'A Special Place in Hell'

posted by Zach Patton

In this day and age, it's kind of amazing how quickly a public figure can fall from grace -- and how it's so often caused by the tiniest thing. A flub caught on YouTube, say, or an inappropriate sentence on a MySpace page.

Today's entry in this file comes from Colorado, where last week state Rep. Mike Merrifield caused a firestorm of controversy that ended in his resigning as chairman of the House Education committee -- in the span of about 36 hours.

On Thursday, Face the State, a Colorado politics blog, posted an email Merrifield had written in December, in which he had criticized charter school supporters. But his criticism was a little...abrasive:

"There must be a special place in hell for these Privatizers, Charterizers and Voucherziers. They deserve it!"

Not surprisingly, the email, which Merrifield sent to Sen. Sue Windels, the chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, quickly set off a lot of controversy. It's likely an email like this would catch attention any time, but the state Senate is set to debate a bill -- sponsored by Merrifield and Windels -- that would restore public school districts' authority over most charter schools in the state.

On Friday morning, the story had been picked up by the Rocky Mountain News, the Denver Post and the Colorado Springs Gazette.

By Friday afternoon, Merrifield had apologized on the House floor and had stepped down from his committee chairmanship.

It's just another form of the age-old lesson, kids: NEVER WRITE IT DOWN.

Gambling on Lottery Privatization

posted by Josh Goodman

Today's big topic in privatization is infrastructure: toll roads, parking garages and airports. Tomorrow's, though, seems to be lottery privatization, something Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich have proposed and Michigan's Jennifer Granholm is considering.

Infrastructure privatization has been controversial and lottery privatization will be too, but there are differences between the two. Consider how two arguments for and two arguments against the former apply (or don't) to the latter:

Pro #1: Private companies can provide more cost-effective management than government.

This is perhaps the fundamental argument for any privatization endeavor, but it was uniquely suited to some infrastructure debates. With regard to the Indiana Toll Road, Daniels could point out that the state was actually losing money on it. In other words, supporters of privatization had the advantage because there wasn't any question whether the infrastructure was being managed poorly. The debate instead boiled down to whether this was due to the inherent superiority of private control or whether the government could have been doing a better job.

That won't be true in the lottery debate. The whole reason states have pursued lotteries is that it's so easy to manage them well enough to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars, so the case for privatization is tougher.

Another pro -- and a couple cons --  after the jump. 

Outcarceration

posted by Zach Patton

As you've probably read, California just announced that, for the first time, the state will send inmates to be housed in private prisons in other states.  Exporting those prisoners -- right now, it'll be about 2,200 -- will take some pressure off California's prison system, which is so stressed that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called it a state of emergency earlier this year.

But exporting prisoners is dicey, as I learned while reporting on an article for Governing last year. That story focused on private prisons, but many of the challenges are the same.

The biggest difficulty is oversight: When a state is shipping inmates to a private facility in another state (as California is), how can it ensure that the prisoners will be properly managed?

Other big challenges revolve around inmates' families and the prisoners' connection to the outside world. I came across this AP story from a few years ago, in which a couple of critics of moving prisoners out-of-state make two good points:

"Kids are great motivators for parents in prison to get their act together," Brady said. "You take away the possibility of kids' visits and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy -- 'See, these people can't be rehabilitated."'

[...]

"Current progressive corrections thinking is all about re-entry" into society, Gerhardstein said. "Wouldn't it be easier to re-enter from across the street than from across the country?"

It's easy to say that the prisoners brought their situation upon themselves -- If they can't visit their children, they have only themselves to blame. But the truth is that exporting prisoners to other states can seriously impede a state's efforts to monitor and rehabilitate inmates.

In that sense, California's recent plan isn't a solution. It's just the beginning of a new set of problems.

Public Sector Competence

posted by Alan Greenblatt

I've been talking to people up in Massachusetts about why the Big Dig has turned into such a black eye, while another project with a similar initial budget that was also run by a public authority -- the cleanup of Boston harbor -- is widely viewed as a success.

I thought I'd share some notes from my conversation with Fred Salvucci, a former Massachusetts secretary of transportation who now teaches at MIT. His ideas have some salience to a wide variety of privatization efforts, I think. (I should note that he's been getting plenty of "I told you so" ink in the Boston media in light of the Big Dig mess -- but why should we be any different?)

The most striking difference between the Massachusetts projects is that in the case of the cleanup, there were plenty of layers of oversight. The efforts of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority have been overseen by a federal judge. But MWRA also has an independent board of directors, to whom its managers were accountable. Those managers, in turn, held contractors' feet to the fire -- something that didn't happen enough on the Big Dig.

Sell American

posted by Christopher Swope

So you're thinking of selling off a highway or two. But you saw how that whole Dubai ports thing shook out. Foreign ownership = bad politics, you're thinking. You want an American firm to lease your highway, toll your drivers and shower your budget with dollars, not euros.

Well you may be in luck. Some U.S. investment banks are finally getting into the infrastructure privatization biz, according to the Wall Street Journal (paid subscription). By contrast, Chicago and Indiana, both in the headlines recently for making billions on toll-road privatization deals, sold to a consortium of Australian and Spanish companies.

Legal Trouble for Convergys

posted by Alan Greenblatt

Florida's massive contract with Convergys to run its human resources management system has always been troubled. Now it's the source of legal action, as state Attorney General Charlie Crist has filed a false-claims case against the company.

A Par $20 Million Hole

posted by Christopher Swope

How did Tennessee taxpayers wind up in the drink on a bunch of Jack Nicklaus-designed golf courses? The Tennessean has this great story showing how politics and golf don't mix well--at least not at the statehouse, anyway.

Apparently, the state crafted a public-private partnership aimed at luring golf tourism back in 1993. The idea was to build four top-notch golf courses, marketed collectively as "The Bear Trace," a takeoff on Nicklaus' nickname. Taxpayers backed $20 million worth of bonds to build the links, which were to be paid off by the profits of a private company running the concessions.

Private Governments

posted by Alan Greenblatt

Robert H. Nelson, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland, published a useful article in Sunday's Washington Post outlining the current state of homeowners' associations. Nearly one out of every five Americans is now living under a layer of private government--a share that is growing fast.

Here's the money quote (as we like to say in the blogosphere):

"When historians look back on the last decades of the 20th century, they may well see the associations' rapid spread as a phenomenon with the same social and economic importance as the rise of business corporations at the end of the 19th century. Where Americans of that era collectivized private ownership of industrial property, today we are collectivizing residential property ownership--and literally transforming local government as we go. Traditional individual rights of ownership are giving way to group rights of the whole neighborhood--a sort of paradoxical 'private socialism,' American-style."