in new neighborhoods. (I wrote about the first such ordinance in 1978.) Are exactions of any kind demanded of Springfield developers to pay for such off-site services, and if so, do they cover the actual costs of the services?

The public costs of new development extend far beyond what municipal agencies spend planning, regulating and equipping new buildings. These external costs – what economists call negative externalities – of large shopping center parking lots include ugliness, aggravated heat effects and accelerated runoff into storm sewers; the last aggravates stormwater overflows, which in turn affect other properties in the area. Do owners of such lots pay fees to the sanitary district to offset their contribution to the costs of stormwater control? In addition to shifting the cost of overflows to the people who cause them, such fees would make surface lots everywhere more costly, which would tip parking economics slightly toward garages or at least smaller surface lots downtown.

The city’s “functional population” consists of its residents plus day-trippers in the form of commuters and shoppers from out of town. Has the city considered ways to recoup the additional costs, if any, of providing traffic control, police and streets capable of accommodating peak-period traffic to drivers who do not pay property taxes in Springfield? Do the sales tax and gasoline taxes such visitors pay while they are in the city cover the costs imposed by their consumption of services?

Governments bankrolling sound projects can today borrow at interest rates that in real terms are less than zero. Economists point out that by borrowing at those rates a government will not debase its credit standing, as public spending ideologues insist, but improve it. Funding investments today that will lower government costs in the future by 1) fixing cheaply today stuff like water mains or sewer pipes that will otherwise have to be fixed more expensively over the next 30 years or 2) by improving productivity that will reduce costs of routine government operations, like installing more efficient pumps at the water plant. The city and kindred special-purpose districts must have dozens of public investment projects likely to achieve real returns higher than zero, among them, one would think, a new public parking garage downtown. Are local governments exploring investing now while the investing’s good?

Answering such questions has proven more than ordinarily complicated in other cities, partly because the economics of development are complex, partly because information is lacking. That doesn’t make them any less worth asking.

Contact James Krohe Jr. at [email protected].