Transportation in Minnesota: A real need, and real chance. to help those left behind

The importance of a quality transportation system cannot be overstated. Our highway system, railroads, airports and a robust transit system are essential to economic growth and the simpler purpose of moving people from place to place.

With an election approaching, it is important that we have conversations with public officials about the underrepresented transportation issue –– and especially the concerns of those being left behind by the current system, particularly those with disabilities.

While a third of the country, with the push of a button, simply hails a car through a transportation network company (TNC) such as Uber to travel quickly and at reasonable cost, many members of the disability community are stuck in the position of needing to schedule rides days or even weeks in advance with little to no assurance of punctuality.

While we need to continue to move forward in finding innovative solutions to address transportation disparities, we shouldn’t settle for solutions that are leaving people behind. As it stands, the vehicles of transportation network companies generally don’t meet accessibility standards. Para-transit is expensive and hard to plan for.

Partnerships with TNCs are not an ideal long-term answer, but the technology and existing systems can be used in the development of more sustainable answers

The state and localities have two viable options in providing ride-share services to individuals with disabilities –– approaches that meet accessibility regulations and are available via smart phone. The first choice is simply to develop regulations mandating that a certain percentage of a TNC’s vehicle fleet must meet federal accessibility standards

The second option is for the state to leverage existing technologies and provide a comparable option. While TNCs and taxi companies differ in business structure, they both offer the same on-demand-style service. Many taxi companies are even rolling out GPS tracking to keep up with competition from companies like Lyft. And their vehicles are more likely to meet accessibility standards.

It is the 21st century, and now is the optimal time for public agencies to implement a smartphone transit app. Agencies could roll out the service in pieces, beginning with the ability to track your ride online, which would eliminate the long wait times often associated with para-transit services.

Most TNCs utilize subsidies to keep rides cheap enough to balance the need to maintain a solid customer base, while paying drivers enough to maintain a large fleet. These subsidies come straight out of the pockets of private companies.

Each ride on public transit agency para-transit is subsidized by tax dollars, adding cost to the population as a whole. Even with the public subsidies, para-transit rides cost more than the typical bus fare.

Public agencies would be able to fill more vehicles to higher capacity with carpooling models. By utilizing the existing fleet more efficiently, they could provide faster service, thus improving service quality. Extra seats in vehicles could also be used to pick up carpool customers who do not require accessible vehicles but are traveling to similar locations.

We live in an era of innovation. We have the potential to change systems and find real solutions to transportation disparities. But before we move forward, we need to stop and contemplate how we are going to use modern-day technology to improve access to transportation options

TNCs are a very plausible option and there is a demand for them, but effective policy is inclusive of everyone. It’s time to give everyone a seat at the table in the development of such policies.

Noah J. McCourt is an autism self-advocate, a member of the Governor’s Council on Disabilities and since 2017, chair of the state Subcommittee on Children’s Mental Health. Jim McDonough is chair of the Ramsey County Board of Commissioners.

http://www.startribune.com/transportation-in-minnesota-a-real-need-and-real-chance-to-help-those-left-behind/495098971/

Big oil and gas companies are winners in Trump's new trade deal

Only a few months into office, President Trump had delivered on a number of promises to the oil and natural gas industry, such as reviving the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines while trying to rewrite a number of environmental regulations.

The entire time, Big Oil cheered the administration on.

But more privately, many of those same multinational energy companies were worried about Trump keeping another one of his campaign promises: to rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement, the trilateral trade pact that underpins the work of major oil firms across the continent.

"There was genuine concern," said Joshua Zive, an energy lobbyist at the law and lobbying firm Bracewell.

Now, with a new agreement hammered out among the United States, Mexico and Canada, the sector is breathing a sigh of relief.

Count the oil and gas industry among the winners of the new NAFTA — or, as Trump is rebranding it, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. The oil business persuaded the White House to keep a number of features of the old NAFTA deal in the new agreement, including provisions that help protect U.S. oil companies' investments abroad and allow for tax-free transport of raw and refined products across borders.

"We're mostly happy that it's been preserved, that many of the provisions in the original NAFTA that had supported the integrated North American energy markets are still in place," said Aaron Padilla, senior advisor for international policy at the American Petroleum Institute, the nation's biggest oil and gas lobbying group.

Among their biggest concerns was the preservation of a system of resolving international trade disputes called investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS.

Under that dispute settlement system, multinationals can sue the governments of nations in which they work when those states issue new regulations. The system has attracted critics on the left for derailing anti-pollution efforts and on the right for eroding U.S. sovereignty.

Trump's trade negotiators looked at the legal system with skepticism, too. The final deal does limit ISDS, but with a few key exceptions. Oil and gas is one of only five economic sectors, including telecommunications and transportation, to keep ISDS in the crucial Mexican market.

The oil lobby regards that carve-out as a key victory given the investment that multinationals have made there since Mexico opened its oil and gas fields to foreign drilling starting in 2013. Foreign oil companies were booted from Mexico 75 years before then. Now BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and Total have all won leases there that could have been jeopardized had Trump torn up NAFTA.

Keeping that arbitration system intact in Mexico was a "higher priority" than doing so in Canada, Padilla said.

Environmental critics, never big fans of the original NAFTA for including ISDS, were quick to criticize the new agreement as more of the same and to note that the deal "makes no mention of climate change," according to Charlie Cray, a political and business strategist for Greenpeace USA.

While Cray said the deal "includes improvements" to ISDS, he added: "Any provisions that give big polluters a way to hold governments over a barrel are unacceptable."

In another victory, USMCA, like NAFTA before it, would prohibit tariffs on raw and refined oil and gas products, such as gasoline sold by U.S. refiners in Mexico. The deal would also reduce tariffs on a special thinner that helps heavy Canadian crude from Alberta and Saskatchewan flow more easily through pipelines to refineries in the United States.

For the last two years, as a potential NAFTA renegotiation loomed, the American Petroleum Institute and other oil-sector trade groups pressed their case with the White House, the U.S. trade representative and Congress to keep key parts of the pact.

By September of last year, the oil lobby became more publicly vocal about its concerns with ending NAFTA. If the negotiations are not "handled appropriately," API then-President and Chief Executive Jack Gerard told reporters at the time, "I think all of us, including those of us in the oil and gas industry, are going to have to look long and hard at the situation."

GOP leaders in Congress took up those concerns as well. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) made clear to the White House that eroding investor protections abroad may lose the new agreement the support of some congressional Republicans.

The new trade pact is not a done deal yet. The Senate still needs to approve the renegotiated pact before it takes effect.

At least for now, the oil industry just appreciates that tense trilateral talks are over.

"The energy industry in North America was desperate for stability," Zive said. "It can't be stated how important it is to move out of the contentious stage of negotiations."

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-oil-gas-nafta-usmca-20181003-story.html

New NAFTA deal omits climate change, and hands oil and gas yet another win

President Donald Trump’s deal to tweak the trade agreement among the United States, Mexico, and Canada won early praise for changes meant to raise wages and improve safety regulations on cross-border trucking.

But on Monday, environmental groups panned the accord to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, arguing it includes “corporate giveaways” for fossil fuel giants, excludes binding agreements on lead pollution, and contains no mention of human-caused global warming.

Neither “climate” nor “warming” are among the words in the 31 pages of the new deal’s environment chapter.

NAFTA was long criticized for encouraging companies to shift polluting operations to Mexico, the poorest country with the laxest environmental rules in the trilateral trade agreement. Particular complaints focused on the investor-state dispute settlement process, a system in which companies have been historically affordedbroad corporate rights that override local environmental regulations.

The new deal limits those rights, with one major exception: U.S. oil and gas companies. Under the rules, firms that have, or may at some point obtain, government contracts to drill or build infrastructure like pipelines and refineries in Mexico ― such as ExxonMobil Corp. ― can challenge new environmental safeguards Mexican President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador has vowed to erect.

“It’s like saying, ‘From here on, we’re going to protect the henhouse by keeping all animals away, except for foxes, they’re cool,’” Ben Beachy, director of the Sierra Club’s living economy program, said in a phone interview.

That’s not the only giveaway for the oil and gas industry. The updated deal, which requires congressional approval, preserves a provision that requires the U.S. government to automatically approve all gas exports to Mexico, despite another rule mandating regulators consider the public interest.

“We urge Congress to approve” the revised deal, said Mike Sommers, chief of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s biggest lobby. “Retaining a trade agreement for North America will help ensure the U.S. energy revolution continues into the future.”

The deal, rebranded the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, tosses aside a standard set of seven multilateral environmental agreements that undergirded the last four U.S. trade deals. USCMA includes enforcement language taken from just one of the environmental accords, weakens the language from another two, and makes zero mention of the other four.

“Trump’s trade agreement with Mexico and Canada is a corporate giveaway intended to sharply limit the powers of government to protect people and the planet,” said Doug Norlen, director of economic policy at the nonpartisan Friends of the Earth. “This agreement is an attack on our ability to hold Big Oil and Gas accountable for the damage they cause to our communities.”

USCMA also includes a section on good regulatory practices that Beachy said “would be better named deregulation.”

The rules essentially give corporations an extra opportunity to challenge proposed regulations before they’re finalized, and ask for existing regulations to be repealed.

“We expect that, after Trump is out of office, we’re going to have to work hard to re-regulate,” he said. “Even after Trump leaves office, Trump’s NAFTA (revision) could extend his polluting legacy for years.”

https://grist.org/article/new-nafta-deal-omits-climate-change-and-hands-oil-and-gas-yet-another-win/

Dean Transportation is hiring

LANSING, Mich. (WILX) - If you are interested in working for Dean Transportation then mark Saturday, October 6 on your calendar.

That's the day that representatives from Dean Transportation will be meeting with local job applicants.

This free event runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Dean Transportation Offices on Aurelius Road.

People attending will find out about the business first hand, the benefits and paid training.

And the first 50 qualified candidates will have on-the-spot interviews.

The main focus of the hiring event is to fill 50 school bus driver positions in Lansing area.

https://www.wilx.com/content/news/Dean-Transportation-is-hiring-495037421.html

Differing jobs account for racial pay gap in unionized construction

Larry Mishel spends nearly 650 words acknowledging the accuracy of my op-ed "Construction unions leave minority workers behind," writing, "Black workers do earn less than whites in union construction" likely because "blacks [are] more heavily represented in lower-paid occupations."

I'm glad we agree on that point.

Mishel, whose think tank has received nearly $70,000 from Gary LaBarbera's Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York since 2016, is the third surrogate to publicly respond to my editorial on the lack of diversity in the city's unionized building trades. Ironically, all three of these union responses came from white men. Indeed, all the top leaders of New York City's building trades unions are white males.

Readers looking for a more-accurate representation of the so-called diversity in the unionized building trades should refer to a 2016 Crain's op-ed by three members of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 14-14B. They describe an "old-boy network" that—far from being "ancient history"—still keeps the union almost entirely white. The writers called it "a direct consequence of union leadership building barriers to equal opportunity for nonwhite workers."

Rather than paying for sympathetic studies from union-aligned think tanks, Mr. LaBarbera should submit the data requested by the president of the NAACP New York State Conference nearly three years ago, including "comprehensive data showing the exact number of African-American and Hispanic members currently employed in each building trade" and "how many African-American and Hispanic apprentices advanced to full-time employment."

If Mr. LaBarbera is unwilling to provide this proof of diversity, perhaps he and his hired spokesman doth protest too much.

https://www.crainsnewyork.com/letters-editor/differing-jobs-account-racial-pay-gap-unionized-construction

Opportunity for Public Comment on Future Transportation Projects

State officials want to hear from the public on what local projects should be priorities in the state's next 10-year transportation plan, called the State Transportation Improvement Program. Data and local input are used to determine which projects get built based on a funding formula aimed at reducing congestion, increasing safety and promoting economic growth.

The department's 14 local transportation divisions are accepting input on division-level projects starting as early as this week in some locations. Division-level projects are one of three categories in which projects are funded.

In August, the department released the preliminary scores for projects evaluated at the regional level. The divisions and local transportation planning organizations will use that information, along with feedback from the public, to determine how to assign local input points to division-level projects.

Project priorities can be as small as a new turn lane, an intersection upgrade or another improvement. Please note that the comment period is not for maintenance-related projects such as patching potholes, resurfacing, or cleaning out ditches. NCDOT uses a different method to prioritize maintenance projects.

The department will provide auxiliary aids and services under the Americans with Disabilities Act for disabled persons who want to provide input. Anyone requiring special services should contact the division contact on the STIP development website as early as possible so that arrangements can be made.

When all project scores are finalized at the statewide, regional and division levels, the top-scoring projects will be scheduled into a draft of the 2020-20229 STIP based on available funding and other factors. They include the completion of environmental studies and engineering plans, corridor spending caps and federal and state funding restrictions.

Local transportation planning organizations across the state also receive local input on project priorities. For more information on that process, contact your local metropolitan planning organization (MPO) or rural planning organization (RPO). Links to the MPO and RPO directories can be found on the STIP Development website.

The draft plan is scheduled to be released for public comment in January 2019, and adopted by the N.C. Board of Transportation at its summer monthly meeting.

Information on the process and how and when to comment is available on the NCDOT’s 2020-2029 STIP development website at ncdot.gov/initiatives-policies/Transportation/stip/development/Pages/default.aspx. From this site, scroll down to the Next Steps section to find the public comment opportunities for your area.

The Strategic Transportation Investments Law established a data-driven funding formula that takes politics out of the planning process. The transportation plan is updated every two years to ensure it accurately reflects the state's current needs.

http://www.thepilot.com/news/opportunity-for-public-comment-on-future-transportation-projects/article_81ed5e5c-c5ad-11e8-ab5b-637ed470c9ef.html

More than $60K in construction equipment damaged in Santa Rosa County

SANTA ROSA COUNTY, Fla. (WEAR) — A local construction company is dealing with repeated acts of vandalism at a construction site. The crimes are not only costing the firm money, but time.

"Right now, we are already three to four weeks behind because of vandals,” said Kenneth King with All South Construction.

All South Construction is trying to build roads in a subdivision on Nelson Road in Holley.

However, three pieces of heavy equipment have been hit by vandals. On three occasions, in the past two-and-a-half weeks, radiator and gas lines have been slashed and engines were damaged.

"You've got the fuel caps removed, oil caps removed, dirt packed in them. It downs the equipment,” King said.

The Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office has recovered some fingerprints and the company has images captured by cameras.

"Whoever’s doing the damage, it's quite substantial. So, it's not anything that’s going to be a slap on the wrist. It's going to be serious changes, for high dollar amount items that have been damaged,” explained Sgt. Rich Aloy.

So far, damaged is estimated at more than $60,000.

A $5,000 reward is being offered for information leading to an arrest or arrests in the case.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/2018-10-01/construction-spending-01-august.html