For Class Discussion (bring to class Mar



For Class Discussion (bring to class Mar. 9)

Comment upon the institutional issue(s) arising from each of the following (note: some are dated). In particular, what institutional questions or issues arise from each discussion?

A. Ohio State Patrol Incident

Two officers used poor judgment when they tried to dig out a snowbound lawmaker and then arranged for troopers to drive her more than 170 miles to committee meetings, the State Highway Patrol said. A patrol report said Lt. Matthew Gurwell, the Chardon post commander, and Sgt. Judith Neel violated regulations in helping Rep. Diane Grendell, R-Chesterland, get to the meetings in Columbus on Nov. 12.

At the time, Geauga County was in the middle of a weeklong storm that dumped up to 4 feet of snow on parts of northeast Ohio. Neel tried to use the patrol's snowplow to clear Grendell's driveway, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer reported yesterday. When that failed, Gurwell arranged for officers to drive her more than 170 miles, from her home east of Cleveland to Columbus.

The report said Grendell called the Chardon post Nov. 11 and said she would need an officer to drive her to Columbus. Grendell said yesterday that legislative leaders had told her to contact the patrol if she needed help during emergencies. ''The patrol often helps out state representatives,'' she said. During the trip, she and the troopers stopped to help people who had run out of gas or were otherwise stranded.

Grendell said she is sorry to see the two officers in trouble for assisting her. ''They were very goodhearted people that tried to help me.'' The patrol is reviewing the report to determine whether the officers should be disciplined, said Sgt. Brenda Collins, patrol spokeswoman. The report said Lt. J.P. Allen, the department's legislative liaison, would tell Grendell not to ask the patrol to plow her driveway or provide transportation in the future.

Gurwell and Neel could not be reached yesterday. Gurwell said in the report that he did not get approval from his supervisors because ''cooperation between the Highway Patrol and state representatives is very important and I did not want . . . to tarnish it.'' Neel said she did not seek approval because she believed her supervisors would agree with her decision to try to plow the drive._

B. American Red Cross and 9-11

The American Red Cross yesterday defended its use of money collected after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, saying in a press conference and in a contentious Capitol Hill hearing that Americans intended their donations to cover more than aid to victims. The agency's explanation came as members of Congress criticized its decision to devote some of the donated money to build blood supplies and prepare for a response to future terrorist attacks.

So far, $ 564 million has been raised for the "Liberty Fund" set up after the attacks, with $ 121 million already paid directly to families, the Red Cross said. In her congressional testimony, Red Cross President Bernadine Healy said families will receive about $ 300 million. The agency has not been specific about how the remaining funds would be spent.

Healy -- and other Red Cross officials during a press conference held before the hearing -- said they believe their messages to local chapters and their public appeals made clear to donors that money would be used for family needs after the Sept. 11 attacks, and for its "aftermath" and "emerging" needs. The need arises "because we are in a war," and to do less would be akin to responding only to the attack on Pearl Harbor without planning for the duration of World War II, Healy said.

The broader language of its appeals, Healy said, explains why the Red Cross feels it is appropriate to spend Liberty Fund money for anthrax victims, a $ 50 million program to build blood inventories and $ 14.7 million on community outreach. If the Red Cross board decides at the end of two years that all the family needs have been met, leftover funds could be "reprogrammed" to more general uses, Healy told the subcommittee on oversight and investigation of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

"That's not what people gave for," countered Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.). Donations were made for direct help to families and victims, Stupak said, adding that the Red Cross "took advantage" of the response to bolster long-range objectives.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who is establishing a central database to disburse funds, called for a streamlined application process. Spitzer said the Red Cross's explanation that funds might be reserved, reprogrammed or put into continuing projects "is anathema" to the people who donated._

C. …where bodies are buried

If there's one thing I've learned from experience, it's that experience is overrated. How many times have you turned on a football or basketball playoff, listened to the announcers blather on about the importance of playoff experience, and then watched the battle-tested veterans get flattened by a collection of rank rookies? Experience is a lousy standard to use in picking a winner on the field. You almost have to be a sportscaster not to notice that.

 By and large, the same principle holds in most fields of endeavor. You need a certain amount of experience to perform competently, but at some point, it ceases to be the most important credential. Forty years of practice doesn't make anyone the best candidate to represent you in court, remove your appendix, teach you piano or cater your wedding. If you think it does, you'll make the wrong choice more often than not.

 But like all household truths, this one has its exceptions. If you look around carefully, you will probably notice that there are a few important jobs that still seem to be handled best by somebody who's been around the track a few times. The evidence of the past few years would suggest that governing a state is one of those.

 Not long ago, as a way of avoiding more productive work, I took out a piece of paper and made a list of the "best" American governors of the 1990s. Here, in no particular order, are the ones I came up with: Ned McWherter of Tennessee, George Voinovich of Ohio, Roy Romer of Colorado, Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, John Engler of Michigan and Zell Miller of Georgia.

 I don't pretend there's anything objective about such a list, or that I'm the most qualified person to draw one up. But I have no particular axe to grind, and I tried as best I could to leave my own pet causes out of it. I was looking for governors who (1) set out a coherent policy agenda and accomplished most of it or (2) projected a consistent image of competence and authority.

 All six of these contenders passed one or the other of these two tests. McWherter launched the nation's most innovative and widely copied health care and housing programs, and Miller rewrote his state's civil service law and steered through a nationally admired higher education funding program. Thompson and Engler took office vowing to reorganize state government along market-friendly lines, and to a great extent both of them accomplished it.

 Voinovich and Romer don't fit so neatly in the innovation category, but I included them under the second criterion, as prudent and sensible managers who leave no doubt that somebody capable is in charge. Romer has demonstrated his negotiating skill in tough situations time after time, while Voinovich has proved to be exemplary at bringing labor and management together in an efficient administration.

D. New York City Report

Protesting what they described as unsafe conditions for welfare recipients who work in New York City parks, workfare laborers and their supporters disrupted a Groundhog Day ceremony Sunday at the city's zoo in Queens. The protesters said that many of the 5,500 workfare laborers assigned to the Department of Parks and Recreation must often pick up trash, including dangerous materials like used syringes, without proper gloves. Also, the department regularly has too few coats for the laborers, who must then wear their own, they said.

   To obtain and keep benefits, 30,000 welfare recipients in the city now must sweep parks, subway cars and streets, and perform a multitude of other duties like transporting corpses at city

hospitals, as part of the work experience program. But even as the city has come to rely more on workfare laborers, it has failed to provide adequate training and equipment, said Benjamin Dulchin, a leader of a group called WEP Workers Together.

   Sunday, Karen Kithan Yau, a lawyer with the National Employment Law Project, led about a dozen organizers and workers as they heckled Henry Stern, the parks commissioner, at the Queens Wildlife Center. "If they're asking WEP workers to pick up Pampers with soiled bodily fluids, the least they could do is provide plastic gloves," Ms. Yau said. Stern told reporters that his department would soon receive more leather-padded gloves to replace the cloth ones that most laborers are now given. He attributed coat shortages in some parks to distribution problems.

   After guards escorted the protesters out of the zoo, Stern said the work experience program had made the parks cleaner.   "This is a radical group of yuppie activists," Stern said of the protesters. "They're revolutionaries in search of a cause, and the cause du jour is that people have some coats."

   "These aren't WEP workers," he added. "I don't think you'll see any WEP workers out there."    Milton McFarlan, who had slipped back inside the zoo, chimed in with, "I'm a WEP worker."   Stern said: "Well, it's one. That's unique. You have a coat?" Later, McFarlan, 54, said he has been picking up trash, planting trees and shoveling snow at Prospect Park 14 days a month for the last 15 months. He said he first went on welfare three years ago, after injuring his back in a car accident.

   For him, having a coat is a matter of dignity, he said. Because the parks department does not permit workfare laborers to keep their work coats, McFarlan said he wears his own jacket to work instead of sharing coats with others. "It's unsanitary," he said. "You work in it; you sweat in it.  If you share coats, you get someone else's disease. If it's your coat, it's your own disease."

E. City of Lebanon cable fiasco

State Auditor Jim Petro’s office will examine spending and contractual procedures for Lebanon’s controversial municipal cable television venture. The examination, part of the city’s annual audit by

the state, is expected to be completed within a month, said Deborah Biggs, Lebanon’s chief fiscal          officer.            

In a Feb. 11 letter, attorneys for entertainment industry giant Time-Warner Inc. requested that

the state review Lebanon’s spending. The letter requested the audit because it said attorneys with the firm representing Time-Warner—Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff—could find no evidence the Lebanon City Council adopted ordinances to approve contracts or expenditures for the $5.1 million cable system.

Petro’s office said it would “review the legal compliance requirements surrounding this issue

during our audit” scheduled to be released in August. Lebanon City Manager Richard Hayward said

Tuesday that last year the council gave him authority to spend up to $1 million. Lebanon’s council, he said, doesn’t review every contract before it is signed, unlike some cities that obtain council sign-off for all contracts above a certain amount.

                 Biggs, who has been the city’s auditor and chief financial officer for 11 years, said all spending for the cable system was done lawfully. Biggs said Lebanon has “followed all guideline the state requires or the city requires.” Hayward characterized Time-Warner’s request as another in a series of harassment tactics the company has used its efforts to kill the city’s cable venture.

                 Jennifer Mooney, Time-Warner vice president for public affairs, said the company doesn’t oppose competition. “We want to ensure a level playing field,” she said. Lebanon has already built a significant portion of the cable system. It has constructed a control building and the backbone for the system, a loop of fiber optic cable surrounding Lebanon. The loop was installed a year ago along with needed monitoring equipment for the city-owned electrical utility, Hayward said. All that remains are satellite dishes, system nodes, and cabeling to Lebanon households, he said.

               City officials said the cable will not only provide cheaper cable rates for residents, but also could offer citizens Internet access and read household electric usage remotely. Last week, however, Lebanon City Council voted 4-3 to delay approving the remaining cable and instead have residents vote on the system in  November. The council is divided into two factions: those who want to launch the cable venture to compete with Time-Warner and those who are skeptical of the cable system and of Hayward. On April 14, the council will entertain a proposal to fire Hayward.

               In response to the effort to fire Hayward, a citizens group is circulating petitions to recall Vice Mayor Mary-Ann Cole. Other council members who have expressed skepticism of cable are Mayor James Mills, Michael Coyan and newcomer Mark Flick. Flick, elected in November, has lead the effort to fire Hayward, who has held his job 10 years. Supporting Hayward are council members AmyBrewer, Gil Jarrard and Jackson Hedges.

 

F. Airport Problems

Even before September 11, the Zenith City Airport Authority was in trouble. Everyone knew it — sort of. The mayor and city council knew it. So did the governor and the legislature. The ZCAA Board knew it. And, of course, Harriet Zefra, your predecessor as the authority’s executive director, knew it.

Still, it wasn’t a crisis. It was simply annoying. And, thus, except for worrying a little, nobody did much about it After September 11, however, this irritant became a calamity. Zefra resigned. And the ZCAA Board hired you to turn the authority around.

After all, you’d established some success fixing broken organizations. In your youth, you took the Zenith City Historical Society — a small club controlled by a few of the city’s oldest families — and created a menu of programs that engaged schools, families, faculty at West Dakota University, senior citizens and corporate sponsors. Recently, you cemented your reputation when you drained the red ink from the balance sheet of the West Dakota State Hospital.

Unfortunately, you know nothing about airplanes or airports. On the other hand, that might be an advantage. You aren’t going to fly the airplanes — or have anything to do with flying them. And because you know nothing about airports, you are free to rethink what the airport should do, what it should not do, what it needs to do better and — most important — how it might do so.

The Zenith City airport isn’t big. Yet its single runway has always had commercial jet service from at least two airlines. As both the capital and the biggest city in West Dakota, the city has been the transportation hub for the state. So even when airline deregulation freed the airlines to discontinue some service, only one airline pulled out.

Still, neither passenger traffic nor takeoffs and landings grew at the projected rate. The downtown civic center never attracted the large conventions that the city had assumed when it built the thing. Similarly, tourism in the West Dakota mountains has lagged even modest predictions. Nevertheless, ZCAA planning and operations continued to be driven by civic pride and old-fashioned boosterism.

In fact, the ZCAA Board and other civic leaders pushed Zefra and her predecessors to expand the airport’s services and terminal facilities. “We’ll never fill the civic center until convention planners are impressed with our city,” went the local logic, “and these key decision makers will never be impressed when the first thing they see is a third-class airport.”

Thus, no one dissented when the ZCAA unveiled its plan to transform the terminal. The mayor and the city council, the governor and the legislature, the Zenith City Tribune and the West Dakota Chamber of Commerce all endorsed the concept. So did the labor unions and the state’s tourism industry. Several helped to convince the bond-rating agencies that the financial plan for the new terminal was sound.

It wasn’t. Neither was the authority’s overall strategy. In an effort to attract more conventions (and more tourists), ZCAA had added services and personnel usually found only at larger airports. For example, to attract two upscale restaurants, it offered contracts that were unusually favorable. And to make sure that the airport made an excellent first impression on visitors, the authority gave all new employees extensive customer-service training.

Unfortunately, airport traffic did not expand as fast as airport services — and thus airport revenues lagged airport expenses. The financial projections had always assumed that passenger growth would only follow improved services. But rather than decrease (and disappear), the deficit grew — slowly but steadily.

G. Scheduling Issues (from NASA Columbia Accident Investigation Board report)

During the course of this investigation, the Board received several unsolicited comments from NASA personnel regard-ing pressure to meet a schedule. These comments all concerned a date, more than a year after the launch of Columbia, that seemed etched in stone: February 19, 2004, the scheduled launch date of STS-120. This flight was a milestone in the minds of NASA management since it would carry a sec-tion of the International Space Station called “Node 2.” This would configure the International Space Station to its “U.S. Core Complete” status.

At first glance, the Core Complete configuration date seemed noteworthy but unrelated to the Columbia accident. However, as the investigation continued, it became apparent that the complexity and political mandates surrounding the International Space Station Program, as well as Shuttle Pro-gram management.s responses to them, resulted in pressure to meet an increasingly ambitious launch schedule.

In mid-2001, NASA adopted plans to make the over-budget and behind-schedule International Space Station credible to the White House and Congress. The Space Station Program and NASA were on probation, and had to prove they could meet schedules and budgets. The plan to regain credibility focused on the February 19, 2004, date for the launch of Node 2 and the resultant Core Complete status. If this goal was not met, NASA would risk losing support from the White House and Congress for subsequent Space Station growth.

By the late summer of 2002, a variety of problems caused Space Station assembly work and Shuttle flights to slip be-yond their target dates. With the Node 2 launch endpoint fixed, these delays caused the schedule to become ever more compressed.

Meeting U.S. Core Complete by February 19, 2004, would require preparing and launching 10 flights in less than 16 months. With the focus on retaining support for the Space Station program, little attention was paid to the effects the aggressive Node 2 launch date would have on the Shuttle Program. After years of downsizing and budget cuts (Chapter 5), this mandate and events in the months leading up to STS-107 introduced elements of risk to the Program. Columbia and the STS-107 crew, who had seen numerous launch slips due to missions that were deemed higher priorities, were further affected by the mandatory Core Complete date. The high-pressure environments created by NASA Headquarters unquestionably affected Columbia, even though it was not flying to the International Space Station.

H. Tony Blair’s Problem

In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair had a problem. The majority opinion amongst the British public was set against an invasion of Iraq. Likewise, a large proportion of the governing Labour Party’s members of Parliament (MPs) wanted to prevent military action. Suspicion of the push towards war was rooted in concern for international law and the United Nations, in concern for the independence of European policy-formation processes, and, not least, in distrust of the Bush administration’s methods, motives, and tone. If MPs voted against military intervention, or placed barriers on its taking place (making it conditional on United Nations Security Council approval, for example), Blair’s hands would have been tied.

In an effort to bring public and parliamentary opinion behind his proposed policies, Blair decided to publish a dossier, outlining the intelligence assessment of the threat that Iraq posed. This dossier, titled Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, was published on 24 September 2002.

The publication of intelligence assessments was largely unprecedented. Intelligence is normally passed from the Intelligence Services to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which is based in the Cabinet Office, and includes intelligence professionals and civil servants drawn from several major intelligence-gathering agencies. As the “main instrument for advising on priorities for intelligence gathering” the JIC is tasked with making high-level intelligence judgments drawn from the assessments of the various units and services that report to them (Cabinet Office 2001). It is worth emphasizing that the JIC is not a political committee. It prepares and provides information from which politicians may make decisions.

The dossier set out to display the evidence that Iraq was maintaining a WMD program and was prepared to employ WMD, both against Iraqi civilians (as had happened in Halabja in 1988) and in pursuit of Saddam Hussein’s strategy of regional domination. It was divided into three parts, outlining in turn Iraq’s chemical, biological, nuclear, and ballistic missile programs, the history of UN inspections, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The dossier was prefaced both by a foreword, signed by Tony Blair, and by an executive summary. Blair’s foreword set out the case that could be drawn from the information contained in the dossier, while, strangely, the executive summary “took the form of a judgment. It was not a summary of the main points in the text.”

One serious allegation was that Iraq was capable of activating WMD within 45 minutes after an order to deploy was given. This charge was repeated four times, including in the prime minister’s foreword. The 45 minute claim was a key part of the evidence presented in the dossier.

Parliament was recalled when the dossier was published, and Tony Blair repeated the allegations, including the 45 minute claim, in his statement.

Although much of the information in the dossier was not new, the new elements were sufficiently serious that they had an effect. When members of Parliament voted, the government’s motion was carried. The effect on public opinion was more difficult to measure, but several newspapers carried front page stories about the 45 minute claim the day after the dossier was published.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download