- BMGer PJ hypothesizes that Christy Mihos might be a serious candidate for Governor in 2010. I doubt it. As in 2006, there are aspects of Mihos’s message that will be appealing, but his glaring weaknesses as a gubernatorial candidate that were so evident in 2006 seem very likely to reassert themselves.
However, I said in 2006, and I continue to think, that he could — and should — win statewide office. He should be the next State Auditor. He’d be really good at that job, and with the possible collapse of the Globe now on the horizon, someone has got to step up to take on the documentation of whether state “funds are spent in an appropriate manner.” An independently-elected and -funded state office seems like an excellent choice.
If Christy would just let whatever common sense he has get a hold of his ego and his ambition, he could really do the state some good.
- Has anyone else noticed that the Easter Day traffic fiasco has got just about everyone — even the most conservative among us — demanding that more toll-takers be put on the job? For years, MassPike toll collectors have been the poster children for hackery. Every chance Howie Carr gets, he makes some quip about legislators with relatives working for the Pike, and just recently he bemoaned the lack of toll collector layoffs. (And, full disclosure, we occasionally have taken those easy pot-shots as well.)
Well, now it turns out that the highway actually doesn’t work very well if there aren’t enough people collecting tolls. Put aside whose fault the Easter Day mess was — facts are facts, and the fact is that if we are going to have toll booths at all, you need people to staff them. So, until we can take down the Rt. 128 tolls (and, regrettably, that day isn’t coming soon), maybe we’d all just better suck it up.
- It’s standard procedure to fingerprint anyone who is arrested, right? So is it really that big a deal to take a DNA sample at the same time? If so, why? Please be specific.
I don’t think anyone would dispute that having enough toll takers to keep traffic from backing up is necessary. The gripe that most people have is how much they are paid. By cutting back on the number of toll takers, LeBovidge may have saved some money for the Pike, but at the expense of wasted time and added stress for those who use it. If he were to truly cut costs as people have urged him to do, he would staff the tolls with employees being paid a reasonable rate. Certainly in tough times such as these, one could find people to collect tolls for less than $60,000 a year. Many people with a lot higher level of education and jobs that require far more skill make far less than that.
I’ve been searching and can’t find one. It would be great to see the detail to understand the reality that they keep mentioning. Who works there? How many administrators? What are they’re healthcare/pension costs? What are their labor rates?
I was just searching for the total toll revenue the Pike collects annually. I would take any recent year. Couldn’t find that either…
http://www.masspike.com/aboutu…
I just googled for it. Didn’t think to go to their site. Feeling pretty stupid.
Howie Carr consistently perpetuates the myth of the $100,000 toll-taker. According to public data on the Boston Herald’s website, a toll collector’s salary is $53,022.70 for a 40 hour week. That isn’t even your $60,000 figure.
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p>I’m not sure how people are evaluating whether that is a reasonable salary. Most likely by anecdote, as in “hey, I’d love to earn $53,022 a year” — about $26 per hour. Would you accept such a salary working a job inside of 128, in particular a job that is outside, rain or shine, 100 degrees or 0 degrees?
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p>Also, ask anyone how reliable the work force becomes when you get into the $8-12/hour range.
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p>Once you consider those things, I don’t think $53,022.70 is that outrageous.
According this bostonchannel.com report:
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p>
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p>Whatever we might say about Mr. Carr, his $100K figure is not far off — it hardly constitutes a “myth”. I read “441” toll-takers earning “an average salary” of $71,000 — and I get $31.3M/year being paid for a “service” performed better without human intervention.
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p>The Turnpike Authority — with all its executives and every employee — should be dissolved. The toll-booths should be removed. The tolls should be eliminated, and the gas tax raised to replace the lost revenue.
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p>This state cannot afford the luxury of continuing to pay salaries for jobs that technology does far better at far lower cost.
Could someone explain to me why Toll Collectors “start” at $53K while Assistant District Attorneys start at $32K (after 3 years of Law School). At least one of those two positions is being paid at the wrong rate. Which one???? I say both… start the toll collector at $15-20/hour (huge line for applications would form) and start ADA’s at $70K.
You can’t take an average salary and then add over 40% to it and claim it’s close enough to $100k. The overtime number is irrelevant — working more than a straight 40 deserves overtime on a job paid hourly.
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p>Are they paid too much? Could be. Should we get rid of tolls altogether and jack up the gas tax? Possibly. Regardless of your thoughts on those two things, 71 != 100 in the reality based community, even for really large cases of 71.
Howie Carr is quoted as referring to “the myth of the $100,000 toll taker.” Of course that’s not an average. As far as I’m concerned, even ONE toll-taker being paid anywhere close to $100K is an outrage. My wife, a PhD geneticist with twenty years industry experience, just managed to cross that threshold. I don’t feel that this state is in a position to pay any toll-taker (or, for that matter, MBTA fare collector) $100,000. With or without overtime.
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p>I took the average salary, as reported by the Boston Channel in the link that I cited, and multiplied that by 441 — the number of toll-takers from which that average was calculated.
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p>Last time I checked, if the average of N samples is C, then the total of all the samples is N*C — $31.3M in this case.
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p>Have I made a stupid caffeine-impaired blunder here somewhere?
so long as by “average” they meant “mean”, the math is right.
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p>As for a $100,000 toll taker, there isn’t one. Given a mean of $71,000 (as reported) and the availability of overtime, somebody showing up with $90,000 doesn’t seem that extreme to me. Let’s say the guy works Sundays as one of his 5 days. You’re already at 5.5/5 * $71,000 = $78,100. That’s 40 hours/week, but working Sundays. Let’s say he pulls an extra shift every other week: that’s an extra 2681.5 = 312 hours of straight time. If the average straight time is $71,000 / (50*40) = $35.50 an hour, that’s another $11,076.
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p>Grand total: $89,176. That’s a guy making an “average” hourly wage (as reported) who works Sundays and works one extra shift every two weeks. Totally plausible.
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p>If you’ve got a problem with even one toll taker making $90,000, then what you’ve really got is a problem with the mean being $71,000… because getting to $90k from $71k isn’t that big a stretch using a 1.5 bonus for Sundays and all hours over 40. I didn’t even include non-Sunday holidays!
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p>
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p>P.S. You did make one math error. The 441 is full time and part time… not “full time equivalent”. The $31.3M assumes that all work full time, so should be an upper bound on total wages. This, of course, assumes that the guy who works 10 hours a week has his annual compensation multiplied by 4 before included in the $71k mean…
When I saw the “average” descriptor, I wondered about that. Since they offered no description of the methodology (at least from what I could see), I figured they did the stupidest simplest thing possible — total annual payroll (full and part-time) divided by total number of employees (full and part time).
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p>You’re quite right about the distribution, and it’s true that I have a problem with the mean being 71K. There are too many people who work too hard at far worse jobs whose work product I value more for me to feel good about it. Selfish, I grant you. It just rubs me wrong. How many teachers make $71K? How many restaurant chefs?
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p>I don’t think we know enough about the population to know very much about the sigma of the distribution.
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p>You wrote:
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p>That may be how the workers are paid (I don’t know), but that’s beyond what MA law requires:
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p>If they’re working 40 hours, they should be getting straight time whether they work Sunday’s or not. Here’s how I think the numbers work out on average:
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p>
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p>That says that the average toll-taker works an average of 9 hours overtime per week. I’d have to spend more time scratching my tired noggin than I’m willing to right now to figure out what it would cost at straight-time to do the same amount of work, but I’m pretty sure it’s a lot less than the state is paying now.
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p>I agree that Mr. Carr exaggerates the problem (how astonishing!), but I think there is a problem.
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p>I think a more relevant question is to look at the lifetime cost of each automated EZ-Pass reader, what volume of traffic can it sustain, what revenue does that translate to, and how does that compare with the burdened cost and revenue collected of the toll-taker it replaces.
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p>I suspect that the difference between $50K and 71K is negligible in comparison.
Get more folks to use FastLane. This has been kicked around in this thread and even moreso on a thread a few days older about the Pike in particular.
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p>Figuring out how to get the folks who live in MA and use the Pike 1-10 times a year but during holiday rushes [Easter, Mem Day, July 4, Labor Day, Thxgvg, XMas, etc] to get a FastLane would go a long way toward eliminating the holiday crunch.
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p>But what about the daily crunch? What percentage of Tuesday 7-10am traffic doesn’t use a transponder? How often are 2+ booths open which accept cash? Heck, we could get to the point where 0.5 toll takers in each direction are people: put a person in the “middle booth” and have a window on both sides — then he or she could just alternate between eastbound and westbound.
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p>For Jan-Mar 2008, the breakdown was roughly 62% transponder, 38% cash. 2009 saw a boost, to 67% transponder. Given that surrounding states also have transponders, that’s still an insanely low percentage of transponder usage… but not out of the norm. The NY Thruway had a usage of 61.39% in 2007. FasTrak in the SF Bay gets about 50%. So, it’s insanely low — but also quite in line with other roadways’ usage pattern.
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p>You can’t cut down on the number of employees without getting that transponder usage way up. Way up. Unfortunately, the financial docs don’t appear to break out salary for toll collectors, distinct from other employees, so it’s really hard to know how much room there is to cut the number of hours down.
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p>Let’s say you could cut toll collector costs 10%. That’s nothing to sneeze at — it would take some combination of far more FastLane transponders and/or reducing the cost per hour of employee by better allocating part time/full time/over time hours. Still, cutting those costs by 10% would only save $3M. Frankly, for an agency with over $400,000,000 in expenses, $3M isn’t so much. A percent is a percent, and it’d be worth squeezing for, but where’s the other $100M in operations and public protection budget going? I’d bet it’d be easier to save $3M by eliminating jobs in that area than saving $3M in toll takers wages.
take the tolls down. I would prefer to see the MTA go into a Chapter 9 bankruptcy so the money taxpayers will spend to bail out a mismanaged “independent” agency would go to silly things like bridge repairs and schools. However, if the state insists on paying for this debt, there are a million ways to collect the revenue that don’t involved stopping people in the middle of a highway.
the question can be asked, “why is there so much overtime.”
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p>Maybe hiring slightly more employees and having less overtime would save money?
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p>But then again, so would getting rid of all the tolls and increasing the gas tax 11 cents to compensate.
chunk of what tolls take in.
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p>I find it amazing we have these tolls at all, at least in the scale that we do. We could get rid of them and have a much fairer/efficient tax through adding to the gas. 11/12 cents matches everything every toll brings into this state, minus toll-collecting expenses.
First, what about times when people feel compelled to give DNA to eliminate themselves as a suspect in a serious crime–like in the Christina Worthington case. Sure an innocent person would want to take a DNA test to eliminate themselves as a suspect in a murder, for example. But their DNA will now be on file and what if they committ a crime in the future…didn’t they basically incriminate themselves because the DNA is now in a permenant data base? Should we have a system in which someone voluntary gives a DNA sample that can be used against them in the future? Certianly David you have a better grasp on this than I, but I hope the answer is no.
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p>Secondly, a finger print is a finger print. DNA is not some kind of uber-finger print. It gives away information about who we are that could be used/abused outside the criminal justice setting. What controls are in place (like written laws) that protects this database from being used for other purposes. Forgive me for the “black helicopter” scenario I’m about to outline…but we need assurances that the DNA database won’t be used as part of our medical/insurance system for God knows what reason.
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p>Yes, DNA helps us catch bad guys and certainly frees innocent people. But the comparison to finger prints is simplistic and dishonest. We do need to walk carefully into the world of The Minority Report.
As a technical legal matter, I think the answer is no, but I’d have to look it up, and I don’t feel like doing so right now.
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p>As a big picture matter, this just doesn’t bother me. Perhaps that makes me a bad person. But if someone commits a crime, and they can be linked to that crime by DNA, fingerprint, or other information that’s already on file, that’s a good thing, right?
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p>Also, note that you’re talking about a different scenario than I am — I’m talking about people who have been arrested. You’re talking about the bizarre Christa Worthington situation, which was handled very badly.
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p>As for this:
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p>
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p>Actually, that’s exactly what it is. It’s “uber” because it has a lot more information than just a fingerprint. Consequently, as you point out, there are ways in which that information could be abused. I hope and expect that the FBI has rules that prevent that from happening. If not, they should. It’s a valid concern, but I think not one that should override the law enforcement uses.
…to help investigators with a current crime, that sample should not be put into the database.
I’m not sure I want to make it that much easier for supermarket chains to catch and prosecute people for stealing a loaf of bread in the middle of what could turn into an economic depression. Maybe that makes me a bad person.
the Republicans who defended the Patriot Act, telling people they need not worry about being illegally spied upon, because what’s the big deal so long as they have nothing to hide?
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p>Um, sure.
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p>I’m sure there’s some good ideas for DNA reform, but people do need to be protected from abuse from the government — even to the degree where the protection borders on paranoia. The government simply hasn’t proven itself trustworthy with this sort of data — case in point the NSA using the Patriot Act powers of wiretapping to spy on a congressperson. If people said that could have happened, they would have been labeled a tin-foil hat wearer… and yet it did.
Should be reworded to fit your example: “If someone is arrested for an alleged crime…”. The commission hasn’t be established legally at the time of arrest.
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p>Incidentally, can one refuse to give prints to the police on 5th amendment grounds?
Fingerprinting is not testimonial or communicative so as to fall within the 5th amendment bar against compelling someone to be a “witness” against himself. The language in the Mass. Constitution (Article XII) is arguably broader, but the SJC has been unwilling to extend it to fingerprints.
The suggestion that this program will help free innocent people is simply incorrect — in fact, it is far more likely to do the opposite.
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p>As proposed, this program will build a database of a very small percentage of the US population. That means the database will also have a very small likelihood of containing the DNA of some rape perpetrator five years hence.
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p>It does mean, however, that the resulting database will have a very high likelihood — nearly one hundred percent — of containing any false positives that occur. Since this database will be the first place authorities go for testing, each sample in this database will be sampled for each crime authorities investigate. Multiply those two numbers, and it doesn’t take very many years to virtually assure that false positives will occur in this database — every test has a non-zero false positive rate. Each one of those false-positives is an innocent man or woman who then has to convince a jury that the DNA test was wrong. Good luck with that one.
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p>This program will have just the opposite effect from what progressives surely intend. It will dramatically and disproportionally increase the number of innocent men and women convicted and punished for crimes they did not commit.
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p>If DNA testing is to be performed at all — and I strongly suspect that it will — then the only strategy that works is for the database to contain the entire population.
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p>That is why the question we should really be debating is who can and cannot access that database. Some folks trust government authorities with this access.
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p>I do not.
I hope you are going to get out to hear Renee Fleming today.
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p>Next, on the Turnpike. I noticed last week that the cutback in maintenance is starting to show up. The Pike used to be the best paved and safest road in the state. Now, you see (and feel) spalling of the pavement quite often: The top layer is starting to peel off. This will allow moisture underneath between the other layers of the roadway, with the inevitable potholes and further deterioration. Hitting those at high speed will damage tires and other parts of cars and trucks. What we don’t pay in tolls, we will pay in car repairs.
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p>Also, note how many of the guardrails are bent out of shape. In the past, these would be repaired quickly. Why does that matter? Well, a bent guardrail no longer has its full shock-absorbing capacity. If you see a deformed guardrail, there is a good reason for the fact that it is bent: There’s something about that part of the roadway that makes it more likely to have an accident there. And, if it happened once, it may happen again, but the next time, the railing won’t be as strong and may not protect the drivers quite as well.
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p>It doesn’t matter who runs the Turnpike if the Governor and Legislature don’t permit them to (1) raise tolls and/or (2) be relieved of Big Dig debt and/or (3) get increase state revenues from a large increase in the gasoline tax. On the last point, we are currently paying $2 less for gas than last year. A 25 cent tax would still leave it well below that level and help keep the Pike and the MBTA alive and able to maintain service levels.
When you give the government your fingerprints, you’re giving them a means to identify you and nothing more. When you give the government your DNA, you’re giving them a lot more information–information about your parentage, your genetic predispositions, etc. I think we probably don’t yet know how much information about a person will ultimately be extracted from the genome.
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p>So I think there are significant privacy concerns with DNA that don’t exist with fingerprinting. I would feel differently if the fortune tellers were correct and you could actually tell a lot about a person from the lines on his hand!
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p>TedF
gattica
A mention that horror show of a movie is like the Bat Signal, but for kooks.
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p>Plus, it’s gattaca, so you can spell out the movie title with DNA bases.
the good captain in a long time. Let’s hope he’s not still lurking!
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p>But, I’m sorry, the government taking DNA samples of people like they do fingerprints is scary, even to Gattaca-like lengths. After all the wiretapping and illegal spying this country’s done, this isn’t even tin-foil hat territory. It’s just the simple truth.
than those we’re discussing here.
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p>The most fundamental issue with this approach is that it maximizes the likelihood that an innocent man or woman will be convicted because of a false positive DNA match.
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p>I hope that stomv will chime in here, he knows the numbers far better than I.
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p>The problem is that the DNA database we’re discussing contains a small fraction of the total population. In addition to those who are arrested, by the way, it also includes immigrants who have been detained. “Undesirables”, in other words.
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p>Every test has two competing failure mechanisms — “false positive” and “false negative” failures. Dialing down the “false positive” knob to protect the innocent means dialing UP the “false negative” — and we will be besieged with stories of guilty perpetrators who were wrongly cleared.
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p>The more scared we get, the more intense the “national security crisis”, then the more we’ll dial down the “false negative” — “President Obama’s liberal socialist FBI cleared the Muslim terrorist who killed your family because of a failed DNA test”. Willie Horton all over again. That will, in turn, dial UP the false positive rate — and a growing number of innocent men and women will be convicted of crimes based on spurious DNA test matches.
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p>If the perpetrator of a crime is not in the DNA database, there is zero chance that an accurate test can identify that perpetrator. That means, therefore, that there is a 100 percent chance that a “positive” match is false. Only the “undesirables” are exposed to this risk. The effect is to add yet another layer of oppression, discrimination and institutionalized bigotry against people who are already powerless.
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p>The solution is to put everyone into the DNA database. Yup, every citizen. It’s the same principle that motivates making a single-payer health care system apply to everyone — there is, by construction, no discrimination. The risk pool is spread as wide as possible. In the case of DNA, the risk is the risk of prosecution after a false positive (instead of the risk of needing an expensive medical procedure).
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p>The question of how society addresses the obvious privacy implications of this strategy is deep and profound. My own bias is to make ALL of the information public, as well as maintaining a full and public archive of all the searches done against the database — sort of a who’s-looked-at-my-profile-today on steroids.
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p>I feel I am far more at risk from abuse of my data by government and corporate interests than by other individuals. I am therefore far more sanguine about the approach I outline here than any effort to restrain government from abusing secret information that only government possesses — or even knows about.
Can you present any examples of a false positive DNA test (to a non-relative of the actual prepetrator would be great)? The best examples would be from after testing of short tandem repeats in 13 different loci became common practice.
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p>My concern is that you’re proposing to spread a once per century risk among the whole population, at a significant expense in collection and maintenance costs. Even if I agreed with your premise that this was a discrimination issue, the spending associated with the low return in social justice would be even better spent in other arenas of economic and social equality.
Examiner Bias
There are more, both at the linked page and elsewhere. It’s not magic; people can still screw it up.
So, perhaps I’ve entered into a semantic confusion over what a false positive actually is: it looks like you’re saying that experimenter error produces false positives, whereas I assumed that a test’s false positive rate would be the probability of the test giving the wrong answer when done properly.
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p>In cases like current DNA testing, this means the accuracy of the test is limited by the technical competence of the tester. The test may be accurate to 1 in a billion, but if the tester makes a mistake 1 in ten thousand tests, the true accuracy of the test is 1 in 10,000? With about 50,000 cases helped by the feds alone with current tech as of 2007, are there any false positives with current tech?
If the lab screws up, and an innocent person is convicted because of it, then for that person, the outcome is a false positive. He’s not going to be grateful that the test is so good.
is one mechanism that has produced false positives. I don’t have the link handy, I’m reasonable sure I remember a state (was it MA?) having to release or retry hundreds of convicts because of demonstrated contamination (among other shoddy practices) in the testing lab.
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p>Are you sure the “once per century” rate you describe applies to a relatively small sample (compared to the total population) being tested for every occurrence of a set of crimes, nationwide? According to this report, there were 97,460 rapes reported in the US in 1995. Take the total number of samples in the proposed database and multiply by 97,460 (assuming the rape rate remains constant). I think that’s on the order of 1×10^9 tests run for a database containing 10,000 samples.
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p>There is some reasonable dispute about the false-positive rate — proponents claim 1 in 10^9, detractors claim 1 in 10^3. That’s a huge spread, and we haven’t done nearly enough tests under controlled enough conditions to even estimate (in any rigorous sense) the actual rate. If the error rate is, say, 1 in 10^6, then that’s about ONE THOUSAND false positives for a database containing 10000 samples. Even in the best case of a 1×10^9, that’s still one innocent person improperly identified per year, and that for a database containing only 10,000 samples.
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p>This evidence is being used because it is (mistakenly) viewed as absolute. That means, in my opinion, that a false positive is virtually synonymous with a false conviction.
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p>I don’t know what an acceptable number of false convictions might be. Maybe one or two per year is acceptable, but I’m pretty sure that hundreds — never mind thousands — is not.
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p>I think it’s pretty hard, verging on impossible, to get to a reliable “once per century” mark that you cite.
My wife (a geneticist) points out that the problem is actually much worse than I already highlighted.
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p>She points out that the sequences being sampled are NOT independent. In fact, they have a large number of highly correlated rather than independent variables, because of things like familial inheritance, ethnic groups, and so on.
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p>Thus, when looking at the risk of false positives, the situation is much worse — it’s much more likely for a cousin of the guilty party to be falsely identified than an unrelated person.
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p>Further, she observes that in the opinion of the forensic geneticists she knows (yes, that is a specialty), the FBI is really looking for ways to predict a phenotype — eye color, complexion, and so on. After all, nobody can infer eye color, build, or likely height from a fingerprint.
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p>In this use, having your DNA in the database at all makes you far more likely to be accused of a crime, whether or not you are guilty.
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p>A limited sample like this is a bad, bad, bad idea.
don’t want traffic at the tolls?
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p>get rid of them.
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p>12 cents // gallon would pay for this state to get rid of every single toll in the state.
you and your simple, clever, elegant solutions to complex problems!
take it!
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p>There’s so much anger and grief over the turnpike — needlessly so. 11/12 cents would more than cover what the tolls bring in (as in, some left over to increase infrastructure spending), without the needless expenses or politically-connected jobs. 20 cents would do that + add $200 million to the state’s public transportation systems. 25 cents would do all of that + add another 125 million or so for public infrastructure.
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p>Even the 25 cent option, let’s call it the caddy option of increasing state revenue, would add barely over $100/year to the expenses of the average citizen of this state. Some people who are using tolls every day, spending over $1k a year on them currently – $2k if when the toll hikes go through – would actually save funds and be able to spend that in the local economy.
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p>Why make government more complicated, open to more secrecy and less transparency and far less efficient, when we could have a simple, efficient and very modest tax that would be about the cost of a cup of coffee from Dunks a week. I’ll pick that solution to government problems every time.
Not everybody rides the Pike very often. They have a vested interest in not changing the status quo… and that’s a whole lot of folks. That number goes down if you start including tolls on bridges and tunnels, but I have no idea where the threshold is. Put another way:
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p>What percent of people would pay 5%+ less per year in gas+tolls if we got rid of the tolls? What percent would pay 5%+ more? What percent are close to a “push”?
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p>There’s some real political insight within that data methinks. I don’t have any idea how to even approximate those fractions with any actual analysis though.
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p>To make matters worse, 11-12 cents rids us of tolls. It doesn’t do anything to address
* revenue shortfall for necessary capital maintenance
* revenue shortfall for necessary capital improvements/expansions
* revenue shortfall necessary to keep the T from suffering massive cuts
* revenue shortfall necessary to expand local, commuter, and city-to-city mass transit
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p>So frankly, I’m against the RyePlan unless you can also get enough political willpower to push through a Patrick-esque plan, with enough revenue to deal with multiple problems at the same time.
and I think we can get the people of this state behind it, too.
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p>The coalition of people who would be behind it:
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p>people who were stuck in those Easter Weekend lines
Daily Boston commuters north and west of town.
MBTA users
other public transit users
people who’ve hit a pothole lately
people who care about our state’s infrastructure
people who hate the Pike
people who think taxes should be fair
people who think taxes should be efficient
people who really, really hate the Pike
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p>is that everyone yet?
I don’t see that whole list seeing $0.25 a gallon as worth it. Specifically:
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p>Definitely worth it:
MBTA users
other public transit users
people who really, really hate the Pike
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p>Possibly worth it:
Daily Boston commuters north and west of town.
people who care about our state’s infrastructure
people who hate the Pike
people who think taxes should be fair
people who think taxes should be efficient
people who really, really hate the Pike
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p>Not, in and of itself, enough to justify $0.25 a gallon:
people who were stuck in those Easter Weekend lines
people who’ve hit a pothole lately
but also…
people who live in Western, Central, or South Shore Mass
people who are overly sensitive to the price of gas relative to it’s actual impact on their wallet
people who don’t trust Beacon Hill to spend their tax money wisely, regardless of the promises
people who resent funding the MBTA with their gas tax
people who resent funding the big dig with their gas tax
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p>
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p>Suddenly, it’s just not so obvious that the votes are there.