Thursday, July 29, 2010

Parent Resource Network Evening Event

As you probably already know, a passion I have outside of work/family/volunteering, is the work my wife and I do for the non-profit we started, Parent Resource Network, a 501(c)(3) non-profit company. Annually we hold a fundraiser where money raised goes directly to families with children born prematurely or with chronic illness and/or congenital disorders. This organization was founded after we had our daughter, Taylor, born 17 weeks prematurely. After spending nine full months in the Neonatal Intensive Care unit, my wife Kelly and I realized that there were a lot of families who needed a network of support to rely on during the trying time in the NICU and beyond. This is why we founded PRN in 2006; to provide direct services to families that need it. From simple things like GetGo gas cards that help with hospital commute costs to goody bags with snacks, PRN pitches in. We have also been successful in rolling out more involved programs like Bereavement Services and Palliative Care. Today we provide services to all of the hospitals in the Pittsburgh region operating a NICU.

On August 14th, Parent Resource Network will hold its annual fund raising event at the Smart House on Mt Washington. Cost to attend is only $40 and there will be a live band, silent auction items and live table games to win prizes. It is your support that keeps this organization going and allows us to have a tremendous positive impact on these families.

Please visit http://parentresourcenetwork.org for more information on the event.

If you are unable to attend but would still like to donate to our organization, please visit our website at http://parentresourcenetwork.org/giving and donate online. Your financial support would be greatly appreciated! Donation are tax-deductible.

Thanks for reading. Email me with any questions about the event.


James

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

July Update

The question now on many people's minds is, "Now What". Our property taxes just increased over 10% in June. The High School Project is effectively stalled until Judge James renders his ruling. We just let the cat out of the bag on the deduct alternates. We will have no tennis courts for approximately 3 years at the high school in the current design. We were recently turned away by both the Zoning Hearing Board and the Planning Board. The Board recently passed a new policy requiring many documents in our packets to be released to the public only by a majority vote of the Board or after our voting meeting. We are also having discussions regarding posting information about who is requesting right-to-know requests on the District website.

Unfortunately, these are the issues that the Board is dealing with. Most, if not all, of them could have been avoided with the proper foresight, advice, and planning. I am going to comment on the issues one at a time while keeping in mind that there are some legal issues surrounding the Zoning Hearing Board.

First, I want to update you on where we are with our property taxes. As you know, taxes were increased for the 2010-2011 school year to help pay for the high school. We floated the bonds in October 2009 in order to try to take advantage of what were historically low interest rates. As you may know, interest rates have remained at about the same level as they were in October 2009. The District has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest on these bonds. This is interest that was unnecessary as we had enough money in the bank to pay current bills for some time. Additionally, the bonds we floated were traditional municipal bonds and not the less expensive Build America Bonds. We floated the traditional bonds in order to "maximize bond proceeds" as opposed to trying to make the bond float more beneficial to the taxpayer. This was a decision I voted against as it was clear on the documentation we had on the night of the vote that the Build America Bonds would have saved our taxpayers over $2 million over the life of the bonds. Our bond advisor was given the instruction to maximize proceeds and we therefore were able to get a premium on the traditional bonds. The premium simply meant that the District was going to make payments on the bond that were higher than what the market was asking for at the time. In exchange for this higher coupon payment, bond buyers were willing to pay the District a little more (a premium) for our bonds. While this does mean we will borrow less in the second float of the bonds for the high school, this is only because we paid more than market coupon rates for the first float of bonds. These bonds accounted for a very large percentage of your recent tax hike.

Another factor in our latest budget is that it is another year in which we plan to have a reduction in students and another year in which we will not lose any staff to compensate for that reduction. You may remember from the passing of the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 budgets that I advocated for reductions in staff to compensate for the reduction in student enrollment. In fact, in the 2009-2010 budget we planned to eliminate 3 positions partially to account for this reduction in students. However, every one of these positions was added back prior to the start of the school year. As I said last year, just as we would plan to increase staff when we have an increase in students, we need to figure out how to reduce staff when we have the trickle out of students that we have seen over the past 10 years. In a perfect world we would have been able to reduce staff to account for the reduced student population. This would have had the effect reducing the overall burden of the high school project on our residents. Unfortunately, there was not enough Board support to either reduce staff or programs to help offset the tax increase for the bonds floated for the high school (the budget passed 6-2).

Here is a table of our student population:

Year Student Population
2001 5640
2002 5597
2003 5610
2004 5551
2005 5494
2006 5441
2007 5429
2008 5423

Over 200 students lost (and counting) and we have not reduced our staffing levels. Since staffing is the single largest expense in our budget, it is important that we stay on top of exactly what we need. Otherwise, we start to raise taxes at a rate far faster than the Districts that have the ability to adjust more readily to these types of changes.

Here is an updated graph comparing our millage (municipal and school district) to some other Districts throughout the County:



What this graph shows is exactly what I talked about in my White Paper in January. We are continuing on a path to taxing our residents at a much higher rate than school districts with which we compete. A continuation of this trend will no doubt lead to some serious consequences in Mt Lebanon. We cannot expect to charge a large premium to live in our community and avoid negative consequences. At what point that happens I don't know. But I have a feeling that the point is awful close.

As of the passage of school district 2010-2011 budgets, here is a list of the millage rates for the 25 highest taxed school districts in Allegheny County:


School District Millage
1
Fort Cherry 118.5
2 Wilkinsburg 35
3 Brentwood 28.27
4 Northgate 27.6
5 East Allegheny 27.54
6 Mt Lebanon 26.63
7 Deer Lakes 26.25
8 South Park 25.99
9 Woodland Hills 25.65
10 Shaler 25.63
11 Sto-Rox 25
12 South Fayette 24.88
13 Penn Hills 24.81
14 Bethel Park 24.56
15 Highlands 24.41
16 Carylton 24.15
17 Cornell 24.11
18 Steel Valley 24.07
19 Riverview 24.05
20 Elizabeth-Forward 23.51
21 Baldwin-Whitehall 23.5
22 Allegheny Valley 23.46
23 West Mifflin 22.992
24 Upper St Clair 22.29
25 Plum 22.2

There we are, sandwiched between Deer Lakes and East Allegheny. No disrespect to the other school districts, but what else do we have in common with them besides these millage rates? For a District and community that wants to compare itself to other peers like Upper St Clair, Fox Chapel, North Allegheny, Bethel Park and others, is this the position in which we want to find ourselves?

Regardless of the tax hike to pay for it, the high school project itself is effectively stalled. It is public knowledge that the District went before the Mt Lebanon Zoning Hearing Board and requested two variances. One of the variances was for parking spaces and the other was for lot coverage. The Zoning Hearing Board voted unanimously against approving the variances to allow the project to move forward. The District has since appealed and is awaiting a ruling by Judge James about the status of the variance request. As I said before, there are some legal issues here that cannot be commented on until the case is over. The reality of the situation is that it is rather embarrassing for me to be in the position of suing my own Zoning Hearing Board. Both sides have "lawyered up" (the ZH Board attorney paid for by the Municipality) and we are now using tax dollars on both sides of the issue to fight a no-win situation in court.

Still sticking with the high school project, we have recently talked about a deduct alternate list. To be clear, there has already been some significant value engineering when it comes to using materials in the school. As an example, we are going to use a vinyl composite material for the flooring. This decision will result in savings based on the materials we had previously planned to use. There are a number of decisions like this that I consider to be part of the value engineering process. What the Board has started to consider on top of these types of changes is alterations to the design of the building itself. The architects and project manager are preparing more information for the Board regarding larger possible deductions to the project. These possible deductions include eliminating the second auxiliary gymnasium, altering the number of air handlers in the athletic wing, changing the scope of the renovations to the Little Theater and Auditorium, and moving the tennis courts off-site. There was even discussion about leaving some parts of these deducts alternates to be completed at a different time so as to reduce the overall cost and scope of the current project. The Board will decide in August which, if any, of the deduct alternates should be bid. Please be sure to give your feedback to the Board regarding these possible changes prior to August 9th.

Finally, there have been some recent policy changes and discussion that are of interest. In June, while I was away on business, the Board took up policy BBAA, Board Member Responsibility and Ethics. We added the following text to the policy:

Individual Board members shall refrain from publishing, distributing, releasing or disclosing any documents, records or information containing or reflecting the predecisional deliberation of the Board relating to matters such as budget recommendations, legislative proposals or any contemplated or proposed policy or course of action. This preclusion includes any research, memorandums or other documents used by the Board in its predecisional deliberations.

I would have voted against this policy. The thing is, this is how I do my job as a Director. When we get a packet that is filled with information and recommendations, it is important for me to try to understand each issue as best as I can. Often times I will seek advice outside of the District and central office when it comes to certain issues. One example would be the bond issue from October of 2009. After reviewing the information given to the Board from the central office and our bond advisor I decided to go outside of the District to get more information. I called other financial advisors to other school districts and I called friends of mine who work in the bond industry. It was these people who led me to ask our bond advisor to compare costs of both the Build America Bonds (part of the federal government stimulus package) and traditional municipal bonds. Prior to my research we had only been quoted information about traditional bonds. Armed with new information on Build America Bonds, I was able to get our financial advisor to present the BAB bonds and traditional bonds side by side for comparison purposes. The result was that the BAB bonds would have saved the District taxpayers over $2 million dollars. Unfortunately, as mentioned previously in this post, our bond advisor was ultimately given the advice to maximize the proceeds of our bond sale as opposed to maximizing the savings of the bond float to our taxpayers. The bond information that was given to the Board would have been classified as "predecisional" or possibly even "research". This means I would have been in violation of Board policy if I went outside of the Board and District to get additional information regarding items in my packet. I wholeheartedly disagree with this policy and I promise you that I will violate the policy at least once a month for the rest of my years on the Board. If I didn't then I wouldn't be doing my job as a Director. Think about this for a second. Two weeks ago we were given the State Auditor's report on the District. There was some interesting information in there on a number of topics. Our solicitor said in our discussion meeting that because we had not yet voted on the report, that it was considered pre-decisional. That means that I could technically not even talk to a neighbor about the auditor's findings about bus drivers or about the Marge Sable incident without violating board policy. I would have had to have waited until after the vote to make comment. If we withhold this type of information from the public prior to a vote, then how in the world can we expect our residents to come up to the microphone before a meeting and comment on any number of topics on the agenda? Is this the kind of board our residents expect?

The other policy that has been part of our discussions has been regarding right-to-know requests. Director Remely first suggested a few months back that we post the names of people making right to know requests on the District website. While we have had a number of right-to-know requests, I am not sure that the best way to deal with it is to post people's names online. The idea here should be figure out WHY we have so many requests and then address THAT issue. If we post the names of requesters then we are not addressing the issue, instead we are simply appearing as if we have something to hide. Posting names on the district website will end up having a "chilling effect" on our residents and may inhibit them from doing something that they would otherwise do quite freely. This action would only reinforce the idea that the Board and District is trying to hide something. Rather than taking this route it is my belief that the District and Board need to increase transparency in all things that we do. If the Board decides to follow through with this idea to post names of RTK requesters online, then it is only fair that the information requested in the RTK request also get posted online. If the District will not post this information on the District website itself, then the RTK information should get posted on a publicly available website open to all Mt Lebanon residents for review and inspection.

Thanks for reading.

James

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Mt. Lebanon Real Estate Numbers

One of the interesting things about our budget for fiscal year 2009-2010 was the fact that our Real Estate Transfer Tax continued to outperform every other line item in our budget. Clearly there was something different happening in 2009-2010 than happened in 2008-2009.

Without the data I have now, I hypothesized that the number of home sales had likely increased due to the $8000 homebuyer tax credit. This was not a hard guess to make as home sales around the country rebounded once the tax credit went into effect. What I didn't know was at what price the homes were selling for.

I was able to get a summary of all real estate sold in the 15228 zip code for FY 2008-2009 and for FY 2009-2010 until May of 2010.

Here is the data:

Fiscal Year Home Sales Through May

Month FY 2008-2009 FY 2009-2010
July 35 31
Aug 23 31
Sept 21 18
Oct 12 27
Nov 8 18
Dec 14 23
Jan 10 13
Feb 9 9
Mar 8 14
Apr 19 19
May 21 25
Total 180 228

As you can see, starting in October 2010, home sales for every month in fiscal year 2009-2010 equaled or outpaced home sales in fiscal year 2008-2009. The Home Buyer Tax Credit I believe went into effect starting in January 2009 and expired April 30, 2010.

The above data is interesting in that it shows that the number of homes sold in Mt Lebanon during this period increased by 26.7%. That's quite the jump.

The other side of the coin to this is that the transfer tax is not based on just the number of homes sold but also on the price of the home. For instance, despite the increase in the number of sales, if the average sales price had fallen substantially, then we would not have seen the increase in transfer tax receipts. Luckily, I have the average sale price data for the same time period below:

Average Sold Price Through May

Month FY 2008-2009 FY 2009-2010
July $ 245 $ 233
Aug $ 204 $ 248
Sept $ 279 $ 261
Oct $ 196 $ 188
Nov $ 186 $ 226
Dec $ 166 $ 238
Jan $ 216 $ 224
Feb $ 220 $ 160
Mar $ 252 $ 258
Apr $ 214 $ 268
May $ 234 $ 232
Average $ 219 $ 231

As you can see above, not only did the number of homes sold increase by 26.7% but the average price of the home sold increased by 5.5%. What I find interesting is that the increase in the average price was just above the $8,000 stimulus.

There are a lot of conflicting conclusions I can draw from the above information. Or maybe a better way to say it is that the above data begs a lot of questions. Did home prices actually go up in Mt. Lebanon during this time period? If so, was it short lived due to the stimulus money? Was it simply the effect of more expensive homes being listed on the market than the year before?

There is another set of data that can help answer that last question. Below is a chart showing the average list price of a home for each of the fiscal years:

Average Active Price Through May
Month FY 2008-2009 FY 2009-2010
July $ 268 $ 345
Aug $ 267 $ 337
Sept $ 268 $ 341
Oct $ 277 $ 310
Nov $ 292 $ 327
Dec $ 294 $ 342
Jan $ 290 $ 358
Feb $ 287 $ 341
Mar $ 331 $ 336
Apr $ 339 $ 339
May $ 356 $ 350
Average
$ 297 $ 339

As you can see, the average list price of the homes on the market increased by a whopping 14.1%. So, we had more expensive homes on the market and more sales of said homes.

So what does this mean for the 2010-2011 budget that we just passed? I would expect our transfer tax receipts to drop substantially from 2010-2011. The FY 2009-2010 increase was due mostly to a number of higher priced homes on the market and higher sales volume driven by the home buyers tax credit.

As is the case with most stimulus, what the tax credit did was move demand forward. I have heard from more than one Realtor that the real estate market is extremely quiet for this time of year (and that is not just in Mt Lebanon). Those people that had planned to perhaps wait an extra year to buy a home in 2011 simply accelerated their purchase to gain the $8000 tax credit to help them buy a home in early 2010. As with the "Cash for Clunkers" program, we will see demand for home purchases decline substantially once the stimulus is removed. How long it lasts is anyone's guess.

If anyone has any additional insight to the information presented above, I'd love to hear it. If enough people email me, I would be happy to provide an update or a different perspective.

Thanks for reading.

James

Friday, July 2, 2010

Jobs Still Scarce

I came across an article at the Calculated Risk blog that I thought I would share. CR has been tracking employment during this recession and has an interesting graph when comparing unemployment for this recession to all other post World War II recessions.

Please see the chart below:

Click on image for larger view

From the CR blog:
For the current employment recession, employment peaked in December 2007, and this recession is by far the worst recession since WWII in percentage terms, and 2nd worst in terms of the unemployment rate (only early '80s recession with a peak of 10.8 percent was worse).

The decrease in the unemployment rate was because of a decline in the participation rate - and that is not good news. Although better than May, this is still a weak report.
This has been no ordinary recession.

The Daily Kos has the following tidbit (I just realized they copied the same graph I have above):
  • About 14.6 million Americans remain unemployed.
  • 45.5% the unemployed, or 6.8 million Americas, have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. The ranks of these long-term unemployed remains at a post-Depression record.
  • There are now 7.9 million more Americans out of work than when the recession began in December 2007. (Roughly 15 million more are underemployed or have dropped out of the labor force -- and thus the statistical calculations).

Pennsylvania's unemployment rate (8.5% in May 2010) trails the national unemployment rate of 9.5%. Mt. Lebanon's unemployment rate has risen to 6% (May 2010) from 5.5% in April (see the excel sheet in this link). This is up from 4.9% in May 2009 (again in the excel sheet in this link).

While our rate is lower than the national and state averages, our trends are very much the same. The scary thing about this is that the national unemployment rate continues to decline not because jobs are being created but because people are simply giving up looking for work. Not a good sign at all.

Thanks for reading.

James