Category Archives: Local Government

When Ideology Trumps Competence

The Star reports that Indiana will lose in excess of sixty million dollars in tobacco settlement money, because the state neglected to enforce provisions of the original settlement.

Who is responsible for enforcing the terms of a legal settlement to which a state is party?

While all affected agencies have an obligation to comply with laws and other legal obligations that affect them, those in charge of those agencies necessarily rely upon their lawyers to inform and instruct them. In this case, it is the office of Attorney General. The original settlement was negotiated when Steve Carter was AG, and–unless there is a lot more to this story– the responsibility for monitoring compliance would continue to rest with the office of Attorney General and his staff.

That means that the current AG, Greg Zoeller, is responsible for ensuring compliance with this and other settlements, contracts and agreements to which the state is party. He can discharge that responsibility through subordinates, but–as Harry Truman used to say–the buck stops with him.

Having an office charged with ensuring compliance with prior agreements and settlements is particularly important in government, where agency personnel turn over frequently. (When I was Corporation Counsel for Indianapolis, a roughly analogous position, my office had similar responsibilities for municipal compliance.)

Judging from his eager pursuit of hot-button national issues, Zoeller has ample time and resources at his disposal. He was “lead counsel” for other AGs in the recent Windsor case on same-sex marriage, and he has participated in other “culture war” cases which affected Indiana tangentially, if at all. In addition to these entirely voluntary activities, he has spent time pursuing appeals and cases which his office was highly unlikely to win. (Just a couple of weeks ago, he brought a suit against the Affordable Care Act–aka “Obamacare”–a suit widely derided by local attorneys who have described the theory advanced by Zoeller as “fanciful” and worse.)

So–Zoeller evidently has plenty of time and tax money to volunteer in cases implicating his religious and ideological beliefs. But somehow, he hasn’t found the time or resources to ensure that Indiana was in compliance with its legal obligations under the tobacco settlement.

He didn’t have time to ensure that the state wouldn’t lose sixty million dollars.

Too busy trying to keep those gay people from marrying…..

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Not According to Plan…

A colleague informs me that the military has a saying: Prior planning prevents piss-poor performance.

Well, batten down the hatches. If you think Indianapolis government hasn’t been performing very well lately, we’re about to see how bad it can get. Not that we’ll see piss-poor results immediately– we won’t. And that’s part of the problem.

The City of Indianapolis has just fired more than half of its planning staff–a staff that was already a bare-bones remnant of what it has been in the past. (And let’s be honest, even in its most robust past it was barely adequate.)

Most citizens don’t see the need for planning. They understand the need for public safety, they appreciate garbage collection and street paving. They know they need sewers.  Planning, on the other hand, seems vaguely bureaucratic and arcane.

Modern urban planning began in the early decades of the 20th Century; it was a response to appalling sanitary, social and economic conditions in the rapidly-growing industrial cities of the time. Today, it can be described as a technical and political process that uses extensive public input to guide land use, transportation, urban design and protect the environment.

Planning is what allows us to use our ever-more-limited public resources efficiently to achieve goals that the public has identified as important.

Knowing where growth is occurring tells us where to put new roads. Planning and zoning decisions protect the value of property (you aren’t likely to spend money improving your home if a gas station can be built next door). Planning projections allow us to avoid unnecessary congestion, provide urban amenities like parks where those are most needed, focus renewal efforts on deteriorating neighborhoods, and deploy public safety officers strategically. Planning allows us to ameliorate or avoid things like urban asthma and lead poisoning, ensure that water supplies will continue to be adequate….in short, it helps us  ensure that our physical and social infrastructure is serving us properly.

Planning allows city administrators to base the decisions they have to make every day on data rather than hunches.  And the public availability of that data allows citizens to hold their government accountable for those decisions–to ensure that they are based on relevant criteria rather than on cronyism or responsiveness to special interests. 

The thing is, planners aren’t “front and center.” They work behind the scenes, and their concerns tend to be long-term. So an administration that wants to save money can get rid of planners, knowing that the negative effects won’t be obvious until he or she is safely out of office.

Next time you drive around Castleton Square–if you are hardy enough, or just unlucky enough to have to do so–consider it the face of the future.

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Indiana’s Train to Nowhere

The past several years have not been kind to Indiana.

National indicators show the state at or near the bottom of numerous categories: education, personal income, transportation, entrepreneurship…In their zeal for low taxes, our elected officials have proudly handed us a state where we get what we pay for–which is to say, not much.

Now, this “good enough for Hoosiers” mindset is threatening the Hoosier State, one of the last trains serving Indiana.

The Hoosier State is certainly not state of the art, but it does run every day from Indianapolis to Chicago. That’s a far cry from the 10 trains a day in each direction that ran on that corridor until the late 1950s, it’s an even farther cry from the multiple 110 mph trains being built in Illinois and Michigan, but it is at least something.

The Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 requires states with passenger rail service of less than 750 miles to take financial responsibility for those routes by October 1, 2013, or lose them. Fifteen states were thus required to invest in their short haul routes; Indiana is the only state that has not agreed to do so. Once again, we are the only holdout.

Keeping the Hoosier State will cost just under 3 million dollars a year. (To put this in context, Indiana subsidizes a non-stop flight to San Francisco with a 1.5 million revenue guarantee.)

So what do we get for that money? What will we lose if we lose the Hoosier State?

  • Amtrak boards over 35,000 passengers a year at Union Station. (That number would increase dramatically if the quality of the service increased, but that isn’t “on the table.”)
  • Sixty percent of our convention visitors come from Chicago, and passengers can walk to most downtown hotels from Union Station. That gives us a strategic advantage over places like Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus, etc. when we are pitching convention business (or Super Bowls).
  • The 539 jobs at the Amtrak Beech Grove facility are important to our local economy; losing the Hoosier State probably means losing those jobs.

The transportation committee of the Indiana Legislature will have a hearing at 10:00  tomorrow, and there will also be a rally at 4:00 outside the Statehouse. But time is running short, and few lawmakers have shown a recognition of what is truly at stake.

Economics are one thing. Quality of life is another. But trumping both is the less tangible issue of self-image.

How long do we want to keep being the backward state–the “middle finger of the South”? How long will “good enough” be good enough?

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The Rest of the Story

There used to be a radio show hosted by Paul Harvey called “The Rest of the Story.” It would begin with a “story,” be interrupted by a commercial, and then conclude with a recitation of facts that made you realize that what you’d been hearing was a different take on a familiar biography or event.

I’ve thought about the rest of the story several times in the past couple of days–and especially about the obligation of journalists to share with their readers those facts that constitute the “rest of the story.” Reporting is supposed to be about digging beneath surface recitations–giving readers all of the facts relevant to a situation, whether they confirm a partisan’s preferred telling or not.

The first example was a glowing, puff piece in the Star about the successes of the Tindley Academy, a charter school operating in the Meadows neighborhood. The rigor of the school was credited with stabilizing the neighborhood–attracting and retaining the right kind of parents. The Mayor was quoted as saying he planned to use similar charters to help revitalize other neighborhoods.

A friend sent me a link to Department of Education statistics showing that, year after year, the school has enrolled 100 students and graduated 20. As he noted, charter schools can and do dismiss students for numerous reasons, including academic non-performance that might drag down their averages.

Once I knew “the rest of the story,” Tindley didn’t look quite like the panacea for revitalization that the Mayor suggested.

The second example was a column by Matt Tully, supporting the Broad Ripple development that would include Whole Foods. The arguments he made were reasonable ones; however, as my husband–and subsequently Paul Ogden–both pointed out, the way in which Tully framed the debate was less than accurate.

Tully focused upon whether the reuse of the parcel was appropriate, and whether a Whole Foods is compatible with Broad Ripple’s character.  As he framed it, such a redevelopment would be a welcome detour from the over-reliance on bars in the Village. Hard to argue with that.

Except that isn’t what the argument is about.

The question is not: would a Whole Foods be nice on that corner? The questions actually being debated are: should the city be subsidizing (to the tune of some $6,000,000) a development that will include a grocery that will compete with the existing (unsubsidized) Broad Ripple grocery? And is the design of the proposed development–which includes apartments and other elements in addition to the Whole Foods–consistent with the character of the neighborhood?

Now, reasonable people can certainly come to different conclusions about those questions, but knowing what the dispute is actually about would seem to be a pretty important “rest of the story.”

Where’s Paul Harvey when you need him?

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Longing for a Little Competence

Back in “the day,” Bill Hudnut used to make speeches about the importance of being a city that worked. The basic message was simple: we can’t do the big things if we can’t get the day-to-day mechanics right. The first order of business for any public manager is to ensure that public services are being delivered properly and the public’s business is being handled prudently.

If Bill was right–and I believe he was–then all I can say is “Houston, We Have a Problem.”

According to news reports, Mayor Ballard and 100 “city leaders” are leaving on a trade mission to Germany.  And the City is putting together another SuperBowl bid.  (Let’s just ignore that 6 million dollar cricket field…) Big things, check.

But how are we doing with the humdrum everyday stuff? How is that “city that works” thing going?

Is the public’s business being handled properly?  Paul Ogden has the truly jaw-dropping details of a lease between the City and a  campaign contributor for an uninhabitable  Regional Operations Center that wouldn’t pass the smell test of a first-year law student. I spent 17 years practicing real estate law, and I have never seen anything remotely that egregious.  Either the lease was the result of corruption, or it was negotiated by the most incompetent lawyer in central Indiana. Either way, it represented a colossal waste of ever-more-scarce tax dollars.

How about those public services? My commute from my home in downtown Indianapolis to IUPUI is about a mile and a half. Usually, it takes 5-8 minutes, depending upon the time of day. But for the past several weeks, it has taken nearly half an hour. Traffic has been bumper to bumper, thanks to poorly managed street repair projects and (evidently unregulated and unsupervised) private construction that has brought traffic on some of our busiest downtown streets to a virtual standstill. Some  congestion is obviously inescapable, but it is clear that much of it is a result of poor–or nonexistent–management. The resulting mess increases drive time, air pollution and frayed nerves.

The city isn’t the only inept manager of local construction projects, of course.  The state has closed I65 and the downtown split, in order to raise bridges that keep getting damaged because trucks keep hitting them. Barely ten years ago, the much-ballyhood “Hyperfix”  shut down those same portions of the interstates, so that multiple repairs could be made. For reasons that have never been explained, the Hyperfix project didn’t include work to raise the bridges–and this isn’t a new problem.

What’s the old saying? There’s never time to do it right, but always time to do it over?

Managing curb and sidewalk construction, ensuring that highways are safe, vetting contracts to ensure that taxpayers aren’t getting ripped off–these and many other municipal tasks aren’t glamorous. But they’re necessary and important. They are essential elements of a city that works.

You’ve gotta drive to the airport if you’re going to fly to exotic places on that junket. The fifteen people in Indy who play cricket need to drive to the game.

And eventually, if you keep flushing tax dollars down friends’ toilets, there won’t be any left.

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