BuckeyeBlog

Lynn Walsh, Investigative Reporter for the Buckeye Institute, spoke with 610 WTVN’s Bob Connors this morning about the phantom congressional districts posted on www.recovery.gov. 10 districts in Ohio, that do not exist, received more than $5.3 million in stimulus funds, creating/retaining 11 jobs. Ohio only has 18 congressional districts.

lynn.walsh.nov19.Bob Connors

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, responsible for overseeing the information on www.recovery.gov, says the mistakes are data entry errors. Yesterday, the Board purged the state/territory summary pages of Ohio and other states nationwide, lumping all of the phantom districts into an “unassigned congressional district” column; in some case the information was re-entered with the correct congressional district numbers.

With the final decision on Issue One just a day away and as the battle between both sides heats up, I decided it was time to be front and center with a Columbus Police Officer. On Saturday, August 2, 2009, I accompanied a police officer who’s job may be on the line. I rode side-by-side with him during the second shift at the 19th Precinct on the west side of Columbus. This is a first-hand account of a night in the 19th Precinct.

It began like any other ride-a-long, (I have been on two others before, one in Athens, Ohio and the other in Baltimore, Maryland), strange looks, some smiles but mostly the officers just pretending like I am not there. After passing the warrant check and scanning my license I was cleared to go.

The officer I was riding with has been with the Columbus Police Department for four years, an average length it seemed compared to the other officers working that night. The officer explained what was in the car, mentioning his car is short on supplies because, “the city won’t pay for them.” Then it was time to head on the road. (more…)

Here is video with Maurice Thompson of the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law and Fox News Contributor, Judge Andrew Napolitano:

Yesterday, Maurice Thompson of the 1851 Center was on WTVN 610 AM discussing city taxes with Bob Conners.

And Lynn Walsh, our Investigative Reporter, was on NBC 4 Columbus to discuss the compensation of city employees:

Police equipment costs are adding to the City of Columbus’ budget hole again this year.

According to a report provided to City Council in 2007, the Columbus Division of Police’s helicopter fleet is the third largest of any police helicopter fleet in the country. The City even seems to be in disagreement about just how many choppers make up the fleet. One report links the city to owning eight helicopters, six of which are operational and another two that are held in storage.

A 2008 report from the City Auditor cites seven fully operational helicopters. City Council approved the purchase of a new helicopter in 2007, which cost tax payers $1,356,545. If each helicopter cost around $1.3 million, the city has spent between $9.1 and $10.4 million on purchasing helicopters. In addition, the city has $1.7 million worth of insurance on each helicopter.

However, those figures do not include the cost of operating every helicopter. In a report to City Council, the division claims to fly a helicopter in the air 16 hours a day, 365 days a year. That is more than 5,800 hours a year. According to a manual on the manufacturer’s website, it costs $375/hour to operate a McDonnell Douglass MD500E. Therefore, the cost of operating one helicopter at that rate is $2.19 million a year.

However, the claim that helicopters are used 16 hours per day is inconsistent with the numbers in the department’s budget this year. Only $248,000 has been appropriated for fuel costs this year, but as of June 23, 2009, not a single penny of that money has been spent. So far this year, the department has spent $100,000 on maintaining and servicing its fleet.

Does the City own “hybrid” helicopters that don’t require fuel, or is the fleet not being used as regularly as the Division claims?

Recent posts regarding the City of Columbus employee salary database has garnered some attention throughout Columbus and Ohio.  A lot of the interest stems from Issue One, a proposed income tax increase in the City of Columbus.  I had an opportunity to join Dirk Thompson from 610 WTVN on his show “Dirk Thompson Hunt for the Truth.”  Click here to listen to the show.

More information regarding the employee salary database can be found here.

A safe city is at the top of most citizens’ lists; and to keep a city safe a strong police force is needed. According to the Division of Police 2008 Annual Report there are 1,876 sworn personnel officers and 335 civilian personnel officers. That is equivalent to 2.4 officers for every 1,000 people in Columbus. That is greater than the national average of two officers per 1,000 people.

Not only is Columbus higher than the national average the Capital City also sits above some of the larger cities. Based on 2005 numbers, Columbus had 2.5 officers per 1,000 people. That is greater than Los Angeles and Dallas, Texas.

Is lowering the number of officers per 1,000 people from 2.4 to the national average of two an option? Of course it could be, whether it is a solution is debatable. What is not debatable is whether or not it would save the city money.

Dropping the police force to the equivalent of two officers per 1,000 people in Columbus would mean the loss of about 440 officers. If the average police officer salary in 2008 for a police officer was $75,208, the city of Columbus would have seen more than $33.1 million in personnel savings last year in police officer salaries alone.

It must be nice to have allies in the General Assembly. As the Ohio Contractors Association found out, getting a provision tucked into the budget bill which will reduce comptition for state construction jobs (and, in turn, drive up the cost of those jobs) was pretty easy:

House Democrats slipped a provision into the state budget last month banning some uses of a new style of competitive bidding over the Internet that has netted big savings in Portage County.

Inserted at the request of the Ohio Contractors Association, the provision added during the early hours of April 28 bans Internet reverse auctions for supplies and services related to construction projects.

Vernon Sykes, an Akron Democrat, was behind this language. As Portage County’s experience with these auctions shows, they can produce substantial savings:

Jeff Lonzrick, an engineering manager for Portage County’s water resources department, said the online bidding on the water project was done April 20 by a half-dozen companies prequalified to do the work. It resulted in a low bid of $188,500, while the engineer’s estimated cost had been $253,000, he said. The project was a routine replacement of 1,126 feet of a 16-inch water main in Aurora.

The contractors claim that these auctions don’t produce this kind of savings regularly. Fine. As Portage County Commissioner Chuck Keiper says, then their supporters should have this debate in the full House and not stick the ban in a budget bill.

Making businesses compete for government contracts is good. The more transparent the competition, the better. Trying to reduce this transparency at the behest of a politically-connected interest group is a shameful. Perhaps that’s why Rep. Sykes tried to slip this into the budget bill unnoticed. Kudos to the Plain Dealer’s Aaron Marshall for exposing this anti-taxpayer move on the part of Rep. Skyes and the Ohio Contractors Association.

Kudos to Ohio State Rep. Seth Morgan who has filed suit with the Ohio Supreme Court seeking the Court’s backing in his quest to secure information for the Governor under Ohio’s Open Records Act (found in Ohio Revised Code’s Chapter 149).

Unfortunately the Governor has stiff-armed Rep. Morgan’s request for the evidence Strickland used to formulate his ‘Evidence-Based Education’ plan for state school spending. 

The Administration’s recent, repeated attempts to hide its workings from the people raise important concerns about the Governor’s commitment to freedom and liberty in Ohio.

The Founders knew that the consent of the governed, upon which the legitimacy of the government they were designing would rest, would mean nothing if government were to deliberately obscure its workings.  An opaque government would invalidate popular consent, and with it, the legitimacy of governmental authority.

No transparency, no freedom.  Even Gorbachev understood the connection in offering glasnost to the Soviet people twenty years ago now.  Remember that, Governor? 
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The news that Governor Strickland’s education finance proposal is being modeled not by the analytical research resources of the Ohio Department of Education but by a private firm of Driscoll and Fleeter is worth noting on several levels.

First, the Akron Beacon Journal among others scores the move for its obvious obfuscation of the workings of government.  Observers can’t see how ’the sausage is being made’ as they could have when the ODE was doing such work.  We’ve long pointed out that one of the characteristics of a government worthy of a free people is that its inner workings are thoroughly transparent to citizens.  When the Governor hides from public scrutiny the development of the policy he has staked his incumbency on, he is, in effect, insulting the freedom of Ohioans.    

Second, the Governor has turned to a firm which has enjoyed a cozy relationship with a key vested interest in the school funding debate.  As the AP notes Driscoll and Fleeter are “….on the payroll of a private tax institute run by the Ohio School Boards Association…”.  That’s a pretty generous assessment as any examination of the public record would reveal that the OSBA, their so-called private tax institute (”Education Tax Policy Institute”) and Driscoll and Fleeter are a thoroughly integrated entity.  Just take a look at the ETPI’s tax filing submitted in August of last year (available through Guidestar service, free registration required) and you’ll see it was initially ’signed’ by Rich Levin, a former partner in Driscoll and Fleeter and now the state’s tax commissioner — some 18 months after Levin had left private practice for his current position. 

Much research has documented that school finance in Ohio is a largely a political exercise distributing tax dollars among and according to the interests of adults who work in the system and the bureaucracies they control, all according to their relative political power.  The interests of children and their parents, relatively powerless in the universe of school politics, come in a distant second in this exercise.  (See for example, this report by our Matt Carr.)  

By outsourcing the design of his proposed system to the OSBA, the Governor continues to put the interests of education bureaucrats over that of children and parents. 

Finally, we just have to ask why the Governor allows himself the freedom to choose a for-profit provider in the vital task of designing a new school finance system when he won’t permit the same choice to Ohio children and their parents seeking to get the best possible education?   Clearly Strickland’s objections to for-profit schools are not based on consistently applied principles.  And our research shows that they aren’t based on fact, either.  The reality is the Governor just continues to serve up special interest politics when it comes to school finance reform.