 On Point Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes his On Point column most weekdays. He is also an author and freelance writer. Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com. |
September 2007 | Main | November 2007
You can’t blame some parents for getting their backs up at the Denver Public Schools for replacing letter grades in middle schools with a system of 1-2-3-4. Even when you understand the theory behind the change, it’s not clear what it means in practice.
You can’t blame some parents for getting their backs up at the Denver Public Schools for replacing letter grades in middle schools with a system of 1-2-3-4. Even when you understand the theory behind the change, it’s not clear what it means in practice.
Let’s see if we can sort this out. According to the district's parent guide, a “4” means students are “far ahead of where they are expected to be at that point in time, relative to the [state] standards.” But it does not equal an “A.”
A “3” means students are “well on their way to reaching the standard at the end of the year.” But it is not the same as a “B.”
A “2” means a student is “not quite on track to meet the standard,” while a “1” means the student is flat out behind. But don’t confuse them with a “C” or a “D,” let alone an “F.”
To further muddle matters, upset parents in southeast Denver say they’ve been told that 4’s will be rare indeed, stoking suspicion that a 3 will amount to a catchall category lumping kids from high C’s to low A’s in a single undivided mass.
Not so, insists Denver’s chief academic officer, Jaime Aquino. The new system, he says, is “much more precise.”
No, I guess we can’t sort this out.
The parent guide disparages the old grading system (which is still used in high schools) as follows: “In a traditional system, what does an ‘A’ really mean? It only compares students within their class. A standards-based progress report allows you to gauge your student’s academic progress using a meaningful measure, the state standard.”
Sounds good, but what does that really mean? A standards-based education is only as good as the standards, and most parents have no idea if the Colorado standards are truly top-notch. For example, does being proficient in the 8th grade math standard mean you can compete with a kid of the same age in Seoul or Hamburg?
The district could help parents figure out what the new system means by documenting how it’s actually used. After this school year, why not offer parents a detailed breakdown of the grade distribution at their school in the first year of the new system compared to the final year of the old?
It may be that teachers are handing out 4’s at about the same rate they awarded A’s (although whether that’s a good thing is a separate discussion; maybe A’s were given out too freely in the past). Or perhaps the overwhelming majority of grades in many schools are now 3’s and 2’s, in which case the district has moved to the near equivalent of a satisfactory/unsatisfactory grading system.
Whatever the case, parents deserve more than reassuring references to a state standard they may not fully understand.
Loophole?
Ever wonder why the The Denver Museum of Nature & Science can donate $300,000 to this fall’s campaign to pass a series of bond projects that will benefit that institution when school districts can’t spend a penny of their budgets pushing similar ballot issues to help themselves?
Elementary, my dear taxpayer. State law says “No agency, department, board, division, bureau, commission or council of the state or any political subdivision thereof shall . . . expend any public moneys” urging electors “to vote in favor of or against any local ballot issue.” The museum, meanwhile, while it does operate in a city-owned facility, is a not-for-profit organization that uses its visitor fees rather than the public money it receives from the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District for its political contributions.
A legal loophole? Maybe not, since we wouldn’t want to quash the free speech of nonprofits. But it sure feels like one, doesn’t it?
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
The new energy economy is coming faster than you think — although perhaps not in the alluring form foreseen by green governors such as Bill Ritter and Arnold Schwarzenegger, with plentiful energy flowing from endless rows of windmills and solar panels strung across the fruited plain.
No, the new energy economy increasingly looks as if it may be a world of shortages and even brownouts, as well as electricity prices trending sharply higher.
If so, it will be the result of decisions we can see being made today.
The new energy economy is coming faster than you think — although perhaps not in the alluring form foreseen by green governors such as Bill Ritter and Arnold Schwarzenegger, with plentiful energy flowing from endless rows of windmills and solar panels strung across the fruited plain.
No, the new energy economy increasingly looks as if it may be a world of shortages and even brownouts, as well as electricity prices trending sharply higher.
If so, it will be the result of decisions we can see being made today.
The most dramatic such decision occurred just last week, when the top official in the Kansas Department of Health and Environment denied a permit to build coal-fired generators at an existing plant solely to prevent release of “carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases,” not because it would violate any existing air-pollution standard. His staff had recommended that the permit be granted.
Even before the Kansas decision, The Associated Press has reported, “At least 16 coal-fired power plant proposals nationwide have been scrapped in recent months and more than three dozen have been delayed as utilities face increasing pressure due to concerns over global warming and rising construction costs.” If the logic of Kansas’ top regulator is widely mimicked, permits for new coal generators will become as rare as the passenger pigeon.
Meanwhile, rising demand for electricity is already outstripping supply. According to the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which takes no position on specific debates over generation or transmission, “Electricity usage in the United States is projected to grow more than twice as fast as committed resources over the next 10 years.”
Closer to home, the Colorado Energy Forum last year estimated that demand for electricity in this state would jump by 50 percent during the next 20 years.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, a wholesaler based in Westminster, is a partner in the Kansas project. “We proposed one of the cleanest coal plants that exist anywhere in the country,” spokesman Lee Boughey told me. And it’s not as if Tri-State is a coal-addicted, anti-renewables rogue. It supported this year’s bill upping the renewable-energy mandate in Colorado for utilities.
So what will be used as a substitute for coal if it is squeezed out as a baseload energy source, since wind and solar are not yet suited for the role? Perhaps nuclear will provide part of the answer, although the lead times and cost of building nuclear plants are staggering. Most of the other solutions often mentioned, notably “clean coal” technology involving the capture and storage of carbon dioxide, remain in the experimental stage.
No, the fallback baseload power source will almost certainly involve natural gas, whose price is higher and more volatile than coal, and whose supplies are already under pressure from rising demand.
Maybe the new energy economy should be renamed the newly expensive energy economy. At the very least the public should understand the trade-off in yanking plans for coal plants: that there is no such thing as a free green lunch when it comes to baseload power.
Using the right word
When University of Colorado President Hank Brown warned higher education commissioners last week that soaring tuition risks pushing some students into lower-cost institutions, with the result that “you’ll ghettoize those students,” the only black panel member told Brown he was offended.
But why? “Ghettoize” is found in dictionaries and is commonly used in much the way Brown employed it — meaning to isolate or congregate in a particular location.
And while ghetto was once a popular way to refer to black urban slums, it has a much older history that has nothing to do with America. In Europe, it referred to the quarter of the city where Jews had to live; there were major ghettos in Venice, Frankfurt, and a number of other towns.
Brown was not insensitive to use “ghettoize” as he did, and he shouldn’t shrink from using it again.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Poor U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham, born a century or so too late, fated to live without the deference and privilege due to someone of his exalted station.
Poor U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham, born a century or so too late, fated to live without the deference and privilege due to someone of his exalted station.
To be sure, in his federal courtroom Nottingham is free to lord it over those who appear before him — a right he reportedly relishes. On the bench, according to a Rocky article earlier this year, he is “known for his short fuse and for asserting his control early.” In the trial of former Qwest chief Joe Nacchio, for example, Nottingham managed to give the U.S. attorney a good dressing down at the very first pretrial hearing.
But outside the courtroom, alas for the judge, it’s a different story. Although Nottingham is the same special individual, the world is not always ready to confirm it, and this can be frustrating in the extreme.
At times, for example, Nottingham will find himself in a crowded parking lot without a single space reserved near the store for dignitaries. When this occurred a month ago, the judge took matters into his own hands: He pulled rank and parked his SUV in a handicapped space.
Judge Nottingham’s attorneys say he “regrets parking in a handicapped space in his haste to pick up a prescription at a local Walgreen’s, but respectfully disagrees with the remainder of Ms. Elliott’s version of this incident.”
“Ms. Elliott” would be Jeanne Elliott, a spunky attorney confined to a wheelchair who cornered the judge and his car in the lot. She says that after she blocked his exit, he announced that he was a federal judge and warned he’d call U.S. marshals if she didn’t clear out.
No wonder Nottingham “disagrees with the remainder of Ms. Elliott’s version of this incident,” since it makes him sound awfully self-important. Which, as we all know, is entirely out of character for this shrinking violet on the federal bench.
Pay the PETA piper
Speaking of judges, one in the Roaring Fork Valley recently ordered a hunter to donate $500 to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals after the fellow baited and killed a bear illegally. Fortunately, Judge Chuck Buss is retired and was only filling in at the time for a vacationing jurist. So perhaps his eccentric sentence won’t catch on.
As The Aspen Times pointed out in an editorial, PETA doesn’t “do anything for wild black bears, and sending money to PETA is a complete waste of a fine ‘in lieu of community service.’ ”
Actually, it’s worse than that. The hunter is being forced to support a group with an agenda that is both strange and radical, and with which he almost certainly disagrees. PETA doesn’t merely push for humane treatment of animals and for humans to stop eating meat and wearing furs. Lots of people either sympathize with those positions or consider them intellectually respectable.
No, PETA goes much further. It has demonstrated time and again that it sees no moral distinction between species, that it believes killing an animal is equivalent to human murder. It’s a doctrine with revolutionary implications for any culture.
A few years ago, to cite the most notorious evidence for this attitude, PETA launched a Holocaust on Your Plate campaign. One of the claims: the “leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps.” No wonder PETA thought nothing of such grotesque comparisons as a picture of starving camp inmates juxtaposed with a photo of caged chickens.
Eventually the group issued a halfhearted apology, all the while continuing to assert that “the logic and methods employed in factory farms and slaughterhouses are analogous to those used in concentration camps.”
Given such a fringe worldview, it’s no wonder that PETA considers it unethical not only to eat fish but even to keep them in aquariums — to mention just one of its more exotic views. If judges can force convicted offenders to support an outfit like that, then what group would fail to qualify for similar subsidies?
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Et tu, Jared?
Earlier this year, I made the case that Jared Polis is the most interesting Democratic candidate for the 2nd Congressional District — a district destined, I noted, to “elect another liberal in 2008 to replace Mark Udall.”
Why the most interesting? Because Polis is a remarkable entrepreneur who “marches to his own drummer at times — on educational choice, to cite one example.”
In recent weeks, unfortunately, Polis has muffled that drum as he falls back to the safe but stupefying strategy of pandering to his party’s political base.
Et tu, Jared?
Earlier this year, I made the case that Jared Polis is the most interesting Democratic candidate for the 2nd Congressional District — a district destined, I noted, to “elect another liberal in 2008 to replace Mark Udall.”
Why the most interesting? Because Polis is a remarkable entrepreneur who “marches to his own drummer at times — on educational choice, to cite one example.”
In recent weeks, unfortunately, Polis has muffled that drum as he falls back to the safe but stupefying strategy of pandering to his party’s political base.
Four years ago, Polis supported a modest pilot program that would have allowed a limited number of poor inner-city kids to tap public vouchers to help them attend the private school of their choice. This newspaper even published a column by Polis extolling the plan and the decision of then Attorney General Ken Salazar to support it.
“Salazar is right,” he wrote. “This experiment deserves a fair test, an honest chance. If it succeeds, it will benefit the lives of children and families.”
The experiment didn’t succeed. The state Supreme Court killed it after the legislature enacted the law. But now Polis maintains he never actually liked the idea and opposes voucher plans.
“The bill evolved into a voucher bill . . . and I did not support it in its final form,” he told The Denver Post. “It was punitive and a mandatory bill requiring districts provide subsidies for private schools.”
Except that it did not evolve into a voucher bill. It began as a voucher bill, which is why Polis called it a “modest voucher proposal” in his Rocky Op-Ed.
Polis probably remains the most interesting of the three 2nd District candidates. He even still favors more educational choice than his leading opponent, Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald, who earlier this year essentially accused many parents of kids in charter schools of being racist. Those schools cater, she falsely charged, to “white flight.”
In addition, as Polis assured me in an e-mail a few weeks ago, he remains “a ‘globalization optimist’ in that I think that bringing the world closer together through cultural and trade ties is a fundamentally good thing that is good for all nations.” That’s a far cry from the misguided globalization gloom that permeates the thinking of so many candidates today on both the left and right.
It’s somewhat depressing, however, that Polis would so meekly capitulate on the single issue where he might have taken a little heat during a Democratic primary. If Salazar’s position on vouchers once qualified as a profile in courage, as Polis claimed in 2003, what word should we use to characterize Polis’ own profile today?
‘Higher’ ed
Most predictable headline of this or any other year: “College costs outpace inflation rate” (The New York Times, Oct. 23).
Perhaps also inevitably, the article blames insufficient government aid for the price surge nationally. “We hope that state governments . . . will do their part to reinvest in higher education,” said David Ward of the American Council on Education.
Tuition at public colleges does of course tend to rise faster than normal when state support sags; Colorado provides recent evidence for this. Yet average tuition hikes often exceed inflation even when state support is strong.
If lagging government aid were the primary cause of soaring tuition, you’d think private colleges would be immune to the trend. But the College Board, which released the tuition figures this week, reports that private colleges this year hiked tuition by almost the same percentage as public colleges, 6.3 percent as opposed to 6.6 percent.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
After my column last week on Denver’s aggressive push for high-density development near the Southmoor rail station, I received several plaintive e-mails similar to the following:
“I live in Lowry,” wrote Gail Bell, “and the Lowry residents along with all of the surrounding East Denver neighborhoods have been fighting against numerous high-density developments for over a year. Why haven’t we been able to get any support from the media or the mayor?”
The second part of her question is easy to answer: They can’t get the support of the mayor because he’s not particularly sympathetic to Denverites who resist higher density
After my column last week on Denver’s aggressive push for high-density development near the Southmoor rail station, I received several plaintive e-mails similar to the following:
“I live in Lowry,” wrote Gail Bell, “and the Lowry residents along with all of the surrounding East Denver neighborhoods have been fighting against numerous high-density developments for over a year. Why haven’t we been able to get any support from the media or the mayor?”
The second part of her question is easy to answer: They can’t get the support of the mayor because he’s not particularly sympathetic to Denverites who resist higher density. To the contrary. John Hickenlooper supports the so-called smart-growth agenda that promotes higher densities for an array of reasons — especially near transit corridors and arterials. And so does his planning director, Peter Park, a national leader in the movement.
Not that Monaco Boulevard and Quebec Street in East Denver truly qualify as major thoroughfares — but no matter. They’ll do fine for the purposes of the city’s high-density mania.
Concerned residents tell me the original development concept for the Buckley Annex, 72 acres south of First Avenue between Monaco and Quebec, called for buildings as tall as 12 stories. But even after months of push-back and input from nearby neigbhorhoods, the proposed density remains imposing: Buildings several stories high near the edge of the site and up to seven or eight stories in the middle.
No wonder some residents are distressed by the potential impact on streets, views, schools and the general ambiance.
It’s fine if Denver wants to support high density in downtown, Stapleton and other sites where it already exists or will not potentially overwhelm stable, low-density neighborhoods that were chosen by homeowners for precisely those attributes. Dense neighborhoods can obviously be vibrant and appealing. As Park once noted, “Some of the greatest neighborhoods around New York and Chicago were built around transit. We have the opportunity to do that again . . . ” But city officials’ first loyalty should be to the residents of neighborhoods that exist, not to prospective residents whose influx will — and is meant to — transform them.
By the way, the Air Force still owns the Buckley Annex, and the planning process is being coordinated by the Lowry Redevelopment Authority. But there’s no question the Hickenlooper administration supports the authority’s direction.
To appreciate how stacked the process is against dissenters from the neighborhoods, you only have to read “Myth Three” that appears in an Aug. 1 PowerPoint presentation available at the Buckley Annex link (click on “Task Force Meetings” once there) on the Lowry Web site (lowry.org).
“Myth Three: Higher-density development creates more regional traffic congestion and parking problems than low-density development.”
The truth, the document insists, is that “higher-density development generates less traffic than low-density development per unit.”
Notice the curious language: “regional” traffic congestion and parking problems as opposed to “neighborhood” congestion and parking problems. Less traffic “per unit” rather than less traffic, period.
Yes, higher density should result in fewer total vehicle trips in a metro area than would be the case with the same number of housing units in lower density, but higher density almost inevitably generates more traffic in surrounding neighborhoods than lower density on the same space. And the authors of the “myth” must know this or they wouldn’t present it as they did.
As for Gail Bell’s other question, “Why haven’t we been able to get any support from the media?” — well, for what it’s worth, you just have.
Southmoor clarification
In re-reading my column on the Southmoor density plan, I can understand why some readers were confused as to my attitude. On the one hand I chided the mayor and local councilwoman for their naive view of potential traffic and neighborhood impacts, but I also defended the planning process and suggested some degree of high-density housing may be inevitable.
Just to be clear: The city’s plan includes substantially more density than is healthy for the surrounding neighborhoods — and there is still time, the city willing, to scale back the proposal.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
If Bill and Paula Leake were counting on a white knight to rescue them from the aggressive designs of the Metro Baseball Stadium District, they may have to look somewhere other than the mayor’s office.
If Bill and Paula Leake were counting on a white knight to rescue them from the aggressive designs of the Metro Baseball Stadium District, they may have to look somewhere other than the mayor’s office.
In remarks quoted in Saturday’s Rocky, John Hickenlooper said the Leakes’ attempt to sell their property near Coors Field for development of a 140-feet building pits “two important values against each other: Private property rights against communal shared values. This is like historic preservation — just because you own something doesn’t mean you can tear it down because it has a shared communal value.”
The mayor is obviously correct that shared communal values are important. However, they are not mentioned in the Constitution while property rights and other individual rights and freedoms are. For a very good reason: A majority of citizens has much less difficulty protecting its interests than a single person. And once a pushy, righteous majority starts overriding individual dreams in the name of the greater good — in other words, communal values — you can pretty much kiss liberty as we know it goodbye.
The stadium district is backing an ordinance establishing a “view plane” from inside Coors Field that would block the Leakes’ plan to sell their property for development. The ordinance would indeed protect shared communal values because few Coloradans — myself included — relish the prospect of a new building marring part of a mountain view for even a limited number of fans.
But a law crafted for no other purpose than to stop a single rezoning and sale of property owned by a couple whose family business has been part of a neighborhood for 30 years smacks of a classic example of the tyranny of the majority.
It’s an ugly mistake, in other words, however worthy the stated goal.
Hardly a throng
In a blunt broadside we published last week (“Rocky off base in critique of museum in Civic Center,” Oct. 10), the chairman of the Colorado Historical Society noted that the Colorado History Museum’s “programs and exhibits attracted nearly 150,000 visitors last year alone . . . .”
W. Bart Berger’s point: Relocating the museum onto Denver’s downtown Civic Center would “activate and repopulate” the rundown area.
Maybe so, but let’s at least do the math in considering the claim. “Nearly 150,000” divided by 365 (the museum is open seven days a week) equals 410 visitors a day. That may amount to a nice turnout for a state history museum, but the word “throng” hardly springs to mind.
Berger is confident the museum could attract more visitors in a plum location such as Civic Center. No doubt about it — although the effort would depend in part on a major upgrade of some museum exhibits, and no one can credibly guess what the ensuing turnout might be.
Berger is less persuasive when he contends that Civic Center “isn’t a ‘park,’ it is a civic gathering place.” It is actually both, which is why concern for its grass and open space is not driven by editorial opportunism, as he implies. Rather, it’s the most obvious objection to the historical society’s proposal, one appreciated even by most of those who believe the plan’s merits outweigh its drawbacks.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at Carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Carroll: Don't have a cow, man
Is red meat the next tobacco? Is the federal government destined to hector Americans about their consumption of beef in the same way it now discourages smoking — and perhaps even levy a special tax on it someday?
Until recently, such questions were not merely improbable, they were silly. But no longer. When an ultra-establishment voice such as the Los Angeles Times devotes a 1,600-word editorial to the perils of “Killer cow emissions,” not as parody but as serious analysis, you know that concern over porterhouse steaks has elbowed its way into the mainstream.
Is red meat the next tobacco? Is the federal government destined to hector Americans about their consumption of beef in the same way it now discourages smoking — and perhaps even levy a special tax on it someday?
Until recently, such questions were not merely improbable, they were silly. But no longer. When an ultra-establishment voice such as the Los Angeles Times devotes a 1,600-word editorial to the perils of “Killer cow emissions,” not as parody but as serious analysis, you know that concern over porterhouse steaks has elbowed its way into the mainstream.
After noting that “livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide, according to the U.N. — more than all the planes, trains and automobiles on the planet,” the Times slogs through a variety of tactics that might reduce the impact of the methane gas that cattle produce (mostly through belching). It then concludes, however, that none of these measures would be enough.
The only alternative: “eating less meat.” As a result, “the government should not only get out of the business of promoting unhealthful and environmentally destructive foods, it should be actively discouraging them.”
Let’s be clear what the Times is saying: The government should actively discourage eating beef in order to combat global warming. The editorial also cites beef’s “unhealthful” effects, to be sure, but if it were truly worried about them, it could have advocated a campaign against red meat years ago. No, global warming is what tipped the scales.
Global warming is quickly becoming the one-stop shop for almost every variety of social engineer and closet authoritarian who hankers to boss the rest of us around. Those who want to dictate where Americans live, including the size of their houses and lots, what they drive or whether they drive, and even what they eat, need only link their goal to the campaign against global warming to infuse it with moral force.
You don’t have to be a global warming skeptic (I’m certainly not) to be disturbed by this trend. Surely preserving freedom is at least as important as combating global warming — just as preserving civil liberties ought to trump the war against global terrorism.
Because if that’s not the case — if global warming outranks every other consideration, why shouldn’t we slap a heavy greenhouse tax on red meat or ban its sale altogether? After all, the Times informs us, “cutting out meat would do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than trading in a gas guzzler for a hybrid car.”
And tofu burgers aren’t really all that bad, are they?
Our highest value?
I guess I don’t have to ask the executive director of the San Francisco Planning & Urban Research Association whether freedom or the campaign against global warming is more important. In an article this week in USA Today, Gabriel Metcalf is quoted as saying that the city’s proposed 1,200-foot Transbay Transit Center is a “statement that our highest value is ecology. Just as church steeples were always the tallest buildings in the Middle Ages, we’re marking our transit hub as the most important spot on the skyline.”
Our highest value is ecology? And where do such “values” as freedom, justice, the pursuit of truth and knowledge, and the cultivation of community, to mention just a few other candidates, fit in the rankings?
If our highest value is ecology — if that’s truly the emerging consensus — then the banning of red meat is hardly the worst crackdown in the name of the environment that could be lurking in the wings.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Mayor John Hickenlooper spun reality on its head at a meeting Wednesday when confronted by southeast Denver residents irate about the possibility of several blocks of high-density, multistory housing near the Southmoor light-rail station.
Mayor John Hickenlooper spun reality on its head at a meeting Wednesday when confronted by southeast Denver residents irate about the possibility of several blocks of high-density, multistory housing near the Southmoor light-rail station.
“You’re not going to get full value (from light rail) if you can’t have some density around each station,” Hickenlooper said, according to the Rocky. “Otherwise, you’re just going to have more and more traffic, and if you want to experience that, go spend a week in Los Angeles.”
Sorry, mayor: Higher density is what will bring Los Angeles to Denver, not delay its arrival. Los Angeles may cover a huge geographical area, but it is also a high-density urban area that squeezes far more people than Denver onto every square mile by way of smaller lots and more multifamily dwellings. And yes, the traffic is much worse there, just as it is destined to become steadily more congested here as densities rise.
Can the mayor name a single high-density city in America that is a low-congestion paradise?
If hundreds (at least) of additional residents move into the Southmoor neighborhood, many may commute by rail to work and perhaps to sporting events (as I did Sunday from that station), but for most other errands they’ll drive their cars.
The mayor is hardly alone in his reality-defying hope that higher density will forestall L.A.-type gridlock. Peggy Lehmann, the southeast Denver councilwoman, told me the reason “we put light rail there is that we want people out of their cars.” Families who might otherwise own three vehicles, she said, might choose to own one instead.
Perhaps. Except that most American adults like to own a car, not depend on someone else’s, even if they take transit to work. Moreover, the important statistic is not how many cars people own but how many trips they take in them. Believe me, if you live in Southmoor, many of your destinations will require the use of four wheels.
That said, however, area residents need to take a deep breath and calm down. The city did not try to ambush them with a high-density plan. It held focus- group meetings with landowners and representatives of neighborhood associations. Officials provided me with a postcard they say also was mailed to households within a quarter mile of the station alerting residents to a May 10 event to discuss development ideas.
An equally pertinent point: Landowners already have the right to put multifamily housing on those blocks, which now include parking lots, small shops and a King Soopers. The zoning allows it.
Finally, if southeast Denver residents are like most city voters, they favored the southeast train line and the later rail-system buildout represented by FasTracks (ignoring, I might add, this editorial page’s advice). What did they expect — that train stations would open and the city would fail to encourage “transit-oriented development” near them emphasizing more housing? Of course the city was going to act.
Peter Park, the city’s planning director, made the case to me Thursday that without city involvement, future development near the Southmoor station might make little or no provision for open space, tree-lined walkways, protection of important sight lines and links to neighborhood streets, all of which the preliminary drawings include. Ironically, the current planning process was meant in part to provide signals to developers as to what might be acceptable to officials and neighborhood residents.
Obviously, many residents aren’t on board, as Park now understands. “I’m hoping people come out on Nov. 8,” he said, referring to the next community meeting to discuss the plan.
But they should attend under no illusions. First, there is probably little they can do to stop higher residential density if the three major landowners someday decide that’s what they want. Second, contrary to what the mayor implies, the greater density will aggravate congestion, just as they fear, not keep it at bay.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
“I absolutely agree that trade is a great idea in many respects,” Tom Tancredo said in Tuesday’s GOP presidential debate, while giving a very good impression of a man who thinks trade is a bad idea in many respects.
“I absolutely agree that trade is a great idea in many respects,” Tom Tancredo said in Tuesday’s GOP presidential debate, while giving a very good impression of a man who thinks trade is a bad idea in many respects.
Tancredo is opposed to trading “at all” with countries “who are your potential enemy,” by which, of course, he means China — a rather large source of imports to dismiss. Yet even Tancredo didn’t go as far as Rep. Duncan Hunter, who seems eager to start a trade war with any country whose tariffs aren’t as low as ours or whose currency, in his judgment, is undervalued.
Fortunately, the top-tier Republican contenders — Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney and John McCain — generally reject the protectionist siren song. The more important question, however, may be whether voters do. And here the evidence is bleak: “By a nearly two-one margin,” The Wall Street Journal reported last week, “Republican voters believe free trade is bad for the U.S. economy, a shift in opinion that mirrors Democratic views. . . .
It’s easy to understand why most Americans might now consider free trade bad for the economy. They are fed a steady diet of anecdotal analysis from fear-mongers such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs and special interests — unions, farm lobbies, old-line industries — bent on protecting the status quo. They hear reports of jobs lost to globalization but rarely of good jobs created because of it.
Meanwhile, many politicians and journalists seem unaware that most of today’s fears regarding trade have been expressed in almost precisely the same fashion at various times for more than 150 years — a period during which per capita wealth has risen by leaps and bounds.
The trade skeptics claim that it’s different this time. With so many Chinese and Indians moving off the farm, they say, a race to the bottom in wages has truly begun. The economy will be hollowed out this time for sure.
Don’t believe them. They are wrong for the same reasons their gloomy predecessors were wrong. So long as wages are related to productivity, as they are, a race to the bottom will remain a myth. As Martin Wolf, the associate editor of the Financial Times, points out in his book Why Globalization Works, “Today, South Korea wages are fifteen times as high as China’s. Fifty years ago, they would have been much the same. In time, China’s wages and so its costs will also rise, together with its productivity. As they do so, its comparative advantage will also change. Today, South Korea has largely left garment manufacture behind. In time, so will China.”
Is it such a bad thing to leave garment manufacture — or toy manufacture, to cite a current example — behind? You’d think so if you listened to the anti-traders, although countries that have are much wealthier than those that have not. Still, there may be no arguing with people who believe a national economy should manufacture everything. What they need to understand is that even if their self-sufficient utopia existed, the share of manufacturing jobs in its total economy would continue to decline, for two reasons: soaring productivity and because the demand for services expands faster in a wealthy nation than the demand for goods.
For some reason this decline in the share of manufacturing jobs terrifies the anti-traders. However, “to think this will be a disaster shows one is prey to the ‘lump of labor fallacy,’ ” Wolf expains, “the view that there exists a fixed number of jobs in an economy. Nobody with any knowledge of economic history could believe such a thing. Two hundred years ago, the share of the population engaged in agriculture in today’s high-income countries was about three-quarters. Today, it is 2 or 3 percent. . . . . Are all the people not required in the fields now unemployed? The answer is of course not. They do a host of jobs, most of them far more amusing and less arduous than their ancestors could even have imagined in 1800. The same will be true in future.”
It’s helpful to read Wolf side by side with Lou Dobbs’ War on the Middle Class, as I did recently, and decide for yourself who makes the more cogent case on trade. From where I sit, it’s not a close call.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Carol Chambers has been faulted for a number of things during her term as district attorney for Arapahoe, Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties, but not — until now — for playing to the grandstand in pursuit of easy praise and eventual votes.
Quite the opposite. Most of Chambers’ controversial moves — complaining about her salary, announcing she would not prosecute cases involving a certain Aurora cop, monitoring judges’ hours and highlighting the possibility of “overt hostility” by jurists toward her prosecutors, to mention a few of the incidents — have almost been guaranteed to generate a backlash of bad publicity.
Carol Chambers has been faulted for a number of things during her term as district attorney for Arapahoe, Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties, but not — until now — for playing to the grandstand in pursuit of easy praise and eventual votes.
Quite the opposite. Most of Chambers’ controversial moves — complaining about her salary, announcing she would not prosecute cases involving a certain Aurora cop, monitoring judges’ hours and highlighting the possibility of “overt hostility” by jurists toward her prosecutors, to mention a few of the incidents — have almost been guaranteed to generate a backlash of bad publicity.
But now we are supposed to believe that she files more death penalty cases than other Colorado prosecutors in order to curry public favor?
“I can’t say what’s motivating Carol Chambers,” University of Colorado professor Michael Radelet was quoted as saying in a Rocky story Tuesday, “but I do know she’s had some political problems. This may be a way to take some of the heat off.”
If Radelet doesn’t know what motivates Chambers, then maybe he shouldn’t offer a convenient, invidious guess. He shouldn’t suggest she’d be willing to see the state take someone’s life in order to further her political career.
Like Radelet, I, too, oppose the death penalty. However, my conversations with Chambers, as well as observation of her career, convince me that she does what she thinks is right whether it fits popular fashion or not — that she would seek the death penalty, therefore, because she believes the punishment fits the offense.
Radelet is right, of course, that “people are supposed to be punished for the crime, not for the place (where the crime was committed).” But that cuts both ways. If six of Colorado’s seven pending capital cases come from Chambers’ district, that means most other district attorneys aren’t filing any, despite a Colorado statute that allows them to do so.
Radelet and I might not like that statute, but elected lawmakers passed it, and there’s been little public outcry demanding its repeal. Don’t blame a district attorney for taking it seriously.
Miller’s halo tarnished
Philip Roth was discussing his latest novel on National Public Radio the other day when he launched a surprising salvo against the “prurient” press.
“In the last few days there’s been this revelation about Arthur Miller . . . . talking about the fact that he had a Down Syndrome child whom he’d institutionalized,” Roth said. “A celebrity draws this kind of inquiry. . . . I don’t know that it’s anybody’s business that he had a Down Syndrome child that was institutionalized. It just seems prurient and nothing more to me. It also allows a great deal of moral indignation on the part of these media people.”
Surely Roth knows perfectly well why this news about the late, great playwright — author of Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and many other works — amounts to more than prurience. Miller spent his entire life moralizing — against hypocrisy, fraudulence, fathers who emotionally scar their sons and much else. And that was just in his plays. He also took up many activist causes, most memorably in his stands against McCarthyism and the Vietnam War.
Upon his death in 2005, the BBC obituary was hardly the only one to declare Miller “a man of the highest integrity, both in his work and in his personal life.”
Would a man with such sterling values put a son in a state-run facility against his wife’s wishes? “Miller had not only erased his son from the public record,” reports Vanity Fair, “he had also cut him out of his private life, institutionalizing him at birth, refusing to see him or speak about him, virtually abandoning him.”
Nothing Miller did could undermine his art. The question is how we remember the man himself. And although he was far from a scoundrel, as we always knew, he was also, it turns out, something short of a saint.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Is Gov. Bill Ritter poised to advocate collective bargaining for state workers as a means to inject more competition into government services? This seemingly absurd — but attractive — possibility was suggested in a recent “New Democrat Update” from the Colorado DLC, or Democratic Leadership Council.
Is Gov. Bill Ritter poised to advocate collective bargaining for state workers as a means to inject more competition into government services? This seemingly absurd — but attractive — possibility was suggested in a recent “New Democrat Update” from the Colorado DLC, or Democratic Leadership Council.
The DLC commends Ritter for flirting with collective bargaining, calling it an opportunity to forge a new deal with state workers involving salary bonuses similar to profit-sharing and competition “as an important tool to improve the cost-effectiveness of state services.”
Democrats should heed “the experience of those governments where private sector firms, public agencies and employee unions get opportunities to bid on work,” the DLC continues. “For example, in Indianapolis, competition yielded a 25 percent reduction in the cost of city government without hurting service quality . . . .
“It worked, in part, because the mayor and union leadership negotiated a fair deal with employees. .. . . when union members lose their jobs through competition, they are either hired by the winning private contractor, placed in another city job or retrained and placed in a private-sector job. . . .
“Once required to compete, the Indianapolis union began negotiating for gainsharing. Typically, workers collect 10 to 25 percent of savings when they drive costs below their bid price.”
If the public employee unions, Ritter and Democrats in charge of the legislature could agree on a similar concept for the state, it might indeed be revolutionary — even to the point of justifying collective bargaining as part of the deal.
But now a word from the real world: Colorado has a legislature that in its first year working with a Democratic governor couldn’t even keep its mitts off a longstanding mandate that RTD bid out a percentage of its bus service. Lawmakers changed the requirement that RTD “shall” offer a percentage of bus routes to private businesses to the voluntary “may,” and replaced a contracting floor with a ceiling.
These are the guys we’re supposed to believe might sign off on the transformation of state government into an incentive-based system involving the most creative, efficient providers — when that appears to be the very last thing they’d ever want to do.
Two camps
A pop quiz: In the paragraph quoted below, taken from a New York Times article on the Bush administration’s depressingly stubborn attempts to justify abusive tactics during CIA interrogations, the reporters use two condescending words.
For a grade of “A,” identify them.
“The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House.”
If you identified “most surprising,” congratulations. If you failed to note them, too bad. It means you probably share the preconceptions of the Times writers and consider conservatives indifferent to individual rights.
In fact, conservatives fall into two camps on the question of civil liberties; one group tends to defer to state power — former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales being the stellar example — while the other leans just as strongly in favor of individual rights.
It so happens that liberals are divided into similar camps on fundamental rights, too — most notably free speech. A growing number of liberals are willing to allow government to dictate the terms of political speech during campaigns, for example, and to indulge radical students dictating the boundaries of permissible speech on college campuses.
Fortunately, many other liberals still side with individuals, not government or mobs, in debates over free speech — although you can bet the Times would never declare that fact “most surprising.”
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at Carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com
An official with Boulder’s Western Resource Advocates was not a happy camper last week when he heard about a poll sponsored by the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.
“It’s dishonest to link drilling on the Roan to oil imports,” fumed Mike Chiropolos, referring to the poll’s finding that 60 percent of Coloradans would approve drilling atop the western Colorado plateau to cut our dependence on foreign oil.
“Producing natural gas anywhere in Colorado isn’t going to reduce the country’s demand for oil,” he said.
Not so fast, friend.
An official with Boulder’s Western Resource Advocates was not a happy camper last week when he heard about a poll sponsored by the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.
“It’s dishonest to link drilling on the Roan to oil imports,” fumed Mike Chiropolos, referring to the poll’s finding that 60 percent of Coloradans would approve drilling atop the western Colorado plateau to cut our dependence on foreign oil.
“Producing natural gas anywhere in Colorado isn’t going to reduce the country’s demand for oil,” he said.
Not so fast, friend. As MSNBC reported earlier this year, “Honda’s Civic GX, a $25,000 natural gas vehicle sold in California and New York, stood atop the ‘greenest’ list, beating all gasoline-electric hybrids based on a ‘green score’ derived from fuel economy as well as health and global warming impacts.”
Kiplinger.com described the Honda Civic GX as simply “the cleanest internal-combustion vehicle on the road.”
Can any crystal ball foretell long-term growth in vehicles powered by natural gas (Roan energy supplies, after all, would be in production for decades)? As air quality and environmental pressures ramp up, who knows where sales might go?
To be sure, Chiropolos does raise a relevant question about polling methods. It’s hard for the public to answer survey questions intelligently if they don’t understand the context, and it’s difficult to provide context without biasing the result.
Like Chiropolos, I would not have linked the bonanza of natural gas under the Roan to energy independence. No, I’d have linked it to home heating bills and to a revenue stream from lease bonuses and other taxes that could relieve political pressure to raise taxes on all of us for higher education and roads.
But I suppose those opposed to drilling on the Roan wouldn’t have been thrilled with that question, either.
The old canard resurfaces
“As you know, as a state, Colorado ranks near the bottom of all 50 states in the amount of money per capita it spends on K-12 education . . ."
— Denver Public SchoolsSuperintendent Michael Bennet, in a letter to teachers last week
If Colorado ranks near the bottom of all 50 states, it’s in the quantity of accurate information provided to the public on education funding. There’s simply no other conclusion to draw when even Bennet, a straight shooter and all-around class act, succumbs to blarney regarding support for schools.
Colorado does not rank near the bottom of all 50 states in its per capita support of K-12 education. Not close. This canard has been repeated so often over the years that it has been transformed into an article of faith among many education-spending advocates.
Even the liberal Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute acknowledges that the state doesn’t rank nearly so low in straight-up comparisons of dollars spent. “Using data from U.S. Census’ Public Education Finances Report,” the institute concluded in a June report, “ . . . Colorado ranked 34th in per capita spending” for fiscal year 2003-’04.
Meanwhile, Governing magazine’s sourcebook (sourcebook.governing.com), a nonpartisan compiler of data, ranks the state 25th in per capita spending on K-12 education for 2005 (the latest available year).
If Bennet had said Colorado spends less per capita than the national average, he would have been right. If he’d told teachers that Colorado ranks near the bottom when calculating education spending per $1,000 of personal income, because we’re a relatively high-income state, he’d have been equally correct. (The relevance of this particular ranking is not entirely clear, though. Should a state’s citizens expect to pay a fixed percentage of their earnings for important goods and services as their incomes rise? Why?)
Bennet is right that Coloradans don’t spend lavishly on education, comparatively speaking. But we haven’t exactly been Scrooges, either.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
A friend who served on a Denver Parks and Recreation advisory panel once quipped that the city’s rec centers set their hours mainly to serve the needs of their own staff — and maybe the neighborhood unemployed.
To appreciate what inspired his joke, you need only go to the city’s Web site and check out rec center hours.
A friend who served on a Denver Parks and Recreation advisory panel once quipped that the city’s rec centers set their hours mainly to serve the needs of their own staff — and maybe the neighborhood unemployed.
To appreciate what inspired his joke, you need only go to the city’s Web site and check out rec center hours.
The first thing you’ll notice is that of the city’s more than two dozen rec centers, only three open at all on Sunday, each for just a few hours.
Holidays? Forget it. The centers are not only closed on big family occasions such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, but on eight other holidays, too (you read that right), including a few that most workers in the private sector don’t even get.
But the Saturday schedules are the shocker. Not only are several rec centers also closed on Saturday, but almost all of the rest post sharply abbreviated hours. Four, five and six hours of service are common, and most centers lock their doors by mid-afternoon.
If your job involves a standard weekday schedule, your best shot at finding a nearby Denver rec center open is the evenings, when many facilities do operate late enough to be of use.
Given these relatively skimpy hours, I was all set to fulminate against Parks and Recreation for proposing further schedule cutbacks (mainly in the morning) at 11 centers — until I reached spokeswoman Jill McGranahan. She tells me that the hours would be lopped off not to save money so much as to reflect underuse of the facilities during those times.
Why open a center at 10 a.m. if only one guy wanders in to lift weights during the first hour or so?
But if saving money isn’t the driving motive in what amounts to a trim of 4 percent of all rec center hours, why not shift some of those lost hours to the weekend — either at the centers facing cutbacks or to others that enjoy higher traffic? Rec center employees might prefer a Monday through Friday routine, but the facilities exist first and foremost for the convenience of the taxpaying public.
Mega-rec?
Speaking of rec centers, Denver voters are being asked this fall to approve $21.4 million in bonds for two new facilities — or, more precisely, for the construction of one center at Stapleton and for the planning, design and acquisition of land for another somewhere near downtown.
These would be large, “regional” centers, drawing visitors from many neighborhoods, similar to what several suburbs already enjoy.
It’s an attractive idea (assuming you buy the idea of local government providing a service that the private sector is quite willing to supply — but let’s save that debate for another day). If Denver is going to embark on a long-term program of building mega-rec centers, however, it would be nice to hear that officials are committed to closing a number of small, dated facilities at the same time.
There’s a reason, after all, that 11 rec centers can’t draw enough visitors in the morning to justify their current operations. And as larger centers open, some older facilities will be even more hard put to justify their survival.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.