Moving Forward After the Vote

At long last, Election Day has come and gone.  The decisions with which we must live for the next few years have been made.  It’s time to ponder the next steps, particularly with regard to the tax measures that were proposed to pull our cities back from the brink of fiscal breakdown.

Once again, I’ll view the tax measure landscape through the telescope of Petaluma’s Measure Q.  However, I expect that the observations will provide at least a few insights to similar tax measures elsewhere.

However, you have an advantage on me today.  You know whether Measure Q passed.  I don’t.  I’m working on this post while keeping an eye on the early returns, with the decision on Measure Q unclear.

So today will be a do-it-yourself blog post.  Pick the heading below that matches the headline in your morning paper and read on.  (If the “Yes” and “No” ballots ended nearly equal, perhaps you should read both.  You’ll have plenty of time as the County election officials sort out the tally.)

Measure Q Sneaks By

 Despite consistent erosion from the early polling numbers, Measure Q held on to win.  The sales tax in Petaluma will jump by one percent and City Hall takes a big step away from the fiscal cliff.

I’m pleased.  I like my town and didn’t wish it to be under the continuing spectre of a possible bankruptcy.

But that doesn’t mean that all is rosy.  There are serious questions about whether the civic improvements promised by the Measure Q proponents can all be delivered.

Also, there are at least a few folks like myself who voted for Measure Q, but don’t believe that the Rainier Connector makes sense for the City.  Those who would view the victory of Measure Q, however thin the margin, as a plebiscite for the Rainier Connector shouldn’t forgot those of us who voted for Measure Q without supporting Rainier.

It seems to me that the City Council, if they are to responsibly represent the citizens, needs to take an honest look  at the cashflow for the Measure Q revenue and then to refine their wish list.  I know it’s be politically difficult, nigh upon political suicide, to remove Rainier from the table shortly after securing a tax increase with Rainier as the key talking point, but better now than later.

Of course, the wild card is the citizens committee that will be formed to ensure that the new revenues are spent as promised.  If, as I suspect, it’ll be impossible for Measure Q to cover all the proposed improvements, the function of the committee would seem to become murky.

I have no idea how the committee process will play out, but I’ll be a greatly interested observer.

It’s great that Measure Q passed, but the story has only begun.  The City has challenging times ahead.

Measure Q Goes Down to Narrow Defeat

After rosy early projections of easy victory, Measure Q stumbled in the homestretch, coming up short at the wire.

But the need to mend City finances remains.  The financial projections from City Hall show dire numbers in the coming fiscal year.  There seems little alternative but to return to the voters with a more modest and more focused tax measure.

Therefore, we should look at the nature of the Measure Q defeat.  From conversations around town, it seems to me that the “No” voters fell into three camps, those who think that government is so inefficient that they’ll vote against any tax measure, those who may be sympathetic to the financial difficulties at City Hall but have their own pocketbook worries to consider, and those who are willing to help their city but were troubled by the structure of Measure Q.

The first two groups likely can’t be swayed regardless of any new arguments that may be mustered.  So that leaves the third group.  And I believe strongly believe that the folks who were sympathetic to the plight of City Hall but nonetheless opposed Measure Q can be convinced to support a Son-of-Q proposal. But the support won’t come easily.  I see three major tasks:

Education: I know the City financial records are open, but the records are complex and difficult to comprehend for a layperson.  A series of public workshops, heavily promoted in local media, might help bridge the educational gap.  The workshops could also include interaction with City departments on the issues behind the fiscal crisis.

But the information can’t be organized with a particular agenda in mind.  And honest answers must be provided to citizen questions.  Obfuscation would undermine any potential benefits.  Although I wasn’t present, I was told of a situation in an early Measure Q public meeting where an earnest question from a concerned citizen was given an evasive answer.  That non-response seemed to echo throughout the following campaign.

Insight: The thoughts of the educated citizenry on a new ballot measure must be sought and carefully weighed.  Obviously, everyone’s pet issues can’t be accommodated, but a reasonable balance can be sought.  I understand that the Rainier Connector was included in Measure Q because of polling, but I wonder if a better accounting of the Rainier costs as vetted through a public process might not have resulted in Rainier being omitted from the ballot measure.  The slimmed down Measure Q might well have passed.

Outreach: Petaluma has a strong component of public involvement, what one local activist frequently terms its “social capital”.   And yet that element of public life seemed underused in the Measure Q campaign.  Once the next ballot measure is defined, the public should be mobilized to argue in favor of it with their friends and acquaintances.

As one example, Petaluma has an unusually broad range of city committees and commissions, filled with citizens volunteering their time to participate in public life and to improve their community.  I sit on several of those committees and commissions.  And yet not once was a briefing about Measure Q offered in any of the meetings I attend, nor was support sought from the members.  That was a missed opportunity.

As another example, Petaluma has a strong culture of block parties.  Many of the participants value the Petaluma community.  I suggested early in the Measure Q campaign that block parties can be a good place to build a consensus around the fiscal future of the city.  Not only was that suggestion not acted upon, but the city code that makes most block parties technically illegal wasn’t modified.  It was another missed opportunity.

Going forward won’t be easy, but going forward with intelligence and resolve will be necessary.   The City has challenging times ahead.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

No Matter Who Designs It, the Sack Won’t Be Big Enough

With the election looming ever closer, I’ll offer yet one more perspective on Petaluma’s Measure Q, the proposed one percent sales tax measure that would run into perpetuity.  I apologize for my continued focus on Measure Q instead of touching upon other tax measures in the region, but I’m in a place where Measure Q insights and weaknesses are regularly paraded before me.  And I expect that the lessons from Measure Q are applicable to other tax measures.

In broad brushes, Measure Q is expected to generate an additional $10 million annually in City revenue.  The City Council, in planning for the allocation of the funds, is looking at a 30-year window.  So the total revenue to be spent is $300 million.

In rough numbers, $100 million would go toward infrastructure repairs, largely street work, another $100 million toward emergency services, and the final $100 million toward the Rainier Connector.  (The most frequently published funding need for the Rainier Connector is $88 million, but there are a number of assumptions behind that estimate, some of which may be optimistic, so rounding to $100 million is reasonable.)

Let’s look more closely at the $100 million for infrastructure repair.  A City official has described the sum as sufficient to improve the streets, not to perfection, but to a good level of pavement condition as measured by regional standards.  (To ensure that I’d heard correctly, I confirmed this repair philosophy with another City person.)  I concur with the decision to target good instead of excellent.

However, street repairs have a finite life.  For repairs that are short of complete reconstruction, the life is usually no more than twenty to twenty-five years.

Do you see the problem?  The City would use 30 years of tax revenue to fund repairs with lifespans of less than thirty years.  The repairs would have worn out, the streets returned to their pre-repair state, and further decline begun even while the revenues to pay for the repairs were still being collected from our children.  Even with an increased sales tax rate that would make Petaluma the highest in the region and would nearly reach the state cap, the average condition of the streets would, on average, continue to slide.

Nor is that the only arithmetic problem with Measure Q.  If the Rainier Connector is built in 2018/19, which is earliest date generally projected, the engineer and contractor would expect to get paid as the work is completed, not over thirty years.

Bonding, of course, is how municipalities convert a future revenue stream into the funds needed to pay immediate bills.  However, bond-holders require interest on their funds.  One City candidate offered an estimate that every $1 of bonding would require committing $2 of future tax revenue.  From long-ago experience in financing publicly-owned hydroelectric projects, the estimate seems reasonable.  So, building a $100 million Rainier Connector would require committing $200 million in revenue.

Where does that leave us?  Of the $300 million to be spent, we’ve spent $200 million on the Rainier Connector and another $100 million on street repairs that will wear out before the bill is fully paid.  And we haven’t begun to touch the emergency services needs.

And if that picture isn’t already bleak, we really can’t be sure about the revenue projections either.

The retail world is changing.  On-line sales are replacing brick-and-mortar commerce.  And post-recession wage stagnation is reducing the purchasing power of broad demographic bands.  Plus, the two new Petaluma shopping centers have spaces that haven’t yet filled and reports are that sales tax collections from the properties are running behind projections.  Perhaps the $10 million in annual revenue is optimistic.

Many opponents of Measure Q, in anticipation of its ballot box rejection, are suggesting new ways to bundle the tax measure for the next election, including a rebalancing of the revenue allocation and the use of multiple ballot measures.  In general, I agree with the changes they suggest.  But they continue to leave the Rainier Connector in the mix.

And as long as Rainier is on the table, the problem remains the age-old conundrum of fitting ten pounds of flour into a five-pound bag.  And no matter who designs the bag, what fancy snaps are specified, or how elegant the embroidery may be, the ten pounds of flour won’t fit.

There are remedies available.  I’ve covered them previously, so needn’t pontificate too strenuously today, but there are three essential fixes, one painful and two excruciating.

First, forget the Rainier Connector.  It doesn’t provide much traffic relief and we can’t afford it given other, more pressing needs.

Second, acknowledge that the post-World War II turn toward suburbia was a fundamental mistake and we need to back away from it.  It’ll take years to reverse the harm, but the sooner we start the better.

Third, recognize that Proposition 13 and its ilk were treating a symptom and not the cause, which was suburbia, and begin making up for the thirty-five years of financial legerdemain that has led us to the current distress.

None of them are easy solutions, but all of them are vital.

And the first step is to pass Measure Q.  It may be ill-conceived and poorly formulated, but at least it begins to tackle some of the accumulated deficits.  Especially if the absurdity of the Rainier Connector becomes too obvious to ignore and we can use the new revenues in a pivot toward urbanism.

Perhaps it’s perverse to argue for Measure Q while simultaneously hoping that its key element is never implemented, but it’s no more perverse that the current predicament in which we’ve placed ourselves.

It’s past time to start thinking about what a bag that can hold ten pounds of flour will look like.

By my next post, the election will have passed.  Whether the tax measures such as Measure Q pass or fail, it’ll be time to start plotting the next steps.

Schedule Notes

Two thoughts for your upcoming calendar:

Petaluma Urban Chat: On Tuesday, November 11, Urban Chat will begin a mini-charrette on the potential redevelopment of the Sonoma Marin Fairgrounds.  Although not a requirement, I’d prefer if people could commit to participating at the meeting of the 11th and at the two subsequent meetings on December 9th and January 13th.  Numerous people have made the three-meeting commitment, but more would be appreciated.  Please email me or respond below in the comments.

Unless we have enough folks to move elsewhere, we’ll meet at the Aqus Café at 2nd and H Streets in Petaluma.  We’ll convene at 5:30pm.

SF Urban Film Fest: The SF Urban Film Fest will be held this coming weekend, starting on Thursday, November 6 and closing on Sunday, November 9.  I’ve made tentative plans to attend the closing day.  If anyone wishes to join me, let me know.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

A Tuesday Evening of Civic Involvement

This coming Tuesday evening will offer two opportunities for involvement in the Petaluma community.  Those willing to commit an extended chunk of time can be informed, and perhaps also entertained, from 5:30 until 9:30

Petaluma Urban Chat: The monthly meeting of Petaluma Urban Chat will fall on the Tuesday the 14th this month.  As always, the meeting will convene at 5:30pm at the Aqus Café at 2nd and H Streets in Petaluma.

This month’s meeting will feature a discussion of Measure Q on the Petaluma ballot, the proposed one percent sales tax bump, the revenues from which the current City Council anticipates directing toward deferred infrastructure repairs, the needs of the emergency services departments, and the Rainier Connector. 

City Council candidate Dave King has accepted an invitation to join Urban Chat to discuss his views on the measure.

To set the stage for the Tuesday discussion, it’s interesting, and also confounding, to look at the positions that have been taken on Measure Q versus positions on the Rainier Connector.

All of the City Council candidates, including the mayoral candidates, express support for the Rainier Connector.  Some also support Measure Q because of the funding that it would provide for the Connector.  But others oppose Measure Q because the funding commitment isn’t sufficiently committed to the Rainier Connector.  If elected, they promise to put forth another, stronger ballot measure at a future date.

On the other hand, all the self-identified urbanists with whom I’ve spoken oppose the Rainier Connector.  Many, including me, acknowledge that it would make Petaluma a better place, but balk at the price tag, arguing that there are better uses for the money.  As a result, many urbanists oppose Measure Q because of the funding that it provides toward the Connector.  But others, again including me, support Measure Q because the other municipal needs are sufficiently dire that it would be wrong to subject the City to further financial distress.

About the only apparent conclusion that can be drawn from that intertwined spaghetti of opinions is that none of the City Council candidates are urbanists.  And I don’t believe that even that conclusion is valid.

I can’t promise that a frank discussion, even with the thoughts of Dave King, will bring clarity to the issue, but perhaps it can cut a bit of the fog.

Regular attendees know that the 5:30 start time tends to be bit soft, with some attendees still in line to secure beverages when the minute hand points straight down.  But for this month, we will start promptly at the designated time.   King has another obligation to which he must depart at 6:15, so those who don’t have a beverage in front of them at 5:30 will be asked to wait until King departs.

As always, everyone is welcome.  New attendees are particularly encouraged to join us.

Planning Commission: Immediately after the Urban Chat meeting, the Petaluma Planning Commission will convene at City Hall.  The agenda item likely to attract the greatest controversy is the proposed modifications to the Zoning Code and SMART Code to permit and to regulate rentals of private homes within mixed-use and residential neighborhoods, the types of rentals generally described as “AirBnB”.

(Disclaimer: I’ve never stayed in an AirBnB rental, but once spent several nights in a VRBO rental home.  I secured the home for an extended family getaway, but most of the participants came down ill in the days before we gathered, so there were only two of us rattling around in a big house overlooking the North California surf.  To the best of my recollection, we didn’t make enough noise to disturb the neighbors.  Also, I had earlier found rental flats in both London and Venice through Craigslist.)

The whole AirBnB controversy irritates me.  If we hadn’t collectively and wrongly turned our backs on urbanism, I don’t believe there would even be an AirBnB controversy.  Instead, there would be clusters of mixed-use multi-family dwellings near walkable cores.  Individual owners within those buildings might still wish to rent their homes on a daily or weekly basis, but that would be an issue for the homeowners association to address, not the entire city.  Besides, adding another further people to busy urban sidewalks would be barely noticeable.

And if enough rental rooms were available near the walkable core, I doubt there would be a market for rentals in the more distant residential-only neighborhoods, except for properties with special settings or views.

But we did turn away from urbanism, those buildings that should logically contain the AirBnB units of today don’t exist, and now we must decide what to do about AirBnB.

So, urbanism has little to offer us on the AirBnB subject except a severe tsk-tsk-tsk.  Instead, we’re left on our own to sort out the balance of private property rights versus the rights of neighbors to the peaceful enjoyment of their own homes.

With that grumpy preamble, I find the City staff to have done a credible job in balancing the multiple objectives.

Homeowners who wish to rent out all or part of their homes would pay an initial fee, annual renewal fee, and transient occupancy taxes to the city.

Neighbors would be notified of intended rental operations.  Although they wouldn’t be able to oppose the permits, their complaints about operations would be grounds for revocation or non-renewal of permits.

Even though the City doubts their ability to enforce them on a regular basis, maximum occupancy standards would be set so that non-compliance can be considered in actions against property owners.

Minimum parking standards would be imposed on the rental operations, although limited use of street parking would be allowed.  Any excess need for street parking would be subject to a land-use action which the neighbors could oppose.

The entire City staff report can be found here.  I find it well-written and reasonable.  Although I certainly understand the concerns of the neighbors, many of which can found here and here.

But my final test is the hypothetical question of how I would feel if the proposed regulations were to affect my neighborhood.

I don’t know of any AirBnB rentals that have been proposed near my house, but I don’t think I’d mind a few AirBnB renters sharing my sidewalks.  (Indeed, there are a couple of neighbors whom I’d happily trade for overnight renters.)  It’s a fun little neighborhood.  If I was visiting Petaluma, it’s the kind of neighborhood in which I’d enjoy resting my head, second only to staying closer to downtown.

Regarding my Tuesday evening, I’ll definitely attend the Urban Chat meeting.  I’ll try to also attend the Planning Commission meeting, although other obligations may interfere.

In my next post, I’ll return to the topic of urbanism and seniors, tackling the question of walkability and other non-motorized options for seniors.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Petaluma’s Measure Q: The Argument Over Government Efficiency

My last two posts have been about Measure Q, which will be on the Petaluma ballot this fall.   It’s a sales tax measure intended to address the municipal budgetary issues lingering after the great recession.  There are many similar tax measures on ballots across the country, so in writing about Measure Q, I hope that I’m touching up the issues that are being raised in many municipalities.  Although I’ll leave it to individual readers to translate the discussion below to their particular communities.

The connection between urbanism and Measure Q, and its multitude of siblings, is clear, but nonetheless awkward.  Much of the municipal financial malaise which Measure Q targets is the result of 70 years of unjustified faith in the land-use paradigm of drivable suburbia.  As has been long predicted, the costs of the failed experiment are coming home to roost and cities everywhere are struggling with the results.

But the response of too many cities, including Petaluma, isn’t to use the requested new tax proceeds to change land-use models, but instead to use the dollars to double down on their bets on drivable suburbia.  This decision leaves urbanists, such as me, in a quandary.  While willing to help pay off the debts of failed suburbia, we’d prefer not to be a part of further wrong-headed “investments”. 

In my last two posts, I wrote about how genetic coding lingering in my DNA after four centuries may be leading me to support Measure Q and about my responses to objections raised by readers.

Before leaving Measure Q, at least for awhile, I want to touch upon one final objection that is often made to increased municipal taxes.  Perhaps it hasn’t been raised on my blog or in emails to me, but it requires only a short search to find the objection splattered around the internet.

And that argument is that cities have plenty of money to fulfill their mission and only fail because they are appallingly inefficient.  Admittedly, it may be only a few folks who hold that opinion, but elections something swing on a few folks or the few other folks who listen to fringe opinions.

So, I want to write about the fallacy of government inefficiency.  If you still choose to vote against Measure Q, that’s your decision.  But I don’t want government inefficacy to be one of your reasons, because we’ll need to believe in government if we are to make the turn toward urbanism.  It was government that played a key role in codifying and organizing our turn toward suburbia and we’ll need government to play a similar role as we back out of that failure and head elsewhere.

By chance, I wrote about the fallacy of government inefficiency in a draft post several months.  I excised the words in final editing because the post ran too long, but I saved the text and it works fine here.

“Let me touch upon a couple of points that are often raised in opposition to proposed tax hikes.  First, some will claim that if government was more efficient, then the new taxes wouldn’t be needed.  Second, some will argue that they can’t afford the new taxes.

“In response to the former, I agree that government is inefficient.  So are households where, on average, 40 percent of purchased food is thrown away because of spoilage and where many spare bedrooms are filled with unused exercise equipment.  So are corporations which often make poor strategic decisions and fail to support important initiatives because of board room politics.

“It’s the nature of people, especially groups of people, to be inefficient.  Given an adequacy of resources, we often let inattention, personal agendas, and bickering take priority over efficiency.

“It’s an intriguing goal to suggest that government be more efficient than the rest of us.  But as a basis for ballot box decisions, it’s idealistic and misguided.

“In response to the concern about the affordability of new taxes, it’s certainly possible that a tax increase will be difficult for some to afford.  But I suggest that the difficulty is more related to how we distribute income and share tax burdens.   These are worthy topics of discussion, although far beyond the scope of an urbanism blog.  And I don’t think we can afford to hamstring our governments while we pursue philosophical discussions on topics that we’ve ducked for years.”

At the time, I exchanged emails on the subject with an economist cousin, who also had thoughts to share.  (A note about my family: I have a remarkable set of cousins, all of whom have attracted similarly remarkable spouses.  There may not be many of us, I have only three first cousins, but when we sit down over a holiday dinner, there is a mechanical engineer, a forester, an attorney, an artist, a former economics professor, and others.  Even better, we all get along, with conversations that are as insightful as they are spirited.  I deeply appreciate having this family.)

My cousin’s comments, only slightly edited for clarity, follow:

“I agree with your thoughts about government, although I would also add this: Government is more inefficient than people or private companies because it takes on more difficult tasks.  It’s relatively easy for the private sector to be efficient.  Farmers, for example, know the prices (even future prices) of what they produce, so it’s easy for them to optimize.  But government undertakes a task only when the market prevents the private sector from operating efficiently.  And these tasks are often very hard:

·         “Public goods, e.g. national defense, fireworks, lighthouses - Due to the free-rider problem, the private sector won’t provide these kinds of goods, so it’s up to government to do it.  This is hard enough in itself because it’s hard to decide how much of different kinds of defense services to provide without price signals to guide you, but it also allows public officials to misallocate resources, e.g., by insisting that obsolete defense programs be funded so as to create jobs in a certain district.

·         “Natural monopolies, like the postal service - With farmers, the profit motive leads to a somewhat efficient outcome.  But with a natural monopoly, the profit motive leads to an inefficient outcome.  So when the postal service loses money (which is optimal), it’s seen as confirming the idea that government does things inefficiently.  Congress also interferes here, e.g., by insisting that post offices be run out in the middle of nowhere.

·         ”Transfers - Any organization that gives out money and benefits is going to have to deal with fraud, even private companies, e.g., double-dippers at the free sample booths at Costco.  The government does more of this than the private sector, and is therefore more vulnerable to fraud.

·         “Externalities - Economists have long advocated market-based solutions to externalities, but these would involve taxes, which are often unacceptable, and subsidies, which are counted as expenditures in budgets.  Congress often prefers regulation because the costs are hidden in that they’re passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

“Ultimately, government has an imposingly difficult set of tasks, much like Ginger Rogers dancing backwards in high heels.”

I’m not sure I grasp every point she offers, but at least I know where to begin the Christmas dinner conversation.

In my next post, I’ll speculate about why it’s so hard to start community discussions about urbanism.  After that, I’ll tackle football and urbanism.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Petaluma’s Measure Q: The Arguments Roll In

In my last post, I wrote about my reasons for supporting Measure Q in Petaluma, a sales tax measure intended to replenish municipal coffers after the great recession.  I suggested that my distant roots in Puritanism may induce me to insist on paying my own way, rather than transferring the costs of municipal upkeep to other segments of the population or other generations, and leading me to vote for Measure Q even though I find some aspects flawed.

The specific circumstances around Measure Q are unique to Petaluma, but there are similar tax measures on ballots around the country as the costs of the failed 70-year experiment in drivable suburbia continue to be tallied.  So I feel comfortable writing about Measure Q and letting the readers draws the parallels to their own communities.

From my email inbox, it appears that I may be in a minority among urbanists in my support of Measure Q.  And I’m fine with that.  Writing this blog is indicative of my willingness to not conform.  I can’t see the harm in finding yet one more isolated island to inhabit.

However, the emails make legitimate comments about Measure Q, which I think are worthy of discussion.  So today’s post will summarize the comments and my responses.

One reader, a long-time Petaluma resident who recently moved away and misses the town, wrote that, if he still lived here, he’d oppose Measure Q because it’s “a backdoor to the Rainier Connector”.

To which I could only question of his use of “backdoor”.  To me, it’s a clear front door.  Proponents often point toward the Rainier Connector as a reason to support Measure Q.

Indeed, the likelihood of Rainier being built is my principal concern with Measure Q.  I can only hope that the city uses the Measure Q funds to do the necessary infrastructure repairs and then, during the years during which Caltrans is assembling the funds to improve Highway 101 to accommodate the Rainier Connector, the community sees the flaws in Rainier and collectively decides to shift priorities elsewhere.  I know that likelihood is limited, but I’m willing to hope that the public eventually grasps the failure of suburbia.

Another reader expressed concern about the possibility of future City Councils redirecting the revenue from the tax measure.  One specific concern she expressed was the use of the funds to cover pension obligations.

But the key point on pensions is that the obligation already exists.  Short of falling into municipal bankruptcy and attempting to discharge a part of the pension obligation through the court system as is being done in Detroit and Stockton, we're stuck with the debt.  Measure Q isn't so much about funding the pensions, but about making up the shortfall that results after City Hall writes the checks to the pension funds.

One can certainly argue that the pension deals reached by the City Councils of the late 20th century were flawed and should never have been made.  Indeed, that is a conversation that I think should happen so that we can learn from the mistakes.  But any conclusions we reach will have no impact on the current municipal financial outlook.

Lastly, a reader says that she’ll vote against Measure Q because the tax is regressive and falls unreasonably hard on younger adults getting started in life and raising families.  I’ll make the pedantic point that, as a flat rate, the sales tax is actually neither progressive nor regressive.  And then I’ll agree with her enthusiastically.

I’d much rather see municipal finances addressed by a progressive tax, whether a revision to Proposition 13, a local income tax, or some other alternative.  This argument veers into an area of national economic policy and social equity that is beyond both the range of this blog and my ability to effectively discourse, but remains worthy of consideration by the voters.

Indeed, this point almost displaces the Rainier Connector as a reason to dislike Measure Q.  Nonetheless, I still remain clothespin-on-nose supportive of Measure Q.  Those darned Pilgrims are deeply embedded in my psyche.

(This last reader also makes the humorous aside that she truly doesn’t mind the potholes, finding that they make an effective traffic calming approach on her overly wide street.  This argument is tangential to Measure Q, but nonetheless seemed worthy of sharing.)

I hadn’t planned on covering this subject today, but receiving thought-provoking emails is always cause for celebration and publishing schedule adjustments.  Under my revised schedule, my next three posts will address the principal non-urbanist objection to Measure Q, ruminations on why urbanism doesn’t have a more prominent role in public debate, and a parallel between urbanism and football.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

We Built This Stuff, We Really Should Take Care of It

When I was a young engineer, long before the days of electronic communication, I often found myself giving my name when leaving a message.  If the person taking the message was of a certain age, let’s say at least two decades older than me, the response upon hearing my last name was often, “Any relation to John?”

Over time, the frequency of the question waned.  The older message-takers retired and their younger replacements were from an era after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Courtship of Miles Standish” had disappeared from high school syllabi.  I can guess a number of reasons why Longfellow was dropped, but still miss the days when I was regularly asked about John Alden.

 (For those not familiar with the narrative poem, Longfellow writes of the early days of the Pilgrim settlement in what is now Massachusetts.  The photo above is of a replica of the Mayflower, the ship in which the Pilgrims arrived.

Miles Standish was a military officer for the colony, responsible for maintaining peace with the Native Americans.  But whatever confidence he may have shown in military affairs was lacking in his relationship with the opposite gender.

Arguing that his time was better spent in managing the weaponry of the colony, he asked his good friend John Alden to ask on Standish’s behalf for the hand of Priscilla Mullins, another young Pilgrim.  John, although he also fancied Priscilla, agreed to undertake the duty for his friend.

Priscilla, perhaps deciding that a good-natured dupe was a better catch than a preening but cowardly military man, responded with the words that were among Longfellow’s most famous, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”  Nuptials followed shortly afterwards.)

To answer the long-ago question, yes, the John Alden of the Longfellow poem is my distant grandfather, thirteen generations distant.  Indeed, John and Priscilla are the progenitors of everyone in the U.S. named Alden and a great many more also.  One estimate is that a half-million people are descended from the original two Aldens.

And so it is that a small handful of my ancestors were Pilgrims.  Starting with John and Priscilla and then counting the in-laws of their son from whom I’m descended and continuing for another generation or two before the Pilgrims began to disperse and to meld into the bigger world, there might be twenty Pilgrims of John and Priscilla’s generation in my family tree.

However, one has 8,192 ancestors thirteen generations back, so twenty would seem to have a relatively minor effect on my genetic makeup.  Nonetheless, I sometimes feel a tug of Puritanism, the belief system that drove the Pilgrims to the New World, when I ponder municipal finances.  And that tug will dictate how on I vote on a key ballot measure in Petaluma this November, a ballot measure that has its equivalents in many communities.

As I’ve often written in this blog, our modern suburban world relies on a web of subsidies.  People who live closer to the urban core, and therefore need less infrastructure to live their lives, nonetheless pay property taxes that support those near the fringe.

Buyers of new homes, through impact fees, are expected to cover the infrastructure cost of the increasing population of which they’re a part, but many of those fees go toward maintenance and upgrade costs that would have been required even without population growth.  (This is what StrongTowns calls the suburban Ponzi scheme.)

The next generation is expected to cover the costs of infrastructure maintenance that we choose to defer in this generation.

And the general taxpayers, regardless of their own reliance of petroleum, are expected to cover many of the environmental and geopolitical costs and risks of petroleum use.

The Puritanism in me, although heavily diluted, quails at benefiting from any of these subsidies.  Puritanism is about self-sufficiency, about not having a negative balance in what Tom Wolfe, in
“Bonfire of the Vanities” described as the “favor bank”, the sum total of favors owed to and due from others.  I don’t find it necessary to have a positive balance, but find that a negative balance in my favor bank is morally uncomfortable.

And thus I’ll vote yes this November on Petaluma’s Measure Q, a sales tax increase intended to restore funding for deferred municipal obligations such as infrastructure maintenance and vehicle replacement.  My vote is in keeping with my oft-stated philosophy, “We built this stuff, we really should take care of it.”

I understand that the new tax will be a burden on some.  However, that burden is the result of having built a world for which upkeep is expensive.   The challenge should be finding a way to build a world that is more affordable, not finding someone on whom to offload the expenses. 

To be fair, I should note that some of the people with I share an urbanist philosophy will be voting against Measure Q.  They aren’t trying to duck their share of the deferred costs.  However, they’re uncomfortable with the plan to use some of the proceeds from Measure Q to build the Rainier Connector, finding it unwise to build more infrastructure that we’ll struggle to maintain.

I see their point and share their discomfort with the Rainier Connector, but feel that the need to cover deferred expenses is the greater good at this time.  Also, I can hope that over the next five years, before the earliest date on which the Rainier Connector can go into construction, the community will realize the need to build a more affordable world.  Which is one reason that I’ll continue to write this blog.

Thinking back to John and Priscilla Alden, I suspect that they would have been puzzled that we even needed to discuss whether to maintain the stuff we built.  But once they understood the issues, I believe they would have also voted for Measure Q, although also being hesitant to build new infrastructure that will be financially difficult to maintain.  It was the way Puritans thought.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)