Keep your money; we have ideology

Can the North Carolina General Assembly, newly in the hands of Republicans, be crazy enough to reject $461 million in federal funding for rail improvements? We're about to find out.

Rep. Ric Killian of Charlotte has introduced legislation to refuse the U.S. Department of Transportation grants that would improve tracks and speed passenger trains along the Charlotte-to-Raleigh corridor. His rationale is that $461 million would be bad for North Carolina. How he arrives at that conclusion is as foggy as morning mist over a train station. Killian says accepting the grants will obligate the state to pick up part of the costs. No, say state and federal officials: the grants cover all the costs associated with the project. Well, all those danged passenger trains could hurt freight trains, he says. That's hard to figure, since the grants would provide dual tracks along part of the route and new sidings to allow trains to pass each other. Killian also thinks high-speed rail will hurt small towns that the trains speed through without stopping. Many small towns see freight trains speeding through without stopping now. Should we put up stop freight trains at every little town?

It sounds like Killian's objections are more ideological than pragmatic. GOP governors in Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin rejected high-speed rail grants, so North Carolina can join the bandwagon and, thereby, embarrass President Obama, who has been pushing high-speed rail as both a transportation improvement and an economic stimulus.

I've taken the train from Charlotte to Wilson once, and I found it a pleasant experience. If the trip could be shortened by an hour or two, it would be even more pleasant. If the federal government is giving away $461 million to spend on N.C. tracks and trains, it makes little sense to dream up excuses for not accepting it. Yes, it's true that Congress will have to borrow the money to give it to North Carolina, but Congress is going to borrow that money anyway. One state's rejection of offered grants won't change the federal deficit.

Video captures Acorn offering assistance

If you haven't seen this video of a couple of Acorn employees doing their dead-level best to accommodate a purported prostitute and her pimp in a scheme to bring 14-year-old Salvadoran girls to the United States to join the prostitute's enterprise, you've missed one of the most entertaining sites on the Web. And one of the most frightening, disgusting and maddening. Take a look:

The video was put together by a partisan Web site, www.biggovernment.com, which sent a man and a woman, dressed flagrantly as a pimp and a prostitute, to Acorn offices around the country to ask for assistance in setting up a prostitution business. In this video, the Acorn workers in Baltimore were eager to help, going so far as to suggest all sorts of tax dodges, lies and subterfuge to make the whorehouse a profitable enterprise and, at the same time, avoid law enforcement and federal taxes.

But as outrageous as that video is, the real outrage is this: Acorn, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is financed by taxpayer dollars! Despite the fact that it has been charged in several jurisdictions with voter fraud, Acorn has received $53 million in federal funds and stands to receive $8.5 Billion in Obama administration stimulus funds. Acorn receives money for federal housing assistance (hence, its employees could advise the pimp and prostitute on where to find housing for their underage workers), for voter registration and for other causes.

Acorn is unabashedly liberal, and the actors who exposed Acorn are unabashedly conservative, so some healthy skepticism is in order. An Acorn spokesman claimed the videos were false and threatened legal action, but Acorn fired the two employees in the video. Then Acorn claimed that BigGovernment.com had tried to trap Acorn employees in offices across the country but found fraud only in Baltimore. Then BigGovernment.com released additional videos from Acorn offices in San Bernardino, Calif., Washington, D.C., and others. Acorn employees at other offices were eager to help the budding entrepreneurs and ignore the illegality of prostitution, child sex slaves, tax fraud, etc.

Hidden-camera videos and reporters posing as someone else are always suspect, but you can't discount these videos merely because the organization that set up the sting was at political odds with Acorn. ABC News set up a sting of Food Lion several years ago, which was no less dubious than the BigGovernment.com expose of Acorn. A closer analogy was a sting set up by the Charlotte Observer a number of years ago attempting to prove that topless bars and massage parlors were fronts for prostitution. The Observer sent two "undercover" reporters, a male and a female, to these businesses and sought to catch the employees offering more than a show or a back rub. The Observer didn't have nearly as good a result as the Acorn sting. The actors who went to Acorn do not appear to be doing anything outside the parameters of investigative journalism.

Acorn has a lot of explaining to do, but so does Congress, which keeps shoveling taxpayer dollars to Acorn in the form of federal grants and pork-barrel appropriations. Want to eliminate waste and fraud in the federal budget? Start by cutting off taxpayer funding for all advocacy organizations. If Acorn, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation or the Brookings Institute wants a grant, let it come from private funding, not from the federal budget.

When 'free money' isn't cheap

Wilson City Council has approved applying for federal grants that will provide funds to construct a sixth city fire station and to pay some operational costs temporarily. But the deal would leave the city with around $1.5 million in new operational costs, once the federal grant expires, and require a half-million-dollar investment in fire vehicles.

This is not "free money," by a long shot, but only one council member — Bill Blackman — voted against the costly gift.

Fire Chief Don Oliver had sold the grant proposals to City Council by saying the city had not built a new fire station since 1975 and then comparing emergency call volumes from 1975 and today. That approach is misleading, at best, but it did get the newspaper's endorsement. The city has built at least four new fire stations since 1975; it has simply not added any stations since then. Belated kudos to the Wilson Times for (finally) pointing out the disingenuousness in Oliver's argument in today's article, which cites some of the new stations that have been built since 1975. Wilson relocated its headquarters station on Douglas Street to a new facility on Hines Street in the early 1980s. In 1987, it replaced the Fairview Avenue station with a new one on Forest Hills Road. And in 1996, under Oliver's watch, the department relocated two stations, one to U.S. 301 and the other to Airport Boulevard. By my count, that's four new stations since 1975, leaving only one station older than 30 years.

If you look at the two most recent stations, you'll be struck by how much larger and more elaborate those are compared to the stations built before Oliver arrived. The fire department is probably better since Oliver came here from Colorado; it certainly is more lavishly equipped. Years ago, Oliver talked the city into buying a truck with a ladder that would reach to the top of the seven-story BB&T building, even though the BB&T tower is equipped for fighting fires from inside the building. (Do you think New York's fire department had ladders that would reach to the top of the World Trade Center?). The truck cost around $750,000. To my knowledge, that ladder has not been required for fighting any fire since then, but it has starred in some fire department demonstrations. The next time a fire call goes out, count the number of vehicles that respond. I've rarely seen fewer than four, even for an inconsequential electrical fire. The department has used Homeland Security grants to buy golf-cart size vehicles for ferrying people and equipment. It has taken on fire safety education for children, equipping a house on wheels for its teaching mission. Its latest (and largely unnoticed) work is converting a house adjacent to the Hines Street station as a new fire safety education facility, presumably replacing that elaborate school on wheels. This conversion has been expensive, but I've not seen any figures.

I don't doubt that Wilson has a good fire department. I can't remember the last time we had a death from fire. But City Council ought to be a little more skeptical in discerning "needs" and "wants," and taxpayers ought to be wary of "free grants" that will end up costing them $1.5 million a year or more.