Across the Great Divide

Home is Where You Don't Have to Wear Pants.

A man I'll call Buzz was talking about receiving four trespassing tickets in the past week.

Since getting out of jail and completing his parole, he's been living on the streets downtown. Last Wednesday night he received three tickets as he moved from one downtown location to another trying to find a place to sleep. He acquired his fourth last night in a city parking ramp.

When someone like Buzz walks in our door, they leave behind the street labels that proclaim their poverty, their offenses, their diagnoses, their addictions, their failures and their unsheltered states. In theory, anyway. 

It's their behavior inside the Day Center that matters.

Over the years here, I've met about two dozen men that I've known to be registered sex offenders. Only one has ever caused any trouble. He was a white-haired aging Elvis who said he couldn't wait to get out of town because there were "too many fucking fags" here. The gay man he said it to took offense and the disagreement went outside.

(That was two or three year years ago. Elvis didn't leave. I saw him last month riding a bike to the grocery store.)

I hadn't pegged Buzz as a sex offender, just a lonely, talkative old man who's my age but looks older with his pear-shaped body, age spots and missing teeth. Today he was wearing a dress shirt that looked remarkably like one I donated last year, along with a pair of high-water sweatpants.

It turns out Buzz has a fairly extensive record of being seen without any pants. Indecent exposure charges against homeless men used to be rather routinely wrapped up with public urination, but in the cases involving Buzz that I could find, he was up to something else. The last time, in 2013, he was out in the desert north of town when a woman walking her dogs encountered him naked and, fearing he was having a medical problem, called 911.

By the time the police arrived, Buzz was clothed, but given his record of 15 prior offenses and registered offender status, he received a felony charge that led to his present circumstances.

More recently, he told me had been living in a former motel converted to low-income housing. In August, his parole officer revoked his parole and he went to jail to serve the duration of his two-year sentence. (When I asked about the nature of his legal problems, Buzz declined to discuss them.)

Once in jail, he was unable to arrange to pay his rent. Even local calls are collect from jail, and the property management firm would not accept his calls. Neither would anyone else. His rent became delinquent and he was evicted by the sheriff's department. The apartment was cleaned out and all his possessions were moved to the parking lot where other tenants were allowed to pick them over.

Because Buzz was in jail, he couldn't do anything about it. 

He lost his clothes, furniture, bedding, cookware, TV and accessories, and a lifetime collection of movie DVDs he said was worth $4500—"John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies. Rogers and Hammerstein musicals."

Clothes are easy enough to come by, but housing is not, especially for registered sex offenders. Buzz remained persistent, eventually finding a $350-a-month room he can afford with his Social Security. There was one more catch, however. The new property is managed by the company that evicted him, and they were demanding a double damage deposit because of the prior broken lease. He lacked the cash to pay it and his rent and was stymied until he got assistance from Volunteers of America. 

Yesterday, he was supposed to sign the papers for his new place.

At age 67, he says he's learned his lesson and is ready to move on. He can't do anything about the past. Then he started talking about heaven and God reclaiming the earth and answering to all our infractions that have been recorded in the Golden Book upstairs.

I suppose heaven's like the Day Center. There's forgiveness but even the angels have to wear pants.

Colorado County Wants to Solve Budget Crunch with Unequal Enforcement.

My home state offers a useful bellwether to Minnesotans  who wonder how those "leave us alone" low tax policies will work out if the GOP actually gets a chance to fulfill its promises. Colorado Springs has gotten most of the attention lately for cutting city services and seeing its city manager resign after only two years on the job, but the tea party mentality is strong on the western side of the state, too.

The latest is this story  about Mesa County planning to cut back on services to certain communities that declined to be annexed into the city of Grand Junction.  More accurately, not enough property owners representing enough acres in the communities of Clifton and Fruitvale signed a petition requesting annexation.

The details might not make sense in Minnesota, especially in the metro, where counties largely overlap with incorporated cities. Out here, there are plenty of unincorporated areas within the "metro" of the Grand Valley, along with plenty of property owners who want a rural lifestyle (heavy equipment, junked cars and horses in the yard) along with city-style law enforcement and emergency services.

When the annexation fell through, the conservative county commissioners said, you want rural, we'll give you rural! (And they showed that it's not just liberal city governments that end up threatening to cut law enforcement when their budgets shrink.)

The sheriff, who is elected but has his budget approved by the commissioners, is caught in the middle.

His department is the primary law enforcement agency for an area that's about two-thirds the size of Connecticut. They have to cover some rural, remote and rugged country, but also a patchwork of suburban and exurban communities. The area in question has about 18 percent of the county's population and accounts for roughly 40 percent of the department's calls.

The sheriff, a Republican, says he can't selectively pull back enforcement in some parts of the county and provide a different level of service in the more upscale areas.

"It’s one thing to not put a sidewalk in. But if you weren’t to provide law-enforcement services, that criminal element or apathy gains a foothold. And there are no guarantees that apathy or the criminal element stays in that neighborhood.

“We have to hold the line in order to keep this entire county a good place to live.”

Good for the sheriff.

As for the county board members making noises about reducing services, I feel their pain. But not very much, because they are among the small government conservatives who helped create the idea that government and local communities can get along just fine with lower taxes.

Colorado Marijuana Rx Law Causing Pain as Well as Relieving it.

Last week I wrote about local difficulties with enforcing Colorado's medical marijuana law.

Here's a pretty good article that gives an overview of the economic and law enforcement issues related to the law as more people in the valley get into the business.

[The legislator sponsoring a new regulatory bill] knows folks in law enforcement and those selling medical marijuana equally are unhappy with how his bill is shaping up. Dispensaries are afraid the cost of staying in business will be too high; law enforcement is angry they’ll be in business at all.

The city of Grand Junction alone could collect $445,500 in annual sales taxes on medical marijuana sold through the dispensaries.

Medical Weed Operation Leads to Exposing Patient Information.

Colorado is getting its feet wet with medical marijuana, creating some new twists on how drug laws are enforced.

This week in my hometown, authorities were called to an office building near the Census offices where someone observed an unusual smell. More than a thousand marijuana plants were found under grow lights.

But with cultivation being legal based upon the number of patients being supplied by a dispensary, the cops couldn't just confiscate the weed.

They did, however, check to see whether the large number of plants was justified.

Here's where it starts to get sticky.

A search warrant executed Tuesday authorized the seizure of photocopies of patients’ marijuana registry cards, as well as doctors’ recommendations and personal contact information for patients [...]

The judge who signed the warrant did what he had to, I guess, if there was suspicion that the legal growing operation was producing extra weed on the side. But in order to confirm the proportions being grown were legitimate, patient records were opened up to scrutiny.

This is the sort of thing that makes some people afraid of government getting deeper into the health care business, of course, so even if the grower (Sid Squirrel!) is totally on the up and up, this sort of investigation could have repercussions beyond the drug business.

[Disclosure: My brother is a local police commander and the judge is a former classmate. I have not discussed the case with either of them.]

Crime and Punishment.

Jon Tevlin has it right:

It is the single largest item in the bonding bill. It is controversial by nature, considered suspect by many legal scholars and criminal behaviorists, and it will likely secure the infrastructure of a permanent and exponentially more expensive government function into perpetuity. Yet it will likely be approved without rigorous debate because politicians never want to see campaign ads saying they are soft on perverts.

Pawlenty wants an $89 million expansion of the facility for sex offenders at Moose Lake, which holds predators we think will re-offend. Public officials might air doubts about civil commitments privately, but they also know it is impossible to offer a nuanced response to a "soft-on-sex-offender" tag.

The Moose Lake facility was briefly a bargaining chip in the bonding bill. But it's more significant for the reasons Tevlin notes. It institutionalizes a long-term expense — call it a reverse entitlement if you like — by building a dedicated facility to hold sex offenders after their sentences are completed. And it perpetuates the constitutionally dubious practice of punishing people for crimes they might commit in the future.

No matter whether this works or is even right, building the detention facility means the policy is likely to continue. And people got more exercised over the cost of a few flat screen TVs at the current Moose Lake facility.

*****

And conceal and carry advocates should love this one. A driver with a carry permit uses his loaded handgun to stop another driver from honking and flashing lights at him.

I wonder how he'd answer the survey question about using his weapon to foil a crime?

However, he's the one who got arrested.

How To Save Minnesota's Congressional Butt.

What loser.

Here I am posting on Christmas morning about the potential for Minnesota to lose one of its eight Congressional seats if our population falls short in the upcoming Census. State forecasts show us missing the mark by about 1,100 people – a difference of less than one month’s population change.

King Banaian notes this, along with a discussion we had in 2008 about how and why Minnesota's population growth is slowing. He suggests he might have a student investigate the question as a senior project.

I'd welcome that analysis.

That got me thinking, though. Why not some senior projects on ways Minnesota could avoid losing the seat?

We might have to take action sooner than a student could write a paper, so I'll offer some of my own solutions to legislators, too. I've tried to make suggestions that could appeal to either party:

1. Enrich Minnesota health care and supplemental income programs for the poor to attract more people from Chicago
   
2. "Rent" 2,000 surplus unemployed South Dakotans and make them Pipestone residents for the duration of the Census
3. Annex Hudson, Wisconsin. In addition to boosting the Minnesota population, it will relieve residents who commute to jobs in Minnesota from having to file two income tax returns, although those still working in Wisconsin would be out of luck
4. Offer a free building and infrastructure improvements, with no property or corporate income taxes payable until 2080, to any business that can relocate its workforce here by spring (wait, that's what other states already do)
5. Bring major league soccer to St. Paul and watch the economy blossom
6. Send Minnesota peacekeeping troops to Missouri, another state on the Congressional district cusp. Leaflet the state with anti-Census propaganda, and t0 be safe, have Rep. Michele Bachmann tour the Ozarks in person
7. Outlaw abortion in Minnesota
8. Put Johnny Crumbles and his associates from Atlantic City in charge of staffing the Minnesota Census effort
9. Encourage tax cheaters to declare their phantom dependents on their Census forms, too
10. The comments are open...

Smart Politics Can Divide, but Can it Figure?

I can't tell if Smart Politics has a statistical tin ear or is willfully deaf.

Here's an example: Minnesota Has 2nd Largest Increase in Prison Population in the Nation This Decade.

What kind of policies or changes in the population are responsible for Minnesota's prison population increasing by 50.79% — from 6,238 to 9,406 between 2000 and 2010? A helpful analysis from a public policy center named for Hubert Humphrey might tell us.

Smart Politics, which posts under the banner of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, just does the math, notes the change and passes on rather pointless observations like this:

Looking at states in the Upper Midwest region, North Dakota experienced the ninth largest increase in the nation in state and federal prisoners since 2000, with its prison population rising at a rate of 34.9 percent to 1,452 total prisoners. South Dakota's rate of increase was ranked #14 in the nation (27.8 percent; 3,342 prisoners), while Wisconsin was ranked #33 (12.7 percent; 23,380 prisoners), and Iowa was ranked #38 (10.2 percent; 8,766 prisoners).

I've remarked often about how state rankings often overstate small differences and get interpreted idiotically. The role of analysts should be to look beyond their number crunching to offer some enlightenment.

The incarceration data is in the Smart Politics table, but a useful caveat is not in the post — a small increase affects a small number percentage-wise more than a large number. Minnesota's high ranking for the period selected means nothing without more context. Even after the increase, Minnesota has the 18th lowest absolute number of prisoners.

More pertinent here would be a comparison between Minnesota and other states with similarly sized populations.

 On a prisoner-per-capita basis, Minnesota has perhaps the lowest rate in the nation. (I haven't calculated every state, but our rate is at least half the rate of similar-sized Wisconsin, Maryland, Colorado and Missouri, and of South Dakota to boot. We're also lower than North Dakota and West Virginia.)

Those lower incarceration rates mean we spend less on corrections and reflect the fact we do more to get people out of the criminal justice system so they can lead productive lives.

You'd think smart policy thinkers at University could dig that out for us.

Should Road Taxes Follow Historical Model?

Small-government conservatives like to hold that transportation users should pay for infrastructure through user fees. That's what drivers do via gas taxes, they argue, and what transit riders don't do via fares.

Another view is that everyone benefits indirectly as well as directly from the entire system. Individual decisions about how to get from one place to another can impose more or less burden on the system, and we all receive some good from the efficient movement of materials, goods and services through our communities.

Rather than trying to quantify individual use, the funding system spreads the cost to everyone through a variety of taxes.

More than a century ago, when the reach and condition of roads left much to be desired, society was experimenting with different ways to pay for better infrastructure. Private companies formed to build turnpikes and toll roads. Groups of farmers and ranchers pooled their labor and equipment to improve roads so they could get their products to market.

And some communities appointed road overseers and collected taxes to maintain the roads, and if citizens couldn't pay cash, they could pay in labor.

Chaska Obscura has surfaced an account of one case taken from the town's historical records:

Charge: Charles Raasch appeared personally before me and being duly sworn and examined on his oath complains and says that he is overseer of the highway of the town of Chaska in the county of Carver and state of Minnesota that A. Lobel, a male person above 21 and under 50 years of age and not a pauper, idiot, lunatic or otherwise exempt, is a resident of said town and liable to road tax or poll tax therein for the year of 1888.

That on the 14th day of August 1888, at Chaska in said county, [Raasch] as such overseer caused A. Lobel to be duly notified to perform such labor in person or by substitute or to commit for the same, but said A. Lobel has wholly failed and refused to do so, and that such tax is wholly unpaid contrary to the forms of the statue in such case made and provided and against the peace and dignity of the state of Minnesota.

Judgment: Defendant in custody before me. Defendant duly arraigned to which he pleaded “guilty.” Whereupon I adjudge that he is guilty of the offence complained of. Thereupon defendant paid the sum of $3 the amount of such tax and the costs of this action taxed at the sum of $3.82, total $6.82. Judgment paid and this action dismissed.

Bringing back the tax exemption for idiots and lunatics might quiet some of the protests that paupers have it too easy today.

When Judges Go Postal: Justice Anderson Fires a Shot.

Eric Black reports on the Minnesota Supreme Court decision to levy an addition $100 to the annual fee paid by practicing lawyers to renew their licenses.

The funds raised will to subsidize the operation of state public defender offices and Legal Aid — which help poor Minnesotans in criminal and civil cases, respectively.

In reluctantly enacting the order, the justices acted left no uncertainty that they are:

royally pissed off at the governor and the Legislature for abdicating their responsibility to raise the taxes necessary to cover the spending they order, including spending that is required by the U.S. and Minnesota Constitutions.

Black covers implications of the case in his thorough way, so read his story. But if you don't, here's a taste of the concurring opinion [PDF] written by Justice (and Republican appointee) Paul Anderson, calling out Grover Norquist and his acolytes around the bathtub:

The problem with this approach is that when you continuously put the government's head under water, it is not the government that drowns — real people drown. Floodwaters breach levees and people drown. Bridges collapse and people drown. I have little tolerance for this anti-government rhetoric given the adverse consequences that result to real people, especially the least advantaged among us, when this myopic approach to governing actually gets translated into policy. I believe that government does have a proper, even an essential role to play in creating and preserving a civilized society.

Petters: How to Know When He's Cheating.

Apparently some of Tom Petters' business associates never read those popular features on "How to tell your guy is cheating." Or asked a psychic. Or read a book on how to recognize the signs.

In yesterday's fraud trial testimony, one of Petters' dupes described how he "planned to go to California to inspect the inventory [he was asked to invest in], but Petters said no because it was in a locked facility available only to the insurers of the merchandise."

Right. Available to insurers but not investors.

That excuse sounded to me remarkably like what the married guy says to his girlfriend when she wonders why they never spend any time at his place. 

Some of the other behavior sounded familiar, too. For example:

Tells stories that don't make sense. Paul Feehan, GE Capital's manager of corporate lending at the time, testified that he called Petters directly to discuss his company's mounting financial troubles. "I got a series of promises. There was always a new excuse and the excuses kept piling up," he said.

Accuses you of infidelity. Feehan said he and Marrone wrote Costco to check on the inventory of electronics goods that Petters claimed to have bought with the money he borrowed. Petters immediately called back and "read me the riot act," Feehan said. "He was very adamant that I stay away from Costco."

Takes offense when you make normal and natural inquiries and may demand to know why you are checking up. When Colburn told Petters he intended to call the companies that were supposed to sell the TVs, Petters was adamantly opposed. He said Petters left a voice mail message saying, "You won't get the satisfaction that you're looking for."

Lives a changed or more extravagant life style. The dapper Petters funded his philanthropy, gambling and world travel with money from investors.

Signs of unexplainable exhaustion or restlessness. Petters was notoriously fidgety and had a short attention span, so any change there would be in matter of degree.

Hides or “loses” bills. A classic symptom. Instead of hiding paperwork about his transactions, Petters forged it.

Withholds affection and/or sex. When one lender questioned Petters too closely, he terminated the relationship, saying they were too hard to do business with.

Concocts alibis calculated to elicit empathy instead of scrutiny. At one point in August 2008, Petters told one of his investors that he had a family emergency and would repay the investor "within days," the government said, noting that Petters then sent an e-mail to Coleman that said, "Dancing...my sh[o]es have holes i[n] them."

Petters is still dancing. His defense claims he was victimized by others while he was distraught over the death of his son.