Cities Rent Police, Janitors to Save Cash

Faced with a $118 million budget deficit, the city of San Jose, Calif., recently decided it could no longer afford its own janitors. So the city's budget called for dropping its custodial staff and hiring outside contractors to clean its city hall and airport, saving about $4 million.

To keep all its swimming pools open and staffed, the city is replacing some city workers with contractors.

"These are cases where the question is being asked, 'Is this a core service at the city level?' " said Michelle McGurk, senior policy adviser to the San Jose mayor.

After years of whittling staff and cutting back on services, towns and cities are now outsourcing some of the most basic functions of local government, from policing to trash collection. Services that cities can no longer afford to provide are being contracted to private vendors, counties or even neighboring towns.

The move saves cities budget-crushing costs of employee benefits like health insurance and retirement. Critics say contracting means giving up local control and personalized services.

Cities say they have little choice. Municipalities across the U.S. will face a projected shortfall of $56 to $86 billion between 2010 and 2012, according to a report from the National League of Cities.

"You can do across-the-board cuts for only so long," said Andrew Belknap, Western Regional Vice President for Management Partners, a government consulting group. "It's gone from the tactical cost cutting to get through a recession, to in some cases saying we have to exit that business or service altogether."

Maywood, a tiny city southeast of Los Angeles, is taking contracting to the extreme. The city of around 40,000 is letting go of its entire staff and contracting with outsiders to perform all city services. The city is disbanding its police force and handing public safety over to the Los Angeles County Sheriff. Its neighbor, the city of Bell, will take over running Maywood's City Hall.

Like many towns, Maywood is battling a budget deficit. But city officials said they were forced into the situation when the city's insurance carrier decided to cancel coverage because of the $21 million in legal expenses and judgments against the city stemming from the conduct of its police department. Without insurance, the city is barred from hiring employees who work directly for the city.

"We're on the cutting edge here. We're the tip of the spear," said Magdalena Prado, Maywood's community-relations officer, who works for the city as a contractor. Ms. Prado said she has gotten inquiries from cities across the country "wanting to know how this is going to play out. They're facing their own financial strains and looking to us as an example."

Maywood officials insist services will continue. The city has for years used contract workers to run services such as parks and recreation.

But not every transition is smooth, and city employees losing their jobs are seldom eager to help their replacements take them over.

Cities can face expensive lawsuits or severance costs when they lay off employees, although these costs differ in every city, depending on the union contract, the number of people losing their jobs and whether the contractor is willing to hire the former employees.

Maywood city council member Felipe Aguirre said the city negotiated severance packages with civilian employees, but the former police officers have been more difficult. The police union attempted to stop the city from dismantling the department by filing a temporary restraining order. The order wasn't granted, and the police department was disbanded July 1.

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officials say they are getting more inquiries from cities and towns who want to pay them to take over local policing. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has policing contracts with 42 out of 88 cities in the county.

States in the Red

Most states have addressed or still face gaps in their budgets, while tax revenue declined in the final quarter of 2009.

More on the State, Local Fiscal Crisis

• Schools Face Test on Budget Math
  06/15/10
• States Squeeze Local Schools
  06/14/10
• A School Prays for Help
  06/14/10
• Disabled Face Hard Choices as States Slash Medicaid
  05/20/10
• Strapped City Cuts and Cuts
  04/13/10
• Toledo's Fiscal Reckoning -- City Takes on Unions as It Manages to Patch a $48 Million Gap in Its Budget
  04/08/10
• Cash-Poor Cities Take On Unions
  04/01/10
• Police, Fire Departments Face Budget Axe
  02/12/10
• States Try to Tax More Services as Coffers Deflate
  02/07/10
• As Slump Hits Home, Cities Downsize Their Ambitions
  12/26/09

Lakewood, a small city near Long Beach, is known nationally for developing a model city structure, known as the Lakewood Plan, that contracts out some major services while maintaining local control over others. The city contracts 40% of its services to outside vendors, including public safety, which is run by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Other areas it continues to handle itself, including parks and recreation, city-hall administrative services and the water department.

Outsourcing is on the rise around the country. Johns Creek, an Atlanta suburb that incorporated in 2006, contracted all of its city-hall and public-works services with CH2M Hill, a Denver company that provides everything from staff to furniture. The city maintains its own fire and police departments, and employs its own city manager and finance director.

"The county was hard-pressed to provide the services here that people wanted and expected," said Doug Nurse, the city's spokesman, and a CH2M Hill employee. "We had everything in place. We were good to go."

In California, the state's $19 billion budget deficit is putting additional pressure on local governments. The state has begun to reduce the amount of redevelopment funds cities have traditionally received; Pasadena, for instance, had to hand $10.8 million back to the state.

In Long Beach, city officials are considering a plan to help close an $18.5 million budget deficit by hiring a private contractor to manage city marinas.

"We're trying to focus on core services so that non-core services can be eliminated eventually," said David Wodynski, the assistant director of financial management for Long Beach.

A recent Nevada state law requires cities and counties to study consolidating services and provide detailed analysis to lawmakers by September.

The Los Angeles suburbs of Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena are contemplating merging services such as tree-trimming, employee training, purchasing and police helicopters. All three face deficits, and reductions in state funds. The cities have already started a joint emergency-dispatch center that has grown to include other cities.

Glendale has faced an $8 million shortfall on a $170 million annual budget for the last three years, said city manager Jim Starbird, and has already cut police and fire personnel.

"We have to find ways to reduce the costs of services we provide," he said. "We can't just keep cutting services."

Housing Starts Decline

U.S. builders held back their shovels and cut housing starts again in June, but a sign emerged of a turnaround in construction.

Housing starts dropped by 5.0%, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 549,000, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. Single-family housing starts slipped 0.7% to an annual rate of 454,000. Apartment construction fell harder.

Permits for new construction, however, rose, signaling a pickup down the road for builders.

The 5.0% drop was more than forecast and brought starts to the lowest level ...

How long can the Higgs boson keep hiding?

For 50 years, physicists have been hunting for the missing piece in the puzzle of the universe. At last, says Graham Farmelo, a sighting may not be too far away .

How detecting the Higgs boson in the LHC would look. Finding the elusive last piece of the puzzle may not be far away, says Graham Farmelo.

When will it show its face? Since the existence of the Higgs particle was first predicted almost half a century ago, thousands of physicists have spent many millions of pounds in an attempt to pin it down, as yet to no avail. Last week, the web was humming with rumours that experimenters at Fermilab, near Chicago, had observed the particle using their Tevatron atom-smasher. But the lab’s authorities moved quickly to quash the gossip, using its Twitter feed to dismiss the “rumours spread by one fame-seeking blogger”. If nature really has chosen to involve the Higgs in its grand scheme, it is doing an excellent job of keeping it secret.

At first glance, it seems odd that an obscure subatomic particle has attracted so much attention. It’s not just that it would be much too small for any human being to see – theorists predict that it will weigh billions of times less than a typical dust particle, and will have only the briefest of lives. After each one is born, death should follow about a hundred trillionths of a trillionth of a second later as it falls apart to produce other particles.

Yet physicists care deeply about the Higgs, because its putative existence follows from an elegant theoretical idea that helps explain why almost all of the most basic particles have mass. The Higgs theory, named after its co-author – a distinguished, now-retired theoretician at the University of Edinburgh – does a lot to explain why you and every material thing around you are not as insubstantial as light.

At a deeper level, what makes the Higgs particle so important is that it represents the one unconfirmed part of perhaps the greatest triumph of modern science – the theory of the fundamental particles and the main forces between them. Known by the stupefyingly dull name of the Standard Model, it is based on quantum theory and relativity, and gives an excellent account of virtually all subatomic experiments ever performed. If the existence of the Higgs particle (or quite possibly several of them) could be demonstrated, theoreticians would be much more confident that this part of the Model is correct, and not a convenient fiction.

These experts have used their equations to make plenty of specific predictions about how the Higgs should behave. The problem is that they have not been able to say precisely how heavy it is, making life difficult for the teams of experimenters searching for it. By the year 2000, it was possible to specify only that it was pretty heavy by subatomic standards, weighing at least 120 times as much as a proton.

The only machines with sufficient power to generate a particle this heavy are the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. As a result, their host laboratories – Fermilab and Cern – are the only places in the entire world that stand a chance of claiming the prize of being the first to see the Higgs. In public, the two labs say that it doesn’t matter who wins, but in private the competition is becoming more intense by the month.

If it is the LHC that finally locates it, it would be a triumph for the largest and most complex machine ever built. Sometimes called “the fastest racetrack on Earth”, its aim is to look in unprecedented detail at the subatomic world by smashing together protons that have been accelerated to within a whisker of the speed of light. About 600 million collisions take place every second inside several gigantic detectors, each of them a masterpiece of precision engineering. It is then up to scientists, aided by their global network of computers, to examine the shower of debris from each collision and shed light on the innermost workings of the universe.

Technology like this does not come cheap. The total cost of setting up the LHC was about £6 billion, with Britain paying the annual equivalent of a fancy cappuccino for every adult in the UK. For this, we get to be one of the leading players in this multinational project, and to benefit from its spin-offs.

After serious helium leaks forced it to be switched off only days after the extraordinary festival of publicity that heralded its completion in September 2008, the LHC is now in exquisite shape. Meanwhile, the Tevatron in Chicago was collecting data and is currently in the best position to catch first sight of the Higgs.

“I personally am very confident that if the Higgs particle is there, it will turn out to be around 140 times as heavy as the proton,” says Stefan Söldner-Rembold of the University of Manchester, a physicist working at the Tevatron. That would put it just about within range for the Tevatron to produce and observe.

At the moment, the LHC is running at half its projected maximum energy, with two of its colossal particle detectors focused on hunting for the Higgs. However, it is highly unlikely that the experimenters will be able to pin the particle down before the machine begins to run at full power, from around 2013. “It could well be that the Tevatron will see the first hints of the Higgs particle,” says British theoretician John Ellis at Cern, “but it will take the LHC to pin down it down with complete confidence.” So perhaps the prize for getting the Higgs to show its face clearly will be shared.

If experimenters can definitively prove the Higgs’s existence, the discovery will be a triumph for the whole enterprise of theoretical physics, and its effort, in Stephen Hawking’s enticing phrase, to “know the mind of God”. But what if it doesn’t exist? Even though the LHC was designed to investigate many other things, including antimatter, and could eventually discover the existence of dozens of new particles, to find out that its creators have been on a decades-long wild goose chase might be regarded as something of an embarrassment.

Certainly, the public will be surprised after all the media hoopla about the Higgs, and its allegedly divine importance (the Nobel-winning experimenter Leon Lederman once called it “the God particle”, but has never successfully explained why, beyond the need for a catchy title to sell a book).

Physicists are nothing if not inventive, and some already have explanations up their sleeves if the Higgs does not exist – some of the hottest new theories involve the existence of additional dimensions, beyond the usual ones of space and time.

But most believe in their bones that the Higgs is about to shed its shyness and show us its face. The leading theoretician Nima Arkani-Hamed, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, is so convinced that he has bet a year’s salary on the Higgs being found, either at Fermilab or the Large Hadron Collider.

My own guess is that his money is safe, and that we’ll see the Higgs within the next five years as part of another, long-awaited golden age in particle physics.

Ron Paul EXPOSES the Real GDP and Unemployment Numbers

Times loses almost 90% of online readership

Less than three weeks after the Times paywall went up, data shows a massive decline in web traffic

The registration page for thetimes.co.uk - 25.6% of users sign up and proceed to the Times site

The Times has lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June, calculations by the Guardian show.

Unregistered users of thetimes.co.uk are now "bounced" to a Times+ membership page where they have to register if they want to view Times content. Data from the web metrics company Experian Hitwise shows that only 25.6% of such users sign up and proceed to a Times web page; based on custom categories (created at the Guardian) that have been used to track the performance of major UK press titles online, visits to the Times site have fallen to 4.16% of UK quality press online traffic, compared with 15% before it made registration compulsory on 15 June.

These figures can then be used to model how this may impact on the number of users hitting the new Times site. Based on the last available ABCe data for Times Online readership (from February 2010), which showed that it had 1.2 million daily unique users, and Hitwise's figures showing it had 15% of UK online newspaper traffic, that means a total of 332,800 daily users trying to visit the Times site.

If none of the people visiting the site have already registered, the one-on-four dropout rate means that traffic actually going from the registration site to the Times site is just 84,800, or 1.06% of total UK newspaper traffic – a 93% fall compared with May.

However, some have registered: Dan Sabbagh, formerly the media correspondent for the Times, suggests that about 150,000 users registered for access to the Times and Sunday Times while they were free, with 15,000 apparently agreeing to pay money.

If all 150,000 form part of the total 332,800 users going to the site, the fall in traffic is 84% compared with May: 182,800 would be unregistered and "bounced" to the registration site – but only 45,700 would proceed to the site, based on the Hitwise numbers. The total number of daily visitors would thus be 195,700, or just 16% of the February and May pre-registration figures.

News International withdrew in March from the voluntary ABCe auditing scheme, saying only that it had "suspended the public reporting of monthly ABCe website traffic for Times Online and the Sun" and that News International is "working with ABCe to help evolve metrics related to engagement as the business models evolve". But, on these figures, it would now have between 84,800 and 195,700 daily unique users.

The huge drop matches the industry expectation before the Times instituted the paywall that traffic would fall off by 90%, which is the standard experience when a site moves to a paid-access model instead of free access.

The figures are also unlikely to surprise some executives at the Times: the Sunday Times's editor, John Witherow, predicted in May that "perhaps more than 90%" of pre-registration readers were likely to be lost once the registration-only service was implemented.

It is not clear whether the number of people visiting the site will generate enough revenue to justify the experiment – which Rupert Murdoch says could produce "significant revenues" and, if successful, could see other free-access news websites follow suit.

There are approximately 150,000 Times print subscribers who get a free online registration, but if the estimated 15,000 daily online users who agreed to pay opt for the £2 a week deal, the paywall will generate £120,000 a month – £1.4m a year.

Digital revenue should not be seen in isolation to print revenue, however. Sales of the Times have been given a modest boost from the serialisation of Lord Mandelson's book The Third Man, yet News International's accounts to June 2009 show a daily loss of about £240,000 for both Times titles, and last month's ABCs show a year-on-year headline monthly circulation slump of 14%, to 503,642.

Sabbagh goes on to calculate that the typical Times print reader is worth "at least two and a half times" the average online reader.

The Times started redirecting traffic to registration pages on 15 June, and put the paywall fully in place on 2 July.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

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BP photoshops fake photo of crisis command center, posts on main BP site

UPDATE 12:08PM Eastern 7/20/10: BP has faked yet another oil crisis response photo on its Web site.

UPDATE: 11:14PM Eastern: BP has now posted the "original" photo, they claim. Except - surprise - they are refusing to post the high-resolution version of the new "original" photo. They posted the high-res version of the altered photo earlier, and in fact, that version is still live via a link below the new photo. Why not post the high-res version of the new "original" photo? Afraid someone is going to enlarge it and find out it's fake too?

UPDATE 10:37PM Eastern: The Washington Post has the story now. Oddly, BP is now claiming that the photo is real - but it showed blank screens, and rather than show blank screens at AP's crisis center, they instead put fake content-filled screens in the photo. Uh, a few questions.

1) Why were the screens in the crisis center blank in the middle of the crisis? Coffee break?
2) The BP spokesman claims that the photographer photoshopped the changes. Really? A professional photographer hired by BP Photoshops so poorly that a 12 year old kid could do a better job. Really? Let me show you what BP said exactly, and then the photo that supposedly this "professional" edited:

Scott Dean, a spokesman for BP, said that there was nothing sinister in the photo alteration and provided the original unaltered version. He said that a photographer working for the company had inserted the three images in spots where the video screens were blank.

Now here is the Photoshop job that the "professional" photographer did - this is just one part of the photo that he screwed up:



Anyone who has ever used Photoshop knows that this is an incredibly amateur job. I can do far better than this, and I tend to play with Photoshop for fun. We're to believe that a professional photographer did this poor a job, for pay, for a huge corporate client? Really? No one would hire this photographer again if this is true. Oh, and the photographer added the fake screens to the photo, what, without BP's permission? That's what they're implying, "the photographer did it."

3) Why does the meta data show that the photo was actually taken on March 6, 2001? Or is BP next going to tell us that their professional photographer has never set the time and date stamp on his multi-thousand dollar camera? Because then all of his photos for all of his clients will be screwed up. Really?
______________________________________

UPDATE: The photo contains data suggesting it was taken in 2001, not July of 2010 as claimed on BP's Web site. That would suggest, at least one possibility is, that BP took an old photo and Photoshopped new pictures of the oil spill over it, to make it look "new." More on this at the end of the post.

I guess if you're doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center. Why do they need a fake photo at all? Don't they have a real crisis response center they could have used?

Original BP Photo that is linked off of this page, with a snippet of the photo:



Note the bad Photoshop job on the parts I cropped and blew up - click on each photo to see the larger version, which makes it painfully clear that they faked the photo (poorly, at that):















UPDATE: BP has apologized for the Photoshopped version of its command center, and it has just released this new, unedited version.



In all seriousness, an astute reader noticed that the meta info for the photo says it was created in 2001, not July 16, 2010 as claimed on BP's site. It looks like BP took a photo from 2001, and in order to make it look like the command center in July of 2010, they pasted pictures of the oil well leaking over the old photo.

Las Vegas Vs. Homeless People

I am so embarrassed for Las Vegas. There seems no limit on how outrageous the city is willing to be in what is becoming an out of control campaign to persecute the least fortunate people in all of Las Vegas. Let's review. This year Las Vegas made it illegal to give food to homeless people in parks. Then Las Vegas made it illegal for people to sleep near "deposits" of urine and feces. To be fair the "deposit" law was deemed too outrageous to keep on the books and the city repealed it; after which the police began jailing homeless people in an effort to enforce the nonexistent law. Today's Review-Journal headline: "Shopping carts taken from homeless: They say they were denied chance to keep belongings." To Oscar Goodman, Las Vegas City Council and Metro: Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you.