Local Government – Page 63

The Ethics Challenge

The Indianapolis Star actually engaged in journalism yesterday, and the result wasn’t comforting: a lengthy story about DCS director and former Juvenile Court Judge James Payne. Payne abused his position and fought the professionals in his own agency in a case involving his grandchildren.

You can read the details in the Star, which devoted significant space to the story.

My question isn’t so much about the sordid accusations and depressing details of the Payne son’s divorce and custody battle. It is bemusement over the elder Payne’s indignant refusal to recognize his own ethical transgression. When I was in law school–and the Judge and I are roughly the same age–there was a mandatory course in legal ethics. Conflicts of interest and abuses of power were central to that course. But even if the content of law school classes has faded, the Judge has always presented himself as a deeply religious man; he has worn his Christianity on his sleeve. Isn’t there something about “do unto others” that might have alerted him to the impropriety of his behavior?

Governor Daniels’ office was quick to distance itself from the Judge, protesting a complete unawareness of his inappropriate involvement in the case involving his own grandchildren. I believe the Governor–after all, he has been unaware of half-billion dollar “errors” in his administration, too. But the Governor has a history of turning a blind eye toward behaviors that raise ethical questions–notably, hiring a well-connected law firm to represent the state in the IBM lawsuit. That firm represents ACS–yes, the same ACS that made out like a bandit in the deal to manage Indianapolis’ parking meters.

ACS was IBM’s partner in the huge contract to manage Indiana’s welfare eligibility operations, and (unlike IBM) wasn’t terminated when the problems with that privatization effort became too embarrassing to ignore. When reporters raised questions about the propriety of hiring ACS’ lawyers to sue its former partner, the firm defended itself by pointing out that it had disclosed its conflicts–in a letter that took seven pages to detail them. (Maybe I’m dense, but I’ve never understood why disclosing an impropriety makes it go away.)

It was all very cozy. All in the family, you might say.

The real lesson here, I suppose, is that we can’t depend upon any administration to police itself in order to avoid self-serving behaviors. We need watchdogs–real newspapers to report on our elected and appointed officials. It was nice to see the Star acting like a real newspaper for a change.

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We Are City

We are City is an effort focused on our urban fabric; they send out a daily newsletter with informative items and thought-provoking short essays. Today’s “Think” piece comes from Brad Beaubien, an urban planner, and it is well worth sharing and contemplating.

The agora was a public space filled with government buildings, religious temples, and public markets. It’s where the great philosophers of western civilization developed their arguments. It’s where the priests, military commanders, and legislators ruled. But it’s also the place where you did your daily shopping. While I don’t want to overlook or diminish the fact that in Greek society women and slaves were prohibited from public life, the concept of the Agora is vitally important. It’s a place where citizens of all means had a part and a place. They all mingled. And that was a critical physical manifestation of democracy.

You see, people only know what they know. And they only know what they experience. The value of the agora was that the rich and the poor, the aristocrat and the laborer, and the philosopher and the priest, all co-mingled in one physical place. While they certainly did not agree with one another, that experience and exposure helped provide the grease that makes a democracy work—compromise.

Fast forward to today. We get into our cars, leave our garages, drive with our windows rolled up and music playing out of our subdivision where everyone looks just like us, down highways and streets designed to minimize disruption of our travel, into the parking lot reserved for our coworkers, and into our cubicles, where we promptly put in our earphones and get to work. The design of the modern city and its transport systems has virtually eliminated the necessity to experience anyone other than those just like you. The main street shopping districts where the beggar and the banker co-existed have been replaced with sanitized malls we visit if permitted. The streetcar the businessman and the immigrant youth both waited for has been replaced with a city built solely for the private car. Our grand public parks crumble while private HOA’s tax themselves to maintain members-only trails and swimming pools. Even our old stadiums, where some seats were better than others but all got wet when it rained and everyone ate the same hot dog, now have luxury box suites with climate control and a catered feast. We don’t have agoras anymore. We don’t experience one another anymore. And as a result, we don’t understand one another anymore. It’s easy to demonize the poor when your only experience with them is driving as fast as you can through their neighborhoods on the way home. It’s easy to demonize the 1% when your only experience with them is glancing up at their feast in the glassed-off skybox.

I’m in the design professions, and I see things through the eyes of a designer. I know there are other lenses. But when I look at the state of our democracy, the state of our legislatures, and the state of our public discourse, I see the consequence of the decline of the American agora. We can’t work together because we don’t understand one another because we don’t experience one another. It’s a vicious cycle.

Fixing our zoning code, our transportation network, and our natural systems are noble and necessary causes for a host of reasons. What I’m most encouraged by is their ability to again create places, neighborhoods, and cities where we again experience one another, again understand one another, and again are able to have a thriving democracy.

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Our Deteriorating Public Services

I’m officially pissed.

The rant I’m about to embark upon was triggered by the City’s recycling contractor, Republic, which–for the third straight time–picked up everyone’s recycling except ours. We’ve had plenty of reasons to be less than enamored of the recycling program, which charges extra for the service (thus incentivizing environmentally irresponsible behavior). My biggest gripe has been the refusal of Republic to come down the alley, as our regular garbage pick-up does. Since we live in the city–the “hood”–that means we have to schlep our container down one alley, then another, in order to get it to the street. Not only is this inconvenient for elderly folks (and we’re pretty elderly!), it means that the street looks cluttered and trashy for two or three days, while cans are taken out and then returned to garages.

It isn’t just recycling. Regular trash pickup has gotten hit-or-miss of late. Crime in our neighborhood has increased to a worrisome degree–initially, the increase was mostly petty thefts, or cars being broken into, but more recently, people have been mugged and homes invaded while the occupants were still there. Scary stuff that we haven’t previously experienced.

When apartments being built a couple of blocks from our house caught fire a couple of months ago, it took IFD what seemed like a long time to arrive. That may have been an incorrect impression, but several people in the neighborhood reported a discomfiting wait between their 911 calls and the first truck. In those minutes, the blaze became a huge conflagration (we could feel the heat on our front porch, which is a good two and a half blocks away, and the flames could be seen for miles).

Not far from where that fire raged is a city park that–despite repeated promises–continues to shows signs of neglect. It has a very nice pool, but the hours of operation have been sharply cut back since it first opened.

It’s hard to remember that during the Hudnut Administration, streets in the Mile Square were swept every day. Now, from the looks of it, they aren’t being swept at all.

Part of the problem is management. Construction and especially street repairs drag on for weeks more than necessary (and let’s not even talk about the Cultural Trail segments that kept parts of Mass Avenue and Virginia Avenue closed for months on end while little or no work got done). Accountability for garbage collection is a management issue. But the major culprit is lack of money. So we have too few police, too few lifeguards, too few managers generally.

It’s bad enough that we’ve starved local government; it’s worse that we’ve actually built that starvation diet into our state constitution. Indiana taxpayers have spoken, and what they’ve said is that they don’t care enough about the quality of public services to pay for those services.

Unfortunately, we get what we pay for.

One of the unintended consequences of a city with inadequate public services and a deteriorating quality of life is that the people who can, leave. And they take their tax dollars with them, triggering a cycle of further decline.

We aren’t there yet, but the signs are ominous.

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Music for World-Class Cities

When I was in City Hall back in the late 1970s, the goal was to make Indianapolis a “world class” city. That wasn’t just the rhetoric used by the Mayor and his administration–it was echoed by the City Committee (now long defunct) and by the Lilly Endowment, which facilitated the goal with generous grants.

The decision to make Indianapolis into an amateur sports capital wasn’t made because city leaders loved sports, although many surely did. It was based on a hard-headed analysis of where we might have a comparative advantage. The goal was city-building, and sports were a means to that end.

That was then, and now is now. There is no longer a City Committee, and the Endowment–while still generous and immensely important to Indianapolis– no longer partners with elected officials to improve Indianapolis as it did then. Our current Mayor is not a visionary (to put it kindly). Making matters worse, Indianapolis has lost many of the corporate headquarters and locally-owned banks from which we used to draw private-sector civic leadership.

Now, we are in danger of seeing the Indianapolis Symphony–a symphony befitting a world-class city, a symphony of which we have been justifiably proud–become a part-time (read “second-class”) enterprise.

The Symphony is facing significant financial problems. It will obviously be important to determine the cause of those problems–poor portfolio management? Unfavorable labor contract? Other? I certainly haven’t a clue, and few outside the Board and musicians themselves are likely to have even a reasonable hypothesis.

But I do know one thing: in addition to being a beloved part of our city’s cultural scene and a point of pride, the symphony is important to our local economy.

Nationally, nonprofit arts organizations generate $135 billion in economic activity annually, supporting 4.1 million jobs and generating $22.3 billion in government revenue. Investment in the arts supports jobs, generates tax revenues, promotes tourism, and advances our increasingly creativity-based economy. The typical arts attendee spends $24.60 per person, per event, not including the cost of admission, on items such as meals, parking, and babysitters. Attendees who live outside the county in which the arts event takes place spend twice as much as their local counterparts.

A symphony season has far more impact on the local economy than football. Early in my academic career, I worked on a paper with an expert in the economic impact of sports. Such impact as exists is by virtue of intangibles–the value of raising the profile of the city with the team, that sort of thing. There was no direct dollar benefit. Despite that lack of immediate economic impact, we pump large amounts of public money into privately-owned sports teams and venues.

To the best of my knowledge, no public money flows to the symphony and a mere pittance is distributed among other arts organizations in the city. The arts have clearly not been a priority.

I am not suggesting that long-term public funding is the answer to the symphony’s current problems. Obviously, figuring out what happened, correcting missteps as possible, and developing a plan for future sustainability is critical, but that process takes time. If Indianapolis weren’t so starved for revenue, some sort of “bridge” loan or grant to keep the symphony going during that time would make a lot of sense, because keeping something important is easier and less costly than trying to rebuild it once it is gone.

Indianapolis used to understand that world-class cities require constant attention and inspired leadership. These days we don’t seem to have either.

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Our Political Charade

I’ve reluctantly concluded that self-government doesn’t work. Voters respond to vacuous platitudes and bumper-sticker slogans, and candidates are perfectly willing to pander to their uninformed biases while evading the complexities of policy.

Case in point, an egregious but certainly not the only available example: Mike Pence.

Yesterday, in the “candidate conversation” hosted by the Public Policy Institute at IUPUI, Pence said he wants Indiana to have more control over how federal dollars are spent in the state. His campaign literature features a promise to create a new state agency to “reject” federal regulations, and (an unrealistic and ridiculous) promise to return federal dollars to Washington.

A couple of days ago, he declared he would not create a state- based health insurance exchange. (The Affordable Care Act authorizes states to set up these new, competitive marketplaces to allow individuals and small businesses to choose among an array of affordable, comprehensive health insurance plans.) The ACA provides for these exchanges to be established at the state level, but if a state refuses to do so, authorizes the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to come into the state to establish that state’s exchange.

It is obviously in Indiana’s best interests to control our own Exchange. The ACA gives states considerable flexibility to tailor these mechanisms to the needs of the people living in that state, and a locally-run Exchange is likely to be more responsive to the concerns of our elected officials and the professionals and nonprofits who serve the constituency using the Exchange. Refusing to allow the state to create an Exchange doesn’t keep the dreaded “Obamacare” from being implemented; it simply assures that it will be controlled by Washington–something Pence claims he opposes.

This pastiche of inconsistent positions makes no sense as policy. But that really isn’t the point–at least, it isn’t the point for Pence. The point is to tell voters what they want to hear–that they can get services without paying for them, that (despite substantial evidence to the contrary) further reducing taxes will create jobs, that a program to increase access to healthcare is an assault on their freedom (Pence’s website really does say that), that Indiana should control its own destiny –except where we refuse to do so and thereby hand control over to the federal government. It’s all ludicrous and incoherent, and it has kept Pence ahead in the polls.

It’s been said that we get the government we deserve.

That’s the problem.

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