USA > History > 2010 > Towns / Cities (I)

In Los Angeles,

Big Step Ahead for Mass Transit

November 25, 2010
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

LOS ANGELES — This auto-obsessed city — a place where people love their cars almost as much as they hate the traffic — has embarked on the biggest expansion of its mass transit system in decades, an effort to change the way people navigate its sprawling and clogged streets and freeways.

Los Angeles transit officials, after years of debate, have approved an 8.6-mile extension of the Purple Line subway, from Koreatown through a crowded corridor of offices, homes, museums, schools and shopping centers in Beverly Hills, Century City and Westwood.

What once seemed a quixotic vision — the “Subway to the Sea,” connecting Union Station in downtown to the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica — no longer seems quite so quixotic.

At the same time, Los Angeles received $546 million from the federal government to build, over the next 10 years, an 8.5-mile above-ground light-rail line from the Crenshaw district to Los Angeles International Airport.

An 11-mile extension of the Metro Gold Line, which starts in East Los Angeles and will eventually go out to Montclair, began in June, and construction is set to begin this year extending the Exposition Light Rail Line from Culver City to Santa Monica.

Taken together, these developments have emboldened mass transit enthusiasts here and lent credibility to what has become something of a legacy project for Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who ran for office pledging to build a transit system that would upend long-established commuting habits and ease what has long been a bane of life in Los Angeles.

“This put to rest all this talk of, ‘Will we ever build a subway?’ ” Mr. Villaraigosa said, somewhat triumphantly, in an interview. “This is a big deal. People have been talking about it for years. And they were making fun of me: ‘Where is the subway?!’ ”

Los Angeles once had a large, intricate and thriving public transportation system, with so-called Yellow Car trolleys that ran on downtown streets and a vast network of Red Cars, operated by the Pacific Electric Railroad, that ran throughout the region. This was dismantled amid the city’s fervent embrace of the automobile (encouraged, in no small part, by oil interests in Los Angeles that realized the economic potential of the car).

But with a vote by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority’s board last month to approve the Purple Line expansion, there is a consensus that these projects are going to be built, even among those who describe them as a waste of money in a region that will never embrace mass transit. The projects are being financed by a half-cent sales tax surcharge approved by Los Angeles voters two years ago and expected to raise $40 billion over the next 30 years.

Not to say that there aren’t battles left to be fought.

Beverly Hills officials oppose a proposed stretch of the Purple Line because it would burrow under a public high school; they want the line moved a few blocks north. That has its own complications: skirting the high school would put the subway cheek by jowl against an earthquake fault that runs down Santa Monica Boulevard.

“We very much want the Subway to the Sea, but we are very strongly against the high school route,” said Jimmy Delshad, the mayor of Beverly Hills.

Most immediately, the Republican takeover of the United States House this month threatens to undermine a fiscal maneuver pressed by Mr. Villaraigosa in Washington to accelerate construction of the projects. The mayor had asked the federal government to give an advance loan against those sales tax revenues, allowing the work to be done in 10 years, an idea that seemed to be gaining steam until Election Day.

“Let’s face it, after the midterm election we’re in a new world,” said Joel Epstein, a mass transit advocate.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, the Democrat who represents the area, said he hoped Republicans would not block a plan that, he argued, would create jobs, improve the transit system and not cost the federal government a significant sum of money.

“This is the kind of idea that some Republicans may even find attractive,” Mr. Waxman said. “It’s tremendously important. I see that whenever I’m at home and in my car: it’s just terrible traffic.”

Still, the most intriguing question may be whether a place that has so embraced the culture of cars — and, with its sprawl, could not be more different from subway-friendly cities like New York, London and Paris — will make the kind of lifestyle adjustment envisioned by mass transit enthusiasts. There were an average of 295,000 daily riders on the 79 miles of subway and light-rail lines in October, and 1.2 million on city buses.

Tom Rubin, a mass transit consultant in Oakland, called the subway project fiscal folly that would serve only to take resources away from the widely used, if less efficient, network of buses.

“They have been pushing rail expansion for decades now,” Mr. Rubin said, “and it has not had much of an impact in terms of increasing transit ridership. The big problem is that these are very, very expensive, and we wind up spending so much money on building these rail lines that there is not enough to operate bus service. So we wind up cutting back on bus operations and then raising fares, which drives the riders away.”

Robert B. Cervero, the director of the University of California Transportation Center in Berkeley, said that if the subway expansion cut commuting time as promised, it would indeed change ridership habits. Transit officials said the ride from Koreatown to Westwood by subway would take 24 minutes, compared with 50 minutes during the rush in a car or on a bus.

“The science of public transit is not too complicated,” Mr. Cervero said in an e-mail message. “It comes down to how time-competitive transit is with the private car. If it takes two to three times longer to get from Point A to Point B by transit, the vast majority of folks will drive. If it’s faster going by bus or train, then most will forsake their car and ride transit.”

Mr. Epstein said that changing demographics and population patterns — and ever-rising frustration over traffic — would inevitably drive people from cars underground.

“There’s a whole new type of Angeleno who has no cultural opposition to riding,” he said. “The whole old-school L.A. thinking that people don’t ride subways, that’s a thing of the past.”

    In Los Angeles, Big Step Ahead for Mass Transit, NYT, 25.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/us/26transit.html

New York City Crime Dips

but Violent Crime Is Up

November 25, 2010
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and JANET ROBERTS

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, within six weeks of the year’s end, faced questions about the state of crime in New York City with what has become a familiar and welcome answer: Overall crime in the city is down again in 2010.

“Crime is down this year,” Mr. Kelly told reporters on Tuesday after a promotion ceremony in Lower Manhattan. “Down about a percent and a half, citywide, the index crimes.”

But the reason the Police Department can make that claim is not that murders are down. Or rapes. Or robberies. All of those crimes are up, as are shootings, driving an overall 3.5 percent increase in violent crime through mid-November, compared with last year.

Rather, because of the way major crimes are counted in New York — lumping violent crimes in with far larger numbers of property theft complaints, including the largest category, grand larceny — police officials could say that overall crime was down 1.3 percent. Without a substantial decrease in grand larcenies this year, however, the city would show an increase in overall crime.

When pressed, Mr. Kelly, to be fair, does not dodge the truth of the more disturbing numbers. “We have seen a spike in murders, rapes and robberies,” he acknowledged.

But he cautioned against compartmentalizing crimes or analyzing data from too short a period, seeking to put those spikes in historical context. Homicides are up, he said, but only over the record low last year, 471. They are still on track to be “probably the third-lowest year for murders that we’ve had since we started to record them accurately,” Mr. Kelly noted.

He added: “Every year of the Bloomberg administration, we’ve had murders below the 600 level. It never happened before. Prior to 2002, we’ve never had a year where we had less than 600 murders.”

But murder counts have not been the issue talked about the most in connection with New York crime statistics this year. Instead, much debate has centered on a fresh set of concerns over the integrity of the crime statistics and suspicions about whether crime complaints were being manipulated.

A first note sounded in February when, in an academic survey, retired police captains and higher-ranking officers said pressure to reduce crime had led some managers to alter crime data to show annual decreases in the index crimes measured in the department’s CompStat program.

Police officials disputed the methodology of the survey.

Later, a whistleblower officer made public his allegations that crime complaints in the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn were manipulated. In October the department brought internal charges against the precinct’s former commander and four others, accusing them of failing to record a grand-larceny auto theft and a robbery complaint.

Notably, grand larceny is one crime category that draws scrutiny from those who suspect numbers-fudging. In their survey of retired captains and others, the two academic researchers said some respondents told them that commanders and supervisors had combed Web sites to find lower values for items stolen from victims, enabling them to downgrade reported grand larcenies to misdemeanors from felonies.

Richard M. Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission, which monitors crime and police policies, said it was “hard to know” if the crime numbers, particularly on grand larceny, were being manipulated. But he said, “There are certainly serious questions out there that need to be resolved about the police data.”

An analysis by The New York Times of crime tallies through Nov. 14, downloaded from the Web site of the Police Department, provided no clear confirmation or rebuttal of statistical manipulations.

Robbery is driving the citywide rise in violence. On a precinct level, the 75th Precinct in East New York, Brooklyn, was one of three in the city showing the highest increases in robberies. The others were the 103rd in Jamaica, Queens, and the 79th in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Citywide, robbery was up in four of the five boroughs, and in pockets of all of them.

The police say teenager-on-teenager robbery is up in many places. It is hitting hardest in the Bronx, where an increase of 383 robberies, compared with the same period in 2009, accounted for almost half the citywide jump.

Rapes were up 15 percent citywide and rose in every borough but Queens. Already, with 1,207 rapes on the books through mid-November, there have been more rapes recorded than in all of 2009. If the pace continues, the city will log more than 1,300 rapes this year, a higher number than for any year since 2006.

The highest rape rates — those double or more the citywide per capita rate — cut two distinct swaths through the city, one across Harlem and into the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, and the other running southeast in Brooklyn from Bedford-Stuyvesant into East New York.

Homicides hit 470 by Nov. 14, which was 67 more than in the same period last year. Their numbers increased the most in traditional danger zones, in the Bronx and northern Brooklyn, and new concentrations appeared in eastern Queens, where two precincts accounted for 20 percent of the city’s overall increase.

A look at homicides per precinct shows that the 75th led the way, with 29. Next door in Brooklyn, the 73rd Precinct was on pace to log the highest rate of homicides per capita, for the fourth year running, with 2.6 homicides per 10,000 residents. The 25th Precinct, in East Harlem, saw the biggest raw number increase, to 10 from 2 last year. By contrast, eight precincts made it through mid-November with no homicides.

Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said each category had to be seen in context. Robberies were still 13 percent lower than two years ago. More than 90 percent of rapes this year involved acquaintances or relatives, which “would seem to indicate that the past reluctance of victims to report relatives or date rapes is giving way to willingness of victims to report,” he said.

Violent assault was fairly flat, because there were 111 fewer assaults on police officers, traffic agents and other peace officers than in 2009. With murders, Mr. Browne said, the police are simply “fighting our own success.”

On the flip side, major property crimes, and most notably grand larcenies, which are defined as felony thefts with losses valued at more than $1,000, declined by a combined 4 percent. Property crimes were down by 2,348, to 57,737 cases from 60,085 in the first 10 1/2 months of last year. Burglary dropped to 16,113 from 16,508, and auto thefts dropped to 9,096 from 9,276, the police statistics show. The drop in grand larcenies, to 32,528 from 34,301, represented 76 percent of the net decrease.

And the biggest drop in grand larcenies happened in the geographically confined area of Manhattan south of 59th Street, which logged 560 fewer larcenies through Nov. 14, representing nearly a third of the total citywide decrease in that category. Statistics from the two Midtown precincts were responsible for most of that decline, combining for 318 fewer larcenies.

Mr. Browne said southern Manhattan always dwarfs other areas of the city in generating complaints of grand larceny, “so it should not come as a surprise that a decrease there would have a major effect, as would an increase.” He said Deputy Chief Michael J. McEnroy led several initiatives this year to reduce grand larcenies and property crimes in southern Manhattan, including running burglary and larceny apprehension and surveillance teams.

In the end, Mr. Aborn of the Citizens Crime Commission said, the story of crime this year is complicated. “New York remains an incredibly safe city,” said Mr. Aborn, who ran unsuccessfully last year for Manhattan district attorney. “The one thing cutting against that is this is the first year where we have seen a steady uptick in violent crime. And that is something that we really need to keep our eye on.”

    New York City Crime Dips but Violent Crime Is Up, NYT, 25.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/nyregion/26crime.html

For New York Comptroller, Attorney General

October 15, 2010
The New York Times
Harry Wilson

New Yorkers will soon elect the first comptroller since Alan Hevesi disgraced the job. Almost four years ago, Mr. Hevesi was replaced by Thomas DiNapoli, who was picked by fellow Democrats in the State Legislature.

Mr. DiNapoli, who started with little experience or knowledge of finance, has been a worthy caretaker. New Yorkers, however, have a chance to choose someone who knows finance and is not beholden to the Democrats in control in Albany.

That person is the Republican candidate, Harry Wilson, who helped turn around General Motors last year.

Mr. DiNapoli has made some helpful changes in the comptroller’s office in an effort to shield the $125 billion pension fund from political influence. He has also repeatedly warned about problems in the state budget. But he adopted a questionable plan from the pension fund, and he has failed to push hard enough to create public campaign financing for the comptroller’s office.

It is rare for someone of Mr. Wilson’s talents and expertise to compete for one of the most important and least glamorous jobs in state politics.

Mr. Wilson went to Harvard Business School and worked for Goldman Sachs, the Blackstone Group and Silver Point Capital. Mr. DiNapoli tries to make that résumé sound tainted, but the investment and management skills exhibited with General Motors are just what are needed for New York’s financial and ethical blight.

Mr. Wilson promises to strengthen ethics rules, make better audits of state agencies and drastically reduce the $350 million a year in investment fees paid for the state’s pension fund.

Eric Schneiderman

In the race for attorney general, Daniel Donovan, the Republican, is a decent man who seems ready to restore the job to the sleepy backwater it was a dozen years ago. The Democrat, State Senator Eric Schneiderman, would continue taking on powerful interests gone bad in Albany, on Wall Street or elsewhere.

Mr. Schneiderman should be given the chance to do that.

As the Staten Island district attorney for seven years, Mr. Donovan has done a competent job. He has increased the borough’s conviction rate, provided much-needed witness protections in his area and added translators for an increasingly diverse community. Unfortunately, he does not seem to see a wider role for the state’s attorney general and clearly wants to soften oversight of Wall Street.

Women’s groups have rightly become concerned about an opponent of Roe v. Wade like Mr. Donovan taking over as attorney general because, in other states, that position has been used as a national platform to fight abortion rights. Mr. Donovan says he would enforce the laws that make abortion legal. That crimped statement stands in stark contrast to Mr. Schneiderman’s history of working to support women’s rights.

Both candidates have acted foolishly at times in the campaign, especially in their fight over Al Sharpton’s endorsement of Mr. Schneiderman. The bottom line is that Mr. Schneiderman has made a strong case recently and over the years that he would take an active role in fighting for criminal justice, public integrity, civil rights, consumer rights, the environment and health care.

    For New York Comptroller, Attorney General, NYT, 15.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/opinion/16sat2.html

N.Y. Faces $200 Billion in Retiree Health Costs

October 12, 2010
The New York Times
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

The cities, counties and authorities of New York have promised more than $200 billion worth of health benefits to their retirees while setting aside almost nothing, putting the public work force on a collision course with the taxpayers who are expected to foot the bill.

The total cost appears in a report to be issued on Wednesday by the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a research organization that studies fiscal policy.

It does not suggest that New York must somehow come up with $200 billion right away.

But the report casts serious doubt over whether medical benefits for New York’s retirees will be sustainable, given the sputtering economy and today’s climate of hostility toward new taxes and taxpayer bailouts.

The daunting size of the health care obligation raises the possibility that localities will be forced at some point to choose between paying their retirees’ medical costs and paying the investors who hold their bonds. Government officials aim to satisfy both groups, and have even made painful cuts in local services when necessary to keep up with both sets of payments.

Only a few places have tried to rein in their costs, by billing retirees for a portion of the premiums, for example. Retirees have responded with lawsuits, but ratings agencies and municipal bond buyers have shrugged off these warning signs.

“So far, the market doesn’t care,” said Edmund J. McMahon, the director of the Empire Center. “The market seems to assume, on the basis of nothing, that at some point all of these places are simply going to stop paying retiree health benefits.”

The health benefits are entirely separate from the pensions that New York’s public workers have earned. Governments have reported their pension obligations for years, but their retiree medical obligations have been building up unseen, because governments were not required to account for them. The information is starting to come to light because of a new accounting requirement.

One city, Schenectady, found the cost too overwhelming to calculate, warning that it “will be astronomical, with the potential of bankrupting municipalities.”

The city even said in a document accompanying a recent debt offering that it did not know whether it was really required to comply with the new accounting rule.

The $200 billion that New York State and its localities owe retirees in the aggregate is less than the amount they owe their bondholders, about $264 billion. But health costs are rising, and in some places the obligations have already eclipsed the value of the government’s outstanding bonds. Most credit analysts seem to expect that if a municipality has to default on something, it will default on its retiree health promises, not on its bonds. Pensions, meanwhile, are considered protected by the New York State constitution.

But no one knows for sure, and no one is predicting that retirees will take the loss of a valuable health plan lying down.

“It will be a mess. There will be a lot of disputes, a lot of litigation,” said Jerry A. Webman, chief economist for OppenheimerFunds. He said that defaults and bankruptcies by governments were still so rare that there was little legal precedent, and no way of knowing which pledges would survive a court challenge.

Retiree health benefits in New York consist of an indemnity plan plus optional managed-care plans.

There is no central source of information, but Mr. McMahon found governments paying 35 percent to 100 percent of the premiums. Retirees can further reduce their share by paying their premiums with unused sick time.

The vast majority of the work force can start drawing benefits at age 55. When retirees turn 65 and join Medicare, their former employers reimburse their Medicare premiums and supplement the federal program.

The cost pressures are by no means unique to New York. States and cities across the country have promised retiree health benefits without identifying a way to pay for them, leaving taxpayers on the hook. Mr. McMahon said he thought his group’s new study was the first to aggregate the obligations in a single state.

In practice, each municipality pledges to pay its own retiree health obligations. But if one were in distress, the state could step in through the Financial Emergency Act, passed in 1975 for the rescue of New York City, and might backstop some costs.

The state already stands behind the bonds of some authorities as well. Some officials and bankers worry that the state might be unable to make good if a number of towns and authorities got into trouble at the same time. New York State does have a solid AA rating on its general obligation bonds, however.

New York City has the biggest retiree health obligation, having promised benefits worth $62 billion as of June 30, 2008 — roughly what the state of California has promised, and more than New York City’s outstanding debt on its bonds.

The city’s five pension funds also have big holes, which have been calculated in various ways. The last time the city’s chief actuary, Robert C. North, assessed their status, in June 2008, he found a shortfall of about $75 billion between what the workers had earned and the money that had been set aside.

The new accounting rule for retiree health plans lets governments disclose a little at a time, but New York City reported its entire obligation. The combination of the unfunded pension and retiree health obligations gives New York City a negative net worth, but that does not mean it is about to collapse, just that it will have to bring its finances back into balance. New York City’s general obligation debt is rated AA.

The obligation to employees of New York State was only slightly less than the city’s, $60 billion. Third place went to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which has promised health benefits worth about $13 billion.

Mr. McMahon of the Empire Center drew the numbers primarily from local government reports, ferreted out from obscure documents, bond offering statements and audited financial statements.

He then tried to determine where the burden was heaviest. He found that every resident of New York City was responsible for $7,343, in today’s dollars, for health care for retired city workers. What’s more, they owe a big share of the costs for retired state workers, an additional $3,082 for each person living in New York state.

Among the state’s smaller cities, Mr. McMahon found unusually large per capita amounts owed in Buffalo, Syracuse, White Plains and Niagara Falls.

“You’ve got a lot of cities whose growth prospects are murky, to put it best,” Mr. McMahon said. “You’re looking at a G.M.-type situation, a struggling company that’s trying to remake itself, but it has this huge legacy cost.”

Buffalo also has the distinction of paying more for health care for its retirees than for its current employees, a situation Mr. McMahon called “exceptional.”

    N.Y. Faces $200 Billion in Retiree Health Costs, NYT, 12.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/business/13retire.html

Fiscal Woes Deepening for Cities, Report Says

October 6, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER

The nation’s cities are in their worst fiscal shape in at least a quarter of a century and have probably not yet hit the bottom of their slide, according to a report released on Wednesday.

The report, by the National League of Cities, found that many cities, which are in their fourth straight year of declining revenues, are only now beginning to see lower property values translate into lower property tax collections, which are the backbone of many city budgets.

It can take several years for city assessors to catch up to real estate market conditions, and this year, for the first time since the housing bubble burst, cities are projecting a 1.8 percent decrease in property tax collections.

With sales tax collections still down, and unemployment and stagnant salaries taking a toll on cities that rely on income-tax revenues, cities are seeing their revenues drop even faster than many of them have been able to cut spending. They also face the additional burden of paying rising health care and pension costs for their employees.

“The effects of a depressed real estate market, low levels of consumer confidence, and high levels of unemployment will likely play out in cities through 2010, 2011 and beyond,” the report said.

Cities around the country have made steep cuts to stay afloat, from layoffs of firefighters and police officers to turning off street lights. The report, which surveyed finance officers in 338 cities, found that two-thirds of them were canceling or delaying construction and maintenance projects, a third were laying off workers and a quarter were cutting public safety.

Christopher W. Hoene, one of the authors of the report, said in an interview that the length of the downturn had dealt cities an unusual blow: in most recessions, he said, sales tax collections start to improve by the time property tax collections drop to reflect lower home values.

“This time around, the recession has been deep enough that we have the two major sources of revenue down at the same time,” Mr. Hoene said.

And cities have few places to turn for help, leaving tax increases and service cuts as their main options.

“Right now there isn’t really anywhere to turn,” Mr. Hoene said, noting that many states are now cutting aid to cities, not increasing it. “The state budgets are in a position where they are more likely to hurt than to help.”

    Fiscal Woes Deepening for Cities, Report Says, NYT, 6.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/us/07cities.html

Struggling Cities Shut Firehouses in Budget Crisis

August 26, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER

SAN DIEGO — Fire departments around the nation are cutting jobs, closing firehouses and increasingly resorting to “rolling brownouts” in which they shut different fire companies on different days as the economic downturn forces many cities and towns to make deep cuts that are slowing their responses to fires and other emergencies.

Philadelphia began rolling brownouts this month, joining cities from Baltimore to Sacramento that now shut some units every day. San Jose, Calif., laid off 49 firefighters last month. And Lawrence, Mass., north of Boston, has laid off firefighters and shut down half of its six firehouses, forcing the city to rely on help from neighboring departments each time a fire goes to a second alarm.

Fire chiefs and union officials alike say it is the first time they have seen such deep cuts in so many parts of the country. “I’ve never seen it so widespread,” said Harold A. Schaitberger, the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters.

The risks of cutting fire service were driven home here last month when Bentley Do, a 2-year-old boy who was visiting relatives, somehow got his hands on a gum ball, put it in his mouth, started laughing and then began choking.

“It blocked the air hole,” said his uncle, Brian Do, who called 911 while other relatives frantically tried to dislodge the gum ball. “No air could flow in and out.”

It is only 600 steps from the front door of the neatly kept stucco home where the boy was staying to the nearest fire station, just down the block. But the station was empty that evening: its engine was in another part of town, on a call in an area usually covered by an engine that had been taken out of service as part of a brownout plan.

The police came to the home within five minutes and began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, officials said. But it took nine and a half minutes — almost twice the national goal of arriving within five minutes — for the fire engine, with a paramedic and more medical equipment, to get there. An ambulance came moments later and took Bentley to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The San Diego Fire-Rescue chief, Javier Mainar, said it was impossible to say whether the delay contributed to Bentley’s death on July 20. But he said there was no doubt that the city’s brownouts, which take 13 percent of firefighters off the streets each day to save $11.5 million annually, led to the delay.

“You can just lock everything down and look at it sequentially, chronologically, as to what occurred,” Chief Mainar said in an interview. “There is no question that the brownout of Engine 44 resulted in Engine 38 having to take a response in that community, and because of that, Engine 38 was now out of position to respond to something that happened just down the street from their fire station.”

Fire service was once a sacred cow at budget time. But the downturn has lingered so long that many cities, which have already made deep cuts in other agencies, are now turning to their fire departments.

Some are trying to wrest concessions from unions, which over the years have won generous pension plans that allow many firefighters to retire in their 40s and 50s — plans that many cities say are unaffordable. Others want to reduce minimum-staffing requirements, which often force them to resort to costly overtime to fill shifts. Others are simply cutting service.

Analysts worry that some of the cuts could be putting people and property in danger. As the downturn has worn on, ISO, an organization that evaluates cities’ fire protection capabilities for the insurance industry, has downgraded more cities, said Michael R. Waters, ISO’s vice president of risk-detection services.

“This is generally due to a reduction in firefighting personnel available for responding to calls, a reduction in the number of responding fire apparatus, and gaps in the optimal deployment of apparatus or deficiencies in firefighter training programs,” Mr. Waters said in a statement.

Several fire chiefs said in interviews that the cuts were making them nervous.

“It’s roulette,” said Chief James S. Clack of the Baltimore City Fire Department, which recently reduced the number of fire units closed each day to three from six. Officials saw that the closings in the 55-unit department were in some cases leading to longer response times. “I’m always worried that something’s going to happen where one of these companies is closed.”

Early in his mayoralty, Michael R. Bloomberg of New York closed six fire companies to save money. This year, a threat to close 20 more — a 6 percent reduction in New York’s fire companies — was averted when the city found savings elsewhere.

Several cities — including Lawrence — have said that they were forced to cut service because the unions failed to make concessions. Mr. Schaitberger, the union president, who was here for a union convention, said that protecting the pensions his members have won over the years was a top priority this year.

The pension issue has an added resonance in San Diego. The city was forced to consider a bankruptcy filing even before the Great Recession, and was barred from raising money by selling bonds to the public after officials disclosed that they had shortchanged the pension fund for city workers for years, even as they improved pension benefits. San Diego’s pension fund has only two-thirds of the money it needs to pay the benefits promised to retirees, according to an updated calculation made by the city in the spring, and faces a shortfall of $2.1 billion.

So even before the recession and the brownouts, fire service in San Diego was stretched thin. A previous San Diego fire chief, Jeff Bowman, was hired in 2002 with a mandate to build up the department, but he resigned in 2006, after the pension-fueled fiscal crisis surfaced and it became clear that he would not get the money to build and staff the extra fire stations he believed were needed. “The question is whether fire protection is adequate, and in my opinion it’s not,” he said in an interview.

After Bentley Do died, the City Council agreed to put a question on the ballot in November asking voters to approve a sales tax increase, which could be put in place only if the city adopts certain budget and pension reforms. The money could restore the fire service and help close a deep budget gap projected for next year.

But it would come too late for the Do family. Bentley, whose father, Nam Do, an American, was working in Vietnam as an architect, was just visiting San Diego with his mother, Mien Nguyen. Ms. Nguyen, who was six months pregnant, was here to take the oath of United States citizenship. She was sworn in the day after Bentley died, Brian Do, the uncle, said, but she fainted when she got her certificate and was taken to the hospital. Nam Do left his job in Vietnam to come here to grieve for his son, and goes to a temple every day, Brian Do said.

He said that the family had no plans to sue the city. “We’re not blaming the city or blaming the Fire Department,” he said, “but the reason I speak out is because I want them to do a better job for other people.”

    Struggling Cities Shut Firehouses in Budget Crisis, NYT, 26.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27cuts.html

New Orleans Mayor Had a Full Plate Even Before the Spill

July 13, 2010
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
 

NEW ORLEANS — The Risky Business and the Mañana, two shrimp boats with names that sum up much about life in this city, were on the lookout for oil in the waters leading into Lake Pontchartrain.

Watching them last Friday aboard the Power Nap, another shrimp boat involved in the response, was a group of BP and Coast Guard officials, unemployed fishermen, cleanup workers and Mitch Landrieu, the city’s relatively new mayor.

Mr. Landrieu talked with almost fatherly pride about the steps his administration and the president of neighboring St. Tammany Parish had put together to block the oil, including a new kind of boom that was being deployed and a line of barges across the narrow strait that leads into the lake.

These efforts had mostly worked so far, though strong winds had pushed tar balls past the barges over the previous weekend.

It was another unexpected battle for the mayor, who took office just after the spill started and discovered far bigger problems with the city than he anticipated.

“The oil spill’s much worse than we ever thought,” Mr. Landrieu said. “The budget’s much worse, the dysfunction is much worse, the N.O.P.D. is much worse. But, you know, that’s why I signed up.”

During the short election season before his landslide victory in February and the long transition that followed, Mr. Landrieu promised to tackle a daunting agenda. He vowed to kick-start the stubbornly slow recovery from Hurricane Katrina and tackle the decay that dates back decades — the high crime rate, the poor health of residents and the deteriorating infrastructure.

Then, on April 20, just 13 days before his inauguration, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, about 150 miles from New Orleans. And so his first official act after being sworn in was to talk to President Obama about the oil spill.

“From the beginning, we’ve been triaging, responding to this catastrophic event and handling the other catastrophic event,” said Mr. Landrieu, whose sister Mary is a senator and whose father, Moon, was the mayor 32 years ago.

The other catastrophic event Mr. Landrieu was referring to is the city’s finances, which he often compares to a gushing oil leak. After he took office, he discovered soaring overtime budgets in many departments, disastrously lax record keeping and a $67 million deficit, about twice what he had been led to expect before taking over.

But the list of catastrophes goes on. The city’s Police Department is so corrupt and ineffective, he said, that he formally asked the Justice Department to investigate, which it is now doing. The city still suffers from a chronic shortage of health care facilities since Hurricane Katrina, as well as glut of blighted and abandoned houses.

All of this Mr. Landrieu highlighted in his first State of the City speech, departing from tradition and delivering it two months into his term rather than waiting for a year to pass. He detailed a series of measures his administration had already taken to reduce the city’s deficit by more than half. And, with fewer specifics, he spoke of deeper cuts to be announced in the coming weeks.

New Orleans residents say that it is early enough in the Landrieu administration — and that memories of the previous one, of broadly unpopular C. Ray Nagin, are fresh enough — that Mr. Landrieu can still emphasize the mess as an inheritance.

“There’s a learning curve for anybody who comes into office like that,” said Jon Johnson, a member of the City Council. “You’ve got to allow the individual the opportunity to know where all the bones are buried. And I think that’s where we are.”

The oil is only the most recent part of that inheritance.

The day that White House officials came to Louisiana, a week after the rig sank and a few days before the May 3 inauguration, was the day Mr. Landrieu said he began to realize that BP and the federal government were not fully prepared.

“They didn’t really know what the long-term consequences were going to be because they didn’t really know how to stop the problem,” he said.

Mr. Landrieu, a Democrat, has not been as outspoken in his criticism of the spill response — unlike others in his state, who “want to go on TV and scream” — though he shares a certain sort of swagger: this is Louisiana, and disasters are something people here are used to managing.

Then again, Mr. Landrieu added, the city has not been on the front lines.

New Orleans, in fact, has been in “a little bit of an awkward predicament,” he said.

For most of the last two months, the oil impact in Louisiana has been hours away from the city. But New Orleans has nevertheless become home to the response command center and to news anchors who deliver reports on the cleanup with the city’s riverfront as a backdrop.

This has led at times to an odd and seemingly contradictory message.

On one hand, the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau makes announcements, such as one on July 12, that “tourism remains vibrant in New Orleans,” citing the success of the recent Essence Fest, playing down the oil impact in Lake Pontchartrain and declaring Louisiana seafood safe to eat.

On the other, the city has also been pushing BP, so far unsuccessfully, for $75 million for marketing efforts to persuade tourists to keep coming. Mr. Landrieu pointed out real effects, like the shuttering of a 134-year-old oyster company and fishermen who are seeing their livelihoods dwindle.

The oil spill has also provided some political cover for Mr. Landrieu. Difficult steps, particularly the announcements of cutbacks and layoffs, have not dominated the news for days on end.

“He doesn’t have to worry about being second-guessed on his every move,” said Clancy DuBos, who writes a political column for The Gambit, the local alternative weekly newspaper he publishes.

Still, there are plenty of people in the city who are not so easily distracted, people who have not had a police station or an emergency room nearby for nearly five years.

“They don’t want to hear any more excuses,” said Mr. Johnson, whose district, which includes the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East, is lagging the furthest behind in the recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

That district also includes the only areas of New Orleans where oil has actually appeared — in the marshes far to the east of the city proper.

Nevertheless, Mr. Johnson said, a vast majority of his constituents do not want to be told that fighting the spill will take time and energy that would otherwise be dedicated to hurricane recovery efforts.

“It’s going to be a hard sell,” Mr. Johnson said. “I think people understand it. I think they’re sympathetic, but their priorities are clear.”

Mr. Landrieu said he was able to address all the problems at the same time, often discussing recovery issues and oil spill concerns in the same conversations with White House officials. He did acknowledge, however, that all of this had put a strain on the city’s limited resources.

“When you’re fighting to survive every day,” he said, “you can’t think about where you’re going to be a year from now.”

    New Orleans Mayor Had a Full Plate Even Before the Spill, NYT, 13.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/us/14landrieu.html

Pa. City Fights Crime With Soccer, Strict Curfews

June 22, 2010
Filed at 3:19 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHESTER, Pa. (AP) -- Leaders in one of Pennsylvania's oldest cities are preparing to extend a five-day state of emergency to at least a month, but residents say they've been living with violence for decades.

Charles Stansbury's 2-year-old cousin was killed this month in a shooting in Chester. He says crimes like it are nothing new there and wonders why nothing has been done until now.

The little boy and three other people were shot to death within eight days. Mayor Wendell Butler Jr. responded with a 9 p.m. curfew in five high-crime neighborhoods.

The crackdown comes amid Chester's efforts to shed its negative image with a $500 million revitalization plan that includes a 12,000-seat Major League Soccer stadium.

A Philadelphia Union spokeswoman says the recent events will have no effect on the sold-out home-opener Sunday.

Chester was settled in 1644 and sits about halfway between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Del.

    Pa. City Fights Crime With Soccer, Strict Curfews, NYT, 22.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/22/us/AP-US-Chester-Emergency.html

Nebraska Town Votes to Banish Illegal Immigrants

June 21, 2010
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

CHICAGO — Residents of a small city in eastern Nebraska voted Monday to banish illegal immigrants from jobs and rental homes, defying an earlier decision by the city’s leaders and setting off what is all but certain to be a costly and closely watched legal challenge.

In Fremont , a meat-packing town of about 25,000 people, unofficial results from The Associated Press late Monday showed that 57 percent of voters approved a referendum barring landlords from renting to those in the country illegally, requiring renters to provide information to the police and to obtain city occupancy licenses, and obliging city businesses to use a federal database to check for illegal immigrants.

Opponents of the new law, including some business and church leaders, had argued that the City of Fremont simply could not afford the new law, which is all but certain to be challenged in court. In a flurry of television commercials and presentations by opponents in the final days before Monday’s vote, opponents said paying to defend such a local law would require a significant cut in Fremont city services or a stiff tax increase — or some combination of the two.

“There were a lot of tears in this room tonight,” said Kristin Ostrom, an opponent who gathered with others in an old V.F.W. building to await the results. “Unfortunately, people have voted for an ordinance that’s going to cost millions of dollars, and that says to the Hispanic community that the Anglo community is saying they are not welcome here. They thought they were coming to a small-town community with small-town values.”

But advocates argued that federal authorities had failed to enforce their own immigration restrictions, leaving places like Fremont — with a small but growing Hispanic population — to take care of such matters themselves. They complained that illegal immigrants were causing an increase in crime, taking jobs that would once have gone to longtime residents, and changing the character of their quiet city, some 30 miles of farm fields from Omaha.

Within minutes of the results being announced, officials from the A.C.L.U. Nebraska pledged to file a lawsuit as quickly as possible.

“If this law goes into effect, it will cause discrimination and racial profiling against Latinos and others who appear to be foreign born, including U.S. citizens,” Laurel Marsh, executive director of A.C.L.U. Nebraska , said in a statement issued late Monday. “The A.C.L.U. Nebraska has no option but to turn to the courts to stop this un-American and unconstitutional ordinance before the law goes into effect. Not only do local ordinances such as this violate federal law, they are also completely out of step with American values of fairness and equality.”

Fremont’s Hispanic population, practically nonexistent two decades ago, has grown to about 2,000 people, according to some estimates. No one knows how many illegal immigrants live in Fremont, and the estimates (depending on which side of this debate one is on) vary enormously.

Still, some in Fremont point, with worry, to other Nebraska towns — places like Schuyler and Lexington — as communities that no longer look or feel the way they once did.

In recent years, numerous towns and cities around the nation have considered adopting laws restricting illegal immigrants. But in most cases, political leaders and town councils have been the ones to pass the provisions — not the voters. And the laws have proven politically-tangled: measures in towns like Hazleton, Pa., and Farmers Branch, Tex., are still being fought in court, while some other cities (facing the prospect of drawn-out legal battles) have dropped the issue.

That almost happened in Fremont. Two years ago, a City Council member in Fremont suggested the city should pass a law on illegal immigrants. But after two emotional hearings — with what both sides said was participants from all over the state, the Council voted 4 to 4 on the proposal. The longtime mayor then voted against it, saying that he, too, was opposed to illegal immigrants but had come to believe that the question was one that had been, legally speaking, left to federal authorities, not Fremont.

Some residents were outraged by the choice, and began collecting signatures on a petition to put the question to a vote — the vote that ultimately came on Monday.

As residents of Fremont began considering what the decision would now mean, details of the new law were a new matter for debate. Some noted, with puzzlement, that the law would not apply to the area’s two biggest meatpacking plants (including Hormel, the largest employer) because they are just outside the city’s official boundaries, and that the law would also not apply to “casual labor for domestic tasks” around Fremont homes. But some said they believe the housing requirements — and new $5 occupancy license rule — might apply to people living in nursing homes.

    Nebraska Town Votes to Banish Illegal Immigrants, NYT, 21.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/us/22fremont.html

Race Assumes Central Role in New Orleans Vote

January 13, 2010
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — Less than a month before the primary, the race for mayor here is a struggle over who will bring down the soaring murder rate, who will attract badly needed new businesses and who will guide the city in its still dauntingly long road to recovery. But it is also about something else.

“It’s always about race,” said Lambert C. Boissiere Jr., a former state senator and currently the city constable. “I don’t know why we dance around it.”

The balance of power between blacks and whites in New Orleans has been an issue for decades, a back-and-forth that has only intensified since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, now that every election is a referendum on the future of the city. But a recent decision by a black candidate to drop out of the 2010 mayor’s race has made the possibility of a white man in the city’s most powerful office startlingly real.

For most of 2009, the mayor’s race was a lackluster affair that attracted far less interest than Saints’ football.

The relatively low wattage of the candidates left an opening for Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who, despite months of denials, announced his entry at the last minute in early December. Mr. Landrieu has run unsuccessfully for mayor twice before, in 1994 and 2006. Since losing to the current mayor, C. Ray Nagin, four years ago, Mr. Landrieu has kept a moderate profile, using his position to promote Louisiana’s tourism industry and cultural economy. (Mr. Nagin cannot run again because of term limits.)

But many of those who preferred Mr. Nagin to Mr. Landrieu in 2006 have had a case of buyer’s remorse, expressing disappointment at the current mayor’s halting leadership in the years since Hurricane Katrina and an unending series of scandals at City Hall. And Mr. Landrieu has nearly universal name recognition: his sister Mary is a United States senator, and his father, Moon Landrieu, was mayor in the 1970s, the last white man to hold the job.

In the weeks after Mr. Landrieu’s announcement, the wisdom among political experts around town had generally been that the Feb. 6 primary would result in two candidates who would go on to compete in the March runoff: a white candidate, most likely Mr. Landrieu, and a black one. The black candidate was widely expected to be Edwin R. Murray, a state senator who is well respected if a little reserved for the rough and tumble of New Orleans politics.

Mr. Murray was among the most successful fund-raisers and was better known than the other black candidates: Nadine Ramsey, a former Civil District Court judge; James Perry, director of a fair housing group; and Troy Henry, owner of a consulting firm. While few thought it was possible to beat Mr. Landrieu in the primary, the idea was that minds would concentrate in the runoff, and that black voters might rally to Mr. Murray’s side.

All of this arithmetic became irrelevant on Jan. 2, when Mr. Murray announced, to the shock of even some of his closest aides, that he was leaving the race.

“Ed was going to be the guy to beat,” said Robert Berning, Mr. Murray’s media adviser.

Mr. Murray’s decision, several campaign aides said, was based on recent polls showing Mr. Landrieu with a huge lead, buttressed by considerable support among black voters, many of whom remember the racial barriers torn down by Mr. Landrieu’s father. That lead was not insurmountable, but overcoming it would have required a large outlay of campaign money that just was not there.

Mr. Murray also said in a statement that he had dropped out to avoid a racially divisive campaign. But the fact that his announcement left Mr. Landrieu and John Georges, a white businessman and former candidate for governor, as two of the front-runners, may have fueled just that.

The New Orleans Tribune, an African-American newsmagazine, called Mr. Murray’s decision “a betrayal of the black community.” At a news conference, Mr. Henry castigated the news media for having “prematurely crowned the next mayor as a white mayor.”

Even though Mr. Georges has some prominent black supporters and Mr. Landrieu’s own father helped bring African-Americans into City Hall, influential blacks around the city are already anxious about the possible effects of electing the first white mayor in 32 years.

“The mayor has always been the citadel of strength for the black community in this town,” said Bernard L. Charbonnet Jr., a lawyer who is active in black political circles. “It has always been the prize.”

Black professionals refer to the office as “the franchise,” the counterweight to the economic power of New Orleans’s white elite. For the past three decades, the black private sector — the lawyers, businessmen and architects — has relied on the franchise: they may not always be able to become board members at the city’s white-owned firms, but black professionals turned to the city government for contracts and jobs.

But after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Charbonnet said, the importance of keeping the franchise often paled next to immediate crises, like the city’s shortage of health care facilities, the slow recovery of the black middle-class neighborhoods of Gentilly and New Orleans East, and the widespread scattering of the city’s population. Some members of the city’s black middle class found Atlanta, St. Louis or Chicago to be more welcoming; though blacks are still in the majority here, their numbers have shrunk.

“We’re not attuned to politics as we once were,” Mr. Charbonnet said. But that is unfortunate, he added. The prospect of a white mayor, he said, is “an earth-shaking event.”

For this reason, black voters have been urged to rally around one of the remaining black candidates, and Mr. Henry seems to be gaining ground quickly. After all, Mr. Landrieu seemed poised to beat Mr. Nagin around this time in 2006, but Mr. Nagin won, 52 percent to 48 percent. (Mr. Landrieu’s defeat may have owed more to his unpopularity among conservative whites, some of whom vow never to vote for a Landrieu.)

Still, some black power players are making calculations that they never thought they would.

Bill Rouselle, owner of a public relations and consulting firm, helped engineer Mr. Nagin’s re-election in 2006 and had been working for Mr. Murray’s campaign. Now he has agreed to join the Landrieu campaign.

“The critical thing for the African-American community is to be much more focused on a clear agenda,” he said.

In recent years, Mr. Rouselle said, “the agenda being followed became a secondary concern to getting a black person elected.”

Mr. Rouselle said his daughter was even thinking of voting for Mr. Landrieu.

“For her to even consider voting for a white candidate is something totally different,” he said. “It’s almost as big a deal as the prospect two years ago that we would have an African-American president of the United States.”

    Race Assumes Central Role in New Orleans Vote, NYT, 13.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/us/13orleans.html