I recently attended a talk by David Hume, a BC government expert in civic engagement. He gave the Apps 4 Climate Action contest as an interesting form of civic engagement. The contest submissions are in and people’s choice voting has started. I’ve reviewed the apps:

The Climate Reports

Given that the Net is now full of data visualization toys like Gapminder, visualizing single datasets in a PDF is fail.

MathTappers

Your app demo is a video?! Fail.

The Dictionary of the Climate Debate

Why is this an app? Fail.

Rain Caddy

I love that the app loudly recommends using a tin can instead of this fail.

Save the Rain

Cool trick to calculate roof area, but this app doesn’t really do much.

GreenMoney

First fail for requiring sign-up. Second fail for not understanding anything about economics.

Etho App

Vaporware. I hope they failed their course.

Smoggy

This game sucks and just has some data bolted on. Fail.

Waterly

Looked pretty good until it told me I should consider watering my lawn today even though it’s illegal. Fail.

Canadian Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Industrial Sector

This isn’t an app. Fail.

ShowMeBC

Requires Microsoft Silverfail.

Vancouver Bike Routes

Useful until Google Maps rolls out biking directions for Vancouver. Fails to use climate change data as per contest rules.

BCEmissions.ca

They don’t use the best visualization for some of the data, but the real fail here is the lack of comparison to other municipalities.

VELO

This commercial app was launched in fall of 2009, which is allowed by the contest but lame. The app also fails to make sense.

The Effects of Rising Sea Levels on Vancouver due to Global Warming

An amaturely low amount of effort went into this failapp.

VanTrash

Wonderful app and receiving lots of great press, but it clearly violates the terms of the contest by not using climate change data.

My #1 pick goes to Save the Rain followed by BCEmissions.ca. No other apps deserve anything. Given that the top prize is $5500, I’m surprised that the competition was so weak. (I was ineligible to participate.)

All public sector organizations in BC are required to release salaries for everyone who makes over $75k/year. They’re not, however, required to do it in machine-readable format (the legislation was written in the 80s). So the Vancouver Sun does optical-character recognition on all of it and makes it searchable online – but note, the Sun doesn’t provide a dump of their database; they’re trying to make a buck, not fix the world.

If you know managers in public organizations, it’s marginally fun to look them up. And it’s fun to look up random professors* (although it was more fun when I was a student in Ontario, where the publication cut-off is $100k). But beyond that I’m not really sure what it’s good for? The Sun has tried to do some analysis about the ballooning public service, but deep in the article they note that Ontario’s is growing at the same size. And besides, the neoconservative vision for the public service is to have a bunch of private-sector contracts overseen by a handful of highly-paid public servants.

* 50 university and college employees with a title that includes “computer science” make over $75k…51 employees with “philosophy” do.

Rumor has it that MiniFor is axing people today, or did so yesterday. Trying to confirm through my contacts there…

[Update: Confirmed. They started notifying "redundancies" -- gotta love bizeuphespeak -- just over an hour ago.

Stumpage -- the fee paid by logging companies to the Ministry for the right to log the land -- is way down, apparently, this year. These employment cuts probably reflect that.]

All provincial and federal public servants are supposed to be non-partisan during work hours. Most of them are free to do partisan activity in their free time. We’ve come a long way since 1960 when Dave Barrett had to get special permission to run, and even longer since 1899 when public servants weren’t allowed to vote in BC. I happen to be in one of the few positions that has a higher burden of non-partisanship (although that hasn’t been tested in court, as far as I know): I am expected to remain non-partisan in my private life.

The members of the Local Government Elections Task Force were all appointed by Cabinet. Apparently some people^[who?] consider the Task Force to have a partisan slant. To maintain my squeaky-clean image, my employer asked me to remove my personal opinions from my post on the Task Force.

The impact of social media on the political status of public servants is an active area of research. Requests for interviews with me can be left in the comments.

The City of Victoria council now has three options for the Johnson Street Bridge:

1. hold a referendum
2. decide not to replace the bridge
3. get the money somewhere else

I’m not going to speculate on the political cost, but there’s an obvious way to do #3: a design-build-finance-operate public-private partnership. Instead of just constructing a bridge with government money, the construction partner borrows the money on the private market and the government promises to pay them fee over the lifetime of the contract. These partnerships make the most sense when there is a revenue risk, such as a toll.

The Golden Ears Bridge on the Fraser River is the obvious precedent. The Golden Crossing Group is paid a fixed fee and tolls go to Translink (I suspect a private partner would demand power to set the toll if it were their source of revenue). The contract includes things like safety bonuses, maintenance standards and availability guarantees.

The P3 idea was first floated, to my knowledge, by Victoria Vision. Putting a toll on the bridge would solve the complaint of some Victoria residents that they’re paying for a bridge used mostly by people living in eastern municipalities. The BC Liberals like P3s, so the project might attract some money from the provincial government.

I’d like to see a P3 request written generally enough to get both refurbish and rebuild proposals, which can then be compared based on hard, fixed costs. This can be done by specifying a pay scale for the hand-back condition of the bridge at the end of the contract: the company gets a pay-out based on years of life left.

BC Ferries is one of the key pieces of infrastructure in BC. It used to be a Crown corporation. Now it’s…something else. “Independently-operated public corporation”, let’s say.

I think very few people know how BC Ferries is structured despite the importance of the service. I had the opportunity to do an assignment on BC Ferries so now I can explain it to you:

BC Ferry Services Inc (BCFS) owns the ferries, leases the terminals (from the province) and employs the unionized workers that run them. BCFS has a contract with the Ministry of Transportation that includes subsidies for some of the routes. BCFS has issued some bonds that are mostly held by national banks – as far as I can tell, there are no covenants on those bonds that give the holders control of BCFS.

Ferry ticket prices are set by the BC Ferry Commission, which is an independent statutory office appointed by the Legislative Assembly. (So if you think prices are too high, write your MLA.)

The board of BCFS is mostly members of the BC Ferry Authority (BCFA), which is a public partnership. The BCFA is appointed as follows:

• 4 by coastal regional districts
• 2 by Cabinet
• 1 by the BC Ferry & Marine Workers’ Union
• 2 by the previous directors of the BCFA

I think the point of having the two-layer BCFA-BCFS board is to prevent political meddling and accountability but mostly to make BCFS independent enough to secure its own bonds. The other value of independence is that the only constraints on BC Ferries is the contract. (If you don’t like the terms of the contract, write the Minister of Transportation.)

The two big questions I have are:

• What principles is the BCFS board operating under? Maximizing shareholder value doesn’t make sense.
• How do the banks and the markets see the reality of this whole thing? How would you create a model for the value of the bonds?

I’m taking two online university courses this term while I work full time:

• Introduction to Public Administration
• Public Sector Management

I’ll probably write blog posts less often. I am keeping an eye out for course content that’s worth sharing, as I have done in the past.

The CCPA tried to measure how much we benefit from public service. But they noted that the biggest problem with their study is that actually the only data available is to measure the cost of public services consumed by households. Government cannot use the market theory of value because the things government produces (mostly as a monopoly) are not traded in markets; instead, government accountants use the cost-of-production theory of value.

Cost theories of value have been rejected by neoclassical economics. Not having any way of measuring the value besides the cost means that cost-benefit analysis is meaningless. So when business people look at government services they see them as at most zero net benefit.

This is similar to the problem of measuring government’s success by changes in gross domestic product (GDP). Government needs critical accounting more desperately than the private sector does.

Do taxes redistribute wealth from hard-workers to moochers or pay for public services that the wealthy disproportionately consume (eg: bigger target of property crime, children more likely to go to university, etc.)? The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has attempted to measure how much Canadians benefit from public services.

The CCPA says 82% of public service consumption is measurable by household; only 18% is indivisible things like environmental protection and national defense. People in households that make more than $50k/year all get around $15k/year (households that make less get significant transfer payments). Wealthier households tend to have more people in them, so they consume more public services at the household level.

Here’s the most detailed table the report provides for figuring out how much you’re getting:

Multiply by the number of people in your household. Then subtract your total personal taxes from the Fraser Institute’s calculator. (I figure the left-wing bias of the CCPA will cancel out the right-wing bias of the Fraser Institute.) If you have a surplus, vote for more taxes; if you have a deficit, vote for tax cuts.

There are three layers of instruction and direction given to public servants: legislation, policy and procedure. Narratives have a long history in legislation, and are often used something like this:

1. A journalist writes a human interest story about a member of a class of wronged people. Alternately, a lawyer finds a named plaintiff to represent a class in a class action lawsuit.
2. Legislative committees invite non-expert “witnesses” to tell personal narratives (I get the impression that Congressional committees do this more than House of Commons/Legislative Assembly committees but here’s an example).
3. Bills get written and passed that are either explicitly eponymous or coined so by journalists (eg: Grant’s Law).

You could say that politicians and journalists are into narratives because those professions are all about image. But policy analysts don’t use narratives, which I think is neglecting a powerful tool. The first significant move in this direction that I know about is the column “Narrative Matters” in the health policy journal Health Affairs. It makes sense that narratives would first be used in “tissue” policy, but I believe that sooner or later there’ll be policy narratives about small businesses, logging licenses and tax law.