letter’s signatories include Nobel laureates Eugene Fama, Edward Prescott, and Vernon Smith along with a number of previous administration officials, among them Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and Harvey Rosen, all past chairs of the Council of Economic Advisors. (The full letter and list of signatories is available here.)

Raising the minimum wage costs jobs for the very workers it is supposed to help. A recent study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that the proposed increase would cost the economy 500,000 jobs by 2016. This outcome from raising the minimum wage agrees with previous work, including analysis that David Neumark and I wrote for the Show-Me Institute.

Missouri policymakers must consider the full impact of raising the minimum wage. It simply is not good public policy to raise wages for some individuals at the expense of other workers who are made even worse off than they are now. The minimum wage simply is not a viable policy tool to fight poverty.

Policy Breakfast: Government Privatization in Missouri: Successes, Risks, and Opportunities

Posted on by David Stokes

Show-Me Institute Director of Local Government Policy David Stokes recently released a case study about privatization efforts in Missouri. The study documents the variety of ways in which counties, cities, and towns can engage the private sector to effectively provide many public services. Examples of areas that can experience cost savings and service improvements through privatization include trash pick-up, ambulance service, swimming pool and golf course management, animal control, fleet management, government pharmacy services, and much more.

Read the full case study: .

Bloodletting In Clayton

Posted on by David Stokes

For centuries until approximately 200 years ago, bloodletting was a common treatment for illness. If you were sick, you would go get a nice bleeding. We finally learned what should have been obvious: with the exception of one or two illnesses, bleeding was a terrible idea that did more harm than good. The Missouri local tax equivalent to bloodletting is the economic development sales tax.

Government does a terrible job planning the economy, whether it is a Soviet five-year plan or retail TIFs (tax increment financing) in Saint Louis County. Municipal government can improve the local economy by doing the things it needs to do well: police, fire, local roads, etc. It does not need to “develop” our economy, especially because “economic development” in Missouri is synonymous with taxpayer subsidies and corporate welfare.

Clayton, the Saint Louis County seat and the region’s other downtown, is considering an economic development sales tax, along with three other tax increases, on the April ballot. Doing four tax increases at once (four!) is crazy, but the point of this post is just the economic development sales tax.

Clayton has been careful in its use of tax incentives and other economic development tools in comparison to other Saint Louis County municipalities, which admittedly is a very low bar. Clayton deserves credit for that. So I can’t understand why it would propose raising a tax to do more of something it should not do in the first place: government planning of the local economy.

Clayton officials likely would claim that the intention for the new tax funds is not more use of subsidies or more local planning, but a continued focus on business recruitment, retention, etc. I believe them, and in the short run, I am sure that would be true. But, in my opinion, the increased use of, and funding for, government economic development activities will almost certainly be followed by heavier use of various subsidies and tax incentives. Cities such as Clayton should be moving in the opposite direction with less or zero use of these types of programs, not increasing taxes to do things they should skip from the start.

More to come on these four tax increase proposals next week.

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