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.)
Oak Ridge may have its share of contentious local issues, but we can take pride in being a progressive community where government employees are professionals — unlike certain neighboring communities where nepotism seems to be standard operating procedure, as Average Woman discusses today.
Earlier this week the Knoxville News Sentinel reported on the phenomenon (discussed here earlier) of local governments employing Washington, DC lobbyists to give “extra muscle” in seeking targeted pork-barrel funding for local projects. The report indicates a new dubious distinction for Oak Ridge — we spend more on federal lobbying than any other local government in the area.
The City of Oak Ridge’s annual expenditure of approximately $100,000 for work by the Ferguson Group leads the Knoxville metro region in lobbyist spending, exceeding the $40K spent yearly by the City of Knoxville and the $90K total cost of a lobbying contract shared by Blount County, the cities of Maryville and Alcoa, Maryville College, and Blount Memorial Hospital. Within Tennessee, Memphis seems to be the spending champ at $160,000, but at just 24 cents per resident, Memphis’ spending on DC lobbyists doesn’t come close to Oak Ridge’s expenditure of almost $3.60 per resident. (Chattanooga is reported to have spent $90,000 in the first half of 2006; the article doesn’t indicate whether their annual cost is twice that, or if they dropped the contract after mid-2006.)
In an editorial today, the News Sentinel appeared unable to decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but they the editorialist did point out that “there are problems with using taxpayer money at the local level to chase more taxpayer money at the federal level.” There are problems, indeed — so let’s stop paying lobbyists to “game” the federal system on our behalf.
Reports in the news (Pelosi Says She Would Drain GOP ‘Swamp‘) and on blogs suggest that the Democrats who are about to take control of Congress hope to rein in the practice of earmarking.
An article in the Washington Post last winter explained earmarking:
An earmark is a narrowly focused appropriation. …These home-state projects — which range from highways to research grants — now are commonplace in Congress’s 13 annual appropriations bills that fund the federal government….
…Earmarks are supposed to go through a public process. Lawmakers, acting on a need in their districts or states, submit a written request to the appropriate congressional subcommittee and ask the panel’s members for support — in private and at an open hearing.
Instead, projects, many of which are never openly considered, are handed out as favors in exchange for votes on key pieces of legislation by party leaders and appropriations chairmen. Alternatively, earmarks are withheld as punishment when lawmakers fail to toe the party line. In addition, earmarks are regularly slipped into legislation at the very end of the process — during House-Senate conference deliberations.
Thomas A. Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, said that 98 percent of the 3,000-plus earmarks added to a single appropriations bill last year were added in conference. Such last-minute earmarks are routinely included in a conference report that cannot be tampered with before final passage.
Schatz said that the proliferation of earmarks started after Republicans took control of the House in 1994. Then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) directed appropriators to help GOP lawmakers with tough reelection races by giving them projects they could boast about back home.
The amount of federal spending allocated by earmarking and other pork-barrel mushroomed during the 12 years of Republican control of Congress (see Washington Post graphic). Earlier this year Republicans instituted some reforms that were supposed to open the process a bit; I hope the newly elected Democrats are willing to go farther…
By hiring a DC lobbyist to the tune of $8000 a month (under a conract that runs until December 2007) Oak Ridge has “invested” heavily in buying influence to get earmarks. Reforms in the process would benefit US taxpayers, while making our city’s “investment” in lobbying services look even less worthwhile than it does already.
If reforms in earmarking come to pass, maybe the city can recoup some of our money by finding useful things for the hired DC political experts to do until the contract runs out. They were hired to help lure garden-variety transportation, recreation, and economic development grants, but Oak Ridge is a city with a major federal government presence that has created some unique problems. Could we use their help with those unique problems?
I’m bothered by (and have commented previously on) the City of Oak Ridge’s lobbying activities in Washington, DC. An article earlier this year in The New York Times, titled “Hiring Federal Lobbyists, Towns Learn Money Talks”, describes the disturbing national trend in which Oak Ridge is eagerly participating.
This hot trend is for local governments to hire professional lobbyists to help them gain Congressional “earmarks” — federal pork-barrel funding quietly inserted into bills, bypassing Congressional debate and the federal agency processes that are supposed to select projects for funding based on their merit (and priorities set by Congress).
According to the July 2, 2006, article:
Since 1998, the number of public entities hiring private firms to represent them in Washington has nearly doubled to 1,421 from 763…. Most of these new clients had never sought earmarks — some had never even heard of them — before someone knocked on their door, essentially offering big pots for a pittance. Others had read in the newspaper about neighbors with lobbyists building bridges or beach walks and felt pressure to keep up with the municipal Joneses. “We’re all in competition for the same dollars, and you want all the advantages you can have,” said John Litton, city manager in Lake Mary, Fla., about 20 miles north of Orlando.
The collective bill over eight years has topped $640 million. Enlisted almost exclusively to land earmarks, lobbyists for local governments have boomed alongside a broader explosion in such appropriations, to 12,852 items worth $64 billion last year from 4,219 pet projects totaling $27.7 billion in 1998. The prolific earmarking does not change the overall budget’s bottom line, but how the pie is cut: dollars are doled out, often in secret, at the whim of a lone legislator — often under the influence of a lobbyist — rather than through a competitive process.
It is against the law to use federal money to hire lobbyists. Yet local officials’ near-unanimous justification is that the lobbyists pay for themselves many times over through the infusion of federal funds.
Ronald D. Utt, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a frequent critic of earmarks, said he was most troubled at seeing firms solicit public clients with virtual guarantees that they could deliver “dollars for pennies” (or billions for millions). “The mystery to me is the way they are able to promise returns,” Mr. Utt said, pointing to the revolving door between Congressional appropriators’ payrolls and lobby shops, as well as to lobbyists’ generous campaign contributions. “It goes beyond mere influence peddling to just outright, classic third-world corruption.”
Beyond any question of quid pro quo, some critics say the new ubiquity of private lobbyists paid with public money perverts basic democratic tenets. Of the 250 top-grossing firms in Washington, 48 have state, local and tribal governments as their leading source of revenue, far more than any other sector, according to the Center for Public Integrity, which monitors lobbying.
Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, one of several Washington watchdog groups critical of earmarks, said it was local politicians’ mandate to make their needs known — and the job of members of Congress to look out for them.
“If you’re a mayor or a city councilman and you have to hire a lobbyist, what a gross admission of failure on your part,” Mr. Phillips said. “I would think they have a fiduciary responsibility to not put taxpayer dollars into lobbyists when they’re elected to be, really, the lobbyist for the people.”
The mayors and city council members, though, point to the special appropriations as proof of their fiscal prudence.
Alcalde & Fay is one of three firms — along with Patton Boggs and the Ferguson Group — that collected $25 million from public clients in the past eight years, much more than any other lobbyists. A close look at Alcalde & Fay’s 44 public clients in Florida alone shows that, since 2001, $9.8 million in lobbying fees translated into $173 million in earmarks, or a return of $18.41 on every dollar spent.
A snapshot analysis shows that hiring a lobbyist seems to help. North Miami Beach and Homestead, Florida, Alcalde & Fay clients with about 40,000 residents each, got a combined $13 million in earmarks in the past five years, while six cities of similar size got none. (Dunedin, population 35,691, lacked a lobbyist but got three earmarks totaling $2.7 million while its congressman, Mr. Young, ran the Appropriations Committee.)
Local leaders say they lack both the knowledge of bureaucratic procedures and the political contacts to navigate the complex world of federal appropriations. Besides, they are thousands of miles from Washington, picking up garbage and running recreation programs and putting police officers on beats.
Large governments — along with ports, airports and public utilities — have long had people in Washington looking out for their interests. What has changed in the past few years is the number of smaller entities looking to get in on the action.
The number of cities with lobbyists, for example, has grown to 511 from 234 in 1998, and the number of counties has also doubled, to 186 from 85. Fifty-nine public school districts had lobbyists last year, up from 19 in 1998, while the number of police and fire departments with their own paid representatives jumped to 16, from just 2.
One Congressional staffer told the Times (describing his boss):
“When asked the question whether a city or county needs to hire a lobbyist, he has always told them they don’t need to hire a lobbyist to work with their own congressman. That’s his job. Those are the people he was elected to represent. He doesn’t need to work through somebody else to schedule a meeting with a mayor or a city council member.”
In a July 10, 2006, editorial
Lobbyists, Yes. The People, Maybe the Times editorialist said:
The news that the Washington lobbying industry is rapidly extending its tentacles into cities, towns and school districts across the country should be an outright embarrassment to Congress. Elected lawmakers — not high-paid lobbyists — are supposed to be best attuned to meeting the needs of their localities. But not in the booming marketplace called earmarking — the rapid-fire, debate-free amending of budget bills with millions in special-interest boons for favored pleaders. In this case, lobbyists are shopping themselves as gifted middlemen for mayors and school boards. And localities are biting, having seen the sorry evidence that lawmakers tend to deliver earmarks more readily for Beltway lobbyists than for hometown nobodies.
In Florida, 44 public sector clients of one well-connected lobbyist netted $173 million in earmarked projects since 2001. This is a return of better than $18 federal dollars for every local dollar spent on lobbying, according to a report by Jodi Rudoren and Aron Pilhofer of The Times. The founding fathers surely didn’t envision such a lucrative warping of the federal-local relationship. But lawmakers do very well by it. They not only deliver tailored pork back home, but they also are rewarded by the circular money game where grateful lobbyists and special interests raise vast sums for the re-election campaigns of cooperative incumbents.
The City of Oak Ridge was one of only a handful of Tennessee local governments listed in the article as having lobbyist representation in Washington. Our current lobbyist, the Ferguson Group, named in that article as one of the lobbying firms that makes the most from local governments; their contract with Oak Ridge is worth more than $100,000 a year of local taxpayers’ money.
City officials claim that this is a winning arrangement for the city, because the size of the grants received exceeds the “investment” in the lobbying firm. On the contrary, I think the only winner in this arrangement is a booming political-manipulation industry in Washington, DC that we are supporting with our local dollars. We are paying these to manipulate the political process so we can get federal grants (for example, a DOT grant to complete the next phase of the Melton Lake Greenway) that we probably would qualify for anyway through normal agency processes (the same way we got previous grants for the greenway), and that generally still require that the city contribute local matching funds. This is a losing arrangement for taxpayers, and for the cause of good government, in general.
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