Category Archives: Local Government

I Guess This Doesn’t Include Indiana

Macleans has identified cities it dubs a “new brain belt.”

These are the places where they think the greatest innovation is happening today. Sometimes they are classic rust-belt cities but mostly they are university or hospital towns in the vicinity: Waterloo, Ont., instead of Windsor.

They identify characteristics of such places: high-tech facilities, quality educational institutions, taxpayer support for research, appealing living conditions and, most important for them, cultures of free thinking, in contrast to the “hierarchical, regimented thinking so prevalent in Asian and MIST [Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey] countries.”

Or states like Indiana.

We have had several robust discussions on this blog about my theory of “paradigm shift.” Call it that, or focus on the narrower question (posed by MacLeans) whether your own city or state is “innovative” or “future oriented”–the question is one with which every Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development organization is wrestling: how does my city/ metropolitan area/state continue to compete and thrive in a world that is constantly changing? How do we get from here (wherever that is) to there (wherever that is)?

I was struck by the list of characteristics identified by MacLeans: of the five, four focused on human capital–more precisely, the development of an intellectual culture.

  • High tech facilities are built in places having workforces that can operate and manage them, places where both technical skills and comfort with technical innovation are plentiful.
  • The phrase “quality educational institutions” suggests the sort of yeasty and challenging environment that deals in questions, not answers–the sort of educational environment that produces new ideas and new ways of thinking about the traditional ones. (Quality is not defined by job placement statistics–sorry, Indiana Commission on Higher Education.)
  • “Taxpayer support for research” certainly doesn’t call to mind the penny-pinching, “I’ve got mine, Jack, and I’m holding onto it” attitude that has long characterized my own state of Indiana. It certainly doesn’t describe a state that would constitutionalize a cap on property taxes, lest those taxes somehow get raised and then–horrors!–spent on a common civic good like education. Or a better quality of life.
  • When you think about it, a culture of “free thinking”–the fourth intellectual attribute of forward-looking places–really leads to the only characteristic listed that doesn’t immediately connect to the life of the mind: a good quality of life. I don’t think you can have a good quality of life without such a “free thinking” culture.

People who enjoy engaging with ideas, with the arts, with people unlike themselves–people interested not only in acquiring new skills but in using those skills to improve their communities–are people who understand the organic nature and human importance of those communities, and the importance of their own connections to them.

There are people in my city–and I’d wager in yours–who are working hard to create a community that looks like that.

But at this point, my city– and most definitely my state— have a long way to go.

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Truly Torn

Oh, Mike Pence! Sometimes you do confound me! Apparently, you’ve accidentally done something good!

According to a recent report in The Indiana Lawyer, 

Under the administration of Gov. Mike Pence, legal fees paid to the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana have soared beyond $1.4 million and may approach $2 million, according to an Indiana Lawyer analysis. The $1.4 million total does not include fees that have been or will be paid in the current fiscal year ending June 30 or other legal fees ACLU claims are owed by the state. The fees represent the state’s payment of legal bills to parties who prevail in federal court on claims that government action violated their constitutionally protected civil rights.

Regular readers of this blog will remember that I spent six years (1992-98) as the Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU. Those were rewarding years in so many ways–I learned so much and met so many wonderful people; it was so gratifying to be part of an organization that defended individual liberties…..

But I must admit that the most vivid memory I took with me when I left the ACLU for academic life was the constant pressure of fundraising. We had wonderful lawyers and dedicated clerical staff, and we all worked for a pittance–but I had to raise that pittance. The ACLU only has two sources of income: charitable gifts (fundraising) and legal fees.

And legal fees aren’t a given. The organization only gets legal fees when it wins a lawsuit and the law allows such recovery. Even when the organization is successful and the case is a fee-generating one, it can take years of litigation–first, the case itself, then a fight over fees…

So I really, honestly do want to thank Governor Pence for his largesse to Indiana’s ACLU. I mean, $2 million dollars is a windfall! It should allow the ACLU some much-needed “breathing room,” some assurance that it will “be there”–in a position to protect LGBT Hoosiers from discrimination, reproductive rights from theocratic lawmakers, public school students from government-imposed prayer, law-abiding citizens against official overreach…Well, you all get the idea.

Here’s another idea: Each time Indiana’s constitutionally clueless Governor and AG lose another case to the ACLU, let’s all send the ACLU a few extra dollars to celebrate. Because after November, I have a feeling this bonanza may dry up….and Jane Henegar, the wonderful current Executive Director, will have to resume her begging.

Send a few bucks to Indiana’s ACLU in “honor” of Governor Pence.

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That Urban/Rural Divide

There are lots of ways to “slice and dice” human populations (and unfortunately, we humans excel in exploiting and magnifying those differences). One dividing line that has not gotten the attention it deserves is the one between inhabitants of rural and urban America.

As the authors of a famous rant–The Urban Archipelago—pointed out some years back, America’s cities are big blue dots, many of which are swimming in red seas. For many reasons, people who live in more densely populated areas tend to be more supportive of the institution of government, and less likely to respond to political attacks on its legitimacy. (To take just one example, people who regularly pick up a rifle and go hunting look at gun control issues differently than people worrying that their children will be victims of a drive-by shooting or be on the wrong end of a Saturday-night special.)

That these differences lead to different behaviors at the polls is no surprise; the political problem, however, is that our current method of drawing electoral districts significantly advantages rural areas–at the same time that those areas are rapidly losing population to urban America.

Take Indiana. As Michael Hicks recently reported

In last month’s population report, the number of shrinking counties rose to 54, and those growing faster than the nation as a whole rose to 14. That left 24 counties in relative decline. All the growth is happening in urban places, and all the decline is in rural or small town Indiana. It has been this way for half a century, but the pace is accelerating. This population redistribution matters deeply for Indiana’s health through the 21st century.

Cities grow for simple reasons that cannot be duplicated in rural areas no matter how wishful the thinking. Through the forces of agglomeration, each 5.0 percent growth in population causes GDP per worker to rise by roughly 1.0 percent. This leads to higher wages that in turn attract more educated workers to urban areas, which further boost productivity. In cities, workers combine to be more productive overall than the sum of their individual skills. Economists call this phenomenon ‘increasing returns.’

The phenomenon Hicks reports on is being replicated all over the world, and if the social science research is to be believed, the flow of population from farm to metropolitan area is unlikely to reverse any time soon.

This population distribution creates a real problem for a political system ostensibly based on “one person, one vote.” I have posted previously about gerrymandering, but even when the process of creating districts is fair, our human tendency to move to areas where people are like-minded results in “packed” districts that generate so-called “wasted votes”–a migratory process that Bill Bishop has called The Big Sort. 

It isn’t only that the urban dweller’s vote counts less, troubling as that is.

Municipal areas are the drivers of state economies, but in states like Indiana, the urban economy is still in thrall to decisions made by a predominantly rural legislature. Unsurprisingly, tax policies and distribution formulas favor rural areas with diminishing populations over growing urban and suburban communities, and culture war bills like the recent anti-gay measures in North Carolina and Mississippi typically pass with the votes of rural representatives unconcerned that such measures trigger boycotts that hurt urban enterprises owned by people who generally opposed them.

People living in a downtown high-rise deserve to have their votes matter as much as the votes of people living on a farm. Even more importantly, they deserve to have their laws made by people who understand the needs and realities of city life.

We need to do something to level the playing field, but I’m not sure what that something is.

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Baseball and Politics

Thursday night, my husband went with several other family members to the opening of the Indianapolis Indians’ baseball season. As he–and several media outlets–subsequently reported, Governor Pence also attended, and the announcement of his presence generated loud and emphatic boos from the assembled crowd.

That booing underlines a political lesson we might sum up as: live by social issues, die by social issues. (I may be “over-analyzing” this; if so, chalk it up to twenty years of teaching public administration.)

Here’s what I mean: When we elect people to administrative offices–mayor, governor, President–we rarely base our subsequent evaluations of their job performance on the efficiency or effectiveness of the agencies controlled by those offices. Ideally, of course, we would, but most of the time, we aren’t in a position to know whether the city issued improper drainage permits, or the state failed to enforce environmental standards, spent limited resources on frivolous lawsuits, etc.

Unless we are members of a constituency that is directly aware of or affected by administrative incompetence, we are unlikely to recognize it, so we generally don’t base our opinions or cast our votes on the basis of perceived management skills. We don’t even base our votes on candidates’ policy preferences–unless those policies implicate so-called “hot button” issues.

This dichotomy between the mundane, albeit important, administrative skills needed for effective governance and the passions that characterize disputes over social issues poses an under-appreciated  danger for culture warriors like Indiana’s Governor.

Run-of-the-mill administrative incompetence is unlikely to motivate widespread passionate opposition, no matter how damaging and/or costly poor governance may be.Over-the-top forays into the culture wars, however–especially when those highly-visible and clearly unconstitutional efforts can be shown to do real damage to the reputation and economy of the state–can generate significant public hostility, as we have recently seen in North Carolina, Mississippi and–of course–Indiana.

Voters and baseball fans don’t boo someone for poor management skills (even though that would warm the cockles of a public management professor’s heart). Voters do, however, feel strongly about arrogant ideologues who feel entitled to tell them how they should conduct their lives.

There’s a reason for all those “Pence Must Go” signs.

And for “boos” at the baseball game.

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Surely You Jest….

Evidently, the Indiana GOP has announced that Governor Mike Pence will be running for re-election on his record. Jeff Cardwell, Indiana’s Republican Party Chair, is quoted as saying (presumably with a straight face) “He has a very strong record.”

Well, it certainly smells strong…

The Democrats’ response has been pretty predictable. A media release pointed to several documented aspects of the Governor’s “strong” record: Indiana’s per capita income is 38th in the U.S., thanks in part to repeal of the Common Construction Wage; the damage done by RFRA; Indiana’s rank of 46th in quality of life; Pence’s decisions to decline an 80 million dollar grant for pre-kindergarten, to cut funding for public schools and to wage unremitting war on the elected Superintendent of Public Instruction; his responsibility for Indiana’s infrastructure woes, including poor supervision of contractors that facilitated acceptance of substandard asphalt; his understaffing of DCS that nearly crippled that department while putting vulnerable children at risk; the damage he has done and continues to do to the state’s reputation by rejecting Syrian refugees and signing an insane and punitive anti-abortion bill…

And of course, the Democrats couldn’t resist another mention of JustIN, Pence’s tone-deaf proposal to establish a “news bureau.”

But if you are really interested in seeing the “record” that Mike Pence plans to run on, in all of its fulsome “glory,” you should revisit a recent post from this very blog. I began by listing all the reasons Hoosiers should not re-elect our Pastor-in-Chief, and then I challenged readers to fill in the blanks, to tell me what I had missed.

Forty-two of them did.

Together with the list in my post, the comments provide a pretty comprehensive picture of what Mike Pence has done to Indiana.  (Much more comprehensive than the Democrats’ press release but to be fair, no one would read it if it had been that long.)

This post would also be too long if I included everything listed in the prior post and its comments, but here are just a few that the Democrat’s media advisory left out…

  • He’s made war on Planned Parenthood, denying poor women life-saving health services and facilitating the HIV outbreak in Scott County. Meanwhile, he diverted money from medically-appropriate clinics to “pro life” organizations.
  • He has enthusiastically supported privatized prisons. (Couldn’t have anything to do with campaign contributions, could it?)
  • He refused to expand Medicaid even though the feds were paying for it.
  • He refused to apply for the SNAP time limit waiver, for which Indiana qualified, resulting in benefit cuts to an estimated 65,000 individuals.
  • Vastly increased logging in state forests, among other assaults on the environment….

There’s a lot more in the original, but you get the idea.

Yessiree–a strong record to run on!

Surely, they jest.

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