I’m tickled about the news that the big cuts in DOE’s 2011 Environmental Management (i.e., environmental cleanup) budget for Oak Ridge that were rumored to be in the proposed budget have been averted. Frank Munger’s blog tells about Representative Lincoln Davis’ role in restoring funds to the yet-to-be-announced budget. Three cheers for Lincoln Davis!
Cleanup budgets have been lean in recent years (less than necessary t0 meet previously negotiated regulatory commitments). Cutting the funding even further would not only have caused a lot of job losses, but would have required East Tennessee to live even longer with the negative legacies of the Manhattan Project and Cold War.
I hope that the funding restoration remains intact as the proposed budget moves through Congress…
The 3/50 Project is giving us all a simple recipe for preserving and promoting commercial activity in our communities: pick 3 independently owned local businesses that you would miss if they disappeared, and spend $50 each month at those businesses ($50 divided among all three). The basic idea is to commit a total of $50 each month to locally owned independent businesses.
The promoters point out that the money spent in independent local businesses returns more money to the community — in taxes, payroll, and other expenditures — than the money spent in big-box stores and franchises. (And the return to the community is infinitely greater than when we spend our money in out-0f-town businesses or online.) Ideally, it also means that local retail areas thrive because they contain one-of-a-kind independent businesses that customers seek out. (This is particularly important for older shopping areas — like Jackson Square and Grove Center. )
All this is consistent with the concepts of a sustainable local economy and a sustainable environment — for example, the Oak Ridge Environmental Quality Advisory Board’s draft climate action plan calls for “increasing the local velocity of money” (basically, keeping more money in the local economy and moving it around faster) as one strategy for making Oak Ridge more self-sufficient — and thus more sustainable. With the Jackson Square and Grove Center merchants, Oak Ridge Chamber of Commerce, and several other local businesses signed on as supporters of the 3/50 Project, it appears that different elements in the community are all together on this.
Thinking about the 3/50 concept, I quickly realized that some independent local businesses that are important to me are unlikely to get my business every month. For example, I’m wearing shoes that came from Edwards Shoe Store and I drive a car that was last serviced at Chuck’s CarCare Center, and even though I value these two businesses, I’m unlikely to spend money with them every single month. On the other hand, in any given month I’m likely to spend $50 or more divided between several independent local eateries (places like Homeland Food, the Magnolia Tree Restaurant, Mediterranean Delight, the Flatwater Grill, and the various Mexican restaurants). Most people are likely to have different “threes” in different months — and spend more than $50 in some months.
I’ve also pondered a bit regarding some of the 3/50 Project’s criteria — for example, the idea that locally-owned franchise businesses don’t qualify because they have advantages, like preferred vendor lists, specially negotiated vendor pricing, and a regionally/nationally recognized brand name, that true independent businesses lack. Franchises are less in need of customer support than truly independent businesses. However, if my goal as a city leader is to maintain a vital retail sector and keep money in town, I have to care about the success of locally owned franchises – partly because they are more likely to succeed (and thus provide a stronger retail sector).
For me, the key idea of the 3/50 Project is that we consumers need to be conscious of where the money we spend is going to end up — and try to make spending decisions that keep more of that money in the local economy. I like having one simple message that tells us to do all that.
I hope that our local independent business owners will return the favor by paying attention to customer needs and wants (different operating hours to better serve two-earner households? offering special ordering to better meet customer needs?) — so we will have more and more reasons to spend our money with them.
The election returns are in, and I’m elated by the election of Barack Obama. He will be inheriting a country that has serious problems, but between his pragmatism and his amazing ability to inspire people, I am hopeful that he will provide the leadership America needs.
The Oak Ridge City Charter Commission election results are also in, thanks to some late evening work at The Oak Ridger (thanks to Donna, John, Darrell, Carmen, and Leean). Although the newspaper’s headline says that “Status quo candidates” won, it appears to me that the reality is that voters elected the individual people (or at least the names) that they knew and respected best: Gene Caldwell, Pat Postma, Leonard Abbatiello, Chuck Agle, and David McCoy from the ORION list and Virginia Jones and Pat Fain from the CDAR list. I hope that these 7 people will recognize that they were elected primarily for who they are — not necessarily for the platforms they campaigned on — and that they will fulfill the public’s trust by undertaking an open-minded evaluation of the pros and cons of various arrangements for electing our local government.
Monday evening’s City Council agenda included several resolutions to authorize sale of municipal bonds in order to refinance some of the city’s debt at lower rates of interest. (Oak Ridge recently attained a very favorable bond rating, making it possible to borrow at better interest rates than the city was able to get earlier.)
Two weeks ago, when the agenda was being drawn up, the proposal to refinance some debt looked pretty mundane. After the financial crisis that has unfolded over the past 9 days, though, it felt downright surreal to be talking matter-of-factly about selling millions of dollars’ worth of bonds.
Here’s hoping that “normal” returns to our money system soon…
In the midst of Oak Ridge’s continual community gripefest about the dearth of retail, I discovered today that there’s a Barnes & Noble outlet right here in the Atomic City .
OK, it’s “just” the bookstore at the Roane State Community College campus, but it’s still a Barnes & Noble store…
Today’s morning newspapers both had articles (Oak Ridger: 13-cent tax hike projected and News Sentinel: Stagnant development behind OR tax increase) describing Steve Jenkins’ presentation at yesterday’s meeting of the City Council Budget and Finance committee, and both reported (based on a table included in Steve’s handouts) that Oak Ridge has the 4th highest property tax of Tennessee’s cities, “trailing only Memphis, Humboldt and Knoxville.”
There’s no denying that Oak Ridge’s property taxes are high in comparison with most other places in Tennessee, but it seems to me that that comparative ranking of property taxes levied by municipalities is misleading. Because of differences in which unit of local government provides various services, a comparison of local property taxes is not meaningful unless it also includes the property taxes paid to counties, as well as to special school districts where those exist. Comparing tax rates in municipalities that operate school systems and police departments (to name just two areas where municipalities differ) with tax rates in municipalities that leave these services to the county is not like comparing apples and oranges — it’s like comparing the cost of a full-course meal at one restaurant with the price of the main course (or even just the appetizer) at another eatery.
When total local property tax burdens are compared, it turns out that Oak Ridge has more company near the high end of the list, and the smallish West Tennessee city of Humboldt drops even farther down the list. According to the state comptroller’s office, the cities and towns in Tennessee with the highest combined local property tax rates (equal to or greater than the rates paid by Oak Ridgers) are as follows:
- Memphis (Shelby County) – $7.4732
- Bartlett (Shelby County) – $5.63
- Germantown (Shelby County) – $5.63
- Knoxville (Knox County) – $5.50
- Collierville (Shelby County) – $5.37
- Chattanooga (Hamilton County) – $5.356
- Oak Ridge (Anderson County) – $5.33
- Millington (Shelby County) – $5.32
- Humboldt (the portion in Madison County) – $5.30 (most of the city is in Gibson County where the combined tax rate is $3.78)
- Arlington (Shelby County) – $5.09
- Oakdale (Morgan County) – $4.98
- Lookout Mountain (Hamilton County) – $4.954
- Henning (Lauderdale County) – $4.95
- Bristol (Sullivan County) – $4.95
- Signal Mountain (Hamilton County) – $4.929
- Oak Ridge (Roane County) – $4.92
Viewed that way, it seems that Oak Ridge has more company than those newspaper articles suggested.
Note that this is not a comparison of total local tax burden. Notably, it does not include local sales tax (which is at its highest possible rate in both Anderson and Roane counties) or the wheel taxes that are levied in many Tennessee counties (not including Anderson and Roane). For example, without the $55 wheel tax in Metro Nashville Davidson County, Nashville’s total property tax rate likely would be a good bit higher than its current value of $4.69.
I’ve gotten word that the fireworks show planned for tomorrow evening (the 4th of July) has been canceled due to unforeseen problems. 
Added: See WBIR-TV for details.
The City of Oak Ridge has procured the fireworks, so the show will go on some time later this year.
Added July 3, 2008: Lest anyone is confused, the 2008 fireworks show is a “GO” at Melton Hill Lake! See this blog post and this website for more details.
Tim Holt has submitted a letter to the editor about a statistical analysis of shopping centers. This post is borrowed/modified from his to-be-published letter…A 1996 paper by by two university researchers, published in the Journal of Real Estate Research, examined the question: “How Critical Is a Good Location to a Regional Shopping Center?” The research used data from 38 regions containing multiple shopping centers and considered several primary variables believed to affect center’s success, including shopping center size in square feet, distance to the customers, and customer income levels.
A multivariate statistical analysis yielded the finding (surprising to the researchers) that a shopping center’s success was very strongly dependent on the center’s size and only very weakly related to distance from the customer. The study’s summary states:
The goal of this paper is to empirically measure the consumer utility trade-off between store location (i.e. distance to a shopping center) and retail agglomeration (shopping area size) in regional shopping centers. Using the Lakshmanan and Hansen retail expenditure model, our findings reveal that the distance specification is of surprisingly little importance in explaining retail sales. Conversely, agglomeration economies were of significant importance in explaining consumer patronage at regional shopping centers. The implications of these results is that smaller regional shopping centers may be dominated by large super-regional shopping centers with the smaller one or two anchor regional shopping centers unable to compete with the larger, many anchored super-regional shopping centers.
What this means for Oak Ridge is that (while additional shopping opportunities here would benefit local residents and increase sales tax collections) a moderate-sized Target-anchored shopping center in Oak Ridge (that is, Crestpointe) will never beat the giant Turkey Creek shopping complex at its own game. Oak Ridgers (and others) will still be drawn to the larger shopping center…
It is unrealistic to plan for the future with the expectation that a new shopping center that features some of the same stores as Turkey Creek will succeed in keeping Oak Ridgers away from Turkey Creek, or will attract droves of customers from Hardin Valley and Solway.
This is a partially written blog post that I filed away last October and failed to finish — until now.
At its October 2006 meeting, City Council extended both of the city’s lobbying contracts for more than a year — through the end of 2007. That same evening, Council voted to lodge a strong objection to the TVA land policy changes that were then under consideration.
I spoke against both actions, as documented in a newspaper article about the meeting (excepts below)…
From The Oak Ridger, October 24, 2006
Council approves lobbying contracts
Opposes Tennessee Valley Authority land-policy change
by John Huotari
Oak Ridge City Council members on Monday night approved renewed contracts with state and federal lobbyists, extending the contracts through the end of 2007 at an estimated cost of close to $200,000.
Council members voted 6-1 to renew and extend a contract with the city’s federal lobbyist, The Ferguson Group LLC of Washington, D.C. That company’s contract is worth $8,000 a month plus up to $500 a month in reimbursable expenses, pushing the maximum total value up to $119,000 through 2007.
Meanwhile, Council members voted unanimously to renew and extend a contract with Oak Ridge’s state lobbyist, Bill Nolan and Associates, of Oak Ridge. Nolan lobbies Tennessee officials in Nashville, and he is paid $4,650 a month, which works out to roughly $65,000 during the next 14 months.
City officials say The Ferguson Group has helped the city organize its funding and grant requests, and provided information about and support for pending legislation and federal programs…. …Oak Ridge resident Ellen Smith questioned the wisdom of paying $119,000 to a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. “I’d feel better if we were spending a fraction of that money to help staff here,” she said.
Contrary to the impressions held by some Oak Ridgers (including another Council candidate), the Washington lobbying firm that the city employs is not addressing the city’s strategic interests with respect to the Department of Energy or complex legislative proposals. Instead it is focused on finding opportunities to insert grant funding for Oak Ridge projects (”earmarks” or “pork barrel”) into the fine print of appropriations bills. This work, which mainly has the effect of helping staff avoid having to apply for grants that Oak Ridge appears to qualify for (for projects such as greenways or connecting our city infrastructure to places like Rarity Ridge and the Horizon Center), does not require unique legislative expertise.
We are sending city dollars off to Washington, DC, for work that may not be needed at all and that easily could be done here at home — not only at lower cost, but by workers who would spend much of their income here in the community.
If the city is interested in reducing costs of city government, this lobbying contract is the first item to cut.
From that same article:
[The City Council] also unanimously agreed to send a letter to Tennessee Valley Authority officials, expressing concern with a proposed land policy and rejecting at least part of it.
Regarding TVA, city officials are responding to a proposed land policy that would restrict how the federal agency disposes of public land for private use. The policy — presented to TVA’s new board of directors in September — was developed after two controversial land deals involving local developer Mike Ross and Chattanooga developer John “Thunder” Thornton.
Officials say the proposed policy would eliminate the potential for residential and commercial development on the agency’s lands, and hinder industrial development. They said those changes run counter to TVA’s economic-development mission. “I don’t understand the motivation for moving in the opposite direction,” Oak Ridge City Councilwoman Lou Dunlap said. City officials question how the policy would affect potential development at the Clinch River Industrial Site in west Oak Ridge. “This to me … is an overcorrection,” Oak Ridge Mayor David Bradshaw said. “This suggested policy change is not in our best interest.”
Some Oak Ridge residents disagree, though. Smith, who is also Oak Ridge Environmental Quality Advisory Board chairwoman, said many residents believe the city’s quality-of-life is enhanced by having public TVA lands on local waterfronts. “There are citizens in this community who believe this is in the public interest,” she said. Some opponents to TVA land deals have suggested that land seized by the federal government from private parties should be returned to those individuals when and if TVA no longer needs the land. But, Beehan said, “We’re a couple of generations away from that.” TVA officials have placed a moratorium on major land actions while they review their existing policy. The public utility is accepting comments through Nov. 3.
As things happened, comments on TVA’s land policy were overwhelming in favor of maintaining publicly-owned lakefront lands for public use, and restricting residential and commercial development on the small amount of lakefront land that remains in the agency’s hands. The agency adopted a policy very similar to what was proposed — and neither the proposal nor the adopted policy actually prevents industrial development at sites such as the Clinch River Industrial Site (which was once the site of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor project).
I believe that the vast majority of Oak Ridgers who had any opinion on the issue favor the land policy that TVA adopted, contrary to City Council’s views regarding the public interest.
Oak Ridge is in the midst of the 20-day drive to collect enough petition signatures to force a referendum on the proposed bond issue for the Crestpointe shopping center.
As a general rule, I don’t think that voters should be able to insist on voting on individual financial decisions by elected officials. (At the February 19th Council meeting, I urged Council to delay a vote on the bond resolution, in hopes that we could avoid a referendum. I actually hoped that with another month’s time, four of them might decide to oppose the project, or there would be an alternative proposal available for them to consider.) I do, however, believe in systems of “checks and balances” in government, and the Tennessee law that allows for voters to petition for a referendum on a bond issue provides one important “check” on the decisions made by elected officials. The law doesn’t make it easy to call for a referendum (it’s not easy to gather the signatures of 10% of a community’s registered voters in just 20 days), which assures that this mechanism will be used only in extraordinary situations — when voters feel that their elected officials are making a serious mistake.
I consider the Crestpointe proposal to be a sufficiently extraordinary situation that I have been carrying petitions around town, and otherwise supporting the petition campaign. I expect that petitioners will be successful in gathering at least 2000 valid signatures, so the voters will get to decide this issue in June.
In the course of petitioning, I have started to take special notice of the number of registered voters who don’t live here any more — and have not voted here since some time in the 1990s. These include folks who moved out of the area, as well as Oak Ridge kids who registered here when they were 18, but have long since established new residences in other parts of the country. I believe it used to be that Tennessee purged the records of people who had not voted recently, but current law requires that election commissions keep a voter on the list until they receive written confirmation that the voter has died, moved out of the area, wants to be removed from the voter list, has been convicted of an “infamous crime,” or has changed their name (other than by marriage) and failed to inform the election commission. The law does include a provision allowing the election commission to investigate by sending “confirmation notices”, but it’s pretty cumbersome: “If the voter fails to respond to a confirmation notice, and if the voter fails to otherwise update the voter’s registration over a period of two consecutive regular November elections following the date the notice was first sent.” (Since November elections happen only in even-numbered years, this process takes a bare minimum of two years.)
I’m very glad to know that people aren’t losing their right to vote without good reason. However, it occurs to me that those extra names on the voter list inflates the total number of voters. In a normal election, that reduces the reported voter turnout percentage, but otherwise it makes little difference. When applied to a petition that must be signed by 10% of voters, however, it inflates the number of required signatures – raising the bar even higher than lawmakers intended. Harrumph!
Furthermore, I can’t help but recall that failure to remove people from voter lists in a timely manner sometimes leads to situations in which corrupt politicians “vote the graveyard.” I hope our local election commissions are working to avert electoral fraud by mailing out “confirmation notices” to those folks who I believe to be phantom voters. (Additionally, future petitioners will be grateful.)
