Political Economy in Dauphin County: CAT Edition

Capitol Area Transit has a funding crisis.

As they prepare to finalize their 2014 budgets, Cumberland and Dauphin counties could be headed into a showdown with Capital Area Transit over funding.  

The counties, who join with Harrisburg as CAT's funding partners, have each proposed giving the authority level funding for 2014. But that is less than what CAT has asked for, and less than what CAT executive director William Jones said the counties need to provide under state law.  

The problem is compounded by Harrisburg's inability to pay the $73,000 it owes CAT from 2013.  

Under Act 44, the partners together have to increase their payments to CAT by 5 percent annually, Jones said. If that doesn't happen, CAT could have to return money to the state and federal governments that were meant to match local investment in mass transit.

It looks like Harrisburg's new Mayor Eric Papenfuse's fledgling admin is going to get jammed with a major bill here before all is said and done.

Harrisburg Mayor-elect Eric Papenfuse could propose changing CAT's allocation when he takes office, but that would mean cutting elsewhere in the tight city budget. 

"We wouldn't want to say anything before we get a recommendation from our transition team," said Papenfuse spokeswoman Joyce Davis. 

The new administration expects to have 15 days to make changes to the budget, Davis said. There will almost certainly be some alterations to the Thompson, Davis said, since Papenfuse wants to make changes to how Harrisburg's government is organized.

City councilman Bruce Weber seems to think the city can pay. . .

@stcif01 I would say that would be a bit extreme...#HBG should pay its required & outstanding obligations. Have to find $$. It can be done
— Bruce P Weber (@btrain12) December 5, 2013

The discussion that ensued was a good fleshing out of where Harrisburg stands politically.

I contend that for proper regional transit to be a viable alternative to automobile transportation, the counties must become a bigger part of the revenue streams to CAT. Bruce here is telling it just how it is. He is a city councilman right now and has to solve problems right now. The city, like it or not, is subordinate politically to the suburban priorities of Dauphin, and on this issue, Cumberland County. 

Suburban, exurban, and rural voter priorities are not aligned currently, even though the city of Harrisburg, not the townships, is the region's economic powerhouse. Never-the-less this disconnect makes it good politics for Dauphin County's two Republican commissioners to tell Harrisburg to eat it every chance they get, so they can get Norquisty, to the detriment of the region as a whole. 

This is exactly why we need to work to change voter preferences. 

It is not because Harrisburg is some charity case that we should feel bad for and implement policies that righteously assist it. It is because as liberals, and hopefully progressives ones at that, we realize that transportation policy should be about moving people, not moving cars. Because we realize that segregation in schools comes when people divest from their communities and separate themselves further and further from their neighbors out of fear and selfishness. It is because we want everyone to receive the same standard of access to health care and food. It is because we want to lower the barriers to market entry so everyone can have a fair shot at their hopes.  

Democrats have already won in measures of strictly affiliation. Now, if we want real policy victories, like expanding CAT's service, we need to transform that numerical advantage into people demanding change. Right now with the balance of power tilted in the GOP's favor all Democratic leaders like Councilman Weber can do, when presented with situations like this is go along to get along.

Segregation Still Matters

Last week's This American Life highlighted the strenuous research/reporting that Nikole Hannah-Jones has been doing for the journalistic non-prof ProPublica on housing discrimination and segregation in America. 

What I think was most critical to take away from the hour long segment, is that de facto racism is still a huge force in American politics, as much as the GOP want's us to think it is not.

America, years after the civil rights movement, is still heavily divided by zip code, and those five digits may be the most important numbers in your life. 

The study — based on millions of anonymous earnings records and being released this week by a team of top academic economists — is the first with enough data to compare upward mobility across metropolitan areas. These comparisons provide some of the most powerful evidence so far about the factors that seem to drive people’s chances of rising beyond the station of their birth, including education, family structure and the economic layout of metropolitan areas. 

Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. By contrast, some of the highest rates occur in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota. 

“Where you grow up matters,” said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the study’s authors. “There is tremendous variation across the U.S. in the extent to which kids can rise out of poverty.”

Knowing how important, and random birth location is, it is intuitive to say that segregation is a major political problem worthy of devoting our time and energy to combat. It can be harder once we try to stop and think about it to qualify what makes it such a problem. After all, the civil rights movement is over. We won right? Any outcomes now are normal and acceptable, based on self selection?

All it takes is a ride through Harrisburg city to know this is not the case. The perpetuation of the status-quo leads us down an already well worn road of segregation, isolation, and othering. 

Highlighted in the TAL program was President Lyndon Johnson's 1967 Kerner Commission Report. The report was produced to try and establish the causes of race riots that dominated American cities in the late 1960's. Hannah-Jones quoted from it

"This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."

"Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it."

The creation of these separate societies are as real today as they ever were. Black and white experience separate lived experiences, realities.

The failure to truly integrate haunts us still today. Separateness enables us to only further separate. White families live in income exclusive suburban environments with good schools, while people of color reside in urban, low income hoods with crumbling infrastructure and institutions. 

"The most segregated parts of the country are, and have been for decades, the Northeast and the Midwest. Milwaukee is consistently one of the most segregated cities in the country. In Milwaukee and in other cities, including New York, the level of black-white segregation by one important measure has declined only by a trickle in 30 years. 

I've got a map on the wall in my office of Brooklyn that shows a giant red cluster right in the middle, where African Americans make up over 80% of the population, even though they're only 25% of the city overall, and even though on the street, New York feels like a very integrated city."

--- 

"The average African-American household making $75,000 a year or more, that family lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average white family making less than $40,000 a year. That is, a black family making twice as much money as a white family probably still lives in a poorer neighborhood. That's according to a study from Brown University."

The availability heuristic easily takes hold and to us, what you see is all there is. The reality of white suburban conservatives and even some liberals is a racial empathy gap. 

George Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin because he perceived him as dangerous. The defense argues he was, the prosecution argues he wasn’t. No one, of course, argues that Zimmerman approached Martin with kindness, or stopped to consider the boy as anything other than suspicious, an outsider. Ultimately Zimmerman shot and killed Martin. A lack of empathy can produce national tragedies. But it also drives quieter, more routine forms of discrimination.

It includes advocacy for cutting taxes, tough on crime stances, austerity budgets, and states' rights, and local sovereignty. 

Work Search Requirements

This has issue has gotten some traction now that the effects of  a rule change allows state unemployment benefits to be withheld if those collecting the benefits don’t register with a useless career site, are coming to fruition. Tom Corbett is using the same language in his Medicaid talk. 

The desire to of Republicans stems from a couple places. Skin deep it is an easy appeal to not just the party base, but really many independents and Democrats too who don’t know any better. They throw around the terms “Government Waste” and worry that poor people’s priorities aren’t straight. Deeper than that though I think the conversion of many non GOPers to this line of thinking has been a messaging victory for them.

The position that you should have to look for work while on unemployment, or Medicaid (even when you already have a job) stems from the feeling that people who are poor are poor because they don’t try hard enough. As in the people who are poor are not actually interested in looking on their own. This position ignores a startling amount of research to the contrary, and is downright cruel (I would go so far as to say psychically damaging) to the people living these realities. 

Yet from Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens to Mitt Romney 47% comment the message remains the same. Policy priorities like this should remind us all why we are affiliated Democrats. 

At a time when people are dropping out of the work force in droves maybe if the Republicans were really concerned with helping the unemployed they would stop cutting investment in and from the public sector.