I can’t help but be grimly amused at times by the current “debate” over financing public schools in the Texas legislature.  The very same school administrators who are clamoring for more state and federal money can be seen later (sometimes on the same newscast) complaining about onerous state and federal rules and the “loss of local control.”  I’m tempted at times to wonder how people could be so dense, but then I remember these are public schools…. 

Those who continually clamor for more state or federal money would be well advised to remember that he who controls the purse strings controls how that money will be spent.  If they really want local control they’d be better served to abolish the federal department of education and tell the state to get out of the funding business.

What is it?  A mob takeover?  Nope.  The city of Arlington is making some of its residents an offer they can’t refuse:

For property owners who might be eager to sell, the City Council approved a series of incentives in November. Renters would receive $5,250; business owners would be paid fair market value plus $10,000; and homeowners would receive $22,500 above fair market value.

To be eligible for those bonuses, which include moving costs, homeowners and businesses owners would have to move within 90 days and renters would have to vacate the property within 45 days.

For those who don’t accept the voluntary buyouts, the city would use its power of eminent domain to condemn the properties and buy them at a flat fair market value without the bonuses.

The option is to either take the “bonus” or have the land stolen by the city and receive “fair market value.”  Aside from the issue of government force, the sticking point here is what does the city consider “fair market value.”  $22K over “fair market value” isn’t very helpful if the “fair market value” offered isn’t really fair or market…

Anyway, I hope the voters of Arlington are happy now that they’ve successfully voted to point the government’s guns at the heads of their fellow citizens and steal their land.  Not to mention the higher taxes they voted for themselves.  All for the privilege of paying for a billionare to locate his sports team in their city.

In looking at the current status of HB823 I discovered that you can create a watch for changes to a specific bill.  You can have the legislature’s computer system email you whenever a bill on your watch list changes, and you can have up to 25 bills on your watch list.

If you’re interested, you can go here to register and add bills to your list (you can also add a bill directly from the bill’s status page).

I don’t care much for Laura Miller, the mayor of Dallas.  She’s too much of a nanny-state type.  However, every now and then she does something right.

Black civil-rights activists asked Dallas Mayor Laura Miller on Wednesday to apologize for calling Terrell Bolton, the city’s former police chief, an idiot last week. Her response: “No.”

“It’s insulting to the whole African-American community,” Roy Williams said. “It seems as if you’re trying to play the race card in reverse.”

Ms. Miller brushed off that accusation, saying Mr. Bolton’s poor crime-fighting tactics hurt minority communities the worst.

“Everybody in the city knows how I feel about the former chief,” she said.

It really bothered me to see Williams playing the race card with regards to the former chief.  The man was incompetent at best and simply unsuited to the position.  It’s not racist to point this out.  Frankly, the black community only marginalizes itself further by getting so defensive about it.  They’d be far better served to let it go and admit that Bolton wasn’t cut out for the position.

Here’s yet another instance where a bad case makes for bad law.

Amy Werry won’t turn 21 until Oct. 15, 2006, but the 19-year-old already knows that is a Sunday.

Should she choose to do so, Werry could hit the bars at midnight that day to celebrate with her first legal sip of alcohol and any other drinks that friends buy her before last call.

“That’s the way most people do it,” she said.

The coming-of-age tradition of young Texans toasting their 21st birthdays from midnight until 2 a.m. could be ending. State lawmakers are considering a bill that would make it illegal to serve people drinks on their 21st birthday until 7 a.m., or until noon on Sundays.

Supporters say the law would deter celebrators from drinking multiple shots of alcohol in a short time, a practice that can be fatal.

“When you start at midnight, you have only until 2 a.m.,” said Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands. “The clock is ticking. At least the next day, they won’t be trying to cram” so many drinks into two hours.

I think the real problem here is that the generally-prevailing Puritan attitude towards alcohol in this country (and especially Texas) doesn’t allow for a healthy environment for teaching children how to deal with alcohol when they are old enough to drink.  We don’t put people behind the wheel of a car at a certain age and say, “Here you go, you’re fully legal.”  So why do we expect people to know how to magically handle alcohol at the instant they reach some arbitrarily determined age?

Of course, parents (even in Texas) have the right to allow their children to drink.  Unfortunately, the zero-tolerance ninnies have made it so taboo that many parents are reluctant to allow even moderate consumption.  So what you end up with are a bunch of people who have no good experience with alcohol suddenly having full access to it.  A lot of them are going to do stupid things at first.

Anyhow, this is yet another stupid law that won’t do anything but drive the “problem” underground.  As the young woman in the article states, people will just get drunk at home if they can’t go to bars. 

There isn’t anything quite as uniquely dangerous to liberty as a politician who wants to “raise awareness” or “send a message” to save us from ourselves.

Is posting signs advocating a particular candiate or position in an election electioneering?  Texas has specific laws against this activity within 100 feet of a polling place on election day.  The election judges are required to post signs at the 100-ft mark to denote the exclusion zone.

I’m curious about this, since the polling place I went to on Saturday for the bond election was at the Bear Creek Intermediate School(*).  There was a Suburban in the parking lot, within the exclusion zone, that had three very large “Yes” posters on the windshield.  It was obvious that the vehicle was parked there with the intent to display the “Yes” posters to all voters entering the polling place (it was not driveable with the signs).

Given what I’ve been read in the Texas Election Code, I think this is illegal.  I suppose it wouldn’t make a difference to the outcome, but it bugs me because even if I’m not correctly reading the code, it seems improper to bring political signs into the exclusion area.  On further thought, I think the owner of the Suburban was hanging around the area (or at least I got the distinct impression that it was his vehicle), which would seem to violate the loitering provision of the above statute.

(*) It also occurs to me that it seems vaguely improper to hold a school bond election in a school cafeteria.

The latest huge bond package request from KISD passed, after a full-court press by the KISD administration and other interested parties (including at least three mailings from the school district itself).  I was less than pleased with the rhetoric and techniques of the “Yes” crowd, specifically their threat that failing to vote to raise our taxes to fund the extravagant school building programs would cause our taxes to be raised to fund portable buildings. 

It leads me to question the whole concept of funding for public schools.  A whole segment of the population has managed to foist the external costs of their behavior onto the rest of us.  On top of that they have managed to paint us as evil if we question paying for the costs of their children. 

If we were to really make school funding fair, the people who use the service would pay for it.  Instead, every time another family moves into far North Ft. Worth, my taxes go up. 

What?  That’s cold and heartless?  Sorry, but it’s about time somebody spoke up and told the cold, hard truth.  If people can’t afford the costs of educating their children, then maybe they ought to be thinking about whether they should have them or not and stop expecting the rest of us to subsidize their choices.

As I feared, this week’s work is proceeding at last week’s pace, the problem being that the customer has 6 or 7 projects in the pipeline and suddenly wants them all done at once…

Anyhow, I spent a few minutes at lunch watching the noon news on WFAA and finally heard some excerpts from the Bush tapes.  Given the initial hype by the media, I suspect that the actual tapes have got to be something of a disappointment to them.  As anyone who knows me knows, I’m not any sort of fan of George W Bush.  However, I didn’t hear anything damning in there.  I heard a guy who’s concerned about setting an example and not having people make the same mistakes he did.  No matter how much I disagree with the War on (Some) Drugs™, I don’t disagree that using drugs is stupid.  It seems that President Bush knows this from personal experience.  So what’s the big scoop here?

Of late there has been quite a bit of public discussion and back-and-forth over whether the City of Keller should replace or upgrade the current public library.  Several years before I moved here a proposal for a new library (at a cost of approximately $10 million) was put before the voters and soundly rejected.  The current proposals are to either expand the existing library (at a cost of approximately $7 million) or build a new one in Keller Town Center (at a cost of approximately $8 million).  (A little background can be found in this recent opinion piece.)

There are several things about this whole “debate” that irk me, but let me start with the top one.  The proponents of the new library want the city council to “just do it” and approve issuing bonds to build a new library.  The council is making noises about sending it to the voters for approval.  I had an interesting discussion with one of the supporters who said that she was going to work against the reelection of any council member who voted to call an election on the issue.  I was a bit stunned to hear this.  Her rationale was that the opponents of the library would be able to influence the public campaign too well and the supporters would lose an election.  It seems odd to me to deny the public a voice in something this big.  The other rationale that the supporters use is that the council voted for bonds to fund the new City (Taj ma)Hall and several other large projects without voter input.  It seems to me that instead of decrying sending the library for a vote they should be decrying the fact that the council didn’t send the other issues for a vote.  If anything, I’d be inclined to vote against any council member that decided to spend that kind of money without a vote.

The second thing that bugs me is that I think the supporters of the library are being disingenuous by claiming that a new library in Town Center would help drive new business there.  It turns out that this is related to a serious problem brought about by the city council in previous years when they decided to create the Town Center using a special taxing district.  Unfortunately (for us), their grand scheme of emulating Southlake has failed, leaving the city with the potential for having to make up all those unrealized tax revenues.  Anyhow, I’m not sure how they expected to build an upscale shopping experience around a freakin’ Tom Thumb.  It’s basically a strip shopping center with a nice façade and an integrated overall look, but not much more.  There are some basic things over there that I use, but nothing that couldn’t be found elsewhere.  In fact, I find the place a bit hard to navigate because of the traffic flow patterns (and the insane drivers who tear through there).

Frankly, I just don’t see how a library would drive much new business to the existing stores, other than perhaps slightly increasing traffic for Starbucks or the BankOne.  But even if they are right, it seems dubious to me that it would be enough to help, considering the size of the problem.

…
The special taxing district needs an $81 million property value increase by 2007 to pay off debt used to build roads and the Town Hall.
…

That gives us two years to come up with $81 million in property development.  A library just isn’t going to do that.  Further, the amount of crap that a company has to go through to build a new business in Keller will make it difficult to get even a tenth of that amount in new development.

But in the interest of fairness I tried to find some information on expected economic impacts of libraries.  Unfortunately, all I could find were cheerleading articles and studies that were started with the premise that a library had a positive economic impact.  I didn’t find anything that I trusted as being a scientific impartial study of the real impact of a library (it’s interesting that the first study I found claimed that this would actually be impossible, so they just went with surveying the users of libraries).

Here’s what a quick Google search turned up:

• South Carolina Public Library Economic Impact Study
• New York Library Association – Economic Impact of Libraries
• Mid-Hudson Library System – Economic Impact of Libraries

Some other links on the issue:

• ourKeller website—A group interested in open government in the City of Keller and Keller ISD.  Supports a public vote on the library (and has a petition to require a vote).
• Friends of The Keller Public Library—kind of self-explanatory.

The third point the proponents of the new library keep putting forth is that it won’t increase our taxes.  I haven’t had much time to research this issue, but I’m concerned about this claim, as it seems dubious.  Bonds have to be paid back as debt service out of our taxes.  This means that the city has to budget for this somehow.  It seems dangerous to me to take on more debt at a time when there is a high potential for a tremendous shortfall in revenues in the near term, and while basic city services (fire, police) are not fully funded.

Until someone can show me an unbiased scientific study (i.e. not one of the studies above) showing positive business impacts of a new library, I am going to remain sceptical. 

During the last legislative session, the busy little beavers in Austin passed (and the Governor signed) 1625 bills into law.  So far this session, they’re already off to a quick start, with 391 bills filed in the House and 155 bills filed in the Senate. 

It really irks me to see this sort of thing, since there’s no chance in hell that the average citizen can keep up with all the new laws.  As I wrote in the above linked article, I’d like to see a requirement that the government notify every citizen about all the new laws as well as (like a commenter suggested) a sunset provision where they were required to reauthorize every previous law every 10 years.