Letter to the Editor 11/20/2006
Follow Up Letter to all six Mayors of Long Beach Island on the Evacuation Plan issue.
Dear Mayor;
On September 17, 2005 you were sent a letter from our President, John Kostopoulos, on behalf of the more than one hundred members of the LBI democratic Club suggesting, in light of the great difficulties we all witnessed in the government response to Hurricane Katrina, that it was a good time to review the Plans and resources available to deal with a hurricane hitting the Island.
On a matter of this importance we were disappointed not to receive a written reply from you. We did get some information from our towns’ emergency responders, which we appreciated. However after carefully reviewing the information available to us we are very much concerned that Island occupants are at great risk, and not well prepared for a serious storm and flooding. The major reasons for our concern are presented below.
First, it is important to recognize that, as a very long barrier Island with one exit road that narrows to two lanes (at the Hospital), we are in a somewhat unique and very vulnerable situation. No generic FEMA or State Plan would be applicable to us. We were told that four days would be needed to clear the Island in the summer season. That means that an evacuation would have to be ordered and begun when a hurricane was still far away –around 1000 miles or near Florida- but predicted to hit us. Improvements in predicting hurricane paths have been made over the years, but four days ahead of the impact time the error involved is still high, and there is a high probability that it would miss us. With that much uncertainty it would be very difficult to make an evacuation decision that early, and it is much more likely that a decision would be made one to two days ahead of the impact time when the prediction errors are a lot less. Unfortunately, that means that in our situation a full evacuation would likely not be possible.
This problem is made worse because there are apparently no Contingency Plans in place, i.e. what one is supposed to do if he/she cannot get off the Island. Only Barnegat Light is developing such a Contingency Plan – to be ready in June we were told. So it seems that once you get in your car and get stuck on the Boulevard you are on your own. This is a disaster just waiting to happen. We recommend that every Town promptly develop such a contingency Plan, or better yet a single, consistent Island- wide Plan, since you never know which Town you’ll get stuck in.
Second, we are told that there is an Evacuation Plan in place but that the public is not permitted to see it, because of a Directive to withhold information that could aid a terrorist. We looked into this. Any “Directive” to keep the Evacuation Plan from the public doesn’t come from FEMA. They in fact are concerned with such a restriction because they feel that the more the public knows about their own evacuation plans the better. The New Jersey Office of Counter Terrorism referred us to Executive Order 21 from former Governor McGreevy which does authorize withholding information from the public that would interfere with the State’s ability to defend against a terrorist attack or would materially increase the risk of such an attack. But they also said that this requirement was not intended to restrict public access to plans for natural events such as hurricanes. So, we contend that applying this restriction to a Plan that is to be used for hurricanes is not appropriate, and is in fact the exact opposite of what good emergency planning should be. The basis and history of the decision to keep this Plan from the public should be made known. Absent any compelling reason we may be unaware of, the existing Plan should be condensed –omitting any truly sensitive information- and made public. In the interim period while that is being done, an all- day seminar involving all the Island Towns and Stafford should be conducted.
Some issues to address in a condensed Plan and a Seminar include;
1. Is the Evacuation Plan referred to the same as the Plan for nuclear emergencies that was developed with funding from the Oyster Creek Generating Station? If so, does it cover the Island Townships South of the Bridge and outside the Oyster Creek planning area?
2. What state, county, local government offices are involved in a hurricane evacuation? What are their responsibilities? What are their decision- making authorities? Can one party override another? What emergency response assets and resources does each have?
3. Who has the authority to order an evacuation? If each mayor and certain county and state officials do, what happens if there is disagreement? For example, if only one mayor decides to evacuate, are the resources of all the towns and agencies, especially Stafford and Ship Bottom since they control access to the Bridge, made available?
4. Are cable, regular phone and cell phone links secure in a severe storm? Can police lines handle the influx of calls in an emergency? What will happen if these links break down? Who decides what to broadcast over the radio?
5. Is there any “staging” in the Evacuation Plan, i.e. who leaves first, second etc. This might greatly speedup an orderly evacuation. Florida had such a plan, which includes the authority to shut down a motel etc, and electronic signs to inform people who leaves when.
6. How will the elderly, sick, others without cars get off the Island? Will school buses be made available? Who orders that? Who drives them? What other vehicles are available?
7. Will gas stations on the route remain open? Will they stock up on gas before hand? Who has the authority to decide this?
8. Has any evacuation modeling been done of the Island and the various storm events it might experience? It doesn’t appear that any transportation modeling of vehicle queues and expected delays has been done.
9. How often are “table top” exercises, where emergency scenarios are played out, held? Are the results of the exercise documented? Are those reports available for review? We recommend that several members of the public participate in the next table top exercises as observers.
To summarize, we are asking that the work done to date be brought forward so that the general public, whose lives may depend upon it, can review it and provide input. As we mentioned in our first letter we have members familiar with issues of this nature and could help in a constructive review of the Plan if it were made available.
Given the importance of this subject, I would also suggest that a written response to this letter would be appropriate.
Sincerely,
Dr. Robert Stern, Vice President
Democratic Club of Long Beach Island
The Social Security Issue, by Dr Robert Stern, VP of the Democratic Club of LBI
Recently, you have heard a lot about Social Security. Unfortunately, most of it has been exaggerated, misleading or simply untrue. This handout prepared by the Long Beach Island Democratic Club attempts to present the facts about Social Security, put the problems with it in perspective, and come up with some common sense solutions. Social Security checks don’t have political party labels on them and our hope is that Democrats, Republicans, and Independents can rally around those solutions and press our elected representatives to enact them. This has more to do with results than politics. The numbers below come from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
The Social Security Program has served the country well. More than 47 million Americans receive benefits from it. About 69% of the benefits go to retirees and their spouses, the rest to disabled workers, children and survivors. Without Social Security today over 40% of our elderly people would live in poverty; even with it, today, about 10 % still do.
Social Security is a” pay as you” go system. In other words, current workers pay the benefits to current retirees. When workers pay in more revenues annually than benefits to retirees, a surplus is built up in the Social Security Trust Fund. That is happening today, and is shown in Figure 1 below. As the “baby boomers” retire they will get the benefit of that paying in, but eventually –around 2050- the Trust Fund will run out and benefits will be constrained by the annual revenues coming in then.
So, what does this mean to a person retiring after 2050? It’s true that that person could no longer receive the “scheduled” benefit that is calculated by Social Security formulas based on real wage growth. But as seen in Figure 2 that benefit is pretty optimistic. It would in fact make the Social Security payments to future retirees more than twice as good in terms of purchasing power than they are today. That’s still a laudable goal but even if nothing were done and future benefits were constrained by current revenue formulas, the Social Security payments to individuals (see Figure 2) still get better by about 25% than today's. So the talk about Social Security not “being there” for younger workers is simply not true.
So, what is the challenge for us today? Well , given that company retirement plans aren’t as reliable as they once were, and that health care costs keep rising , we’d like to see our children able to count on Social Security for more of their retirement security than we could. Private accounts won’t do the trick. As seen in Figures 1 and 2 the benefits paid under the Private Account proposals, including both the Social Security Fund and private account payouts, are always less than what would occur under the current system even if nothing were done , not to mention being well below the “scheduled” benefits. This is because the increased benefit from your investment is more than offset by the decreased social security benefit from withdrawing money from the System and paying interest on your withdrawn money, and by calculating Social Security benefit based on price rather than wage growth. Also, the part of the invested money that is inherited hurts the retirement objective of Social Security.
The real solution is to bring long term scheduled benefits and revenues together as shown in Figure 3. If this is begun early enough, around 2015, then only a 10% cut from scheduled benefits is needed as opposed to the 30% reduction needed in 2050 shown in Figure 1. About a 15% increase in revenue-or 0.7% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - is also needed to close the gap between benefit and revenue. That gap doesn’t need to be fully closed by new measures because a good part of the Trust Fund surplus can be preserved for future use as shown by the curved arrows in Figure 3.
Some options for increasing revenue are shown in Table 1. Even without raising the payroll tax, the 0.7% of GDP need can be reached.
The Social Security Program, rather than being in a crisis, is in good shape for another 45 years, not only providing but increasing individual benefits in real terms. If made early, modest fixes to the System can be made to sustain and even improve it well beyond 2050. We should all be working to identify the impact and equity of those fixes, rather than engaging in an ideological struggle over public versus private systems.
