Yeah, I got nothing

(Note: This will likely only be of interest to my local friends and social network buddies. It’s a response to Concerning The Suburbs, Their Raison D’etre, And How It Is Reflected In Their Planned Public Spaces, prompted by a discussion on Twitter earlier today. If you’re curious, or want the context, go read that first.

So, I’ve been staring at that essay for a good 30 minutes trying to figure out what my thesis is here. So far, I got nothing. I’m struggling because there are two separate arguments being made, intertwined in ways that make them difficult to separate. Here goes my attempt to understand, then respond.)

My impression walking away from the conversation this morning was that Josh had set an unattainable standard by which to evaluate the impact of Blue Back Square on the town of West Hartford. The essay reinforces that impression.

In particular, this rankles:

Compare it to, say, Inman Square in Cambridge, Mass.: It would not do in BBS to have buses passing right through and stopping right in front of the Cheesecake Factory, if those buses ran a route that included, say, the local district court and jail, and nearby housing projects. Nor would it do to have upscale boutiques interspersed with dollar stores and appliance repair stores and bodegas, the way you might see in a secondary commercial center in Brooklyn, like 5th Avenue in Sunset Park, or even on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

I’d quibble on the details here. I consider Blue Back to be part of West Hartford’s town center. In that scope, most of the objections of how Blue Back fosters economic exclusivity fall apart. Major bus lines run right through WH center and they go right into Hartford, past the court, even – take the 60-66. It’s not like that bus stop is prohibitively far, it’s two mini blocks east of BBS.

Businesses are not corner bodegas, but they’re mid-tier chains & indy businesses at the low end: CVS, Harry’s Pizza, Cosi, Gyro Palace, Moe’s, Subway, Ben & Jerry’s, etc. Sure, there are more upscale places, but there’s more variety than you’re allowing for.

But this is all debating the details.

If you’re arguing Blue Back could have a more economically diverse customer and visitor base, I don’t disagree with that. But I also think it’s hard to argue that it hasn’t brought in more economic diversity and created more unpredictable interaction than what was there before it. In that light, and measured against any development project in the state, I think it’s done a net positive for the area and for the town on the diversity front.

Held up to the ideal of something like Inman Square or Brooklyn, the products of organic and centuries long growth of two major American cities and their environs… well, sure, it’s not going to measure up in terms of economic diversity and retail/residential integration. But what does?

It would help to have an example of a development plan or project that provided the kind of new urbanism or whatever you’re calling this that you’re describing. I don’t know of any, especially any that have done a better job than BBS that didn’t already start in already dense construction.

And it would be nice to talk about what urban means, and what counts as “authentic urban” — I don’t agree with the narrow definition because I don’t think it’s historically valid (I also am not well educated on this topic to make the argument here… so, worthy of a conversation, I think, perhaps with others).

I was on the radio

I was a guest on today’s episode of Where We Live on WNPR. The topic was on Connecticut Startup Culture. Give it a listen, and let the mocking commence (“Check it out, it’s awesome!” groan).

One thing we didn’t get to on the show (and, let’s be honest, there are probably a dozen conversations wrapped into this wax ball of a topic), was the demographic differences between CT and NYC or San Francisco. My sense is, and this is definitely anecdotal, that our mix of entrepreneurs in CT is probably a little older than the folks in those other cities. Probably doubly so in tech.

Before the show, I joked to Gitamba that the prototypical ramen diet isn’t really an option when you have a child at home. Accelerators like TechStars or Y Combinator target that frenetic pace and schedule. That makes sense for their programs, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it might not be the only or best model for areas still building up their entrepreneur base and culture.

Anyway, just an extra thought on the way out the door of the station.

A jumble of thoughts

On a normal Friday of a normal December, a bunch of families said goodbye to their kids and sent them off to school. Announcements. Meetings for the Principal. A normal Friday.

Then the abnormal sound of gunfire. Of violence. Of death.

And now, the sound of tears, of sadness, of remembering and loss… of fears and nightmares past and future.


I keep imagining what it must be like for the parents of the victims today, especially of the young children. I imagine myself in their shoes, I imagine walking by a now-always-empty room with bright paint evoking happier times.

My thoughts are with the families affected by the tragedy.


When I walk into my son’s class, the kids say “Hi Che’s Dad!” They make me smile no matter how crappy my morning has been. I keep thinking about what someone must go through to walk into a classroom full of children and open fire. Why would anyone want to hurt them?

It’s unfathomable. The loss is unfathomable. The chance and the randomness is most unfathomable of all.


I wrote this earlier today re: discussing gun control policy on the day of a tragedy (slightly edited for grammar):

My only point is that today should be about the tragedy itself, to burn in the news and to cope with the loss & fear of loss that these events bring up.

We get wrapped up in hammering the stats, the policy ideas, and how “stupid” the other side is on this debates today, but the real work is how we keep this in the public eye going forward.

I’m also seeing things like this at TPM that ask good questions. This is the nitty gritty of how we help prevent these sorts of tragedies in the future. Even on the mental care front, how would those laws work?

I’m just incredibly sad & angry about this, and I’m not ready to have those conversations today. That’s all I’m saying.

The response I got from people on Twitter & elsewhere primarily centered on getting people talking about the issues at play while attention is fully on the tragedy. They argue that tomorrow the pain will be a little less for those of us not directly affected. In a month the national media will forget about this completely.

There’s probably a lot of truth to that… the second, little tragedy that goes along with the big, evil tragedy that happened in Newtown.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

So, it seems our job is to keep us from forgetting this bit of our past, to keep it squarely in focus during the next Congress and the next legislative session here in CT and beyond. Take a moment and ask yourself, “What am I doing for the victims of Newtown?”

If you’re upset about this, and want the government to do something about this, learn what you can about the issues at play. What ideas do people have for reducing gun violence? What should we ask our representatives in government to do? Is gun violence reduction about more than guns? Do we need to rethink mental health policies in this country?

As you do learn about these things, contact your representatives in your state legislature, Congress, and anyone else you think is in a position to advocate for better policies. Tell them what you’re learning, ask them to look into the best ideas you find.

There’s always a risk that bad laws get rushed through in the wake of tragedies. This one will be no different, so it’s up to all of us to become smarter about the dynamics at play here and what public policy options people have considered. We need to do something. Let’s make sure that something lives up to the memories of those lost today.

We need context, not balance

Like many towns, West Hartford has a advertising supported, free weekly paper that’s mailed to everyone. The latest issue arrived today with this as the front page article:

Fire, police overtime nears $3 million in 2010

The Town of West Hartford paid nearly $3 million in overtime compensation in 2010 to police and fire department personnel, according to data released under a Freedom of Information request.

Town administrators this year combed through expenses, trimming nearly $1 million from the original proposed budget before approving a 2012-13 spending plan. But in trying to cut, administrators lack the power to control specific items, such as overtime paid to union employees.

You should go read the article.

Here’s what stood out to me: the next several paragraphs (easily the first third of the article) includes quotes by the Republican members of our town council (the minority party) and other claims that collective bargaining is to blame for the OT in 2010.

At first, I wondered why they didn’t include any quotes by the Mayor or from Democrats on the council. Then I realized that I actually didn’t really care about that. I don’t really care about balance in that sense.

What bugs me is that there’s no context given to these numbers or information. For example, the reporter names particular police officers and firefighters who earned a significant amount of overtime. The reporter writes about how the Republican members of the council want to go after the contracts negotiated with the unions. They give particular salary numbers out.

I read all of this and was left with… “and so what?” I don’t know if this is a matter of lazy reporting or tight deadlines and a need to print something or an assumption by the writer that readers are already super informed, but as a pretty regular watcher of town news, I was left with a bunch of questions. I needed context in order to put the numbers in perspective and to understand some of the claims made in the article (both by people quoted as well as the author).

Some questions I would love to see answered:

  • What is a typical yearly budget for overtime expenditure?
  • What is typical overtime budgeting for towns around the state with similar populations?
  • Why did the cited officers get so much overtime pay? How many hours did they work? What was the purpose of those hours?
  • What are some of these union rules that drive overtime costs? What union rules do the Republican members find objectionable?

That’s just a small list. These numbers sound big (“$3 million in OT!” – “That police officer doubled his salary!”) but given some context, they may not be crazy. For example, if the officer is working double shifts most days to make up for staffing shortages, that may be reasonable compensation. If he does it every year, maybe there’s a policy change required. How can we tell with the information provided?

I want better reporting from our papers. People might be willing to pay for them if they actually dug a little deeper than a blogger with SEO skills…

Incentivizing individual relocation vs. corporate relocation

Where We Live ran a show today on why younger people (25-34) are leaving the state. I ended up missing the show (listening to it now!), but caught a very lively discussion on Twitter.

One side conversation (you can see it on storify here) that I joined in on was about how hard it is to convince people to move to CT.

Let’s be honest. It’s hard. Harder than it should be, quite honestly, considering how nice it is to live here. I had a lot of experience with this when I was hiring people at ESPN. Even with a kick ass company, a dream job for most sports fans, and great relocation packages, it was hard to convince people to move to CT. There are a lot of reasons, and they vary by person, but they all seemed to boil down to cost and opportunity.

For people moving from a relatively low cost-of-living area, like Kansas or Vermont or Nevada, it was mostly about cost. CT looks and feels expensive when you’re browsing real estate or rents even though we’re cheap-ish for the region. For whatever reason, cost-of-living adjustments never seemed to truly capture the difference people felt.

For people moving from a big city or high cost-of-living area, like New York City or Boston or San Francisco, it was mostly about opportunity. What if they didn’t like the job here? What job opportunities would they have at a similar style company? This was exaggerated in my particular industry. There aren’t many of the kind of companies that are doing consumer Internet or mobile products that ESPN makes. If you live in NYC or Boston or SF, on the other hand, you have dozens of options plus many, many strong startup and entrepreneurial companies nearby.

There are people working on the second issue (e.g. this effort). So I asked about the cost reason, specifically:

As I mentioned, you can read the whole convo if you want, but that’s the main point.

CT just authorized $291 million in spending over 10 years to incentivize Jackson Labs to build a $1 billion facility here. Of that, $192 million is a loan that is entirely forgiven if the facility creates & retains 300 jobs in 10 years.

Now, I don’t know whether that’s a good program or not for 300 jobs, but like a lot of programs, the government seems to focus on giving money to companies rather than individuals. This isn’t bad per se, but the tradeoffs are worth talking about.

For one thing, this means that the government has to choose an industry or individual company to offer these incentives to. This doesn’t prevent existing companies from leaving, nor does it help them. That seems odd to me. But it’s also exceedingly common. Remember the brouhaha about Boeing moving it’s HQ?

Instead, I wonder if cities or states have considered incentivizing individuals to take existing jobs. For the same expenditure ($192 million over 10 years), the state could offer 5 year rent or property tax credits of $5,000 to over 7,500 families or individuals. $5,000 would cover over 100% of the median property tax for the state.

On the surface, that seems like a better use of taxpayer money. That assumes there are, of course, 7,500 jobs to fill in the state. Then again, more people moving here mean more people needing services and products. I suspect like any social network, virtual or real, there are network effects that come into play once you create some momentum.

Curious if anyone has seen studies or programs like this in the United States. I wonder how well they work, and what data we can glean from them.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

(I should point out, coincidently, and in testament to how obvious the headline choice is, the Courant chose a similar headline. I started writing this before I saw the Courant article, for the record. 🙂 )

I had a rather animated conversation with a friend today about CL&P’s performance during this most recent storm. I won’t bore you with the whole thing, but there are a few things I wanted to open up to a broader conversation. At this point, my focus is about how to ensure that people aren’t surprised, frustrated and without power the next time weather happens.

My expectation as a customer is that they have a plan to:

  1. … maintain the lines during normal times to minimize potential damage from a weather event.
  2. … repair the lines quickly, including how to get additional crews in if necessary
  3. … coordinate repairs with town leaders around the state

Reporting about the outage has called into question CL&P’s effectiveness on all three aspects. The Times published an article this weekend calling into question the maintenance budgeting at CL&P and planning. Even better was this anecdote from our own Mayor Slifka in the Courant:

In West Hartford this week, when the electric company was refusing to tell town leaders what streets its crews were going to be working on, officials came up with their own improvised solution. Municipal leaders sent town police over to CL&P’s staging area at Westfarms mall in the evening to ask the crews themselves where they would be heading to work the next day.

This isn’t neurotic small town bureaucrats overreacting. This information is critical during an emergency, when fire and rescue personnel must know what streets are passable. Already, one elderly West Hartford woman without power died in a fire at her home this week.

So what did CL&P do when they found out West Hartford police were tracking down where crews were going to work?

They told their workers not to talk to the cops. Now there’s a company that cares.

The communication issues seem unforgivable. No one has come up with a plausible reason why CL&P couldn’t tell the towns where their crews would be, or in what order they were approaching the work. Either they didn’t have a plan or central coordination, or they put their corporate image above the safety of citizens. That’s basically it.

There’s going to be an investigation into CL&P’s performance, so maybe we’ll find out more about how they stack up to other utilities. Regardless, though, the episode has raised an alternate option that we should consider.

I think it’s time to consider organizing our utilities differently. For example, the way we handle water here in West Hartford is via a public/private corporation. With the MDC, we have pooled together resources with several surrounding towns and cities in order to provide water to our citizens via a non-profit corporation. The city of Norwich has run their own public utility corporation (for profit) for over 100 years. We let governments at all levels maintain roads, airports, and other infrastructure. In my mind, the lines that carry telephone, cable, and Internet (particularly at the local level – the last mile networks) should be like roads – shared, impartially maintained where private companies compete to provide us service. I don’t see why power lines, especially at the local level, should be any different. In all of these cases, you break monopolies, accelerate the competition from private vendors for new products and solutions, and bring accountability closer to the customer. At least the mayor won’t have to send out the police to chat up crews to find out details about the repair efforts.

These seem like good things. There are certainly going to be tradeoffs. Curious how everyone else feels about something like this.

If you’re interested in learning more, the Colin McEnroe show covered this topic today, including a few towns that converted their transmission functions to a public agency or a public/private corporation. I caught part of it this afternoon, looking forward to listening to the rest later tonight (after the Eagles game – Go Eagles!)

‘Our Great Education Challenge’ at the CT Forum

I attend each Connecticut Forum event hoping to leave smarter than when I arrive. This is usually a slam dunk, no doubt it’ll happen thing for any given Forum event. Except, that is, for last night.

The topic was Our Great Education Challenge. The panel consisted of:

  • Davis Guggenheim, the filmmaker behind Waiting for Superman & An Inconvenient Truth
  • Lily Eskelsen, VP of the National Educators Association (NEA), the largest teachers’ union
  • Joel Klein, the current and outgoing chancellor of the New York City public schools
  • Deborah Gist, Rhode Island Commissioner of Education
  • Jon Schnur, CEO of New Leaders for New Schools
  • The panel was moderated by MSNBC correspondent Norah O’Donnell.

Looking at that list, it seems like this group was (unintentionally, I’m sure) set up to fail to reach any sort of consensus or real conversation.

It helps, at this point, to be familiar with Waiting for Superman. If you haven’t seen the movie, you can quickly read my review of the film. Short version: the film concludes unions are at the heart of America’s education problem because they prevent principals and schools from coaching, firing, or adequately managing teachers.

As it turns out, every person on the panel (plus the moderator) basically took the Superman position as a given except Lily Eskelsen (the sole union perspective on the panel). This is unsurprising considering their backgrounds – two are school administrators who spar with unions constantly. Guggenheim obviously agrees with his own film. Excluding Schnur, then, you have the makings of a pile on for Eskelsen. So, that’s essentially what we got. The entire Forum consisted of the panelists delivering applause lines ripping on the unions or going back and forth with Eskelsen.

It would’ve been more productive to talk about specific union concessions that would make school improvements easier, or to discuss whether the union even has a purpose in today’s school system. I’d be interested in understanding why only 17% of charter schools perform better than public schools, or why Joel Klein thinks that’s a success rate worth “cherishing.” Or, why Deborah Gist thinks school systems would negotiate these weird, applause line worthy rules into their teacher contracts.

It’s not that I believe these people are playing fast and loose with the numbers, or have some hidden agenda. In fact, I believe they have sound reasons for their perspectives (and they wear their agendas pretty plainly out in the open). I just think they’re used to talking about this topic with other educators and school reformers. So, they mention things like “alternative evaluation systems” without explaining what that means because, well, everyone on the panel knows.

This seems like a flaw in the Forum format. The moderators are often prepared to discuss the issues and to facilitate conversation among the panel, but not so much to facilitate understanding for the audience. It’s really a missed opportunity. I would love a moderator who worked to get panelists to explain terms or concepts that may not be obvious to non-experts.

For example, teacher evaluation was a key topic of discussion. During the Forum, Eskelsen brought up concerns with using test scores as a sole measure of teacher effectiveness. A number of panelists mentioned that some districts were testing alternative and more comprehensive teacher evaluation systems. No one, however, ever bothered to explain what some of them are or what else they look at beyond a standardized test. I was really curious about that and felt let down when the topics shifted.

My other takeaway from the forum was that there were lots of anecdotes or quips that highlighted some ridiculous policy or other that everyone universally could hate or be amused by. Applause lines, if you will. Last night, I called it sloganeering. That still seems like the best description of last night’s conversation.

For example, at one point, Norah O’Donnell turned to the audience and called teachers heroes who have a tough job and work very hard. Its the constant refrain, didn’t seem particularly sincere. Mere minutes later, a panelist cracks a joke about teachers leaving at 3PM even though their schools are failing. Well, which one is it? There’s a weird sort of contradiction that comes up in education reform conversations. Teachers are both working really hard and lazy, overpaid and underpaid, and so on. Doesn’t really help the conversation.

Ultimately, I walked away with the same questions I had at the end of Superman, which was disappointing. There was one exception, though. During the audience Q&A portion, O’Donnell asked a question I submitted about class size (cool!). Joel Klein pointed out that one of the Harlem charters has 30 kids in some classes. Eskelsen pointed out that she’s taught up to 39 in one. Pretty big difference, and one reason I remain skeptical that firing teachers has anything to do with charter success.

I’m hoping we can continue this discussion in the coming weeks among ourselves. I have some ideas on how to bring this conversation along, and I want to start by looking at some of the questions I asked in my review of Superman. I also have a bunch of questions jotted down in my notes from the Forum last night. Between the two, there are a lot of items worth a follow up. On that front, the Forum was a rousing success.

Following up on my @ctforum tweet

I wanted to briefly expand on a few tweets I made during last night’s Connecticut Forum. The topic was “The End of Civility?” and the panel featured David Gergen, Stephen Carter, Christopher Buckley, and Gina Barreca. It was a good discussion, and what I’ll address was only one aspect of it.

The rise of the political blogs is as much about a shift of power as it is about technology. Having a panel of elites decry the rise of blogs is a bit one-sided. Three of the panelists were the children of university professors or, uh, William F. Buckley. They grew up with access and opportunity – I doubt any of them would’ve had trouble meeting a Senator or Congressman as a high school or university student.

Technology enabled others outside the establishment to get heard. That’s what explains the rise of blogging. Buckley’s characterization of blogging as the equivalent of “Ask Any A**hole” in newspaper-speak is an oversimplification. There are smart bloggers and stupid bloggers and rabble rouser bloggers. They’re not all the same.

Take it another way: we’ve seen this with lots of other technological shifts, from the advent of the printing press and cheaper presses to the rise of radio and TV. I haven’t studied this closely, but my sense is that we’ve seen similar noise before things sort of settle down, e.g. yellow journalism, conspiracy newsletters, pamphleteers.

We’re still settling down with the Internet in our political sphere. The fact that we’re still getting used to how it fits into the discourse shouldn’t be a surprise.

For the forum, I would’ve preferred some representation of bloggers on the panel. It was bordering on annoying listening to 3 scions of establishment elites decry the rise of the “rabble.” It would’ve been more interesting to have Gergen chat with, say, Duncan Black of Eschaton or even Michelle Malkin or one of the intense right wing blogs. The conversation would’ve really gotten into the civility of current political discourse a lot faster.

For long time friends and readers, my opinion on the lack of civility won’t surprise you. I look to an abdication of the referee role by our TV media, instead becoming passive stenographers of the news. Or, worse, active partisanship on the part of Fox News and the WSJ and WaPo editorial boards.

It would be easier to add perspective to the lies and attack of the blogs if there were a referee. That doesn’t exist. Even worse, we have national press taking explicit sides. Fox News didn’t come up once, by the way. It’s hard for me to believe that their active encouragement of the worst sorts of rumors and falsehoods from the blogs isn’t hurting the civility of our discourse. But of course, they’re on TV, so it’s not their fault.

(yes, they brought up cable news as a broad topic, but Fox News as a network is a phenomenon more akin to yellow journalism. The other networks aren’t the same in that regard. Individual shows may be, e.g. Olbermann, but there is no network as partisan as Fox.)

Nurses make all the difference

It’s hard to find time to blog or write or do much of anything aside from take care of our new baby, but I’ve been itching to write this post since we left the hospital last week.

When you’re expecting a baby, you can tour the hospital. They show you the rooms in labor and delivery and in maternity and the nursery wing. They tell you about the amenities, the security, and medical technologies they have available. After our stay at Hartford Hospital, I can honestly tell you that none of those things are that important. What made our stay there amazing were the nurses and care staff. To a person, they were thoughtful, kind, attentive, and, most of all, helpful.

Helpful is under-appreciated. Helpful could be knowing what to say when a mom is upset because her son isn’t latching on right. It could be the nurse that stays in the room reassuring the new parents because, let’s face it, new parents worry a lot (especially us). Or it could be the PCA that gets the mom some extra supplies or juice containers. Our nurses and PCAs at Hartford Hospital were the best.

To all the nurses and care staff at Hartford Hospital that took care of Heidi and my son, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you. You made our time at the hospital comfortable and helped Heidi and I get comfortable with caring for our new son, from swaddling instructions to breast feeding help. Our time at the hospital exceeded our expectations in just about every way. Thank you.