Isaac Laquedem

The second floor is safe again, even though the roof still leaks

My friend with the restaurant and the fire stairs reports that the City authorities have since smiled upon him, and have told him that his second floor lounge is now officially safe, even though the roof above the sixth floor still leaks.

Even after the cuts, Portland's schools are still the most costly

Monday's Oregonian carried this article about what local school districts would cut as a result of the state cutting local school support for 2010-2011.  Some districts propose to cut teachers and administrative staff, some propose to reduce special programs, and some propose to dip into reserves.

The article included a table (not apparently available online) that showed, for 9 metro-area districts, their 2009 enrollment, their 2010-2011 budgets, the state funding shortfall, and what the districts propose to cut.  One thing missing from the table, however, was just how much it costs each district to educate a student.  I did the math; here it is:

Portland                   $9,976 per student per year
David Douglas           $9,163
Tigard-Tualatin           $9,034
Lake Oswego            $8,628
Hillsboro                    $8,497
Forest Grove              $8,362
West Linn-Wilsonville  $8,289
Beaverton                   $8,142
North Clackamas        $7,524

The Portland school district is losing $19.4 million of state funds.  That's $425 for each of the 45,681 students in the district, which will reduce the funding per student to $9,731 -- still above what every other large district in the area spends on its students.

I'm used to thinking of Portland as a large school district, and it is; it's still the largest in the state in numbers of students.  But it isn't as large as it was; some years ago it educated 70,000 students a year; it now has only 45,000.  Beaverton has 37,000 and Hillsboro has 20,000, not as large as Portland, certainly, but within the same general range.  Yet they manage to educate their students for $1,500 less (Hillsboro) and $1800 less (Beaverton).  What is the extra $1,500 buying?  Let's find out.

Mississippi loses its perfect record with the FDIC

I'd posted in March about how Mississippi had avoided the rash of bank failures that has spread across the rest of the country.  Two weeks ago Mississippi had its first bank closure in 10 years, when the Comptroller of the Currency closed the First National Bank in Rosedale and appointed the FDIC as its receiver.  Even though the bank was closed, the FDIC projects the failure to be less costly than most, relative to the size of the failed bank; the FDIC estimates the cost to the insurance fund to be about 20% of the bank's assets.  By contrast, the FDIC estimated the cost to the fund of the most recent bank failure in Washington, an outfit called Washington First International Bank, to be about 30% of the bank's assets.

This is a rough measure of the loan quality of a failed bank, and -- even allowing that the Rosedale bank failed -- suggests what I'd posited in March, which is that Mississippi's bankers are more hard-nosed, or maybe eagle-eyed, than their colleagues in the rest of the country.

Amtrak lets the chips fall where they may, but not on children without an adult present

I don't understand the nanny state.  Amtrak's Coast Starlight route has a lounge car, called the Pacific Parlour Car, for passengers who book sleeper service.  It hosts a wine tasting in the afternoon, and according to the information on the train, children aren't permitted in the lounge car during the wine tasting.  On a recent trip, Amtrak's personnel (uniformly friendly) welcomed the Laquedemitasse to the wine tasting, and plied him with extra cheese and non-alcoholic apple cider, despite the rules.  On the other hand, he wasn't allowed to buy potato chips at the snack bar without parental supervision.

Yale Fan Chooses Harvard

If he survives the jokes and teasing he's going to get from the other freshmen, this particular young man, whose name really is Yale Fan and who hails from Beaverton, and who is entering Harvard College in September, is likely to make his mark in physics.  He's already received national recognition for his research in quantum computing, the concept of using the quantum states of subatomic particles to serve as the zeroes and ones of computer data, and there's doubtless more to come.

That's one small step for man, one giant set of fire stairs for a building department

A friend who runs a restaurant downtown on two floors of an old building says that the Portland building pooh-bahs told him that he couldn't use the second floor beyond a certain date unless he, or the owner of the building, repaired one of the internal fire stairs in the building so that guests on the second floor could exit in case of fire.  (The restaurant has two other internal staircases and an exterior fire escape also.)  He replaced the stairs, not just from the second floor to the street but -- at the city's insistence -- all the way from the top of the building down to the street.  (The rest of the building is empty.)  Problem solved?  Not quite, because the same pooh-bahs told him that the second floor is unsafe until the owner repairs the roof.  It's a six-floor building.  The restaurant owner is scratching his head over this one, and wondering (a) how a leaky roof 40 feet above his restaurant makes the second floor unsafe, but not the first floor, and (b) how many more things the city will come up with before he gets his final occupancy permit.  I think he wishes that the building people had more than one active project on their plates, so that they'd spend some of their time elsewhere.  He's also thinking that his next restaurant -- and the jobs that come with it -- will be in one of the suburbs, where the rules stay the same from start to finish. 

The Laquedem Oregon Budget Crisis Health Plan

The State of Oregon is facing a deficit of $560 million for the current biennium.  Governor Kulongoski has told each state agency to prepare a list of what it would cut to reduce its spending by 9%, which is roundly what the state has to cut from its spending wish-list to get its budget back in balance.

The governor means well, but fundamentally he's wrong to ask each agency to cut the same percentage from the budget.  The reason he's wrong is because he's implicitly saying that every state function is of equal value: that is, state parks, state prisons, state land use planning, state tax collections, state regulation of gunk on the bottom of canoes, state business promotion, state protection of salmon streams, and the Fine Fescue Commission (we really have one) are all of equal value to the state and therefore should be cut by equally proportionate amounts.  (I'm being unfair to the Oregon Fine Fescue Commission, because it's funded by the grass seed industry, but I like the sound of the name.)

By proposing to cut something from everything, the governor is evading the tough decision.  If the current budgets for state agencies are at the minimal levels needed to sustain the services (and I'm willing to accept that state agencies, on the whole, don't waste a lot of money), then by cutting something from every agency, the governor is proposing to have every function of state government inadequately funded.  That is, he's proposing to have every state service fail, not at once, but by the death of a thousand cuts.

I believe that Governor Kulongoski should consider the approach that Dr. Kitzhaber took as governor when he helped to formulate the Oregon Health Plan.  The salient point of the Oregon Health Plan was that it ranked hundreds of medical treatments in order of importance, and started paying for them from no. 1 as far down the list as the money held out.  If the Plan had enough money to pay for only the 273 most important procedures, then it paid nothing for procedures 274 and below.

Governor Kulongoski should do the same thing for the current functions of the state.  What are the most important functions?  Fund them fully.  What's down the list?  Cut those entirely.  Let's do at least a few things well enough to be proud of them, instead of trimming here and there until we do all of them badly.

I would rank the state's major functions in approximately this order: public safety (law enforcement), K-12 education, highways, courts, parks, and elections.  I'm willing to agree that I may have left one or two of the most important things out.  I will strenuously argue that most of the other things the state does are less important than these six, and that no dollars should be cut from these six things (allowing that highways should be paid for entirely from the gas tax and not from other state funds) until those functions of lesser importance that are not fully supported by user fees have been eliminated.

"But Program X is important!" I imagine people saying.  (Fill in your favorite program here.)  I'm sure it is.  Is it more important than our state parks?  Is it more important than our state prisons?  If it isn't, then it has to go, because your fellow citizens, and mine, aren't willing to pay for it.