Sunday 8/13/2006 DAILY NEWS DIGEST
http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/115546149176890.xml&coll=2 – Lobbyists provide lavish travel for legislators, spouses.
http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/115546162076890.xml&coll=2 – Party hearing on District 54 Democratic primary runoff will hinge on timing of the filing of required financial disclosure forms.
http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/115546144476890.xml&coll=2 – Despite overall population loss, Black Belt sees increase in number of Hispanic residents.
http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/115546151276890.xml&coll=2 – “The Political Notebook” from The Birmingham News.
http://www.al.com/opinion/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/opinion/115546131876890.xml&coll=2 – Commentary by child advocate Graham Champion calls for independent quality assurance process at DHR in seeking compliance with RC case.
http://www.al.com/opinion/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/opinion/115546103876890.xml&coll=2 – Commentary by local attorney reviews public transit in Europe and questions why Alabama refuses to address transit needs.
http://www.al.com/news/mobileregister/index.ssf?/base/news/115546116277070.xml&coll=3 – Article questions campaign expenditures for two current PSC commissioners.
http://www.al.com/news/huntsvilletimes/index.ssf?/base/news/115546067177190.xml&coll=1 – Long lines form as Madison County low income residents apply for energy assistance.
http://www.gadsdentimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060813/NEWS/608130329/1137/NEWS - Baxley campaign in full swing.
http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060813/NEWS02/608130321/1009 - State House, Senate officials continue to push for new State House study.
http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060813/NEWS/608130344/1013/EDITORIAL2 - “Alabama Exposure” Dana Beyerle’s weekly political column for the NYTimes regional papers.
http://www.timesdaily.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060813/NEWS/608130326/1016/OPINIONS02 - Commentary accuses GOP Congressional leadership of using poor as fodder in battle to extend tax breaks to rich.
FROM TODAY’S ANNISTON STAR:
Out of the loop
By Josh Keller
Star Staff Writer
08-13-2006
From its factory here in Anniston, North American Bus Industries has shipped off 1,175 buses to Los Angeles, 899 buses to Miami and 35 buses to El Paso, Texas.
It has sold none in Alabama.
“We’d be very happy to sell some next door, but it’s just never happened,” said Bill Coryell, NABI’s vice president of sales.
That one of the nation’s largest bus suppliers cannot find a market in its home state speaks to Alabama’s history of bus systems that falter, go bankrupt and disappear.
A recurring problem is money. Last month, Birmingham operators announced a plan to save money that likely will reduce service to the suburbs, echoing decades of cuts. One bus system director called service in the state’s biggest cities “totally dysfunctional and non-responsive,” and then added that he was being nice.
In this climate, the three short white Anniston Express buses that loop around Anniston, Weaver and Hobson City are something of an exception. They have traveled the same basic routes, with the same funding, for 18 years.
The buses do have a limited public reach. Each month, they take a few thousand riders to jobs, doctors and grocery stores. The riders are mostly poor or elderly. There is no advertising, no posted schedules, no Web site. Walt Adams, who helped establish the buses for Alabama Limousine, called it “the secret system.”
But the buses are notable simply because they exist.
Alabama, after all, takes an unusual view of public transportation: It does not fund it, the only state east of Colorado to do so, according to the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics. In fact, a 1952 state constitutional amendment effectively makes such spending illegal.
At the time, such laws, designed to protect funding of the developing interstate highway system, were common across the country. But as other states have since relaxed funding limitations on public transportation, Alabama has stayed the course.
“The analogy that I have always used,” said John Sorells, director of Dothan’s transit system, “is that I am allowed by statute to build a million-dollar neoclassical structure over a Coke machine in a rest stop, but I cannot go to Kmart and spend $1.37 on a quart of oil for a bus.”
As a result, regional planners said, Alabama’s bus routes have foundered even as the nation’s use of public transit has risen steadily with gas prices.
Since 1995, public transit use has gone up by 23 percent, according to the American Public Transportation Association. About 14 million Americans use public transit each weekday.
Many Alabamians don’t have the option. Nearly half of the state’s 67 counties do not have public transportation of any kind, and only one out of 200 Alabamians takes public transit to work, according to federal estimates. Wyoming’s rate is three times higher.
One Southerner captured the country’s sentiment toward driving almost 60 years ago.
“The American really loves nothing but his automobile, not his wife his child nor his country nor even his bank-account first,” William Faulkner wrote. And certainly not buses.
And not, by any means, in Alabama.
The lack of money, transportation experts said, is rooted in an attachment to cars and a distrust of buses that goes beyond the American norm. Buses, if not invisible, are often symbols of poverty and racial conflict, but cars — from the speedway at Talladega to the state house in Montgomery, cars are king.
That fact will never change, said Adams, who runs Anniston’s bus line.
“It’d be like people in Alabama saying they don’t care about football anymore,” he said. “I don’t care if gas goes to $20 a gallon. You don’t wanna just sit in your apartment all day long, you drive.”
Hell without one
For many, the need to drive is irrelevant. The last time the government checked, in 2000, 8 percent of Calhoun County households had no vehicles. Some of those residents take the bus instead.
A few weeks ago, as her bus rolled steadily through Weaver, driver Dianne Goode talked without turning around, to nobody in particular. The passengers called back to her, giving their take on a shooting in Ohatchee, and the bus was small enough to contain the conversation.
The relationship between Anniston Express bus drivers and many of their riders is personal. Few bother to request a stop; the drivers already know where they want to get off. Nearly all the riders have been here before, and the drivers have given some of them nicknames.
“I’ll give you a dollar when I get the change, baby,” a passenger on a different bus told the driver, referring to her fare, as she got off at FoodMax on Quintard Avenue.
“Either that or we’re gonna take your unborn grandkids,” the driver joked.
The familiarity is a measure both of the system’s consistency and its limited customer base. Between 80 and 90 percent of the ridership is elderly or handicapped, according to Bill Curtis, director of the East Alabama Planning and Regional Development Commission. With buses that come only once an hour and mostly to poorer neighborhoods, the system was built to serve a specific group, Adams said: those who have no choice.
“Now the people who have a BMW and live up on the top of the hill, they haven’t ridden the thing in their life,” Adams said. “But it’s not designed for them.”
Many passengers also share a low-level frustration with the buses, which do not travel to Oxford or Jacksonville. Because the “pulse” system is designed around circuitous loops, riders spend a lot of time waiting for buses to come around, and still more time traveling through areas far from their destinations.
A trip to Wal-Mart to pick up milk, 20 minutes in a car, takes at least two hours on the bus.
“I don’t have a car, so that makes it hell,” said Kay, a rider who declined to give her last name. Her bus ride to Winn-Dixie in Golden Springs takes her as far west as Noble Street and as far north as Stringfellow Hospital.
Strong local support
Yet regardless of its limitations, Anniston’s regular bus service is one of only a few in smaller Alabama cities that are not suburbs. Florence and Decatur, both bigger than Anniston, lack fixed-line buses altogether.
“Most cities in the state, there isn’t one,” said Walt Adams. His office is less than 10 miles from the factory where NABI churns out hundreds of buses a year for metro areas.
The absence of state funding is a large reason why Alabama’s smaller and medium-sized cities don’t offer bus service, said Daniel Turner, director of Tuscaloosa’s University Transportation Center for Alabama. Although most transportation funding comes from the federal government, state support helps other states garner matching federal funds. Without that support, he said, even limited systems are tough to build.
The question might be, then: How has the Anniston Express survived for 18 years?
Smaller bus systems, like those in Anniston, Gadsden and Dothan, share some common traits, Turner said. They subsist on a steady source of city funding and a central personality to keep the funding going.
For decades, that personality in Calhoun County has been Bill Curtis, director of the East Alabama Regional Planning and Development Commission since the system’s inception, according to several officials. The buses here always have garnered an unusual amount of support from Anniston, now about $150,000 per year. In recent months, Curtis has persuaded Oxford Mayor Leon Smith to consider expanding the system to Oxford, the mayor said in an interview.
“I have to commend the city of Anniston for funding the system for all these years,” said Jack Plunk, principal planner for the planning commission.
Plunk said he has long-term goals to expand the system, including limiting the headway between buses to 15 minutes to make them “more convenient than actually driving your car.” But the changes would be impossible without new sources of funding, he said.
The same is true statewide, according to a 2000 study done by the University Transportation Center for Alabama and commissioned by the state Department of Transportation.
Expanding the 12 largest urban bus systems in the state and running them for 10 years, the study estimated, would cost an additional $98 million. By contrast, the Anniston Eastern Parkway is estimated to cost $135 million.
Cultural prohibitions
The most famous picture ever taken in Anniston is of a bus. A group of Freedom Riders on Greyhound to Birmingham had made it to Alabama 202 east of Bynum. The bus is on fire.
Images like this one help explain the state’s resistance to mass transit, said Jim Carnes, publications director for the Montgomery advocacy group Alabama Arise.
“In Alabama, of course, there were racial aspects to it. The opponents of public transit have sort of been able to paint it as an urban black issue,” Carnes said.
More fundamentally, Alabama is a rural state, making it difficult to build transit systems that are more convenient than driving, said Daniel Turner.
Geographical divisions have led to political ones. The issue always has divided urban and rural lawmakers, said state Sen. Rodger Smitherman, D-Birmingham.
Smitherman introduced a bill in February that would have relaxed Alabama’s 1952 amendment prohibiting the use of gas and license taxes for public transportation. The bill, which would have earmarked 1 percent of those revenues for transit, died in committee without a vote.
A gallon of regular gasoline in Calhoun County cost around $2.18 in February. This week, it’s averaging $2.83.
“I think in the past that it was seen as an urban concern and not a rural concern,” Smitherman said, adding that he was optimistic about finding a solution after November’s elections. “As a result, the majority of the legislators who voted to put that constitutional amendment on, they felt like they would not have been affected.”
The cultural views of public transit, for many, coalesce into a general aversion to buses, said John Sorells, the Dothan bus operator.
“If you go to any normal red-blooded NASCAR fan in Anniston or Talladega, regardless of the vocabulary they use, they are gonna tell you that public transit is a social service delivery system. It’s part of the welfare state.
“That mindset is the single most corrosive thing working against public transportation in the state of Alabama,” Sorells said.
Even higher funding could never immediately make public transportation viable, Carnes said. The growth of cities has followed highways, not transit systems, and establishing convenient public transportation would take more than money alone, he said.
“It’s an old pattern that’s hard to break,” he said.
“A tremendous need”
In February, some activists laid part of the blame of the failure of Smitherman’s constitutional amendment on lobbying efforts from the state’s transportation department. Indeed, the department’s chief engineer testified against the amendment during a public hearing.
But Don Arkle, assistant chief engineer for policy and planning, said the department does not oppose public transportation. The department has no public transit projects simply because it does not receive any funding earmarked for the purpose, he said.
“We really don’t have the option of spending it on transit,” Arkle said, noting the 1952 prohibition. “Right now most people would say that we’re really not keeping up with our maintenance needs with our roads. You could make an argument that you could do more with money that would help us with improvements. And transit interests will make the argument that more money would help the buses.”
There is a “tremendous need” to fix the state’s roads, he said, beyond what current highway funding can cover: the Anniston Eastern Parkway; 3,000 miles of resurfacing; a new freeway between Memphis and Huntsville; the Dothan Bypass; and the extension of I-85 from Montgomery to the Mississippi line.
“Those are all mega-projects that all totaled up would be in the billions,” he said.
The hot, dusty hillside that will soon host the Eastern Parkway could be glimpsed out the window of Kay’s east bus to Golden Springs, but she turned inward.
Her job search is difficult, she said, because several recent openings were too far from a bus stop. But more than that, she said, not being able to drive feels frustrating, constricting.
“I guess I probably need a car,” she said.
Unfunded payout increases stir RSA concerns
By Brian Lyman
Star Capitol Correspondent
08-13-2006
MONTGOMERY – When David Bronner began running the Retirement Systems of Alabama in 1973, RSA could meet only 25 percent of its funding requirements.
At the end of June 2005, the fund had $26.6 billion under management and was 89 percent funded – a high percentage for these plans, and even a slight retreat from the late 1990s, when it was 100 percent funded.
The health of the fund is far better than those in states like New Jersey, which has an $18 billion shortfall. But RSA executives do have concerns about cost-of-living increases approved by the Legislature in 2005 and last spring, which increased payouts to retirees by 11 percent.
RSA Deputy Director Mark Reynolds says those increases will reduce the system’s funding from 89 percent to about 84 percent. Bronner warned legislators about the potential drop last spring and asked them to provide money to RSA to cover the increase.
“We were urging caution,” Reynolds said. “They didn’t use it, and we’ll start paying for it next fall. I’m not advocating that we don’t give retirees raises. But a 4 percent increase is $150 million. They’ve got to fund that liability.”
The 84 percent funding means that the system could pay 84 percent of its obligations in the unlikely event that the system would have to pay every single recipient at once. The immediate health of the state’s three pension funds – for teachers, state employees and members of the judicial system – is less of a concern to RSA than long-term concerns, particularly with the rising cost of health care.
The system
State employees contribute a fixed percentage of their income into RSA, ranging from 5 percent for teachers to 10 percent for state troopers. Members can get benefits if they log in 10 years of vested service by age 60, or if they put in 25 years at any age.
The RSA, meanwhile, invests members’ money. The teachers’ and state employees’ funds have about 43 percent of their money in domestic stocks. RSA also has invested in other properties. USAir and the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail may be the most notable, but RSA also has purchased buildings and community newspapers.
For decades, the state capped the fund’s ability to invest in common stocks at 20 percent. That cap was lifted in 1992, and the system enjoyed the boom times of the late 1990s with other investors.
Bronner was not available for comment last week, but Reynolds said the system began to cut back on its stock portfolio before the 2000 correction took place. Still, the downturn hurt the system to an extent, and the market’s laggard performance combined with low return on bond investments,
“We’re trying to amp our returns with existing portfolios,” said Marc Green, RSA’s Chief Investment Officer. “We’re looking for returns, just like everyone in a tough market.”
With life spans steadily increasing, the system has to pay benefits out to members for a longer time. While RSA is not a pay-as-you-go system like Social Security – each employee has their own account that they support – Reynolds argues that future adjustments to pensions must be funded by the legislature.
Managers have been able to beat the market in some ways: Portfolios grew 4.5 to 4.8 percent in fiscal 2005, about a point better than the S&P 500.
Reynolds describes Bronner as “overall, very conservative” when it comes to investments.
“We’ve never been very aggressive in the market,” he said. “New Jersey was 100 percent invested, and they really got whacked.”
Raises
Bronner’s warnings about the additional costs of a COLA increase went largely unheeded during budget debates this spring. With a surprise surplus in front of them and an election ahead, legislators passed pay raises for teachers and employees, tax cuts and additional benefits for retirees.
State Sen. Del Marsh, R-Anniston, often cited Bronner’s concerns during budget debates last spring.
“This thing continues to increase, and we don’t have the revenue to continue to fund it 100 percent,” he said Friday. “What’s going to happen is the Legislature is going to have to find a way to make up the difference. The money is going to have to come from the education fund to make it whole, and the funding is going to come out of the classrooms.”
But Mac MacArthur, executive director of the Alabama State Employees’ Association, the state employees’ union, argues that the increases were badly needed. In Alabama, unlike other states, cost-of-living increases are not automatic, and state employees and retirees went three years without a raise before receiving a 4 percent increase in 2005 and a 7 percent increase this year.
“If you look at the cost of living, go back any period of time, even with these back to back unprecedented COLAs, retired state employees have fallen behind in the cost of living,” he said. “It’s amounting to a pay cut.”
MacArthur says he “completely agrees” with Bronner that the system needs to be adequately funded, but argues that state employees have lost ground to their private sector counterparts.
“You have to throw into the mix that when most state employees came to work in state, the pay was a little more comparable to private sector,” he said. “There was more stability and a better career path. Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen that eroded away.”
That, MacArthur says, means fewer people are staying in their jobs, and the population is graying. According the Association, 20 percent of state employees could retire today, with another 20 percent able to retire in the next 5 to 10 years.
Whether they actually do so is another matter; Reynolds and MacArthur both say they’re seeing more people work beyond their retirement ages, due in part to rising health costs; employees want to put more years in to have higher pensions that will cover costs in the future. That could help the long-term bottom line for the system, Reynolds said.
“I think they’ll start rethinking retirement from an insurance point of view, as well as from a ‘what am I going to do’ point of view,” he said.
MacArthur feels the system is “sound.”
“It is 83 percent funded,” he said. “Which is pretty well close to fully-funded.”
Reynolds agrees, but wants to make sure it stays at that level. But he sympathizes with the Legislature’s predicament in raising money.
“They’re politicians, and bless their hearts, their job is to solve a problem that costs money without raising taxes, and they have to explain to Aunt Sally why she can’t have all the drugs she wants,” Reynolds said.
