Globalization and Taxation

In his chapter, Dr. Theodore Hershberg, professor of public policy and history and founder and director of the Center for Greater Philadelphia at Penn, takes a look at the very big picture, exploring the link between globalization and local taxation.
To compete globally, we need to regionalize to reduce the costs of goods and services. The United States has “widespread inefficiencies” embedded in overlapping city, county, state, and federal governments that duplicate personnel, services, and costs—not to mention the resources wasted through corruption in some cities. At best, elected officials are beholden to the unions for public services, including police and schools. “They are held hostage to those votes, which compromise efforts at reform,” Hershberg says. He suggests that a “blue-ribbon” commission of business people could benchmark municipal salaries equivalent to those in the private sector.
We need problem-solvers, critical thinkers, quick learners” to compete globally, Hershberg says. Getting away from conventional pedagogy means spending more on education, and local real-estate taxes will not suffice as a source. He predicts that when baby boomers retire on fixed incomes, “they will not stand” for the current over-reliance on real-estate taxes to fund education.
Hershberg adds an ominous fiscal note: “When inner cities fail, the losers are suburbanites—the dominant shareholders in the banks, insurance companies, and pension funds that own the lion’s share of big downtown complexes.” Yet he sees “oblivious” suburbanites watching the decay of core cities as though the situation is an inevitable “Greek tragedy.”

Decanted” Populations, Disappearing Farmlands

Dr. John Keene, professor of city and regional planning, adds environmental justice and disappearing farmlands to the urban-sprawl balance sheet. “We need to examine our environmental legislation,” he says. This would involve reviewing criteria for federally funded projects with adverse impacts on a community, and asking questions about the number of similar projects in the past in a given area. We’ve been putting sewage-treatment plants and other “unwanted” facilities near low-income families, he says.
Citing a 25 percent decline in the population of large U.S. cities, he says, “We decant populations,” via subsidized highways, and weaken the tax base of bigger cities. “Sprawl is least fair to those who can’t afford to move,” he adds.
While cities are being abandoned, farms are being replaced. Keene recommends changing tax assessments of farmlands to protect them, and using tax incentives to revitalize inner cities. Municipalities should create enterprise zones, and offer grants for projects such as riverfront restoration, he says. He also is an advocate for the federal “brownfields” program and says we need to reduce liability hurdles and create financial support for those who would rejuvenate contaminated urban sites.
One encouraging sign is that more than a dozen states now have growth-management legislation, but it remains to be seen how effective such legislation will be in slowing the current sprawl juggernaut.

How Clean, How Costly—and Who Decides?

Dr. Roger Raufer, an independent consulting engineer and adjunct professor at Penn, says “serious environmental issues require a regional, national, or international regulatory approach. Cities will have to subordinate their efforts to larger authorities.” Any pollution-control efforts must consider the broader ecosystem, he says.
Raufer works with economic models to construct cost/benefit curves that serve as guides for regulatory action. For example, society has achieved major health advances with clean water, to the point where new regulations generally have only marginal benefits. As society has climbed the marginal cost curve, improvements in pollution control cost more, and achieve less, he says. In a case like this, money is better spent on immunizations for children and other medical interventions likely to have greater benefits for health.
Cities should have more discretion in making local decisions about pollution-control improvements,” Raufer says—especially with regard to the unfunded federal mandates of recent years, in which Washington has imposed requirements without appropriating the money to pay for them. “If cities must finance pollution-control efforts, they should have a greater say.”

Zoning Out (of Date)

Barnett himself examines the environmental impacts of local zoning laws. Noting that most zoning ordinances date back to the Hoover administration in the 1920s, he says it’s time to update. The big problem is that “most zoning language addresses land as a commodity, rather than as an ecosystem.”
Barnett describes ordinances that pay no attention to trees, grading and the potential for erosion, low-lying water, or, for that matter, topography. He believes that zoning ordinances should mandate protection for natural drainage areas. Preventing excessive run-off, such as that from parking lots, is much cheaper than building new stormwater-treatment plants, he points out.
Finally, he suggests federal transportation legislation could include funds to encourage communities to plan commercial districts and mixed density housing that can be served by public transportation.

Stop Subsidizing Exurban Growth

Dr. Anne Whiston Spirn, a former Penn faculty member and now professor of landscape architecture and regional planning at MIT, agrees with Barnett on the ecosystem issue. “Bulldozing terrain and diverting streams can work for a time, but it’s easier and better to work with nature.” She points to Denver’s success in retaining storm water in man-made tributaries and streams along the Platte River. These dual-purpose, public greenways minimize flooding, preventing water-treatment system overload.
Noting the “new urban infrastructure” built on farmland and forests at the edge of metropolitan areas, Spirn mourns the fact that some of the richest agricultural soil in the country is “lost forever” under parking lots, houses, and streets. There are still sewer, gas, and electrical lines under abandoned neighborhoods, while this infrastructure is “recreated at the fringes, laboriously and expensively,” Spirn says.
If there really is a demand for exurban growth, let the market bear the full cost,” she adds. “We need to stop federal subsidization of new infrastructure and homes.”

“I’m From PennJerDel, How About You?

Dr. Gary Hack, Paley Professor and dean of the Graduate School of Fine Arts, says the terms cities and suburbs may become obsolete. Instead we will have metropolitan regions. (He invokes the unlovely conglomeration of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, PennJerDel, as an example.)
While Hack points out that urban sprawl has been occurring since the railroads were built, today the problems are worse: “We now have a mismatch of job location and people who need jobs, of forms of taxation and demands for services and social assistance,” he says.
Highways radiate out from urban areas, and development follows. People need cars to get from one new metropolitan “cluster” to another. To change these clusters into functioning urban centers, he says, we need mass transit—but can’t get government approval for such systems.
Hack argues that every metro region needs a regional plan developed by the private sector or planning commissions, citing private advisory groups in Chicago, New York, and New Jersey. Historically, it’s been common to set up regional authorities to finance and operate airports, transit, and ports—but these have rarely been coupled with regional planning efforts.
Eventually, such regions will need a regional government, or a group of regional agencies, to manage themselves. On the other hand, Hack says “every city and county has to give more decision-making to local districts. Government power for regions has to be balanced by more neighborhood control over matters where locals have the best insights.”

By The Pennsylvania Gazette

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http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0701/fairweather2.html