Cities and towns in my state raise revenue from two sources. The state sends them money and property taxes. To fulfill the state’s responsibility to educate everybody approximately at the same level the state adds more to the budgets of poor towns than rich ones. In my town much of the revenue comes from property taxes. These taxes are capped. A law passed a few decades ago limits tax revenues from rising more that 2.5 percent a year without going to the local voters and getting what is known as an override.

Costs, for the basket of goods that town buy, have risen faster than 2.5% for the vast majority of the decades since the property tax was put in place. The result has been that we have cut continuously back on the services the town provides. It has almost fallen out of living memory that we used to plow the sidewalks in town.

Some costs are rising so fast that they alone consume the entire 2.5%. Health insurance, in my town, consumed more this year.

We spend about half our budget on schools.

At the last school board meeting they discussed the option of eliminating 12th grade at the high school. They might just be able to met all the mandated requirements in 11 years.

Bleck.

I bet the story of how their PR people will manage this story would make a great article for the New Yorker!

Forced-labor charges for Saudi prince’s wife

By Stephanie Ebbert and Scott Goldstein, Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent  |  March 31, 2005

WINCHESTER — The wife of a Saudi prince was arrested yesterday for allegedly forcing two Indonesian housekeepers to work for her family at homes in Arlington and Winchester for meager wages over nearly two years.

A federal grand jury indicted Hana F. Al Jader on 10 counts of forced labor, domestic servitude, and other immigration offenses, alleging that she hid her servants’ passports and work visas and threatened they would be harmed if they failed to perform the work.

Jader, a 39-year-old Saudi national married to Prince Mohamed Bin Turki Alsaud, …

It’s got it all! Problem, the media, and a hero, the PR team, and I assume there will be movement; except I notice the story New York Times doesn’t appear to have called up this story from it’s farm team paper, the Boston Globe, … yet.

Man! Whisky Bar’s star is burning bright over on there on the left side of the blogging sky!

I’m in this 16+% too.

One-third of the respondents to the ABC News poll reported that a friend or relative had died after life support was stopped. And more than half of these respondents were involved in the decision.

I spent an awful lot of hours making sure the DNR was in still on hand.

I can imagine nothing more horrific than having to play Calvin ball with the religious right during that time.

David Brooks is going to have trouble getting invited to the good parties!

E-rate (or education rate) is a program funded in part by one of those numerous little charges the phone company piles onto your bill under the heading of various taxes and fees. It’s a variation on the old universal service fee that to shift money down the power-law curve an assure that the poor and rural get phones.

FCC established the E-rate program using an organizational structure unusual to the government without conducting a comprehensive assessment to determine which federal requirements, policies, and practices apply to it. The E-rate program is administered by a private, not-for-profit corporation with no contract or memorandum of understanding with FCC, and program Since 1998, the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) E-rate program has committed more than $13 billion to help schools and libraries acquire Internet and telecommunications services.

13 Billion, hm. There are around 225 Million people in the US; so that’s $57.77 each. These days the program spends about 2.24 Billion a year, or about ten bucks per person per year.

The program has some serious oversight problems. The GAO has been poking the FCC, which administers the program, in the ribs about these for years. Last year it finally got some traction; at which point the entire program came to a halt. Apparently the program was running outside the usual rules for managing federal funds. It had money invested in unusual ways. It lacked required reserves. To get the program running again the Congress passed a special temporary exception to the rules in December 2004. Of course like all programs where Billions of dollars are going by you can also find some outrageous examples of fraud. The level here is probably worse do to the sloppy oversight structure the FCC setup for the program.

Recently the GAO releasted report (pdf) that summarizes this mess.

What to do? Some folks would like to kill the entire program. They stand on the GAO report and promise everybody ten bucks a year.

The program was set up in 98 as a way, in part, to get Internet into the schools and libraries. If you’ve participated in one of the volunteer events where you pull wires in a old school building it is likely that part of the equipment and the discounted service were paid for by this program. The funds are distributed in a very progressive manner. Rural and poor school districts get much deeper discounts.

The GAO report is very depressing. The laundry list of foul ups in the FCC’s setup for this thing is just plain ugly. They didn’t set goals. They didn’t measure efficiency. They didn’t manage the funds in compliance with the rules. They didn’t require appropriate record retention by the schools and libraries. They didn’t look for gold plating. They didn’t attempt to estimate the rate of bogus payments. All of this the GAO pointed out back in 2000.

Meanwhile I suspect there is whole tangled story to be told in the managerial structure of this thing. The 2.24 Billion is spent by a nonprofit (the USAC or Universal Services Administration Company) a subsidiary of the National Carriers Exchange Association (another nonprofit) thru a for profit organization called the National Carriers Exchange Association Services Incorporated. It looks like the FCC just handed the money over to the telecom industry and and said, you guys take care of this.

My default managerial reaction in a situation like this is to decide first I like the goals of the program. I do, Next question, can it be fixed? It can. It’s clear from the GAO report that just following the rules would fix much of the problem. Finally there is always a hostage problem. The beneficiaries of the program are held hostage by program managers. Punishing the incompetent program managers without doing harm to beneficiaries is difficult. But yeah, management isn’t easy.

The good news is that it appears that the GAO is doing it’s job. Let’s hope the FCC can be convinced to do theirs.