Transit vs Driving

Why Do Transit Commuters Take Longer to Get to Work Than Drivers? 

Nationwide, the average worker spends 24.7 minutes, each way, traveling to and from work.  People who drive alone spend 24.4 minutes; people who carpool spend 28.0 minutes; people who walk take 11.9 minutes; and people who take transit take 48.7 minutes.

In other words,mpeople who take transit spend almost exactly twice as much time en route as people who drive alone.  Why?  The simple answer is that transit is slower.  But this flies in the face of the Ida that people have a travel-time budget that limits the total amount of time they are willing to spend traveling each day (or week).  

Is the travel-time budget idea wrong?

Read this provocative article by Randall O'Toole at The Antiplanner 

Bus barn battles

Two thoughts from the Lake Oswego Review front page article November 13, 2014.

Waluga bus garage has neighbors fuming
By Jillian Daley

Diesel emissions spew from tailpipes and engines growl as dozens of school buses queue up and trundle through the Waluga neighborhood of Lake Oswego, starting at about 6:30 a.m. on weekdays.

Buses rumble down Beasley Way during the evening, on weekends and in the summer, too, ferrying students and other groups to special events. The large buses squeeze down narrow roads, sometimes rolling onto sidewalks for tight turns and making it difficult for residents to navigate their neighborhoods.

Living on the same street as a bus garage is “hell,” Kate O’Rielly says.

1.  Industrial areas are important for cities to have and maintain.  As the city continues to make plans to re-zone the "under-performing" two industrial areas in the city.  They aren't pretty.  They don't have glamorous jobs, though the largest employer in the city with high-paying jobs is in the SW industrial zone.

Where does a city put necessary utility or function?  Where do you put a wastewater treatment plant, a bus barn. a city operations facility?  These facilities do not make good neighbors and this is why industrial zones exist - to segregate functional land uses.  Where would you put the bus barn - is there room in your neighborhood?

First Student’s contract with Lake Oswego goes back more than a decade. In 2003, the district hit financial hard times — a difficult period that lasted about three fiscal years — and took “drastic measures” to close a budget gap, a 2013 district financial report says.

“The entire transportation staff of 40 people was laid off in June 2003 and a contract for transportation services was entered into with First Student (formerly Laidlaw),” the report says. “The district’s bus fleet was also sold at that time for $1,000,000 to Laidlaw as part of

2.  To save money, the school district cut personnel and contracted out services.  With this move, the city was no longer obligated to pay for ballooning salary, benefits and retirement costs that continued to cut into direct educational services, it's primary function.

The City can learn some lessons from the school district and other cities that have decided to use contracted personnel to fulfill city services to save the taxpayers money or retain city services when budget get tight.  As long as there are controls against cronyism, a serious study of which contract services could benefit the city is needed.

WSJ: The Dangerous Business of Everest

A story from the top of the world.  If you want to read more, find the story at:  wsj.com/everest  

Death at 19,000 Feet

Sherpas, Fate and the Dangerous Business of Everest

By  Gordon Fairclough, Raymond Zhong, and Krishna Pokharel

KHUMJUNG, Nepal—They came from six continents, each angling for a chance to reach the roof of the world. As harsh winter turned to spring, hundreds of climbers settled into what has become business as usual at the base camp below Mount Everest.   

Telling it like it is

City Council gets a message. 
What are they going to do about it?

As you may have read in previous blog posts (Planning Department Oops! #1, 2, and 3), the Planning Department has a way of interpreting development codes that a normal, educated person, reading the same code, would understand and find to have a completely different meaning.  

Codes can be complicated, and Lake Oswego is famous for its lengthy and Byzantine codes.  But when the citizens who helped create the codes for the neighborhood overlay see things going awry, there is reason to step back and review the intent and wording of the code.  What is happening now disrespects the neighborhood, the Neighborhood Plan, City Codes, and the concept of fair play. 

Read the prior posts 
and watch the

Citizen Conments portion of the November 13, 2014 City Council meeting, and listen to the first speaker.  The citizen even invites council members to meet with her directly if they want to hear the truth of what is happening.  Her anger and frustration at going through channels and dealing with staff and getting rebuffed is a common theme.  

USC will follow this story to see what, if any, changes are made or what action is taken to remedy this ongoing problem of changing interpretation and selective enforcement of code. 

Metro leaves neighborhood density to the cities

A little-publicized measure on the ballot that prohibits Metro from requiring higher density in single family neighborhoods.  This does not protect neighborhoods from increased density.  The entities that can break low-density zoning codes are local jurisdictions - mainly cities.  City codes matter!

New Platform District buildings at Orenco Station in Hillsboro. (Luke Hammill/Oregonian)

Metro measure, keeping regional government out of neighborhood density plans approved

The Oregonian, November 4, 2014

The Metro regional government will continue to be restricted from requiring housing density increases in neighborhoods after voters extended an existing ban on Tuesday.

Metro Councilor Craig Dirksen, who represents sections of Washington and Clackamas counties, said he was pleased that voters took the time to understand the measure and vote accordingly. "I think this shows that the people by and large are satisfied with the process that we have," Dirksen added.

Metro sponsored that measure as an alternative to a more extensive proposal from an opposition group that called for barring density requirements on any pieces of land zoned for residential use.

Measure 26-160 applies to just single-family neighborhoods in the tri-county area. City and county governments are responsible for setting and establishing density requirements in neighborhoods.

The regional government promotes density along major roads and in neighborhood centers throughout the Portland metro area, part of the long-held vision and planning tied to the area's urban growth boundary.

Dirksen said nobody on the Metro council wanted the prohibition to expire, saying if the measure had failed, "our policy would not have changed."

In his op-ed, [Tom] Hughes said Metro would continue to protect the urban growth boundary. "The real growing pains will be felt at the local level as cities, in particular, work with residents to determine how to accommodate development and improve and maintain the great communities that make up our region,"

What "sustainability" looks like

The Reality of  Sustainability and Smart Growth 

This is the Metro 2040 Functional Plan on a larger scale.  Everything that is going on in the Bay Area is happening here, so it is important to read this presentation by by Cato Institute Fellow Randall O'Toole.   At the end of the presentation are resources for further investigation.

The Bay Area Plan is a misguided effort that will lock people into miserable existences all for the sake of......   That's the problem, there is no point to all of this - the environmental goals are bogus. If goals for environmental sustainability are driving the Plan, then the entire Plan is a failure.

As you read the presentation, think about how the Plan Bay Area sounds like Metro's.  Think about living in the dystopian, urban future the Central Planners are creating for us - because we allowed them start down this path and we failed to see what was happening in time to stop it.  Will Lake Oswego save itself?

 Plan Bay Area: Strategy for a 

 Sustainable Region 

Presentation by Randall O'Toole, Cato Institute 

Quick Fixes will turn to long-term changes.

Planners OK 'quick fixes' to Sensitive Lands

Lake Oswego Review, November 13, 2013   By Saundra Sorenson

Excerpts: USC comments in red.
The SL program is capricious and non-scientific, written by non-scientists (planners) who play with words like "invasive," "riperian" "native" and others that are applied in simplistic and political way, but are not based on solid science.   In a nutshell, the program is idiotic and unfair. 

Some of the changes will be overridden by more sweeping reforms to the program next year, [Scot] Siegel said, "but really, the reason for bringing the changes now and earlier than the rest of the package is to provide immediate relief for private-property owners."

Two code fixes will relax landscaping regulations in private backyards.  Currently, in areas classified as either Respurce Comservation or Reaource Protection districts, plants used in landscaping must "provide food or cover for wildlife." The code amendment asks instead that plants be "swell-suited to local soils and growing conditions" -- which means some non-native plants could be used. 
Old way: What plants for what wildlife?  New way: Can grow just about anything.  My Skeptic self says, expect this one to be changed, but I hope not.

[Gerry] Haase has found the burden unduly on him to prove that there are no wetlands on his property. To disprove the clerical error, Haase must have a wetlands expert inspect his property first.

"The city said they would pay for it," Hasse said. "But the situation is, I don't believe that this is the way it should be handled." 
Of course not.  In the system we have now, one is guilty without proof a crime has been committed, then the culprit/victim must prove to bureaucrats they are innocent (usually at their own expense, and sometimes with an attorney.)  This process gives government regulators the maximum control over private land.  This does not sound like we are living in America anymore.  

Another code, amendment will hit close to for Planning Commission member Bill Ward, who after purchasing a property on Lily Bay Court found that it had a tree grove overlay on it. 
Tree groves were originally found by examining aerial maps and drawing lines around groups of trees.  They had little access to property on the ground to confirmx that the areas were "sensitive" habitat for any species, let alone threatened or endangered one. 

In what he described as "an insult-to-injury situation," Ward 
estimates he spent more than $3,000 having the property surveyed and delineated.  In the end, he had much less usable property than he originally thought --- and the developable parcel was a "crazy, cloud-shaped area."
The real insult to Ward and everyone else is that the SL program seeks to provide habitat for "wildlife," but never specifies what wildlife the planners refer to.  The second, bureaucratic insult is the bother and expense OWNERS have to go through to have THE CITY'S sensitive lands map defined on the ground to confirm THEIR fuzzy goals. 

"Owners (often) find to their dismay that the Sensitive Lands issue has taken over a portion of what they thought to be their land," Ward explained, "and that they can no longer use a portion of their land.  It's just basically off-limits."
"what they thought to be their land" says it all. 

Kent Myers agrees. Taking the the required setbacks into account, the stream designation of a ditch has claimed nearly one acre on his seven-acre property.


Kent Meyers has been paying taxes on the land for 49 years and (jokingly) wants to know where to go for a refund.   It's not a joke.  The value of Meyers' property, Ward's property, and that of others who have Sensitive Lands has dropped dramatically because of it.  

Be careful, iIt's windy out there

It's November - the beginning of the windy-rainy season in Western Oregon.  Time for fallen trees, power outages, and cozying up to a warm fire.

But wait!  About those fallen trees....

The November 2014 issue of Hello LO has a number of safety tips for dealing with extreme winter weather events, and there, among the warnings about gas leaks and emergency preparedness kits is, "Ready Your Trees For Winter," though I don't think the "Your" part was intended as irony.   

The city acts as if the                     Don't forget to take photos!

trees on private
 property are owned by the property owner, but in fact, they claim so many regulatory rights over them that individual ownership has been reduced to that of a caretaker of a community resource.  And if the trees on one's property aren't taken care of to the city's standards, they can fine the pretend owner for not doing their job.  See Chapter 55 of the Municipal Codes titled Trees for regulations pertaining to trees on private property.  Lake Oswego is probably the only city that has an entire chapter devoted to trees.  


From Hello LO:

Ready Your Trees For Winter

Large trees are an extremely valuable asset to both the individual property owner and the community.  An investment in pruning or inspection can help prevent damage from wind, snow or ice, and help preserve those irreplaceable older trees that add so much to the character and heritage of our city.  

Storm Clean-Up And The Tree Code   (Edited for brevity)
In order to protect Lake Oswego's natural setting, the City requires both homeowners and businesses to obtain a permit to remove a tree.  

Emergency Tree Permit -  for trees that present an immediate danger of collapse and present hazard to people or property.
Hazard Tree Permit - for trees that are cracked, split leaning or physically damaged to the degree that it is clear the tree is likely to 
fail.  
Downed Trees -a permit is not required to remove downed trees.  
However, pictures are encouraged for documentation.

Do you want to know what Oregon City requires for tree removal?  Nothing - unless the tree is in the public right-of-way or on a slope or next to designated wetlands.  In OC, people own and control their own trees.  

There is no way the city can monitor every tree that is topped, pruned badly, is considered invasive or is in the wrong spot.  For that they need nosy neighbors to turn in people in. It's a bad situation for all. 

The city has laid claim to ownership by regulagory control of all trees in the city as community assets with no compensation to the landowners who must hire tree cutters and Arborists and get permits to satisfy city staff.  The landowner bears all the responsibility for trees, while "enforced" benefits flow to the 
community at large.  There is something seriously wrong with this
 picture!

Freedom From Speech

It happens here too. 

Under the guise of

"civil discourse," people are pressured to fall into line with the prevailing attitude on a variety of topics.  If one has differing ideas they must be spoken politely, without anger or irritation, and deal in generalities. In other words, "Don't rock the boat (too much) or we will label you as misinformed and untouchable."  

It starts in elementary school, or perhaps younger, when children are protected from bad things happening to them - no hurt feelings, no losing at games, nobody better than the next person.  As adults, these children are not prepared to handle the rough and tumble of the real world.  Eventually, instead of adapting to reality, they try to change the world and human behavior to their liking.  

From the Huffington Post, November 9, 2014

Freedom of Speech or Freedom From Speech: 50 Years After the Berkeley Free Speech Movement

By Greg Lukianoff, President of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)

And while a call for civility may seem uncontroversial, we at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) have seen the term abused to enforce top-down conformity, just as the great philosopher John Stuart Mills explained in his masterpiece, On Liberty.     
Please read the entire essay using the link above.

Election Day hangover

Gardening: The cure for whatever ails you

Plus it's better than a trip to the gym.

I'm going to rake leaves.  I'll be back when it rains!

For those of you who would like a reminder of things you should do but never get around to, here is an article from the OSU Extension Service (paid for in part by Clackamas County voters) on fall gardening.  It's not too late!  

Hacking into Oregon's election financing

Someone was reading my mind - easy access for election information in Oregon.  Hack Oregon is a new site that is growing, but until the site tells us who were the big spenders and which groups gave money to local candidates and measures, this is just scratching the surface.  We need clarity about what influences and agendas are driving campaigns.  Perhaps this will be something else this site will tackle in the future. Read the FAQs for more election and site information.  

Did you know the statewide average for grassroots funding is 13%?

Go to Hack Oregon to view their project, Behind the Curtain.

BEHIND THE CURTAIN

A SEARCHABLE LIBRARY OF VISUALIZATIONS FOR THE ENTIRE DATABASE OF OREGON ELECTIONS

 

Spend now on rail, regret later

What if rail enthusiasts are all wrong?  
Taxpayers would have a very expensive white elephant, but at least some people would have made money.  Read about California's "high speed" rail effort, the failing, old-school program to connect SF to LA.  The real costs and problems can be found elsewhere on the web. Now read about the future of transportation or what it could be like.  This one is technically feasible!

Hyperloop: San Francisco to L.A. in 30 minutes

By Steve Hargreaves  @hargreavesCNN August 13, 2013: 9:43 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney)  

Serial entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk unveiled design plans for his Hyperloop -- a superfast transport system that could cut the travel time from Los Angeles to San Francisco to 30 minutes, and cost a fraction of the currently proposed high speed rail project.

In a technical paper published Monday, Musk said his idea is similar to the "old pneumatic tubes used to send mail and packages within and between buildings," but would operate under much less pressure to save on energy.

The cars would be pushed or pulled through the tube by a series of electric motors, possibly similar to the ones used by the Tesla Model S. Each car would be mounted with a fan in front to move the air out of the way. The air itself would then be directed underneath the car, forming a cushion on which it would ride. The entire thing would be powered by solar panels mounted on top of the tube.

Musk said it could cost less than one-tenth of the planned high speed rail system in California project that's estimated to cost $70 billion. It would also be six times faster.

In fact, it was the high cost of the California train that prompted Musk to research the Hyperloop in the first place."How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and JPL -- doing incredible things like
indexing all the world's knowledge and putting rovers on Mars -- would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world," he wrote.

Thank you for the hard work to come!

              

Thank you to all the candidates for City Council who stepped up to take on a very hard and time consuming job.  Most of us can't imagine being a politician muc less campaigning for the job. 
City council is the part of the government closest to the people and has great power over their lives, their homes, and their quality of life.  

The most important thing anyone in government can do is study the issues independently of staff reports so they can ask specific questions and can tell if something sounds OK or isn't quite right, and have the guts to do the ethical, if unpopular thing - disagree.  

        Dedication empathy  sleep?
Research Always be polite  Study
     Work long hours  Ask questions
             Go to meetings  Go to more meetings 
Daytime meetings, Nighttime meetings
        Study  Read  Read some more
    Emails, calls, people wanting something...
                                 Study!

Heard around town..

  

...from authoritative sources:


Regarding the city's budget:
Sales, fees and services bring in more money than property taxes.

Utility fees equal 83% of property tax income.

 Debt service for the city is $7 million per year.  If this debt were paid down to zero, it would cost each person $700 per year, and the debt would be paid off in 2035.  (Population of Lake Oswego as of 2012 was 37,298 - US Census)

Employee costs and retirement benefits are the largest expense of city government.  Some cities outsource some or all of their services, such as finance, parks maintenance and fire, while others hire their own staff.  The number of employees and how they are paid has a huge influence on the city's budget.  In Lake Oswego it takes 100 taxpayers to support 1 full time employee. Comparable cities are as low as 11 taxpayers to 1 FTE.  The discrepancy comes from staffing and wage differences, with Lake Oswego being the most expensive.

If significant changes are not made to spending, the city's income will fail to cover expenses in the budget year, 2017-2018.  Lake Oswego is becoming too expensive to live in and we want to see expenses cut rather than more debt or raising taxes and fees.

On Sensitive Lands:
I was 18 years ago tat overnight, 10% of the property owners became responsible for the city's natural resources.  Citizen's property [uses] became non-conforming with added deed restrictions.  To build, sell or do anything in the property, property owners have to go through an expensive [unaffordable] process of delineation and deed changes costing thousands of dollars.  Changes were promised, but it's been 18 years without clarity.

On Codes:
A couple of years ago a survey of citizens showed that a majority thought the tree code was too intrusive, yet substantive changes have not been made.

On Neighborhood Plans:
Only 8 of 22 Neighborhood Associations have formal Neighborhood Plans.  Regarding the renewed effort to get more neighborhoods to create plans and update the old ones, citizens see how existing Plans (and even associated code) have been ignored when they were needed most.  People are wondering, "Why bother?"  We want the plan, but we want them to mean something and have the teeth of codes included as part of the deal.

Election Day

Every vote counts!

Pie-in-the-sky futurists

Automobile The Next Cigarette
The Resiliant Earth, May 15, 2013  By Doug L. Hoffman

A recent report on the IEEE website claims that the

car of the future is not a hybrid, electric or even hydrogen powered vehicle. In fact, it is no car at all. It seems that a group of pie-in-the-sky futurists have decided that the automobile in any form is a bourgeois abomination. The hope for the future is mass transit and electric bicycles say the urban planning pundits. This shocking bit of utopian navel gazing comes out of the New York "Energy for Tomorrow” conference, which was devoted to “Building Sustainable Cities.” One prognosticator went so far as to pronounce the car the next cigarette, soon to become a pariah to all right thinking lefties. It is unsurprising that a bunch of big city officials and socialist leaning academics would prematurely announce the demise of the automobile, but then futuristic urban planning has a long history of being unerringly wrong.

Writing in the IEEE web column Energywise, Bill Sweet provides a gushing overview of one of the most asinine ideas ever to pop stillborn from a thinktank. With a modest recovery underway in the US and continued growth in Asia auto sales have recovered somewhat in recent years, yet many of the “experts” at the Times's conference have come out strongly anti-auto. Here is how Sweet put it:

Most shocking, perhaps, was the level of hostility expressed by 
many speakers to the automobile as such. Jaime Lerner, a former 
mayor of Brazil's Curitiba, known for the work he did there introducing an integrated mass transportation system that has been copied the world over, expressed the belief that cars some day soon will be seen as noxious as tobacco is today. “The car is going to be the cigarette of the future,” Lerner said.

The distaste Lerner and others expressed had to do not merely with pollutants and gasoline but, first and foremost, with congestion and what you might call human equities. Enrique Penalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, said his transportation reforms emphasized wide use of mini-buses (like the VW “Volksbus” seen ubiquitously in Mexico City), which after all emit pollutants and consume hydrocarbons too. The decisive factor for Penalosa is the amount of urban space consumed by a bus, as compared with a private car. “If we are all equal before the law,” he said, then “a bus carrying 100 people should be entitled to 100 times as much road space as a private car.”

It is totally amazing that those who do not own or drive personal automobiles think the rest of us are willing to adopt their inner-city 
lifestyle, content to use public transportation and share-a-ride bicycles. Don't misunderstand, we have no objection to public transportation in cities—it is outside of cities that the myopic green view fails. In reality, half of humanity lives outside of large urban areas where personal vehicles are not just a nicety but a necessity. Those who live outside of major cities in North America, Australia and elsewhere know this and are not about to relinquish their private vehicles.

The fundamental truth overlooked by the navel gazers is that the automobile freed the common man. In America, Henry Ford's spindly wheeled creations put the nation in motion. For the first time, people were free to pick up and move if times grew hard in 
their area or there were better jobs in the offing somewhere else. And move the people did, sometimes all the way across the continent. There is a reason why California became so car crazy, most of that state's citizens arrived by car.

Will a carbon tax come to Oregon?

Carbon tax, the Cover Oregon of tax reform: Editorial Agenda 2014

The Oregonian, September 17, 2014  Editorial 
Excerpt:  

In the other part of this split universe, lawmakers who'd gathered in Salem this week for committee meetings received an update, some enthusiastically, on a carbon tax study that will be completed later this year. Thus, even as the Legislature decides how to move beyond the failure of one complex and overly ambitious project, there's talk of effecting what one state industry group has called "the most far-reaching tax change since the founding of the state." It's almost as if Cover Oregon, and its lessons, never happened.

There's a simple explanation for this disconnect. Gov. Kitzhaber signed Senate Bill 306, which mandated the carbon tax study, on Aug. 14, 2013. A month and a half later, on Oct. 1, 2013, Cover Oregon famously failed to launch. The carbon tax update lawmakers received this week is an echo of a political reality that disappeared along with all of those perky and hopeful Cover Oregon ads. You'd like to think lawmakers realize that times have changed, but, well, you never know.

SB 306, which passed largely along party lines, mandated a study of "the feasibility of imposing a clean air fee or tax statewide as a new revenue option that would augment or replace portions of existing revenues." In other words, tax reform, the global warming edition.

This finished study, to be presented to lawmakers by Nov. 15, will be plopped into the midst of a long-running reform effort by Gov. Kitzhaber. If he and his legislative colleagues are still serious about tax reform, they should put the study on a high shelf somewhere in Salem and move on.

Whether assessed at the producer or consumer level, a carbon tax would act like a very specific kind of consumption tax. It would be a tax on energy – the gas you put in your car, the electricity with which you heat your home – that would be determined by greenhouse gas production.

And for what? It's one thing to tax fuel to pay for roads, but it's another to do so for reasons that are more ideological than practical. The harm would be obvious, especially to those with less money. Meanwhile, the effect of such a tax in a single state on global warming would be negligible, and perhaps nonexistent.  

So shelve it. Instead, lawmakers and the governor should continue the long and difficult process of building up the credibility they'll need to sell Oregonians on even a modest tax reform proposal that doesn't include a sales tax of any flavor, let alone something as exotic as a carbon tax.

Clackamas smart on climate

Their Climate Smart Plan

See letter from Clackamas County to Metro on County website - Item 4 in agenda packet for the CCBC meeting of 10/30/2014  

There is time for Lake Oswego to join Clackamas County in rejecting any mandated, expensive regulations supporting the Climate Smart Communities Plan under Metro (and the state) as not productive, too expensive, and not wanted.  

*

‘Climate Smart’ plan pits Clackamas vs Metro

Steve Becker, KOIN News, October 30, 2014

See KOIN VIDEO

County Chair John Ludlow said relieving congestion with another lane along I-205 -- to reduce congestion and greenhouse gases, is a plan.   

Public provided input to Clackamas County Commission on Thursday

Excerpt:

CLACKAMAS, Ore. (KOIN 6) — Clackamas County officials are questioning Metro’s Climate Smart plan, a program that will eventually be implemented to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Commissioners called the plan “Portland-centric” and said it will 
hurt more than help Clackamas County.


As it’s drafted now — calling for fewer cars and more mass transit —  Metro’s Climate Smart program won’t work in Clackamas County, commissioners said.

The public provided input Thursday to the commissioners, and most did not like the plan.

One person told the commission, “Their Climate Smart plan has nothing to do with climate and it has nothing to do with being smart.”

Another was more succinct. “I’m asking you to do everything in your power as commissioners to reject this.”

Metro will take up all recommendations for the Climate Smart
 plan in December.

Candidates are in the home stretch!

Who's leading the pack?  

With Election Day just 4 days away, most of the ballots are already turned in.  On Wednesday there will be election post-mortems as each candidate and their campaign "staff" figures out what they did right and what they could have done better.  Final revenue figures will be turned in, revelations will come out, and the public will get a better feel for who they voted for and what the next couple of years will bring.  May the best people win!

Fianaces to Date:         Cash                          In-Kind                           Expenses
                                 Contributions            Contributions                         
Ed Brockman             $  3,503                             0                                  $  3,312              

Joe Buck                     $14,810                             0                                  $17,126              

Jeff Gudman              $  3,650                              0                                 $  3,353              

Matt Keenen              $  3,300                        $  9,272                             $  4,117

Jackie Manz               $  5,085                        $    555                              $  4,537

The real value of $100

To see a map of the country's metropolitan areas and how far $100 goes, use this link to see the MAP from the Tax Foundation.  There are more maps and statistics on similar topics within links on this website.  

 

The Real Value of $100 in Metropolitan Areas

By 

Alan Cole, Lyman Stone, Tom VanAntwerp, Richard Borean

  

We recently published a map showing how far $100 would take you in different states. For example, in states with low costs of living, like Arkansas, $100 had the same sort of purchasing power that $115 would have in an average state.

We got a lot of requests – particularly from upstate New Yorkers - for a map of purchasing power that separates out cities from non-metropolitan areas. Fortunately, that data is available from the BEA’s interactive tables, and we have created an interactive map of purchasing power down to the city level.