RTD is pushing a major public relations campaign to build an expensive light rail transit (LRT) system in southwest Denver, and eventually the whole metro area.
In nine US cities that constructed LRT projects, actual costs exceeded projections and ridership fell short of projections. Actual cost per rider exceeded projections by an average of 5.4 times.
READ MORESixteen dollars for a one-way trip to Denver’s new International Airport? That’s what RTD says it needs to cover costs. But $16 seems much too much. It’s more than many travelers can afford, and more than others will tolerate. Virtually everyone, including RTD, agrees the proposed fares ought to be reduced. The tough question is how to go about actually delivering the lower fares everybody wants. By increasing subsidies? Restructuring service? Cutting costs?
READ MOREThe Colorado Public Utilities Commission has blocked new competitors from entering Denver’s three-firm taxicab market for nearly half a century. Job creation and entrepreneurship, especially for low income people are hurt by this policy…
READ MOREThe common abbreviation for newly-opened Denver International Airport is DIA. But to comply with truth in labeling, the abbreviation really ought to be MIA. Because the new airport is the Most Inconvenient Airport in the United States.
READ MOREHere is evidence that if Amendment 7 passes on Nov. 3, Parents in the countries of Denver, Boulder, Adams, Arapahoe, Jefferson, and Douglas will be able to take vouchers into an independent and church related educational sector that is socially inclusive, responsive to harder-to-educate children, quality-driven, and remarkably affordable.
Data in this issue paper, obtained through an Independence Institute survey of 48 schools and state records on 100 others, support that characterization. They contradict the bleak picture of an expensive, exclusive, unaccountable nonpublic sector as commonly portrayed by voucher opponents.
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Amendment 6, Gov. Roy Romer’s school tax increase proposal, could cost Colorado 57,000 jobs if Romer’s own economic and political assumptions are correct. A leading economic researcher says the loss could reach 75,000 jobs. No one foresees an economic boost from the tax.
READ MOREChildren First, the sales tax and school reform proposal facing voters on Nov. 3, is fiscally unnecessary because next year’s revenue estimates have made a “nonexistent bogeyman” of Gov. Roy Romer’s alleged 12% funding cut. In addition, the measure is educationally counterproductive because it would disempower families and school districts, and economically harmful because it would destroy up to 75,000 jobs.
READ MOREIntroduction by the Editor: Everyone agrees our kids and their schools deserve first priority. But must it be done by giving our hard-working Colorado taxpayers last priority? Such would be the effect of Amendment Six, the misnamed “Children First Initiative” which teacher unions and Gov. Roy Romer want voters to approve on Nov. 3.
READ MOREActress Rebecca Schaeffer, co-star of the television series “My Sister Sam,” had a lot of admirers. One admirer, a crazy gentlemen named Robert Bardo, decided he wanted to kill the actress.
Killer Bardo had no idea where the actress lived, but luckily for Bardo, the state government of California provided him with his victim’s address.
Bardo went to a private investigative agency, claimed that Ms. Schaeffer was a long-lost friend, and asked for help in tracking her down. The investigative agency went to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, paid a one dollar fee, and was told the address that Ms. Schaeffer had listed on her driver’s license.
Close your eyes for a moment, and think about the United Airlines giveaway. Can you hear a faint whirring in the distance? Does it sound a little like an airplane propeller? More likely, it’s the sound of 39 people spinning in their graves — the framers of the Colorado constitution.
READ MOREWill Senate Bill 102, due for House action the week of March 18, produce unintended adverse consequences for property rights in Colorado? This policy brief from the Independence Institute suggests that it could do so if not amended.
READ MOREWhether or not events of the 1990s bear out the fashionable assumption that the Cold War is over, with the passing of the 1980s we are clearly entering a period when America’s relationship with the Soviet Union will be closer, more routine, and more diversified that ever before. This will mean not only greater engagement at the government level, but also a dizzying expansion of non-government contacts.
READ MORERapid, efficient movement of people and goods is fundamental to the vitality and prosperity of any metropolitan area, Metro Denver faces growing pains as it seeks to modernize an overcrowded transportation system so that mobility is more nearly equal for everyone and costs are more directly allocated to users.
READ MOREDenver this year renewed and expanded a 1983 law setting goals (in practice, quotas) for the share of public works contracts that will go to firms owned by minorities (25%) and women (12%).
But the program is vulnerable to public disapproval and judicial overturning since it fails the tests imposed by recent U.S. supreme Court and appeals court rulings.
READ MOREhe conclusion from those studies, ststistically rigorous and thoroughly documented was as follows: “An inverse relationship exists between changes in state relative tax burdens and state relative economic growth. Those states with decreasing relative tax burdens tend to experience subsequent above average economic growth. Those states with increasing relative tax burdens tend to experience subsequent below average growth.”2
READ MORELeadership, said Harry Truman, is the art of getting other people to run with your idea as if it were their own. One of this year;s best examples came from the Colorado General Assembly.
Prompted by House majority leader Chris Paulson. along with Speaker Bev Bledsoe and their Senate counterparts, the legislature has enlisted fifty statewide leaders from business, professions, an civic groups in a six-month study project called vision Colorado. (See Page 10 for names and affiliations.)
READ MOREAmy Oliver Cooke, Director
Email: Amy@i2i.org
Phone: 303-279-6536, ext 107
Amy Oliver Cooke, Director
Email: Amy@i2i.org
Phone: 303-279-6536, ext 107
Over at Education Next (one of my favorite stops these days), professors Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky say there may be a way to make a positive move beyond the traditional debate over teacher pensions:
The critics of DB [defined benefit plans] are correct that current plans are seriously underfunded in part because benefits are not […]
READ MORELast week I asked what Denver Public Schools was up to with a plan to change the enrollment policies for some of its charter schools, making them into “boundary schools.” What’s up with that?
When you’re 5 years old like I am, you can tend to be insecure about questioning authority so often. Thus I was […]
