Love to drive? Come to North Dakota

Posted on October 14, 2010 by

I hate to do this, but here’s a story on Forbes.com about how awesome the driving experience is in North Dakota. This online magazine has been pretty kind to our state, putting us in the national rankings now and again and touting our sweet, sweet oil-soaked economy. I hate that I feel so grateful for a little national attention, but I think it’s part of becoming North Dakotan.

You can read the story for yourself, but here are some data and links that may explain things better than the Forbes.com story. It annoys the hell out of me that they never publish the entire list, just the Top 10 and the Bottom 10 and don’t link to the sources they cite. So I found them all.

Here are the Top 10 states for drivers (I’ll explain how the writer arrived at this in a bit.):

  • 1. South Carolina
  • 2. Nebraska
  • 3. Missouri
  • 4. North Dakota
  • 5. Mississippi
  • 6. Texas
  • 7. Kansas
  • 8. New Hampshire (tie)
  • 8. Wyoming (tie)
  • 10. Tennessee (tie)
  • 10. Arizona (tie)

Here are the Bottom 10:

  • 1. California
  • 2. Illinois
  • 3. New York
  • 4. Michigan
  • 5. Alaska
  • 6. Maryland
  • 7. Connecticut (tie)
  • 7. Rhode Island (tie)
  • 9. Louisiana
  • 10. Washington

So here’s how Forbes.com decided on the ranking: gas prices, insurance rates, infrastructure/safety and legal protections for drivers, meaning cops and courts don’t exploit them with lots of speed traps, etc.

Here are the rankings on gas prices, via GasBuddy.com, from lowest price to highest price (We don’t do too well here, though oil-soaked Alaska does worst.):

  • 1. South Carolina
  • 2. Texas
  • 3. Arizona
  • 4. Louisiana
  • 5. Mississippi
  • 6. Oklahoma
  • 7. Arkansas
  • 8. New Jersey
  • 9. Tennessee
  • 10. Alabama
  • 11. Colorado
  • 12. Missouri
  • 13. Georgia
  • 14. Virginia
  • 15. Wyoming
  • 16. Kansas
  • 17. North Carolina
  • 18. New Hampshire
  • 19. Iowa
  • 20. New Mexico
  • 21. Kentucky
  • 22. Maryland
  • 23. Massachusetts
  • 24. Delaware
  • 25. Florida
  • 26. Indiana
  • 27. Utah
  • 28. Ohio
  • 29. Pennsylvania
  • 30. Vermont
  • 31. North Dakota
  • 32. South Dakota
  • 33. Washington, D.C.
  • 34. Montana
  • 35. Rhode Island
  • 36. Wisconsin
  • 37. Minnesota
  • 38. Nevada
  • 39. Maine
  • 40. Nebraska
  • 41. West Virginia
  • 42. Michigan
  • 43. Idaho
  • 44. Oregon
  • 45. New York
  • 46. Illinois
  • 47. Connecticut
  • 48. Washington
  • 49. California
  • 50. Alaska
  • 51. Hawaii

Here are the rankings on insurance rates, via Insure.com, from highest to lowest:

  • 1. Louisiana
  • 2. Michigan
  • 3. Oklahoma
  • 4. Montana
  • 5. California
  • 6. South Dakota
  • 7. Washington, D.C.
  • 8. Georgia
  • 9. Illinois
  • 10. Connecticut
  • 11. Arkansas
  • 12. New Mexico
  • 13. Rhode Island
  • 14. West Virginia
  • 15. Alaska
  • 16. Wyoming
  • 17. Maryland
  • 18. Kansas
  • 19. Kentucky
  • 20. Colorado
  • 21. Mississippi
  • 22. New Jersey
  • 23. New York
  • 24. Texas
  • 25. Florida
  • 26. Pennsylvania
  • 27. Delaware
  • 28. Missouri
  • 29. Minnesota
  • 30. Alabama
  • 31. North Dakota
  • 32. Hawaii
  • 33. Indiana
  • 34. Nevada
  • 35. Washington
  • 36. Utah
  • 37. Virginia
  • 38. Nebraska
  • 39. Oregon
  • 40. Idaho
  • 41. South Carolina
  • 42. Tennessee
  • 43. Arizona
  • 44. North Carolina
  • 45. Massachusetts
  • 46. Iowa
  • 47. New Hampshire
  • 48. Wisconsin
  • 49. Ohio
  • 50. Vermont
  • 51. Maine

Here are rankings on infrastructure/safety, via Reason Foundation, from best to worst (We really shined here. It’s worth noting that the per mile cost of our infrastructure is lower than many other states’, so the roads are good and they’re cheap, too. For the below list, see page 15 of the PDF.):

  • North Dakota 1
  • Montana 2
  • Kansas 3
  • New Mexico 4
  • Nebraska 5
  • South Carolina 6
  • Wyoming 7
  • Missouri 8
  • Georgia 9
  • Oregon 10
  • Delaware 11
  • South Dakota 12
  • Texas 13
  • Kentucky 14
  • Nevada 15
  • Mississippi 16
  • Idaho 17
  • Virginia 18
  • Tennessee 19
  • Alabama 20
  • North Carolina 21
  • Utah 22
  • Indiana 23
  • Ohio 24
  • Minnesota 25
  • Arizona 26
  • New Hampshire 27
  • Wisconsin 28
  • Arkansas 29
  • West Virginia 30
  • Iowa 31
  • Maine 32
  • Washington 33
  • Colorado 34
  • Michigan 35
  • Louisiana 36
  • Oklahoma 37
  • Pennsylvania 38
  • Florida 39
  • Illinois 40
  • Connecticut 41
  • Vermont 42
  • Maryland 43
  • Massachusetts 44
  • New Jersey 45
  • New York 46
  • Hawaii 47
  • California 48
  • Alaska 49
  • Rhode Island 50

Here are the rankings on legal protections, via the National Motorists Association, from worst to best (We also really shined here. I agree. Having driven in other states with draconian traffic fines, among other things, North Dakota is paradise. And the low fines have not lead to a rash of bad driving, which only goes to show that fines are just a way for the governments to make money.):

  • 1. New Jersey
  • 2. Ohio
  • 3. Maryland
  • 4. Louisiana
  • 5. New York
  • 6. Illinois
  • 7. Delaware
  • 8. Virginia
  • 9. Washington
  • 10. Massachusetts
  • 11. Colorado
  • 12. Oregon
  • 13. Tennessee
  • 14. California
  • 15. Michigan
  • 16. Vermont
  • 17. Maine
  • 18. Florida
  • 19. Pennsylvania
  • 20. North Carolina
  • 21. Alabama
  • 22. Rhode Island
  • 23. West Virginia
  • 24. New Hampshire
  • 25. Arizona
  • 26. New Mexico
  • 27. Missouri
  • 28. Texas
  • 29. Oklahoma
  • 30. Nevada
  • 31. Georgia
  • 32. Connecticut
  • 33. South Carolina
  • 34. Iowa
  • 35. Hawaii
  • 36. Arkansas
  • 37. Alaska
  • 38. Kansas
  • 39. Mississippi
  • 40. Wisconsin
  • 41. Utah
  • 42. South Dakota
  • 43. Indiana
  • 44. Minnesota
  • 45. North Dakota
  • 46. Kentucky
  • 47. Nebraska
  • 48. Montana
  • 49. Idaho
  • 50. Wyoming

Wait, are you still reading this? The Web is big; go read something fun!

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Ban-schman, some teens say they’ll still text and drive

Posted on October 14, 2010 by

The City Beat usually doesn’t have the time to attend the Grand Forks Youth Commission, but I probably should’ve gone this week. There was an interesting survey done by some Central High School students in DECA that shows some interesting, though probably not very surprising facts about area teens and what they think about texting and driving.

DECA presented its findings to the Youth Commission, prompting the middle and high schoolers on that made up the commission to agree to do fight public perception about the practice. I think I could sum up the perception found in the survey: “Texting and driving is dangerous, but not if I do it.”

One caveat about this survey, which I got from City Hall rather than DECA, and I couldn’t get ahold of the DECA advisor today. It doesn’t claim that it’s a scientific survey of area teens and doesn’t have a margin of error. What it does claim is it included 487 students, 14 and older, and I think that’s a pretty significant number.

So here’s what the survey says (First number is percentage of total, second number is total respondents.):

1. What is your gender?

  • Male: 48.3% / 235
  • Female: 51.7% / 252

2. What is your age?

  • 14: 10.5% / 51
  • 15: 24.4% / 119
  • 16: 25.5% / 124
  • 17: 22.2% / 108
  • 18: 4.3% / 21
  • 19 and over: 13.1% / 64

3. Do you have a license? If no go to question 10.

  • Yes: 71.5% / 348
  • No: 28.5% / 139

4. Do you have a cell phone? If no, go to question 10.

  • Yes: 92.4% / 450
  • No: 7.6% / 37

5. What type of phone do you have?

  • Touch Screen: 16.7% / 69
  • Keypad: 62.8% / 260
  • Both: 20.5% / 85

6. Can you easily text without looking at your phone?

  • Yes: 59.9% / 248
  • No: 40.1% / 166

7. Have you ever TWD (texted while driving)?

  • Yes: 73.3% / 302
  • No: 26.7% / 110

8. How often do you TWD?

  • always: 10.0% / 41
  • most of the time: 13.1% / 54
  • sometimes: 26.0% / 107
  • rarely: 28.2% / 116
  • never: 22.8% / 94

9. How likely are you to talk on the phone when driving?

  • always: 8.4% / 34
  • most the time: 13.3% / 54
  • sometimes: 44.1% / 179
  • rarely: 23.9% / 97
  • never: 10.3% / 42

10. Have you ever been in an accident while the driver has been TWD?

  • Yes: 3.9% / 19
  • Almost: 11.1% / 54
  • No: 84.9% / 412

11. Do you know someone who has been in an accident because of TWD?

  • Yes: 33.7% / 164
  • No: 66.3% / 323

12. Which do you believe is more distracting while driving…

  • Talking on the phone: 4.9% / 24
  • Texting: 58.1% / 283
  • Both are equally distracting: 24.6% / 120
  • I believe neither are distracting: 12.3% / 60

13. What would help you prevent TWD? (select all the [sic] apply)

  • in-school education: 7.0% / 34
  • community awareness: 9.7% / 47
  • driver’s permit handbook: 7.2% / 35
  • radio station broadcasts: 10.7% / 52
  • make it illegal: 26.1% / 127
  • all the above 39.4% / 192

14. How would you rate the following distractions while driving?

  Not dangerous at all Least dangerous Somewhat dangerous Most dangerous
eat 15.4% /75 31.9% / 155 46.1% / 224 6.6% / 32
change clothes 6.6% / 32 3.7% / 18 24.5% / 119 65.2% / 316
put on make-up 8.1% / 39 5.2% / 25 38.1% / 184 48.7% / 235
read 6.8% / 33 3.3% / 16 22.1% / 107 67.8% / 328
take photos 8.5% / 41 14.7% / 71 37.9% / 183 38.9% / 188
play video games 6.6% / 32 3.1% / 15 19.5% / 94 70.7% / 341
on facebook 8.9% / 43 7.9% / 38 27.7% / 134 55.6% / 269
texting 8.8% / 42 12.2% / 58 31.9% / 152 47.2% / 225

15. When you hear statistics about TWD, do they change your habits or the way you drive?

  • Yes: 47.4% / 231
  • No: 52.6% / 256

16. Do you think TWD should be illegal?

  • Yes: 57.7% / 281
  • No: 42.3% / 206

17. Do you still plan to text and drive, now that it’s illegal in Grand Forks?

  • Yes: 42.7% / 208
  • No: 57.3% / 279

It’s kind of funny to see so many contradictions in there, which, I think is typical of public opinion in general, not just teens. Is texting and driving dangerous? Yes. What would reduce texting and driving? Making it illegal. Should it be made illegal? Yes. Would it stop you from texting and driving? No.

Obviously, it’s not just teens doing this. We don’t have stats for Grand Forks, but just looking around and looking at national stats suggest their parents are just as guilty.

Here’s the national survey I leaned on:

One in four (27%) American adults say they have texted while driving, the same proportion as the number of driving age teens (26%) who say they have texted while driving….

Beyond driving, one in six (17%) cell-toting adults say they have been so distracted while talking or texting that they have physically bumped into another person or an object. That amounts to 14% of all American adults who have been so engrossed in talking, texting or otherwise using their cell phones that they bumped into something or someone.

On the other hand, the question is how often do teens and adults text and drive? I suspect that adults may text once in a while, but teens do it a lot more. No data to suggest that, but if you look at the volume of text traffic, it’s the teens that are doing most of it.

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Much ado about a few dollars

Posted on October 12, 2010 by

The City Beat was mildly annoyed by the grilling that Grand Forks city staff got from the City Council’s finance committee about two weeks ago over some proposed fee increases. Staff members got so flustered they couldn’t explain what the hell was really going on. This has happened enough times that you’d think everybody would just learn to relax.

It started out with Council President Hal Gershman saying that he thought the council had said it wanted fees to be pegged to inflation and the proposed fee increases weren’t it. He wasn’t upset, he said, but just wanted it done right. If I remember correctly, finance Chairman Doug Christensen thought that was the signal for some hard questioning of staff. He was really curious, I’m sure. Doug was much more relaxed yesterday at finance when the fees came up again.

Anyway, I thought maybe I ought to go talk to staff myself and get the explanation that the council couldn’t get.

The part about the money

Let me start with the money side of this issue.

I did analyze the proposed fee increases – all 348 of them — and Hal is right. The increases were all over the place. Permits for businesses that provide emergency alarm systems: Up 203 percent. Dog licenses: Unchanged. Class 1 liquor license annual fee: Up 3.1 percent.

There was a pretty consistent pattern in many cases: Fees were raised by 3 percent and rounded up to the nearest $1 or $5. Some fees were rounded down. I confirmed that this was the case with staff, who said they feel the public likes it that way. There must be more people paying with cash than I thought. So the perception of inconsistency was simply that, when you round up or down, depending on how small the dollar amounts are, you get funny increases like 4.3 percent or 7.7 percent or 1.9 percent.

In other cases, there was no clear pattern. I didn’t have time to check out every one of them, but I did pick a few random ones to check on. Christmas tree selling permits, for example, didn’t go up at all, staying at $50. I was told that was because it seemed silly to jack up the price a couple dollars when the city only issued two such permits last year. The fee to have a judge preside over a wedding went up from $50 to $60. I was told they hadn’t gone up for four years and they also went up to match what others charge.

One interesting thing that emerged was the discovery of a study done in 1994, where the cost of providing every fee-based service was analyzed. Finance Director Saroj Jerath said it was misplaced in the chaos of the 1997 flood and was found in the basement. Since then, many of the fees have been subjected to annual inflation adjustments.

All of these things came up when the finance committee discussed the issue again yesterday – It came back because the council couldn’t agree on what to do with the fees. — and the committee agreed to just accept staff’s proposed fees and then do another cost-of-service study.

An explanation of inflation and cost of service

After the meeting, I talked to the council and pointed out what I thought was a discrepancy. Throughout, they alternately talked about pegging fees to inflation and pegging them to cost of service, as if the two were one and the same. They aren’t are they?

Inflation, or the Consumer Price Index put out by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, measures the changing cost of a basket of goods and services — sweaters, breakfast cereal, gasoline – at the national, regional and local level. It’s an abstraction that has nothing to do with the cost of city services. But because it would be costly in staff time to do a cost-of-service study every year, inflation is a convenient substitute. The two are not the same.

The cost of service, as the 1994 study showed, is a combination of factors such as staff time, wages, benefits, mileage, administrative overhead, material costs and so on.

Those things may go up at roughly the same rate as inflation, but they don’t have to. Staff wages have not been pegged to inflation, but roughly to the wages of staff at similar cities in the region, which has more to do with the supply and demand for those jobs than for sweaters or gasoline.

Benefits costs have been going up way faster than inflation for probably the past decade, as anyone paying health insurance premiums know.

Mileage rates have gone up because the cost of gasoline has also accelerated ahead of inflation.

On the other hand, administrative overhead has to have dropped. The number of city employees has fallen even as the population they serve has grown, something I’ve mentioned in the past.

The part about the politics

The main reason for the conflict between staff and council on this little issue, which Hal tried not to make a big deal of, is the tone of questioning, mostly by Doug, which seemed to suggest wrongdoing. This was compounded by the poor choice of words.

In my story, I mentioned how Saroj the finance director was “fuming” a little over accusations that her staff raised fees arbitrarily. Doug tried to claim at yesterday’s meeting that it was just me “editorializing,” as in opinionating. When some one spits out the word “arbitrary” in reference to what a certain council member had said about her staff, she is clearly fuming. It’s easy to stereotype bureaucrats as capricious just as as it’s easy to stereotype lawyers as weasels, so one can imagine how she might be offended at the characterization.

City staff probably miscalculated by giving the council the fee increases with no explanation attached, which leaves a lot of room for speculation by the council. As the note at the beginning of that proposal suggests, city staff thought this was just a housekeeping matter that didn’t require much explanation. The council had already agreed to the fee increases as part of the 2011 budget and this is just putting those increases into law. Having learned the lesson, staff returned with a more detailed explanation, answering most of the questions. If it had done this at the start, this thing wouldn’t turned into such a pointless fight.

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Follow-up: Sex offender registry goes political

Posted on October 6, 2010 by

That story I did about North Dakota not complying with national sex offender laws a while back is now a political issue:

Democratic-NPL candidate Jeanette Boechler said Wednesday that Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem “falsely claimed” North Dakota was, for the most part, complying with a 2006 law that set national standards for sex offender registration.

But Stenehjem said the state is “99 percent compliant” with the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, part of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act passed by Congress in 2006.

“I don’t think the voters of North Dakota know that we’re not in compliance, and I don’t think they would like it,” Boechler said.

Stenehjem said the state already is “at the forefront” of sex offender registry and long-term treatment — even if it doesn’t follow all provisions of the law.

“I don’t want to weaken it just to say that we’re in compliance with a mandate from Washington,” he said.

Boechler criticized comments Stenehjem made to the Herald this summer — especially his assertion that the state is “in full compliance except for a couple of areas” of the law where he has “policy disputes with the one-size-fits-all federal approach.”

She released a report Monday that says Stenehjem’s claim was untrue because North Dakota isn’t among the top 20 states in the nation as far as compliance with the law.

I’m not going to wade into partisan politics, but I think it’s worth repeating that there are differences of opinion within the law enforcement community about sex offender registration. So neither side is clearly in the right, which makes politicking a little tricky.

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GF city law: If you don’t pay, they don’t spray

Posted on October 6, 2010 by

The City Beat saw this story on ABC News last night and wondered if this could happen in Grand Forks, by this I mean:

South Fulton, Tenn., firefighters stood on the sidelines, watching as flames engulfed Gene Cranick‘s Obion County home. They refused to help because Cranick had not paid an annual “pay to spray” subscription fee.

“I just forgot to pay my $75,” homeowner Gene Cranick said. “I did it last year, the year before. … It slipped my mind.”

The city of South Fulton charges that $75 fire protection fee to rural residents who live outside the city limits. When a household has not paid the fee, firefighters are required by law to not respond.

As it turns out, there’s a similar law in Grand Forks. I couldn’t find a copy of the South Fulton city codes for a comparison, but here’s what Grand Forks’ city codes says (I’ve bolded the key parts, so skip the rest if you’re inclined.):

ARTICLE 5.  FIRE PROTECTION OUTSIDE CITY LIMITS

12-0501.  Agreement contracts–Application; fees; termination.
City fire protection shall be available to an owner of property situated outside of the taxing jurisdiction of the City of Grand Forks upon approval of the application of the owner by the fire chief and city council, and the payment of fees in an amount computed as specified herein, said application of the owner having been made to the city auditor. The annual fee for such outside fire protection shall be an amount equal to the annual mill levy for fire protection within the city could produce based on a “taxable” value as determined by the city assessor, using the same methods the city assessor uses to arrive at taxable value of property within the city, with a minimum of fee for such outside fire protection specified as one thousand eighty-four dollars ($1,084.00) per year. Each contract shall have an anniversary date of January 1, with the beginning payment of each contract to be prorated to the next January 1, with each payment thereafter to be made annually on or before January 1 of each year. Protection of any property for which payment is not made as herein provided shall be deemed cancelled at the hours of midnight on January 1. The city council may terminate any such contract as of the anniversary date of January 1 of any year upon ninety (90) days’ written notice, and may terminate any such contract as to property which has refused annexation to the City of Grand Forks ninety (90) days after such refusal….

12-0503.  Use of fire equipment outside city; circumstances, discretion.
The fire officer in charge of the city’s firefighting facilities at any given time is hereby authorized to dispatch from the city limits such of the city’s fire apparatus, equipment, and personnel as the officer deems appropriate under the circumstances in response to a fire or life threatening emergency existing outside the city limits or a hazardous materials incident occurring within the county limits in the following cases:

(1)   Where a fire or life threatening emergency exists on property shown on the current list of outside fire protection.

(2)   Where a fire exists on property not under contract, but because of its proximity, threatens property which the city is obligated to or has agreed to protect. However, in such cases the fire equipment shall be used to fight a fire on such property not under contract only to the extent necessary to save lives and protect that property which is under contract or which is situated within the city limits.

(3)   Where a fire exists upon a public highway and is located not more than fifteen (15) miles from the city limits.

(4)   Where a fire or life threatening emergency exists as a result of some accident which occurred on a public highway at a point not more than fifteen (15) miles from the city limits.

(5)   Where a fire or hazardous materials incident exists and is a prime obligation of another jurisdiction with which the City of Grand Forks has mutual aid agreement in force executed by specific authorization of the city council.

(6)   Where a fire exists as a direct or indirect result of any operation or activity operated, managed, or conducted by the City of Grand Forks.

(7)   In all other cases, fire department service to locations outside the city limits shall be limited to life threatening situations or responses to hazardous material incidents within the county limits.

(8)   Provided, however, that the restrictions and conditions established by this article shall not be applied to the use of that fire department vehicle commonly designated as the rescue van or rescue vehicle where circumstances in which use of such fire rescue van or vehicle has been requested by another fire department, political subdivision, or the United Hospital of Grand Forks, North Dakota.

(9)   Provided, further, however, that nothing herein shall in any way, impose any liability whatsoever by the City of Grand Forks for any failure of the city to dispatch such fire apparatus, equipment, and personnel, to successfully combat any fire, control and handle any life threatening emergency, or respond to any hazardous materials incident.

(10)   The extent to which such apparatus, equipment, and personnel of the City of Grand Forks shall be used and the manner of combating a life threatening emergency, fire or incident shall rest in the sole discretion of the officer in charge of the fire department at any give time. It is intended, under any and all circumstances, that property inside the city will always be given preference in case of simultaneous fires or life threatening situations.

So in South Fulton, it sounds like the Carricks called for help, but the fire department wouldn’t come. Then a neighbor whose property was threatened and who had paid the $75 called, then the firefighters came, but only to protect the neighbors’ property, leaving the Carricks’ home to burn.

That’s exactly what Subsection 2 above is about.

I called fire Chief Pete O’Neill and he said he remembered that in the 1970s, something exactly like this happened. Club 81, a strip club on U.S. Highway 81, was burning, but it hadn’t paid the fire protection fee. Northwest Bell, or something like that, was next doors and the company had paid. So GFFD went out there to protect Northwest Bell, but didn’t touch Club 81. The Manvel Fire Department, which covered that area, had to come down to take care of the blaze, by which time it was too late.

Since the law is still on the books, I think this could happen again.

Fire protection scheme

Here’s how fire protection works in this area:

  • Inside city limits, it’s GFFD’s job, obviously.
  • But Grand Forks has a mutual-aid agreement with East Grand Forks and Grand Forks Air Force Base, so if the fire departments in those area called for help, GFFD would be obligated to respond.
  • Outside city limits, fire protection is divided up among three rural fire departments: Thompson to the south, Emerado to the west and Manvel to the north. GFFD could help if asked — it’s a good-neighbor policy not mutual aid — but the city doesn’t have the tanker trucks needed to fight rural fires; they need hydrants.
  • There happens to be islands of unannexed land within city limits — basically non-city land surrounded by city land — and some have homes on them; there’s a home on South 42nd Street that’s outside, according to Chief O’Neill. They’re under the jurisdiction of whichever rural fire department’s zone that they’re closest to. Under the most public relations-ugly scenario, one of those homes could go up in flames and the owners hadn’t paid. We’d be seeing GFFD firefighters not doing anything while hundreds of cars drive by.

There’s a reason for this, to some eyes, heartless treatment. If the city helps, then people that live just outside city limits to avoid city taxes would be getting the same protection that people who do pay taxes. And, if there were another big fire inside city limits at the same time and GFFD couldn’t muster a full response in a timely manner, that’d be inexcusable.

Anyway, I wonder how Grand Forks is going to look in the national news if an incident like South Fulton happened here. First, you’ve got the mainstream media going bonkers over it; go ahead and Google “South Fulton fire” and see what comes up. Now you’ve got talking heads trying to turn up even more heat.

Cost of service

By the way, if you read Section 12-0501 above, you’ll notice that the fire protection fee is $1,084. The city plans to raise it to $1,120. I’m not sure what this is about. I had a lengthy and inconclusive discussion with City Council member Curt Kreun about the fees, which don’t seem to reflect actual cost of service to the average property owner in town. Curt hadn’t read the law so he thinks that because there are other revenues that go into fire protection than just property taxes the cost of service can be higher than property taxes. He’s kind of wrong, but we’ll get to that in a second.

I have done stories where I figured out the property tax bill for the average homeowner and it came to around $660. Now, that’s $660 for all city services — except utilities — not just fire protection. One would expect fire protection to be a fraction of that, say a third. GFFD’s budget is a bit smaller than GFPD’s, which is about half the general fund, if I remember correctly.

Now to Curt’s point: Yes there are other revenues that pay for fire protection. I just did a story about how we pay for city services a few weeks ago. I don’t have a break out for fire alone, but public safety as a service — including the cops, 911 center and courts –rely on property taxes for 32 percent of funding. The rest are sales tax, 12 percent; fees, fines, licenses, 11 percent; interest and dividends; 1 percent; grants and other intergovernmental transfers, 14 percent; rental and other earned income, 6 percent; cash carry-over from the previous year, 1 percent; and transfers from other departments that are protected by public safety, 23 percent.

If the principle is the rural resident pays whatever the average property owner in Grand Forks pays, then property taxes is pretty much it. The only fees residents pay that nobody else pays are utilities, and most of that is purely for the cost of service; the council recently agreed to a 2 percent fee increase to subsidize other city services, which includes fire. A rural resident also pays sales tax and their income tax contributs to those intergovernmental transfers.

Curt is a hardliner about people living just outside city limits to avoid higher city property taxes, so he always gets a little obstinate where that issue is concerned. I don’t know why he’s so emotional about it, but I was merely pointing out that I think the fire protection fee is a tad high and doesn’t appear to reflect of the law. But the attitude I’m getting is if people want to avoid paying the city then they can’t complain if the city doesn’t help them.

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Science club: Some kind of lesson about flood control

Posted on October 4, 2010 by

There was a big meeting of scientists and engineers in Grand Forks the other day and the big speaker was a guy named Robert Twilley. He’s a Louisiana State University ecologist and research chief involved in restoration of his state’s coastal wetlands, the same one whose diminishment made flooding so bad during Hurricane Katrina.

Anyway, I thought he had some interesting points regarding the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ main approach to flood control, which is to use technology to tame nature, except nature can bite back in subtle ways.

The corps’ Mississippi River and Tributaries Project, the big Seven Wonders of the World-sized flood control project down there, has been a boon for the state and for the nation, turning an unpredictable river into a major route for shipment of goods from the interior of the country. The problem is it tamed the river too much.

It reduced the number of outlets in the Mississippi River Delta to a handful, and because water carries sediment, it also reduced the flow of sediments that build wetlands. Louisiana’s wetlands are sinking while sea levels are rising so a continual flow of sediment is needed for them to stay above water, according to Dr. Twilley. The wetlands, as you may know, serve as a buffer between the cities of Louisiana and the sea. As wetlands shrink, they leave cities more vulnerable to flooding during hurricane season.

This made me wonder if wetlands loss in the Red River Valley have exacerbated flooding. Theoretically, if the wetlands were still around, they could hold some of the melted snow in the spring or the torrential rain that falls in the early summer, reducing the amount of water that dumps into the Red River tributaries.

I didn’t find anything to that effect, but, as it turns out, there have been some studies of whether wetlands restoration would reduce flooding. These happened shortly after the 1997 flood we’re all familiar with. Anyway, here’s the end result of one of those studies:

Based on the results of this study, the widespread restoration of wetlands is not considered to be wise use of public funds for the purpose of reducing flood related damage at the watershed or basin-wide level in the Red River Valley. However, this does not completely negate the potential feasibility of wetland restoration for flood control and/or the generation of other wetland-based environmental goods and services on a more limited and site-specific basis. Therefore, more research should be conducted regarding the use and non-use values of restored wetlands and how these values change when large numbers of wetlands are restored under various restoration options. In the meantime, wetland restoration in the Red River Valley should probably only be conducted in cases where simple restoration on low cost land can provide two or more additional feet of available storage bounce, have clear impacts on localized flood damage, and provide the additional (non-flood related) benefits. These scenarios are likely to occur only at a selective number of locations rather than across entire watersheds.

I don’t have time to read the entire thing, but my skimming shows that the problem is the restorable wetlands in the study area — the authors didn’t look at the entire valley — didn’t have the volume needed to reduce water levels significantly in major floods.

On the other hand, there is a proposal out there that sort of mimics wetlands: The Waffle Plan at UND’s Energy and Environmental Research Center. The plan would pay farmers to temporarily store water on their fields and not drain it.

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UND enrollment growth no longer a big worry

Posted on October 1, 2010 by

The City Beat hesitated a little while writing the lede in yesterday’s story about UND President Robert Kelley’s State of the University address because how do you say enrollment of 14,200 is about as big as the university really wants to be without adding all kinds of caveats?

I must’ve rephrased the lede a few times before settling on “close to the limit.” As I mentioned in the story, the caveats are that undergrad enrollment is very close to the limit, grad enrollment has a little room along with distance ed enrollment.

Professional schools such as the Law School and med school may grow if UND can persuade the Legislature to pay for expansion. The Law School is coming up on accreditation time and has been told it needs more space and renovated space. The med school needs expansion to train more doctors for the state’s rural areas, a critical need that UND hopes will be persuasive.

Walking to work this morning, I was thinking of reasons why the university shouldn’t just grow as big as it can.

First, higher ed doesn’t pay for itself in the conventional sense — Dr. Kelley says it does because of the $1 billion economic impact on the state. — so that means the bigger the university gets the greater the burden on taxpayers.

Second, this wouldn’t be as big an issue if the number of taxpayers expands greatly and the number of North Dakota students requiring higher ed also expands greatly. However, given demographic trends, neither of those things are true. A very large chunk of the student population comes out of Minnesota and many not from the immediate neighborhood. That’s a result of recruitment drives reaching down to the Twin Cities, as well as into other states.

What you want in a research university is probably a critical mass of some kind so you have a certain diversity of faculty and the ability to pull in a certain amount of research grants and contracts; this is where that economic impact comes in. So contraction of enrollment would be a step backwards.

But if you’ve already reached that critical mass and there’s no demographic pressure to expand undergrad enrollment, which is the majority of enrollment, I guess you don’t have to expand more.

Third, Dr. Kelley thinks there’s some attraction in being a smaller, more tight-knit university. There’s a quote that I meant to use, but forgot: “We can be distinctive as a cuampus that offers the advantages of a major research university, yet maintains much of the feel of a small liberal arts college.” That liberal arts college is what UND started as and continues to be its distinction from North Dakota State University to the south.

It’s interesting that Dr. Dick Hanson, the interim president at NDSU, had a similar sentiment regarding growth. In March, the Herald spoke with him and this is what I reported:

“It doesn’t matter if we’re bigger than UND,” North Dakota State University Interim President Dick Hanson said. “It doesn’t matter me.”

The era under which NDSU relentlessly pursued enrollment growth was at an end, he suggested, clarifying his earlier ambivalence toward the rapid expansion of the student body that his university may not have room for.

 ”Getting bigger isn’t the point; getting better is the point,” he said Friday at a meeting with the Herald’s Editorial Board.

 Hanson said that, unlike former President Joseph Chapman, he doesn’t believe in competing with UND by creating rival academic programs.

Dr. Hanson said all this because the pell-mell growth under Dr. Chapman was blamed for some financial problems the university faced as it ran out of room for students.

Compare this to what Dr. Kelley said yesterday:

I believe that these enrollment numbers are just about right for the physical resources of the institution. So, I submit to you that the challenge before us, now,  is not so much quantity, but to continue to focus on quality. Of course, we will need to sustain enrollment numbers.  But, of greater importance for the long term, focus now on enhancing the quality of the academic programs at the university; the quality of research, creative and scholarly opportunities for students and faculty; and an enhanced overall quality of the university experience at UND.

I asked him to elaborate after the speech and the first thing he mentioned was the limited space in residence halls and dining halls. 

NDSU President Dean Bresciani hasn’t said anything like that as far as I can tell — and I’m just doing some Web searches here — and he seemed to indicate in his State of the University address yesterday that he would try to address the space constraints at his university with the Legislature.

NDSU’s evolution over the past decade has reflected its increasing productivity, visibility and contributions to ever-broadening constituencies. Success in doing so has led to a consistent and dramatic increase in the level of demand for the university expressed by prospective students, scholars and business leaders not just in North Dakota, but throughout the nation and even the world. For 11 years in a row now, and reflecting our new reputation, enrollments have hit record levels.

In fact, it has been argued that, if anything, we are a victim of our own success. And although finding adequate resources to meet demand is a serious problem, I’m going to call the challenges we face to maintain our increasing success a good problem, and one that ultimately offers a strategic opportunity to better serve the state.

I kind of wonder how these subtle differences will shape out in the coming legislative sessions, if not this biennium, maybe the next or the one after?

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UND team wins UAV competition in Australia; UAV competition comes to GF

Posted on September 30, 2010 by

The City Beat is running out of time to blog today. Sorry, sorry. But I do have time to drop a few links relevant to some stories I’ve been working on today.

First story: UND’s unmanned aircraft team won a search and rescue competition in Queensland, Australia, this week, which is big enough news for President Robert Kelley to mention it in his State of the University Address today and vice president for research Phyllis Johnson to mention it at the R&D Showcase on Wednesday.

What is this competition? It’s a A$50,000 contest among 11 university teams from around the world. The rules are pretty tough requiring a no-more-than 90 minute attempt to search an area about 8 square miles in size for a man-sized dummy, equipped with a heat lamp to simulate body heat, and dropping 2 cups of water near him. UND found “Outback Joe,” the dummy, but didn’t get the water close enough, winning only A$15,000. But it’s the first university to win the competition, so thumbs up to them. Check out Joe’s Twitter feed to get a sense of how things went.

Second story: A different kind of unmanned aircraft competition is coming to Grand Forks, this one a little more combat-oriented, courtesy of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. Check out the hilarious video on this page. Anyway, the mission here sounds extremely complex and I’d be surprised if any team made it in its first year.

What they have to do, according to the rules, is maneuver a small unmanned aircraft through a broken window into a simulated enemy spy base, evade guards, security cameras, ground pressure sensors and laser tripwires to pickup a tiny thumb drive filled with some sensitive information. And they have to do it all in 10 minutes.

I don’t think even the CIA has this technology yet!

What I thought was fascinating is how far we’ve come with unmanned aircraft technology. When the first AUVSI mission came out in 1995, all the rules required was the aircraft pick up some discs and move them over a 3-foot barrier. That was just 15 years ago.

Well, gotta go.

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Science club: Landfill gas project is pretty much dead

Posted on September 29, 2010 by

Aww man, the dream is dead.

Back in 2007, when the whole fight over where Grand Forks would, or rather could, build its new landfill, the City Beat did a story about the Fargo landfill, with some mention of a system that city uses to tap gas generated by putrefying garbage and convert it to heat for a nearby oilseed processing plant.

It was pretty cool then when Grand Forks looked into such a system for its old landfill. In 2008, I reported that UND’s Energy and Environmental Research Center had found that there may be enough landfill gas to pay for a 2-megawatt generator. The cost was estimated at $3.5 million, which means, at the electricity rate of the time, break even would occur in six years.

Well, that hopeful estimate prompted a more detailed study by Burns & McDonnell, the guys who designed the new landfill. Yesterday, their engineers came before the Grand Forks City Council’s service committee to say, essentially, that the city landfill is too small to generate enough gas to break even.

Here are a few reasons why:

  • Rule of thumb says a 1.5-megawatt generator needs 450 cubic feet per minute of gas and a 2-megawatt generator needs 700 cfm. In 2010, the landfill is expected to generate 776 cfm, but only 209 cfm can be recovered. There are areas where the garbage is too shallow for landfill gas taps to work; they need about 20 feet of garbage. It gets worse. By 2030, there would only be 386 cfm with only 104 cfm recoverable. Fresh garbage is more putrid and generates more gas, stale garbage is almost done putrifying so there’s less gas.
  • A system of pipelines and gas taps would cost $3 million. Add a boiler for heating and costs go up to $4.5 million. Add a generator or two and costs go up to $4.7 million. I’m not sure how they calculated maintenance and operations and electric rates, but the bottom line is that, over 20 years, the city would still be in the hole by at least $3.1 million with just the boiler and $3.7 million with the boiler and generator.
  • Even with carbon credits at $12 per credit, which is the floor in proposed federal climate change legislation, that’s still not enough to break even.

That’s just heartbreaking. All that putrid gas gone to waste.

B&M consultants said the city could install a gas collection system at the new landfill and turn the landfill into something called a bioreactor, which is just a fancy word for adding water to the garbage to encourage microbes to putrify the garbage faster and make more gas. But, they said, it’ll cost a lot of money. How much they didn’t say.

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Texting and driving ban doesn’t, uh, work?

Posted on September 28, 2010 by

A few weeks ago, the Grand Forks City Council banned texting and driving because it’s considered dangerously distracting. Today, the Highway Loss Data Institute, affiliated with the insurance industry, said bans in four states have not reduced highway accidents and may have caused them to go up.

What the smurf?

I called the HLDI and Anne Fleming, a spokeswoman, was kind enough to answer my questions. I sort of imagined they got lots of media calls — people are fascinated with texting and driving, which is so tempting and yet so obviously stupid – and a reporter from a small-town paper would be lucky to get anything.

Anyways, it’s not that texting bans do not cause a reduction in texting and driving. That can’t be gleaned from the data, she said. All it shows is that when you compare drivers in the states with bans and the neighboring states that don’t have bans you see either a comparable accident rate or you see an increase.

It could be that texting and driving has decreased, in which case drivers have found something new to distract them. It could be texting and driving has stayed the same, in which case law enforcement isn’t very effective. It could be that drivers are more furtive about texting — say, texting in their lap instead of on the steering wheel — in which case it could explain why accident rates went up a little.

Traditionally, the way you change driver behavior is with a two-prong approach: Public education and law enforcement. That is, tell people it’s dangerous and then punish them if they do it. It worked for seatbelt usage, but, with texting and driving, it’s harder to see people texting if they want to hide it.

I was pleased to be able to throw some prior research at Anne to get her take. As I mentioned in an earlier post, national data shows accident rates have been dropping for years in spite of increase in travel and increase in the popularity of cell phone usage, especially texting in recent years. I suggested that maybe whatever experiments showing texting and driving to be dangerous were flawed because, in real life, people are more careful.

She said that research shows that cell phone use is absolutley associated with accidents. In fact, HLDI’s sister organization the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety compared phone records with accidents and found that cell phone use increased risks of accidents four-fold.

Better car technology, she suggested, has reduced accident rates faster than cell phone use has increased them. That technology may hold the key to resolving this problem and she said HLDI is looking into them.

Here’s what IIHS has to say about technology in regards to the problem of driving and talking on the phone:

Automakers are rolling out crash avoidance systems that warn drivers when they are not paying attention. Some systems may intervene if the system judges that a crash is imminent. Systems like lane-departure warning and forward-collision warning promise to prevent many kinds of distracted driving crashes, not just those that result from cellphone use (see Status Report, April 17, 2008). But this isn’t a quick fix. Most new vehicles don’t have crash avoidance features, and it will take some time before the systems are in wide use as newer vehicles supplant older ones. Plus the effects of these technologies on real-world crashes have not yet been established.

It is possible that technologies that prevent drivers from using phones may help, too. Several blocking technologies are on the market and more are on the way. They are designed to block or limit driver cellphone communications while a car is in motion. Most can be set up so drivers can always phone a family member or other prespecified contact, and passengers still get to use their phones even if drivers’ are blocked. Calls to 911 and other emergency numbers aren’t prohibited. Companies mainly market these technologies to parents of teen drivers and business and fleet owners to keep tabs on employees. Costs range from about $35 to $200 a year, including monthly service fees. Some companies offer free trials. It is unclear how well these systems will work and if drivers will accept them.

Now that I think about it, I have two observations.

First, this technology is relatively new and even today few cars have them so they can’t possibly have had an impact on accident rates over the last 20 years. The main thrust of auto safety technology as I understand it has been better survivability after accidents have occurred. So they might reduce fatalities, but would have no impact on the number of accidents.

Second, if the ineffectiveness of texting bans is because enforcement is difficult, what explains the ineffectiveness of banning cell phone use by drivers? When somebody’s holding an object to his or her ear, it’s as clear as if he or she is wearing seatbelts and that’s proven easy to enforce.

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