Lincolnite

I'm not crazy about Lincoln's emphasis lately on making arterials as wide as possible. Driving on Pioneers Blvd. around Lucille Dr., for example, I feel like I stumbled across a runway for B-52s. With two lanes each direction, right turn lanes, and a wiiiide center turn lane, there's space galore. We're told that's great for safety, but it's killer on our wallets and ugly as sin, not to mention the fact that it invites drivers to speed like they're on the Utah salt flats. Which brings me to the concerns being raised about updates to Old Cheney Road east of Highway 2. Disclaimer: Don't take road-building advice from some guy who blogs from his basement. There's a literal case of NIMBY going on here so we have to ask ourselves if this is really something Lincolnites as a whole should be concerned with. It is. Roads aren't just about transportation. Roads also help define neighborhoods. For example, compare and contrast Sheridan Boulevard and North Cotner Boulevard. Those two streets communicate very different messages about the neighborhoods they pass through. And need I remind you what the single lane portion of South 27th Street communicates about those neighborhoods? More broadly, those streets communicate oodles about how we, as a community, value the interaction between transportation, home, and business. One of the concerns expressed by Old Cheney neighbors involves the inclusion of right turn lanes into neighborhoods. The neighbors don't want 'em because it means that much more land has to be taken from their back yards. Road engineers argue that right turn lanes are safer and better promote the flow of traffic. Ditto for medians, which are also optional. So what's our priority? Faster speed limits or streets that don't look like they need an air traffic control tower? Having traveled the portions of Old Cheney Road that don't feature right turn lanes for most of my life, I'm inclined to say we can feel confident in ditching that feature. The intersection at 35th and Old Cheney, among many others, doesn't feel any less safe because of its lack of right turn lane. Perhaps accident data says otherwise. As for having a median, I personally prefer well-maintained medians over those bugly center turn lanes as they appear on Pioneers. When there aren't many places to turn into, they use up acres of concrete despite the fact that much of the surface area isn't particularly usable. Ick. I do have to call out Jon Camp on one error. He argues that Old Cheney's design, as it is currently proposed, is excessive because "this is just a residential arterial". Sorry Mr. Camp, but that's just plain foolish. Sure that portion of Old Cheney isn't much today, but to suggest that it isn't a critical component of Lincoln's long-term transportation plan is bizarrely short-sighted. That's the sort of thinking that has led to some of the transportation problems we have in Lincoln today. Let's not continue down that road (so to speak).

The Missus is down and out with some vile illness so I'm juggling work and kids today. I may also wind up teaching pre-algebra at a homeschool co-op unless we can find a different substitute. Considering I've never taught math in my life, that could be pretty awkward. So... Any pre-algebra teachers out there want to teach a class for an hour or so today? I know, it's a long shot. I'm off to study how to rationalize denominators ... er, something like that.

You might think it's bad news that UNL has announced $5 million worth of budget cuts. It will mean lost jobs and lost educational opportunities. That stinks. But there's a plus side. No really. Some good comes out of every bit of bad budget news at UNL. See, every time UNL's budget is mentioned, out come the folks who have no understanding of how the budgets of UNL's academic and athletic sides relate to one another. And that's fantastic, because instantly you can tell oodles about the worth of an individual's blatherings. If a person understands that the Athletic Department budget is distinct from that of the rest of the University, he may be worth listening to. But if he thinks a cut in Food Science is Tom Osborne's fault, you immediately know he's a doofus. And since you know the doofus doesn't let facts get in the way of his ranting, you can be pretty certain all of his opinions are fact-free. In other words, you can ignore his verbal dribbles on every topic! Yay! You don't have to look far for examples. Here's a good one from 10/11's website. The ironically-named "Bye bye education" goes above and beyond by also bringing the City Council into play:

Sacrifice education for basketball at an arena...great decision, Lincolnites! You certainly have your priorities in order! Tom Osborne does not know everything, and everything that he says is not God's word! He was wrong about the arena, and now our universities are suffering because of the lack of funds! That guy should retire and just call well enough alone before he makes more bad decisions for the rest of us. Of course, good ole John Camp (city council member, and owner of half of the Haymarket) was lobbying in favor of the arena, too. Looks like that guy is going to make a killing on the arena. What does he care about education, though, as long as his pocket book gets fatter by being in a position of power. GET JOHN CAMP OUT OF OFFICE!!!

See how easy that is? By doing us the favor of conflating all sorts of unrelated things, "Bye bye education" has pasted a big ol' "I R Dumb" sign on his forehead. Obviously that doesn't do us a whole lot of good in an anonymous web venue, but plenty of folks say the same sorts of things when they're fully identifiable. When they do, you quickly know just how much their opinions are worth. Seriously folks, please stop relating monies that have no relation. There are plenty of things to not like about the UNL Athletic Department, but stealing money from academics is not one of them. On the contrary, thanks to its support services the Athletic Department provides superior educational opportunities to a population that, on average, would otherwise be significantly worse off. If you want to talk about athletics taking funds from academics, check out the budgets of the other State colleges and universities. You'll have a better chance finding what you're after over there.

I'm having a really difficult time getting myself fired up over commercial vehicles legally parking in places that are advantageous for their advertising properties. You've seen them around: those trucks, vans, or other vehicles with prominent advertising on the side that are parked far from their apparent homes. But some folks are up in arms, and their natural reaction is "there oughtta be a law". There appear to be three primary factors at play here. The first is unsightliness. Some folks don't care for the mobile billboards' aesthetic qualities. I'm not convinced that's a reason to write up a new law. If you want to control your neighborhood's visual vibe, go join a homeowner's association. That's not to say that the "look" of an area should never be subject to legal constraints, but a truck with a logo and a phone number surely falls short of any reasonable person's concern. The second factor is convenience. In at least one instance, a business's ability to receive deliveries is allegedly hampered by a legally-parked truck. It won't take a creative person long to come up with oodles of solutions that don't require a blanket, city-wide ban. A specific, targeted no parking zone (perhaps limited to common delivery hours) is certainly a better way to go, for example. The final factor appears to be simple petty rivalry. Some business owners don't like how other business owners do things. It's a tale as old as history, and frankly, it's annoying. Rather than come to terms with an action that doesn't actually hurt anyone (other than the easily-remedied situation noted above), a group of offended individuals runs to a lawmaker for assistance. It's an uncreative and over-broad "solution" to a (mostly) non-problem. But you know me. I'm not the sort to look to an ordinance to solve life's little annoyances until the justification is particularly strong. In this case, it isn't. Perhaps one of you can convince me otherwise. Have a go at it.

You know how sometimes you're going along and you see a business and you think "Who patronizes that place? I don't know anybody who has ever been there!"? It happens to me pretty much every time I pass a Long John Silver's, but that's not the point of this post. I'm curious about the folks who support area race tracks, such as Eagle Raceway, Nebraska Raceway Park, and so on. Who are those people? I say that with no judgement whatsoever, so don't mistake my purpose here. I'm genuinely curious. In my entire life I can only recall a couple times where an acquaintance has ever even mentioned going to an auto race in the area, and the most recent time was many years ago. Yet the raceways still exist and operate -- the lights shone bright at Nebraska Raceway Park on Saturday night -- so somebody is supporting them. Who? I hope the answer is one (or more) of you. I don't like having these gaps in my connection to the area. It makes me feel incomplete. I figure I can't participate in all the opportunities out there, but at least I can know people who do. So are you a race fan, or do you know somebody who is? What can you tell us about auto racing in southeast Nebraska?

Here's an interesting factoid: Apparently in Lincoln there are currently about 3 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents. That comes out to roughly 131 square feet per person, or an area 11 feet by 12 feet. Quick, go claim the best tract! In the future, that figure could drop to about 1 acre of parkland per 1,000 residents. Again, that's roughly 43.5 square feet per person, or an area 6 feet 7 inches square. I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand Lincoln has a pretty decent parks system going right now. There's plenty of space to be shared, but there's "too much" in the sense that we can't manage it all. So if we can't -- or rather, aren't willing to -- take care of what we have, then less seems like a good idea. But boy, saying "We don't need greenspace or recreational opportunities" makes you cringe, doesn't it? On a related note, Lincoln's future may hold more spraygrounds and fewer pools. That'll make a lot of people flinch. Spraygrounds $7,000 to $10,000 per year to operate; pools comes in at $30,000 to $40,000. The argument is that spraygrounds are more financial viable. I don't follow the math. In order for a $7,000 sprayground to be a better deal than a $40,000 pool, the pool would have to bring in $33,000 or less per year. Let's say that pool is open 80 days per year. (I'm figuring June, July, and August, minus rainy days. It's a rough guesstimate.) That means the pool needs to bring in less than $412.50 per day for the sprayground to lose less money than the pool. But how hard can it be to average $412.50 per day at a pool? That's about 125 regular price youth admissions. Are there really that many low-income admissions or that few pool users that a pool can't bring in 400 bucks worth of admissions and concessions? (That's not a rhetorical question. I haven't been to a public pool in decades so I don't really have a good feel for the numbers.) It's hard for me to understand how public pools aren't making it. As my extremely rough calculations show, it doesn't take all that much for a pool to break even. If they can't even do that ... well, either we keep subsidizing or we try something else. Do public pools have advertising banners on the fences? I don't recall seeing any, but that's not saying much. Surely there's a few grand to be had there. All of this is a long way of saying: fewer (or smaller) parks and fewer pools ... is that where we want Lincoln to head? Perhaps we do. Perhaps we have a glut of parkland, and perhaps public pools are an anachronism. I might (reluctantly) grant you the latter proposition, but I whole-heartedly reject the former. I'm eager to see what Lincolnites think about all this.

Yesterday's primary election wasn't something to get excited about for most Lincoln residents. Only a couple races mattered; everybody else was automatically on their way to the general election. It was such a yawner I even forgot to write something about it yesterday. Oops. In one of the races that mattered, Deena Winter was knocked out of her City Council bid. Jonathan Cook and Travis Nelson move on. Ms. Winter probably has more name recognition than Mr. Nelson, but Nelson comes packaged with a party affiliation. Still, Winter came pretty close. I doubt we've seen the last of her in local politics. Speaking of party affiliation, I have to suspect that party line voters played a role in Tammy Buffington's strong showing. And yes, in her case I'm calling 33% "strong". Ms. Buffington has demonstrated almost zero leadership potential and I have yet to meet a person who thinks she would make a good mayor. The best I've heard so far is "She's not that bad". Lukewarm praise. Not that Chris Beutler has earned himself a ticker tape parade, of course, but he has performed well overall in his role as mayor. The Antelope Valley Project is progressing well; his support for the Haymarket arena was vindicated by voters; a new building is finally under construction in the old Star Ship 9 location; and he has done about as well as can be expected with a very crappy budget situation. Mayor Beutler may not be Mr. Excitement, but he's getting the job done. Oh yeah, there was an Airport Authority vote, too. I ... I've got nothin'. Thanks to those of you who voted. Next up: the general election.

Why is it that governments have to ensure their employees' wages are comparable to the wages of workers elsewhere? It's something I've never quite understood. Can anybody explain it to me? The question arises because of a bill before the Unicameral that would allow Nebraska's cities to compare wages with local businesses, rather than "similar" cities. Comparing locally rather than, say, with Sioux Falls seems a little more sensible. But still ... why compare at all? Isn't it an employer's prerogative to pay its employees any wage it chooses? If the city pays crummy wages, it'll get crummy workers. If the city pays phenomenal wages, it's more likely to get phenomenal workers (and outraged taxpayers). It seems like natural pressures will keep wages more or less in a reasonable range. And yet both current law and the proposed one use external sources, which may be of questionable relevance, to set pay rates. What are the best arguments in favor of letting those external sources have a say in a city's pay rates?

Most of you have figured out by now that Lincoln isn't really in the midst of some grand scheme to bring fiber to every home thanks to Verizon and oodles of public and private partners. Some of you sniffed out the gag right away; others -- including Mr. T, who contacted darn near every IT person in the City-County Building to try to get more information about the awesome project -- took longer. For what it's worth, I wrote that post not just as a gag, but also as a real thought piece. What would happen if Lincolnites got together to wire up every location in town with some of the speediest, unfiltered, and unthrottled internet connections in the country? What if educational institutions like UNL and LPS participated as part of an effort to ensure each and every one of their students had inexpensive (or even free) and reliable access to online educational resources? What if internet access were a public utility in Lincoln, with Lincoln Internet System joining Lincoln Electric System and Lincoln Water System as a provider of a public good? The "what ifs" go on and on. Don't get too hung up on the details of my post. Think instead about what might happen if folks around the city decided to use the internet as a tool to increase Lincoln's competitiveness, and to provide residents, business, and organizations with easy and affordable access to incredible resources. Or if the internet isn't your thing, think about other sorts of tools we could put to work. What would happen if all those groups came together to solve an absolutely huge problem, Lincoln's own trip to the moon? Or maybe that's too much fantasy for such a cool, blustery day.

So Lincoln didn't win the opportunity to host Google's new ridiculously-fast fiber network. That goes instead to Kansas City, Kansas. A bummer for sure, but not the least bit surprising. Many communities were vying for the opportunity. Although Lincoln has a lot going for it, our odds were never very high. That's the bad news. The good news is Lincoln is getting a city-wide high-speed fiber optic network all its own. We're just going to build it ourselves. I was first contacted about this possibility a couple months ago. I brushed it aside because, frankly, Lincoln has enough things on its plate already. Surely City officials weren't working on something as huge as this while also dealing with Antelope Valley, the arena, budget problems, and all the other goings-on in town. In fact they have been working on it, and they're set to make a formal announcement early next week, probably Tuesday. Here's what I know. The effort is a big, multi-organizational effort. And by "multi" I mean it: the City; Lancaster County; UNL; Nebraska Wesleyan; Lincoln Public Schools; Nelnet; Union Bank; and many others. It's an absolutely huge public-private partnership; Haymarket Park ain't got nothin' on this effort. The colleges are on board to help provide students (on and off campus) with new learning opportunities; LPS is there to help get all of its students online; the corporate partners are participating for a variety of strategic and competitive reasons (as you might imagine). And the tech partner? Verizon. That's right, Time Warner can go jump off a cliff. The network Verizon is going to build is the coyote that finally obliterates Time Warner's Road Runner. Many questions remain unanswered for me, and I'm sure even next week's announcement won't fill in all the gaps. As it turns out I know several people involved, at various levels. Considering how many partners there are, you probably know your fair share as well. I suggest you start badgering them. It took me a lot of prodding to get any information from the folks I know. But they're excited, and over the weeks I got a couple of them to tell me bits and pieces. Their excitement is contagious. From what I understand, the target date for completion of the network is 2016. A long time from now, sure, but this is a huge project. I can't imagine all the logistics that need to be dealt with. The first areas to go online will be those nearest downtown and the campuses of the participating colleges. That's similar to how Road Runner was first rolled out; back when it first came to town I was able to get connected at my apartment on 23rd and T long before my parents (35th and Old Cheney) could sign up. I'm thrilled about the implications of this move, sure. But you know what excites me more? I'm positively ecstatic that local government, corporate, and organizational leaders are coming together to do something truly historic. That's where we benefit most. Lincoln was recently named second-happiest city in the U.S. by Gallup. I suspect next year we will have moved up a notch.

Fire Chief Niles Ford has resigned with a departure date of April 29. Great. I get a little shaky whenever major changes to LFR are on the agenda. Firefighting, for reasons I still cannot comprehend, is so blasted political. Most folks' explanations boil down to "it has always been that way". That's less of an explanation than it is a description. To add to the fun this time around, Ford's departure comes in the midst of an election. Read: more politics. Wheee. One of the best things about Niles Ford is that I don't know very much about him. That means he didn't make headlines very often, which means we made it four years with few fire department-related political shenanigans. (Contrast that with the era before his arrival.) More of that, please. I'm not sure if that outcome is best achieved by hiring from the inside or the outside. Generally I prefer advancement from within -- why train good people only to chase them away because they can't have the top jobs? -- but again: politics. Do any of you have strong opinions on Ford or his successor?