Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity (13 page)

It’s not just college students getting the shaft. State education dollars also go toward job-training and retraining programs, and those monies are getting cut too. According to the
Wall Street Journal,
funding for local job-training centers in California is 2 percent lower than it was in 2007, even though the number of unemployed Californians has more than doubled to nearly two million. No wonder California is saddled with one of the highest rates of long-term structural unemployment in the country.
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Libraries

Libraries have also been budget-cut casualties. Nationally, the American Library Association reports that 60 percent of libraries had flat or decreased budgets last year. Forty percent of all libraries have had three consecutive years of revenue shortfalls. For library patrons, the timing of the cuts couldn’t be much worse. Library usage is countercyclical. When times are good, people buy books and magazines. When times are tough, they go the library. So even as demand for libraries has surged, libraries have had to cut hours, trim staff, and eliminate or significantly reduce programs in order to stay open at all.

The free, taxpayer-supported, public library is as uniquely American as hot dogs and hip-hop. The first free public library in the world was built in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1833. Over the decades, public libraries’ role in American life has expanded and evolved. Libraries have always been a safe and quiet place to study—an epicenter of autonomous learning. Kids grew up with their library cards as their only identification—good for five books at a time. Nowadays libraries’ role in the economy and in our lives is different. Some might say bigger. With computers and Internet access, libraries are now used by job hunters to help them connect with potential employers. An American Library Association survey reveals that “more than 70% of libraries report that staff helped users complete online job applications. But the majority of libraries do not have enough staff to assist job-seekers with their vital efforts to get back into the workplace.” Worse, the librarians who still have jobs may lack the proper training to help job seekers navigate the technology. So for now, many libraries have to settle for being just another Wi-Fi hot spot.
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In late 2011 Detroit closed four out of its remaining twenty-three library branches. This came after the city had already fired eighty-two library staff earlier in the year.
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But it’s not just poor cities gutting their library systems. Troy, Michigan, which in 2008
Money
magazine voted the twenty-second-best place to live in the United States, is a relatively affluent city with a median household income from 2006 to 2010 of over $87,000. J.D. Power and Associates and DuPont Automotive have offices there. But due to lack of funding, even Troy’s library was closed down, leaving behind a sobering Web site FAQ section for confused residents. Residents wondering where to gain access to books or other library materials were directed to other local libraries’ help desks in order to see whether their Troy library cards would be accepted.

Libraries are vulnerable because bean counters don’t see the benefits of funding them. “We have invested in full-time librarians for the last three or four years and we haven’t seen the kind of payoff we’d like,” Washington, D.C., school chancellor Kaya Henderson announced at a 2012 meeting. But since when have librarians been expected to provide a return on investment? Isn’t education one of the basic principles in modern America? In D.C., upward of fifty school-librarian positions may be eliminated, even though more than thirty schools are already without site-based librarians. It is tough enough getting students to come to school and pay attention. But how can they continue learning if there is no one in the libraries to guide them? Basic services like school libraries affect not only learning but also students’ overall sense of well-being.
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Just ask youngster Karla Rivera. “I am 13 years old and I love reading. . . . Without the library, I would DIE,” Rivera wrote on the city of New Haven, Connecticut’s Web site. It was 2011, and Connecticut’s second-largest city was grappling with a $5.5 million budget deficit and debating whether costs should be cut by laying off librarians and reducing library hours. “If I didn’t have the library, I probably would not have survived high school,” declared another local teen, Shawnese Turner, insisting that it took her four hours to do her homework at home versus just two hours “in a nice quiet place like the library.”
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Few things are more politically unpopular than closing libraries, but New Haven wound up doing it anyway, axing twelve librarians and cutting seventy-five hours from the weekly hours of the city’s half dozen libraries—despite the fact that library usage was up nearly 50 percent since 2003. New Haven’s mayor, John DeStefano, Jr., insisted he had no choice. Connecticut’s real-estate market has been among the hardest hit in the country, and property-tax revenues just weren’t keeping up with New Haven’s biggest expenses—the cost of public-employee health-insurance and pension plans. Those outlays had soared from $44 million a year to $105 million and now consumed 22 percent of the city budget, up from 12 percent ten years earlier. “They are,” DeStefano said of health care and pensions, “the Pac-Man of our city budget, consuming everything in sight.”
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Parks and Trash Collection

It’s one thing to visit a county park one day and find trash near swings or a ball field. But it’s quite another to return to that same park week after week and realize that the litter isn’t being cleaned up. Not only is this a major eyesore for the community, but it’s a red flag for anyone considering purchasing a home there. It effectively says, “We don’t care about cleanliness in our community”—even if that is not the full truth. Cities and neighborhoods dealing with mounting budgetary issues have been forced to either privatize waste-collection services (which can eliminate jobs for some residents) or cut services and leave trash disposal up to homeowners. For example, in Roanoke, Virginia, officials needed to cut around $1.4 million from the sanitation department. Of that, $160,000 was saved by removing trash bins from condos and townhomes and by “eliminating free residential garbage disposal at the Roanoke Valley Resource Authority Transfer Station,” according to the
Roanoke Times.
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Until then, residents had been allowed to drop off their trash a mere twenty times per year at the local transfer station. But really think about that scenario. If you live in a condo or townhome, your trash bins may be removed, meaning you (or your complex) will have to find a way to a regulated trash dump. This increases costs for everyone—gas, service, and equipment. In the past, waste management seemed like a given, one of the benefits of owning your own place. There was a certain pride in rolling your garbage can out to the curb of a home you had worked hard to build and maintain. Who wants to buy a house someplace that makes you pay to take out the trash? Residents will find a way to get by, but they should not have to. Trash removal ought to be a bare-minimum benefit of paying property taxes.

After closing the ten transfer stations where residents hauled their own trash, Hidalgo County in Texas decided to privatize trash collection, a move projected to save the county roughly $6 million annually.
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There are cost-effective ways like this around poor budgeting by cities and counties. But that raises a question: Where do tax dollars go? After all, it’s not as if trash collection were being cut in order to prevent cuts to ostensibly more important services like police and fire departments. Those are being cut too.

Public Safety

With fewer police and firefighters on the streets, response times have gotten longer. In Red Feather Lakes and Upper Poudre, Colorado, residents were warned that they would have to wait between forty and sixty minutes for emergency response, instead of the usual twenty minutes. That’s scary given the increased number of hardened criminals who may soon be roaming the streets of budget-strained states. In May 2011 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the state of California to release thirty thousand prisoners to reduce overcrowding in its prisons. While the issue of overcrowded prisons has been around for years, the solutions once discussed centered on privatizing prisons or granting more lenient sentences to nonviolent offenders—not allowing a mass exodus of convicted felons. In California there’s no place to put thirty thousand inmates. “It can be like the Wild West out there if we’re not careful,” one worried bike-shop owner in Bakersfield told the
Wall Street Journal.
Some prisoners could be relocated from state prisons to municipal jails, but there isn’t room for all of them. “I call it ‘justice by geography,’ depending upon where you get arrested,” said UC Berkeley criminal-justice expert Barry Krisberg.
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California is not alone. Scrambling to find ways to keep prisons open in the face of shrinking budgets, Angola, Louisiana, has resorted to substituting watchdogs for prison guards. After the prison’s annual budget was cut back from $135 million five years ago to $115 million today, the warden brought in “wolf dogs” to replace over one hundred prison guards it had to lay off. “You might run,” one inmate declared, “but they’re going to catch you.” According to a
Wall Street Journal
story, the money spent on one prison guard’s salary could cover the cost of the full medical care, supplies, and food for thirty of these “wolf dogs.” As of August 2012, there have been few protests of the substitution.
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In Stockton, California, the murder rate is rising, as the police department has had to lay off several dozen police officers. Others in the department have resigned themselves to asking for their pink slips or accepting lower salaries. Stockton’s fire department is in a similar predicament.
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Shrinking police and fire departments and slower emergency-response times are not what residents sign up for when they scribble their signatures on mortgage documents. This is not the American dream pitched to them by Realtors, politicians, and history books. The dream has been replaced by fears about whether or not their homes will sell or their streets will be safe. Unfortunately, this nightmare is an unavoidable reality for some cities and states struggling to balance budgets. Imagine you live in one of those Colorado communities where police response times have increased from twenty to sixty minutes. Imagine there’s an armed robbery or violent assault in progress—with perpetrators seemingly free to commit any crime with the knowledge that they’ll be long gone before police ever show up.

In Arizona, a state whose economy is still reeling from the real-estate crash, surviving municipal budget cuts has become a way of life in many communities. Surprise, Arizona, for instance, has been forced to eliminate support roles at its police and fire departments in order to cut costs. While police officers’ and firefighters’ jobs were saved, their responsibilities have been extended, putting a strain on core police and fire services and the departments’ overtime budgets. Other cuts included $50,000 in reductions on spending for training and supplies. In other words, some of these policemen or firefighters don’t even have the proper training or equipment to protect their city—all to save $350,000. What is the cost of a lost life or a burglarized home?
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With fewer police officers and firefighters, crime rates will inevitably go up, as is already happening in places like San Bernardino, California, and Orlando, Florida. There is no Bruce Wayne or Peter Parker to keep the city’s streets safe. Communities will have to get used to lower-quality policing—lower-quality everything, for that matter. “We’re going to have to learn to fend for ourselves,” Nick Gonzalez, president of a San Bernardino neighborhood group, lamented after his city declared bankruptcy and made such deep cuts to police that property crimes might now go uninvestigated.
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Clearly these aren’t the neighborhoods of yesteryear with tree-lined sidewalks and mail carriers we knew by name extending their greetings to our mothers once we reached home. Rather, the new standard encourages neighborhood watch and vigilante justice, libraries closed on Sundays (and sometimes Mondays too), and shorter hours in the municipal pool—all of which erode quality of life and make the decision to pick up stakes that much easier.

California is going to have a hard time digging out of its fiscal nightmare. Just as excessive leverage gave investment banks like Bear Stearns no margin of error during the financial crisis, there’s little budgetary wiggle room for states that carry outsized debt loads. Indeed, it’s sadly ironic that a state whose latest boom was so tied to real estate has a law, Proposition 13, that prohibits municipalities from raising property taxes meaningfully enough to keep towns and cities properly funded. California allows a police chief to retire with a pension of over $200,000 after less than a year on the job but doesn’t have enough money to buy new books for classrooms or to keep violent felons in jail. No wonder the state is facing an exodus of employers and employees alike.

Things are very different in Indiana, especially when it comes to education. Since 2000 Indiana has increased state spending on K-12 education from $3.9 billion to $7.6 billion and spending on higher education from $1.3 billion to $1.8 billion. Since 1990 the percentage of Indiana’s population holding a college degree has increased by almost 50 percent. It still remains too far below the national average, but the metrics are heading in the right direction and the gap is narrowing. The K-12 story is even stronger: Indiana’s high-school graduation rate is not only above national average but is also improving faster than the national average.
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Such things matter. They matter to businesses seeking to relocate or expand. They matter to investors deciding where to put their money. And they matter to families considering where to buy a house. With the housing-bust states showing few signs of pulling out of their economic and budgetary tailspins, these decisions have never been more clear cut.