Public transit exists to move people efficiently from Point A to Point B. But if riders can be sold something along the way, that's good too, right? A financial services firm, ING Direct, thinks so. The company is offering to buy one morning's free ride for everyone using a big city's rail system in return for being allowed to market its services in the stations. Three systems, Boston's T, San Francisco's BART and Washington, D.C.'s Metro have already given their patrons a free ride. Such a promotion isn't cheap: ING Direct paid more than $600,000 for the Washington event. In return, the company draped its signs on the turnstiles and had ING representatives on hand to pass out marketing information. In the planning stages, Metro's board of directors was not pleased that ING wanted to offer free rides only to rail passengers, not bus riders. (Most Metro bus riders are in the city, while most rail passengers are suburbanites.) They saw this in racial and economic terms, with bus riders being slighted because, as one board member put it, "they're not as high-tech, they're not as accessible, they're not as visible in as many ways as rail riders." In the end, ING agreed to include bus riders, which added about $90,000 to the promotion's cost.
HOW THE OTHER HALF WORKS
In 1890, journalist Jacob Riis shocked affluent Americans with his book "How the Other Half Lives," about the scandalous living conditions of poor immigrants in New York. If Riis were alive today, he'd almost certainly include a chapter about day laborers. They are (almost always) men who, as the name suggests, work a day at a time in low-wage manual jobs, usually for construction or landscaping companies. On an early-morning drive through areas with high numbers of illegal immigrants, you'll see them standing in groups at convenience store or shopping center parking lots, waiting for contractors to pull up. If one does, watch out. The men push and shove their way into vans or jump on the back of pickup trucks. Cities must grapple with a variety of problems related to this practice: from workers who are swindled out of their wages to passersby frightened by groups of men loitering in parking lots. Duluth, Georgia, has begun regulating its day laborer system. The Atlanta suburb now registers and issues photo IDs to laborers (and fines those hired on street corners without an ID), assists a church in running a labor hall where contractors can request workers, and requires that contractors sign contracts guaranteeing to pay at least $10 an hour.
A LINE IS CROSSED
What comes to mind when you think of Portland, Oregon? Nike running shoes? Nice city parks? How about Portland's famous urban growth boundary, which draws a line around the region, with intense development on one side and farms on the other? Well, you might need to reconsider that last one. Oregon voters dealt a major blow to the growth boundary in the November election by passing an initiative requiring that governments compensate landowners who bought land under one set of development rules only to have a more restrictive set of rules imposed later on. Despite opposition to the change from former governors, environmentalists, utilities, labor unions and most of the state's farm bureaus, 60 percent of voters sided with the property- rights advocates. So what will it mean? Almost certainly more development outside the growth boundaries--and probably odd growth, too. A farmer whose family bought the land before zoning changes were made, for instance, could put a Dairy Queen and strip mall on it, but a timber company that bought the land later on could not. Governments could, of course, pay the farmer for the difference between the value of keeping his land in agriculture and its potential value as a strip mall, but most governments don't have that kind of money.
WELCOME, SISTER
The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul have been locked in a hundred years of sibling rivalry. St. Paul doesn't care much for Minneapolis (pushy, stuck up), and Minneapolis barely recognizes St. Paul's existence (slow, boring). So it's newsworthy that, for the first time in memory, the two city councils are meeting together this month. The seven-member St. Paul council is traveling to Minneapolis to meet with one of that council's committees. Reason: The two bodies want to go to the state legislature this winter with a joint wish list. "It's a pretty powerful statement when Minneapolis and St. Paul can get together on some important issues," a St. Paul council member noted. Two issues likely to be on the list: greater public transit funding and changes in property taxes. The idea of a united front makes so much sense, why haven't these councils been meeting together all along? There were some efforts in the 1970s, when the two bodies created something called the Twin Cities Committee and selected three members from each body to meet and talk. But in time, new council members were elected, old rivalries resurfaced, and the Twin Cities Committee faded away. (See related article on page 16.)
