No Radar Love in Ohio

Posted on by Martha King

The Supreme Court of Ohio ruled Wednesday that a “police officer’s unaided visual estimation of a vehicle’s speed is sufficient evidence to support a conviction for speeding in violation.”

In 2008, Mark Jenney was issued a ticket for traveling 79 mph in a 60 mph zone. At his municipal trial, the charge was revised to 70 in a 60 mph zone. Radar results were deemed inadmissible at all trial levels.

Traffic violation cases are increasingly becoming the locus of a fundamental reinterpretation of the rights of the accused, in ways that already begin to set a wider precedent for shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused.

Take, for example, the 2009 case of Gant Bloom in St. Louis, who fought — and won — his red-light camera ticket appeal. Representing himself, Bloom successfully argued that he could not be charged with running a red light, because the city could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he, rather than his girlfriend, was the driver of his BMW at the time of the incident.

The recent ruling in Ohio provides yet another reason why Missourians ought to be concerned about how traffic cases are handled, lest this nascent precedent that abrogates the rights of the accused for traffic violations be spread to other states and other areas of law.

Faith in the Free Market

Posted on by Vince Smith

A June 2 article in the St. Louis Business Journal discusses a plan to revitalize a former shopping mall and office space, as well as the former Dillard’s building and Union Pacific railroad building downtown. The plan is to convert them into multiple repurposed buildings: The Laurel, Park Pacific Apartments, The St. Louis Centre, and The One City Centre.

This initially sounds great (I am definitely in favor of a better-looking city), but after factoring in the cost of $89 million from Missouri taxpayers, the plan begins to lose its luster.

Private developers are footing the majority of the bill, but the remaining government intervention into this real estate market seems ill-advised. When an investment becomes economically viable, a private entrepreneur will usually dive in with no cost to the state. Whenever the government involves itself in a market, on the other hand, either through subsidies or special taxes, it entails some amount of dead-weight loss, but by placing some trust in reducing burdensome regulation and allowing the market to work, we can eliminate some of this wasted productivity.

If politicians had a demonstrated track record of choosing investments that paid off, there could be an argument for such targeted tax credits — but no such track record exists. If no private developer finds it worthwhile to redevelop a set of properties without receiving massive tax credits, the project is probably not an efficient way to invest our tax dollars, especially at this time when fiscal discipline is so important. The government would better serve the people of Missouri by trusting the market to do its job.

Kansas City Needs Help Collecting Taxes

Posted on by David Stokes

Yesterday’s Kansas City Star has an interesting story about tax collection problems in Kansas City. I give Councilman John Sharp credit for an honest take on the situation:

“The findings are very disturbing,” agreed Councilman John Sharp. “Until we do a better job of collecting the taxes that are owed us, we’re not really in a position to go to taxpayers and say we need to increase taxes.”

Amen to that. Taxes should be spread widely, and then collected efficiently, so they can be as low as possible for everyone. According to the article, business license fees are one of the taxes not being collected effectively, and I am confident that Kansas City’s very complicated licensing system plays a big role in that.

The city’s contract with a private, outside collection agency does not appear to be going well:

•The Revenue Division did not include performance standards or measurable outcomes in the city’s contract with a collection agency. The city in 2008 gave its collection agency $3.8 million in potential profits and earnings tax cases to pursue. But the agency collected only $151,000.

One of the advantages of property taxation over income taxation is ease of collection. Businesses close and people move out of Kansas City. I can sympathize with both the collection agency here, and the person who allegedly owes the city income taxes from a few years back who has long since moved out of Kansas City. Trying to collect that can be very hard, and I would bet that, in some cases, the money is not actually owed in the first place. But someone always owns the land, and there are simple and easily executed lien procedures for governments looking to collect back taxes on property. I am not generally inclined to root for the government, but the ease of collecting property taxes is just one more argument against the earnings tax.

Help Your Local Brick and Politician Business

Posted on by David Stokes

John Combest today links to a story out of the Mexico Ledger about the opening of a new brick factory in Mexico, Mo. There is certainly a lot of good news in the story. Who in the world complains about new factories and new jobs? I certainly don’t. But there is also something unsettling in the article — how it has become routine and accepted that private enterprises will be subject to major government involvement.

I don’t have any criticism for anything specific in the story. I don’t blame the new company for asking for aid. I don’t blame the politicians for getting involved. I’ll even admit that the deal itself (from what I can read in the story) might be a better use of taxpayer funds than many other such deals. But it is unfortunate, and bodes poorly for our economic future, that government involvement in projects like this is now so common and expected. From the article:

On Friday, Mexico City Council members unanimously approved a $1 million CDBG loan to the project that will be funded and serviced by the state’s Department of Economic Development. The loan was one of the final steps to finalizing the project.

In addition to local, state and federal grants and loans […]

The news I want to hear would report on a business that gets going without any involvement from the government. That is the man-bites-dog story that I want to read.

The Riverfront Times Nails It on Health Care

Posted on by David Stokes

The Riverfront Times gets it exactly right as to whom the recently passed health care bill will help in the short-term: the modern-day 20-something slacker. The recently passed bill contains many offensive and horrible parts, but the requirement that children be covered under their parents’ policies until they are 27 is especially so.

This one rule encompasses the worst of all worlds: an overbearing nanny state, the belief that the government has the right to dictate such rules to families and private businesses, and legislation that now makes it even easier for young people out of college to further delay adulthood.

Can St. Louis Really Support Another Performing Arts Facility? Local Government Certainly Thinks So

Posted on by Thomas Duda

If I read the tea leaves correctly, I expect an announcement in the coming days, weeks, or months that the Kiel Opera House in St. Louis will soon commence an expensive — excuse me, extensive — renovation. That’s the only conclusion that I draw from the May 28 article in the St. Louis Business Journal, “SCP, McKees invest $2.9 million in Kiel Opera House.” The complexity of the deal appears staggering, but one fact is crystal clear: The project would simply never become a reality were it not for taxpayer largesse. Here is a brief outline of funding sources for the Kiel restoration, as identified in the May 28 article:

The above sources total more than $74 million, of which only $13.9 million appears remotely like private capital that flows independent of a government guarantee. Thinking about it, though, even the private mortgage loan has implicit public backing, because the project that it supports would not exist in the absence of a legislative quagmire of market distortion.

First, in 2009, Ordinance 68380 amended the city of St. Louis’ 5-percent gross receipts tax on ticketed entertainment productions, intending to incentivize the “owner, primary tenant, occupant or operator, or [a]ffiliate” of a “Contiguous Recreation Facility […] contiguous to a historic theatre, opera house or concert hall” to redevelop said historic theater for “$50,000,000-$99,999,999” (hyperlink added). The redevelopment would be subject to the following guideline:

  • “[with] a redevelopment plan approved by the City by ordinance and a Redevelopment Agreement approved by the LCRA.”

Lo and behold, the development team for the upcoming Kiel Opera House renovation — which includes the ownership group for the St. Louis Blues hockey team and Scottrade Center — sought and received each of the above approvals. St. Louis Ordinance 68381 authorizes a redevelopment plan for the Kiel Opera House and affirms LCRA’s approval of the project.

St. Louis did not stop there, however, as Ordinances 68382, 68383, 68384, and 68385 collectively tweak the terms of a lease agreement on the city-owned Kiel Opera House facility, earmark funds from a previously approved Community Improvement District (Ordinance 68377) to support the Opera House’s redevelopment, and bring the entire legislative morass full circle by using taxes abated in accordance with Ordinance 68380 to provide debt service on the project’s city-issued bonds.

If the project’s bonds ultimately find buyers, then a combination of federal, state, and St. Louis taxpayers, hockey fans, and service users would foot the vast majority of the costs for restoring one of St. Louis’ architectural gems. Most will do so unwittingly, because St. Louis city does not examine, account for, or consider fiscal and economic impacts when passing legislation.

Please do not hear me wrong; the last thing that I want to see is another building sit vacant for decades on end. That said, I cannot cheer a rehabilitation project that relies so heavily on bloated and unwieldy allocations of taxpayer capital. Can Kiel Opera House return to life as “a 3,200-seat theater for concerts, Broadway shows, and family and holiday programs [with] four side banquet halls […] available for weddings, conferences and other events” in the absence of public subsidy?

Perhaps not.

But, then again, did you know that the Fabulous Fox Theater in St. Louis sprang back to life without state tax credits or city-backed bonds?

I predict that Kiel’s future success — whatever form it may take — will come at the expense of other performing arts venues throughout the region. The failure of the Kiel project to attract private capital investment suggests to me that it may simply displace performance activities that would otherwise occur elsewhere, at privately supported venues throughout St. Louis.

Although there are strong arguments that markets tend to underproduce artistic work relative to growth in other sectors of the economy and that public subsidy can increase access to art and yield positive externalities, these arguments do not apply to the question of whether St. Louis city is underproducing space for such art downtown. At present, the vacancy rate in downtown’s myriad office buildings is nearly 19 percent, which means that competition for tenants is fierce and that already-low lease rates are falling still lower. Simply stated, the facilitation of architectural space is the last thing that St. Louis City needs to subsidize. Of Kiel’s proposed $74 million renovation cost, $43.4 million will go to the contractor and an indeterminate amount will fund professional services like attorneys’ and bond underwriters’ fees. None of the project’s costs will fund artistic production.

Many contend that tax credits create jobs. However, I see no evidence to suggest that they ever have or ever will.

Policing By Camera: A Discussion of Red Light and Surveillance Cameras as a Tool of Law Enforcement

Posted on by Audrey Spalding

On Wednesday next week, the Show-Me Institute and the Saint Louis chapter of Liberty on the Rocks will co-host a discussion of the use of cameras in public places as a law enforcement tool. During the past few months, red light cameras and surveillance cameras have been in the news, and we’re excited to have Sen. Jim Lembke and Alderman Antonio French, both of whom have taken strong stances on these issues, speaking at this event!

The discussion will begin at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, June 9,
at the Show-Me Institute Office at 4512 W. Pine.
Please RSVP either by email, to [email protected],
or by phone at (314) 454-0647,
or by commenting on this blog post.

Sen. Lembke, who represents part of the city of Saint Louis and Saint Louis County, has spoken out against the use of red light cameras, on the grounds that they entail the presumption of guilt. As he said in a Post-Dispatch article, “[the use of red light cameras] takes liberty away in that there’s no other crime that I know of on the books where I as a citizen am guilty until I prove my innocence.”

Alderman French, who represents the 21st ward, has been campaigning hard to have surveillance cameras set up near high-crime areas in his ward. In the Riverfront Times blog, French explained that the crime is coming from a small group of people, and that surveillance cameras might deter that activity. From the RFT:

“It’s the same group of bad guys doing bad things,” French says. “We’ll advertise the hell out if it, that there’s cameras. One of reason people do things is because they think that can get away with it. If they know somebody is watching it’s very likely they’ll go somewhere else to do drug activity and violence.”

One of the most interesting aspects about the use of both red light and surveillance cameras is that the cameras will likely soon be able to identify, without a doubt, the individual committing a crime. At that point, although camera surveillance seems to be a particularly un-American activity, is there any constitutional argument against it? Do cameras really infringe upon our liberties if they are placed in public places where any police officer could also be placed?

French and Lembke will have the opportunity to answer these questions, and others, on June 9. If you are free, please drop by. The discussion will be informal; it our hope that attendees can ask the elected officials questions directly, and be part of an engaging conversation about the trade-offs between liberty and security.

Liberty on the Rocks is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, social organization that seeks to unite individuals, regardless of political affiliation, who desire liberty. With the goal of facilitating networks, friendships, and intelligent conversation, Liberty on the Rocks seeks to initiate the energy and dialogue necessary to move America from the grassroots up, toward the constitutional principles of freedom used to found this nation.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad For-Profit Animal Shelter?

Posted on by David Stokes

St. Louis is, George; St. Louis is.

The plan to contract out the operation of the animal shelter to Stray Rescue has been canceled. The Suburban Journals has the story on the new plan here, which still involves Stray Rescue and many other animal rescue groups. Another plan had been offered by a local vet to operate the shelter as a clinic/shelter on a for-profit basis, as has been done in Kansas City. It is one thing to reject the vet’s plan, which was submitted after the deadline, when another plan involving Stray Rescue was already going forward. It is quite another to continue to disregard the vet’s idea now that plan no. 1 has crashed and burned.

I attended the news conference when the program cancellation was announced last week. I asked a health department official there if the veterinarian’s privatization proposal would be revised. She said she would be willing to talk to him, but (and this is an exact quote) “I am uncomfortable with for-profit groups.” So, in other words, the proposal — no matter how great it may or may not be — is off-limits because the veterinarian has the audacity to possibly earn some type of profit from the care of lost, sick, and abused animals.

This fear is perfectly reasonable of course, given that the for-profit bid for the animal shelter was coordinated by Drexel Burnham Lambert as part of a thinly disguised hostile takeover of the shelter, which would then be cannibalized and sold off piecemeal to enrich the financiers at the expense of the kittens. Oh, wait — you say it was actually proposed by a local vet with a long history of taking care of animals in the city of St. Louis? Well, then maybe the city should reconsider the idea. …

Seriously, only someone who has spent their entire lives working for the government could say something like, “I am uncomfortable with for-profit groups.” I am sure that the director has accomplished many worthy things during her public service, and I am sure she is a fine person, but the knee-jerk opposition to any group that might earn any type of profit is unseemly, albeit not surprising. For too many government employees, P.J. O’Rourke’s words about John Kenneth Galbraith apply:

[…] and, after 97 years of comfort and achievement in a free market society, still believed that a free market society is wrong.

The city should undertake to reconsider new proposals for the animal shelter, and for-profit ideas should be given just as much consideration as any other. Taking care of animals and making a profit are not mutually exclusive.

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