Governing Magazine/September 2007 OBSERVER By Alan Greenblatt ELECTRIC EXUBERANCE A commuter-train experiment in California may have big implications Caltrain, the commuter-rail line that runs between San Francisco and the Silicon Valley, is in the midst of a comeback, generated by the success of an unorthodox gamble. Faced with a large deficit in 2005, the system naturally considered reducing service. But it rejected that and decided it could fill its $13.5 million hole by increasing service and thus attracting more riders. The scheme worked, despite some higher fees, as the Bay Area economy rebounded from its dot-com collapse. Now, Caltrain is preparing to do something even more unusual--switch from diesel-powered trains to electric. Electric commuter rail is common in Europe but unusual in the United States. One of the reasons is that most of our commuter trains share tracks with freight trains. That has led to an insistence from federal regulators on heavy, "crashworthy" vehicles--a standard that electric cars have trouble meeting. Caltrain has the luxury of controlling its own tracks and claims it will fashion strategies to avoid crashes involving its lighter electric trains. If the Federal Railroad Administration buys this argument, Caltrain should be able to double the number of daily trains that it runs, to nearly 200. The reason, says Jonah Weinberg, a Caltrain spokesman, is that "the new, lighter equipment would allow us to speed up faster and stop faster" between stations. More trains should encourage more ridership, with people able to show up at the station confident that their waiting time will be 10 minutes or less. Although electric has its advantages, it clearly won't be for everyone. The infrastructure required for running electric trains has greater upfront costs than the infrastructure for diesel trains. That's what they've found out in Denver, where the new FasTracks system will include two lines each of diesel and electric. Despite the concerns about cost, electric made sense for the lines with more stations, including the ride from downtown out to the airport, says Scott Reed, of the Denver Regional Transit District. The appeal lies not only in faster starting and stopping but also in reduced noise and pollution along the rail lines. Diesel will be used on lines with fewer stations, since it typically can travel at a higher top speed. "I don't hear a groundswell moving toward electric," says Martin Schroder, senior manager of rail programs for the American Public Transportation Association. "I can't tell you that diesel is going away." But Caltrain's electric experiment, if successful, may lead to a re-examination of commuter-train options in many other places. ROD REELING Bashing the legislature is one way to get elected governor. It's a lousy way to govern. It's hard to think of a contemporary state official who has misplayed a winning hand as badly as Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Swept into office in 2002, Blagojevich brought with him Democratic majorities in both chambers of the legislature for the first time in three decades. The result has been heated acrimony and severe governmental dysfunction. Blagojevich ran by railing against a "culture of corruption" and chose not to let up after taking office. During his first year, he characterized legislators as "drunken sailors" unable to curb their free-spending habits. He seemed surprised that they took offense but kept up the heat. For more than four years, he has acted in the belief that he can generate momentum toward change through public relations campaigns, rather than by cultivating legislative leaders, or even fully briefing them about his plans. The governor swung for the fences after winning reelection last year, calling for universal health coverage. Blagojevich refused to raise broad-based taxes to pay for his program--or to do much about the state's preexisting structural deficits. Instead, he proposed a gross- receipts tax on businesses. The Illinois House rejected the idea unanimously, but Blajojevich did not concede defeat, leading to a budget stalemate that ran on through the summer. "He's consistently overplayed his hand in terms of what he's wanted to do," says Kent Redfield, a University of Illinois at Springfield political scientist. "There just hasn't been that set of advisers who could tell the boss he's wrong without worrying about losing their jobs." Legislators continue to find Blagojevich's holier-than-thou attitude hard to take, especially in light of a long-running FBI investigation into his administration's hiring practices and influence peddling. This year, a few legislators have gone over the edge, publicly calling the governor "insane" or calling for his impeachment. House Speaker Michael Madigan, a fellow Democrat, has refused even to consider most of the governor's programs, leading Blagojevich to respond with a new round of name calling on his own part. Despite the fact that Democrats are in full control of the machinery of government, Springfield has devolved into an unproductive war of words worse than anyone can remember even in a famously fractious capital. The question now is whether Blagojevich and the legislature can learn to get along well enough to make something--anything--out of his remaining time in office. "He is the most unpredictable governor I've seen in the 40 years that I've been monitoring the statehouse," says Mike Lawrence, head of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute. "If he continues in his current style, I think we can see these kinds of difficulties for the next three years." SLOW-SPEED POLITICS The long journey of high-speed rail in California YEAR EVENT 1997 The California High Speed Rail Authority forms, with a mandate to ask voters for funding by 2007. 1999 The authority delays the funding vote to allow more time to study alternative routes for the track. 2002 Lawmakers agree to put a $10 billion high-speed rail bond measure on the 2004 ballot. 2004 Amid a budget crisis, the bond vote is delayed until 2006. 2006 With a crowded slate of bond measures, lawmakers postpone the vote until 2008. Sources: San Francisco Chronicle, Daily News of Los Angeles, Bond Buyer, Fresno Bee SUBURBAN STRAINS In many legislatures, suburbs have the votes to prevail--if they can find a way to work together. The suburbs around Minneapolis and St. Paul should have plenty of clout in the state legislature. Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty hails from Eagan, just south of the Twin Cities airport, and the state House has seen a big influx of young Democrats from suburban districts--a major reason the party took control of the House last November. After the next Census and reapportionment, the Twin Cities will be home to a near-majority of the districts in the entire state. So why do the suburbs keep getting stiffed in the legislative process? Here's a prime example: All the localities in Minnesota took a hard hit during the bleak budget year of 2003, when the state cut its local government aid program by 25 percent. Since then, much of that money has been restored. But the formula for disbursing the money has been changed, leaving the suburbs with a smaller share. A coalition of 85 of them lobbied the legislature for more this year--and got nowhere. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that not all suburbs are created equal. The inner-ring suburban communities that were built out by 1970 or so are largely made up of modest homes now filled with aging residents. In recent years, those suburbs have had difficulty capturing large-scale residential and commercial development. They have relatively little in common with the newer and wealthier outlying suburbs--the ones that form Pawlenty's main constituency--and so it has been hard to create a suburban bloc capable of arguing its case on a unified basis. The suburbs' other problem is more strictly political. House Democrats may owe their majority to their new suburban members, but the fact that they have been freshly elected over the past election cycle or two means the suburbanites generally are not committee chairs or veteran power brokers. The suburban caucus has a lot less clout than senior members who represent less politically volatile urban or rural areas. All of a sudden, says Tom Goodwin, a city councilman in the suburb of Apple Valley, "we have Democrats in what have for the last 20 years been strong Republican districts." Apple Valley has lost $3 million in annual state funding in recent years. It's traditional in most legislatures for outstate members to complain about extra aid going to the major cities. The new source of tension, in Minnesota and elsewhere, is likely to revolve around the efforts of the potentially dominant suburbs to overcome their own regional jealousies. NOTHING BUT A STREET For some functions of government, two Texarkanas may be one too many. Texarkana is one city, separated by a main street that happens to be a state border. Over the years, officials on both the Arkansas and Texas sides have talked occasionally about consolidating services but have never gotten very far. Now, with several top positions vacant in both places, there is renewed hope that the cities can finally cooperate without setting off too great a turf battle. Plenty of adjoining communities in other places waste money by offering duplicative services. But not many of them share the same name and have fire stations located within sight of each other. Since "nothing but a street" separates the two communities, as a former mayor on the Texas side says, the local chamber of commerce has been holding informational meetings and running a technical study of consolidation, examining state and federal regulations that might stand in the way. There may be other obstacles. Close as they are, the two Texarkanas have moved in different economic directions, largely because of policies enacted at the state level. Regulation of business is less strict in Texas--there are no usury laws, for example--and retail development has tended to migrate there, leaving Texarkana, Arkansas, to play catch-up. James Bramlett, the current mayor on the Texas side, says he is proud of his town's relative prosperity and wouldn't want to see anything damage it. But even Bramlett admits twin fire departments and separate public works agencies are a waste of money. He doesn't believe consolidation would save a lot on personnel costs, but he does think the two adjacent towns could stop buying so much duplicate equipment--"It's one of the biggest cost-saving factors that we can address," Bramlett says. It's not that the towns have never shared anything. They once did have a common fire chief, and they still use the same water supply. But there wasn't much momentum to go further until the city manager's slot on both sides went vacant, along with other top jobs, leading some to insist that now might be a good time to see what could be done. Texarkana, Texas, has since filled its manager position, but with the mayor's support, talks are moving ahead. "It's something that ought to be manageable," says a member of the chamber of commerce task force. "It's something that would be smart to do, to look at services that are only separated by another street, even though it's a state line." MILWAUKEE'S BOAST "We lack the hour-and-a-half commute, and we lack the hurricanes and earthquakes." Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, explaining the advantages of his city Source: Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel A REGIONAL MESS Cooperation can end in corruption. Iowa learned that the hard way. Of course, not all efforts at regional partnership turn out well. The Des Moines area has been in an uproar ever since it was revealed last year that a regional job-training program had degenerated into a cesspool of corruption. More than 25 years ago, eight Iowa counties that surround the city of Des Moines formed CIETC--the Central Iowa Employment and Training Consortium--as a vehicle for sharing and disbursing federal job- training funds. CIETC was overseen by a board made up of local elected officials--or at least it was supposed to be. In fact, there was little fiscal accountability. Three staff members stuck their fingers into the till, collecting compensation totaling $1.8 million over a 30-month period. Seven people are under indictment in the case. After the scandal broke last year, one Des Moines city councilman told the state legislature that his function on the CIETC board was merely to be a "rubber stamp" for staff salaries and bonuses. That didn't sit well with the lawmakers. What made them angrier was the fact that the local governments involved were refusing to reimburse the state $1.5 million it had been forced to return to the federal Department of Labor. Tom Courtney, chairman of the Government Oversight Committee in the state Senate, suggested that the different governments involved simply swallow hard and divide up the check for the damage equally. But the local governments couldn't agree among themselves on who deserved what share of the blame, so the dispute about who should pay what dragged on for more than a year. CIETC is now officially disbanded, but the impact of the scandal will not disappear for a long time. The affair has given the whole idea of shared governmental responsibility a bad name around Des Moines. That's a major reason for the embarrassing failure of a recent ballot measure to expand intergovernmental cooperation in a smaller part of the Des Moines area. Local officials and business leaders proposed a sales-tax increase that would have been shared among three counties to reduce property taxes and improve cultural and recreational facilities. Citizens voted it down by a 5-to-1 margin in July. The measure might never have had a chance, but the failure of the CIETC regional experiment made voters more wary about letting counties share funds again--even for the most legitimate of purposes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2007, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc. http://www.governing.com