Citiwire.net

For Release Thursday, June 25, 2009
Citiwire.net

Maybe somewhere in Obama-land, stimulus money is protecting public school classrooms. But here in the red clay of North Carolina, there’s a teacher layoff bloodbath going on.

A few days after I heard that the toughest and best history teacher at our daughter’s high school got the ax–one of hundreds of teacher layoffs in Charlotte’s public schools and thousands in $5 billion-in-the-red North Carolina–I listened to Charlotte’s airport manager describe a $300-million parking deck he’s planning, complete with pedestrian tunnel. It’s in a package of projects: a new international concourse, two new hourly parking decks, an expanded ticketing area, a new runway–all to be funded by bond sales, the debt paid with airport revenues. “We’re spending money like drunken sailors,” the manager recently told a Charlotte Chamber of Commerce group.

This is madness.

I live in a city where thousands go homeless every night, where public schools are laying off hundreds of teachers, teacher assistants and other very much needed staff. When the state’s budget is final, hundreds more will almost certainly lose jobs. Although North Carolina’s unemployment rate is now at 11.1 percent and homelessness is growing, essential health care and human services will be slashed–even if the legislature adopts a package of tax increases to shave a billion or so off the projected $5 billion shortfall.

And Charlotte is building a Taj Mahal parking deck at its airport? While teachers are being laid off, and essential human services eliminated? Something is horribly wrong.

The problem is not–as many voters undoubtedly assume–misplaced priorities by city officials. (In North Carolina city governments don’t run school systems.) The underlying problem is that we have too many little governments, each with its own pot of money and sliver of governance. It’s a system that easily undermines the democratic process, leading to startlingly bad public policy.

We’re lost in a labyrinth of local governments, a crazy-quilt that leads to crazy priorities. For instance, most everyone would agree it’s smarter to keep excellent teachers in classrooms than to pamper airport customers with a new parking deck and tunnel.

But if the airport manager scrapped that parking deck, the money saved wouldn’t benefit the schools by a penny. Nor would it help fill potholes, provide mental health treatment or build even an inch of a light rail line. The airport is an “enterprise fund,” run off the airport-only revenues it brings in. Those revenues aren’t legally available to the public schools.

All over America we have city budgets, county budgets, school system budgets, state government budgets and dozens of other budgets: municipal service district budgets, sewer district budgets, enterprise fund budgets, highway trust fund budgets. And that doesn’t even count the federal budget.

Voters are so confused about who pays for what that they don’t know which of their elected representatives to complain to. Charlotte parents outraged over teacher layoffs rail at the elected school board. But in North Carolina school boards must make do with whatever funds are allocated to them by the state legislature and county governments. Most voters, including those trying to protest education cuts, don’t even know who their state representatives are, much less how to reach them.

Maybe a few places are paying attention. The New York Times reported in May that local governments in the New York region, battered by recession, are considering a wave of consolidations, mergers and shared services. New York state government, the Times reported, has spent $29 million over two years to help 140 local governments consolidate services. In addition, it reported, New Jersey–whose 566 municipalities are the most, per capita of any state–last year started slashing funding to more than 300 communities of less than 10,000 population, pushing them to combine services.

North Carolina has 100 counties–a political jurisdiction created to be small enough so a farmer could travel by horse to the county seat and home again, within a day. It’s a quaint and nostalgic delineation, but hardly a 21st-century one. Georgia has 159 counties. Texas has 254.

But it’s safe to assume that most elected officials in cash-strapped jurisdictions are spending the bulk of their energy and political capital these days trying to balance failing budgets, rather than trying to eliminate their own jobs or those of political rivals, or merging cities and counties that don’t want to be merged. Indeed, while a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, a crisis also demands rather a lot of attention, leaving little time for the kinds of essential restructuring and tax reform that so many state and local governments truly need.

So for now, most of us are left with absurdities like this one: Hundreds of teachers are losing their jobs. Meanwhile, over at Charlotte city offices no layoffs are planned or needed. And the airport is going to be just gorgeous.

Sharing the pain?

Hardly.

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