IS IT TRUE that other media sources are finally publishing articles about the vanishing population of the City of Evansville?…that it has only taken 50 years for them to start?…that finally the Courier and Press ran an editorial yesterday that addressed the topic of population declines?…that the Downtown loft program, Front Door Pride, the Pigeon Creek Greenway, a public smoking ban, Amazonia, Bosse Field, the LST and the Downtown arena were all cited in the article as efforts that have been made to make Evansville more attractive?…that population shrinkage is about people and not about stuff?…that with the exception of a public smoking ban which incidentally has NOT BEEN ADOPTED by the Evansville City Council that all of these things are targeted at tourists or at very small numbers of people?…that if these are the things that are being done to alleviate the symptom of population shrinkage that Evansville is seriously misguided?

IS IT TRUE that the Manhattan Institute released a study that concluded that the most influential attribute to the growth of a city is the SKILLS of its residents?…that not one of the things listed above does one thing to improve the SKILLS or educational attainment of so much as one Evansvillian?…that the same study concluded that SKILLED people look for cities that have good schools, safe neighborhoods, short commutes, and other SKILLED people when deciding where to live?…that not one of the things listed above does one thing to improve the schools, the safety of neighborhoods, or attracts or inspires other SKILLED people to choose Evansville as home?

IS IT TRUE that the Front Door Pride homes and the IDEA Home are absolutely stunning and setting neighborhood aside some of the best priced homes in America?…that selling homes for half of what they cost to build is not sustainable for local governments and benefits only a few people?…that price does not matter to young professionals ready to start a family unless the neighborhood schools are top performers and crime is minimal?…that if the FDP neighborhood had schools that compete with Scott Elementary on ISTEP performance and the low crime rates of northern Vanderburgh County that all of these houses would be sold at double the price?…that there is still the ugly reality that adding homes when the population is shrinking defies the logic of free markets?

IS IT TRUE that population flight really is a problem for the City of Evansville?…that breaking down the numbers for the first decade of the millennium reveals that Evansville shrunk by roughly 10 people per week when annexations are considered?…that some of these people left for better opportunities and others passed away?…that there are only two ways to grow a population?…that having babies and having people that move here are the only growth mechanisms available?…that an aging demographic as is typical for Evansville are rapidly getting beyond the age of having more babies?…that the growth of the population of Evansville will depend on being the choice of people who were not born here as a home?…that people choose where to live based on economic opportunity, safety, schools, and then on entertainment options?…that I have never ever know anyone to relocate to a city because of an arena, a ball field complex, a rain forest exhibit, or a WWII boat?…that if the City of Evansville does not start doing something to inspire economic opportunity that the exodus will continue?…that two arenas, five zoos, a hundred miles of bike paths, a chicken in every pot, a half priced house in a crime ridden neighborhood, or even consolidated government will not make up for the deficiency of career opportunities with a good future for young educated professionals.

IS IT TRUE that band aids and games will not solve the population problem? …that an intervention may just be required to get things on a path to growth?…that from an economic perspective it will take the equivalent of chemotherapy, followed by multiple organ transplants to really get the City of Evansville onto a path to relevance and prosperity?

Practical Goals for a Growing City

The article is rather long and deep analytically. It goes into some rather intricate details about the fact that cities with skilled people grow and concentrates on what to do to keep or attract skilled people. It is also clear that valuable skills are a dynamic thing and that creating positive change is the real key to maintaining skills. Here are some excerpts. I encourage anyone who really wants to understand how to make Evansville a skilled city and thus a relevant city to digest the entire article several times.

“Cities grow when people want to be near other people in that city or to something else that’s near that city.”

“In 1900, it was important to be near the coal mine, near the Great Lakes; in 2000, it was irrelevant.”

“In 2000, increasingly, cities are located around places where smart people want to live rather than around places where businesses have some inborn transportation cost advantage.”

“There is no reason to think that the decline of manufacturing firms or the exodus of manufacturing from cities is inefficient or bad. It is a big mistake to think that we’re going to reinvent cities around nineteenth-century solutions.”

“Moving ideas and skilled people has been what made cities work. It’s no longer about the port; it’s about the people. Entrepreneurship is part of the equation.”

“The policy vision that this will tend to push is that if we have skilled workers, the employers will follow. We should have an employee-based view of public policy.”

“Schools predict population growth, employment growth, income growth, and housing growth. Schools are a reliable predictor of which cities do well and which cities do poorly. ”

“The crucial thing, obviously, is that you have smart people and that they want to stay there—and that they don’t immediately respond to a negative shock by moving on to the next city.”

“The key to reinvention is to keep skilled people from leaving. That brings us to the actual policy issue: How do you make cities skilled? If skilled people are so important, how do you keep skilled people in your city?”

“being good at manufacturing meant that they were less-skilled places, so cities such as Philadelphia and Detroit tended to attract huge numbers of unskilled people, which can be a real difficulty for the city later on. The fact that a city was good at doing something for less-skilled people—though it was great in 1950—was terrible in 2000”

“The bad news is that in the best-case scenarios, the top bureaucrats of governments still choose losers.”

“Cities often focus on growing industries in which they have no conceivable comparative advantage. How are cities with incredibly low skill levels and no major universities going to be serious centers of biotech?”

“Why would you think that by focusing on low-skilled, nineteenth-century industries that you are going to reinvent your city for the twenty-first century? The hallmark of the modern economy is unpredictability and innovation”

“There’s no way with the data to reject the view that the number of college graduates, or some reasonable proxy for skills, is everything. Nothing else appears to predict anything about urban success.”

“What else do skilled people like? They live in places with lower murder rates, and they don’t like crime. …Skilled people scoot to the sides of boundaries, where they are able to send their kids to good public schools rather than to bad public schools.”

“As much as we may want to take care of our poorest residents locally, it’s a very hard thing to do because of the mobility of skilled people. We often make things worse because the skilled people emigrate.”

“But if you think that you’re going to save a city by quick fixes such as creating a funky downtown, it’s hard to imagine it working. All the available evidence suggests that most skilled people—for example, a thirty-eight-year-old married couple or a twenty-seven-year-old single person—want good, cheap schools, fast commutes, and safe streets. These things do not come cheap or easy.”

Here is the link to the entire study.

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cb_40.htm

What Makes Cities Grow?

By: Stephen Moore

Back in the 1960s, economist John Kenneth Galbraith pronounced that there was “nothing wrong with New York that doubling the city budget wouldn’t solve.” As the budget more than doubled while the city’s problems grew worse, many came to suspect that just the opposite is true.

Now there’s statistical evidence that high spending and taxes do indeed lead to urban decay. My colleague Dean Stansel and I conducted a study for the Cato Institute comparing the tax and fiscal policies of fast-growing cities with those of declining ones. We found a consistent pattern: spending and taxes were far higher in the declining cities.

Of the nation’s 75 biggest cities, the ten fastest-growing increased in population by between 34 and 89 percent between 1980 and 1990. The ten fastest-declining cities lost between 7 and 16 percent of their populations during the same period. (New York, which grew a modest 3.5 percent, was not among the cities we compared.)

The differences in fiscal policy between the two groups of cities were striking. For every $1 of per-capita expenditures in high-growth cities, the shrinking cities spent $1.71. High-growth cities spent an average of $673 per person per year, versus $1,152 in the shrinking cities. These figures don’t include expenditures on health, education, and welfare, which are difficult to compare across cities because of differences in which level of government is responsible. We found, however, that education expenditures are $1,400 per pupil higher in low-growth cities than in high-growth ones; welfare benefits are higher, too.

Shrinking cities had more than twice as large a bureaucracy as growth cities: the high-growth ten had 99 city employees per 10,000 residents; the shrinking cities, 215. City taxes averaged $304 per capita in the high-growth cities, compared with $588 in the shrinking ones. And whereas none of the 15 highest-growth cities have an income tax, ten of the 15 lowest-growth ones do. A key for urban revival, it’s clear, is to reduce spending and government employment so that existing and prospective businesses and residents don’t bear such a high tax burden.

In our daily “IS IT TRUE” column on February 3rd we published the following paragraph on how there is a fine line between what was going on in Egypt that eventually toppled the regime of a dictator Hosni Mubarek and the discontentment in Evansville that has been rising as a result of basic infrastructure not working and services like park cleanliness not being tended to.

“IS IT TRUE that there is a fine line between what is going on in Egypt and what is going on in Evansville?…that the world seems to be in a period of discontentment?…that this discontentment with the status quo is valid and as plain as the nose on ones face to see?…that somewhere in Cairo, Egypt a few short years ago in private homes, the people that we now see in the streets were forming their own Tea Parties, Southern Indiana Democracy for America’s, and Tri-State Tomorrows?…that those groups attracted members, that politics and governance continued to fail them, and that a breaking point was reached?…that blood has been shed and changes will be made but that if the political leadership of Egypt would have listened and acted 10, 20, or 30 years ago and practiced good public policy all day everyday that this bloodshed could have been avoided?”

Some of our readers understood the parallels and were supportive of the column. Others were downright insulting sending emails to personal addresses and calling me everything from a half wit to a stooge for publishing that observation. I stood by that observation then and I stand by it today.

Let me be clear. I do not equate goon squads, baton wielding camel mounted police, and dictatorial government with needles in the park, disfunctional sewers, uncleanliness, and pot holes that would gobble up a SmartCar. I do equate the failure of American government both local and national to provide fundamental services to the failure of the Egyptian government to perform well enough to keep the outrage at bay.

Egypt is governmentally many years behind the United States from a democratic republic point of view. The Egyptian people went into the streets over human rights that we US citizens basically take for granted. The discontentment in Evansville and other American cities that is manifesting itself in splinter groups seeking to improve our democracy is rooted in not getting what we expect. A case in point is that we expect that our parks will be cleaned and safe, our roads will be maintained, and that our sewer can be counted on to work. These are not rights. They are however services for which we pay taxes to receive. When we do not get these things that we pay for and expect, for a while we tolerate it, then we become disgusted, then a child steps on a needle in a city park and it becomes an outrage. The needle in the park and that cavalier response of local government to the pleas of the father was the “straw that broke the camel’s back” for many people in Evansville.

From that perspective the outrage here is still a fine line away from the outrage in Egypt. This week the public employees of the State of Wisconsin have shut down the Madison school system and 14 Democratic members of their state legislature have crossed the money saving border into Illinois over their Governor’s proposal to ask them to pay more for health insurance, contribute to their own retirement plans, and to modify the collective bargaining agreement that they are working under.

The New York Times today published a column titled “Cairo in the Midwest?” to describe the scene and attitude of the 15,000+ public employees who took to the streets over the Governor’s plan. It is their right to do so and we shall see how it plays out. Personally, I think needles in the park and the general decay of Evansville’s infrastructure is more important and affects a higher percentage of our population than the public employees of Wisconsin’s insurance and retirement plight. Both of course disrupt someones life and both need to be resolved satisfactorily.

The Wisconsin protests are dominating the national news while Evansville’s infrastructure and maintenance deficiencies struggle to get the attention of other local media outlets. Our discontentment is valid and important. For those of you who sent messages calling me a half wit for connecting these dots 16 days ago please extend those comments to the learned journalists and writers from the coasts who are now connecting the same dots and writing about “Cairo in the Midwest”.

Link to “Cairo in the Midwest?”

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/cairo-in-the-midwest/?src=un&feedurl=http://json8.nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.jsonp

Mayor Cites Choosing Family over Politics as Driving his Decision

STATEMENT of Mayor Weinzapfel

From: Evansville Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel
Regarding: Political Future
Date: Saturday, February 19, 2011

I don’t think I’ve made any secret of the fact that for the past few months, I have been exploring the possibility of running for Governor of the State of Indiana. And I’ve been encouraged by many of my supporters and friends to get in the race. They say my experience here in Evansville of creating good jobs, improving education and taking innovative approaches to government could really benefit the state…particularly now.

When I think about running for Governor, I get excited about the possibility of helping all Hoosiers across Indiana achieve their dreams and about moving our state forward. But I also think about the time it takes to run a statewide campaign. I would have to spend the next two years away from my family and friends and away from this community.

Some might find this hard to believe, but one of the benefits of serving as Mayor is that I can do my job and still have time to enjoy my children, watch them grow up and participate in their lives in a meaningful way.
I’m not ready to give that up. And it’s become clear to me that running for Governor would force me to choose between politics and my family. And frankly, that’s an easy choice for me, I choose my family.

And so, I’m announcing today that I will not be a candidate for Governor in 2012

Although I’m not running, I intend to work as hard as I can to help make sure Democrats take back the Governor’s office. I’m excited about the candidates who have expressed an interest in running, and I’m confident that come November of 2012, Hoosiers will be celebrating a Democratic victory, and celebrating a bright future.

IS IT TRUE that City County Observer Mole #3 has predicted for over a year now that lame duck Evansville Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel would not be making a run for either a 3rd term as Mayor or for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Indiana?…that the next career step for Mayor Weinzapfel may just be a position as a lobbyist in either Indianapolis or Washington D. C.?…that the 32 candidates who have put themselves forward to fill 10 elected positions will assume the collective leadership role for the City of Evansville on January 1, 2012?…that the problems that they will face are already legion?

IS IT TRUE that the City County Observer is pleased with the fact that VenuWorks has announced the intention to hire 25 full time workers and up to 300 part timers to service the new Evansville Arena?…that SMG has 32 full time employees in Evansville right now and employs and equivalent number of part timers to do the day to day things needed to manage events?…that we encourage VenuWorks to give much consideration to any SMG employees who may be let go as they have valuable knowledge of local markets and sponsorship opportunities?…that we hope that although the process was suspect that the transition will be smooth and that Evansville prospers as a result of opening the new Arena?

IS IT TRUE that moving 25 or 32 or even 300 jobs from one location within the City of Evansville to another location WILL NOT CREATE ONE JOB?…that the only way for any public official to claim credit for permanent job creation as a result of building the new Arena is to find a use way to use Roberts Stadium in a way that retains many of the jobs that are already depending on its events?…that if and we must say if some senior elected official like a Mayor finds and supports extending the life of Roberts Stadium that then and only then should that person be able to publicly congratulate themselves on creating a single permanent job by building a new Arena?

IS IT TRUE that the 11 elected offices that are up for grabs this year in the City of Evansville elections have drawn the interests of 32 candidates?…that the range of candidates run from high school grads to doctors, from rich to poor, and from populist charismatics to recluses?…that this is what a government of the people is all about?…that Evansville has never seen such a menagerie of people seeking elected office?…that most of these people have a chance?…that for the first time in perhaps 50 or more years Evansville, Indiana has a chance of having a balanced local government?…that good public policy emerges when different philosophies are forced to think together?…that maybe just maybe the groupthink that has paralyzed Evansville will go away forever and a true participative government will lead us to a level not seen since the early 1950’s from a national relevance perspective?

Bill Kramer switches to at-large to Join 5 others for the Party Nomination

Bill Kramer who previously had signed on to carry the Republican banner in the 2nd Ward contest for Evansville City Council today switched his filing to at-large leaving local entrepreneur and businessman E. Lon Walters, whose company coined the billboard term “Your Wife is Hot” to take on the winner of the primary between Missy Mosby and Patrick McBride.

Kramer was preceded this week by 12 hour Mayoral candidate and Certified Nursing Assistant Jeremy L. Heath, and long time law enforcement officer Pete Swaim.

Entering the mix in the last days are former candidate for the Republican nomination for United States House of Representatives and internet entrepreneur Paul Abramson, Republican Committeewoman Michelle Mercer, and David Houston Woods.

As with the Democratic contest the amount of interest in these at-large seats exceeds the nominations available so let the eDebates begin.

Going into the final hours of the last day to file to run for office in the 2011 City of Evansville elections it looked like only 2 candidates would be on the ballot for the Democratic Party. Incumbent City Councilman H. Dan Adams filed a few weeks ago and 2010 candidate for the Indiana House of Representatives Steven Lowell Smith appeared to be the only interested people in the parties three at-large nominations.

In the last 24 hours three new candidates have tossed their hats into the ring seeking the at large nominations. The last minute filer with the most name recognition is recently defeated incumbent Vanderburgh County Assessor Jonathan Weaver. Also joining the race is local defense and family law attorney Conor O’Daniel of Foster, O’Daniel, and Hambidge LLP.

Finally the four men are joined by a lady by the name of Sonya Kates Nixon who describes herself as a criminal justice student, a wife, and a mother of three. Mrs. Nixon sought her parties nomination in the 2007 primary for at-large member of the Evansville City Council as well. Sonya Nixon is the spouse of the Reverend David Nixon who won the Republican primary for Mayor of Evansville in 2007 and was defeated in the general election by a 70 point margin by current Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel.

So, the Democratic primary for at large really seems to have every kind of candidate imaginable from incumbents, to perennial office seekers, to first time candidates. Let the eDebates begin.

In a surprise move, the man who has been called “The Mayor of Goosetown” is having his eligibility to run for Evansville City Council to represent the 4th Ward challenged on the grounds that the word expungement does not appear in Indiana Code regarding eligibility for office.

Mr. Cook as has been previously reported did commit a crime in his youth for which he did his time. Mr. Cook now over 60 years old had preemptively done everything required to make himself eligible to run for office as was supported by Vigo County Officials last year.

Link to reference of his eligibility:

http://www.courierpress.com/news/2010/dec/16/vigo-co-officials-confirm-fred-cooks-felony-was-ex/?print=1

Link to the law with highlighted applicable code:

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