These are some of the stories we’ve been following this week.
Elementary school teacher and students courtesy of woodleywonderworks, CC BY 2.0.
- Evaluating schools and teachers with “value-added” measures and publicly releasing the results doesn’t affect the property values of nearby homes, according to a new study published in the Journal of Urban Economics.
- The Ferguson Commission released its report commissioned by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon following the shooting death of Michael Brown. The 198-page report suggests many reforms to improve racial equity, including a recommendation to end predatory lending in the state. We recently wrote about efforts to reduce predatory lending practices.
- Federal regulators found that Plains All American Pipeline, the company responsible for the California oil spill near Santa Barbara’s coast, kept poor records prior to the spill on how it would prevent or respond to a spill and the level of emergency training of its employees.
- Inspectors in New York examining oil trains, switches, and tracks found four critical defects that required immediate fixes, along with 91 defects that were not critical. The inspections began following oil train crashes in other states.
- The Aurora, Colorado City Council has unanimously approved construction defects reform to help homebuilders. The updated city code gives builders the right to fix defects before litigation can be pursued and allows builders to offer a monetary settlement instead of making repairs.
- A property owner in North Dakota was given a week to accept a compensation offer for an easement on his farm or face an eminent domain lawsuit by a company working to build an oil pipeline.
- In a study just published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, researchers at Duke University stated that fracking accounts for less than 1% of the water consumed for industrial use in the United States.
- The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently issued a private letter ruling (PLR) approving a taxpayer’s plan to claim residential solar tax credits for investing in a community solar energy project. Even though the solar panels are not on the taxpayer’s property, the taxpayer receives a share of the net metering credits generated by the project.
- Residents in Philadelphia are still struggling to understand the 2013 revisions to the city’s property tax system. Property valuations tripled for almost a third of homeowners, but 68,000 eligible homeowners have not signed up for an exemption to ease their tax bills.
- A group of 12 big Wall Street banks has tentatively agreed to settle a lawsuit claiming that they rigged the credit default swap market during the financial crisis, paying investors more than $1.8 billion.
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