Month: May 2010

May 12, 2010

Why Brighter Choice is so hot to impose even more unwanted charter school buildings on the City of Albany and soak the taxpayers

Last week a major story about corruption in the City of Albany broke nationally, but the story has been completely suppressed here in the Capital District. As of the date of this posting, not one media outlet in our region, corporate or otherwise, has seen fit to so much as mention in passing this explosive expose. Consider it regional censorship, even though it adversely affects every taxpayer in the City of Albany.

Juan Gonzalez is that rarest of creatures, a real actual journalist working regularly for the corporate media. How a real journalist like Mr. Gonzalez has ended up writing a column for a worthless rag like the Daily News is just one of life’s mysteries. But for some reason his employers let him write groundbreaking investigative articles, he does not merely provide content.

Friday morning (May 7) I was kinda half listening to Democracy Now! on WRPI FM (91.5) and lingering over a late breakfast when I suddenly heard Mr. Gonzalez say, “I have focused on Albany, New York, which in New York state, is the [school] district with the highest percentage of children in charter schools, twenty percent of the schoolchildren in Albany are now attending charter schools.” I nearly spilled my coffee.

Cash Cow: Brighter Choice Charter School Building At Krank Park

Sometimes a blog post writes itself because, well, someone else wrote it for me. Rather than paraphrase Mr. Gonzalez’ explanation, I have chosen to reprint his Democracy Now! report, which in itself is a concise summary of his May 7 column for the Daily News. Juan Gonzalez often co-hosts on Democracy Now!, here he is with Amy Goodman:

AMY GOODMAN: Juan, before we move on to the Gulf, you have a very interesting column in the “New York Daily News” today, an exposé around big banks and charter schools.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes, Amy, one of the things I’ve been trying now for a couple of years is to try to figure out why is it that so many hedge fund managers, wealthy Americans, and big banks, Wall Street banks- executives of Wall Street banks, have all lined-up supporting and getting involved in the development of charter schools. I think I may have come across one of the reasons.

There’s a lot of money to be made in charter schools, and I’m not talking just about the for-profit management companies that run a lot of these charter schools. It turns out that at the tail end of the Clinton administration in 2000, Congress passed a new kind of tax credit called a New Markets tax credit. What this allows is it gives enormous federal tax credit to banks and equity funds that invest in community projects in under served communities and it’s been used heavily now for the last several years for charter schools.

Journalist Juan Gonzalez

I have focused on Albany, New York, which in New York state, is the district with the highest percentage of children in charter schools, twenty percent of the schoolchildren in Albany are now attending charter schools. I discovered that quite a few of the charter schools there have been built using these New Markets tax credits.

What happens is the investors who put up the money to build charter schools get to basically or virtually double their money in seven years through a thirty-nine percent tax credit from the federal government. In addition, this is a tax credit on money that their lending, so they’re also collecting interest on the loans as well as getting the thirty-nine percent tax credit. They piggyback the tax credit on other kinds of federal tax credits like historic preservation or job creation or brownfields credits.

The result is, you can put in ten million dollars and in seven years double your money. The problem is, that the charter schools end up paying [with] rents the debt service on these loans and so now, a lot of the charter schools in Albany are straining paying their debt service- their rent has gone up from $170,000 to $500,000 in a year or- huge increases in their rents as they strain to pay off these loans, these construction loans.

The rents are eating-up huge portions of their total cost. And, of course, the money is coming from the state.

One of the big issues is that so many of these charter schools are not being audited. No one knows who are the people making these huge windfall profits as the investors. Often, there are interlocking relationships between the charter school boards and the nonprofit groups that organize and syndicate the loans.

There needs to be some light on this whole issue and the state legislature right now is considering expanding charter school caps, but one of the things I press for in my column, there has to be the power of the government to independently audit all of these charter schools or we’re not going to know how public dollars are ending up in the coffers of Wall Street investors.

AMY GOODMAN: Congratulations on doing this and we’ll continue to expose it as you do.

May 3, 2010

Checking out the very new and very old
Walkway Over The Hudson State Historic Park

The Wife and I finally made it down to check out the Walkway Over The Hudson State Park, which opened this past October 2009 for the first time. It’s about an hour and twenty minutes driving south from Albany, located just north of the Mid-Hudson Bridge.

Almost the entire park consists of a pedestrian walkway built on top of an 1889 railroad trestle that spans the Hudson River. At 212 feet above the river it is currently the highest pedestrian walkway in the entire world. The Hudson is about half a mile wide at this point, so including the high up in the air landward approaches, maybe the entire park is a mile long.

View From Mid-Walkway, Looking North Toward Albany

We had a hell of a time trying to find the entrance on the west side of the river. Since I hate to follow orders or directions, I didn’t bother to download a map. I know where to find the Mid-Hudson Bridge, so how hard could it be?

It turns out that there is absolutely no signage of any sort on the mostly uninhabited west side of the river. The entrance to the walkway turns out to be at the end of a small local road, you can’t possibly find it without precise directions. We could see the damn walkway like over there somewhere, but no way to get there by legally traveling on the blacktop.

So next thing you know I made a wrong turn and we found ourselves crossing the Mid-Hudson Bridge into the heart of downtown Poughkeepsie. Again, above the rooftops of the City we could see the entrance to the east side of the bridge like up over there. This time we careened around on the urban back streets until The Wife spotted some signs pointing in the right direction.

Gate On The Poughkeepsie Side

For future reference, if you can find the Poughkeepsie train station, it’s a short uphill walk to the entrance and parking lot of the walkway. Later I heard stories of people coming up from NY City for the day on the Metro North or the Amtrak to walk across the river. Presumably when they are through walking across the river these folks go looking for lunch or whatever else they can buy in downtown Poughkeepsie.

It’s a sad shame that our backward Albany City government officials cannot comprehend the importance of public transit to our local economy. Past Albany civic leaders sent our train station across the river to Rensselaer, our current Mayor Jerry Jennings wants to send our miserable little bus station over there too. We can’t even get a train link built that goes to the Rensselaer station, let alone extend the Metro North to Albany.

Rooftops Of Poughkeepsie, Between The Train Station And The Walkway

On the landward part of the walkway we could look down at the thriving Poughkeepsie neighborhoods around the train station. The railroad trestle had not been crossed by trains since a spectacular fire in 1974, so until last year it sat rotting above it all like a rusty hazardous spike pointing into the heart of downtown Poughkeepsie. This once magnificent iron structure, at one time the highest cantilevered bridge in the world, had become a very visible eyesore and safety hazard.

Leaning Over The Edge,Showing The Old Trestle Under The New Walkway

And yet, the neighborhoods between the train station and the south side of the new walkway appeared to be well kept and thriving. In contrast, the river front property on the north side of the walkway was typical burned out industrial, we could see the telltale round concrete slabs that once supported oil tanks. Probably now that the old rail bridge has become a focus of pride, we will see new urban neighborhoods built over this old tank yard… after it’s cleaned up.

From the entrance to the walkway, we noticed a clean up crew working right up next to the fence down below. It looked to me like the last of the neglected lots filled with junk, visible from the walkway but not from the ground. When the walkway was an abandoned rail trestle no one could see or care about all the crap piled up underneath, but no doubt the urban survivor who collected all that junk will find another piece of property that is out of public view.

The State of New York vastly underestimated the number of people who would use the walkway. The State expected 70 to 80 thousand people to use it during a typical year but according to volunteers that we met, well more than half a million have traversed the span since it opened last October! This according to the automatic counters installed at the gates, and the very visible fact that on a sunny day like this particular Saturday both parking lots on either end of the walkway appeared to be way much too small to accommodate the cars.

Industrial Burnout North Of The Poughkeepsie Entrance

Despite all this, there are some who consider this renovation a waste of money. But consider this. The State had estimated the cost of taking down the rail trestle, which had turned into a serious attractive nuisance along with being an eyesore, to come in at $45 million. That’s big money to wreck a serviceable bridge.

It turned out to be cheaper to turn the bridge into a walkway than to take it down. The final cost for the conversion was $38.8 million, the State of New York spent $22.5 million, the Feds kicked in about $3.5 million. Most of the rest came from foundation grants, including a million from Scenic Hudson.

In Case Of Suicidal Tendencies

It should go without saying that our State officials didn’t come up with this idea that saves the taxpayers money and boosts the economy of the Hudson Valley. After all, reusing this walkway runs contrary to the principles of corporate socialism, it does not directly enhance some foreign corporation’s bottom line. Therefore, in the minds of most of our elected and appointed officials, if a project only benefits people and not a corporation it’s a waste of money.

It took years of organized work by local activists (they prefer to be called “volunteers”) to convince the politicians to plow some of our money back into the State for a change. The first group organized back in 1992 in response to the first proposal to wreck the bridge. The Wife and I encountered these original volunteers manning a table at a fair or flea market or something like that.

We talked quite a bit with them and we were very sympathetic to their cause, but it sounded hopeless to me at the time. For one thing, the guy we talked to told us that he planned to finance the walkway by selling the railway ties and tracks as, I guess, souvenirs. Clearly this first group of folks were full of enthusiasm but did not have a practical plan.

Around 1995 the group reorganized. Some of the old volunteers dropped out because of the funding issue, it seems that they were ideologically opposed to accepting government funding for the project. (I wonder if they would have accepted corporate money.) The new group was more practical, they realized such public projects don’t get done at all without government cooperation.

View South From Mid Walkway

After that the ball got rolling. It probably helped that the bridge was a highly visible eyesore hanging above a populated urban center, an ugly beast hanging over everyone’s heads. It turned out that the volunteers, by calling for the rail bridge to become a walkway, were giving voice to an idea that had already half-formed in a lot of peoples’ minds. Why destroy this perfectly usable thing, this thing that is always in front of us and is a part of our lives? Why not find a new use for it?

So support for the project quickly became broad and popular in and around the City of Poughkeepsie. This gave the new group of volunteers the clout to begin leaning on the elected officials, who were beginning to see the popular walkway idea as a source of votes. Very rapidly the proposal went from crazy and hopeless to practical and inevitable.

The Wife Points To The Joints Along The Rail

One of the objections to the proposal had to do with engineering, how can you put a stationary platform on top of a cantilevered bridge, which is designed to move? Won’t the added top surface crack and slough off when the iron structure underneath sways in the wind? As it turned out, there was a simple solution to this problem.

The walkway itself is a series of interlocking slabs of concrete that are connected together by movable joints. The rails on rails sides of the walkway are also jointed at short intervals, connected by a smaller tube bolted inside a larger outer tube. This simple design allows the rail to move ever so slightly and imperceptibly up and down and also left and right.

Joint At The Bottom Of The Raill

At this time there is absolutely no destination worth mentioning on the west side of the walkway, I expect that will change. The walkway is on track to host more than a million visitors in it’s first year of operation, such foot traffic is bound to raise real estate prices, particularly on the mostly uninhabited west side. We could have used some coffee after our grueling half mile stroll, but alas there wasn’t even an ice cream wagon to greet us.

The volunteers had a table on that end, it was great to talk to successful activists who had achieved their main goal. It gives one hope for the system in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, apparently the corporations haven’t destroyed liberal democracy quite yet. The volunteers that we talked to were still full of enthusiasm for their baby.

One thing they told us is that an elevator will be constructed on the west side. I suppose this will meet handicapped requirements, but I haven’t the slightest idea why such a thing is needed or where it will go. Perhaps an elevator will allow construction of more parking lots downhill and will be used mostly by fat lazy people who can’t climb a short rise without feeling faint.

Approaching The Western End

We arrived pretty early on a warm beautiful Saturday, so we missed the big crowds. We shared the bridge with a fair number of people, but we had plenty of space to move around and take pictures. The real hordes were only showing up as we were leaving in early afternoon.

When we walked back to the parking lot in Poughkeepsie, it looked like a major “special event” in progress. Our little paved parking lot, which was nearly full when we arrived was now guarded by a young lady wearing a safety vest. She was directing cars across the street to a big dirt lot, from what we could see that lot was nearly full.

Clearly a planning initiative is needed for both ends of the walkway, it would not benefit anyone to let the land around both ends descend into ugly sprawl. Now that the project is done, and more spectacularly successful than anyone expected, the new walkway will transform the nearby landscape. Whether that transformation is positive or harmful will depend upon the plans or lack of plans that will be put forth by the municipalities on either end.

No doubt this is the kind of problem the volunteers were hoping to achieve almost twenty years ago, back when a few kooks and nuts looked up at the rusty abandoned rail bridge and first imagined that it could be put to better use.

Tanker Under The Mid Hudson Bridge

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