Tchotchkes

Whenever I go to a trade show I resist the urge to stuff my pockets or tote bag with the little giveaways that many vendors place at their booths to draw you close. Yet over the years my office has become a museum for a collection of objects that I picked up from who knows where.

The ones I can spy from my desk include the blue cheerleader guy, staple removers, myriad screwdrivers, “Talker Putty”, letter openers, a UB key chain, a Coqui frog, a ruler, one ubiquitous buffalo, two brains and a blue squeezie ball that bulges bright red when squeezed.

I don’t know why I keep the stuff. In my desk is another assortment of name tags (really nice ones!), 99-cent headsets, dozens – no, hundreds – of pens, a magnifying glass, and a rock with some saying on it that has long since been rubbed off.

Someday I’ll decide that my office would look better de-cluttered, and most of this stuff will get chucked. As for now, I simply leave it laying around, inert, reminders of trade shows that I’ve long forgotten.

Chores

A friend of mine and I were chatting about how mundane life becomes as we get older, as we take on more responsibility and with that responsibility come tasks that eat into what used to be discretionary time. Funny how it mostly creeps up on you: Not the job, but the occasional dinner meeting or “social” gathering that you feel obligated to attend, and that chews up an evening. The house with its never-ending demands for maintenance; the children (bless them!) with their never-ending demands for attention. The dishes, the laundry, the bathrooms, the vacuuming, the lawn, and this past couple of weekends, the pool, and firewood.

I do not remember how I filled my day prior to having children. I do know that the number of evenings my wife and I go out, now that the kids are in college, has only marginally increased mainly because we’re too tired to go out. I also know that my week-long summer vacation is likely to be spent away from home, so that projects needing my attention will be delayed yet again.

I know only a very few individuals who do not live like this. They tend to pick up every couple of years and move on, either to a new job, a new city, a new home/apartment, or all of these. None are married. I wonder if they are at peace with a nomadic lifestyle, or if they are in search of and never finding satisfaction in life.

I, for one, will not give up my current lifestyle. It will evolve on its own, and eventually provide me with the time to do the things I want to do. As tired as I become by day’s end I am also satisfied that I have tried my best to reach a goal or two.

New York State Thruway Authority Raises Tolls Again

Today’s article about New York’s finest (and I’m not referring to the police, who are fine men and women) comes courtesy of the Buffalo News. The Thruway Authority announced yet another regrettable but necessary increase in tolls, the second since January. There are two more slated for 2009 and 2010. When I visit my sons in the Albany area it will now cost me $25 round trip just to use 280 miles of I-90.

Will I pay it? Sure. Will I like it? Hell no. I’ll probably drive with disdain.

The Thruway is not anything to be proud of. Despite some trucker’s claim that it is one of the best maintained highways in the country, it is a dull, nonscenic and monotonous ride; and to me feels safer only because of the lack of traffic on it relative to the bustling highway systems in other states. Unlike my occasional trips through Ontario to Port Huron – which tend to fly by – the trip to Albany is seemingly endless. They are the same length.  One is a joy to drive; the other is a bore.

What struck me while reading wasn’t the Thruway toll hike. It was the statement that Assemblyman Mark Schroeder made about “the explosion of authorities in new York, which he estimated at 640.” These authorities are beholden to no one, and historically have been used for patronage jobs and as off-books loan vehicles so that the state government can avoid going to referendum as mandated by the state constitution. The Thruway Authority just happens to be today’s whipping boy; deservedly so. But 640 authorities? When is this nonsense going to end? What did New Yorkers do to deserve this kind of punishment?

A quick look at the Thruway Authority’s 2008 budget reveals that it takes 3,119 employees to manage and maintain the Thruway system, about 5 employees per mile, year in, year out. Salaries and salary-related costs make up almost half of the $1.1B budget. What is way out of whack are the fringe benefits: Health insurance, vacation time, sick time and other perks, are again 50 percent additional cost on top of salary. To put it another way: If the average salary were $55,000 (it is, before overtime adds an additional $3,500 to it) then fringe benefits amount to $27,000 per person. As a business person I could buy my employees the very, very best health insurance policy, load on generous vacation and sick time benefits, put a coffee pot in every office and free soda in the soda machine, and I could still not come close to the cost of the Authority’s fringe benefit package. State employees must get take-home gold every day, or something equivalent.

This has gotten way out of hand. Without the word profitability in the state equation, the words efficiency and accountability appear meaningless.

UB 2020 Update

Today marked the 2^nd in a series of 4 forums designed to, well, design the University at Buffalo’s campus for the year 2020. Today’s forum, Campus Concepts, focused on getting each major group affected by the university – students, faculty, staff, community – up to speed on the various concepts envisioned by the planning professionals, to offer ideas, and to obtain feedback. About 700 attended workshops throughout the day.

A capstone session summarizing the day’s activities took place in the evening. Some quick notes follow.

• Students and faculty were polled for ideas throughout the year. About 80 campus conversations have taken place so far.
• The University is considering the shuffling of schools from one campus to another. In the most extreme shuffling, the downtown campus would grow from its current 400,000 square feet to over ten times that size and incorporate every school that had anything to do with medicine (and if the law students have their way, the Law School as well). At the other, lesser extreme, the School of Pharmacy would move from the North to the Main Street campus.
• Traffic and parking are major considerations. The current parking footprint on the North campus is 87 acres, and would need to grow to over 108 should nothing change to reduce dependency on single-occupant vehicles. 93% of the students, staff and faculty operate single-occupancy vehicles on campus. Alternative transportation and ways to reduce the number of trips per person are hot topics for further discussion.
• The campuses should grow by “densifying”, not by sprawl. In particular, the North Campus vision is to create a dense spine, with wind-breaking foliage and bright spaces conducive to student congregation (which is so, so different from the design of the North Campus, greatly inspired by and meant to prevent a recurrence of the campus riots of the late ‘60s).
• Dramatically improve the North Campus lake, making it something more than just a drainage pond.
• Create an urban, not a suburban, feel to the Downtown campus.

The next forum is November 19^th, when a draft design plan will be presented to the public for the first time. Some people and groups are bound to be pleased, while others will anguish that their ideas weren’t considered the correct ones.

Is that also when the litigation will begin?

Resurrecting Buffalo

Can Buffalo Ever Come Back? Probably not – and government should stop bribing people to stay here.

That title, in an article by Harvard professor Ed Glaeser in the New York publication City Journal (and repeated in the New York Sun), riled a lot of Western New Yorkers. In Dr. Glaeser’s defense, the subtitle (in italics above) was added by the Journal – nothing like a downstate magazine twisting the knife, eh? Rather than piss and moan about it, Kate Foster and her staff from UB’s Regional Institute invited Glaeser to come to Buffalo to discuss and possibly defend his position. He agreed, and spent most of this past Friday here under sunny skies.

The forum drew 350 people to WNED studios on a day when most of us would have probably preferred to soak up the warmth and brilliant sunshine. Yet there we were. I had the privilege of being on the discussion panel and also had a semi-private audience with Dr. Glaeser for several hours prior to the presentation. That’s where it got interesting, as that discussion covered many more issues than did the public forum.

But all in all, Glaeser really had two points to make:

• Good schools correlate to good urban health.
• Buffalo and other depressed cities should shrink to success.

Urban success should be measured not by population growth but by quality of life. Glaeser pointed out several times that some of the most successful cities in the U.S.: Chicago, Minneapolis and Boston – to name a few of the cold weather cities – have all suffered substantial population loss since 1970 yet they thrive as urban centers. Glaeser claims that they reinvented themselves to become centers of information flow and today manufacture ideas, not just goods. It stands to reason that a more educated society is advantageous to the creation of an urban environment that nurtures information flow; hence the stress on better schools and better education in general.

My only argument with Dr. Glaeser is the role that job opportunities play. Surprisingly, Glaeser didn’t mention this and, in fact, implied that cities in the South have become consumer cities where people move simply because it’s cheap to do so. All things being equal, I claim that most people would not move from wherever they’ve established roots if they sensed that they had job opportunities where they already live. But for many years now, Buffalo has been slow to create those opportunities, so off we go to find new opportunities elsewhere.

Other things of interest:

• Glaeser basically implied “Don’t look to government largesse to bail you out of this. Buffalo’s success depends on the business sector and the community. Government generally does a bad job, believing that big projects (read: “shiny new buildings”) are needed to solve big problems. They generally don’t work well. Glaeser was against Boston’s Big Dig for this reason. He said to me “The people in Kansas City should not have had to pay for transportation in Boston”.
• Dr. James Williams appeared to sleep through much of Dr. Glaeser’s presentation. Maybe he was just thinking really hard. With his eyes closed.

The Village of Williamsville

The village of Williamsville. 5 lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. Noise, and exhaust fumes. Waiting to cross the street at an intersection sets one’s ears ringing and does nothing to create any sense of an idyllic, peaceful setting. Last Thursday’s walk down Main Street, at 2 PM, made me thankful it wasn’t 5 PM.

This is a village? It’s come a long way in 30 years, not necessarily for the better.

Dead in its Tracks

The current undisputed sensationalistic story du mois is chocked full of juicy things: mothers, children, underage sex, religion, polygamy and now, courtroom drama and lots of lawyers falling over themselves for attention.

The 80-year-old Tom Green County courtroom and a satellite courtroom set up in a City Hall auditorium two blocks away were jammed with dozens of mothers from the retreat, dressed in their iconic pastel prairie dresses and braided upswept hair.

The mothers were sworn in as witnesses, standing and mumbling their ‘I do’s’ in timid voices. As they sat silently, the flock of lawyers was constantly buzzing with murmurs and popping up to make motions or object as Walther tried to maintain order.

But when prosecutors tried to enter into evidence the medical records of three girls — two 17-year-olds and an 18-year-old — the lawyers jumped to their feet and crammed the aisles trying to see the papers. That’s when Walther called the recess.

Oh, the imagery. This will not end well.

High-Tech 2010 Census Effort Reportedly Adrift

The United States has, for the third decade in a row, attempted and failed to create a method by which census data can be collected by some means other than pencil and paper.

It’s not that this would be so bad except that the Census Bureau estimates that the cost of this handheld system is $1.3 billion, and it won’t do what was intended: Allow canvassing workers to enter and transmit census data digitally. It was to be the first truly high-tech census. Plans for the 1990 census called for quite a bit of minicomputer technology to support data collection, and in 2000 the use of data capture systems; those plans didn’t materialize, either.

This article is really discouraging. It further reinforces my belief that agencies like the Census Bureau are loaded with bumbling political appointees being gifted large salaries and prestigious titles for their support of the party in power. The Bureau’s bumbling appointees were Jay Waite and Louis Kincannon. Their CV’s are impressive, their results are not. When asked in 2006 by Senator Tom Koburn what the Bureau would do if the handheld units did not work, Kincannon stated that the handhelds would work, implying there was no need for a contingency plan. He repeated this statement four more times during the Senate hearing, indicating that no plans were in place should the system of handheld units fail to materialize by 2010. Kincannon was replaced in late 2007 by Steven Murdock. Read the entire story here; it’s fascinating.

Fed Ex seems to do a pretty good job using handheld scanners to track millions of packages daily. My wife uses Nielsen SCANTRAK to enter all kinds of data about her weekly purchases, transmits that data on a regular basis and gets awarded points that she can turn into gifts for all her effort. Turbo Tax turns my digitally-created 1040 forms into 2-dimensional bar codes that can be scanned at the receiving end in a matter of seconds.

The technology to do everything the Census Bureau needs has been around for years – commercially, about 15 years already – yet the Bureau cannot figure out how to turn that already-available commercial technology into something that would work for them.

What a shame. What a statement of utter incompetence.

We will pay $1.3 million for a system that will not provide census workers with the tools they need to efficiently do their jobs. We will, instead, pay those 600,000 workers to arm themselves with pencil and paper to collect data from the expected one-third of all Americans who will not return their census forms, only to have that data re-entered by other census workers sitting behind banks of PCs once the paper forms arrive back at headquarters. Total cost for the census: Around $14 billion and growing.

But it’s not entirely a lost cause. Even though the units won’t be able to collect and transmit data, the 151,000 handheld units that will be purchased (note that apparently, not every census worker gets one of these toys) will be able to use GPS to verify the location of every home in America, just like a Tom Tom. An $8,600 Tom Tom.

Maybe by 2020 we’ll decide to build something high-tech that actually works, or make the potentially wise decision to simply continue doing it with pencil and paper. The alternative – the worst alternative – we seem to choose is to pay some company billions for a half-assed, poorly thought-out design that has no chance of getting off the ground.

How sad for us.

Race to the Bottom

Dan Gundersen, Upstate chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, came to the Buffalo Niagara Partnership today to discuss state incentives to businesses, and how we compete for that business with other states.

In a nutshell:

• Business incentives have become an entitlement, not an incentive. Businesses not given an incentive package to come to New York (or any other state, for that matter) will generally choose to go to some region offering an incentive package.
• Because New York has real estate taxes 50% higher than the national average it must offer incentives to lure businesses to the state. The problem is that incentives are being offered by every state, regardless of where they rank tax-wise. The conclusion: Offering incentives rarely provides New York an edge over other states.

This is the classic race to the bottom. As each state tries to outdo every other state the logical conclusion is that businesses will eventually be incentivized (read: entitled) to locate to the region that offers shovel-ready or spec-built real-estate essentially for free – no taxes, ever. People who are lured to that region for the jobs it produces may be burdened with taxes, but not the businesses providing those jobs.

Given that our current system of taxation is plainly not working well, New York State might be wise to grab the lead on this and offer a free ride to any company willing to relocate to the state – especially to the upstate area.

Ed Glaeser

On April 18^th Harvard Professor Ed Glaeser is invited to WNED studios in Buffalo to discuss, possible debate, his locally-controversial article “Can Buffalo Ever Come Back?” first published in the New York Sun and City Journal magazine. Although the subtitle of the article essentially screams “No, and the government shouldn’t bother to try”, a thorough reading hints that Buffalo should endeavor to right-size itself rather than attempt to grow back to its prominent old self.

I am not in agreement with all of Glaeser’s conclusions (especially the ones using old or faulty statistics), and I think he left out a number of arguments that speak highly for Western New York, like its people. Nonetheless, I am not out to disparage the guy, either. Professor Glaeser is the pre-eminent urban economist, and we should listen very seriously about what he has to say for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that people in high places listen to him.

Glaeser eagerly accepted the UB Regional Institute Director Kate Foster’s invitation to come to Buffalo (he’s been here before). He did so graciously and without reservation. The event will not be a public forum, so don’t expect to be able to walk up to a microphone and start venting your anger and frustration at him; that is not the intention. This is meant to be a serious discussion about the future and how we might get there in better shape than we are today.

I have been asked to be on the discussion panel that will meet with Glaeser at 2 PM at WNED. An audience of around 200 is expected. I also get the chance to have lunch with the man in a more private setting. I hope that as a community we take away new insights into how we can efficiently and effectively revitalize Western New York. I certainly intend to pick his brains.

Other articles about Glaeser can be found here and here and here.

Slammed Upside the Head During a Celebration

The University at Buffalo Alumni Association Achievement Awards banquet was held this past Saturday at the Adam’s Mark Hotel in downtown Buffalo.  This year, 19 students, faculty and alumni were honored for their past and present support to the University and to education and science.  My cousin, Michael Buckley, was one of the awardees for excellence in teaching as well as his work with the handicapped.

Dr. Irene Snow, an alumnus and medical director of the Buffalo Medical Group, was also honored.  She was introduced by Susan Banks, who made the most surreal comment when she stated that one of Dr. Snow’s hardest jobs has been to recruit MDs to the Buffalo area at a time when medical reimbursements in Western New York are at an all-time low.

Yet just this past Wednesday my health insurance agent notified me that my company’s rates will be going up a staggering 32% in June, and for the first time our average family health insurance premiums will exceed $10,000 per year.  That doesn’t include the co-pays but, ironically, does include lousy prescription coverage.

I think I’m going to be sick.  On second thought:  I can’t afford to be sick.

The stress brought on by trying to figure out how to pay future health insurance premiums is certain to shorten the lives of many.

Colbert at UB

Colbert is a funny man.

Harold McNeil, the reporter who wrote the review of Stephen Colbert’s live performance at UB’s Distinguished Speaker Series last night, must not watch Colbert’s television show much.  McNeil’s article failed to grab even a glimpse of Colbert’s comic genius, nor convey the comedic absurdities that flew rapid-fire into the audience.

Colbert’s comedy is deliberate, intense, intelligent and non-stop.  He pokes fun at himself as much as politicians and other luminaries, so if your favorite political candidate gets picked on, it’s not for long as he segues to some other topic worth skewering.  The Buffalo News’ review of the show may have gotten the punchlines right but failed to convey any sense of the delivery:  sarcastic, satiric, thought-provoking or just plain funny.

Colbert was at his best when he did a Q&A session at the end of his performance.  The best question:  If he could name a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor after Jon Stewart, what would it be called and what would it contain?  After mulling it for just a few moments, he said (and I paraphrase) “It would have to be a short pint…and contain matzo and gummy bears – I’d call it Chewie Jewie”.

Jimmy Gnecco and Ours

I normally don’t write much about rock and roll – it’s something to be heard more than discussed.  But of late I’ve been catching a lot of Indie products on XM radio, and the band Ours has been getting some air play.  They are the first band in some time that’s caught my attention.  The studio version of their latest album is much more refined that the live renditions available for free online, and is worth a listen or two.

With a reputation for re-inventing himself every few years, I do not expect Jimmy Gnecco’s latest incarnation of Ours to be around for long.  However, the band’s just-released album “Kill the Band” (renamed “Mercy – Dancing for the Death of an Imaginary Enemy”) has these U2-like rhythms mixed with Coldplay-like guitars and voices, and perhaps a little Counting Crows thrown in for that more sorrowful sound.  Pretty neat stuff, especially the song Worst Things Beautiful.  Makes me wish I was still young enough to enjoy going to live concerts.

Dropout Nation

Tonight’s CBS Evening News (with Katie Couric) featured a report on the dropout rate of large-city public schools.  The numbers sound depressing, but without reference to either global results or to completion of high school equivalency programs later in life, it is unclear what these results mean.  Many large cities graduate less than half the students who entered the 9th grade.  But as bad as this may look, the measures used to compute the dropout rate are inconsistent and, in some cases, so poorly known as to produce unreliable results.

The States – and various school districts – calculate dropout rates differently, not in any uniform manner.  The Detroit public school system soft-pedals their statistics claiming that their dropout numbers are skewed by students who moved away or simply died.  The Time Magazine report from the photograph above includes a number of creative ways that public school administrators inflate their own graduation rates to make their schools appear to be performing better than they really are.

What caught my attention tonight was Katie’s vivid description of the rate at which dropping out is occurring in this country:  1.2 million children a year, or 7,000 a day.  “That’s one every 26 seconds” she said.

Um, last time I checked, 1.2 million dropouts divided by 365 days was not 7,000 but about 3,300, which does work out to be around 1 dropout every 26 seconds.  Maybe the person working the television graphics didn’t do so well in high school math.  Or maybe I didn’t see the numbers correctly.  Sure looked like 7,000 to me, though.

The 6:51 PM comment by Demslie regarding this article made me chuckle.  It’s nice to learn exactly where to point the finger for this education fiasco.

By the way, this article claims that the Buffalo, New York public school system has a dropout rate of only 9.5% .  Sure.