Will Rogers without the Humor

IMG_0202Back in the Great Depression, amid the New Deal, when the Republican Party was the very face of the Establishment, a good-natured, lasso-twirling Oklahoma humorist named Will Rogers quipped, “I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

To some extent, amid a rebellion led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist from Vermont, that quip may still seem to hold true. But it is looking pretty tame alongside the free-for-all on the Republican side, where ideological dysfunction seems to reign supreme after years of fairly orthodox nominees leading its party into quadrennial battle. The Establishment is in some ways shaken to its roots.

The moment of silence Saturday evening following the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at the outset of an otherwise raucous Republican debate may have honored proper protocol, but it seemed almost anachronistic in some ways. The uprising within the party is firmly anchored within the conservative elements of the American working class. Polls have consistently shown that Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump draw support from those with the lowest average levels of education within the party, and one can probably assume correspondingly low average income levels as well—if one excludes Trump himself, that is, who is clearly at the other end of the wealth spectrum but a far better self-promoter than any other candidate on the stump. There is irony in watching a multimillionaire real estate developer become the voice of right-wing working-class populism.

All the candidates honored the memory of Scalia, but it should be noted that he was no friend of the working class. His hide-bound originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution represented a particularly rigid brand of legal intellectualism that was increasingly out of touch with current American realities—and was intended to be. Originalism hews to the idea that the Constitution must be always interpreted in light of the intentions of the Founding Fathers, which may sound logical until one considers all the contingencies of American history that they could never have foreseen or even understood. I have seen this kind of originalism applied in the religious arena as well, trying to freeze in time the thinking of people like Martin Luther or others who themselves were revolutionizing the world’s thinking. It has always been hard for me to believe that the Founding Fathers, who themselves challenged the orthodoxy of the British monarchy, truly expected that their vision would be frozen in time for all who followed. Surely they understood the fluid nature of the revolutionary principles they enshrined in the new American system. I do not have to be a lawyer to see through the philosophical flaws in originalism, just as I do not have to be a theologian (but I am a Lutheran) to know that Martin Luther surely understood that he had set in motion with the Reformation certain forces that would lead to periodic reevaluation of the application of essential Christian principles over time. Modern American Lutheranism, fortunately, is for the most part more creative and dynamic in its spirituality than to follow an originalist path. Scalia, however, was a conservative Catholic whose originalism, curiously, did not strictly follow the separation of church and state advocated by Jefferson, Madison, and others. They surely never envisioned today’s Religious Right alliance between conservative Catholics and evangelicals. Those interested in a powerful dissection of the origins of this brand of politics, by the way, can read Thy Kingdom Come, a decade-old treasure by Randall Balmer, a politically liberal evangelical who is deeply critical of the submersion of evangelical religion within the right-wing Republican political agenda.

That point leads us back to the bifurcation to date of the rebellion within the Republican Party. Basically, despite some cross-over in both directions, the Cruz vote relies very heavily on evangelical support from the Religious Right, while Trump relies on a more secular brand of support from working-class Republicans who see jobs slipping away, have lost the unions that used to support their aspirations within the private sector, and who exercise a kind of knee-jerk patriotism with distinctively nativist roots. But, of course, evangelicals can be blue-collar workers, and vice versa, and some evangelicals surely also recoil at their constant media characterization as conservatives, as Balmer does. All that said, indications are that the two candidates, each posing as anti-Establishment, together have been commanding about half of the Republican caucus and primary vote, which means that traditional pro-business Republicans face an uphill battle to maintain control of their party.

What is interesting is that they also face a rather incoherent threat, if judged by the rants and promises of Trump, who seems to enjoy playing a disruptive, destabilizing role in the Republican debates that nonetheless serves very well to keep the focus on Donald Trump. Despite the deference to the Scalia legacy, the debates seem far from the traditions that planted him on the U.S. Supreme Court in the first place. A Reagan nominee, Scalia won enough respect for his professionalism to win unanimous confirmation from the U.S. Senate. Not one Republican candidate in the Greenville, South Carolina, debate noted the obvious fact that every Democrat at the time respected Reagan’s prerogative, although later they did feel Reagan had pushed things just far enough with the nomination of Robert Bork, who was persuaded to withdraw his nomination in the face of intense opposition. This year’s candidates all insisted that President Barack Obama had no right to nominate a successor to Scalia and that they had every right to block confirmation, even before knowing whose name he would submit. The intent, of course, is clear—to withhold that right until a Republican wins the White House in the fall.

But one wonders: Have they considered what they will do if, perhaps as a result of their current intraparty fratricide, they lose that election, especially if the general electorate recoils at granting them such a privilege? Will they pledge to block any Clinton or Sanders nominee for an entire term in office?

It is an intriguing quirk of the American political system, perhaps part of the original intent of the Founding Fathers, that judges of one persuasion often die during the terms of presidents with quite different philosophies, who then get to replace them for life. It cuts both ways, as any intelligent person has seen over time. The failure to contemplate where the logic of obstruction leads may be the truest indication of a disorganized political party.

 

Jim Schwab

It’s Okay to Fail (Sometimes)

Ascension Parish Strike SceneJust in case anyone out there is unduly impressed with my intelligence, I have a revelation: I flunked calculus in my first quarter of my freshman year in college. I was attending Cleveland State University on Kiwanis scholarship money, no less. Not that I really understood what hit me or saw it coming, and that’s the point. I entered with high SAT scores, and the guidance counselor duly noted that I had high placement scores for both Spanish and Mathematics. She recommended a fifth-quarter placement for Spanish though my three years in high school ordinarily equated to fourth-quarter placement. We ended up choosing more conservatively, and I aced both the fourth and fifth quarters of Spanish to complete my language requirement. I probably should have skipped that fourth quarter and taken the advanced placement. On the other hand, we stuck with the advanced placement in calculus, and it backfired. Not so good.

A little background is helpful, as it almost always is in understanding how and why any student performs at the college level. I entered the fall quarter on crutches because of an industrial accident late in the summer. I was earning money working in a chemical plant in a nearby Cleveland suburb, but the dome of an antimony kiln tipped over and trapped my ankle, which was fractured. I collected worker compensation for the next six weeks until the doctor removed the cast, at which time I hobbled for a while until I rebuilt strength in my left leg. That was certainly a distraction, but not a dire impediment. More importantly, but exacerbated by the injury, I had a tendency developed earlier in life not to reach out for help when I needed it, in part because of a stubborn tendency to assume I could figure things out, which I very often had done. I was in deep water in that calculus class, and by the time I realized I could not swim, I was drowning—even though the ankle had healed just fine.

In a subsequent quarter, I asserted some hard-working grit by getting permission to take 20 credits (the limit was 18), five courses instead of four, in order to regain the lost ground from that failed class. And I pushed my through that grinding schedule with respectable grades.

Failing that class, which may have cost me a renewal of the scholarship (I never found out), may have been vital, however, for my growth as a student. I worked two more summers in that chemical plant, which would only qualify as easy work if you enjoy such activities as unloading 50-pound bags of sulfur on a dolly from a railcar in 95-degree heat while wearing a face mask. I should note that my father worked there, too. He ran the garage and was the lead mechanic, repairing and maintaining all the trucks and forklifts and such. When I started college, he too was temporarily disabled. He was in the hospital with a disk injury that required lower back surgery that kept him out of work for six months. Suffice it to say that all the undergraduate tuition for my education came from my own savings from those summer and other seasonal jobs. Thank God for union wages. But it did mean that my education was for me a valuable commodity, hard earned and well paid for. Although I attended college from 1968 to 1973, in the midst of the civil rights, Vietnam war, and environmental protest era, and I did participate in all those causes, I was decidedly not inclined to get silly about drugs, sex, and parties because it was my money that was paying for that education. It makes a difference.

There is a certain right-wing mythology in American politics that says such self-reliance induces a conservative outlook in life. What it does, which has little to do with modern American conservatism in my opinion, is instill a strong dose of resilience and common sense. That may or may not lead to a conservative political outlook. In my case, it led to a strong identification with those struggling to get ahead and a willingness to balance the social scales better than we typically do. My intellectual curiosity drove me to learn more about other cultures and lifestyles and perspectives.

I should also add that I had a powerful hankering to write, one that has asserted itself repeatedly throughout my life and career. It seemed at first that majoring in English made sense; the university did not offer a major in journalism. I enjoyed reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald and 17th-century English novelists for a while, and the honors English classes in which I was placed were stimulating. But I soon realized that another part of me was itching to be born. In high school, perhaps in part because of nerdy tendencies, such as they came in the 1960s, I was somewhat withdrawn. Our high school was a high performer, and I was on an academic quiz show team, but no matter. I never felt that I fit in very easily, but I was president of the Writers Club and active in one or two other groups—but nothing major.

At Cleveland State, however, I quickly found that my inner extrovert was eagerly waiting to burst its shell, and the higher intellectual climate was just what I needed to find my comfort zone. I started doing less well in those honors English classes as I became heavily involved in campus politics, at one point running credibly but unsuccessfully for president of the student government. I founded Cleveland State’s first student environmental group and led it for three years. It was time to blend my academic studies with my real life aspirations, and I shifted my major to political science, which undoubtedly aided my GPA. Suddenly my activities and my studies bore some relation to each other. I could excel again.

None of this led to instant change. It led to perpetual evolution. It took years for many of the seeds planted in those college years to grow and mature, and failure contributed to that growth and maturation every bit as much as any success along the way. Someday I may need a whole book to relate the entire story, and right now I lack the free time to write it thoughtfully and thoroughly. But in all the discussion of resilient communities of which I am a part, I am at least willing to offer that, beneath all the intellectual definitions of resilience, some of us also harbor perspectives on resilience that are built on a solid foundation of personal experience. And in real life, those perspectives matter every bit as much in collectively defining resilience as any words in a dictionary or scientific report.

 

Jim Schwab

 

 

On Taxes and Public Trust

A very curious op-ed article appeared Monday (July 6) in the Chicago Tribune. Tom Geoghegan, best known as a liberal lawyer who represents labor unions, made a plea for more taxes. Not just any taxes for any reason, but “Tax me, please, so Illinois can compete.” Let me set the stage for this commentary.

First, we have a mayor who has been adhering religiously to maintaining property taxes at a relatively low level, compared to many suburbs, while struggling to make the city’s books balance amid pressure to keep the city’s pension funds solvent. Pension funds for both city and Chicago Public Schools retirees promise reasonably generous benefits that include a three percent cost-of-living yearly increase, which certainly beats Social Security in most years because its increases vary with the Consumer Price Index. (For the record, my wife is a Chicago Public Schools retiree.) These agreements have been in place for many years, but for many years the city and the school system have not met their obligations to fund these pensions adequately. The city is also making its perennial argument in Springfield that Chicago residents pay twice for pensions because their own teacher pension fund relies on local property taxes while all other systems in the state rely on state income taxes, which, of course, Chicagoans also pay. Suburban and downstate legislators counter that Chicago gets more of other types of state support because of higher numbers of families in poverty, an argument that strikes me as lame because Chicago is hardly the only city in the state with poor people.

Welcome to the twisted logic of politics in Illinois. We also have a constitutional provision that cements flat-rate income taxes in place. We could only enact a progressive state income tax by first amending the state constitution to allow such a thing. Meanwhile, Illinois is undergoing a bruising battle between a conservative rookie Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, and a legislature with large Democratic majorities in both houses. It is now July, and they have not agreed on a budget, and a judge has ruled that, without statutory authority in the form of an enacted budget, the state cannot pay its workers more than the federal minimum wage until this gets sorted out.

It is not apparent to me, or many others, that either the state of Illinois or the city of Chicago lack considerable wealth or the ability to pay their bills if we sort out our priorities and match spending with revenue. Rauner refuses to budge on the revenue until the legislature adopts at least some of his pro-business, anti-union agenda—he basically wants to make Illinois a right-to-work state—and the legislature is busy enacting budgets that necessarily entail large deficits, so Rauner vetoed their most recent attempt. A standoff is throwing Illinois into turmoil.

To be brutally honest, I could never hope in this short blog post to do justice to all the intricacies of this situation. I am providing only a broad outline of the conflict as background to the Geoghegan commentary. Basically, his perspective is that school closings driven by budget cuts drive middle-class residents to the suburbs for better schools for their children, which they pay higher taxes to achieve. In short, lower taxes make the city less competitive in attracting talent, resulting in a less competitive business climate. He bolsters his argument by pointing out that other big cities facing many of the same macroeconomic challenges have survived the recession and are thriving in ways that Chicago is not. And in ways that Illinois also is not. People in those other states pay higher, progressive income taxes that support public services that make their states and cities more competitive. In short, he says “blue states that collect higher taxes thrive and red states with lower taxes do not.” I am sure one can find some exceptions to his general rule, but he has a point. Taxes alone do not make a state less competitive, especially if used wisely to create better public education and amenities and infrastructure. All these things matter. Then comes Geoghegan’s clincher:

“Illinois is a blue state that tries to govern like a red state. And that’s why the state and its crown jewel, Chicago, are about to go belly up.”

So far, so good. Geoghegan concludes with his plea to “tax me, please,” to achieve better public solvency and make the state and city more competitive. But his article fails to answer or address the question of why a blue state would try to “govern like a red state.” There is an understandable, though also cowardly, fear among legislators and aldermen about raising taxes because there is public resistance. Some public resistance to higher taxes is always to be expected, but in many places it can be overcome with a solid explanation of how that money will be used or invested. It is when it is repeatedly misused or poorly invested that public suspicion becomes a cancer that afflicts the trust people must feel before they are willing to open their wallets to the state and city.

That is where a new book by Thomas J. Gradel and former Chicago alderman Dick Simpson becomes important. Simpson, now teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was an independent who was once a thorn in the side of Mayor Richard J. Daley, the Democratic party boss, subject of the famous Mike Royko book, Boss, whose son Richard M. later ascended to the same office. Richard M. Daley retired before the 2011 mayoral election, when Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor. Corrupt Illinois is a no-holds-barred attack on the pervasive culture of corruption not only in the city but the entire state of Illinois, now famous for having sent two recent governors to prison, Republican George Ryan and his immediate successor, Rod Blagojevich, who ironically had promised to clean up the mess Ryan left behind. Instead, he created his own mess, including the attempted sale of the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama.

There is not room here to review the hundreds of cases of corruption the two authors discuss, stretching from the city of Chicago to numerous suburbs, including the notorious case of Cicero, to downstate communities where clerks and mayors have stolen public funds, to the state capitol, where matters now speak for themselves. What Gradel and Simpson document is the high, very high, cost of public corruption in the erosion of public trust. Taxpayers like to know that, when they fork over more money that is supposed to build roads and bridges or support schools or social services, that money will not end up illicitly in the back pocket of some operator tolerated by politicians who look the other way, or worse, pocket some of it themselves or find other ways to violate the public trust.

Moreover, this is not a partisan issue, as some would like to contend. Both parties have participated in the skullduggery in their own ways. The book supports an observation I have long shared in talking about other states with similar issues, like Louisiana: Once a culture of corruption takes hold, it becomes a bipartisan enterprise. The same can usually be said of the virtuous cycle of comparative honesty in states where such practices meet with immediate public condemnation. I have long encountered people who have difficulty believing me when I tell them that, when I once ran for city council in Iowa City while a graduate student at the University of Iowa, by city ordinance the limit on contributions by any individual to a candidate for a specific election was $50. There are no missing zeroes. It was 1983, but even allowing for inflation, that limit comes nowhere near the inflated sums that float around in Illinois elections. Public tolerance makes a huge difference.

Rauner attempts in his ham-handed fashion, driven by the personal certitude of a hedge fund millionaire, to pose as the enemy of the political class in Illinois. What he does not understand is that his pose might sell far better if he did not also make himself the implacable foe of organized labor and the minimum wage, and if he did not have such a tin ear about the damage his policies are doing to badly needed services for the poor, disabled, and mentally ill. That undermines any public sympathy he might otherwise muster for a legitimate campaign to root out public corruption, which seems at best to be only a secondary target.

If you do nothing else to understand the hole that Illinois has dug for itself, read this book. At times, Corrupt Illinois may seem repetitive, even slightly monotonous, unless you develop a perverse fascination with just how corrupt a state can become. That is because the authors have so much raw material to work with that it is a wonder they fit it all into just 200 pages. They try mightily to be concise and to the point, but the point they make is unavoidable. Until Illinois voters insist on cleaning up this mess, and their political leaders finally grow a conscience and respond, there is no way out of our current impasse.

 

Jim Schwab

Don’t Say Those Words!

Now suppose I go to Florida but decide never to utter the word “mosquitos.” Will that make the little buggers go away?

Or suppose I refuse to say “cockroaches.” Does that mean they would never infest my apartment or condo?

Finally, let us imagine that, on my trip to Florida, I never say the word “sunburn”? Would that make it possible for me to sit on the beach all day, unprotected, without suffering the consequences?

If those propositions sound absurd, then consider the moronic dictum of Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who apparently has decreed that state employees are not to use the words “climate change.” Presto. Problem solved! Climate change ceases to exist, all the science to the contrary be damned (for instance, the most recent National Climate Assessment).

The state of Florida, however, has a long and impressive history of dealing effectively and forthrightly with issues related to hazards. Not perfect, by any means, but far more impressive than most neighboring states. Florida provided significant guidance to its communities on planning for hazard mitigation, and then subsequently for developing plans for post-disaster recovery. It is the only state that enacted a requirement for coastal jurisdictions to develop such plans before disasters, called Post-Disaster Redevelopment Plans (PDRP), although Gov. Scott rescinded the mandate. Even so, the state still has encouraged local jurisdictions to adopt such plans. And before Scott became governor, the Florida Department of Community Affairs (now the Department of Economic Opportunity) produced guidance on the preparation of PDRPs. In addition, Florida issued an addendum to the PDRP guidance to address the threat of sea-level rise resulting from climate change.

Simply put, Florida has been much more proactive than most other states because Florida faces much bigger problems with coastal storms and flooding because of its peninsular geography. What the state has done has not only made a difference, but in many cases provided a model for others. In our new report from the American Planning Association on post-disaster recovery planning, we have cited it extensively, as has the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in other guidance. But now the forward movement seems to have been slammed into reverse gear.

This is a shame, in part because, in my experience, Florida has enjoyed the ability in recent decades to attract high-quality public servants in the fields of environmental quality, urban planning, and emergency management. I have known many of these people, and they were top-notch under both Democratic and Republican administrations. One of them, Craig Fugate, is now leading FEMA. There is a problem, however, with retaining such people: You have to provide a rewarding work environment in which you are honoring, not insulting, the intelligence they bring to their jobs. Once you cross that line with measures such as the censorship of terms like “climate change,” the most likely result over time is a brain drain. Smart people have other places to go and better options for their careers than to be told what to think and what they can say. On the other hand, if, as has been alleged about much of the far right, the real goal is to cripple effective government and make it appear more incompetent than it needs to be in order to support an agenda that advocates a reduced government role, you may wish to foment the frustration with government that may result. I suspect, however, that the majority of American taxpayers, like me, would rather get the best public servants their taxes can buy, and one way to do that is to respect their insights into the problems they are trying to help us all solve. Scott’s response instead is to dismiss the issue from the public agenda.

The problem with trying to do that, especially in a dynamic state like Florida, is that he cannot hope to control the public debate in this way. He does not, for instance, control what can be said by officials in local government, including environmental engineers, planners, emergency managers, coastal resource managers, and others who must face problems like sea-level rise whether or not state employees are allowed to use certain words. Nor will it stop university personnel, including a wide variety of scientists, from discussing the issue. In fact, some, like David Hastings, a marine science professor at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, are describing the tactic as “Orwellian,” according to World Environment News. Sara Gutterman, of GreenBuilder, referred to it as “North Korean style censorship.” Even Newsmax notes, “The Florida policy is reminiscent of a 2012 law passed by lawmakers in North Carolina that prohibits the state from basing coastal policies on scientific predictions regarding sea level rise.” The article goes on to note that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection is charged with trying to combat the impacts of a problem that it is no longer allowed to name.

Enough local officials have been concerned about climate change in some parts of Florida to form a four-county Southeast Florida Climate Change Compact in which they have agreed to pool resources and jointly tackle the issues posed to several of the state’s most vulnerable counties. Those concerns extend naturally to the impacts of hurricanes, whose destructive impact can be magnified over time by eroding shorelines and rising seas. Having heard county executives and others from Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, in particular, discuss these issues, there is no way that I can foresee their backing down, in the face of the real land-use and coastal protection dilemmas they face, from confronting the reality of climate change. But they clearly must do it without state support, although for now at least they certainly can expect moral and tactical support from the federal government.

We can only hope that this wave of unreality in states like North Carolina and Florida is ultimately short-lived. The science is far too advanced for this silliness to continue, no matter how much political red meat it provides in certain circles. The only way to create resilient communities is to openly confront, debate, and discuss the truth, and that cannot be accomplished by banning words from public discussion, a tactic worthy of certain dictatorial regimes where democracy is less well developed than it should be in the world’s most powerful nation. Some policies, in fact, deserve to be treated with scorn precisely because they undercut the robust public discussion that supports both resilience and democratic government. This is one of them.

Jim Schwab

March to End Injustice

On this weekend of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, my wife and I spent last night watching the movie Selma before going out to dinner. Produced by Oprah Winfrey, who also plays the part a Selma protester, the movie focuses on Dr. King’s leadership of the March from Selma to Montgomery for black voting rights in Alabama, which resulted in 1965 in the passage by Congress of the Voting Rights Act that effectively ended the devious practices of southern officials in denying voting rights to black citizens. \

It is an uplifting movie, as one would expect, and I highly recommend it. The movie deserves more than the two Oscar nominations it received, but getting justice in Hollywood has always been a curious game of inside politics. It is not worth probing further in this forum.

Like most movies about a key piece of history, one gets far more out of the movie by knowing something about the events it portrays before watching it. The movie, however, rises above such demands to deliver a powerful message about the realities of segregation and the uncountable ways in which it was designed to crush the human soul. Early in the movie, Oprah’s character, having filled out a voter registration form, goes to the county registrar in Selma to register. The officious clerk first asks if her boss knows she is coming to the courthouse to “create the fuss.”

“No fuss,” she replies, “I just want to register to vote.”

He then asks her about the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, which she recites perfectly. Determined to find a reason to deny her, he then asks how many county judges there are in Alabama. Sixty-nine, she says, and he grimaces. “Name them,” he says, and when she cannot, he stamps DENIED on her application. She leaves, knowing that further discussion is futile. The only thing that will change the outcome, she realizes, is peaceful protest.

I won’t go into great detail about what follows; go see the movie, please. Suffice it to say that, when the protesters in the first attempted march attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, local sheriff Jim Clark orders them to disperse in two minutes or face the consequences. They stand firm, and in short order, officers are flailing away at protesters with billy clubs, splitting skulls and breaking bones. Others on horses chase them down on the way back across the bridge, in one case letting a whip fly. All this is based on the striking reality of the brutality of Clark’s deputies in the historic march.

What anyone with an ounce of decency must wonder, however, even with the hindsight of history, is what motivates the kind of hatred and fear that causes men in uniform to unleash such violence against unarmed protesters seeking one of the most basic human rights in the world? How does anyone develop such animus against fellow human beings? I can almost understand simple cowardice in not confronting such people, but I find it impossible to understand the actual perpetrators of such injustice. For the life of me, I have never understood how any of them could reconcile such behavior with the Bible Belt Christianity they claimed to profess—especially given that Christianity was at the root of Dr. King’s movement.

But the movie is about more than that. It is also about the epic struggle of King, played by David Oyelowo, to motivate President Lyndon B. Johnson to accelerate plans to introduce voting rights legislation at the federal level. There has been a debate about whether the movie fairly portrays Johnson, though it is clear from all historical records that he was a master political manipulator who may well have resented what he saw as his own manipulation by this then 36-year-old Negro preacher. In the end, however, Johnson, who had only the previous fall won the Oval Office in a landslide of epic proportions, was not going to be left behind by the tide of history.

To forestall action by Johnson, amid legal battles over the rights of the protesters to march in Alabama, Gov. George Wallace visits the White House. There ensues what I regard as one of the most intriguing, and surely accurate, scenes in the movie involving Johnson, who asks Wallace why he is “doing this,” that is, using the powers of the state to prevent blacks from voting. Wallace pretends that he has no authority over the county registrars who are preventing blacks from voting, and Johnson is blindingly blunt and direct: “Are you shittin’ me? Are you shitting the President of the United States?” He asks what people in 1985 (not to mention 2015) will think of the stances they took in 1965, but Wallace professes not to care. Johnson ends the conversation simply: “I don’t intend to go down in history alongside the likes of you.”

In the end, as we all know, he not only did the right thing, but by November 1965, with King at his side, signed a landmark law with strict enforcement provisions that permanently changed the political landscape of America. Those who died at the hands of racist murderers, and those whose skulls were cracked and bones were fractured by merciless Alabama troopers and police, had something to show for their courageous sacrifice.

As I said, just go see the movie. If you think of yourself as a brave individual, match your courage against that of those who marched. You may find yourself aspiring to do better. I did.

Jim Schwab

Holiday Promises

The holiday season is upon us, and despite having a modicum of free time that I have not enjoyed for a while, I confess—I am still struggling to compose as much material for this blog as I would prefer. But I am working on it, on some serious material on a variety of issues, and you will see it all in coming weeks. But before I get to that, I want to express some gratitude.

Although any blogger clearly blogs with the hope of finding an audience, I have been stunned in recent weeks as the number of visitors and registered users has soared, the latter number topping 2,200 as of yesterday. At the current rate of growth, I would not be surprised if there are 10,000 of you a year from now. Finding an audience of that size and on that trajectory is extremely heartwarming, and I wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year, as you see fit to celebrate.

Now I shall ask a favor. It has been my assumption that a reason for this growth is that there is a hunger out there for content that goes beyond the obvious, essays that explore beneath the surface, that help make sense out of complicated topics. I cannot write about everything, nor should I try, but there are topics on which I feel I can offer some real depth of analysis and understanding that will be beneficial to others. I think many people are tired of more superficial commentaries that ignore the complexity, the subtleties, and the illuminating details of many issues. But you, as readers, have to be willing to bear with the writer for more than 500 words to get to that depth.

Some time ago, a web editor told me the ideal length for blog articles is 500 to 750 words. I don’t know who has noticed, but I routinely violate that assumption because, if I feel a subject requires greater length for proper explication, I will indulge in that greater length in order to do it justice. I don’t believe in simplistic, jingoistic responses to serious issues, and I deplore the trivialization of public dialogue that I see dominating political discussion these days. Issues like climate change and improving our communities are just not susceptible to such treatment without gross distortion of the truth.

So invite your comments on why you choose to read this blog and what you might like to see, knowing that I choose not to write on a topic unless I have the time and the knowledge to offer something that I can be proud of as an author. This is your holiday gift to me—letting me learn what I am doing or should be doing here that is valuable. I look forward to the comments.

Jim Schwab

America’s Problem

There has been considerable angst in recent weeks about relations between police officers and young black men, and more than a little finger-pointing. While I certainly think this nation needs ongoing discussions about how race relations affect police activity and vice versa, that is not the immediate subject of this blog. Instead, I want to turn to a different aspect of race relations in the United States that I think is undeniable, and yet will be denied by certain segments of the population. It is the ongoing inability of some people to accept the legitimacy of African American leadership even when a majority of Americans have supported it.

I spent the first week of December in Washington, D.C., at a series of meetings big and small, mostly with two federal agencies but also with others. It was only as the week was coming to a close, and I was killing time eating a dinner of shrimp, clam chowder, and beer in the Legal Sea Foods restaurant at Reagan National Airport that I got an interesting revelation by initiating a conversation with the man seated next to me at the bar, where people often get their dinner when they want faster seating than waiting for a table might provide. Besides, being a naturally gregarious sort, I find it relatively easy to strike up such conversations, which might be more difficult if I chose to sit by myself.

In this case, my conversation partner turned out to be a retired U.S. Navy officer who, among other things, talked about the challenges posed to some naval facilities by global warming and sea level rise. He manifested a trend in defense thinking that runs directly counter to Tea Party ideologues who see talk of climate change as some sort of left-wing conspiracy. This man noted the rise in sea levels in places like Diego Garcia, a remote island naval base in the Indian Ocean, and what it might mean over time. But the conversation started when he ordered a New Zealand wine, and I casually remarked on my experience with the subject after receiving some bottles of New Zealand red as gifts for speaking during my visiting fellowship there in 2008. That led to discussion of disaster work, and his comparing military response to disasters to my work on long-term community recovery through urban planning.

Somehow that led to a discussion of visits to Hawaii. I noted that, on our visit there in 2011, my wife and I had taken a rainforest tour in Oahu. It turned out that the tour guide had been a classmate of Barack Obama at the Punahoe School in Honolulu, and he joked, “I must be one of the underachievers.” But I added that he also noted that, on a previous tour, a Marine “birther” had challenged him on the idea that Obama was born in Hawaii and was thus a U.S. citizen. The tour guide laughed and said he told the Marine, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you, but I went to school with him and I knew his mother and grandparents.”

The now retired naval officer noted his disgust with those who questioned Obama’s citizenship, stating that the advocates of such nonsense had turned “a lifelong Republican into a Democrat in the last ten years.” He then expressed a desire to see the right-wing Republicans who raise such questions focus on more substantive issues and quit pursuing issues that, in his view, were a waste of everyone’s time.  He was a very practical man who preferred to solve real problems rather than chase phantoms.

It struck me that a good deal of the far-right criticism of President Obama has been of this nature, but that there is a reason. After all, even before he was elected, Obama was the target of accusations and insinuations that he was a Muslim, that he secretly hated white people, and so forth. American politics has always been to some degree a fountain of character assassination, but over the years most of it has stayed in bounds. With the Obama presidency, however, there seem to be no limits. Most of the issues I have mentioned—the birth controversy, his alleged devotion to Islam, and so forth—are issues absolutely without factual foundation, yet they have circulated and maintain a hard core of believers that polls have often shown to be in the low double digits. To me, anything above the very low single digits in support for such blatant lies is somewhat frightening. I find it troubling that so many fellow Americans readily accept and even advocate such outrageous nonsense. And, frankly, I strongly suspect that a great deal of it emanates from the inability of a certain segment of the population to accept the legitimacy of a black man, even a biracial man, in the White House. Some people seemingly cannot reconcile themselves to the reality of black political leadership at the highest level of government. Never mind the obvious fact that a sizeable minority of whites had to vote for the man, or he would never have become president in the first place.

That brings to mind a small item in Business Week’s recent special issue celebrating its 85th anniversary. The magazine lists, in reverse order, the 85 most significant disruptive innovations during its years in business. Far down the list is the Republican Party’s southern strategy, first enunciated under President Richard Nixon. The aim was to use coded racial appeals to woo the Deep South away from the Democratic Party, taking advantage of resentment among white voters over civil rights. It has worked like a charm, cementing what is now a Republican “Solid South,” but, the magazine notes, the presidency has become a “poisoned chalice” for the GOP because the party’s tactics and ideology have alienated many former adherents of the Party of Lincoln in places like California and the Northeast, which now form a solid block of Democratic support. As a long-time Chicagoan, I would add to that Illinois, which after all generated Obama in the first place. What is interesting in Illinois is that Republicans can win here—but only if they are socially moderate while fiscally conservative. State Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, who died recently only a month after winning re-election to statewide office, was a testament to that proposition, and someone who routinely criticized the more extreme factions of the Republican Party. Bruce Rauner, the governor-elect who defeated Democratic incumbent Pat Quinn, made obvious appeals to and inroads into the African American community. The state fiscal mess created by Illinois’s Democratic legislative leaders added to Quinn’s vulnerability because of his perceived inability to gain control of the situation.

But try to elect a Tea Party or far-right Republican statewide, and you are headed for electoral disaster. Obama handily defeated such a candidate, Alan Keyes (also African American), in 2004 to become U.S. Senator. Illinois voters tolerate many things, but extremism is not one of them.

Now, mind you, I do not mean to imply that any disagreement with President Obama is suspect on these grounds. There is plenty of room to disagree with any U.S. president, and I cannot think of any in my lifetime with whom I would not have some differences on some issues. That includes Obama; there are decisions he has made with which I can at least quibble, and some to which I have serious objections. In most cases, however, there is a good deal of room for compromise. Instead, in Obama’s case, from the very beginning there have been indications that some people had no intention of reaching accommodation with him on any issues whatsoever. The degree of vituperation and name calling has been at times absurd, shameful, and ridiculous.

I don’t think it is unreasonable to see this vituperation as a backdrop to the whole discussion that is now taking place on the streets about police relations with minorities. It is a testament to the fact that there are more than a few among us who lack any capacity to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, especially the shoes of anyone of a different ethnic or racial group. It goes without saying that those lacking capacity for empathy are usually the last to recognize that fact.

 

Jim Schwab

In the Name of God

This is the sin against the Holy Ghost: – To speak of bloody power as right divine,
And call on God to guard each vile chief’s house,
And for such chiefs, turn men to wolves and swine:-

To go forth killing in White Mercy’s name,
Making the trenches stink with spattered brains,
Tearing the nerves and arteries apart,
Sowing with flesh the unreaped golden plains.

In any Church’s name, to sack fair towns,
And turn each home into a screaming sty,
To make the little children fugitive,
And have their mothers for a quick death cry,-

This is the sin against the Holy Ghost:
This is the sin no purging can atone:-
To send forth rapine in the name of Christ:-
To set the face, and make the heart a stone.

Vachel Lindsay

 

Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay, one of the founders in 1915 of the Society of Midland Authors ,with which I have long been involved, penned this poem, “The Unpardonable Sin,” in the midst of World War I, as a screed against the presumption of those who would claim to be committing murder and mayhem on behalf of Almighty God. It has become a classic because it states the obvious so simply while confronting a tendency that has been all too prevalent in human history—the quest to justify one’s own cruelty in the name of God.

I doubt that this poem will have any influence on the leaders or followers of Islamic State, if they even are familiar with it. For starters, it is posed primarily as a challenge to Christians who would justify war in the name of Christ. Nonetheless, I would maintain that, despite its context amid a war that tore Europe apart, it has more universal meaning that condemns any attempt to justify war in the name of a deity, no matter the faith involved.

This is not the subject matter I have most typically addressed in this blog, but I was appalled, though not surprised, to read this week that Islamic State, in an English-language e-zine called Dabiq, actually stated in blunt terms that it has a right to enslave and sexually abuse captured Yazidi women whose husbands ISIS has killed or taken prisoner, on the grounds that “even cross-worshiping Christians for ages considered them devil worshipers and Satanists.” It goes on to note that the women were divided among Islamic State fighters, some of whom sold them into slavery. And all of this is supposedly endorsed by the Koran. One could go on with the grim details, but the fundamental picture seems obvious.

Once we have deemed another group of people subhuman because of their differences in belief, or race, or ethnicity, or whatever excuse we have, their feelings matter not a whit because Allah, or God, has given us permission to treat them as mere chattel or to kill them outright. In cases of what we now euphemistically call “ethnic cleansing,” God has supposedly given us permission to wipe them off the face of the earth.

The whole idea behind this makes many, if not most, of us recoil in moral revulsion, but we need to do more than that. We need to come to grips with the fundamental illogic that makes parts of the human race function in this way. There is an essential arrogance behind all this that cannot be ignored, nor can it be ascribed solely to one radical group or one religion. Christianity has too much to answer for in its own history to assume such a stance. It was only 150 years ago, as the Civil War was winding to a close, that many clergy in southern churches in the U.S. still found it possible to use Holy Scripture to justify slavery. Their “unpardonable sin,” in Vachel Lindsay’s phrasing, was to provide cover for an entire society that was racist to its core and used perverse religious logic in many cases to excuse unspeakable cruelty. There is a scene in the movie Twelve Years a Slave, based on the Simon Northup book in the 1850s, in which the sadistic slave owner to whom Northup has been sold stands in front of his slaves with a Bible and reads from Proverbs , “The servant who does not serve his master will suffer many lashes.” He proceeds to note, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, that “many lashes may mean 40, or 100, or 150. This is holy scripture.” The fact that his slaves are not permitted to learn to read this scripture on their own to find the context from which their cruel owner has extracted this gem is more than ironic. It was a deliberate element of a system of subjugation.

So now we have ISIS resurrecting all the worst tendencies of every religion of every time in justifying the subjugation of other human beings, at a time when intelligent human beings have been hoping and praying that such notions have become a thing of the past. Sadly, that appears not yet to be the case; we have a long struggle ahead of us to expunge such logic from the human race once and for all. Too many people are still hanging on to too many prejudices and looking for justifications of one sort or another. And the most unpardonable of all, as Lindsay suggested, are those that justify their hatreds in the name of the Creator.

What lies at the core of this problem? I once heard Dr. Martin Marty, the theologian and long-time professor in the University of Chicago Divinity School, quote someone—I cannot remember whom—as stating that “a fanatic is someone who is determined to do for the Lord what the Lord would surely do for himself if only he were in full possession of the facts.” As absurd as that notion sounds on its face, it is all too real as human motivation. Somehow, we get it into our heads that a God whom Christians, Jews, and Muslims all describe as omnipotent, omniscient, and loving nonetheless needs the intervention of humans to solve problems that He has failed to perceive and remedy. And if this God is not taking care of business, well, then, it is up to us to do it for him. It is as if we are rushing to defend the honor of a helpless lady rather than worshiping a force far greater than ourselves. Here, God, let me help you by destroying these infidels.

Except that those “infidels,” however defined, are fellow human beings. And in order to get to the idea that these fellow human beings are lesser creatures who need to be slaughtered, enslaved, raped, or maimed, we have to cultivate the notion that the same God who created them and the entire universe somehow passionately hates a part of his creation so badly that he needs our help in getting rid of them.

I don’t care what passages out of the Bible, the Koran, or any other text some fanatic can extract or twist to construct this logic. If you believe in a deity who created the universe, that logic is an insult to the Almighty. And we need to grow up and accept the fact that it is all too easy to manipulate scriptural passages in isolation as justification for our own moral shortcomings. God does not hate the humans He created. He may very often be disappointed in their utter failure to achieve their own high moral potential, but what He does about that is his business, not ours. It is not our right to kill, injure, or enslave based on any differences among us.

There remains the problem of what to do about the people who insist on inflicting such injury on other people. When our own daughters were growing up, I did not endorse or employ corporal punishment because I do not think it is an appropriate remedy and certainly not the best. That said, I had no hesitation about using physical restraint to prevent them or their friends from doing harm to themselves or each other. I once gang-tackled one of our daughters in our living room to stop her from running away when she did not want to confront a serious issue in her life.

I think the same principle applies in both domestic and international situations where violence threatens to dominate people’s lives. Police are allowed to use force to prevent violence, for the same reason. None of this is because God wants us to hurt someone, but because there are times when we need to prevent such harm. The challenge in facing an insurgency like that led by Islamic State is that it inherently involves such complicated scenarios that may produce collateral damage. It is nearly impossible to find surgically sterile solutions; every option seems to leave blood on our hands. Even inaction, as President Barack Obama, like his predecessors, has learned on the job, can leave blood on our hands. There are few perfect solutions. But at least we can avoid the unpardonable sin of presuming that what we are doing is in the name of God. Far better to settle for the more humble proposition that, however imperfectly, we are simply seeking to reduce the level of pain in the world, and ideally to increase the volume of love and mutual respect. That is a goal that will ennoble any human being, no matter what faith he or she professes.

 

Jim Schwab

Digital Coast: A Model for Progress

In an era of congressional gridlock, with so little productive activity coming out of Washington that many people have begun to wonder if federal government is good for anything, the best models often work quietly in the shadows—and they may not even work primarily out of Washington. They work around the country, in the hinterlands, and along the coasts. They may even have odd names like Digital Coast, suggesting the marriage of digital technology with environmental and coastal planning needs. This is the story, in my own idiosyncratic fashion, of one such model.

Just last week, I spent three days in Milwaukee at a meeting of the Digital Coast Partnership, which is affiliated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an arm of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Digital Coast is a program of NOAA’s Coastal Services Center (CSC), based in Charleston, South Carolina. CSC is in the process of merging with the Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management (OCRM), in order to form a single coastal operation within NOAA. OCRM has been responsible for administering the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA), a piece of legislation passed in 1972 that supports a cooperative approach to better coastal resource management between the states and the federal government. But all this may be more bureaucracy than most people want to know, so let’s cut to the chase.

Overburdened local governments and regional planning agencies in coastal areas often do not have all the resources they may need to do a thorough job of planning intelligently for the future of the nation’s coastline. Under the CZMA, that coastline includes all areas along the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Great Lakes, including estuaries and bays like the Chesapeake Bay. In addition to tens of thousands of miles of coast, this area also is home to 39 percent of the U.S. population and many of our largest cities, including Boston, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and Honolulu. In all, some 30 states and five territories are included in the Coastal Zone Management Program.

Managing coastal resources is a delicate balancing act that includes planning for many environmentally sensitive areas, economic powerhouses and attractive tourist destinations, and major ports that drive trillions of dollars in economic activity. It requires advanced planning tools, knowledge of both economics and environmental science, and an understanding of the demographics of these areas, which can be very diverse. Many of our coastal cities like New York have been historic points of entry for many of the immigrants who have subsequently built so much of the modern United States.

Providing a modest suite of online tools and resources to make that job just a little easier at the local level is the job of Digital Coast. But now I am going to dive into the truly interesting part of this whole story—the emergence of the partnership.

Early in 2010, I was approached by representatives of NOAA on behalf of the Digital Coast program to gauge the interest of the American Planning Association in joining what was then a group of five national organizations that comprised the Digital Coast Partnership. These were the original team that had been assembled to help NOAA assess the usefulness of the resources it was creating and to reach deeply into the user communities for those resources to spread the word that this online resource existed. Those five organizations were The Nature Conservancy, National States Geographic Information Council, Coastal States Organization, Association of State Floodplain Managers, and National Association of Counties. Within the first year, they determined that something was missing—contact with urban planners. So they decided to invite us to join them. By July 2010, we signed an agreement to do exactly that, and we have never looked back. At the same time, as Nicholas J. (“Miki”) Schmidt, CSC’s Division Chief for Coastal Geospatial Services, likes to say, they could not be happier that APA joined.

What is the point of this partnership? It is long past the point in American history where a federal agency can afford to develop a new resource for local government without having some means to determine whether what they think will be useful actually is what is most useful to practitioners. Collaboration is more the order of the day. Find the people who will have to make best use of the tools, resources, and data you want to create, and ask whether what you have in mind is as useful as it could be, or even useful at all. If those user groups can vet your product and tell you seriously that, with perhaps this change or that tweak, what you are considering developing would be beneficial to local officials, planners, and resource managers, then go for it. If not, rethink it. In the end, what emerges is a highly productive symbiotic relationship in which those who must make better coastal planning and resource management happen at a local and regional level have a voice in the kinds of tools, data, and resources that may make their jobs easier.

As logical as all that sounds, the case for this model becomes even more compelling in the context of climate change. Our evolving climate, driven by the relentless addition of greenhouse gases from modern transportation, industry, and agriculture, among other, lesser sources, has greatly complicated long-term prediction models, particularly as they affect the modeling of future natural hazards such as flooding, drought, heat waves, and coastal storms. Unfortunately, at the same time, NOAA, as the governmental entity providing or funding much of the science of climate change, has had a target on its back in some of the oversight committees in Congress, especially those now chaired by skeptics of climate change. Some of these members of Congress seem virtually impervious to the mountains of evidence produced both domestically and internationally, to the nearly unanimous consensus behind the theory of climate change among climate scientists, and to the many reports that have supported climate concerns. We live in a strange universe in which science itself has become suspect among some in the halls of Congress, even as the need for scientific insights into complex planetary processes becomes more profound, and the long-term economic consequences of any missteps become ever more frightening. Several recent reports (e.g., Risky Business) and books suggest that we are playing Russian roulette with the world’s economic future.

But again, I digress. I am trying to focus on the value of Digital Coast and the partnership that supports it.

So back to Milwaukee. Our three days there were the latest iteration of a series of twice-yearly meetings of the partners and their NOAA compatriots in an ongoing quest to advance the program and enhance its value, something the partnership has been doing for more than five years now. In the past year, we added two new organizations that have embraced the partnership with enthusiasm: Urban Land Institute, and the National Estuarine Research Reserve Association (NERRA). The latter may sound like a mouthful; it is a relatively small organization, but it is important. Its members constitute the staff of a nationwide network of national estuarine research reserves, where services are provided to monitor and learn the value of coastal and tidal estuaries, to provide educational and environmental services, and to help us all learn what a biologically rich system these estuaries provide if properly cared for. The coast is an intricate fabric of ecosystems. NERRA members help us understand its essential value.

The first of our three days in Milwaukee was devoted to a rather intriguing experiment by ASFPM, which hosted a No Adverse Impact seminar for the Great Lakes, held at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. ASFPM has been leading the development of a Great Lakes Coastal Resilience Planning Guide, to which APA contributed through research support and outreach. This one-day seminar, attended by about 50 people, allowed practitioners who were not directly allied with Digital Coast to mix with the representatives of partner organizations. It also let the partners learn how Digital Coast concepts and tools might be more useful to their members and constituents. I spoke at this seminar in the morning, offering a comparison of two Great Lakes coastal counties and their varying governance systems in an effort to assess their progress toward achieving resilient coastal communities. I also fed into a later presentation about a new “no build” ordinance in St. Joseph, Michigan, requiring that new development in a beachfront residential area be set back far enough to account for the inevitable rise and fall of lake levels and to prevent the rush to build closer to the shore during periods when the lake had retreated.

That question ties directly to one of the major differences between the Great Lakes and oceanic coasts, where sea level rise is the dominant long-term concern. Increased weather variability in the Great Lakes region, as a result of climate change, is likely only to exacerbate long-term oscillations in lake levels, not to raise water levels. Periods of drought and increased temperatures may accelerate evaporation of Great Lakes waters, with considerable variation among the lakes, while heavy precipitation may add to lake levels, and extreme outcomes like the past winter’s polar vortex may extend ice cover and raise lake levels. It is a complex picture. Climate change entails mostly warming most of the time, but with serious variations from the norm on many other occasions. If there is one thing we can count on, it is increased volatility. But that all makes regulating coastal development on the Great Lakes very tricky business because many public officials and much of the public share relatively short memories and short-term perspectives on the associated hazards. We all need a greater tolerance for complexity if we are to understand the problems that lie ahead.

With the seminar behind us, the two-day meeting (August 20-21) involved our usual packed agenda of discussions among more than 20 representatives of NOAA and the partner organizations. We discussed the improvements in the Digital Coast website, how we were going to fund future operations, how we could collaborate on future projects, and how all the work would get done. The NOAA personnel appear to have had wonderful training in collaborative leadership, in ensuring that every partner’s input is valued, and in translating the resulting information into better governmental resources to aid the practitioners who need to make crucial local decisions about coastal development, environmental protection, the protection of jobs that depend on a healthy coast, and other vital subjects. That rubs off on the partners, and the result is a rather seamless web of ideas, contributions, testing, and feedback that serves to enrich what Digital Coast has to offer. This includes tools to visualize impacts of sea level rise, coastal habitat conservation, and the economic value of coastal activities such as commercial fishing, recreation, shipping, and tourism.

So go ahead; click on Digital Coast to visit the website and test-drive the tools, data, and resources and find out why we use the slogan, “More than just data.” Oh, and did I say “we”? Yes. It’s not just another federal program. It is a federal program that wants to hear from you and actually values input and feedback. Digital Coast has taught me a great deal. It has given me reasons to be hopeful about new collaborative models for providing federal services to the public.

 

Jim Schwab

The High Cost of Indifference

As a young man from a blue-collar family, I partially worked my way through college during the summers at a chemical company near Cleveland that employed my father as a truck mechanic. If there is one thing I learned at the time, it was the value of safety and industrial hygiene. The first summer I was there, we college students were rotated through various departments to fill in for men on vacation. One produced cuprous chloride, where I learned that not keeping a gas mask on would quickly make you dead. Others produced chemicals that produced itches and rashes if you were not careful, and in one I fractured my left ankle when an antimony kiln tipped over. I could go on, but the point is simple: Safety matters.

That theme, however, does not yet seem to be official gospel in Texas. I don’t want to issue a blanket indictment here, because I know some state officials probably want things to be different, but they don’t seem to hold the reins of power. Those who do hold those reins prefer a state that boldly advertises its lack of regulations. They see them as impediments to attracting business. The fact that enlightened businesses have often supported environmental, safety, and public health reforms seems not to affect their point of view.

I am offering this perspective now because the Texas State Fire Marshal’s Office in the past week released a long-awaited Firefighter Fatality Investigation, which it was legally required to produce, and issued a number of recommendations for improvements that could save lives in the future. The study was the result of the explosion in a fertilizer storage facility in West, Texas, on April 17, 2013.

Earlier this spring, I was asked to serve on an expert panel on planning and land use for the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), a federal agency created in 1999 to investigate chemical and hazards materials accidents. It was one of two panels organized for a hearing in West, Texas, on April 22, a little more than one year after the incident in which a fertilizer storage facility exploded, killing 15 people, two-thirds of them fire fighters. The explosive material was ammonium nitrate, which has a history of such accidents and was also the material used by Timothy McVeigh in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The CSB is still working on a report documenting its findings about the incident in West, and I do not wish to comment on or explore the issues that require more technical and scientific investigation to determine precisely what happened.

But there are issues about which I learned that I find troubling on the surface, even without the help of that ongoing investigation. For one, Texas law prohibits counties of fewer than 250,000 residents, unless they are adjacent to a county of 250,000 or more, from adopting a fire code. This is somewhat in line with the fact that Texas also has never bestowed zoning authority on its counties, rendering them powerless to influence land use outside incorporated municipalities (which have their own authority). This was one subject of inquiry by the board at the evening hearing, which lasted four hours, but even the state fire marshal, sitting just to my left on the same panel, could offer no explanation for the origins or rationale of that prohibition. He merely indicated at one point that obviously, as a fire marshal, he would rather not see such restrictions. Nonetheless, over the past year since the explosion, and despite ongoing investigation of such issues by the Dallas Morning-News, there is no sign of movement from Gov. Rick Perry’s office on changing the law. There are indications from Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who apparently prefers a different approach. Good for him. And for St. Rep. Joe Pickett of El Paso, who chairs the Texas House Committee on Homeland Security and Public Safety, who also favors reexamining such issues.

The issue is not simply the usual question of unfunded (or even funded) state mandates. I have followed state planning legislation for years, and about half require local communities to prepare comprehensive plans (also known as master or general plans), to one degree or another, sometimes distinguishing on the basis of community size or some other factor. About ten of those, in one form or another, require communities to include in those plans an element addressing natural or other hazards. The rest of the states have permissive legislation, which grants local governments the authority to undertake planning and zoning without requiring it. It is easy enough to understand why some states are more reluctant than others to impose such a mandate, and similar distinctions between mandating and permitting apply to issues like building and fire codes. What is hard to justify, however, unless one believes in libertarianism run amok, is actually prohibiting such regulation at the local level or denying such authority. In fact, only Texas, to my knowledge, has in place the prohibitions I have described. And I simply do not understand why a state sees it in the public interest to bar counties, in this instance, from adopting safety codes with regard to fire prevention. Whose interests are served by this?

It turns out that McLennan County, where West is located, and whose county seat is Waco, does not have a fire code. Moreover, the fire fighters who died had not been trained in the handling of ammonium nitrate, a substance with a notorious history of unpredictable behavior. The hearing included discussion of the need for more and better research on that point, and for better understanding of this chemical’s behavior, in order to prevent future incidents like the explosion in West. All of that is wise and appropriate.

But there are things the state of Texas can fix now, if only it moved beyond its regulatory myopia to see the larger public safety issues that transcend the simplistic notion that regulation necessarily inhibits job creation. That is a dubious premise in any event, but it also begs the question of what price must be paid to create jobs when brave men like the volunteer fire fighters who responded to the blaze in West must pay the ultimate price just to satisfy such ideological predilections. And what jobs remain at West Fertilizer now? The event is a major setback to economic development in a small town like West, and it will take time to heal.

The Fire Marshal’s report includes some recommendations and conclusions that I find perfectly sensible. It notes, for one thing, that Texas has not adopted minimum training standards for volunteer fire departments. That alone would not be a bad place to start, along with the need for local fire codes. The report states, “The Texas Legislature should consider allowing all counties to adopt a fire code.” The report also notes the lack of a local plan to address hazardous materials, noting that standard procedure for residential or even most industrial incidents is inadequate for dealing with a facility like West Fertilizer.

Let me close by adding that West, judging from my admittedly brief visit, is a pleasant town that deserves better. I learned from a building sign next to the hearing site that West was the hometown of Scott Podsednik, an All-Star member of the 2005 Chicago White Sox team that won the World Series. It has an interesting Czech heritage that caused several people to urge me to visit the Czech Stop, a bakery just off northbound I-35 that sells what I now consider the best kolaches anywhere, as well as a very nice, engaging staff. And it has a mayor, Tommy Muska, who is banging on doors in Austin for answers to some of these urgent questions. I hope he and his town find some. At least then, the destruction of dozens of nearby homes, schools, and a nursing home will not have been in vain.

 

Jim Schwab