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 July 13, 2006 | Vol 5 No. 13 |
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In This Issue: – An Opportunity for Real Property Tax Reform in New Jersey – Put the Ark Away: Planning can Prevent Flooding – Twisters in Westchester and Nebraska: A Chronicle
Before departing Trenton for a needed rest following last week’s budget battle, Governor Jon Corzine gave some tantalizing clues to what’s in store for a special legislative session on property taxes later this month. On the Governor’s agenda is consolidation of local services across New Jersey’s highly fragmented system of municipalities and school districts, and changes in the way the state distributes aid to local schools. After years of seeing innovative ideas shunted aside in favor of patch-work rebate programs, this is a call for fundamental reform of a dysfunctional system. Even more optimistically, Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts, the Governor’s adversary in the budget showdown, is singing the same tune. The Speaker already has his own bill pending to encourage shared services and sounds ready to join in a concerted effort to address the underlying problems. No one is under the illusion that this will be easy. Structural change will require challenging entrenched interests and having a serious debate about sensitive issues like local autonomy. In addition, while this year’s budget was balanced without fiscal gimmicks or an over reliance on one-time revenues, the state’s long-term fiscal woes are far from solved. Any further commitment of state revenues to lower local taxes will create a bigger hole in the state deficit that will need to be filled. A good place to start implementing structural change is the estimated $550 million earmarked for property tax relief from the one percentage point increase in the state sales tax. Simply applying sales tax revenue to New Jersey’s existing property tax rebate programs would waste an opportunity to implement structural reforms. Property taxes would still be among the highest in the nation and would continue to result in inefficient land use, an inequitable distribution of tax burdens, and incentives that conflict with the goals of the State Development and Redevelopment Plan, the Council on Affordable Housing and the Abbott education finance decisions. Linking the aid to structural reforms like service consolidation would improve efficiency and help hold down future property tax increases. Beyond use of the sales tax revenue, legislators should be guided by two objectives. One is to cast a wide net in looking at potential reform ideas, giving serious consideration to proposals that may seem radical until they are carefully evaluated. This is the best opportunity in decades for the state to examine the property tax system comprehensively, and all legitimate options should be considered. Second, there needs to be a framework with agreed upon criteria for assessing the multiple goals of property tax reform, from improving land use to greater tax fairness. Regional Plan Association and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy recommended such a framework in their May 2006 report, "Fundamental Property Tax Reform II: A Guide for Evaluating Proposals (Link).” Several criteria and benchmarks were suggested to measure impacts on multiple goals, including improved incentives for the “smart growth” principles embodied in the State Plan, the construction of affordable housing, equitable funding for education and greater fiscal discipline to control costs. An upcoming report, due to be released by RPA this month, will make specific policy recommendations that could be part of a comprehensive package of reforms. These include service consolidation to constrain costs, tax rates for new construction that vary by State Plan area, pilot programs that encourage municipalities to adopt different tax rates for land and structures, and changes in state aid formulas. The report will also provide information for an informed discussion of other revenues, beyond the sales tax, that could be used to lower property taxes. As important as specific ideas are, the first priority is to insure that we take full advantage of this unique moment when citizen demand and the political will for change appear to be aligned. Put the Ark Away: Planning can Prevent Flooding Each year for the last three years, this region has suffered from increasingly severe floods. The most recent floods struck New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania last week. Newspaper articles and television reports, both local and national, reported the worst of the damage and highlighted the most dramatic scenes of wreckage. Residents were advised on flood safety and evacuation plans; there was even some discussion of the connection to longer-term climate patterns. All in all, though, the flooding was treated as an unavoidable act of nature. Indicative of this trend was the New York Times editorial of June 30, which lamented the death toll but ended by simply praying for less rain in July. Missing was the true story – that this flooding has a direct cause and can be avoided. Not all rainstorms need to lead to floods, and we can, in part, blame the pavement. The region’s rapid pace of sprawling development has replaced absorbent soil with impervious surfaces, leaving the rain with no place to go but into our streets and homes. From 1965 to 1995, the amount of urbanized land in this region doubled. Urbanized land as a share of total land increased from 20% to 40% during those 30 years. Since then, the pace of development has almost certainly increased. This pattern has generated the necessary conditions for extreme floods. The more we make the land impervious to water with brick, concrete, and asphalt, the more heavy rains can turn in to flood hazards. Impervious surfaces prevent the rain from soaking into the ground effectively, slowly entering our streams and rivers over time. Instead the rain water quickly becomes runoff, funneled into our waterways via storm drains far too fast, causing extreme flood events. Last week, this was painfully evident in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. While the general patterns of climate change may increase the frequency and strength of storms all over the world, the severity of the impact of those storms will be greatest in places, like this region, that have built over too much of the land. The solution is not necessarily to curb development altogether, but rather to find more sustainable development patterns. This is not a new concept. Ian McHarg’s classic text, ‘Design with Nature’ (1969) gives many examples that have successfully led to regions managing natural hazards in a sustainable way. On a large scale, this means investing in more mass transit and fewer highways, as well as denser, centered development and open space preservation. On a site-specific scale, this can mean residential and commercial developments using green roofs, semi-permeable pavements, rainwater harvesting, and on-site irrigation to create a sustainable built environment in healthy riparian zones. As we saw with Hurricane Katrina, a region’s vulnerability to storms is borne most heavily by the poor, the elderly, those without access to transportation, and those living within the flood plain. While our exposure to storm and flooding risk is critical, it is our socio-economic vulnerability that is the true measure of our ability to cope with a disaster. Since socio-economic divisions are also reflected in our settlement patterns, there is a complex dynamic between land use development patterns that promote flooding and those that leave vulnerable populations most exposed. In flood-prone areas, the poor are less likely to have flood insurance, have less access to transportation and are more vulnerable to economic disruption. In short, the more our sprawling land uses are perpetuated, the more severe flood events we can expect, and the more these populations are likely to be at risk. This changes the meaning of ‘Fair Weather,’ does it not? – Jennifer Cox, Geographer and Manager, GIS Programs The tornado that hit Westchester County last night and the tornado warnings in New Jersey show that the spinning tops of terrible wind are not unknown in these parts. Still, the Tri-state area is not renowned for having twisters. For that, you must go to the flat plains of Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and other parts of this country’s West and Midwest. And it is to those parts I headed a few months ago, when I used some of my precious vacation time to join a 10-day prepackaged group called Tempest Tours. Such a title was not a metaphor for a week of wild partying in the Caribbean – quite the contrary. Tempest Tours actually attempts to lead its members on a tour of the deadliest and fiercest storm on earth on a square foot basis: the tornado. Despite last night’s tornado, which according to news reports knocked down trees and picked up a police car, twisters are not a typical problem for the Tri-state area. But global warming is changing weather patterns. More hurricanes and tornados in the Northeast are one of the possible future scenarios. I’d like to say that such broad concerns were foremost in my mind as I headed west, but in truth I mostly wanted to satisfy a long fascination with these demons of the weather system. Oklahoma City was our base, where tour guests from around the world gathered. Out of sixteen tour guests, five were from the United States, six from the UK, three from Canada, and two from the Netherlands. Our four tour guides, who included professional meteorologists, were responsible for choosing the next day’s destinations. To these guys, the Midwest was an open book. Wherever the best region for severe storms was forecasted, that was the next day’s travel destination, even if it meant 500 miles. While we guests relaxed in hotel rooms, the tour guides sweated over computer forecasting models, desperately trying to pinpoint the area at highest risk for severe storms. The next morning we would pile into vans, and race into the areas with the worst weather. Over the next week, weather was frustratingly beautiful. We saw some mountain thundershowers in New Mexico and Colorado. Later in the week, we drove to Southwestern Nebraska, where we caught up with some stunning day and night lightning shows, but again, no twisters. Although we kept re-assuring each other that we’d see a tornado, frustration was growing as our tour days became numbered. Four days before the tour ended, our long-awaited thirst for cloud-to-ground rotation was quenched. A massive squall line of storms formed to our west as we traveled through central and into eastern Nebraska. We caught storm after storm until finally we spotted a large dust cloud, with a small brown concentrated swirl just beyond the tree line. With my video camera in one hand, and picture camera in the other, I braced myself against the winds, snapped pictures, and watched in awe. I hung tight as the wheat field in front of me was engulfed by the advancing dust cloud. The winds howled and lightning danced across the sky above. A loud shout from the guide signaled us to jump in the vans and follow the storm. We did so, and soon found ourselves passing though the small town of Meadow Grove, where tornado sirens wailed. A chill traveled down my spine, as I knew this meant imminent danger. Trees were moving wildly in the crosswinds as we approached open fields once again, where the mass of dust was very large and the tornado undistinguishable. The dust cloud eventually weakened and spread out as a disorganized windstorm. It was over, and we had done it! We had seen our first tornado. And it wouldn’t be our last. A few hours later, we followed another tornado, which we spotted from the top of a hillside. At one point, we watched the dark, low-lying rotation blow across the road directly in front of us, a roaring mass of debris. Afterwards, we did what anyone would do; we looked for a place to eat. The following day, we saw some more great storms. We stayed 90 miles east of Chicago that night, and drove all the way back to Oklahoma the next day. Along the way we observed a storm that had an enormous cloud structure that rose 50,000 feet into the air, while the sun set over it and yielded beautiful colors and patterns. The next day, in the blistering heat, I caught my flight from Oklahoma City to Newark. Back in my native New Jersey, I often keep myself informed of tornado occurrences. Last night, I did not have to venture far. Despite my love of storms though, I hope tornados mostly stay in Nebraska, and that New Jersey, Connecticut and New York never become the new “Tornado Alley.”
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July 15, 2006 11 a.m.
For information on getting to Governors Island, visit: http://www.govisland.com/Visit_the_Island/saturdays.asp
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Spotlight on The Region A publication of Regional Plan Association, Robert Yaro, President, Alex Marshall, Senior Editor 212-253-2727, x360 alex@rpa.org www.rpa.org |
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