"After spoiling 3 weekends, snow takes aim at Valentine’s Day" by Dan Adams, Megan Woolhouse and Jon Chesto, Globe Correspondent | Globe Staff February 14, 2015
I'm sure it is a conspiracy! Weather has been known to do that.
With the accumulating winter snows costing Massachusetts companies more than $1 billion in lost sales and productivity, Governor Charlie Baker Friday urged consumers to patronize their local businesses and sought to extend the Valentine’s Day holiday to a week of post-storm spending.
If I had the money to spend....
The governor stood with several statewide business leaders Friday and issued a proclamation declaring the coming February school break “Valentine’s Week,” to make up for the sharp loss of business that restaurants and retailers are expecting on a snowy Saturday night.
See: The great Valentine Week whiteout
“It’s been extremely hard for small businesses,” Baker said. “We want to encourage everyone, once the storm passes, to get out and visit your Main Street businesses.”
Baker’s unusual plea came as the MBTA announced it will close the transit system on Sunday and the region prepared for a foot or more of snow that is forecast to begin falling Saturday night, accompanied by winds up to 75 miles per hour. The governor said he is considering imposing another travel ban during this storm, but will wait until Saturday to decide.
Related:
What to fix first on the T?
Crews push to clear roadways ahead of storm
Weeks of snowfall leave drivers in combative mood
They are slashing tires now?
MBTA shutdowns bring out both sides of Charlie Baker
T union’s smart move to let MBTA hire Peter Pan buses
Look at the line out in that bitter cold.
Snowstorms don’t need to stop Boston cold
God, I'm tired of the whining.
Not important, even though it i$:
Economists estimate the drop-off in consumer spending, missed days at work, and transportation delays caused by the string of winter storms have already cost Massachusetts more than $1 billion in lost business activity. The losses are sizable enough to reduce the local economy’s output by 1 percentage point during the beginning of 2015.
Another big storm that shuts down the roads and transit system for several days would inflict deeper damage on the state economy in the short term, said Doug Handler, chief US economist for IHS Global Insight, a Lexington-based forecasting firm.
“It’s about the day-to-day disruptions, the number of days where economic activity more or less ceases,” Handler said. “There will be an impact.”
The impact on the local economy could rival the hit it took last year when weeks of bitter cold, known as the polar vortex, descended on much of the nation, causing business activity to contract more than 2 percent.
We were told there would be no polar vortex this year and we are now seeing record cold.
Personally, I have never felt such bone-chilling numbness in going to get a Globe -- ever!
So it's good for an excuse to explain rotten economy, but....
It took three to six months for the economy to thaw out, but business output eventually recovered, said Northeastern University economist Alan Clayton-Matthews.
Related: “The story for the Massachusetts economy, if you ignore high levels of unemployment and inequality, is the economy has been performing very well.”
He said the local economy could suffer even more this year if the weather pattern doesn’t break soon.
“With another foot of snow, who knows what it could do,” said Clayton-Matthews.
Exactly! Not you guys!
Around the region, the clogged roads, crippled transit system, and snow-blocked sidewalks and parking lots are making it difficult for employees to get to work, deliveries to get to stores and companies, and consumers to go out and shop.
“People just aren’t coming,” bemoaned Jeffrey Azzoto, owner of Focal Point Opticians in Coolidge Corner, Brookline....
“With the snow, people are just worn-out and frazzled,” said Brookline Booksmith co-owner Dana Brigham. “They aren’t going out for dinner, a movie, and a browse at the bookstore.”
No?
*******************
Retailers and restaurants are particularly upset at the timing of this weekend’s storm, because Valentine’s Day is one of their busiest times of the year.
Jon Hurst, president of Retailers Association of Massachusetts, estimated Valentine’s Day-related sales represent a half-billion dollars in the state; consumers, on average, spend more than $150 on the holiday.
“If we lose those sales, they’re never going to come back,” Hurst said at a news conference at the State House with Baker.
It almo$t breaks your heart.
Jay Ash, the state’s economic development secretary, said he was the only customer at one of his favorite restaurants in Chelsea one day this week.
I know the feeling.
The restaurant stopped its takeout delivery business because the piles of snow routinely delayed drivers or prevented them from parking at customers’ homes.
Traffic conditions are not only costing businesses sales, but forcing some to spend more money to keep the flow of freight going. On Friday, A. Duie Pyle, a Pennsylvania-based trucking company with operations in Massachusetts, said it had transferred 35 drivers, dock workers, and other staff from terminals in other states to New England. Employees are also working double shifts, the shipper said, and the company plans to run trucks on Saturday to companies that can receive deliveries.
And up go the shipping rates again!
“Pickup and delivery efforts in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island are still impeded by ongoing snow removal, road restrictions, and customers with limited access,” the company said in an alert posted on its website, “making normal pickup and delivery service extremely problematic.”
In Canton, Humboldt Storage & Moving has spent thousands of dollars to have snow cleared from the roof of its large storage warehouse, owner Howard Goldman said....
Consumers, meanwhile, are understandably fatigued from fighting so much snow and have little energy to slog out to stores.
“It’s just not worth the trouble going out,” said 42-year-old Eric Jamieson, who made an exception Friday to buy his wife a Valentine’s gift at the Derby Street Shoppes in Hingham. “I’d rather just deal with the necessities.”
I have no choice on that.
Nearby, Grace Seibert-Larke said she had come only reluctantly to the shopping center to get her iPad repaired at the Apple Store.
“I’m definitely not in a shopping mood,” the 68-year-old Marshfield resident said. “I feel bad for all of these stores. This weather can’t be good for the economy.”
Or a lot of other things.
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NEXT DAY UPDATES:
"Storm brings more snow to winter-weary region" by Evan Allen, Laura Crimaldi and Jennifer Smith, Globe Staff | Globe Correspondent February 14, 2015
Another wintry blast, another day of staring at the world through frosted glass, darkly.
As the sixth snowstorm in three weeks began its assault on a winter-weary region on Valentine’s Day, airlines canceled hundreds of flights out of Logan Airport, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority planned to shut down completely, and snowy side streets of South Boston were reconfigured into one-way thoroughfares to reduce congestion.
Related: One-way solution tested in South Boston
The storm, which is expected to become a blizzard, is forecast to dump as much as a foot of snow on Boston, which is already struggling with almost 80 inches for the winter, and dashed hope of romantic evenings for some diners, as local restaurants saw a spate of snow-related cancellations....
Mine had already been dashed, sorry.
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"T’s shutdown has riders scrambling; Some employees can’t get to jobs; shops hit again" by Jennifer Smith, Globe Correspondent February 15, 2015
Aimee Lee, 29, who was waiting for the Red Line at Downtown Crossing Saturday morning, was not aware that the subway was closed Sunday.
“Well, I’m not going to work anymore,” said Lee, who does not have a car.
Lee uses the T to get to her three jobs in downtown Boston, Quincy, and Jamaica Plain, along with running errands, as there is no grocery store or CVS within walking distance of her Roslindale home, she said.
Catching a cab when public transportation is unavailable is nearly impossible, Lee said, since the in-demand cabs are often unwilling to traverse narrow, barely plowed streets.
“I just don’t go anywhere when the T isn’t running, meaning I don’t go into work, meaning I’ll probably get fired, meaning I won’t get paid,” she said.
Businesses are suffering too....
It's worse than last winter.
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Look, you can protest all you want. Things could be a lot worse.
"The T’s long, winding, infuriating road to failure" by David Scharfenberg, Globe Staff February 15, 2015
The true story of the breakdown is not one of sudden failure.
As if truth could be found in the propaganda pre$$.
It is a decades-long tale of grand ambitions and runaway costs, of lawmakers who failed to invest amid warnings of collapse, and a system reaching for expansion even as its core deteriorated.
And I simply do not have the time this morning.
And it is, in some respects, a tale of opportunities — a few seized and many missed....
Uh-oh.
The story could begin in many places. But start in 1990.
Governor Michael Dukakis was at the tail end of his third and final term. The Big Dig, an idea two decades in the making, was moving closer to reality. And the governor was determined to push the project forward and cement his legacy.
The Conservation Law Foundation, an influential environmental advocacy group, sensed an opportunity.
That's when I want the brakes applied so I can get off the train!
**************************
But there was nothing so significant as “forward funding” reform, which went into effect in July 2000.
Before the law passed, the MBTA was “backward funded.” It spent what it spent and then presented lawmakers with a bill at the end of the year to cover any deficit. It was more like giving a teenager an unlimited allowance than a prescription for fiscal discipline.
Yes, Ma$$achu$etts is a backward state!
The idea, with forward funding, was to make the T self-sufficient. The agency would get a dedicated funding stream — a penny on every nickel collected in state sales tax.
Woa!
And it would take on the debt the state had acquired over the years building MBTA projects, including the Big Dig-related work.
Forward funding, though, quickly foundered. Sales tax revenue projections proved too rosy. And costs shot up much higher than expected.
It's the same damn story around here!
Take energy.
The T, in the decade that followed the change, was the single largest consumer of electricity in the state. Its trains and buses churned through tens of millions of dollars of gasoline, diesel fuel, and compressed natural gas each year.
And between the 2001 and 2008 fiscal years, fuel and utility bills soared by 122 percent — well above the projected 22 percent.
Well, they are down so taxpayers will be seeing extra loot, right?
Instead there is -- we are told -- a billion dollar hole in the damn thing!
With skyrocketing costs and sagging revenue, chipping away at the transit agency’s debt proved nearly impossible. The T, in fact, repeatedly restructured that debt to balance its books — pushing the problem forward, and, in some cases, exacerbating it.
You are seeing the problem crippling us all, right?
The sirens were soon to come. Would anyone listen?
The last chance to “stand up and fight” came during the Romney administration.
************************
Even those most critical of MBTA spending, though, say the state’s underinvestment in the agency is the core problem.
It's always more money as solution.
A pair of reports, released at the end of the last decade, made that conclusion difficult to avoid.
The Massachusetts Transportation Finance Commission, tasked with taking a deep look at highway and transit finance during the Romney administration, found a staggering funding shortfall, $15 billion to $19 billion over 20 years, just to maintain the infrastructure.
The problem at the MBTA, in particular, hovered between $4.8 billion and $9 billion when the Big Dig-related commitments were included, according to the report.
Stephen J. Silveira, a former MBTA executive and now a Republican lobbyist, headed the commission.
And months before the release of the report, with the scope of the problem coming clear, he delivered the news to Romney in a face-to-face meeting.
It was not well-received....
But an unwillingness to confront the issue head-on, observers say, is a pattern on Beacon Hill.
Two years after the finance commission’s report came out, Governor Deval Patrick tapped former John Hancock chief executive David D’Alessandro to lead an examination of T finances. The result was another dire report.
Laced with subtitles such as “The Outlook is Bleak” and “Debt — The Faustian Bargain,” the report said “a private sector firm faced with this mountain of red ink would likely fold or seek bankruptcy.”
D’Alessandro’s study made a splash in the news, but did not have the impact on Beacon Hill he had hoped. In an interview last week he said, “Do you know how many legislators called me after I did that report? Zero.”
D’Alessandro, like virtually every close observer of the T, maintains that a substantial investment in the agency is critical.
And he’s deeply critical of a Legislature that, he said, has failed to confront that reality, and that instead points fingers at an MBTA whose wages, fares, and so-called “cost-per-mile” expenditures are in line with other big transit systems around the country.
“The Legislature’s ability to shift accountability to the administration is almost Houdini-like,” he said.
The view from Beacon Hill is different. There, insiders say those pushing for more transportation funding have bungled the politics, or misread the public mood.
They start with Patrick’s 2013 tax plan....
Actually, I'm done with him.
The Legislature wound up passing a stripped-down, transportation-focused tax package that would generate an estimated $600 million per year, on average, over the five years that followed. Patrick and transit advocates called it a partial solution. And its value would soon erode.
The measure included a 3-cent bump on the state gas tax, from 21 to 24 cents per gallon. And it indexed the tax to inflation, allowing for automatic increases in the future. But last fall, voters repealed the indexing.
Damn voters!
Beacon Hill denizens insist the vote demonstrates a limited public appetite for investment, a constraint that activists must acknowledge.
“You will never satisfy the advocates,” said Steven A. Baddour, a lobbyist who once served as Senate chairman of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Transportation. “There will always be more that they want. I think the Legislature took a serious stab at the revenue piece. The voters rejected it.”
The MBTA, he said, must be reformed before advocates can make a credible play for more money. The authority’s opaque pension system must be more transparent, he said. And the MBTA must look for ways to privatize more services, despite the restrictions of the Pacheco Law.
The new guy is trying to move on it.
It is an argument that has been made, and one that frustrates advocates who say reform, however important, is a matter of saving millions when the problem is in the billions.
The MBTA’s $5.5 billion debt is roughly $8 billion when interest is included; this year, more than one in five dollars the agency spends will go to debt service.
That means paying off banks and inve$tors, folks.
I keep saying it: when you truly look at government, regardless of name or party, you see that it $erves a certain $elect few and that's it.
But Stephanie Pollack, the Baker administration’s point person on the T, said reform is often cast too narrowly — as a nibbling around the edges.
What the moment demands, she said, is a conversation about a substantial reordering of the agency.
That could mean boosting the contribution that the communities served by the T make to the agency’s budget, she suggested — making it more accountable to them and less accountable to taxpayers in the rest of the state.
Actually, I kind of like that idea.
“What I have always said in my career, and I think what people have learned in a visceral way in the last couple weeks, is . . . the T is the basis of the economy in metropolitan Boston,” Pollack said. “No T, no economy.”
The agency, she said, must show it can invest wisely in its core mission before it asks for the money for an expansion — an expansion that may, in fact, be necessary to keep the region’s economy growing.
Senate President Stanley C. Rosenberg, an Amherst Democrat, said this reform-before-revenue approach is the right one.
The trouble is, he said, the Legislature always stops at reform and never gets to revenue.
So then, will the storms of 2015 provide the political will that has long been absent? Will the disabled trains, the Peter Pan buses brought in to transport commuters, and this weekend’s suspended service finally convince the public and lawmakers that it is time for a major new investment?
Is this the opportunity that will be seized?
Rosenberg paused.
“I think it would be a lot easier,” he said, “if we could figure out how to take the snowflakes and turn them into currency.”
Or have a Federal Reserve printing pre$$ at your side.
Wait a minute. Constitutionally, the government and state can print their own money and hand it out interest free (unlike the usurious banks). Maybe we should try that, Stan.
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Related: Telecommuting won’t fix snow woes
It's all about image “amid the ceaseless winter pummeling with agendas slowed and prospects rise for an ill-timed comment that could later prove politically inconvenient; an elected executive appearing unprepared or unsympathetic may be simultaneously signing his career’s death warrant as they wave a white flag in the face of the wintry onslaught, and if I’ve learned one thing over the course of the past two weeks, it’s that Mother Nature makes the rules.”
We shall see if they have judging by any future fart mi$t.
Related:
"Residents aren’t blaming climate change. They blame the US Army Corps of Engineers, as well as town officials, for failing to fix what they say is an obvious consequence of the construction of the Cape Cod Canal."
Related: State Seizing Seaside Homes
Yeah, that does not look good.
