House of the rising Moonglum

Yes, thank you. I hate to agree with Grover Norquist, but I do love intellectual consistency. If this group of über-conservatives can see the light on the Gitmo detainees, hopefully more will follow. I know I am asking a lot here, but you never know.

Dear President Obama,

As a citizen of the state of Illinois, home to Abraham Lincoln, I would be proud to accept any and all prisoners from our current conflicts in Illinois prisons. For too long our country has operated outside the rule of law with respect to those who have wronged us. We have laws in place with which to punish them, and if we ever hope to regain the trust of the world we must use them. The first step is to find a place within the bounds of the US to house our most dangerous criminals, and we have at our disposal an empty maximum security prison. The citizens of that town seem happy to help out. Once in place we can bring them to trial and finally have justice done. This country has waited for too long, and the rest of the world begins to doubt our sincerity.

Thank you for your attention in this matter,

Moonglum

p.s. Ignore Mark Kirk, he seems to prefer keeping one prison empty while the rest are overcrowded, when opening this one, while providing local jobs could also relieve some of the overcrowding in the rest of the prisons in Illinois. How this reduces our safety I have no idea.

I’m a big proponent of non carbon emitting electricity generation, and a firm believer in using nuke power for base-load. One of the main reasons for that is that I don’t think that any reasonably grid could handle the ups and downs of going to a full grid of more traditional green power. Spain is working hard to change my mind. It looks like the windy weekend allowed them to provide 53% of their power from wind, pushing excess into reverse hydro and selling to their neighbors. Those numbers are impressive for a grid that wasn’t really designed for that kind of behavior. I still don’t believe in base-load wind, but this certainly makes it look like it can be a bigger chunk of the pie than I have been thinking before.

This is the problem with participatory budgeting. The City is already good at hiding where the money goes, and assigning it to oversight-less pools controlled completely out of sight of the citizens. Putting the completely visibly controlled pools of money in the hands of the citizenry seems like closing the barn door when there is a stampede heading your direction.

Eliminate TIFs now, and return the monies to the general fund. Then putting effort into this sort of thing might be worth while.

So, I went to the Participatory Democracy meeting put on by the 49th ward tonight because there was a flyer on my door, and it was close to where I live. I didn’t really realize what I was getting myself into. Turns out this is actually a bit of a big deal. It is a type of budgeting that has been done in many other cities all over the world, but never before in the United States. So because of that, besides the alderman and the steering committee, there was a professor who studies this and helps implement it from Brown University, along with a bunch of other people including someone making a movie about this process. Not to mention about 20 people from the ward. And about 8 from the area that this meeting was supposedly for. Guess it is good I went after all.

So actual attendees were vastly outnumbered by organizers and hangers on. But the alderman was there and the ideas were shared. And it is a reasonably neat idea. Basically the alderman is giving up authority over his capital improvements fund for the ward, and allowing this community based process to drive it. The other neat thing is that the vote when the final budget meeting (open to the entire ward) is actually binding.

The main problem with this is how limited it is. The aldermanic “menu”, the money for capital projects in the ward, is such a small part of the over all city budget, that it is unclear to me how much light this will shed on where the money is really going. Also, there is a difference between saying “we want money spent on X” and actually getting that money spent efficiently. I bet that the breakdown of capital project that we actually get will be very very close to what we would have had under the old system. And finally, even if we did do this on a city wide basis, we would still have the TIF districts. The alderman does a reasonably good job at capital projects and there is pretty good accountability there already. It is the off budget items like TIF spending that really wreck this city.

So, all in all the meeting didn’t really do it for me, but it is an interesting idea. I will certainly be watching this going forward, and if it takes off for more of the city’s budgeting bodies it could actually make a difference.

Oh, and I did get an awesome Joe Moore quote, “I’ve been acting like a benign dictator, if you will.” said in reference to what he is trying to change by switching from the “aldermanic menu” to this “participatory budgeting” system. Hah! You only wish, Joe. There is only one dictator in this town, and it is not you.