Want to create acres of new parks, link long-divided parts of your downtown, beautify an ugly freeway and do so without condemning a square inch of private land? Put a deck on top of your freeways. About 20 cities have decked portions of their freeways and many others are considering it. For example, in Dallas there's an effort underway to deck several blocks of the downtown Woodall Rodgers Freeway. Decking is about repairing old wounds to downtown grids by hiding highways beneath parks. You place a concrete lid or cap atop the freeway, turning the highway into a tunnel. You haul dirt to the top of the deck, plant trees and grass, lay out paths, plazas and bandstands and, voila, you have a brand-new urban park. In Dallas, the idea is to use its deck to link the booming Uptown area just north of downtown to the city's Arts District. The two have been kept apart because it's harrowing to walk on narrow sidewalks across a freeway. But on a deck, you wouldn't see the highway, only the park. The cost of Dallas' planned park is significant but not daunting. Covering the Woodall Rogers freeway and building the park is estimated at $60 million.
RUNNING SCHOOLS THE CANADIAN WAY
Get ready for some new education-reform buzzwords: "the Edmonton model." It's a radical, bottom-up way of running schools, where principals are given say over 95 percent of their budget allocation and told to find the most effective and efficient ways of spending it. Conservative education theorists applaud the Edmonton model. School systems "should measure results, not dictate how to achieve them," Diane Ravitch told a columnist for the New York Post. One person who's a fan of the Edmonton approach is Washington, D.C., Superintendent Clifford B. Janey. He has already tried it in one high school. In return for the school not becoming a charter school and withdrawing from the school system, Janey gave the principal broad authority to make spending decisions. So far, outside observers are supportive of this approach to school management. Even the teachers' union is generally in favor, although one official said it was important that principals and others in schools be trained in deciding things that were once handled downtown.
THE STRANGEST TOWN IN AMERICA?
Vernon, California, a tiny suburb of Los Angeles, may be the strangest town in America. Consider that 44,000 people work in Vernon, but only 93 live there, most in city-owned housing. Sixty of the residents are registered voters and, as the Los Angeles Times reported, "almost all are either city employees or related to a city official." Most startling of all, Vernon hasn't had a contested election in more than a quarter-century. With its small and beholden electorate, Vernon acts more like a for-profit company or maybe a private club than a city. In January, eight outsiders rented a building in Vernon, moved in and announced that three of them would like to run for city council. Within days, the Times reported, the city had turned off the building's electricity, declared it unsafe for habitation and evicted the eight strangers. City officials refused to discuss the incident with the Times, but in a letter one official told the newspaper it looked to him like a takeover attempt orchestrated by outsiders. Why would anyone possibly want to take over Vernon's city government? The city supplies electricity and gas to its businesses, generating tens of millions of dollars per year in revenues, the Times said. And apparently city officials do rather well. The city administrator, who retired last year, took in nearly $600,000 in salary, bonuses and payments for unused vacation time, the newspaper reported.
