All posts by tim

Why we shouldn\’t just sell AISD HQ.

Politics

One of the proposals for shoring up Austin\’s budget woes is to sell the AISD offices on West 6th Street. The current market value is $2.6 million. Which sounds great. But we need to be careful with this. If they sell the offices they have to find a lease. Let\’s say that lease is $5500/month. Since Austin taxpayers only get $55 out of every $100 we give to AISD (the rest going to schools in rural Texas), that $5500 lease will actually end up costing Austinites $10000/month. And that\’s an obligation that will exist if we ever get public school funding fixed. And remember there\’s a cap on the total amount that AISD can tax. Do we really want that much money tied up in a rent payment that we didn\’t have before our budget woes? That\’s going into debt to get out of debt. Silliness.

What AISD should do is sell the West 6th street property and buy a cheaper property in North East or South East Austin. They might only be able to put $1 million towards the budget, but the budget will be better for it in the long run.

Asking Republicans For Help

Politics

I just sent the following to my mother. I think the only way we\’re going to get this budget crisis fixed is to get Republicans across the state howling about the teacher lay-offs and school closings. Feel free to modify and send to all your relatives living in Republican districts.

I know you have a lot of friends in Republican districts around the state. We\’re trying to get awareness about the state budget problem. Basically there was a property tax cut two years ago that defunded the state to the tune of somewhere between $15 and 28 billion dollars. To put that in perspective, you could close every prison in Texas and get rid of the entire Texas Department of Justice and only save $14 billion.

This is going to lead in massive cuts at schools, hospitals, and prisons. Austin is going to be over $100 million dollars in the hole due to this shortfall. Richardson $55 million. Plano $65 million. The superintendent of Austin ISD last night approved cutting 158 elementary school teaching positions and 174 secondary school positions. Those are normal teachers. AISD is considering closing 9 schools. Houston ISD is considering 66. This is the bone, not the fat. As someone who has a grandkid going into school next year, I\’m sure this concerns you.

So we\’re asking the state to restore previous funding levels through a small raise in the sales tax, and to use the rainy day fund to keep school funding stable until the revenues start coming in. You can find your state representatives here:

http://www.house.state.tx.us/members/find-your-representative/

Why I Support Closing Schools

Politics

I know that\’s like saying you\’re a holocaust denier, or have been exposed to extensive experimentation by aliens life forms, but hear me out.

In 2008, the state of Texas allowed for a 1/3 property tax cut. I don\’t fully understand how this worked, but basically no one I know remembers getting anything resembling a large tax cut, and now the state has a massive budget deficit.

How massive? Between $15 and $27 billion. For those who have trouble with numbers that big (like me), GritsForBreakfast (a criminal justice blog) did the math and we could close the entire Texas prison system and not fill in that $15 billion dollar hole. It\’s worth noting that education is 49% of the budget. Quite simply there\’s no way (for a Republican) to balance the budget without cutting education.

So how does this affect Austin? Austin actually has some of the lowest school property taxes in central Texas, but the state caps those taxes at $1.50 per $10000 of property value. Currently Austin is at about $1.20 per $10000. Of that money we get to spend $55 out of every $100 we take in. The rest of the money is sent to the capital to be redistributed to poor school districts. Poor school districts in this case are mostly rural. This is important to keep in mind. Even if Austin were to raise their tax rate to the maximum we would only get to add $55 back to the budget for every $100 we had to fork over.

We are property rich, but our students are poor. Property rich districts like Plano don\’t have all the programs we need like ESL, dual-language, and free lunches. So when the state cuts their funding it doesn\’t create the massive holes it does for AISD.

The CFO of AISD spoke last night and AISD\’s projected budget shortfall depending on how the state deals with cuts is projected to be a minimum of $55 million and could go as high as $120 million. They sent away the facilities task force to come up with $10 million in cuts, which is the proposal they brought back. But people talking about how to make up the difference are conveniently missing the fact that we don\’t need to come up with $10 million to save our schools. We need $55 million. Cutting programs, teacher and administrative salaries are still probably going to be in the $45 million dollars the budget commitee has to come up with.

I know that it\’s unpopular to say you support closing schools, but if we don\’t close schools that\’s 200 teaching positions (on top of whatever cuts the budget committee feels they have to make in teaching staff). And I think the teachers are more important than the name on the building.

Pretending we can \”save austin\’s schools\” is as much fairy dust and puppies*. We can\’t bake sale our way out of this. The district needs a tourniquet, not a band-aid. I support solving the problem by raising taxes at the state level, but that\’s rainbows and kittens with the current legislature.

I have my finger crossed for the $55 million number. I\’m hoping we get out of this only closing 9 schools and with class sizes under 30. I\’m hoping we get to keep art and music. Only time will tell.

* rainbow/kittens phraseology courtesy of @mdahmus

Better Know the Opposition

Development

or why I’m voting YES on Prop 1

I ran almost 9 miles yesterday. I went from my neighborhood, took the Country Club Creek Trail under Pleasant Valley to the Hike and Bike trail, ran to IH-35, crossed, and came back home.

I was running along the trail that the Amli South Shore has put in.

Tangent: That is a really nice piece of trail. They have it running from the street all the way to the shore. It adds about twice as much to the trail as if you were walking on the sidewalk. They have a firepit, lounge chairs, and park benches. All public property from what I can tell.

And I got spit back out on the sidewalk. Where I ran into a huge sign:

Vote No on Prop 1. Wrong priorities, Wrong Time.

Which is kind of interesting because it was right outside an apartment complex. I’ve highlighted it below in red.

I had to draw in the Amli South Shore and it’s trail. Please excuse the rought drawing. Of course the apartment complex in question is against completing the trail. They head out of their complex to the right and they’re on the trail. They head out to the left and they’re on the trail, and inside their complex they have their own private boat dock. Their land is completely at grade, and to complete the trail would simply involve removing two small pieces of fence. But instead the city has to build a boardwalk around this property to connect two pieces of trail.

Of course these people are going to be against the bond. It allows the public to use what they’ve been treating as their own private property. I get to run on sidewalk so they can have a private boat launch.

This isn’t where all the boardwalk money is going though. There’s a stretch under IH-35 that’s never going to be possible to complete without a boardwalk. The grade running from Joe’s crab shack to the McCombs Business School is a pretty insane change in elevation and barring dynamiting the cliff face, we’re not getting a trail on it.

But what about mobility?

So I found out last night that if I worked downtown (which I plan to do in my next job), I can have a 30 minute commute.

Running.

That’s almost entirely on trails. I’ll definitely be doing that. Especially if some of the bond money for sidewalks finally gets sidewalks along Pleasant Valley. This is insane to me. I started making mental notes last night of all the missing sidewalks on Pleasant Valley. Bear in mind this is where the South East HEB is. This isn’t a case of “if you build sidewalks people will walk”. This is a case of “these sidwalks (or lack thereof) are pretty crowded”. I dodged two strollers on my run last night.

But Pleasant Valley is still missing major chunks of sidewalk. I’ve outline the missing stretches in red below.

We should fix this. Just like we would fix a road that people drive on everyday. It’s ridiculous that people in the surrounding area, people who do walk to the HEB, don’t have sidewalks to walk on.

Please. Vote YES on Prop 1

Art and being in the Black

Watching Theater

Julie and I got to talking this weekend about theater companies, budgets, and audience mindsets. We came up with a few sort of obvious statements.

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  • Some Audiences Can’t Enjoy Theater Without Spectacle

    I think this relates to the Holy Sh*t! article that went around last week. It starts out with a fairly given idea. If your theater is awesome, people will generally go see it. Then it says, “You know what’s awesome? Theater that has a Holy Sh*t! moment like some sort of Hollywood Blockbuster.” So obviously if all our theater was full of crazy Hollywood Blockbuster moments we’d have an audience. Which I think we can all agree is true. If theater was just the movies we would have movie audiences! Fantastic insight.

    But there is an element of truth there. There are audiences who can’t enjoy a play without the kitchen sink set. And period costumes. And a string quartet playing original music. And suddenly the cost of your production is around that of a Hollywood Blockbuster.

    Which leads me to number two.

  • Should theater attempt to accommodate everyone?

    I know this is heresay. Every single theater mission statement is about getting new people in the door. About forcing people who currently hate theater to love theater. If necessary by gunpoint. But it’s worth considering. Do we really want everyone?

    I saw a hilarious comedy this summer that I really enjoyed. Loved it. It had a completely realistic set that was simple, but cost some money. The thing was, it didn’t need the set at all. The characters didn’t interact with it in any meaningful way. It gave them an excuse to have tiny bits of stage business, and that’s it. But that set was there simply because of those audience members who can’t handle plays without realistic sets. And that stinks because the company in question could use the money to keep the lights on, and pay their actors, and generally keep making theater.

    Which makes me wonder – is it perhaps time to jettison parts of the audience?

  • Could theater survive if the audience was leaner?

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    p>Would we have budget problems if we didn’t accommodate the audience that requires realism? Thanks to Julie, LGT has always been in the black. We sometimes lose money, but that just means leaner budgets for the next show. One thing we struggle with is how “professional” our productions should look. And by “professional” we mean accommodating of audience members with little to no imagination. Almost all of our shows bring in the same audience numbers. When we try to expand we often end up failing spectacularly. The question we often have to ask, is if we spent $1000 on our set rather than $200-400 would we see additional audience? Past experience has told us that we will. But that audience is usually in the 20-50 person range. It doesn’t equal $600-800 in extra ticket sales. Julie always makes us justify budgets in ticket sales.

    Will posters bring in 4 additional people?

    If it can be justified we do it.

    • You have to decide if they’re worth it. For us, it’s much more useful to keep making inexpensive theater that our audience enjoys as we hone our skills and develop our voice. Going bankrupt doesn’t serve our audience or our artistic development.

    What do you think?

    Interest Rates

    Politics

    Just a quick question. I know there’s an adage that you don’t raise interest rates in a recession. Of course I don’t know of any recession in the past where interest rates were essentially zero.

    My theory is that raising interest rates would cause both business and consumers to buy so that they could lock in today’s rates. I think the main reason we’re not recovering is that there’s no reason for businesses or consumers to “buy now”. If the fed started raising rates people would want to re-fi. They’d want to buy a new car. Any large purchase they’d been putting off they’d potentially make to avoid having to spend more in the future. Obviously you can’t raise rates forever, but we know an economy can run just fine with interest rates in the middle single digits so why not try?

    What’s the flaw in my logic?

    Evil Java Interview Question

    Technical Stuff 
    class Fruit {
    public Fruit() {
       init();
    }
    protected void init() {
    }
}
class Orange extends Fruit {
    private String color = null;
    public Orange() {
        super();
    }
    protected void init() {
        color = "Orange";
    }
}

    If I create a new instance of Orange what is the variable ‘color’ set to? The answer is null.

    #9…#9…

    Public Transportation

    So yesterday we were going to swim lessons and I noticed 5 kids walking along the 71 access road. I pointed them out to Julie as “Schools back in session”. Then I realized. Those kids were walking from the Govalle bus back to our neighborhood. Which meant that they had to walk 1/4 mile from Travis High to the 7-11 at Oltorf and Parker. Take the bus down Parker to Parker and 71, then walk 1/2 mile back into our neighborhood.

    Then this morning I noticed a woman and her child waiting at the bus stop by Ware Rd. And a guy walking home from work along Burleson from Oltorf.

    So while the bus might not have had high ridership, it definitely reached places that other buses don’t and the loss of service is affecting people in very obvious ways.

    The National as done by Stella

    Stella

    This would be a riff on Afraid of Everyone by The National if that’s not obvious:

    Oh… I’m afraid of everyone

    in the whole wide world

    But I love them

    Even though I’m afraid of them.

    Don’t worry if you can’t make the lyrics match up. It’s not going to happen.

    She’s been driving us a bit crazy singing it over and over. Not to mention that it’s permanently wedged in my head. I’m listening to it now. If you can’t beat them…

    Sunstroke 5k #12 – 2010

    Running

    Fantastic weather tonight. A wonderfully cool 79 degrees with a breeze pretty much the entire length of the race. I ended up running behind a kid who looked like me at 10 years old for about the first mile. Like chasing my youth. Except that he was far faster than I ever was, which was funny because he seemed about equally coordinated with limbs flying every which way as he ran.

    Very happy with this race time. Wish I’d pushed myself just a tiny bit more since I only needed to shave off about 20 more seconds to be under 8 minutes. All in all a fantastic race and end to the season.

    Race Time Min/Mile
    2 26:45 8:34
    6 26:44 8:34
    10 26:17 8:21
    12 25:16 8:06