Bus fares on the rise

Here’s something to think about in the wake of the recent announcement that bus fares will be going up by a quarter on July 1st . If Minnesota Republicans do what they’ve said they want to do, the day will come when a lot of people in the metro area will be dropping their entire first hour’s wage into the fare box just to get back and forth to work.

Peter Bell, Met Council chairman, has stated that budget problems left him no choice, he did, however, manage to put off until next month a tougher decision on unpopular, money-saving cuts in bus service proposed for September
But Bell also says he’s sympathetic to the plight of the “distressed customers” who will feel the pain. (His official statement in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune April 22.)

You’ve heard the quip about the kid who murdered his parents and then asked the court for mercy because he was an orphan? You can’t capture the essence of Bell’s statement better than that. Bell now officially joins the chorus of Republicans, led by Tim Pawlenty, who ask us for sympathy as they make the “tough choices” that current budget restraints impose on them.

The fact is they have purposely created the problem they now say ties their hands. And Bell has been in the thick of it.

You have to go back a few years, to 1998. Bell and his then-employer, Twin City Federal Chief Executive Officer William Cooper, were both on the board of directors of the “Center of the American Experiment.” Cooper also chaired the Republican Party of Minnesota.

The Center of the American Experiment is the de facto Republican think tank whose influence on the state over the past decade or so can hardly be overstated. It’s “de facto” because officially the CAE is nonpartisan. As long as the IRS buys that argument, the group keeps its non-profit status, and that’s crucial if it’s going to remain the heavy hitter that it is, because it means people can give it money and deduct the amount of the donation off their taxable income.

In 1998, the CAE came out with its “Minnesota Policy Blueprint.” The Blueprint is essentially a government operating manual for Republicans. It was the brainchild of CAE stalwart Chris Georgacas, who had preceded Cooper as Republican Party chair. Georgacas ran the Blueprint project until he left the CAE in March of 1998, to work for-guess who?-Norm Coleman, at the time running for governor.

The Blueprint has 19 chapters, each on a subject such as education, health or economic development. Each chapter is written by a separate task force with its own chairman. Bell himself chaired the task force on Welfare and Human Services. The Transportation Task Force was chaired by then-Republican state representative Tom Workman.

The CAE is nothing if not “on-message.” Each chapter of the Blueprint begins with the same preface, including the same set of bullet points. They call for limited government, “low-tax, low-regulation policies,” and competition for the delivery of public services.

This is policy talk for what meat-and-potatoes Republicans like to call the starve-the-beast strategy. The theory is that most politicians are incapable of acting to reduce funding for any public service. But they can support tax cuts, and eventually that will do the job.

Could it be? Could starving the publicly-funded bus system be part of a larger Republican strategy, not unlike the strategy for starving the public schools in order to pave the way for privatization, vouchers and the crippling of the unions?

Sounds conspiratorial, but you can’t really call it that. Conspiracies are secret, and this one is there for the viewing. “We advocate competitive contracting in the current transit system,” the Blueprint says, “allowing private and public interests to bid for the contract to operate the Metropolitan Council Transit Authority bus system, for example.”

The Blueprint specifically calls for taking public subsidies away from transportation services. The problem of “the poor,” it adds, could be solved by direct subsidies to individuals. In other words, vouchers. The only thing it doesn’t explicitly mention is the key last step: getting the unions out of the way and driving down wages for transit workers.

Under the proposed CAE scenario, and based on Peter Bell’s estimate that 30 percent of transit system costs are covered by the fare box, getting on a rush-hour bus today would cost five dollars and change. Who might get the voucher for the two-dollar trip? Might it be the same people who qualify for medical assistance? That would mean a single woman with one child and a $10.00-an-hour job would be too rich to qualify. Welcome to Republican utopia.

This is not to say this will happen. The public sector beast, it turns out, is not a beast. It’s a domesticated animal, at times unruly, but when the question gets called, most people don’t want to kill it. On the contrary, they want it healthy. Republicans have started to get that message, with regard to schools and public safety, among other things. At the same time, they are approaching the limit of what they can do with fees, “accounting shifts” and ransacking the tobacco fund.

So now the hard-wired, anti-tax politicians are left with a number of unsavory choices, ranging from tapping gambling addicts to stealing money from their own children by running up government debt. In the meantime, public officials who are charged with making government and its agencies actually work are left holding the bag.

In the case of Peter Bell, it’s a bag he helped to fill. He has been through some tough times in his life, and maybe he does sympathize with the working stiff who has to ride the bus. But years ago he made a decision to hitch his wagon to the rising star of cut-throat laissez-faire Republican conservatism, and to the major political development of our time, certainly in this state: the across-the-board transfer of power, wealth and comfort up the economic ladder, as privation, pain and “belt-tightening” work their way down. Public transportation could be the next arena for this sorry spectacle to unfold.