Notes from the first gathering of Fans of Trenton’s Irresponsible Blogger

Members the “Fans of Trenton’s Irresponsible Blogger (FOTIB)” Facebook group met in person on November 8, 2017 at Trenton Social to the upcoming municipal election in May 2018.   We created a prioritized list of issues that our candidates should be prepared to have positions on and plans for.   Also, given that the position of city councilperson is so poorly understood, we created a list of virtues the candidates should have.

The group of over 20 activists gathered at Trenton Social included some of the city’s best thinkers and doers, including 3 bloggers.

FOTIB 2018 Election Issue List

Some issues are grouped for with similar or closely related items.  (n) indicates repeated issues, therefore high priority.

New blood/thinking in the governing process (6)

• Structure of the administration – departments (2)
• Setting measurable goals
• Budget before fiscal year starts

Cleanliness and Appearance of City (4)

• Presentation and upkeep of parks
• Litter / Dumping
• Road conditions / lights

Specific plans to attract commercial ratables (4)

• Processes for assistance to new business
• Property tax rates for commercial

Change to the governance structure. Currently strong Mayor (2)

• Staggered Council terms
• Changing form of government
• Term Limits

Other Top Issues

• Accountability to ethical standards
• How to make Trenton Schools appealing to citizens who send kids out of district
• Position on current police/law enforcement contracts
• Police residency options
• Vacant property plans
• Position on the State plan for office buildings downtown
• Workforce preparedness and vocational training.

City Council Candidate Virtues

• Moral compass (2)
• Honesty/transparency
• Knowledge of Trenton
• Open minded
• Tenure
• Understands the job
• Ability to negotiate / diplomacy
• Understanding budgets as policy instruments
• Understanding policy and how government works
• Ability to creatively solve problems
• Being available
• Ability to use technology
• Follow up
• Courage to do the right thing

Usually when families don’t have a lot of money, they get very good at budgeting.  It helps to plan spending so you don’t get surprised later in the month or year.

Organizations budget for that reason, but also to make sure they’ve allocated funding to important initiatives that advance the goals of the organization.   The budget is a central planning document that gets everyone in the organization aligned.   This true for companies, schools, non-profits and most governments.

This should not be news to anyone in America.  Every literate America knows that organizations must have budgets.

And yet, the City of Trenton operates without a one and has done so for years.  It should be no mystery then that we have a sense of aimlessness in our effort to revitalize.

“What?”, you ask, “Trenton does have a budget, the Mayor submits one to Council every year”.

Fellow citizens, that is a charade.  Last year’s budget for fiscal year 2017 (that’s July 1, 2016 – June 30, 2017) was not approved by City Council until April 2017.   That’s 9 months into the fiscal year.  For 9 months, we had no budget.

The City Business Administrator is planning to draft a budget for 2018  in October.   That’s four months after the 2018 fiscal year has started.  It will be months before City Council approves it.   Who does that?

It’s not just bad business its in violation of our own City Code.  Our city code is clear: violation of it.

§ 2-78 Budget preparation.

A.  The budget shall be prepared by the Mayor with the assistance of the Business Administrator. During the month of November, the Mayor shall require all department heads to submit requests for appropriations for the ensuing budget year and to appear before the Mayor or the Business Administrator at public hearings which shall be held during that month on the various requests. On or before the 15th day of January, the Mayor shall submit to Council his/her recommended budget together with such explanatory comment or statement as (s)he may deem desirable.

B.  The Business Administrator, with the assistance of the Director of Finance, shall prepare all estimates of non-property tax revenues anticipated for the support of each annual budget.

The City Code, our law, says that the Mayor must submit a budget to Council by January 15 for the ensuing year.  The ensuing year begins July 1.

This timing makes sense.  It gives the Council and the public time to react and for the administration to make changes.

I’ve heard every excuse there is from our city leaders.   The most common one is “we don’t know what the state will give us.”   Do you suspect that any company in America knows its revenues for the upcoming year?  Of course not.  They must estimate.  If things go wrong, they adjust.   But no one wades into a fiscal year without a plan.  No one.

Unless you’re a city government like Trenton.  OR Minneapolis, which also didn’t submit a timely budget and is now being sued by its tax collector.  Is that what it’s going to take in Trenton? Are we going to have to sue ourselves to force our government to act responsibly?

We realistically can’t fix the 2018 fiscal year.  It will be as bad as all the previous Jackson years (though hopefully we won’t have another $5,000,000 stolen).   However, we can avoid re-electing the perpetrators of this debacle.  That includes the current Mayor and any sitting or past council member.   They are all complicit in the mismanagement of our city and our money.

I have written many times about the budget process in Trenton and its many failing and opportunities.  It’s a source of frustration for me that even after collaborating with some of Trenton’s most knowledgeable citizens to recommend improvements, our city leaders have roundly ignored us.  All we  want is well-run, transparent government that plans for improvement.

Here are a few of the previous Reinvent Trenton Articles on our Budget:

Trenton is adrift because it operates without a budget

Trentonians favor fewer services and lower taxes

Trenton’s Budget won’t fix itself

Governor Christie is trying to throw a lot of money at Trenton.  Notably he wants to build an $18M pedestrian bridge from the Capitol building to the Delaware River.  This report highlights the city’s progress (or lack thereof) in 5 basic measurements.   One has to ask whether that kind of investment will move the needle in improving any of these important measures.

It’s not enough, to say we did something, or are working on something or want something to happen.  Rather, the results are what matter.

All five of the following are “lagging” indicators, meaning they represent the past, but they are objective and widely used measurements collected in a consistent way across the state and nation.   There’s no hand-waving with these numbers.

• Crime levels as measured by the Uniform Crime Report
• Population growth as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau (in the case of Trenton, every year)
• Graduation rate as measured by the NJ Department of Education
• Median Household Income as measured by the U.S. Census, and
• Economic success as measured by our Tax Base

Crime is up and so were murders

The 2016 Uniform Crime Report represents last year’s crime

• Uniform Crime Reports for 2016 are 3313
• This is an increase from 2015 of 8.7%
• Murders were up from 17 in 2015 to 21 in 2016

Holding the rate steady would give the City a C, but since the both the murder rate and crime index increased I’m giving it a D.

Source: NJ State Police

Trenton is losing population

Trenton’s 2016 census estimate is 84,056 residents.  This is a 1% decrease from 2010’s population of 84,913.

You can’t revitalize a city by losing population.  It implies that our economy is shrinking, we’re not a desirable place to live and that our property values are going down.   New Jersey as a whole is gaining population at a 1.7% rate.

For continuing to lose population in growing state for the 4^th year in a row (since I’ve been tracking), Trenton gets an F.

Source: US Census Bureau

Graduation rates have declined

The Trenton school district’s 2016 graduation rate was 66.55%.  This is a slide backwards over 2015’s rate of 68.63% which had been a big improvement over the year before.

Just about 2/3 of Trenton kids are graduating now.  But still 1/3 don’t graduate high school which is appalling and continues to explain the high level of lawlessness in the city.

The State of NJ is spending a fortune on a new school but I’ll guess it won’t fix our problems.   We also have a new superintendent but Trenton is a bit of a revolving door in that regard.     One of these days Trentonians will do the right thing and lobby for school choice, county-wide integration or both.

Because we slid backwards, Trenton gets an D.

Source:  NJ Dept. of Education

Incomes in Trenton are down yet again

Median Household Incomes in Trenton are down again to $34.257 (2015 numbers) from $35,647 (2014).  These are the latest numbers we have but represent a disturbing trend in Trenton.  Not only are we losing people, but evidently, we’re losing higher income people.    Furthermore, 28% of people in Trenton live in poverty.

New Jersey’s median household income is more than double Trenton’s at $72,093.

For having shrinking incomes, a 4^th year in a row in a wealthy state, Trenton gets an F.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Tax Base is up a bit

Trenton doesn’t maintain a current publicly available tax list,  so I’ve to use the Dept. of Community Affairs web site.  It gives our tax base as $2,022,437,610 (just over$2B) for 2016.  This is up  from the $1,996,653,658 I reported last year.   The number includes properties with abatements and PILOTs so I think its likely indicative.

It’s tough to say whether this inconsistent reporting is really indicative of $22M in new investment.   However, I do know that $2B is enough of a tax base to support the city and we need something like four times the tax base to pay for our municipal and school budgets.   We have a long way to go and not too many projects in the pipeline.

As a comparison, Hamilton’s tax base is over $5B and tiny Princeton’s is over $6B.

For a tax base that at least isn’t shrinking but will nonetheless lead to higher taxes I give Trenton an D.

Source: Department of Community Affairs

Is the city turning around?  Not yet!

• The numbers are about the same as last year
• If you believe numbers don’t lie then we’re not really improving

If a Mayor and City Council really were interested in progress they would highlight these 5 numbers in every meeting, every State of the City and with the State.    Every dollar spent would be to improve the numbers year over year.   Instead, for the 17^th year in a row (since I’ve lived in Trenton) all I get from our government is hand waving.

Link to the 2016 Report Card

Link to the 2015 Report Card

Link to the 2014 Report Card

I really dislike those books.  The titles are demeaning to people who just want to learn something at a basic level.   But who am I to say; it’s a wildly popular series.   I suppose the title has a little empathy for the person who wants to learn “How to use a computer”, “How to Garden” or “How to do Arithmetic”.
So here I am in year 17 of the Trenton Revitalization Doug Palmer told me was underway.   It’s not! Trenton has steadily slid backwards (based on objective metrics).

And yet the State of NJ, Mercer County and occasionally the Feds continue to throw millions and millions of dollars at Trenton.   We got a hotel, a ballpark, an arena, a Rt 29 conversion, a Light Rail, a Train Station redo, a nursing school, a new Housing Project or two and what do we have to show for it?   Nothing!  We’re still losing population; our tax base and per capita income are still losing ground against the rest of the State.

So maybe we do need some condescending help with the problem.   Maybe the Mayor and Governor need a copy of “How to Redevelop Trenton for Dummies”.

Over the years I’ve likely written enough essays to fill the book but perhaps I need a good outline.  Outlines help keep books simple and suitable for “Dummies”.    The book would have only four chapters and plenty of pictures and examples.  What it wouldn’t have are chapters on how to spend vast sums of taxpayer money on public venues that don’t impact the local economy.   An $18M bridge from the State Capitol into the Delaware River is a distraction just like the Ballpark and Arena were.

Chapter 1 -  CLEAN and NEAT

This chapter will cover:

• How to inform citizens about trash disposal methods
• How to consistently inspect properties for code violations as opposed to inconsistently and capriciously
• How to make the city code work for you.  Do you know what’s in it?
• Trash cans, they can help

Chapter 2 – It’s the Tax Base Dummy

In this chapter, we’ll cover some basic economics and math like:

• How using State and Federal money for development subsidies has a better ROI than anything
• Land Value Tax and how cities benefit
• Consistency is the friend of investment
• Bribery is bad business

Chapter 3 – Transparency and Accountability

In this chapter, we’ll cover basic public relations technique like:

• Using the Internet as a communications tool
• Getting voters bought into your plan, assuming you have one
• Robo-calling, “Less is More”
• Answering citizen concerns
• Modern technology and how “trouble tickets” help organize citizen complaints
• The connection between budgets, spending and priorities

Chapter 4 – Making Trenton a Living Hell for Criminals

This self-help chapter will cover:

• Responding to citizens before it’s too late
• Leveraging private surveillance
• The Economics of Crime
• Criminal databases for everybody

Building parks is what politicians do when they simply don’t know what else to do.

Imagine you’re in charge of a “down on its luck city” with high crime, low income levels, bad schools minimal industry and population loss.  You have only $1 dollar, no make that $20,000,000 left to spend.   The question is, on what do you spend that one time only $20M?

Hmmm …..

If you’re an observer of successful urban revitalization maybe a few things would come to mind:

• How about a stimulus package for urban homesteaders that would attract investment?
• How about site development for a light manufacturing facility?
• How about a big investment in technology and surveillance for the police including body-cams?

All seem worth a thought.   But they have one problem in common.  They aren’t parks.

People love parks, or at least the notion of a park.  Perhaps we have fond childhood memories of playing in a well-kept park with mom and dad.  Perhaps, we remember playing baseball or going on a picnic.

Parks are like catnip for residents that don’t know any better.

“People do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners or designers wish they would.” Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Parks take regular expensive maintenance.  Parks are magnets for drug dealers and prostitutes.   Parks use up land that could be converted to taxable property.  Unless a lot of operational funding is thrown at a park, it’s at best a drain on a city’s finances and at worst a breeding ground for everything wrong with a city.  Parks are what we should do after we’ve achieved some revitalization success.

Parks are what politicians build when they don’t know how to do real revitalization and when they know they’re citizens can be fooled.

That’s what’s going on in Trenton.  Gov. Christie says new Trenton park ‘first step’ to reconfigure Route 29

Faced with his last year in office and in collusion with a governor also in his last year in office, Mayor Jackson realizes that he can’t point to much that’s moved the needle in Trenton.   Instead, he’s lost or wasted millions of taxpayer dollars.   So, what to do?  Build a park or maybe two.

There are a large number of Trenton residents that will immediately reach for their rose colored glasses and think back to pleasant childhood memories to convince themselves that, yes, absolutely, a park will turn Trenton around.   New residents hoping to build new $300,000 homes will flock to Trenton because of our parks.   Criminals will be repulsed by the beauty of the new park and will immediately forgo a life of crime, go back to school, get straight As and find a well-paying job.   That’s what parks do.  The power of parks.

If parks were the linchpin of our Mayor’s overall grand plan (not that anyone believes that) then why hasn’t he shared it with the public?  Why didn’t he base his campaign on it?   Parks were never part of any plan, they just sort of came up and he said, “yeah, sure, then the people will think I did something positive”.

It’s just the opposite, Trenton is taking money out of the “political capital” bank and instead of investing it in to trans-formative initiatives, wasting it on parks.

What does a $130M loft complex in Chambersburg section of Trenton, an $18.3M pedestrian bridge, a $135M proposal to build two new single purpose state owned office buildings at the edge of downtown, a state funded $13M plan to tear down empty houses throughout the city, a $2.3M plan to add features to Cadwalader Park in western Trenton, a $180M high school and a $300M plan to refurbish the New Jersey State Capitol building have in common?

The answer is, NOTHING.

Together these projects total in value $778M.   That’s a lot of money.   Only one of these include private money (Roebling Lofts) and even it benefits from substantial State subsidies.

We have to assume that State of New Jersey doesn’t have the citizens of Trenton’s best interest at heart.   But that doesn’t mean the City of Trenton should let all of this public money be wasted.

We have a very large private project nearing completion of its first phase at the old Roebling complex.  Let’s start with that.   Which of the public State and City projects directly support its success.  If the answer is none, let me suggest that our leaders start over in their thinking.

After participating in the 2002 Leadership Trenton program, I became convinced that Republican’s have much to offer cities. Urban Republican change the attitude towards cities away treating them as charity cases and instead viewing them as opportunities.  This can be done by promoting principles of fiscal conservatism, social liberalism and limited government. These principles shape our deep concerns about racism, sprawl, crime, pollution, welfare and drug addiction.

The Leadership Trenton program showed a serious divide between the interest of economic revitalization and social welfare. The emotion of racial victimization underlies the social welfare movement which deeply distrusts white Republicans. However there is a cold hard reality to building a sustainable urban tax base that is at the heart of the Republican fiscal conservative movement.

There are both black and white fiscal conservatives among Trenton’s and other urban small business communities. They denounce failed policies of publicly subsidized housing, poorly funded public safety and high taxes. Republicans support school choice as a radical change to a persistent problem and they support a pro-business stance that finds strategic advantage in urban site location. Rational Republicans also know that racially spurred sprawl has led to government expansion in the form of bloated transportation departments and segregated school districts.

Urban Republicans don’t have patience with social conservatives. They know that the anti-choice stance on abortion is out of touch with city dwellers. They support the LBGT and want government out of the bedroom. They know that addiction is a disease that can be cured. Most importantly they challenge racism not only on moral grounds but as damaging to our vitality as a people.

However, for Urban Republicans to make progress, our national leaders must root out the latent racism of the party. Republicans have a hard enough time talking about tough social issues without that albatross around our necks.

There are hard cold benefits to a state like New Jersey in helping our cities thrive.   Cities are where innovation happens best.  They’re economical to develop and don’t add to sprawl.  And best of all they conserve energy and reduce our carbon footprint.

A strong Urban Agenda appeals to the business community and many of the traditionally Democratic interests as well.   It’s what we need in New Jersey to grow our state and become national leaders for a better society.

Jane Jacobs is perhaps the most influential writer on urban redevelopment in our time.   Her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is a bible to many on what works and doesn’t in urban revitalization.   In it, she argues that the infusion of large sums of government money into revitalization projects is cataclysmic.  Instead, gradual money that ebbs and flows, fails and succeeds, is what is needed.

The very premise that a large infusion of government money into downtown Trenton will help, no matter how tempting, is fundamentally flawed.   We don’t have to re-read Jacobs to understand this.   Over $150,000,000 in government funds were spent in Trenton 20 years ago to build what Messer’s Palmer and Prunetti called the “Opportunity Triangle”:  The ballpark, the arena and the hotel.   The promise was that these large government investments (yes, our hotel was owned by the city) would stimulate other development in Trenton.

IT NEVER HAPPENED!

Palmer and Prunetti were wrong, way wrong.   They proved how wrong politicians can be at great public expense (the hotel went bankrupt). Bob Prunetti, defended another government project, Thomas Edison State College’s development of Glen Gairn Arms site, by claiming that the patrons at the ballpark were stimulating development as late as 2014.   There is no evidence of this at all.  He was making up a conclusion that was not founded in fact.   Palmer, as late as 2013 told me that he always wanted to sell the hotel to a private owner, yet he never did. After he left office, the hotel, that was built for $60,000,000, was sold in a fire sale for $5,000,000.   Trenton taxpayers lost millions.

So why is it that the Trentonian thinks these two should have an audience regarding the use of public funds in Trenton redevelopment?  (Guest Oped: Palmer and Prunetti: Trenton needs to follow successful examples from other cities)

They shouldn’t.

They had their chance and don’t have anything to show for it.  In the 90s, when they were in power, the country grew economically while Trenton slid backward.   They simply failed to position Trenton to ride the wave of growth that swept the country and  therefore set the city up for the current trend in urban re-population.

Even one of the examples of success they reference in their Op-Ed,  an expensive but uncompleted project in Atlantic City is dubious.   A project that hasn’t even been completed can’t, by definition, be called an economic development success story.  Spending money with no results isn’t success. Who would think otherwise?

Governor Christie’s plan for Trenton has already been roundly criticized by citizens that actually live and work in downtown Trenton.   It’s a tone-deaf proposal that Ms. Jacobs would have railed against.

Prunetti and Palmer propose to change the investment a bit and morph it in to different mixed use project.   However, this still represents a big, risky government directed project.  It’s fundamentally predisposed to have cataclysmic results like stifling streetscapes, crowding out other projects or simply failing (like the hotel).

Who knows why these two former politicians decided to pitch this specific plan.  Perhaps they are somehow connected to it?   Perhaps they haven’t learned the lessons of cataclysmic government money and really think this will work?   I don’t know.  What I do know, and all rational Trentonians should know, is that their track record has been disastrous for Trenton.   The Trentonian has done a disservice to Trenton in publishing their Op-Ed and giving it the credibility that comes with “print”.

It’s 2017.  Where would you rather go to interact with your government, a grandiose building with marble stairs and mahogany desks OR, Facebook.

The State of New Jersey is proposing to spend over $300,000,000 to renovate the State Capitol building.  Following suit, the City of Trenton is preparing to renovate its own City Hall building, which appears to have fallen into disrepair due to bad planning, neglect and misuse.

These will be exorbitantly expensive real estate investments.  To keep the State’s Capitol building project in  perspective, $300,000,000 spent to subsidize private development in Trenton would increase its tax base by 15%.  That kind of money would revitalize the city.

The more important concern is that we’re thinking about spending vast amounts of money to perpetuate government processes that are over 200 years old.  In 1790 when the NJ State Capitol was built and even in 1907 when Trenton City Hall was built, our needs were much different.  Government was smaller and less powerful.   A big imposing building that would intimidate the public was needed to project power.    Today governments project power through taxes and force.

Do we still need intimidating government structures?  Should inertia be in the way rethinking and improving our government?

Let’s take this opportunity to build a better government.

Since the time Trenton City Hall was built, cars, phones and the Internet have become widespread.  In 1907 citizens likely needed a centralized place to meet and do the business of government.  But that’s simply not true today.  In fact, by limiting City Council meetings, records retrieval and permit application to a physical activity ONLY conducted at City Hall, we’ve made government less inclusive and inconvenient.     City and State meetings are essentially small private affairs that go unattended.

Let’s turn this around and use 21^st century technology to do it.

• Every meeting can be webcast.
  • Residents could attend from their homes or office via phone or computer
  • Participation could be managed with modern webcast technology allowing for typed, audio and video interaction
  • Transcripts, documents, public polls and votes could be made automatically available
  • Facebook is already a better place for civic debate than any government building
• Records can be made electronic
  • Most records are (or should be) electronic today
  • With just a little effort we can make birth certificates, tax records etc. available online and eliminate office space for storage and clerks for retrieval
  • Gone would be OPRA requests to get basic government information
• Permits can be submitted online
  • There is no government fee or permit that has to be submitted in person
  • Processes would be faster and leave a clearer paper trail
  • More office space and clerks could be eliminated
• Politicians don’t need marble floors on which to talk politics
  • If a State or City politician really wants to talk politics, let them do it over coffee
  • Or let them use modern, efficient shared office space (our representatives aren’t full time employees after all).
  • Better yet, they can use audio-conferences, email and chat like the rest of us.

We’re contemplating spending millions or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars to perpetuate a style of government which is archaic, inefficient and exclusionary.   Instead, let’s spend a small fraction of that to reinvent government to be closer and more responsive to the people.

Let’s tear the buildings down and start over.   Or, if our state capitols and city halls need to be preserved as relics of an ancient form of government, then let’s spend the money out of the museum budget.