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Written by Ozaukee Press
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Wednesday, 06 February 2013 17:47 |
Users should fund roads through a gas tax, but highway spending needs to be cut back, starting with the Highway 60 mega-bypass
Objections to the Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s preliminary plans for rebuilding a 12-mile stretch of Highway 60 between Grafton and Jackson have focused on the impact on property owners, the countryside and the environment of a highway that would grow from the present 100-foot width to 270 feet and could include bypasses around Five Corners and the Village of Jackson, consuming hundreds of acres of land. Little attention has been paid to the cost of the project, but it is certain that its physical excesses would be matched by financial excesses.
Where will the money for Highway 60 come from? Where will all the money Wisconsin needs to pay for highway construction and maintenance come from? Answers are needed because the state’s traditional highway funding sources are falling short.
The idea that highways are self-supporting through user fees, a popular but dubious notion, has been thoroughly debunked in Wisconsin, which has had to dip into its general fund to pay for highways. All taxpayers, regardless of how much they use the highways, are paying for them. Gas taxes and vehicle registration fees don’t come close to meeting the highway budget.
They’ve been thinking about this in Madison, and some trial balloons have been launched, including raising the gas tax and fees for driver’s licenses and commercial vehicle registration. The recommendations came from the Transportation Finance and Policy Commission, which also proposed a penny-a-mile fee to be paid by vehicle owners for miles driven in the previous year.
The last idea, often called a VMT tax (for vehicle miles traveled), is getting a lot of attention around the country as a highway-funding option for states and the federal government. Backers talk of GPS chips in vehicles that would record and report miles driven.
The VMT tax would be a pure user fee, which is a plus. But its creepy privacy ramifications—Big Brother tracking your car’s movements—make it a hard sell. The version recommended by the Wisconsin commission would avoid that by simply requiring vehicle owners to report how many miles they drove. A vehicle that traveled 10,000 miles would be taxed $100, assuming the owner honestly reported the mileage.
Raising the gas tax is a better, easier and less costly-to-administer option, but politicians who vote on tax issues are wary of the American hypersensitivity to gas prices. Nothing, it seems, infuriates consumers more than rising gas prices.
That helps explain why the transportation commission offered a pot pourri of highway revenue devices, instead of simply pushing an ample gas tax hike. Wisconsin halted automatic increases in the gas tax in 2005. That, along with the fact that people are driving less and using more fuel-efficient vehicles, accounts for a substantial part of the state’s highway funding problem.
But now it’s time to bite the bullet and raise the state’s 30.9 cent per gallon tax. It’s not a perfect user fee, but it’s close enough, and it comes with the desirable side effect of encouraging the use of fuel efficient vehicles.
However the money is extracted from them, Wisconsin residents are going to pay more for highways. It’s best to pay at the pump.
A gas tax increase is needed, but it should not be a substitute for paring down highway spending. Can that be done? The Highway 60 example suggests it can.
Highway 60 west of Grafton certainly needs an upgrade to handle increasing traffic. But there are many ways to do that short of the DOT’s ultrawide highway plan at a savings of many millions of dollars in right-of-way acquisitions and construction.
It’s painful enough paying for highways at the pump or elsewhere without the thought that the money is being spent on inflated projects that the affected communities don’t want.
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Written by Ozaukee Press
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Wednesday, 30 January 2013 18:58 |
With expanded technical education offerings, the Port-Saukville School District is putting a 21st century spin on the concept of a comprehensive high school
The concept of a comprehensive high school education that prepares students for diverse roles in society, once the norm in America, has fallen out of favor in some school districts. Secondary schools in these places, usually economically upscale areas, have shaped curriculums to exclusively serve the needs of students bound for college.
Residents of the Port Washington-Saukville School District can be thankful that their high school never abandoned the comprehensive model, for it is now poised to take vocational education on a leap forward to prepare some of its students for jobs in a high-tech world.
Plans call for Port High to expand its technology education department with an additional teacher and new courses, but that understates the importance of what’s going on. A better indicator is this: Some of the courses will be part of a biomedical engineering program; high school vocational classes will introduce to students to the science of combining engineering principles with biology and medicine to advance health care. In other words, not your grandfather’s shop classes.
The Port High program is a response to need. Even with millions of people looking for jobs, many employers can’t fill positions because applicants don’t have the requisite skills. College educations aren’t the answer. A paper published by Harvard University projects that only a third of the 47 million jobs expected to be created by 2018 will require a bachelor’s degree.
This is not news to employers, which is why local businesses are expected to step up to help pay for the technical education initiative. The district is hoping that the purchase of $161,000 in equipment for the program will be financed by industries.
The prospects of that happening are excellent, judging from the success of Project Lead the Way. That program, in place for four years at Thomas Jefferson Middle School and started at the high school a year later, is aimed at preparing students for careers in engineering, math and science and is supported by area businesses. Students have responded to it in such numbers that demand for the elective classes cannot be met.
The goals of expanded technical education start with getting students interested in studies that serve the advance of technology and then to prepare some for jobs right out of high school and others for further education in technical schools or colleges.
The incentives for students are the careers available in technical fields that are expected to provide solid middle class earnings. As those opportunities proliferate, the importance of the new iteration of high school vocational education will only increase.
There is a caveat, however: A four-year college education remains a significant marker of achievement in the United States. The liberal educations provided at universities and colleges impart broad knowledge of a world much wider than that of the narrowly focused technical disciplines. Education in literature, history, political science, economics and the arts is intended to prepare graduates to be well-rounded contributors to the vitality of society.
College preparation, including ensuring that students understand the value of higher education, remains a primary responsibility for high schools, even as they improve vocational offerings. That, after all, fits the comprehensive high school ideal.
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Written by Ozaukee Press
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Wednesday, 23 January 2013 17:46 |
America loves college sports, but a new study shows that this entertainment comes at a high price to education
With uncanny timing, the University of Wisconsin announced a lavish new pay schedule for football coaches two days after publication of a study finding that major universities are spending more on sports than they are on education.
The study, by the Delta Cost Project of the American Institutes for Research, found that the Big Ten, in which UW competes, is among the conferences whose schools spend at least six times more on each athlete than they spend on educating each student.
It’s not news that NCAA Division 1 athletic programs are hugely expensive enterprises, but the study’s findings documenting the financial excesses of big-time college sports are eye-opening and troubling at a time when fast-rising tuition costs and other expenses are threatening to put college educations out of reach of many families.
Athletic spending in the so-called power conferences exceeded $100,000 per athlete in 2010, compared to less than $15,000 in academic spending for each full-time student, according to the Delta report.
The study confirmed that students help pay for the bloated athletic programs through the fees they pay. On average, students pay 7.6% of the cost of football programs, while another 10% comes from states and institutions. Televisions contracts and ticket sales provide the revenue to cover the remainder of the costs.
As if to validate the findings, the UW Board of Regents last week approved contracts that will pay the defensive and offensive coordinators of the UW football team $480,000 a year each. That’s for assistant coaches. The new head coach will get a contract paying him $10 million over the next five years.
Not that the Wisconsin students and their families and taxpayers who contribute to those salaries should feel fortunate, but it could be worse. Wisconsin’s former head coach, Bret Bielema, was paid $2.6 million at Madison last year and is reported to be getting $3.2 million in his new job this year as coach of the University of Arkansas football team.
Bielema said one of the reasons he quit Wisconsin was that the school did not pay his assistant coaches enough. Judging from the new assistants’ paychecks that will be nearly double last year’s, the regents took that to heart.
If the report is not provoking outrage it’s because college football and basketball are a tremendously popular. The games are terrific entertainment that capture national audiences. Defenders of major-league college sports point out that these programs enhance the reputations of schools, instill pride in student bodies and generate many millions of dollars in TV and ticket revenue.
All true, yet this comes at a cost that erodes the educational mission of colleges. As Donna Desrochers, author of the college sports spending report put it, “Public institutions with Division 1 athletic programs have continued to invest significant resources in athletics, even as academic budgets were under strain during the recent recession.”
Budgets have indeed been strained, and students have been asked to help relieve the strain by paying higher tuition. A bachelor’s degree today can easily cost a UW-Madison student more than $60,000. Which means that some worthy students don’t get to attend this world-renowned (more so for its educational prowess than for its sports success) university and that many who can attend leave with burdensome debt.
That puts paying assistant coaches half a million dollars a year into a stark perspective.
A spokesman for the American Council on Education called the Delta report evidence that college athletic spending has become a “financial arms race” that will ultimately be unsustainable.
Unsustainable might be a good thing. It would give college presidents cover to rebalance spending and devote more resources to their institutions’ reason for existence, which is not to entertain football fans.
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