Scoop

The New York Times
October 10, 2005
In a Still-Growing City, Some Neighborhoods Say Slow Down
By JANNY SCOTT


A swelling population, an overheated real estate market and the biggest building boom in 30 years are fueling a counterrevolution in New York City: Dozens of neighborhoods have asked the Bloomberg administration to rewrite zoning rules to rein in what residents see as runaway development and growth.

In what some housing experts are calling "the downzoning uprising," communities throughout the city want to see an end to an influx of apartments, additional people, and what they consider McMansions - and to preserve neighborhoods of limestone town houses, 1950's ranch houses, even humble wood-frame houses wrapped in aluminum siding.

The administration has agreed, with enthusiasm. Since 2002, 42 rezonings "to preserve neighborhood character," as the administration puts it, have been approved or are under review. About 3,600 blocks have been rezoned, and more proposals are on the way. By contrast, officials say, the city approved only eight such rezonings in the three years before 2002.

The demand to control neighborhood density comes as the city's population is projected to reach 8.4 million by 2010, up from an estimated 8.1 million today. There is already a shortage of housing that moderate and middle-income people can afford. So the push for downzoning pits the rights of neighborhoods against the city's broader need to equitably accommodate its growth.

The downzoning issue also underscores the ambivalence of many New Yorkers toward density. New Yorkers celebrate the city's vitality, changeability and allure, and many recognize density as somehow crucial to New York's energy and life. Yet they balk at the prospect of too much density and change close to home - their homes.

"New York's greatness is based on a concentration of population," said Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who specializes in housing, planning and development. "And New York's great neighborhoods are the ones served by public transportation and built for density."

She said there had often been "an odd antidensity zeitgeist in New York," then added, "Density is good for New York."

Those in favor of the recent downzonings say they will protect neighborhoods against out-of-scale development, especially in places without the infrastructure needed to handle growth. When balanced by increases in density elsewhere, they say, the downzonings will also stop real estate speculation and keep communities stable.

"If you allow the character of a neighborhood to be eroded, the people who live in that neighborhood will leave the city," said Amanda M. Burden, chairwoman of the City Planning Commission. "We can't allow that to happen. Protecting these different neighborhoods, we are providing New Yorkers with a diversity of housing choices."

But others worry that the downzonings are beginning to outweigh the effect of upzonings elsewhere in the city. It is easier, they say, to decrease density than to increase it, especially in an election year. They worry that rezoning the neighborhoods will make them more homogenous, and the home prices higher.

"There are real reasons why people feel they'd rather not have new development, good and bad," said Brad Lander, executive director of the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development. But, he added, "It seems to me that if you refuse growth, you are either implicitly saying we should change our immigration policies and not let people in, or immigrants should live in basements and attics or in the Poconos."

The rush to rezone primarily to reduce density has been felt throughout the city. Much of Staten Island, the fastest-growing county in the state in the 1990's, was rezoned last year to reduce the density of new residential development. In Queens, the city has agreed to rezone Bayside, Cambria Heights and half a dozen other neighborhoods. Rezonings of Whitestone and College Point are also in the works.

In the Bronx, proposals for Morris Park, Woodlawn, Olinville and Riverdale are under public review. Pelham Gardens, Throgs Neck and others have already been rezoned. So have Bensonhurst and Park Slope in Brooklyn. Even in Manhattan, where the city has recently rezoned former manufacturing areas to make high-rise residential development possible, it has at the same time downzoned parts of the West Village.

"Because of confidence in the city, investment in housing and growth in population, we are finding neighborhoods where there's a real mismatch between the ability to build and the character of the neighborhood," said Ms. Burden, who is also the director of the Department of City Planning. "That's where communities have come to us, in every single borough, saying, 'Protect our neighborhood.' "

The problem, as she and others see it, is that the city's zoning resolution had its last major revision in 1961 - at a time when some imagined the city's population to be heading toward 16 million. Many areas ended up zoned for more development than actually occurred. As a result, much of Staten Island, Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx are less densely developed than zoning permits. Until recently, it did not really matter.

But the record-breaking growth in the city's population in the 1990's and the real estate boom that followed made it lucrative for developers to begin taking advantage of the old rules. They started replacing moderate-size homes with big ones, doubling the number of houses on lots, building multifamily housing in single-family neighborhoods. Longtime residents balked.

"People generally plant themselves in neighborhoods for a reason," said Tony Avella, a city councilman from northeast Queens who made overdevelopment a campaign issue when he ran for office in 2001. "It's usually the quality of life. If we allow the quality of life and the neighborhood character to disappear because of overdevelopment, then you lose something that the city will never get back."

Mr. Avella began making the rounds of civic associations in Queens and Brooklyn, spreading the downzoning gospel. In his own district, he hired a planning consultant, Paul Graziano, to do an independent zoning study and make recommendations. Then the Department of City Planning was asked to rewrite much of the district's zoning.

"We thought this would be a good way to jump-start this issue not only in my district but throughout the city," Mr. Avella said. "It really started a groundswell. People started to realize: 'This is a problem in my neighborhood. You know what? This is leading to overcrowding in my school. This is why we have a traffic problem. We're getting sewer backups because the infrastructure can't handle these developments.' People started to realize, 'Wow, this really does affect our quality of life.' "

Mr. Avella had his doubts about a balanced approach.

"There had always been a philosophy in previous administrations in City Planning: 'Well, if we're going to do a downzoning, we have to do an upzoning, too,' " he said. "My argument is, if a neighborhood is improperly zoned and wants a downzoning, they shouldn't have to do an upzoning. They should have it regardless of what happens somewhere else."

One of the first communities in his district to be rezoned was Bayside. There, most of the housing consisted of one- and two-family detached and semidetached homes, but the old zoning allowed row houses and apartment houses as well. So Bayside was rezoned in April to permit for the most part only one- and two-family houses in the future, with new limits on floor area and height to stop out-of-scale development. Similar changes are in the works in other communities. Sean M. Walsh, president of the Queens Civic Congress, attributes the communities' success in part to timing. "We seem to be more successful in the election cycle than in the nonelection cycle," he said. "Because I think you need votes and you try to appease or please people in the neighborhoods."

The impact of downzonings on the city's property tax revenues is not clear, housing experts said. In theory, a downzoning could hurt tax revenues in the short run by limiting new construction; but in the longer run, it could help them if it enhanced the viability of a neighborhood and raised property values.

Rachaele Raynoff, a spokeswoman for the Department of City Planning, said the city was doing nothing different this year than it had in the past. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's administration took office with an economic development plan for the five boroughs, she said, and when it encountered concerns about development pressures in the neighborhoods, the city incorporated those concerns.

Not everyone sees the rezonings as an unalloyed good. Mr. Lander said many of the recent downzonings have not been balanced with upzonings nearby, even in neighborhoods that he believes have the infrastructure to accommodate growth.

For example, he said: "They've effectively downzoned all of Staten Island. That's not smart and balanced rezoning."

He added: "This is a real problem throughout the city, preserving what people love about their neighborhoods and equitably meeting the needs of a growing city. But a fair-share approach to that problem is to ask places to balance it within some reasonable geography, rather than saying: 'We'll preserve our neighborhood. Somebody else should deal with the growth.' "

Vicki Been, director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University and an expert on land-use law, said there is usually a trade-off between low density and affordability. "If people want low density, then there's a cost to affordability, and vice versa," she said. "If you're limiting the building in one place and you've got a growing population and increased housing demand, you've got to provide for it someplace."

Ms. Burden pointed out that the administration has encouraged housing development. The recent rezonings of former manufacturing areas in Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn and West Chelsea and the Hudson Yards in Manhattan are expected to produce 29,000 new units. Other possible areas of growth in the future, she said, include Long Island City in Queens and the area known as the Hub in the Bronx.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Graziano, the 34-year-old planning consultant hired by Councilman Avella, drove through the northeast Queens neighborhoods where he has spent his life, and that he is now intent on preserving. He admired the charm of north Flushing's tree-lined streets, fulminated against development excesses and pondered the struggle still to come.

"For better or worse, this has been kind of a revolution that's gone on here," Mr. Graziano had said earlier. "A very quiet, nontraditional type of revolution. I think it has changed the way that City Planning operates. It has changed the discussion. Which is all that I wanted."

He added: "These neighborhoods substantially have not changed in 40 years. What we're trying to do is make sure they are recognizable 40 years from now. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. In fact, in many other places in the country, that is celebrated. So why shouldn't we celebrate it as well?"

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The New York Times
October 4, 2005
A New Measure of Well-Being From a Happy Little Kingdom
By ANDREW C. REVKIN



What is happiness? In the United States and in many other industrialized countries, it is often equated with money.

Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting figure says something about progress and public welfare. The gross domestic product, or G.D.P., is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a nation.

But the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying out a different idea.

In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan's newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation's priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or gross national happiness.

Bhutan, the king said, needed to ensure that prosperity was shared across society and that it was balanced against preserving cultural traditions, protecting the environment and maintaining a responsive government. The king, now 49, has been instituting policies aimed at accomplishing these goals.

Now Bhutan's example, while still a work in progress, is serving as a catalyst for far broader discussions of national well-being.

Around the world, a growing number of economists, social scientists, corporate leaders and bureaucrats are trying to develop measurements that take into account not just the flow of money but also access to health care, free time with family, conservation of natural resources and other noneconomic factors.

The goal, according to many involved in this effort, is in part to return to a richer definition of the word happiness, more like what the signers of the Declaration of Independence had in mind when they included "the pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right equal to liberty and life itself.

The founding fathers, said John Ralston Saul, a Canadian political philosopher, defined happiness as a balance of individual and community interests. "The Enlightenment theory of happiness was an expression of public good or the public welfare, of the contentment of the people," Mr. Saul said. And, he added, this could not be further from "the 20th-century idea that you should smile because you're at Disneyland."

Mr. Saul was one of about 400 people from more than a dozen countries who gathered recently to consider new ways to define and assess prosperity.

The meeting, held at St. Francis Xavier University in northern Nova Scotia, was a mix of soft ideals and hard-nosed number crunching. Many participants insisted that the focus on commerce and consumption that dominated the 20th century need not be the norm in the 21st century.

Among the attendees were three dozen representatives from Bhutan - teachers, monks, government officials and others - who came to promote what the Switzerland-size country has learned about building a fulfilled, contented society.

While household incomes in Bhutan remain among the world's lowest, life expectancy increased by 19 years from 1984 to 1998, jumping to 66 years. The country, which is preparing to shift to a constitution and an elected government, requires that at least 60 percent of its lands remain forested, welcomes a limited stream of wealthy tourists and exports hydropower to India.

"We have to think of human well-being in broader terms," said Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan's home minister and ex-prime minister. "Material well-being is only one component. That doesn't ensure that you're at peace with your environment and in harmony with each other."

It is a concept grounded in Buddhist doctrine, and even a decade ago it might have been dismissed by most economists and international policy experts as naïve idealism.

Indeed, America's brief flirtation with a similar concept, encapsulated in E. F. Schumacher's 1973 bestseller "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered," ended abruptly with the huge and continuing burst of consumer-driven economic growth that exploded first in industrialized countries and has been spreading in fast-growing developing countries like China.

Yet many experts say it was this very explosion of affluence that eventually led social scientists to realize that economic growth is not always synonymous with progress.

In the early stages of a climb out of poverty, for a household or a country, incomes and contentment grow in lockstep. But various studies show that beyond certain thresholds, roughly as annual per capita income passes $10,000 or $20,000, happiness does not keep up.

And some countries, studies found, were happier than they should be. In the World Values Survey, a project under way since 1995, Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, found that Latin American countries, for example, registered far more subjective happiness than their economic status would suggest.

In contrast, countries that had experienced communist rule were unhappier than noncommunist countries with similar household incomes - even long after communism had collapsed.

"Some types of societies clearly do a much better job of enhancing their people's sense of happiness and well-being than other ones even apart from the somewhat obvious fact that it's better to be rich than to be poor," Dr. Inglehart said.

Even more striking, beyond a certain threshold of wealth people appear to redefine happiness, studies suggest, focusing on their relative position in society instead of their material status.

Nothing defines this shift better than a 1998 survey of 257 students, faculty and staff members at the Harvard School of Public Health.

In the study, the researchers, Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway, gave the subjects a choice of earning $50,000 a year in a world where the average salary was $25,000 or $100,000 a year where the average was $200,000.

About 50 percent of the participants, the researchers found, chose the first option, preferring to be half as prosperous but richer than their neighbors.

Such findings have contributed to the new effort to broaden the way countries and individuals gauge the quality of life - the subject of the Nova Scotia conference.

But researchers have been hard pressed to develop measuring techniques that can capture this broader concept of well-being.

One approach is to study how individuals perceive the daily flow of their lives, having them keep diary-like charts reflecting how various activities, from paying bills to playing softball, make them feel.

A research team at Princeton is working with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to incorporate this kind of charting into its new "time use" survey, which began last year and is given to 4,000 Americans each month.

"The idea is to start with life as we experience it and then try to understand what helps people feel fulfilled and create conditions that generate that," said Dr. Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist working on the survey.

For example, he said, subjecting students to more testing in order to make them more competitive may equip them to succeed in the American quest for ever more income. But that benefit would have to be balanced against the problems that come with the increased stress imposed by additional testing.

"We should not be hoping to construct a utopia," Professor Krueger said. "What we should be talking about is piecemeal movement in the direction of things that make for a better life."

Another strategy is to track trends that can affect a community's well-being by mining existing statistics from censuses, surveys and government agencies that track health, the environment, the economy and other societal barometers.

The resulting scores can be charted in parallel to see how various indicators either complement or impede each other.

In March, Britain said it would begin developing such an "index of well-being," taking into account not only income but mental illness, civility, access to parks and crime rates.

In June, British officials released their first effort along those lines, a summary of "sustainable development indicators" intended to be a snapshot of social and environmental indicators like crime, traffic, pollution and recycling levels.

"What we do in one area of our lives can have an impact on many others, so joined-up thinking and action across central and local government is crucial," said Elliot Morley, Britain's environment minister.

In Canada, Hans Messinger, the director of industry measures and analysis for Statistics Canada, has been working informally with about 20 other economists and social scientists to develop that country's first national index of well-being.

Mr. Messinger is the person who, every month, takes the pulse of his country's economy, sifting streams of data about cash flow to generate the figure called gross domestic product. But for nearly a decade, he has been searching for a better way of measuring the quality of life.

"A sound economy is not an end to itself, but should serve a purpose, to improve society," Mr. Messinger said.

The new well-being index, Mr. Messinger said, will never replace the G.D.P. For one thing, economic activity, affected by weather, labor strikes and other factors, changes far more rapidly than other indicators of happiness.

But understanding what fosters well-being, he said, can help policy makers decide how to shape legislation or regulations.

Later this year, the Canadian group plans to release a first attempt at an index - an assessment of community health, living standards and people's division of time among work, family, voluntarism and other activities. Over the next several years, the team plans to integrate those findings with measurements of education, environmental quality, "community vitality" and the responsiveness of government. Similar initiatives are under way in Australia and New Zealand.

Ronald Colman, a political scientist and the research director for Canada's well-being index, said one challenge was to decide how much weight to give different indicators.

For example, Dr. Colman said, the amount of time devoted to volunteer activities in Canada has dropped more than 12 percent in the last decade.

"That's a real decline in community well-being, but that loss counts for nothing in our current measure of progress," he said.

But shifts in volunteer activity also cannot be easily assessed against cash-based activities, he said.

"Money has nothing to do with why volunteers do what they do," Dr. Colman said. "So how, in a way that's transparent and methodologically decent, do you come up with composite numbers that are meaningful?"

In the end, Canada's index could eventually take the form of a report card rather than a single G.D.P.-like number.

In the United States there have been a few experiments, like the Princeton plan to add a happiness component to labor surveys. But the focus remains on economics. The Census Bureau, for instance, still concentrates on collecting information about people's financial circumstances and possessions, not their perceptions or feelings, said Kurt J. Bauman, a demographer there.

But he added that there was growing interest in moving away from simply tracking indicators of poverty, for example, to looking more comprehensively at social conditions.

"Measuring whether poverty is going up or down is different than measuring changes in the ability of a family to feed itself," he said. "There definitely is a growing perception out there that if you focus too narrowly, you're missing a lot of the picture."

That shift was evident at the conference on Bhutan, organized by Dr. Colman, who is from Nova Scotia. Participants focused on an array of approaches to the happiness puzzle, from practical to radical.

John de Graaf, a Seattle filmmaker and campaigner trying to cut the amount of time people devote to work, wore a T-shirt that said, "Medieval peasants worked less than you do."

In an open discussion, Marc van Bogaert from Belgium described his path to happiness: "I want to live in a world without money."

Al Chaddock, a painter from Nova Scotia, immediately offered a suggestion: "Become an artist."

Other attendees insisted that old-fashioned capitalism could persist even with a shift to goals broader than just making money.

Ray C. Anderson, the founder of Interface Inc., an Atlanta-based carpet company with nearly $1 billion in annual sales, described his company's 11-year-old program to cut pollution and switch to renewable materials.

Mr. Anderson said he was "a radical industrialist, but as competitive as anyone you know and as profit-minded."

Some experts who attended the weeklong conference questioned whether national well-being could really be defined. Just the act of trying to quantify happiness could threaten it, said Frank Bracho, a Venezuelan economist and former ambassador to India. After all, he said, "The most important things in life are not prone to measurement - like love."

But Mr. Messinger argued that the weaknesses of the established model, dominated by economics, demanded the effort.

Other economists pointed out that happiness itself can be illusory.

"Even in a very miserable condition you can be very happy if you are grateful for small mercies," said Siddiqur Osmani, a professor of applied economics from the University of Ulster in Ireland. "If someone is starving and hungry and given two scraps of food a day, he can be very happy."

Bhutanese officials at the meeting described a variety of initiatives aimed at creating the conditions that are most likely to improve the quality of life in the most equitable way.

Bhutan, which had no public education system in 1960, now has schools at all levels around the country and rotates teachers from urban to rural regions to be sure there is equal access to the best teachers, officials said.

Another goal, they said, is to sustain traditions while advancing. People entering hospitals with nonacute health problems can choose Western or traditional medicine.

The more that various effects of a policy are considered, and not simply the economic return, the more likely a country is to achieve a good balance, said Sangay Wangchuk, the head of Bhutan's national parks agency, citing agricultural policies as an example.

Bhutan's effort, in part, is aimed at avoiding the pattern seen in the study at Harvard, in which relative wealth becomes more important than the quality of life.

"The goal of life should not be limited to production, consumption, more production and more consumption," said Thakur S. Powdyel, a senior official in the Bhutanese Ministry of Education. "There is no necessary relationship between the level of possession and the level of well-being."

Mr. Saul, the Canadian political philosopher, said that Bhutan's shift in language from "product" to "happiness" was a profound move in and of itself.

Mechanisms for achieving and tracking happiness can be devised, he said, but only if the goal is articulated clearly from the start.

"It's ideas which determine the directions in which civilizations go," Mr. Saul said. "If you don't get your ideas right, it doesn't matter what policies you try to put in place."

Still, Bhutan's model may not work for larger countries. And even in Bhutan, not everyone is happy. Members of the country's delegation admitted their experiment was very much a work in progress, and they acknowledged that poverty and alcoholism remained serious problems.

The pressures of modernization are also increasing. Bhutan linked itself to the global cultural pipelines of television and the Internet in 1999, and there have been increasing reports in its nascent media of violence and disaffection, particularly among young people.

Some attendees, while welcoming Bhutan's goal, gently criticized the Bhutanese officials for dealing with a Nepali-speaking minority mainly by driving tens of thousands of them out of the country in recent decades, saying that was not a way to foster happiness.

"Bhutan is not a pure Shangri-La, so idyllic and away from all those flaws and foibles," conceded Karma Pedey, a Bhutanese educator dressed in a short dragon-covered jacket and a floor-length rainbow-striped traditional skirt.

But, looking around a packed auditorium, she added: "At same time, I'm very, very happy we have made a global impact."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The New York Times
October 4, 2005
Population Loss Alters Louisiana Politics
By JEREMY ALFORD

BATON ROUGE, La., Oct. 3 - The two recent gulf hurricanes may result in a significant loss of population for Louisiana, and state officials are now virtually certain that Louisiana will lose a Congressional seat - along with federal financing and national influence - after the 2010 census.

Having dislodged more than a million people in southern Louisiana alone, Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita are also likely to alter the state's political landscape, demographers and political experts say, reducing the domination of New Orleans over the State Legislature and increasing the influence of suburban and rural areas.

With a low-wage economy and consistently poor educational performance, Louisiana was losing population even before the hurricanes. The state had a net loss of more than 75,000 people from 1995 to 2000, according to census figures. But the physical and psychological damage inflicted by the hurricanes could push tens of thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands, of people out of the state for good, state officials say, comparable only to the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression and possibly the 1927 floods.

"I'm not sure if history is going to help us with this because we've never had anything like it," said Karen Paterson, the state demographer. "But we have not shown a positive net migration in many years. I would expect that we would experience a significant loss of population statewide."

With evacuees now making decisions on whether to plant roots elsewhere, and the geographical future of New Orleans in question, it is impossible to say with any precision how many people will be in Louisiana at the end of the decade. A dependable number will have to wait until the 2010 census.

The numbers available now, however, are staggering. About 1.5 million people were initially evacuated from the damaged regions, roughly 1 million have applied for hurricane-related federal aid, 30,000 are in out-of-state shelters, 46,400 are in in-state shelters and 932 people have perished in the storms. Officials are unsure how many people are staying in hotels or with family and friends.

Many here were already expecting Louisiana to lose one of its seven Congressional seats because of existing out-migration and high growth rates in other states, but the impact of the hurricanes has solidified fears.

Glenn Koepp, secretary of the Louisiana State Senate and one of the main officials in the state's redistricting office, said Louisiana had fallen so far behind other states that even if it managed to increase by 7,000 people in the next five years, it would still lose a Congressional seat.

Elliott Stonecipher, a political analyst and demographer based in Shreveport, said the state faced a long-term reduction in federal aid as its population diminishes.

"The result is direct," said Mr. Stonecipher, who was formerly an assistant superintendent with the state Department of Education. "With the loss of population there will be a matching loss of revenue. You pick it. Look at education, whether it be Title IX or special education. This will be devastating."

Many politicians are also keeping a close eye on population movement within the state.

Within 48 hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Baton Rouge became Louisiana's largest city, doubling to about 800,000 residents. Local officials are now trying to get a population survey up and running to seek federal aid.

Mr. Koepp said this population shift could actually be the early stages of the deterioration of New Orleans' long-term hold over the State Legislature. "If this holds true, there will be a significant political change," he said.

There are now 21 seats in the House and Senate that encompass or touch on Orleans Parish, of 144 total seats statewide.

But if the population fails to return to the parish in coming years, New Orleans may be confined to just a few seats in each chamber through redistricting, Mr. Koepp added. That could change the state's racial and partisan balance.

If evacuees from the Ninth Ward in New Orleans - a reliable bloc of 30,000 black voters that is traditionally easy to mobilize - choose suburban or rural areas over their urban roots in coming years, it could be a political blow to Democrats, said Roy Fletcher, a political consultant from Shreveport who helped elect former Gov. Mike Foster, a Republican.

"It would give a whole lot of a stronger foothold to Republicans in the Legislature and statewide," Mr. Fletcher said. "Louisiana has always been a swing state, a purple state that's both blue and red. You take the Ninth Ward out of that equation and you get a real shot of Republicans winning statewide office."

Barry Erwin, president of a Council for a Better Louisiana, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that monitors the activities of state government, said such a change could forever alter the political landscape.

"These things are symbolic of a divide that we've always had," he said. "There's an us versus them thing. In New Orleans, it's like us, and then there's the rest of the state. Around the rest of the state, it's like us, and then there's New Orleans. This could change all of that."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

September 30, 2005
GAO: Education Department Broke Rules

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:18 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Education Department engaged in illegal ''covert propaganda'' when it paid columnist Armstrong Williams to promote Bush administration policies and when it produced a video that seemed to be a news story, congressional investigators concluded Friday.

The Government Accountability Office said the public relations efforts violated the government's ''publicity or propaganda prohibition'' because the department did not clearly disclose its role to the public. The department was ordered to report the violations to Congress and the president.

The investigation was requested by Sens. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., after it was revealed late last year that the department had hired Williams, a syndicated conservative columnist and TV personality, to promote Bush's ''No Child Left Behind'' law.

In light of the GAO findings, the senators immediately sent a letter to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings urging her to abide by the law, recover the misspent dollars and meet with them on Capitol Hill.

''The Bush administration took taxpayer funds that should have gone towards helping kids learn and diverted it to a political propaganda campaign,'' Lautenberg said in a statement. ''The administration needs to return these funds to the treasury.''

Kennedy added: ''The taxpayer-funded propaganda campaign coming from the White House is another sign of the culture of corruption that pervades the White House and Republican leadership.''

The PR effort unfolded before Spellings took the helm of the department early this year. Her spokeswoman, Susan Aspey, said, ''Under Secretary Spellings' leadership, stringent processes have been instituted to ensure these types of missteps don't happen again.''

''We've said for the past six months that this was stupid, wrong and ill-advised,'' Aspey said. ''There's nothing in today's action that changes our opinion.''

At issue was a $240,000 contract to have Williams, who is black, inform minorities about Bush's law by producing ads with then-Education Secretary Rod Paige. Williams also was to provide media time to Paige and to persuade other blacks in the media to talk about the law.

Nancie McPhail, Williams' chief of staff, said Friday he would have no comment until he had a chance to review the GAO findings. Williams previously has apologized and said that he ''exercised poor judgment.''

The GAO also looked at a broader Education Department contract with Ketchum, a public relations firm, to publicize the Bush education agenda. This effort included production of a ''video news release'' promoting the education law that looked and sounded like a news story.

At least one television station in New York used the package in 2003, substituting its own reporter for the voiceover but followed the script and video the department provided.

''Because the department's role in the production and distribution of the prepackaged news story is not revealed to the target audience, the prepackaged news story constitutes covert propaganda,'' the investigators wrote.

As part of its contract, Ketchum also rated various news stories and individual reporters on how favorable their education reporting was to Bush and the Republican Party. The GAO said this effort was part of a broader media analysis that was otherwise acceptable and required little added expense.

''Nevertheless, we caution that, if the department chooses to conduct media analyses in the future, it be more diligent in its efforts to ensure that such analyses be free from such explicit partisan content,'' the investigators wrote.

The GAO also notified the department that it should look into whether there was another violation of the propaganda ban when Ketchum arranged for the North American Precis Syndicate to write a newspaper article entitled ''Parents want science classes that make the grade.'' The article appeared in numerous small papers around the country and did not disclose the department's role, the investigators said.

The video and reporter rankings came to light through a Freedom of Information Act request by People for the American Way, a liberal group that contended the department was using tax dollars to promote a political agenda.

Elliot Mincberg, the group's counsel, said the GAO findings ''confirm the concern about the impropriety of what the Department of Education did.'' He said he hoped the findings would help deter any further violations from occurring throughout the government.

Aly Colon, who teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists, said the GAO ruling could be seen as a victory for both the press and the government if it helps to reinforce a standard that ''whatever information is presented to the public is done in the most transparent way possible.''

Both sides benefit when the public is clear on where information is coming from, he said.

In a related matter, the GAO also looked into a Health and Human Services Department contract with syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher to help promote a marriage initiative. The GAO said the Gallagher contract did not violate the propaganda ban ''because the services provided were not covert, self-aggrandizing or purely partisan.''

Gallagher said in an interview that her main work for the past decade has been research and education on ways to strengthen marriage. ''I'd like to take this opportunity to again apologize to my readers for an oversight in not disclosing that I had done a small amount of work for the government in my specialty.''

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On the Net:

Government Accountability Office: http://www.gao.gov

Department of Education: http://www.ed.gov/


Copyright 2005 The Associated Press