Some temp tags aren't so temporary

By Mark Forsythe The Kansas City Post Sales tax. Insurance. Personal property tax. Purchasing a vehicle, even an inexpensive one can lead to a substantial outlay of cash. With our ever climbing sales tax rate in Kansas City, the purchase of a vehicle can mean hundreds of dollars to legally put that vehicle on the road. I personally don't have a problem with paying sales tax. I don't enjoy paying it, but I understand taxation and appreciate its importance to fund our government. The fees generated by personal vehicle purchases are an important part of any municipality's income. Kansas City, like many other metros has a growing segment of people who are choosing to subvert the costs by taking part in an underground economy that funnels hundreds of thousands of dollars away from public coffers on a yearly basis. Counterfeit temporary license tags. We've all seen them taped in the back window of a vehicle. Sometimes they look very professional. Sometimes they consist of an expiration date hand-written in large magic marker. Temporary tags are issued by car dealers or the State for the purpose of legally driving your vehicle until you have time to obtain permanent license plates. Of course if "legally" driving is not on your agenda, and avoiding sales tax, licensing fees and insurance is, there's plenty of places around town willing to sell you sets of very good counterfeit tags that you can use at your leisure. As long as you're not stupid enough to put an expiration date that might arouse suspicion (you can't get a legal tag that expires three years from now) you can drive with impunity. The underground economy of counterfeit tags is massive. There are those who make them. Those who sell them. There are dealerships who use their temp tags to "rent" vehicles to people. The cash rental business provides under the counter income to disreputable businesses while providing a way for people to gain the privilege of operating a motor vehicle on city streets. No paperwork. No insurance. No worries. Just a few bucks and you're on the road for as long as you please. So what's the problem? First and foremost there is the safety issue. When a police officer pulls over a vehicle with counterfeit tags, or sometimes even legitimate temp tags, running the number comes back "Not in the database." I say "sometimes" even though one KC police officer related to me "Every temp tag I have ever run comes back to a dealer and not the owner." Scary stuff. You now have law enforcement officers faced with approaching a vehicle containing occupants about which the officer knows nothing. Not all people who use counterfeit tags are violent criminals, but statistics show that significant amounts of violent criminals use counterfeit temp tags. A distant second in this growing problem is the loss of revenue to city, county and state coffers. While police and public safety are always most important, the amount of lost revenue to government is damaging to us all. Finally there is the issue of navigating streets with uninsured drivers that results in increased insurance rates increasing for all of us. This is of course a state issue. The law governing temp tags (RSMo 301.140) is vague and outdated. It certainly makes no effort to bring vehicle licensing into the 21st century. Perhaps our local legislators will take up this cause and create a more modern system that benefits all of us. It seems to be a matter of priorities. Technology has reached a point where RFIDs keep inventory from leaving a store unnoticed, paper currency has become very difficult to counterfeit because of hidden watermarks, casinos can tell you on any given day exactly how many slot machine tokens they have in circulation and even the doorman at your local watering hole can spot a counterfeit driver's license in a matter of seconds. Why is it in 2007 we're using a vehicle licensing system that consists of cardboard, scotch tape and a magic marker?

After Oil - The rest of the story

By Kevin Klinkenberg The Kansas City Post For several years now I’ve been making a living somehow by extolling the virtues of walkable urbanism. I give countless presentations on how much of a pleasure it is to live in a neighborhood where one can walk to many of life’s daily needs, and your entire lifestyle is not chained to an automobile. For me, that neighborhood is now Volker, where I’m just a couple blocks off of 39th Street. The simple joys of walking to the ice cream store, to a bar, to buy a card or coffee are hard to express unless you’ve not been able to do that for most of your life. You can call this approach whatever you like – New Urbanism, Smart Growth, Quality Places, Traditional Neighborhood Design. But the basic premise is simple – a great many of us simply prefer to live our lives in neighborhoods where walking is a normal, daily activity – not something done simply for exercise. What is apparent these days is that we haven’t been nearly aggressive enough in making more places walkable. This is especially so in the Midwest and Kansas City, where living without a car is frankly unimaginable to most. I wrote previously about how the changing dynamics in energy are beginning to impact us, and will continue to do so. Don’t believe me? Fine, listen to T Boone Pickens, any executive of an oil company or any geologist who studies what is going on. So I left us last time with – what do we do? Do we just throw in the towel and hide in our homes and on our computers? Hardly – that’s not the standard of living which we expect. But we will have to re-order our lives in some fairly simple ways. Fortunately, many of the ways are things that we actually enjoy as human beings, and provide a side benefit of being healthy for us. For example, getting back to walking. Remember walking? Count on doing more of it. Bicycling, too. And that dreaded “t” word will rear its head – transit. Yes, transit. We will all increasingly be taking public transportation on a regular basis if we are to lead productive, fulfilling lives. It really is going to be that simple. Our lives as the 21st century progresses will in many ways resemble the lives our forefathers did in the 19th century. We will have to re-order our daily existence to live in walkable, transit-friendly neighborhoods. This will of course not be an easy thing to do – we’ve spent all of the last 60 years building an infrastructure that supports sprawling, car-oriented development patterns. Many folks simply cannot survive today without the use of a personal vehicle for every trip outside of the house. This will have to change, and change fairly quickly. The greatest opportunity to accommodate the new 21st century lifestyle is paradoxically the places we abandoned in the 20th century. Our pre-WWII neighborhoods, especially in Kansas City, Missouri, were designed and built on a system of streetcars and walkability. They are tailor-made for the way will we need to live in the future. But will our city leadership strive to take advantage of this opportunity? Some consider rail transit, for example, an expense that is hard to justify, even though a continuous, diverse urban fabric is simply not possible without it. Others worry about accommodating far-flung commuters in perhaps the least-dense metro area into the country. Instead, why don’t we work on making the old city itself a haven of walkability, quality density and transit-friendliness? What if we worked hard to make the City great, and welcomed the formerly car-dependent into its arms? Why would we assume that 50 years from now people will still be living in low-density towns such as Grain Valley wanting to commute into downtown Kansas City? In the course of history there are often “game-changing” events that reshape how we live. The advent of elevators made it possible for cities to grow in denser concentrations than previously imagined. Air conditioning has made living in southern climates tolerable year-round, even opening up the possibility of inhabiting the desert. Modern sewage treatment made urban living clean and safe. And the rise of the personal automobile created a dispersed city form unlike anything seen previously in human history. But that era of cheap and easy motoring is over. Let’s all mourn its death – it had its fun moments, but it also has left us decades worth of problems to correct. The future can be better, if we seize it.

2008. Year one of AO – After Oil

By Kevin Klinkenberg The Kansas City Post I’m sitting outside on a beautiful night in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and here I am thinking about oil. The phrase – “get a life” comes to mind. But, it’s on my mind as I watch cars roar by on an overly-wide one way street in this sleepy downtown, sitting in an outdoor café that used to be a fast-food joint. My chair is nestled against a rail that separates me from the surface parking lot in front of the building. It’s an apt scene for thinking about the future of energy and our way of life. I think history will mark history will mark 2008 as year one of AO – After Oil. We are entering a new era that will impact our lives and our cities in ways just as profound as the automobile era did starting in the 20th century. As your grief counselor, let me just advise you that it’d be best for us all to quickly proceed through the 5 stages of grief, so that we can get on to more productive lives. Which stage are you in? Denial – “This isn’t really happening, it’s only a temporary blip” Anger – “It’s the greedy oil companies, Arabs, politicians (insert favorite enemy here)” Bargaining – “If we just all buy hybrid cars we’ll be fine!” Depression – “The economy is collapsing, our society is doomed!” Instead, we all should move on to Acceptance – the era of cheap oil is over, and with it the easy motoring lifestyle that we’ve all grown accustomed to (including me). Our lifestyles are going to be permanently altered by world events, so let’s go ahead and start changing so we can enjoy ourselves more quickly. Welcome to the Post-Petroleum Era. You may have heard the phrase “peak oil” before, or even read a book or two about it. Briefly, allow me to clarify what is going on, so we can move past the Denial stage. The world is not running out of oil tomorrow, or next year or 10 years from now. But what we are running out of is the cheap, easily accessible oil. On top of that, our ability to produce more globally is constrained – all projections by everyone in and outside the industry shows a flattening of worldwide production in the next few years. And if that weren’t enough, worldwide demand is increasing exponentially, thanks to burgeoning economies in places like China, India, Brazil, Russia and the Middle East. One quick example – India currently contains about 300 million people that are considered “middle class”, up from less than 100 million 15 years ago. That number is projected to double to 600 million by 2020 – a little over 10 years from now. Now, middle class in India is not the same as middle class in the US, but it does mean another population equal to the entire US who will be upgrading their lifestyles and vehicles. It might mean just a motorized scooter or bike, or a small car. But it’s a substantial increase in demand regardless. And the same thing is happening in China and the other places I noted above. Those who think the recent spike in oil prices are because of a falling US dollar, or in any way tied to the American economy are simply in that first phase of grief – Denial. So it’s in this context that we must understand the sharp rise in gasoline prices, and what the future holds for us. No amount of biofuels, electric cars or fuel-efficient gasoline engines will change the fundamental dilemma facing us and the world – it simply is going to get more and more expensive to drive our cars, to the point where many, if not most, middle class households will have to sharply curtail driving. In fact, many of us may simply not be able to afford personal motorized transportation at all. So what do we do? That’s the subject for the next column – stay tuned…

Let Citizen Committees Do Their Job

By Mark Forsythe The Kansas City Post The citizen committee culture in Kansas City is something of which I've long been critical. On the surface it sounds like a solid idea. Appoint qualified, civic-minded individuals to study a problem and recommend a solution. Use the talent and experience being offered free of charge of those who wish simply to contribute to the common good. Unfortunately, that is not how citizen committees actually work, or not work if you will. I have had the honor of serving on three mayoral appointed committees. With the exception of the Competitive Review Committee (my first) it has been my experience that the dirty little secret about citizen committees is they really don't reach any of their own conclusions. Mostly committees are a group of individuals, some wishing to contribute, some wishing to pad a civic resume and even one or two just looking for a captive audience to which they can complain about some cause or perceived injustice. Committees watch presentations from paid consultants who are given the real task of developing a solution. The presentations and information provided by the consultants is usually weighted to lead the committee to the conclusions the consultant team inevitably wants implemented. Not that there's anything nefarious going on with the consultants. We all have bias when it comes to our work, so why wouldn't a paid professional present his or her conclusions in a positive light and less desirable solutions in a more negative fashion? In a time when we're all being asked to tighten our financial belts it occurs to me there is a layer of inefficiency in our citizens' advisory committee system. We have two choices from the way I see it. Remove the citizens advisory committees altogether and have the consultants present directly to the City Council, or remove the consultants and appoint citizen advisory committees with relevant qualifications to do the actual work. It would seem the latter would be the most cost effective choice for the taxpayers. Kansas City is blessed with an abundance of professionals from every walk of life who are more than willing, and more than qualified to serve on committees and offer sensible recommendations for a variety of civic issues. I have served with architects, engineers, financiers, attorneys and just about any other type of profession who were more than qualified to offer professional opinions of a variety of subjects. The best part? They're willing to do this for free. The only consultants needed in this process would be a professional selection committee since the Mayor and Council do not seem to have the ability to keep from also appointing their friends, enemies, daughter's dance teacher, wife's friends, large contributors or complete lunatics. Put together a competent group of citizens with backgrounds germane to the issue and watch what civic-minded people can do. To those who would argue that you get what you pay for? How many light rail plans have we paid for in the last 30 years? With all that money wasted on consultants we could have already laid a few miles of track, or a few hundred yards of modern sewer. Maybe even paved a street or two.