Akst: Cheap town moorings cost everyone

Daniel Akst is a member of the Newsday editorial board.

If you have a 30-foot boat and want to dock at Oyster Bay's public Roosevelt Marina, all you have to do is put your name on the waiting list. In roughly 500 years, you'll get a slip.

That's because typically only one dock per year turns over, and there are 503 people ahead of you.

This isn't so strange when you consider that public docks on Long Island charge about half as much as private docks. Mooring a 30-footer at a public slip will cost you around $2,000 a season. A private slip would be more like $4,000, but these docks are priced so that supply and demand are roughly balanced. Nobody has to wait 500 years.

The strange story of Long Island's oversubscribed public docks is no fluke, if you'll forgive the expression. On the contrary, it's typical of the fishy way public assets often are allocated so that a lucky few benefit mightily at the expense of all. In each case, the cost to any one taxpayer is small, but this stuff adds up. And it creates problems that go beyond fairness.

Consider federal lands. Mining companies pay virtually nothing to extract valuable minerals such as gold and silver, enjoying private profit at public expense. If Washington got something like a market price for leasing this land, federal deficits might be lower.

Or how about Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? The government's implied guarantee of their debt enabled these firms to borrow more cheaply, leading to huge profits for shareholders and huge paychecks for the bozos who ran these outfits. Uncle Sam was never adequately compensated for putting his assets on the line, and when Fannie and Freddie collapsed, guess who was left holding the bag? Cost so far: about $130 billion.

Closer to home, consider the value of passage through the Queens Midtown Tunnel at rush hour. At 8 a.m., the tunnel would probably be full even if the toll were $25 (assuming the same rush-hour fee were slapped on the other East River crossings). As things stand, taxpayers (who own the tunnel) are foregoing revenue from higher tolls in order to subsidize traffic jams and generate pollution.

Are you seeing a pattern here? Underpricing taxpayer assets is almost always a mistake, in part because it can drive up the price of private alternatives. If Long Island's scarce public docks were priced higher, not only would it help relieve straitened municipal finances, but it would lower the cost of private docks, since a whole bunch of new docks would become available without anyone having to wait 500 years.

Underpricing public assets distorts behavior, too, often in harmful ways. For example, underpriced street parking -- in midtown Manhattan, a garage is 20 times more expensive than a metered space for the first hour -- motivates drivers to spend lots of time cruising for a space at the curb. One study of New York's SoHo found that 28 percent of drivers were circling in search of a street space. This means everyone else is afflicted by extra traffic, fumes and taxes, all for the private benefit of a few lucky street-parkers who might have paid more.

On Long Island, towns should charge a market price for public docks. If politics prevents this, communities could allocate spaces by annual lottery, with every taxpayer eligible (regardless of boat ownership) and winners free to resell for anything they can get. Full speed ahead on higher-priced public docks. Anything less is the worst kind of slip.