Enid Slack, Larry S. Bourne, Meric S. Gertler
August 13, 2003
A paper prepared for the Panel on the Role of Government
This paper reviews the importance of vibrant cities and city-regions to the provincial economy and examines how to address the economic, social, and fiscal challenges they face.
Enid Slack, Larry S. Bourne, Meric S. Gertler
August 13/2003
A paper prepared for the Panel on the Role of Government
This paper examines the provincial government’s role in responding to the increased social, economic, and fiscal challenges facing communities at risk.
National Association of Independent Insurers August 8/2003
ALBANY, N. Y. — The New York State Insurance Department has taken an important step toward the stabilization of automobile insurance rates by approving a statewide average rate increase of 19.7 percent for high-risk drivers insured through the state’s Automobile Insurance Plan. The increase takes effect for new business August 15 and for renewals October 1, 2003. “This rate increase for drivers in the assigned risk pool is necessary to help address skyrocketing insurance costs,” said Gerald Zimmerman, assistant general counsel for the National Association of Independent Insurers (NAII). “Unless meaningful reforms are adopted that reduce insurance costs, consumers will continue to see rates increase. In the latest report on state average auto premiums by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), New York displaced New Jersey as the second most expensive insurance marketplace in the country. This trend is symptomatic of a system that is in need of cost controls.”
NAII, based in suburban Chicago, is a leading property/casualty insurance company trade association. Its more than 725 member companies write $112 billion in annual premium, representing 31.2 percent of the nation’s property/casualty insurance.
—
Contact: Jeffrey Brewer Telephone: 847-297-7800, ext. 651
E-Mail: Jeffrey.brewer@naii.org
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
August 7, 2003
How much did your toilet bowl cost you in water yesterday? Or your kids’ bathroom sink? Or your kitchen dishwashing machine? The consumption of water appliances – and how much each contributes to the monthly water and heating bill – is now tracked by individual wireless meters and displayed online for tenants in a growing number of apartment buildings, condos, coops and other multi-family complexes south of the border.
“We’ve installed 88,000 wireless water meters in 11,000 units to date, and we have a backlog of 7,500 units to go” says Brian Brittsan, president of California-based Wellspring International, a company whose business is growing by 2,000 to 3,000 units per month.
Wellspring’s 11,000 units represent just a drop in the bucket of a burgeoning North American market worth an estimated US$17-billion. Between two million and three million apartment renters in the United States already pay separately for their water, according to Chicago-based National Submetering and Utility Allocation Association, an organization representing property owners, meter manufacturers and installers of meters that track consumption in individual units.
Five years ago, billing tenants for their individual water consumption was all-but-unknown. Today, multi-family buildings have gone plumb crazy, with upward of 400,000 additional units sporting water meters each year. New buildings are now being designed for metering and old ones are being retrofitted. With metering, conservation climbs, too – metered buildings consume 18% to 36% less water than those that don’t charge tenants for their actual use. And landlords benefit by removing water – commonly their largest variable expense – from their books, often with no capital outlay: Many metering companies install the meters at their own expense, then keep the savings over the first 18 months or so in payment.
As impressive as this industry’s rise has been, its advance has been limited because the plumbing in one type of building stock – existing high-rises – typically took routes that didn’t allow individual units to be metered. Wellspring overcomes this obstacle by placing wireless meters at every point of use within a unit and summing the consumption at each water appliance to determine the unit’s total water usage. As a bonus, the appliance-specific data allows residents to catch hidden leaks as well as slow running toilets and dripping taps, giving them unprecedented control over their water bill.
The water metering industry has been strongest where water is scarce and water prices are highest, such as the water-short Sun Belt. Florida, to remove regulatory impediments to metering, has changed regulations that forced metered building owners to comply with rules desugned to apply to “public water suppliers.” The federal government and other state governments are also sensibly adapting to metering innovations and revising rules that prevent a free water market from developing. But Canada has so far failed to catch the wave, even though companies such as Wellspring rank Toronto as #2 in North America’s multi-family market, after New York. For one thing, Canada’s low water prices – only undeveloped countries still charge less – discourage investments in conservation. For another, the immense Toronto rental market suffers from rent control, which complicates life for building owners interested in improving their property.
Change, however, will come soon enough. In the wake of the deaths at Walkerton, the public has learned that Canada’s dilapidated water systems endanger the public health, leading to pressure for improvements to the water infrastructure. Some improvements have already begun; most are in the pipeline. All of the catchup spending by our water and sewage utilities is raising water rates – Canada’s price hikes are outpacing those in most countries – and speeding the day that water metering takes hold in Canada.
Although higher water rates will hit most Canadian consumers hard, the great majority of residents in multi-family dwellings will largely be spared once their units become individually metered: They will then pay only for their own consumption and not that of wasteful neighbours. The wasteful neighbours, meanwhile, will learn to adapt, too. As one early casualty of the U.S. metering revolution groused after his property management company started charging him for water: “Now I won’t be able to run the shower to help me sleep.”
Right.
Related articles:
Rent control’s wreckage
Homeless by decree
Homeless in paradise
Parasites in the walls
Widening the gap
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute, a Toronto-based think-tank. www.urban.probeinternational.org. E-mail: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
July 31, 2003
THE REAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS: WHY POVERTY, NOT AFFLUENCE, IS THE ENVIRONMENT’S NUMBER ONE ENEMY
by Jack M. Hollander
University of California Press
235 pages, $40.95
– – –
“Affluence fosters environmentalism,” argues The Real Environmental Crisis, a book by professor emeritus Jack M. Hollander of the University of California at Berkeley. “As people become more affluent, most become increasingly sensitive to the health and beauty of their environment. And gaining affluence helps provide the economic means to protect and enhance the environment.”
Hollander’s argument is not new. The claim that poor countries cannot afford to protect the environment first gained prominence in 1972 at the United Nations Conference on Human Environment, when Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, to keep environmentalists at bay in her Soviet-style quest to industrialize, famously said, “Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?”
But what is new is this argument’s embrace by many right-wing groups — the Fraser Institute in Canada, the Cato Institute in the United States among them — who have adopted it as an orthodoxy that can explain the rise of environmentalism in the West. When a nation reaches a certain level of affluence — US$8,000 per capita some groups say straight-faced — its citizens begin to demand measures to protect the environment. Governments can then roll out environmental programs, taxpayers can then fund them, and the environmental quality of life can rise.
In effect, these arguments treat the environment as a product, provided by government, that can be acquired at a certain point in a nation’s development. As affluence grows, they believe, so too does the demand for more environmental amenities. It’s a strange argument for right-wing organizations to make, for it implies collective decision-making, government intervention in the economy and limitless taxation, tempered only by a citizenry’s desire for a clean environment.
In this way, these conservatives have come to accept the environmental logic of socialists. In so doing, they inadvertently endorse planning and regulation, not the free market and the common law, as a desirable medium for environmental decision-making. Do you want less smog in your air or more oxygen in your water? Lobby your parliamentarian and fight it out in the political trenches. Never mind that the common laws — on the books for hundreds of years, until politicians overrode them specifically to permit such pollution — provided a superior, property-right remedy for environmental harm. Never mind that the world’s most environmentally harmful projects — large-scale mining, nuclear plants, massive hydro-electric dams, monoculture agriculture and forestry — have generally required state subsidies or state expropriation of property or both.
Although right-wingers and socialists agree that the environment is a product, they disagree on how much product the government should buy. The two sides then enlist economics and science in cost-benefit battles, with the government as arbiter. Little wonder that politicians decide how much greenhouse gas can be emitted, and by whom. Little wonder that a clean environment is viewed as a luxury product rather than a basic right that societies have traditionally enjoyed and only recently lost.
Hollander himself is no right-winger — he’s a big-government, more-foreign-aid advocate who hopes the West’s concern for the global environment will persuade Westerners to develop the Third World. To his credit, he ignores the half-baked correlations that right-wingers rely on, such as a World Bank analysis that claims fecal coliform bacteria declines at per capita incomes of US$1,375 and sulphur dioxide emissions at US$3,670. Hollander, who considers the eco-affluence science unprovable, ultimately comes to his conclusions on the basis of his educated guess.
Also to his credit, Hollander distances himself from his own thesis, as if, in researching his book, he came to realize that affluence, on its own, doesn’t explain much about the environment at all. In contrast to his book’s marketing spin, in Hollander’s text affluence shares top billing with, and depends upon, good governance. In the end, he needs to resort to gymnastics to retain affluence in his equation: “an environmentally sustainable future is within reach for the entire world provided that affluence and democracy replace poverty and tyranny as the dominant human condition.”
Hollander has become a darling of the right because he criticizes the green movement’s extremism. But if you view the environment as a product, the greens have been right more often than not: As Hollander reluctantly admits, the products from the worldwide nuclear power industry have been economic failures and those from dam-building dubious at best.
Meanwhile, the right overlooks Hollander’s advocacy of, for example, massive foreign aid guided by the likes of the World Bank and the IMF, and massive Western government intervention to spend “whatever it costs to attain and maintain a healthy environment.” Hollander’s own extremism doesn’t seem to bother the right, even though he is at odds with principles they hold dear as well as being wrong about the forces destroying the environment.
