Category Archives: Local Government

In Praise of (Certain) Republicans

If there is hope for the re-emergence of the Republican Party to which I gave a significant chunk of my adult life, it lies in the actions of seven GOP members of the Indianapolis City-County Council on Monday night.

Republicans Will Gooden, Ben Hunter, Robert Lutz, Janice McHenry, Michael McQuillen, Jeff Miller and Jefferson Shreve joined all of the Democratic council members in support of a resolution urging the Indiana General Assembly to reject HJR6. (For anyone who has spent the last couple of years on Mars, HJR6 would place Indiana’s current statutory ban on same-sex marriage in the state’s constitution, and would add gratuitous language outlawing civil unions and official recognition of anything else creative minds might consider “equivalent” to marriage.)

Six Republicans voted against the resolution, but the future of the GOP–if it has one–lies with the seven who refused to be bullied by activists from the far right fringes.

The capture of one of America’s major political parties by extremists has made governing–and civil discourse– virtually impossible.  It has already made GOP candidates unelectable in urban areas, and caused wholesale defections elsewhere.

Those seven Republicans understand something that too many of those remaining in the Grand Old Party seem to have forgotten: politics isn’t–or shouldn’t be–religion. When every vote becomes a test of moral purity, when every issue is a contest between Good and Evil, when any deviation from Approved Doctrine is blasphemy and anything less than ardent affirmation is evidence that the errant member has gone over to the dark side, what you have isn’t a political party.

It’s a cult.

Kudos to the seven who refused to drink the Kool-aid. May their numbers increase.

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Governing Isn’t a Game!

I wouldn’t know Glenda Ritz if I fell over her. I have no idea whether she is doing a competent job as Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, or–more accurately, whether she would be doing a competent job if the Governor and his cronies allowed her to do that job.

Here’s what I do know: she was elected with a lot more votes than Governor Pence received. And I am not the only person increasingly pissed by the games the Governor and legislature have been playing to keep her from doing the job she was elected to do–all in order to strip her office of its usual authority and make it incredibly difficult for her to do her job.

That doesn’t mean I approve of everything Ritz has done in return, but it is certainly clear who started this “tit for tat” that is consuming public resources and diverting time and energy from performance of the tasks We the People have a right to expect our elected officials to perform.

This unseemly effort to “cheat” when the “game” isn’t going your way is one more bit of evidence that our current crop of political actors are uninterested in actually governing. They run for office not because they want to do something, but because they want to be something.

Here’s the deal, Governor: you ran for office. Glenda Ritz ran for office. You were both elected. You don’t get to change the rules in order to ensure that she can’t do her job. She gets to fulfill the duties of her office, and if she doesn’t do that satisfactorily–something We the People will decide–we get to vote her out.

That works for you, too.

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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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