Tag: government

Waffle House Index Measures Hurricane Recovery

Waffle House

The Waffle House Index is an informal metric used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine the impact of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery:

When a hurricane makes landfall, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency relies on a couple of metrics to assess its destructive power.

First, there is the well-known Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. Then there is what he calls the “Waffle House Index.”

Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on. Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions.

via Waffle House Index Measures Hurricane Recovery – WSJ.com.

Panos Kouvelis is the Emerson Distinguished Professor of Operations and Manufacturing Management at Olin Business School and has written about the The ‘Waffle House’ Emergency Level Index:

Both Home Depot and Waffle House are world-class examples in their Disaster Management and Humanitarian Response Planning Approaches. The challenges they face are many: predicting customer demand after a disaster event; providing product required to the affected stores in an accurate and timely manner; establishing appropriate and ethical prices for their products; and maintaining adequate work-force levels after the event. The philosophy of both companies in such situations is more or less the same: getting back into the affected areas, opening stores as quickly as possible, and helping the local economy to rebuild.

As the former Waffle House Restaurants CEO, Bert Thorton, said after a hurricane: “Nothing good can come from a closed Waffle House after a hurricane—not for us, not for the community, not for the associates.” As customers, we couldn’t agree more, and we are grateful for it. We will accept that we cannot get our order of an “over-medium plate scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, diced, topped, peppered, and capped” in their limited menu after the tornado, and we will acknowledge their priceless service of hot meals to law enforcement, emergency responders, and anxious locals.

Today’s GAO Reports: No new GAO products were issued today

I am subscribed to various governmental listservs which range from the Republican-led Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure complaining about the government, to a daily Government Accountability Office Reports digest. The mailing lists generally aren’t glamorous, fairly boring, and often not so interesting (unless they call the Governor of New Jersey a liar), but they are a good source of information.

Every now and again they make me laugh, like today’s GAO Digest, which contained this gem:

Just like the [This Page Intentionally Left Blank] inscription in governmental reports, this is probably a response to people misconstruing no email as not receiving the ever-important email in error, or malice.

Call it an idiot workaround.

House Republicans to Big Data: “HULK SMASH”

Besides going back on their debt ceiling promise (and wanting to raise taxes on poor families) House Republicans voted to end the American Community Survey, which isn’t part of the decennial census, but is a yearly survey which records supremely useful survey charting what exactly it is that we Americans do, ranging from where you work and how you get there to your family and relationships. This is wonderful data and everyone from researchers to the business community uses this data to help craft products and services for Americans.

But to House Republicans, it is EVIL:

The House voted Wednesday to eliminate the detailed surveys of America that have been conducted by the Census Bureau since the nation’s earliest days.

House Republicans, increasingly suspicious of the census generally, advanced a measure to cut the American Community Survey. It passed 232 to 190.

The survey is not part of the constitutionally mandated population count, but some version of it has been done by law as part of the decennial survey since the time of Thomas Jefferson to assess the needs of the nation. It’s generally considered a vital tool for business.

Republicans, acknowledging its usefulness, attacked the survey as an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, arguing that the government has no business knowing how many flush toilets someone has, for instance.

“It would seem that these questions hardly fit the scope of what was intended or required by the Constitution,” said Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), author of the amendment.

“This survey is inappropriate for taxpayer dollars,” Webster added. “It’s the definition of a breach of personal privacy. It’s the picture of what’s wrong in Washington, D.C. It’s unconstitutional.”

via House Votes To Cut Census Survey Done Since Thomas Jefferson.

Too bad that the data is anonymized and individual records are not shared with anyone, including federal agencies and law enforcement entities. By law, the Census Bureau cannot share respondents’ answers with anyone, – not the IRS, not the FBI, not the CIA, and not with any other government agency. Rep. Webster should please review the meaning of “unconstitutional” before using those big words.

Luckily this bill has no chance of passing in the Senate.

Update 12 May 2012

Via Atlantic Cities blog post, What Killing the American Community Survey Would Actually Mean comes this article from Census Director Groves entitled, A Future Without Key Social and Economic Statistics for the Country:

The ACS is our country’s only source of small area estimates on social and demographic characteristics. Manufacturers and service sector firms use ACS to identify the income, education, and occupational skills of local labor markets they serve. Retail businesses use ACS to understand the characteristics of the neighborhoods in which they locate their stores. Homebuilders and realtors understand the housing characteristics and the markets in their communities. Local communities use ACS to choose locations for new schools, hospitals, and fire stations. There is no substitute from the private sector for ACS small area estimates. Even if the funding problems were solved in the proposed budget, the House bill also bans enforcement of the mandatory nature of participation in the ACS; this alone would require at least $64 million more in funding to achieve the same precision of ACS estimates.

Not to mention that many government programs are by statute dependent on data derived from the ACS. Conservative Republicans often complain that government isn’t as efficient as the private sector (a point I don’t agree with after working with many Fortune 100 companies), so how might we make government more efficient? Their solution is to cut any customer reporting and steer the ship blind. Thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Madness.

Update 21 May 2012

In even more ACS news, the New York Times thinks Rep. Webster is heralding the The Beginning of the End of the Census:

“This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators,” said Daniel Webster, a first-term Republican congressman from Florida who sponsored the relevant legislation.

“We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”

In fact, the randomness of the survey is precisely what makes the survey scientific, statistical experts say.

Each year the Census Bureau polls a representative, randomized sample of about three million American households about demographics, habits, languages spoken, occupation, housing and various other categories. The resulting numbers are released without identifying individuals, and offer current demographic portraits of even the country’s tiniest communities.

It is the largest (and only) data set of its kind and is used across the federal government in formulas that determine how much funding states and communities get for things like education and public health.
…
Other private companies and industry groups — including the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Retail Federation and the National Association of Home Builders — are up in arms.

Target recently released a video explaining how it used these census data to determine where to locate new stores. Economic development organizations and other business groups say they use the numbers to figure out where potential workers are.

Government Accountability Office says Chris Christie lied about Access to the Region’s Core

the tunnel project study map

For those of you following at home, we have been following the trials and tribulations of the now canceled Access to the Region’s Core transit rail tunnel – a new pair of tunnels under the Hudson River for New Jersey Transit. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie famously canceled the project in favor of shifting the more than $4 billion to the road transportation trust fund, eliminating the need to raise gas taxes (presently one of the lowest in the nation). The New York Times reports that Report Disputes Christie’s Reason for Halting Tunnel Project in 2010:

The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.

Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.

In fact, the GAO report1 makes clear that the State of New Jersey was on the hook for 32% of the total cost – less than half of Gov. Christie’s exaggerated claim.2 The report also makes clear that the project cost did not materially change, but rather was being refined as more detailed information came to light.

While ARC had some flaws – chiefly being composed as a deep-cavern terminal which was not directly connected to the existing Penn Station – the project was necessary to relieving the Hudson River crossing bottleneck: currently one 15-minute train disruption in the existing tunnel can delay as many as 15 other NJT and Amtrak trains. The chief beneficiary was New Jersey Transit riders who would now have a one-seat ride to Manhattan; secondary effects would be less cars on the road (meaning faster commutes and less pollution) and an increase in demand for housing in New Jersey communities close to NJT stations. All of this was a net-positive for New Jersey.

But Governor Christie3 killed the project under the aegis of fiscal responsibility, but was really all about keeping taxes low:

Canceling the tunnel, then the largest public works project in the nation, helped shape Mr. Christie’s profile as a rising Republican star, an enforcer of fiscal discipline in a country drunk on debt. But the report is likely to revive criticism that his decision, which he said was about “hard choices” in tough economic times, was more about avoiding the need to raise the state’s gasoline tax, which would have violated a campaign promise. The governor subsequently steered $4 billion earmarked for the tunnel to the state’s near-bankrupt transportation trust fund, traditionally financed by the gasoline tax.

Canceling ARC was nothing more than a naked political gambit, and the GAO called the Governor on his deceit. In Gov Christie’s world, it is better to spend the money on short-term gains, than to invest in an infrastructure project which would create long-term stability in a state which depends on New York for its survival.

At what point do we carve the New York-Connecticut-New Jersey MSA4 out of New York and New Jersey to create the 51st State – the State of New York City? Because trying to coordinate rational land use and transportation policy across state lines is not working at all.

State of NYC map

  1. Potential Impacts and Cost Estimates for the Cancelled Hudson River Tunnel Project, GAO-12-344, Mar 9, 2012 ↩
  2. Table 2: Proposed Funding by Source, as of April 2010, page 19 ↩
  3. I originally so much wanted to call Governor Christie the Corpulent King of Jersey, but that didn’t sound nice. So here it is, in a footnote ↩
  4. What’s a Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Area? ↩

You call them Lobbyists, we call them Expeditors

Big Media Matt has a prickly post riffing on a Politico story arguing that, Mitt Romney Shouldn't Need a Dedicated Lobbyist To Build His Tacky Megamansion:

Romney’s house sounds tacky and extravagant, but it’s not some kind of public safety hazard in urgent need of regulation. You shouldn’t need dedicated lobbyists to get permission to build buildings on property you legitimately own. At the end of the day, Romney is going to be able to hire the lobbyist and get his mansion built. But these same hurdles afflict people who might be interested in affordable housing for low-income people or simply regular old market rate structures for the middle class.

Not to defend Mitt Romney, but aesthetics aside, hiring a third-party to navigate regulations isn’t ground breaking.

Rebuilding

In New York City, generally you need an Expediter to file a permit application at the Department of Buildings in order to assit you through the different building codes (there are three currently in force), zoning codes and the general bureaucracy which each building permit application must go through to gain approval. The regulation complexity of having 200+ year old tenement buildings next to skyscrapers (the above photo has structures built ranging from 1883 to 2011) has created a new middleman whose job is to push paper, and in some cases, offer code review. Sometimes the Expediter is the very same architect which is designing and overseeing the project; I was once an Expediter and dealt directly with the DoB on projects I was designing under the review of a licensed architect. This is normal and part of the current process in New York City, Washington DC, Cincinnati, and other locations.

Aesthetics aside, I would argue that structures are, contra Yglesias, a public safety hazard in urgent need of regulation: buildings can, and do, fall down killing people. Having an effective, and efficient, code review process is necessary and proper to guard the citizenry from unsafe and hazardous building. Just recently an architect in California was charged in the death of a firefighter after he installed four outdoor fireplaces inside the house, in violation of building codes. This architect basically built a firetrap, and used faulty piping for the sprinklers which appears to have directly contributed to the death of a firefighter.

There are tons of other examples of willful or unintentional negligence by architects, engineers and builders which has caused building damage and death. This is why becoming a licensed architect is so onerous, and why building codes (which often seem to get in the way of your precious design) are to be followed.

Can the permit process be more efficient, and less encumbered by red tape? Yes. Should government find a balance between efficiency and the mandate to create a safe environment? Yes. Does the presence of this third-party mean we should deregulate building permit applications? No.

I hope that Matt is arguing for more efficient code review, rather than no code review; the only reason Politico called Romney’s expediter a Lobbyist is that it fits Romney’s larger narrative of being out of touch and super rich (which is probably true).