In Marlboro, N.J. the teachers’ union are at odds with the school district. The school board wants the Marlboro Township Education Association to pay $950 per member towards a family health benefits package, to help keep the lid on local taxes. The union isn’t budging, it’s going for a second “super conciliation” session on November 24. The town isn’t budging either. At least two residents are pleased with the town’s tough stance.
In Boston, the teachers unions are at odds with an elementary school. At the John D. O’Bryant School an incentive program (launched by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) awards AP teachers when students pass the exam. The Boston Teachers Union says it’s not fair and the bonus should be distributed to all teachers, since “no one is solely responsible for the development of these students.”
And in Allentown, Pennsylvania Nick Balzano, local leader of the Service Employees International Union’s threatened to put an end to volunteerism by an enterprising Eagle Scout who cleaned up some trails in a local park, ”We’ll be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails.” That went viral, fast. U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent demanded an apology from Mr. Balzano who has since resigned.
Eileen Norcross has an op-ed in the Asbury Park Press arguing that Governor-elect Christie must deal with New Jersey’s education system before it will be possible to deal with the budget deficit, property taxes, income taxes, and outmigration:
School funding is a mess not because of decisions by the Legislature, but edicts from the state’s Supreme Court. For more than 30 years, the courts have controlled the schools through the Abbott decisions (which number 20 separate rulings over 24 years).
To wit, 31 court-designated Abbott districts must spend the same amount per student as the highest-spending district in the state. While other state courts have ruled on state funding formulas for education, none have effectively taken over the Legislature’s policymaking functions as the New Jersey courts have. Read the full post →
Yesterday’s court ruling that the US Army Corps of Engineers is at least partially to blame for the flooding in St. Bernard Parish and New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina is being hailed as a landmark ruling. The judge in the case wrote in his decision:
The Corps’ lassitude and failure to fulfill its duties resulted in a catastrophic loss of human life and property in unprecedented proportions. The Corps’ negligence resulted in the wasting of millions of dollars in flood protection measures and billions of dollars in Congressional outlays to help this region recover from such a catastrophe. Certainly, Congress would never have meant to protect this kind of nonfeasance on the part of the very agency that is tasked with the protection of life and property.
Residents of the affected areas are hailing this as a landmark decision. But their victory may be Pyrrhic and may have the perverse impact of slowing down post-Katrina recovery. Read the full post →
You’ve seen the news. Arizona’s 15th Congressional district created 30 stimulus jobs. But there is no 15th district in Arizona. Arizona only has eight Congressional districts. What happened?
According to the administration, “Some recipients clearly don’t know what congressional district they live in, so they appear to be just throwing in any number. We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on jobs numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes.”
In other words, the data is as good as the recipient filling out the application.
ABC News reports there are phantom districts in Oklahoma and Iowa. And in Connecticut 25 jobs appeared with zero dollars spent.
That is why the Obama administration has stripped 60,000 jobs from its report. Twelve stimulus recipients reported “unrealistic data,” such as a recipient in Talladega, Alabama, which reported 5000 jobs created with $42,000.
This gets to a difficult problem in stimulus tracking – it’s hard to follow $787 billion on the ground from Washington D.C.
If you want to see how stimulus dollars are being spent in your town, visit newly-relaunched Stimulus Watch 2.0.
After a few minutes on the site, I discovered that $3.6 million is being spent in Avenel, N.J. on “various energy-efficiency shovel ready projects”. Yet, the place of performance is Bayonne, NJ – a good 15 miles away. Is the Bayonne Housing Authority managing the HUD grant for work being done in Avenel? According to The Star-Ledger, BHA received $3.6 million for a variety of projects all within Bayonne.
On closer inspection, here’s the trouble. Bayonne NJ is 07002 and Avenel is 07001. A simple typo in a government data-tracking database somehwere down the line.
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