In This Issue:

– NJ Ballot Measures Good, Not Great

– Moynihan Station Two-Step

– Emerging from Underground, Book in Hand

– Calendar

Not Enough of a Good Thing
Unlike in California, where voting is like reading a diner menu, New Jerseyans rarely see multiple public initiatives on their ballots.

That’s not the case this Tuesday though. When Garden State residents walk into the voting booth on Nov. 7th, they will see three proposals that would help restructure the property tax system, maintain and utilize existing parks, and expand transportation funding. Because these questions seek to change the State Constitution, the Legislature had to authorize public votes.

The aims of all three initiatives are good, and all three questions should be approved. However, none of the proposals go far enough and no one should think that a simple yes vote will solve the state’s problems. Looking more closely at the language, voters will see that no new taxes are being raised. This may make it easier for the initatives to pass, but it also leaves aside more contentious proposals and doesn’t really solve the problems the proposals aim to address. That means the Governor, Legislature and voters will have to confront these issues again, and soon.

Some more explanation about each of the three proposals is required:

The first question seeks to dedicate one-half of one percent of the sales tax to property tax reform. On its face, this sounds good. Property taxes have grown too fast and local governments rely on them too much, which in turn produces inequitable and inefficient land use decisions. If the ballot initiative is approved, the new funds of about $600 million would go into a special account to be annually appropriated for property tax “reform.” Again, this sounds good. In fact, RPA’s recommendations for property tax reform include using such a fund as an incentive for municipalities and school districts to hold down taxes by sharing services and implementing innovations that would improve land use efficiency.

But exactly how this new fund would be used is undetermined. This is both vague and insufficient in its restructuring of the property tax system. RPA and others have called for more aggressive measures to reduce property taxes through consolidating duplicative government services, reforming state aid programs, and shifting to more progressive sources such as income taxes. Unfortunately, promising ideas such as tax-base sharing, tax rates that take State Plan goals into account, and land-based taxes have been almost entirely ignored in the legislative debate, and a golden opportunity to align property tax and land use goals may be lost.

The second question would dedicate 15% of the Corporate Business Tax to fund improvements and facilities on preserved open space lands. This is another important and noble cause. As noted in the Star-Ledger, our State parks are in desperately bad shape, in large part because “lawmakers and governors have consistently under funded them through good and bad times.” Deferred maintenance and capital investments always cost more in the long run, so establishing a dedicated source of revenue that is currently being unused is a good idea. If adopted, this would mean $15 million per year for the first 10 years, and $32 million a year after that. With a current backlog of over $250 million just for State parks, and at least as much for county and local parks, these funds are sorely needed.

If anyone’s paying attention, though, they’ll notice that the State fund for open space and farmland preservation is approaching bankruptcy, and new solutions must be found immediately. If another ballot question is raised next year to refinance the Garden State Preservation Trust, will voters be as kind?

The third question would dedicate 1.5 cents of the existing 10.5 cent motor fuels tax for the State’s transportation system. But last year, RPA and other groups recommended the dedication of all the revenue collected from the gas tax for transportation purposes, citing the huge need for investment and the strong connection between this revenue source and anticipated expenditures. Even if Tuesday’s ballot initiative is approved, (which in effect it has to be, just to get the funds to pay off bonds the state has already sold), millions of dollars will still be diverted to the General Fund.

So to sum up, New Jersey voters are being asked to dedicate existing revenues for very worthy purposes: property tax reform, parks capital and transportation improvements. “Yes” votes for all three questions will help improve the quality of life for all who live, work and visit our state. But any reasonable person will see that the Legislature is barely filling the glass half-full. Perhaps next time our leaders will have the ability and courage to do the job right with a long-term plan that ensures fundamental change, sustainable financing, and land use improvements.

Is that too much to ask?

– Thomas G. Dallessio, Vice President and New Jersey Director

Moynihan Station Two-Step
Moynihan Station has been something of an anomaly among major transportation projects in the region: It enjoys seemingly universal support and is almost fully funded, yet it has languished on paper for nearly fifteen years. Given these circumstances, it is understandable that some supporters of the project reacted to its latest delay – a non-vote by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver – as a sign that the station was on its last legs. Fortunately, this is far from the case. With presumptive Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer a big booster, immediate progress can be expected in the new year.

One should be forgiven for feeling a bit confused, though. Things have gotten more complicated, to the point that “Moynihan Station” now means different things to different people. To recap, the project was proposed by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a train station in the eastern portion of the historic Farley Post Office Building across 8th Avenue from Penn Station. As this proposal was reaching the final stages of the regulatory process and preparing for a construction start, the development team floated a long-discussed proposal for a more ambitious project that moved Madison Square Garden to the western annex of Farley, opening up the Penn Station site for a station overhaul and more than five million square feet of office space. To accommodate the new Garden, the train hall in the Farley building would lose its western edge – the so-called intermodal hall – which would be replaced in the new facility east of 8th Avenue.

The timing of this new proposal (dubbed “Plan B”) also added politics to the mix. With the Pataki administration in its final year, the Governor’s team decided to push ahead with the original proposal (“Plan A”), arguing that it didn’t preclude Plan B, which could be pursued on a separate track by the new administration. This approach was almost unanimously supported by civic and business groups (including RPA) at a hearing in May, and seemed poised for approval from the once obscure Public Authorities Control Board in Albany.

Over the summer, Plan A’s march toward construction hit several road bumps. First, some supporters of Plan B, rumored to include Attorney General Spitzer, argued that the best and fastest route to the more ambitious project was to hold Plan A until the larger Plan B made its way through the regulatory process, pursuing the project as a unified whole rather than two discreet pieces. Before this process debate could reach a conclusion, the then unblemished Comptroller Alan Hevesi expressed a laundry list of concerns about the financing and completeness of Pataki’s submission for Plan A.

These concerns were soon echoed by Spitzer and then championed by Silver, who voiced a variety of disparate worries before finally refusing to support Plan A until the details of Plan B were officially presented. Naturally, each side accused the other of playing politics, and it’s difficult to argue with either. Gov. Pataki undoubtedly felt pressure to gain approval for the project before leaving office, while Silver had reason to believe that delay would curry favor with the new Governor (with the bonus of stinging his long-time adversary Pataki).

But this flawed process may have led us to the best policy outcome in the end. While the details are still fuzzy, especially concerning who will pay for the $1 billion renovation of Penn Station, the potential benefits of Plan B are enormous. By creating a truly grand entryway into New York City, Plan B would fulfill Senator Moynihan’s vision in a way that could not be achieved west of 8th Avenue. The new station complex, now named Moynihan East and West, would provide big public spaces, bring light and air down to the tracks, and spare up to 500,000 daily users from Penn’s current cramped passageways. It would also finally rid the city of the miserable MSG donut, paving the way for master planning the whole district to finally reach its potential.

After more than a dozen years of waiting, though, we should not accept pointless delays. Spitzer has pledged to move expeditiously once in office, and his first task must be to determine if it is actually possible to move ahead with Plan A without precluding Plan B. Plan B is worth waiting for, but the public needs assurances that the station west of 8th Avenue will be built in any case, and that Plan B is a real possibility. Barring something highly unexpected, Spitzer will carry a formidable mandate into office, one that should be used to force consensus on the outstanding issues and move Moynihan Station toward reality. In the meantime, rest assured that Moynihan Station is very much alive and kicking.

– Jeremy Soffin, Vice President for Public Affairs

Emerging From Underground, Book in Hand
AWriting a book is a lot like building a house, I suspect. Neither is done in a day, both require a plan or blueprint, and when you’re done, you have a nice feeling of satisfaction, along with some nervousness as to whether the structure will actually stand up. Are the foundations solid? Have you put in a faulty beam or supposition that might cause the whole edifice to come tumbling down?

While I haven’t built a house, I have completed a book recently, my second in fact, called Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities. Just released this week by Carroll and Graf, it discusses what is underneath twelve of the world’s great cities – New York, Paris, London, Chicago, San Francisco, Mexico City, Rome, Cairo, Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow and Sydney – in terms of infrastructure, geology, and archeology. Or said another way, in terms of tunnels, pipes, wires, rails, rocks and ruins.

The book includes lots of interesting details, such as the fact that Ivan the Terrible’s secret library of priceless medieval manuscripts is thought to be still under Moscow somewhere; that Paris has the bones of millions stuffed into its wandering catacombs; and that Beijing’s underground includes hundreds of miles of tunnels dug by peasants with hand tools under the orders of Mao Tse-Tung.

But besides being a collection of interesting trivia, I hope the book also reveals important things about how cities work (to borrow the title of my first book), and how they should work.

A city’s underground teaches us that commerce matters, and trumps geography. Chicago, for example, is geographically one of the worst places in the world to build a city due to its swampy soil and poor drainage. But it’s a great place commercially, because its location on the edge of Lake Michigan enabled it to be a hub for the movement of goods and services in North America. And so its leaders simply figured out a way to build things like safe sewer and water systems (although it took a half century) and to even construct some of the world’s first skyscrapers on this swampy, unstable soil utterly unsuited for tall buildings.

A city’s underground teaches us that planning matters. Neither Chicago’s sewer system, nor the water or metro systems that enabled New York and Paris to remain commercial leaders, would have happened by chance or through the marketplace. A city is a machine for living, to paraphrase Corbusier, and such machines are not constructed “organically” or by chance. They take planning and design.

Which takes us to the third and perhaps most important lesson that a city’s underground teaches us, which is that government matters. The design and installation of the systems mentioned above never happen without some involvement, usually a lot of it, with that much criticized and sometimes-loathed institution, government. And usually the more government involvement, the better the systems.

For example, dig underneath the streets of London or New York, and you’ll find a chaotic system of pipes and wires, some long abandoned, which makes contemporary infrastructure planning and maintenance more difficult. Dig underneath the streets of Paris, and you’ll find an orderly system of water, sewer, train and telecommunication systems, laid so well that sometimes they approach beauty in their overall appearance and functioning.

Why is this so? Because Paris has more often followed the French model of having the state taking primary responsibility for designing and installing infrastructure. London and New York have often followed the Anglo-Saxon model of having private companies install infrastructure. In the 19th century in New York, a dozen or more gas companies competed to lay pipes, while London actually had competing water companies. The evidence of this competitive gold rush still lies underneath our streets. Today, Verizon and Con Edison are the contemporary equivalents of these older companies.

At 6:30 pm on Monday Nov. 13th at the Museum of the City of New York up on 103rd street and Fifth Avenue, I’ll kick off the publication of Beneath the Metropolis with a short lecture and then a reception. I encourage everyone interested in the subject to be there. Details are in the calendar below.

– Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region

Questions or comments on what’s in this issue? Send them to the editor of Spotlight On The Region, Alex Marshall at alex@rpa.org

November 4, 10 AM - 3 PM
Excursion on NJ Transit Light Rail Routes in Newark N.J. Visit light rail maintenance facility. Event organized by Electric Railroaders Association, NY Division. Advance registration required. 718/784-3643, email furlong@erausa.org or visit www.erausa.org, NY Division.

November 9, 7:30 PM
Alex Marshall reads from Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities: At Barnes & Noble book store, 396 Ave. of the Americas (6th Avenue) at 8th St. in Greenwich Village, New York City. (212) 674-8780.

November 13, 6:30 PM  
Book Launch: Beneath the  Metropolis by Alex Marshall (Carrol & Graf, November 2006). Journalist and Regional Plan Association Senior Fellow, Alex Marshall, author of How Cities Work (2001), shows that the world below the sidewalks of 12 of the world’s big cities is as revealing as that above. Reception and book signing to follow talk by author. At the Museum of the City of New York at 1220 Fifth Avenue (at 103rd Street). mcny.org. $5 members, $9 non-members. Reservations suggested. 212-534-1672 ext. 3395.

November 16
2006 L'Enfant Lecture on City Planning and Design, New York City. Enrique Peñalosa speaking on Bogota and Beyond: A New Model for Urban Planning and Development. www.planning.org/lenfant/2006penalosa.htm. 6:30–8:00 p.m. The Great Hall, Cooper Union, 7 E. 7th St., New York City.

December 3 - 5
IBTTA's Transportation Finance Summit to be held December 3-5, 2006 at the Capital Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC. The purpose of the Summit is to bring together transportation financing experts from around the world to discuss practical and workable solutions to the transportation funding challenges faced by all levels of government and the private sector. To learn more about this Summit or register:
http://www.ibtta.org/Events/eventdetail.cfm?ItemNumber=1992.