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).

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…

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!)