Sneaking Suspicions Commentary from a practical perspective
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Sneaking Suspicions Commentary from a practical perspective
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January
17, 2009 I'm this close to kicking my PC with a size 10 Timberline boot, what with all the fun I'm having trying to make it work with a new wireless printer. At the moment, I'm attempting an alternate route, in which the software will be installed on Dr. Schranck's notebook computer, which may be less balky. In the meantime, here are links and the opening lines to the most recent golf columns, which you may enjoy while I continue to test what remains of my self-control:
January
7, 2009 We saw Sean Penn’s Milk on New Year’s Eve, and were both deeply impressed. I appreciated the fact that the movie does not seek to canonize San Francisco’s first openly gay city supervisor, but instead presents a well-balanced portrait of the man, his city, and his times. When the movie was first announced in the general media, my initial impression was to wonder why it hadn’t been made before now, as the story of his rise to prominence and murder is such an obvious choice for a good movie. Now that I’ve seen it, however, I think the passage of years perhaps helped. If anything, it may have acted as a deterrent against making a two-dimensional movie suggesting this skilled politician was a pure-hearted victim of a vicious homophobe, his assassin Dan White. Both men deserved far more than that, as this movie shows with some empathy. I would have liked to have seen more in the movie about George Moscone, the Mayor whom White also shot and killed, but there was already so much else to be covered that it probably just couldn’t fit. Milk well deserves the Oscar buzz it’s now receiving. I wouldn’t be surprised if it picked up one or two little statuettes later this year, for Penn and perhaps the screenwriter/executive producer, Dustin Lance Black.
January
7, 2009 The current administration is taking several steps to reduce costs and otherwise try to meet a steadily-declining budget target. These include the recent issuance of a stern edict that all state offices shall have their thermostats set at no more than 68 degrees in winter. In addition, support services staff are expected to check around for space heaters and similar cheating devices. All well and good, I suppose, except that the office building in which I work dates back to the late 60s/early 70s, when American architects apparently considered the East German government as their muse. A single large pane of un-insulated glass helps produce a nice cold draft in my office, while the heating unit under the window remains turned off, to help maintain the average 68 throughout the building. After a few days of this, especially on returning to work on Monday when the heat's been set even lower on the weekend, I had to do something. So I went to Marshall's and found a Calvin Klein zippered sweater vest for only $19.99, marked down from its original alleged market value of $94. The sweater takes the edge off the chill, but it has another effect I hadn't expected. The new daily ritual of putting on this vest each morning means that I have now become Mr. Rogers. Isn't that special? Sure it is.
January 1, 2009 Two years ago my wife and I traveled to New York for a Broadway show weekend, and saw John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, a Parable, starring Eileen Atkins and Ron Eldard. We enjoyed it very much, not least of which because we both graduated from parochial schools in the mid-1960s. In addition to the play’s primary plot, there were several other markers from that period to savor, notwithstanding the Spartan set design and the limitations of a four-actor ensemble. As we left the theater, my wife asked me if I thought the priest was guilty. I said, “Absolutely.” She said, “How could you possibly think that,” and we were off on one of our debates. Just as that discussion began to take off in earnest, however, we heard several other couples around us on the sidewalk, also arguing over whether the Mother Superior’s suspicions were justified. We took that as a good sign of a well-written play, one that deftly avoids any hint of a resolution to its story. This week we saw the movie version, and also enjoyed it. This time, much of what we brought to the play by way of our own school memories was re-created on the screen. The overall look of the film was spot-on, as was the acting. As we left the movie theater, I asked my wife if she’d changed her mind, now that she’d seen it again. She said if anything, she was even more convinced that the priest was innocent. I said, “So you’re wrong again, I see.” She laughed, and we restarted our debate. Thank you, Mr. Shanley. One of the newest members of Delaware’s Superior Court issued a decision this month that reminds us all that no good deed goes unpunished. Judge John A. Parkins, Jr. is a former Deputy Attorney General and a past partner in one of the state’s old line law firms, and began his first term on the state’s general trial court in August. Sometimes I think the senior judges have a role in determining which cases the newbies will be given to handle. That’s the best explanation I can give for how Judge Parkins soon found himself dealing with a summary judgment motion in a dog bite case. Fortunately, this is not your everyday doggie lawsuit, because it involved a good Samaritan of sorts. Ms. Paloni, a veterinary technician at an upstate vet hospital found out that a female dog named Toots had recently been brought to her place of employment and was to be euthanized. Toots, of an undisclosed breed or combination of breeds, had broken a leg when she fell out of a truck owned by a Wilmington firefighter. Some months before the firefighter had rescued Toots from a fire scene, and had the dog under her care when the accident happened. Unable to pay the surgery costs to repair Toots’ broken leg, the firefighter had (apparently reluctantly) concluded that Toots had to rest forever instead. At that point Ms. Paloni stepped in, and signed paperwork suggesting that she owned Toots—a move that created enough of an employee discount for the cost of the surgery to make it affordable. Toots’ leg was successfully repaired, and a few days later the technician dropped Toots off at the firefighter’s house. Unfortunately, Toots’ recovery didn’t do someone else any favors. A few months later Toots bit a man named Smiley when the man was in Toots’ neighborhood. Smiley then sued the firefighter, the firefighter’s fiancé/husband, and the veterinary technician, courtesy of the ownership papers she signed to save Toots’ life. The vet tech’s lawyers argued that under the circumstances, she couldn’t be held responsible for Toots’ decision to gnaw on poor Smiley. Judge Parkins agreed:
The end
result in this case was not hard to see coming. Nonetheless, I also think
that the next dog to come to that hospital with a broken leg had better have
its own insurance card handy. Like many other states, Delaware is going through a tough budget time right now. Revenues from major General Fund sources such as personal and business income taxes are falling off, and the two major automobile assembly plants that have been the backbone of upstate’s blue collar workforce are shuttering their doors, one permanently. These and other money problems are leading to a current fiscal year projected deficit of over $100 million and a projected deficit for FY09 of over 500 million, about one-sixth of the state’s budget. That’s why the online edition of today's News-Journal produced a wry smile at the sheer banality of the headline for a story discussing the options facing the incoming Markell administration and the General Assembly:
No kidding. That one earns four Claudes. Even so, the real difficulty for the state will be if those in charge do not address the deficit issues. Legally, that’s not possible, because the state’s constitution requires a balanced budget. Even so, under less dire circumstances legislators in prior General Assemblies showed a decided reluctance to either cut programs or raise revenues—but when hundreds of millions of dollars are not showing up in the state’s coffers, that attitude does no one any good. The News-Journal story itself is pretty thorough, and worth reading. It goes through some of the options currently available to the administration and the legislature, such as program cuts and personnel cuts. These options produce their own challenges, of course. For example, any sane person reading the state’s Merit Rule on layoffs and bumping rights should conclude that the process is currently designed to discourage any such form of budgetary relief from ever being adopted. The story also mentions that a half-point increase in the top rate of the state’s personal income tax was estimated to produce over $100 million. I’d like to see that number recalculated again under current conditions before I put too much credence in that suggestion. My own preferences include using furloughs as an option. However, there’s nothing now in the Delaware Code or the state’s personnel regulations that deals with furloughs, and any involuntary furlough arrangement must be negotiated with the unions. I like my wife’s suggestion of a voluntary furlough program, which would also require new legislation to implement. A voluntary furlough could act as a loan by the employees, who would have their loan “repaid” by an equivalent number of vacation days added to their benefits, if the state’s economic picture improves in a few years. For every furlough day taken by all state employees, the state would save a minimum of $5 million, so some kind of furlough arrangement should be considered. As for tax changes, I prefer a return to the notion of shared sacrifice, instead of simply taking a whack at the folks who now pay the top rate in Delaware’s income tax system. For example, why not take another look at past tax legislation decisions from the past two decades, such as those that removed thousands of Delawareans completely off the income tax rolls? A relatively small return to the notion that “everybody pays something" could produce a decent increase in the state’s coffers, and also show that the politics of envy do not trump everything. How about re-reading the Delaware Tax Preference Report, available online? Re-discovering how the effective income tax rates are altered by the series of special deductions and credits trailing the law like the chains and boxes lugged by Marley’s ghost might produce some real reforms in the state’s tax system, and raise a bit of needed cash at the same time. Lots of folks are making their own suggestions, and sending them in to the Markell transition web site. I sent in the voluntary furlough idea already, so we’ll see.
December 1, 2008 There’s a fairly simple explanation for Brian Sullivan’s open question, Why Isn’t Anyone Talking Later Retirement for Government Workers? (Hat-Tip to Glenn Reynolds). Here’s how Sullivan put it:
It’s not just a matter of politics and voting blocs, although the eventual solutions, if any, will certainly be affected by those factors. It’s a matter of property rights. Under State and Federal constitutional law, a government worker’s rights to a statutorily-created contributory pension system become vested at some point, under the terms of the particular plan. That means that the legislature cannot institute any changes in those pension plans that significantly affect the pensions of those who have already obtained vested rights in the system. See, for example, In Re State Employees' Pension Plan, 364 A.2d 1228, a 1976 Delaware State Supreme Court case in which the General Assembly attempted to provide special pension benefits for persons who did not meet the normal conditions for a pension. The Court ruled that the General Assembly could only provide those special benefits by also providing the state pension system with the necessary additional funds to pay for the special pensioners, so as not to affect the vested rights of the other pensioners. In so ruling the Court noted the Federal impairment of contracts clause (Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution), as well as its prior decisions that recognized contributory public pension plans as an integral element of the employment relationship between a government and its employees. If a state legislature wants to reform a state pension plan for government workers, it certainly can. However, a cost- or benefit-cutting fix that affects current pensioners, or government employees with vested pension rights, is not really an option under most circumstances. To do so would violate the employees' contractual property rights. That doesn’t mean a government that wants to reform its defined benefit pension system has no options. What it means is that any changes that adopt Sullivan’s suggestion or similar cost-saving or cost-sharing elements can only be enacted to affect state employees whose pension rights have not yet vested. With many such systems, full or partial vesting occurs after five years’ service, so the immediate fiscal benefits of such changes are not as impressive as one might hope. Nonetheless, Sullivan is right to point out the need for fully funding these public pension plans, and to make the sometimes painful political decisions to do so. For example, when I was the City of Wilmington’s labor lawyer, I worked with my clients to negotiate changes to the police and firefighter’s pension plans with the FOP and the IAFF. The 1984 plans were not quite as generous as the plans they replaced, and so reaching agreement on these new changes was difficult. Any new police officers and firefighters were covered by the new plans, which were fully funded from the beginning. The City dealt with the ongoing unfunded pension liability for the old public safety pension plans by eliminating any new participants, and letting nature take its course with respect to the old plans’ participants. I imagine that by now, almost 25 years after the change, that the City’s funding exposure for those old plans is quite a bit smaller than it once was. Time does march on, after all. Sullivan’s suggestion certainly
has merit, and is a far better approach to public policy than the funding
holiday
recently suggested by New Jersey’s Governor Corzine. Even so, the legal
limitations to extending retirement ages for public pensioners mean that any
significant pension cost reductions are for the long term, and not something
to see any time soon. We had a great time with the thousands of folks who came to this year’s film festival, and appreciate all the nice compliments we’ve received about how it was run and the great movies they saw. I spent most of my time at the Festival Box Office, with a few breaks to see a movie or two. The veteran volunteers who handle the ticket selling are a great bunch, and it’s always fun to catch up with them. As for what I thought about the movies I saw, here are my mini-reviews, using the same grading system used by the Film Society in the competitions for Best Feature, Best Debut Feature, Best Documentary, and Best Short. A Time to Die—This gentle little Polish film features a great actress, Danuta Szaflarska, and a remarkably talented Border Collie as her supporting actor. Outstanding. Grab Bag Shorts--
Tell No One—Reminiscent of Hitchcock’s best work, this French thriller puts a widowed pediatrician in the path of some very bad people, who have a reason to want him dead. Outstanding. Trouble the Water--This documentary about Hurricane Katrina won a Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at this year’s Sundance festival. The personal stories were fascinating, but the movie gave insufficient emphasis on the role of the totally dysfunctional city and state government in responding to the crisis. Very good. A Man Named Pearl--Pearl Fryar is one of those folks who didn’t know they couldn’t do something, so they went and did it. In his case, it involves beautiful topiary sculptures. Outstanding. It also earned second place among a fine collection of documentaries for this year’s Festival.
A Secret (Un Secret)—Claude
Miller’s award-winning adaptation of Philippe Grimbert’s autobiographical
novel of a Jewish family in pre-WWII France, and their subsequent history.
Outstanding. What a landslide, eh? Congratulations to President-elect Obama, Vice-President-elect Biden, Governor-elect Markell and all of the other winners in yesterday's hard-fought, historic elections. Considering all the challenges they will face, it may not be too long before some of these winners begin to consider the wisdom of the warning to be careful what you wish for, because you might just be given it. As a state, Delaware is now presented with several major changes in the local political landscape. Senator Biden's elevation to the Vice-Presidency after 36 years in the Senate means that someone has to be appointed to fill his seat for the next two years. State Representative Terry Spence lost his bid for re-election, ending a twenty-year reign as the Speaker of Delaware's House of Representatives. Several other long-time state representatives also lost their seats, all of whom are Republicans. The State House is now officially in Democratic control. Fewer changes took place in the State Senate races, but all of the open seats went to Democrats, expanding the party's long-time control of that house. Later this month I'll mark the twenty-first anniversary of my appointment as a Deputy Attorney General, assigned to represent the Department of Transportation. Next January will be the very first time that I will be advising my client while one political party controls the Governor's Office, Senate, and House. I think the Delaware results reflect not only the general national trend away from the GOP, at least for the time being. To a large extent, the Blue Hen state's political changes also reflect the impacts of a major demographic shift in its population. Over the last fifteen years or so, Delaware has become a significant retirement mecca, especially for folks from states in the Northeast corridor. The Department of Elections records show that an equally significant number of the new Blue Hens are registered Democrats. The latest numbers show that the Ds now enjoy a huge advantage over the Delaware Republicans, of over 100,000 voters. Sussex County is the only one of the state's three counties where Republicans come close to matching the Democrats in total registration, and even there the Ds hold a slim lead. The Delaware GOP leadership certainly has its work cut out for them. On the other hand, the Democrats are now in complete charge of a state facing the loss of major employers such as the Chrysler and GM assembly plants, with a continuing drag on the state's revenue projections in all sorts of revenue categories, and an increasing demand for state services from a growing population. How the Ds work their way through those issues will go a long way toward determining if this year's state election results are a one-time fluke, or just the beginning of a long-term relationship.
November 4, 2008 The Film Festival is being noticed, as tomorrow's opening night approaches. A reporter from a local paper interviewed me recently, and her story is being picked up and repeated in other outlets. I'm on call to handle election law issues today, but otherwise I'll be busy with Festival preparations. As before, once the Festival begins I will post here mini-reviews of the movies I'm able to see, in between stints at the Box Office and other required duties. And if you're able to come to the Festival, stop by the Box Office in our Big Tent and say hi. |
Appearing January 16-29, 2009 at The Movies at Midway Presented By Please donate to these
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Read Sally's Speech
Tips for site-seeing Current Table of Essays Table of Essays for 2007 Table of Essays for 2006 Table of Essays for 2005 Table of Essays for 2004 Table of Essays for 2003 Table of Essays for 2002 Links to the Archives --alternative access to each essay in the collection. Along the Way--a photoblog. Contact Information: fschranck-at-sneakingsuspicions.com The Blogroll Ann
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The
Rosenbergs
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This is a personal web site. Any opinions or comments I express here are my own, and don't necessarily reflect the official position of my work as a government attorney or any of my clients. That fact may be obvious, but it needs to be said here anyway.
This is a self-portrait by Thomas Frye, an Irish artist (1710-1762). A copy of this print is on our family room wall. I am reliably informed that Frye's pose, his features, and his apparent attitude as displayed in this drawing are similar to mine--except for the wig. © Frederick H. Schranck 2002-2009 |
