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Despite court ruling, mining permit gridlock persists

EnergyBy Jim Waters March 3, 2013

After nearly a year and a half since a federal judge ruled the Environmental Protection Agency’s “enhanced coordination process” for denying mining permits to Kentucky’s energy sector was illegal, a Kentucky representative is now grilling the U.S. Corps of Engineers on why gridlock continues in issuing new permits.

U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, R-KY, went on the offensive last week during an Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee hearing with the Corps:

“In particular, I expect some explanation for why the Corps continues to drag its feet in issuing mining permits under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. This continued deadlock is shuttering mines and adding thousands to unemployment lines in Kentucky and throughout Appalachia.”

In fact, coal companies have laid off more than 2,100 miners in Eastern Kentucky alone since January 2012 according to the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, due in no small part to this sort of gridlock in issuing mining permits. Kentucky coal communities now rank among the worst in unemployment with rates above 14%, well over the overall state rate of 8.1%

Unemployment isn’t the only problem resulting from the blockage of new mining permits. Thanks to this mysterious gridlock, coal severance taxes are also down, resulting in million-dollar budget deficits for coal county governments. What’s worse, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that while coal demand is set to rise almost everywhere across the globe, coal production in eastern Kentucky coalfields will be half as much in 2018 as compared to 2010. Again, denying mining permits is not alleviating the issue.

With eastern Kentucky only set to face even more job loss in the coming years, one has to wonder what the real reason is for the U.S. Corps of Engineers denying mining permits – despite the court ruling revoking the same kind of behavior from the EPA.

Education Secretary called out over inflated claims about sequestration

Education, News, Transparency and AccountabilityBy Richard Innes March 1, 2013

As Education Week points out, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has long been considered an asset for the Obama Administration.

But, Duncan made some incorrect claims recently about the impacts of the pending fiscal sequestration on education around the country, and he is being called out about it – NOT by Republicans, but the not exactly conservative Washington Post!

Writes EdWeek:

“…the Washington Post put Duncan through the fact-check ringer—giving him “Four Pinnochios” for his statements about pink slips already going out to teachers, which is what the education secretary told Politics K-12’s Michele and other reporters last week.”

Four Pinocchios (Spelling lesson for the Post, only one “n” but two “c”s in the name) – Ouch!

Getting Pinocchios from the Washington Post – Quadruple Ouch!

EdWeek continues:

“The Post even compared Duncan’s statements to Susan Rice’s comments on Libya, which ultimately doomed her bid for Secretary of State.” Super Ouch!

Bringing this closer to home, I wonder how many panic-inducing claims about the sequester’s impacts on Kentucky’s schools might also be suffering from the Duncan-Pinocchio effect. I seem to recall a few years back we heard all sorts of claims one spring about all the teachers we were going to lose due to supposed funding short-falls. Came the new school year, and hardly anyone lost a job. Maybe a reader can refresh my memory on that.

For sure, we know some districts could be doing their business a lot more economically. We talked about that in our Bang for the Buck 2012 report.

Flip back to page 18 in that report. Ask yourself how come Harlan Independent – even with a 53 percent free and reduced cost school lunch rate – can educate students at $8,639 a piece and get an ACT Composite Score average of 20.9 while Anderson County, with only a 43 percent lunch rate, spends over $3,440 more per pupil and gets a much lower ACT Composite Score of 18.3?

In any event, it looks like the nation’s head educator got himself caught, right by his growing nose, smack in the center of the sequester tornado. Given the amount of wind constantly being generated in Washington, a Washington “tornado” can be a really dangerous place to be!

Leadership audits save principals in Jefferson County?

Education, NewsBy Richard Innes March 1, 2013

Maybe not

The Louisville Courier-Journal reported today, “Audits: 7 JCPS low-performing schools making improvements, can keep principals.”

Well, maybe not.

I have not had time to evaluate the audits, but I know there is no requirement for the commissioner of education to follow the auditors’ recommendations. In fact, I seem to recall precedents of the commissioner not always following audit recommendations for Persistently Low-Achieving Schools (PLAs).

More importantly, the commissioner and I now know something additional that I don’t think the auditors could have known: newly released math and reading results for the latest PLAN and EXPLORE testing for these seven schools overall don’t look so hot.

Unlike most other state testing in Kentucky, EXPLORE and PLAN are administered in the fall of the eighth and 10th grade years, respectively. Because the principals took over these seven schools in the 2011-12 school year, we now have not one, but two sets of testing data for their time at the helm. Of course, the testing done in early 2011 is more like a reflection of what the previous principal in each school produced, but the 2011-12 scores provide good baseline data for the new principals, as well.

So, how do the numbers actually look? This table shows the percentages of students who scored at or above the EXPLORE or PLAN Benchmark Scores that show students are on track for college and careers.

Where the Benchmark performance declined, I show the 2012-13 scores in red.

If a school showed declines between 2011-12 and 2012-13 in both reading and mathematics, I show the school’s name in red on the 2012-13 line.

Bluntly put, when it comes to math and reading, there’s an awful lot of red in this table.

While only allowing a principal one year at the helm before pronouncing judgment might not be wise, or fair, it would be equally unfair to our kids to say these school leaders are off the hook when their first to second year test data is trending in the wrong direction.

I will try to dig into one or two of the audits over the weekend to see how well they hold together (an initial scan indicates the auditors didn’t even consider test scores).

By the way, these new audits were not conducted or reported in the same way as earlier PLAs audits, and they appear to have been completed by different group of evaluators.

Meanwhile, I wouldn’t place any bets on whether or not those principals are home free. Education Commissioner Terry Holliday has been making comments like things couldn’t get any worse and that some of the PLAs are tantamount to educational genocide. I guarantee you Holliday pays attention to test scores even if the auditors did not.

NYC Mayor claims Kentucky’s record coal exports is “unfortunate”

EnergyBy Jim Waters February 28, 2013

According to one of the most powerfully ignorant politicians in the northeastern U.S., Kentucky’s most prized natural resource and the energy sector it supports can be chillingly described as “a dead man walking.”

This comes as breaking news to Kentucky’s nearly 20,000 coal miners and the three additional industry workers supported by each. But I suppose New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg somehow has more man-on-the-spot knowledge of our energy sector up in New York City than we do here in the commonwealth where coal generates 93% of our electricity.

On Wednesday, Bloomberg had the smug audacity to claim:

“Even though the coal industry doesn’t totally know it yet, or is ready to admit it, its day is done. It used to be said that coal is king, and regrettably coal remains king in nations like India and China. Here in the US, I am happy to say, the king is dead. Coal is a dead man walking.”

What kind of ignorance does it take for a U.S. politician to state flat out that Kentucky’s record exports of coal to developing nations last year is “unfortunate?” If it weren’t for citizens of coal states and the black rock found beneath their land, the kind of advances in human welfare we’ve seen in countries like China and India over the past decade would be only a dream. How “unfortunate” for Bloomberg that states like Kentucky helped turned the dream into reality

Does Bloomberg also find the price of energy in Kentucky – one of the lowest in the nation thanks to our abundant supply of coal – unfortunate? Perhaps we should take Bloomberg’s lead and force utility companies to switch to much more expensive alternative energy sources so the most vulnerable among us can’t afford to turn the heat on. At least his radical anti-humanist agenda would come to fruition.

I wonder if Bloomberg would have the guts to call that unfortunate in front of a crowd of inquiring Kentucky citizens.

The data also doesn’t back Bloomberg’s galling statements. According to the International Energy Agency, coal is set to become the world’s largest source of energy by 2017. What part of this sounds like a dead man walking? Oh yes, if Bloomberg had his way, the Environmental Protection Agency would turn a potentially vibrant industry into that proverbial dead man:

“We are ready for the next round in this struggle, the long, regulatory trench warfare that will determine just how tightly and effectively the EPA clamps down on carbon pollution.”

On second thought, let’s hope Bloomberg and his bright ideas stay where they are in the Big Apple.

Charter school bill advances in Kentucky!

UncategorizedBy Richard Innes February 28, 2013

Senate Bill 176, which would allow Kentucky’s Persistently Low-Achieving Schools to be reformed as charter schools, passed an important hurdle today when the Kentucky Senate’s Education Committee successfully voted the bill out of committee. SB 176 now moves to the Senate floor for a senate-wide vote.

Testimony today was limited because a hearing on the bill already took place on Tuesday. However, Georgia State Senator Alisha Thomas Morgan did get to tell the committee about the great success Georgia is experiencing with its 140 charter schools.

Morgan was an NAACP organizer before joining the Georgia legislature and said she once shared the fears of many of the unknown, but she as she watched the impact of charters, she changed her mind. She also mentioned that Kentucky needs to overcome adult issues because the greatest fear is not doing well for kids.

Bluegrass Beacon: Failure at the heart of central planning

Media, Smaller GovernmentBy bipps February 28, 2013

Steve Horwitz’s recent lecture at Western Kentucky University may have directly concerned failures of the Federal Reserve System, but the nationally known economist’s presentation also offered crucial reminders of how central planning in any sector is a failure.

Proponents of a command-and-control society like to claim that it’s free-market policies that have been tried and found wanting. This nonsense has been crammed down the throats of Kentuckians for so long that the idea of a truly free marketplace for industries like banking, health care or education is dismissed as radically unworkable.

Why, exactly, do we need a central bank like the Federal Reserve to assert monopoly control over our nation’s money supply when the competition of the marketplace works effectively in countless other industries?

WKU student Raymond Shears, a 21-year-old junior business major from London who attended the Horwitz event, told Bowling Green Daily News reporter Chuck Mason that while “it was good to hear an opposite viewpoint on the Fed,” he nevertheless believed that “we need to keep the Fed because of the economy.”

Apparently for Shears and others who think like him, the idea of banks operating according to free-market principles may be philosophically interesting, but it’s theory best left in the lecture hall.

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