Ellis traces anti-government rhetoric back to Thomas Jefferson and pro-government rhetoric to Alexander Hamilton. He eventually makes the following vital points:

For much of our history, the Jeffersonian hostility to an energetic federal government served us well. But with the end of the frontier and the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the expanding role of government in protecting and assuring our “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” has become utterly essential. All the major problems now befuddling us — the destructive excesses of finance capitalism, a profit-based healthcare system, an increasingly contaminated atmosphere — are only soluble if we regard government as the chosen representative of our collective interests as a people and a nation.

I recommend reading Ellis’s piece in its entirety to get a better sense of his argument.

Who would have thought that the wild-haired young comedian on Saturday Night Live would one day become a senator? Only as Al Franken began to write books responding to the dominance of the political right did he emerge as a potential politician. Now I pray that he governs wisely.

The legislation is far from perfect, but it’s clear that given the way our political system works, this is the best we could get from the House right now. Finally as a nation we have begun to take responsibility for the changes that we are making in the climate. Too often in the past, our actions on this issue have been shameful. Still, advocacy group emails are saying that the fight over the bill in the Senate will be even tougher, as Republicans deride the bill as simply an “energy tax” and many Democrats succumb to coal and oil interests in their states.

I have a family connection to this legislation as well. My brother-in-law is an economist working on the legislation for the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, chaired by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).

Here are some of the key provisions of the bill, as reported in a press release from that committee:

* Requires electric utilities to meet 20% of their electricity demand through renewable energy sources and energy efficiency by 2020.

* Invests $190 billion in new clean energy technologies and energy efficiency, including energy efficiency and renewable energy ($90 billion in new investments by 2025), carbon capture and sequestration ($60 billion), electric and other advanced technology vehicles ($20 billion), and basic scientific research and development ($20 billion).

* Mandates new energy-saving standards for buildings, appliances, and industry.

* Reduces carbon emissions from major U.S. sources by 17% by 2020 and over 80% by 2050 compared to 2005 levels.  Complementary measures in the legislation, such as investments in preventing tropical deforestation, will achieve significant additional reductions in carbon emissions.

* Protects consumers from energy price increases.  According to recent analyses from the Congressional Budget Office and the Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation will cost each household less than 50 cents per day in 2020 (not including energy efficiency savings).

1. Yesterday in his news conference presenting the cuts he is making to the state budget, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty made a comment about unnecessary or wasteful spending by cities. He cited as an example a director of nonmotorized transportation for the city of Minneapolis, though in the following breath he noted that the position is federally funded. He was apparently referring to a position funded by the city’s role in the federal Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program.

2. Earlier this month the Republican leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives called for eliminating several federal nonmotorized transportation programs. In a list of cuts (pdf) that they would make to reduce the budget deficit, the Republicans included the following programs: Safe Routes to Schools, the Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program, and Transportation Enhancements. This is an extreme step, indeed, and not likely to win the hearts of all those walkers, wheelchair users, and cyclists out there.

I learned about the latter action at the League of American Bicyclists web site. See the June 5 post on their advocacy page, which has these good comments from League President Andy Clarke:

House Republican leaders have chosen once again to scapegoat bicycling and walking programs, proposing to end the popular and successful Transportation Enhancements and Safe Routes to Schools programs and to terminate four non-motorized pilot projects mid-stream. These programs are hugely popular with communities across the country and address numerous challenges facing our nation – such as climate change, obesity and oil dependence. We know that State Departments of Transportation have reluctantly implemented these programs over the years despite overwhelming public support, and will not support them independently. To suggest ending these programs is short-sighted and out of touch with reality….

We will be asking the White House to reject these proposed cuts out of hand. At a time when we are struggling across several fronts to tackle pressing national concerns related to oil dependence, obesity and the costs of physical inactivity, climate change, air quality and economic competitiveness, it seems inconceivable that we would gut some of the few modest programs that encourage and enable people to walk and bicycle for everyday trips.

The League also provided these facts:

• The Transportation Enhancement and Safe Routes to Schools programs are routinely oversubscribed by a factor of three or more whenever States request applications for funding under these programs.
• More than 40 percent of all trips in the United States are two miles or less and that almost three-quarters of all car trips are two miles or less, suggesting that most travel is local, regardless of mode.
• A 3 percent reduction in vehicle miles traveled in 2008 resulted in a 30 percent reduction in congestion in metropolitan areas around the country, suggesting that demand management strategies such as increasing bicycling and walking are extremely effective in addressing congestion and other traffic-related issues
• and subsidies given through tax breaks to drivers to pay for parking at work cost the taxpayer almost as much per year ($4 billion) as Boehner’s and Cantor’s proposal to slash support for bicycling and walking would save in five years.

]]> http://williamostrem.net/nl/2009/06/17/republicans-take-aim-at-nonmotorized-transportation/feed/ 0 http://williamostrem.net/nl/2009/05/19/rice-county-leaves-its-sidewalk-and-path/ http://williamostrem.net/nl/2009/05/19/rice-county-leaves-its-sidewalk-and-path/#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 14:54:03 +0000 bill http://williamostrem.net/nl/?p=566

[Note: The following appears also as a post at Locally Grown Northfield. Comments can be made there; I've turned them off here. Be sure to note their rules for comment.]

Last August the Rice County Board of Commissioners made a change in their transportation policy that goes against the interests of people who walk, bike, or use wheelchairs in our community. It’s a change that’s detrimental to many of the most vulnerable users of our transportation system, including children, seniors, the poor, and the handicapped.

I’m talking about a change in a fairly arcane and complex policy: the Cost Participation Policy for Cooperative Roadway Construction Projects, which governs the share that the county pays on joint road projects with cities and townships. The policy applies to projects that are part of the county Capital Improvement Plan.

Why should we care about some complex policy? Because it governs the funding for county road projects – which we might also call the public right-of-way – in many of our communities, and because it shapes the way we think about transportation.

The changes made last summer involved the provisions for sidewalks and “bituminous bike paths,” or shared-use paths, along county roads in cities and towns. Previously, the county paid a share of the costs for replacement sidewalks and new and replacement paths – specifically, 55 percent of the cost for municipalities over 5,000 in population, and 100 percent of the cost for those under 5,000. With the change, the county moved these facilities into the “not eligible” category for county funding. In effect, they cut funding of these facilities in their Capital Improvement Plan by 100 percent. The commissioners voted 4-1 for this change last August, with the only exception being Galen Malecha of Northfield at that time.

As a pedestrian/bike advocate and chair of the Northfield Area Task Force on Nonmotorized Transportation, I was immediately concerned about the new policy. It seemed to me to be a step backwards. While more and more governments are passing “complete streets” policies that require them to consider all users of the public right-of-way in their road projects, my own county had adopted an anti-complete streets policy. (Governments with complete streets policies make sidewalks, paths, bike lanes, and other facilities – many of them important for safety purposes – a high priority. See my earlier post on complete streets; see also the Complete the Streets coalition web site.)

I was further irked by the fact that rather than putting sidewalks and paths into the “potential” category for funding – a category that includes storm sewers and traffic signals (and that would not have required any spending) – the county instead put them into the “not eligible” category, which includes items such as “sanitary sewer modification” and “new landscaping.”

It seemed to me that important elements of our transportation system had just been cut out of a whole level of government funding. So I began working with others to change the policy, either to restore sidewalk and path funding to its previous level or move it to the “potential” funding category, the latter being a compromise that represented a victory largely in principle only.

Our Task Force on Nonmotorized Transportation passed a resolution asking the County Board to change its policy, as did the city councils of Northfield and Faribault, the two largest cities in the county by far. Their populations make up about 41,000 out of the county’s 63,000 people, nearly two thirds of the total.

Once a new County Board was seated in January – with Jeff Docken replacing the departing Jim Brown in my own district – we asked the Board to change its policy. The policy was discussed at three different Board meetings. At the first two meetings, those speaking in favor of changing the policy outnumbered those in favor of keeping it by about 8:1 and 5:1. City council members, city staff, and citizens from Northfield and Faribault spoke out for the needs of people who walk, bike, and use wheelchairs in our communities – people such as children, the elderly, the poor, and the disabled.

After these first two meetings I mailed the commissioners a simple proposal to move sidewalks and paths to the “potential” category – sometimes called the “case-by-case” funding option. The commissioners’ Transportation Committee agreed to have the Board vote on two options: accepting this revision or keeping the policy unchanged.

A third County Board meeting addressed the policy on Tuesday, May 5. It was quite different from the first two. About seven people from county townships – rural parts of the county – spoke at the microphone to say they didn’t want the county funding sidewalks and paths. Some of them said that the current budget problems did not allow the county to spend money on such things. One speaker said that if the county wanted to pay for sidewalks and paths, it should do so by issuing fines to people walking and biking on the road.

I was the only person on the other side of the issue who spoke at this meeting, and after that last comment I expect I sounded angry as I read my statement (see below). Later in the meeting the Board discussed the issue, and Commissioners Gillen (who represents part of Northfield) and Plaisance again voiced their strong disapproval of changing the current policy. Gillen said he didn’t support funding the sidewalk and path that were part of an earlier project on Woodley Street in Northfield. Both men expressed anxiety about shortfalls the county faces in funding its roads given the current budget; they feared having to revert paved roads to gravel roads. Plaisance said it was “ridiculous” to fund sidewalks and paths at the present time with transportation funds.

Malecha and Docken pointed out that changing to the “case-by-case” funding option didn’t require spending any money on sidewalks and paths if the Board felt there wasn’t enough money to do so.

When the votes were tallied, Commissioner Bauer joined Gillen and Plaisance in opposing a change. Commissioner Docken joined Malecha in voting for a revised policy. The status quo prevailed by a single vote. Needless to say, I was disappointed by the outcome. (See the Northfield News article about the vote.)

The entire experience got me thinking about the tension between rural and urban interests in our county and at other levels of government. My impression of Rice County government is that rural residents feel more of a connection to it than do city residents, and they influence it out of proportion to their numbers. I’ve been struck by how many Northfield residents do not know who their county commissioner is. The residents of Rice County’s cities need to be informed and keep a close eye on county government to make sure it is meeting our needs. They should consider running for the County Board if necessary.

Rural residents should also remember that our far-flung road system is financed largely by the majority of people who live in urban areas; we urban residents subsidize rural roads because there are so many more of us and we pay the majority of taxes. We pay for the majority of goods and services in our economy.

This cost participation policy change has me wondering how efficient our huge system of paved roads actually is. Can we afford to keep every road paved if it means our urban roads have to be less safe as a result? At the same time, I believe my welfare is bound up with the welfare of those living in rural areas, and they have their own transportation needs.

Surely we need rural and urban people to recognize each other’s needs. However, that rural resident who voiced disdain for anyone not in a car did not speak for many people in my community.

I don’t plan on spending more time on this issue until our budget situation improves, but I do ask that Rice County residents keep it in mind for the future.

In conclusion, here is what I said to the commissioners during my two-minute presentation at the microphone on May 5:

Good morning. I’m Bill Ostrem, a resident of Northfield and chair of the Northfield Area Task Force on Nonmotorized Transportation, which was created by the Northfield city council two years ago.

I thank you for reconsidering this policy and I ask you to put sidewalks and shared-use paths into the “potential county participation” category.  Right now you’re handcuffed by the current policy, which doesn’t allow you to address the full mobility and safety needs of county residents through your capital improvement program.  Making this change gives you the advantage of having a flexible policy that would allow you to address any significant safety issues that you may become aware of. Furthermore, it still gives you the option to say no to adding any costs that you want to avoid. It has all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of the current policy. It also puts you into alignment with the county transportation plan, which includes sections on nonmotorized transportation.

Children and youth, the elderly, disabled people, and others without drivers’ licenses or autos have mobility needs that involve using the public right of way, our roads. Others who want safe options for walking and biking include parents with small children in strollers or on bikes. If they want to walk and bike in our communities they can’t cut through private property, and our urban roads need to reflect that fact with sidewalks and paths. Even rural residents may some day need to retire in our towns and cities and will want safe mobility options.

We have significant problems in the Northfield area alone on county roads that lack these facilities: Woodley Street east, County Road 1, County Road 43 [see picture above]. A flexible policy would allow you to control costs the best way you see fit while still addressing the nonmotorized transportation needs that are a part of the county transportation plan.

Prior to that meeting, I mailed a letter (see below) and copies of the old and current cost participation policy to the commissioners. In the letter I asked them to consider  a simple compromise position: moving the sidewalks and bike paths from the “not eligible” for county participation category to the “potential County participation” category. This is essentially the “case-by-case” funding option that has been discussed as an option.

The transportation committee meetings are not open to the public, but last Friday I called my commissioner, Jeff Docken, to ask what action the committee took. He said that they decided to ask the County Board to consider two options at an upcoming meeting: keeping the current policy or changing it to the “case-by-case” or “potential funding” option that I presented in my letter. I believe he said it would be at a work session, probably May 5, but we should keep an eye on the Board’s agenda for its upcoming meetings.

It remains important for members of the public to let their county commissioner know their views on this subject. Please consider contacting them or writing a letter to the local paper. See below for more information, as well as the text of the letter I submitted.

April 7 County Board Work Session

Several of us advocates spoke again at the April 7 County Board work session, including a Faribault city council member and Jon Denison, a Northfield city council member. During the meeting, two commissioners, Plaisance and Gillen, voiced their strong concerns about funding sidewalks and paths in urban areas. They view the county’s transportation task as maintaining the current road system. Their anxiety is high about being able to maintain the roads in the current budget crisis. They fear having to revert paved roads to gravel roads. Plaisance thinks sidewalks should only be funded by cities through assessment of adjacent residents, though he did say the county may need to be open to helping cities with paths on school property. Gillen voiced his objection to the cost of portions of the Mill Towns Trail, though it is not funded by the county.

Commissioner Malecha is  open to the compromise “case by case” funding option, and Commissioner Docken seems to be open to that as well. The other commissioner, Bauer, did not state a position during the April 7 meeting.

My letter to the County Board

April 13, 2009

Dear Rice County Commissioners,

I would like to address the issue of the Rice County Cost Participation Policy for Cooperative Roadway Construction Projects as it relates to sidewalks and shared-use paths in urban areas, and I’d like to propose a simple compromise solution that I believe would give the county the greatest flexibility in managing its transportation system.

As a Rice County property owner and taxpayer I appreciate the fact that the Board of Commissioners is trying to best use its resources to maintain its large road system, and I understand the extraordinary budgetary pressures the county faces. I also understand that these issues were factors in deciding to change the cost participation policy last summer. However, I do not agree that the new policy fully serves the transportation needs of county residents.

While I would prefer that the county reinstate its previous cost participation policy, I suggest this simple change to the current policy: move “Sidewalks” and “Bituminous Bike Path[s]” to the list of “potential” county participation items. I have enclosed copies of the old and new cost participation policy, with the suggested changes marked in pen.

As I said, these changes would give the county the greatest flexibility in implementing its transportation vision. They would allow the county to work with cities to address the needs of pedestrians, children, bicyclists, the elderly, and the handicapped as they seek to move along and across county roads in urban areas. They would allow the county to address important safety issues and work with school districts, non-profit organizations such as retirement homes, and others to address problem areas. It would allow the county to include sidewalk and path facilities for these groups in its highway capital improvement plan if it makes sense to do so. In many cases plans for such facilities may increase the chances of obtaining additional federal and state grants for transportation projects. Without these changes, the county is severely restricted in its options to address sidewalks and paths.

Furthermore, I suggest changing the term “Bituminous Bike Path” to “Bituminous Shared-Use Path” to reflect the fact that pedestrians, runners, wheelchair users, and inline skaters can use these paths as well as bicyclists. Shared-use path is the term used by MnDOT and other transportation authorities.

The cost participation policy only applies to projects in the County Capital Improvement Plan. In discussing the issue, I believe that the commissioners should know what percentage of the county transportation/highway budget is spent through projects in the capital improvement plan. I ask that they obtain this information from Mr. Luebbe.

Sincerely,

Bill Ostrem, Chair
Northfield Area Task Force on Nonmotorized Transportation
cc: Mr. Weiers, Mr. Luebbe

My wife and I attended the 21st Annual Nobel Peace Prize Forum at St. Olaf College last Friday and Saturday, March 13 and 14. In an arrangement with the Norwegian body that grants the prize, the forums are held at a group of Minnesota and Iowa colleges founded by Norwegian settlers. Since the 2007 Peace Prize was given to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the topic was, of course, climate change. Fortunately for me, the location for this year was St. Olaf.

It was a wonderful and inpsiring conference, and I wanted to share with you the two sessions that stood out the most for me:

The first was the opening keynote address by Dr. Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University. He gave an excellent and entertaining lecture about the scientific understanding of climate change. He also explained the process that the IPCC uses in making its reports, and in the question-and-answer session he made some informative comments about climate change skeptics, among other things (the questioner had asked about George Will and his views on climate change). I recommend watching the video of his talk. It’s worth the investment of time. (Alley starts at around 32 minutes into the video.)

The other particularly inspiring session was a presentation by college and high school students about their work on climate change. This gave me great hope for the future. The youth are taking action: forming groups, lobbying politicians, organizing their fellow youth, getting people to do energy audits, and more. Many of the students had just attended PowerShift, the big climate change student conference in Washington, D.C. the week before. Timoth Den Herder-Thomas of Macalester College was especially impressive in his comments, and he told about the upcoming Summer of Solutions event, in which youth will work on grassroots project related to climate change and also potentially lay the groundwork for careers in this burgeoning field. There is so much to do, and we need their leadership. Now the older folks just need to get out of the way.

Could this possibly be a watershed moment in the climate change movement? It will be interesting to see how many will be there and how the media handle it.

Below is an excerpt from an email about the protest. It was signed by McKibben and sent by 350.org, the climate change action organization that he helped found:

Here’s the backstory: Washington DC has seen its share of big protests over the years, and most of them center on the White House, the Mall or the Capitol.

But today’s event is just a few blocks a way from the White House at the the Capitol Power Plant–a dirty symbol of the dirtiest business on Earth, the combustion of coal.

In that one plant — owned and operated by our senators and representatives — you can see all the filth that comes with coal. There are the particulates it spews into the air and hence the lungs of those Washington residents who enjoy breathing. There are the profits it hands to the coal industry, which is literally willing to level mountains across West Virginia and Kentucky to increase its fat margins. And most of all there is the invisible carbon dioxide it spews each day into the atmosphere, drying our forests, melting our glaciers and acidifying our oceans.

The power plant is only a symbol, of course — a lunch counter or a bus station in the fight for environmental justice. We’ll sit down at its gates for a single afternoon, but the message is much larger: it’s time to start figuring out how to shut down every coal-fired plant on the planet. Success won’t come right away because we’re up against some of the world’s richest corporations, but we have to start turning this tanker around someday, and tomorrow is that day….

[T]he time not to act is running out. Climate science has grown steadily darker in the past 18 months, ever since the rapid melt of Arctic sea ice in the summer of 2007 showed scientists that change was coming faster than they’d reckoned.

That message was underlined recently at the Washington meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, when Stanford researcher Christopher Field said: “We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations.” Our foremost climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has given that future a number — any level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere beyond 350 parts per million, his team has demonstrated, is “incompatible with the planet on which civilization developed.”

Since we’re already past that number — the carbon dioxide level is at 387 parts per million — the fight is on. Indeed, by Hansen’s calculation, the world will need to be out of the coal-burning business by 2030, and the West much sooner than that, if we’re ever going to get back to 350. It’s no accident that NASA’s James Hansen announced he’ll be on hand to get arrested. So will Gus Speth, who ran the United Nations Development Programme, and the farmer and author Wendell Berry who has seen the devastation of his native Kentucky.

And maybe most heartening, I’ll be joined by over a thousand college students who will have just come from lobbying in the halls of Congress for clean energy.  They’ll have just wrapped up PowerShift ’09–a climate convergence organized by a separate coaltion that promises to be a historic catalyst in this movement.  These two complimentary tactics are a very good sign: a healthy movement is like a healthy ecosystem–marked by spectacular diversity.  There are many ways to be a climate activist–lobbying, rallying, educating, and on and on and on.  For me–today at least–being a climate activist means risking arrest with civil disobedience.

Friedman deserves special praise for highlighting the problems of biodiversity loss, or the extinction of species. Based on my reading of science sources over my years of doing test development work, this is a problem that our leaders have not dealt with effectively, and it is being accelerated by climate change.

The strengths of this book are its detail and its wide-ranging inquiry. It does have some weaknesses: Friedman’s tendency to personalize his analysis, as when we learn about his many visits with the global elite at posh spots throughout the world; occasional overly specific detail, as in the section on the future “Energy Internet” or “smart grid”; and his nearly exclusive focus on technological and business-oriented solutions, a focus that many environmentalists criticize.

I did appreciate the fact that he calls for the development of an “ethic of conservation,” even if he has doubts about whether major lifestyle changes are required in the new “energy-climate era.” Here is an excerpt related to this issue:

To become good stewards and good trustees, [according to MIchael J. Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard], “we will need to rein in our tendency to regard the earth and its natural resources as wholly at our disposal for present needs, wants, and desires. We have to develop new habits and attitudes towards consumption.”

Otherwise, whatever technologies we devise will simply be used to extend our current habits of profligate consumption to the huge, burgeoning middle classes of a hot, flat, and crowded world…. Does [this] mean that we, as individuals, have to edit our lifestyles down to a bare minimum, or get by with much less than the average American upper- or middle-class family consumes today? There is an anticapitalist, anticonsumerist, back-to-nature wing of the environmental movement that believes we should and almost delights in advocating that. By the way, that may be right, and should not be dismissed. My point is that we don’t know yet, because we have not tried even the obvious stuff that we do know would have real effects and would not involve fundamental changes in our lifestyle.

Telling every individual on the planet who wants or can afford a car that they cannot have one would be changing our lifestyle. But banning cars over a certain weight or engine size, or bringing maximum speed limits back down to 55 miles per hour, or banning taxis that are not hybrids – such efforts do not strike me as fundamentally cramping anyone’s lifestyle…. Forcing everyone to ride a bike to work would involve changing our lifestyle. But requiring municipalities to set aside bike lanes running from suburbs to inner cities doesn’t strike me as cramping anyone’s lifestyle (and might make our whole society healthier). [And Friedman goes through a list of many other examples] (pp. 192-193)