From The New York Times.
It sounds like a great deal at first. The guy who caused the accident cleans it up. "It's responsibility!", you think. The costs are targeted right at the user.
You already have the choice of buying Acme brand peanut butter or paying top dollar for "Bob's Super-Chunky Organic Stone-Ground Hand-Mixed Kosher USDA-Approved Mother-in-Law-Approved Peanut Butter". This is just taking the thinking another step forward.
The next step is to apply it to the schools. Make the parents pay for their little angels to be educated. Why burden the childless or the seniors who have put in their time and dollars already?
This is good! Do you want there to be light? Pay the streetlight tax. Want sidewalks and curbs? Pay up!
Ambulance? Fire department? Sewers? Flood remediation? Economic bailout? Pay for it yourself!!
This is the point where the idea falls apart.
When does the notion of "community" begin to be considered? What is "your" responsibility, and what is "our" responsibility? That's the thornier question to answer. Call it the(y)our question.
Old people and the youngest of us use more health services than the rest of the population: Is that(y)our responsibility or not? Without the oldest to guide us with their experience and wisdom, and the youngest to replace us, life tends to sputter out. Is that(y)our responsibility or not?
The fire at your house? Is that(y)our responsibility or not? Oops...it spread to the next door house. Is that(y)our responsibility or not? Paging Mrs. O'Leary: Your steak is ready. You did say "well-done", right?
We were all issued legs at birth and can walk anywhere we want. Roads? Is that(y)our responsibility or not? Efficient transportation and a robust supply network. Is that(y)our responsibility or not?
The streetlight in front of your house. Is that(y)our responsibility or not? Does it prevent accidents and prevent crime too? Is that(y)our responsibility or not?
Things that make you go hmmmmm.....
Cities Turn to Fees to Fill Budget Gaps
By David Segal, The New York Times
After her sport utility vehicle sideswiped a van in early February, Shirley Kimel was amazed at how quickly a handful of police officers and firefighters in Winter Haven, Fla., showed up. But a real shock came a week later, when a letter arrived from the city billing her $316 for the cost of responding to the accident.
“I remember thinking, ‘What the heck is this?’ ” says Ms. Kimel, 67, an office manager at a furniture store. “I always thought this sort of thing was covered by my taxes.”
It used to be. But last July, Winter Haven became one of a few dozen cities in the country to start charging “accident response fees.” The idea is to shift the expense of tending to and cleaning up crashes directly to at-fault drivers. Either they, or their insurers, are expected to pay.
Such cash-per-crash ordinances tend to infuriate motorists, and they often generate bad press, but a lot of cities are finding them hard to resist. With the economy flailing and budgets strained, state and local governments are being creative about ways to raise money. And the go-to idea is to invent a fee — or simply raise one.
Ohio’s governor has proposed a budget with more than 150 new or increased fees, including a fivefold increase in the cost to renew a livestock license, as well as larger sums to register a car, order a birth certificate or dump trash in a landfill. Other fees take aim at landlords, cigarette sellers and hospitals, to name a few.
Wisconsin’s governor, James E. Doyle, has proposed a charge on slaughterhouses that would be levied on the basis of each animal slaughtered. He also wants to more than triple the application charge for an elk-hunting license to $10, an idea that has raised eyebrows because the elk population in the state is currently too small to allow an actual hunting season.
Washington’s mayor, Adrian M. Fenty, has proposed a “streetlight user fee” of $4.25 a month, to be added to electric bills, that would cover the cost of operating and maintaining the city’s streetlights. New York City recently expanded its anti-idling law to include anyone parked near a school who leaves the engine running for more than a minute. Doing that will cost you $100.
“The most dangerous places on Staten Island are the schools at drop-off and dismissal time, when parents are parked three deep in the road,” says James S. Oddo, a City Council member from Staten Island who voted for the measure. “There is a mentality here that Johnny can’t walk 100 feet, he has to be dropped off right at the front of the school — and frankly that’s why Johnny is as pudgy as he is.”
Nothing, it seems, is off the table. In Pima County, Ariz., the County Board of Supervisors increased an assortment of fees, including the cost of AIDS testing. Florida has proposed raising medical visit co-payments for inmates in state prisons. Parking fees at the Honolulu Zoo could rise by 500 percent if a proposal there goes through.
Politicians tend to regard fees as more palatable than taxes, and more focused too. If a state needs to finance an infrastructure to oversee fishing, why shouldn’t fishermen foot the bill? But groups like the nonpartisan Tax Foundation in Washington worry that governments are now using fees to shore up budget shortfalls rather than cover specific costs incurred by specific users.
“When it comes to paying for bananas, you’ve got the market as a mechanism to make sure you’re paying a fair price,” says Josh Barro, a staff economist at the Tax Foundation. “But when it comes to getting your driver’s license renewed, the government has a monopoly, and you have no idea what it costs the state or what it’s doing with the money.”
Get-tough approach
In some cases, towns say they are merely enforcing rules that have long been on the books. For the first time in years, for instance, officials at Londonderry, N.H., have mailed notices to dog owners reminding them to renew their annual dog licenses, which cost $6.50 apiece, or face a $25 fine. Town leaders think the get-tough approach could raise an additional $20,000, but Meg Seymour, the town clerk, is dreading local reaction. When the town last sent out fine notices, in 2002, the calls to her office were vicious.
“Let’s just say that we’re the ones who take the venting,” she said. “You have no idea.”
If past patterns hold, the new wave of fees is just getting started. Gary Wagner, a professor of economics at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, was one author of a study of moving-vehicle and parking tickets in North Carolina, covering a 14-year period. He found a strong correlation between a dip in government revenue and a rise in ticket-writing by the police.
“But there’s a lag time,” Mr. Wagner said. “Typically, it’s about a year after the revenues drop that the police start writing more tickets.”
If you date the start of the downturn to last September, the ticket-writing is just getting under way. And New Yorkers can expect more days like the one in mid-March, when the police wrote 9,016 driving-while-phoning tickets within 24 hours, roughly 20 times the usual number.
The “accident response fee” idea could spread, too. A company in Dayton, Ohio, called the Cost Recovery Corporation specializes in setting up collection systems for municipalities that bill for police and fire responses. (The company keeps 10 percent of billings.) Inquiries have tripled in the last year, says the company’s president, Regina Moore.
“What we’re hearing from towns is, ‘The taxpayers are all over us; they don’t want to surrender more tax money,’ ” she said. “And response fees are basically a form of restitution, like paying for a stay in jail.”
Insurance companies loathe the idea, because inevitably customers assume that a crash fee is covered by their policies. (It isn’t, in most cases.) And unlike the pay-to-stay approach to jails, crash fees rarely play well in the media. The mayor of Duluth, Minn., backed off a crash fee proposal shortly after Jay Leno joked about the city, by name, in a “Tonight Show” monologue last year.
In Winter Haven, the accident response fee seemed to leaders to be a reasonable way to help finance the police and fire departments, but so far only 20 percent of the $32,000 that has been billed to at-fault drivers has been collected.
“We chose not to contract out the collection part of this, and frankly, because of staff cuts, we don’t have enough people to handle all the paperwork,” says Joy Townsend, the city’s communications officer. “We’re now evaluating how cost-effective this program is.”
Ms. Kimel, the S.U.V. driver in Florida, will not make the numbers look any better. She has no idea whether the city will come after her for that $316 bill, but she doesn’t care.
“I’m not paying,” she said, “because it isn’t fair.”
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Rendell: Open Records? Did I Say That?
From citypaper.net. The Inquirer article is below.
So here's another farcical law enacted to much hoopla and then studiously ignored leaving the people it's supposed to serve with supersized helpings of nada and zilch.
Pa. agencies ignore open records laws
Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
posted by Isaiah Thompson
categories State Politicians Screwing Philly, State Politics
Today, the Inky reports on a rift between the governor's office and Office of Open Records czar Terry Mutchler. The Inky says that Mutchler wrote a three-page letter to Governor Ed Rendell's office:
According to her letter, the situation has gotten so bad that lawyers in Rendell's office have put representatives of every state agency on notice not to even take her calls. Everything has to be in writing, the lawyers insist.
"At a maximum, these examples demonstrate an anti-open-government spirit," Mutchler, a reporter turned lawyer, lamented in her letter to Rendell, written late last month.
She continued: "Some agencies . . . are using the Right-to-Know law as a shield with which to block information rather than a tool with which to open records of government."
In this spirit of his boss, Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo defends the governor's apparent disinterest in implementing the open records laws he helped create by side-stepping reality with cheerful blather. Says Ardo:
"And let's not forget we're working under a relatively new law here. There is no precedent other than what we are currently setting. ... It will take some time to work out the kinks."
"No precedent," huh? Actually, there are plenty of precedents. Floridsa, where I worked as a reporter, has excellent public records laws.
In 2002, a report by the Investigative Reporters and Editors compared states based on the "open-ness" of their open records laws. Pennsylvania ranked 48th, tying with Alaska. It's not like Pa. is on the cutting edge — I'd say we've got plenty of "precedent," to follow, wouldn't you? In the entire Union, only Alabama and South Dakota were found to have less transparent policies.
This Office of Open Records was supposed to change that. Let's see that it does, Ed.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the Inquirer
Pa.'s public-records czar faults Rendell on openness
By Angela Couloumbis
Inquirer Harrisburg Bureau Posted on Fri, Apr. 10, 2009
HARRISBURG - The Rendell administration appears to be going out of its way to block public access to government documents. At least that is the impression left on the state's new open-records czar.
Terry Mutchler, executive director of Pennsylvania's Office of Public Records, has written to Gov. Rendell questioning whether top administration officials share the view that government should be open and transparent.
In the three-page letter, obtained by The Inquirer, Mutchler revealed a list of her concerns over how the administration has dealt with her and her staff - as well as individual records requests - since she was tapped to lead the open-records office in June.
According to her letter, the situation has gotten so bad that lawyers in Rendell's office have put representatives of every state agency on notice not to even take her calls. Everything has to be in writing, the lawyers insist.
"At a maximum, these examples demonstrate an anti-open-government spirit," Mutchler, a reporter turned lawyer, lamented in her letter to Rendell, written late last month.
She continued: "Some agencies . . . are using the Right-to-Know law as a shield with which to block information rather than a tool with which to open records of government."
Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo yesterday described the differences between Mutchler and the administration as "procedural and not substantive," and said the administration did not believe it had "denied anyone information that the law requires us to make public."
Still, Mutchler, a Rendell appointee, is requesting that the governor send a memorandum to all state agencies directing them to work with her office.
Ardo said the governor had not sent out such a directive because "everybody in the administration already knows the governor's view on open records and transparency in government."
'Speaks for itself'
Reached yesterday, Mutchler, who oversaw public-records access in Illinois for four years before coming to Pennsylvania, said only that the letter "speaks for itself."
The state's new open-records policy was passed last year by the legislature and signed into law by Rendell. It went into effect Jan. 1 and declared that all state, county, and local government records are public unless specifically exempted.
The law also mandated an Office of Open Records to oversee what is billed as a sea change in attitude in Pennsylvania. For years the state's definition of what constituted a public record was very narrow - among the most restrictive in the nation.
At the time of her appointment, Mutchler wrote in her letter, she requested a meeting with secretaries in Rendell's cabinet to express her vision and get their suggestions on how to implement the law smoothly. That meeting has yet to take place.
She also wrote that her office had repeatedly sought to conduct training sessions with open-records officers in each of the state agencies and had been denied.
Until recently, her office had also been shut out of meetings at state agencies in which lawyers were discussing how to interpret the new law, she said in the letter. And now, at the direction of the governor's Office of General Counsel, state agencies have been instructed not to speak with Mutchler on any open-records requests on appeal to her office.
Then there are individual skirmishes over records requests.
DEP's explanation
Just this week, Mutchler's office ordered the Department of Environmental Protection to photocopy and mail documents to a lawyer who had been denied those services.
Asked about the case this week, Mutchler said she was stunned when she saw the DEP's legal explanation for not making copies and mailing the documents.
The agency, which will appeal Mutchler's order, had argued that all it was required to do was make the records available for review, and that it was not obligated to provide copies or mail them.
"I read this a couple of times to make sure I wasn't misreading it," Mutchler said of the DEP's argument. "Even if one could make a solid legal argument that there is no obligation to photocopy or mail records, my first question out of the box is, 'Why wouldn't you?' "
Under the open-records law, Mutchler's office is the first avenue of appeal when a record is denied.
Ardo said the DEP request would have required the agency to photocopy more than 3,500 pages.
"That's as big as a Dumpster," Ardo said. "We were offering the requester an opportunity to review all 3,500 pages and copy the ones they believed were relevant."
Ardo yesterday sought to downplay any tension between the administration and Mutchler's office.
"I think the very fact that we are not in lockstep should give confidence to the public that she is independent and that occasional differences will crop up," he said.
"And let's not forget we're working under a relatively new law here. There is no precedent other than what we are currently setting. . . . It will take some time to work out the kinks."
So here's another farcical law enacted to much hoopla and then studiously ignored leaving the people it's supposed to serve with supersized helpings of nada and zilch.
Pa. agencies ignore open records laws
Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
posted by Isaiah Thompson
categories State Politicians Screwing Philly, State Politics
Today, the Inky reports on a rift between the governor's office and Office of Open Records czar Terry Mutchler. The Inky says that Mutchler wrote a three-page letter to Governor Ed Rendell's office:
According to her letter, the situation has gotten so bad that lawyers in Rendell's office have put representatives of every state agency on notice not to even take her calls. Everything has to be in writing, the lawyers insist.
"At a maximum, these examples demonstrate an anti-open-government spirit," Mutchler, a reporter turned lawyer, lamented in her letter to Rendell, written late last month.
She continued: "Some agencies . . . are using the Right-to-Know law as a shield with which to block information rather than a tool with which to open records of government."
In this spirit of his boss, Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo defends the governor's apparent disinterest in implementing the open records laws he helped create by side-stepping reality with cheerful blather. Says Ardo:
"And let's not forget we're working under a relatively new law here. There is no precedent other than what we are currently setting. ... It will take some time to work out the kinks."
"No precedent," huh? Actually, there are plenty of precedents. Floridsa, where I worked as a reporter, has excellent public records laws.
In 2002, a report by the Investigative Reporters and Editors compared states based on the "open-ness" of their open records laws. Pennsylvania ranked 48th, tying with Alaska. It's not like Pa. is on the cutting edge — I'd say we've got plenty of "precedent," to follow, wouldn't you? In the entire Union, only Alabama and South Dakota were found to have less transparent policies.
This Office of Open Records was supposed to change that. Let's see that it does, Ed.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the Inquirer
Pa.'s public-records czar faults Rendell on openness
By Angela Couloumbis
Inquirer Harrisburg Bureau Posted on Fri, Apr. 10, 2009
HARRISBURG - The Rendell administration appears to be going out of its way to block public access to government documents. At least that is the impression left on the state's new open-records czar.
Terry Mutchler, executive director of Pennsylvania's Office of Public Records, has written to Gov. Rendell questioning whether top administration officials share the view that government should be open and transparent.
In the three-page letter, obtained by The Inquirer, Mutchler revealed a list of her concerns over how the administration has dealt with her and her staff - as well as individual records requests - since she was tapped to lead the open-records office in June.
According to her letter, the situation has gotten so bad that lawyers in Rendell's office have put representatives of every state agency on notice not to even take her calls. Everything has to be in writing, the lawyers insist.
"At a maximum, these examples demonstrate an anti-open-government spirit," Mutchler, a reporter turned lawyer, lamented in her letter to Rendell, written late last month.
She continued: "Some agencies . . . are using the Right-to-Know law as a shield with which to block information rather than a tool with which to open records of government."
Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo yesterday described the differences between Mutchler and the administration as "procedural and not substantive," and said the administration did not believe it had "denied anyone information that the law requires us to make public."
Still, Mutchler, a Rendell appointee, is requesting that the governor send a memorandum to all state agencies directing them to work with her office.
Ardo said the governor had not sent out such a directive because "everybody in the administration already knows the governor's view on open records and transparency in government."
'Speaks for itself'
Reached yesterday, Mutchler, who oversaw public-records access in Illinois for four years before coming to Pennsylvania, said only that the letter "speaks for itself."
The state's new open-records policy was passed last year by the legislature and signed into law by Rendell. It went into effect Jan. 1 and declared that all state, county, and local government records are public unless specifically exempted.
The law also mandated an Office of Open Records to oversee what is billed as a sea change in attitude in Pennsylvania. For years the state's definition of what constituted a public record was very narrow - among the most restrictive in the nation.
At the time of her appointment, Mutchler wrote in her letter, she requested a meeting with secretaries in Rendell's cabinet to express her vision and get their suggestions on how to implement the law smoothly. That meeting has yet to take place.
She also wrote that her office had repeatedly sought to conduct training sessions with open-records officers in each of the state agencies and had been denied.
Until recently, her office had also been shut out of meetings at state agencies in which lawyers were discussing how to interpret the new law, she said in the letter. And now, at the direction of the governor's Office of General Counsel, state agencies have been instructed not to speak with Mutchler on any open-records requests on appeal to her office.
Then there are individual skirmishes over records requests.
DEP's explanation
Just this week, Mutchler's office ordered the Department of Environmental Protection to photocopy and mail documents to a lawyer who had been denied those services.
Asked about the case this week, Mutchler said she was stunned when she saw the DEP's legal explanation for not making copies and mailing the documents.
The agency, which will appeal Mutchler's order, had argued that all it was required to do was make the records available for review, and that it was not obligated to provide copies or mail them.
"I read this a couple of times to make sure I wasn't misreading it," Mutchler said of the DEP's argument. "Even if one could make a solid legal argument that there is no obligation to photocopy or mail records, my first question out of the box is, 'Why wouldn't you?' "
Under the open-records law, Mutchler's office is the first avenue of appeal when a record is denied.
Ardo said the DEP request would have required the agency to photocopy more than 3,500 pages.
"That's as big as a Dumpster," Ardo said. "We were offering the requester an opportunity to review all 3,500 pages and copy the ones they believed were relevant."
Ardo yesterday sought to downplay any tension between the administration and Mutchler's office.
"I think the very fact that we are not in lockstep should give confidence to the public that she is independent and that occasional differences will crop up," he said.
"And let's not forget we're working under a relatively new law here. There is no precedent other than what we are currently setting. . . . It will take some time to work out the kinks."
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