Category Archives: Local Government

Leadership Wanted

The legislative special session has an unenviable task. Times are tough, and we have long since stopped cutting government fat, and moved on to muscle and bone.

 

That said, one of the most monumental threats facing Indianapolis in this round of budget cuts is their potential to effectively destroy IPS—and thus deliver a mortal wound to economic and community development in Indianapolis.

 

The House/Senate budget proposal that failed in April would have meant a $47 million loss to IPS over the next two years. After the last revenue forecast, Governor Daniels told lawmakers to cut more; his numbers would mean an additional $11 million lost to IPS. (To add insult to injury, the House/Senate proposal cut IPS’ state formula funding while increasing state funding for 287 other school districts. Resentment of Indianapolis by legislators from elsewhere in Indiana is nothing new, of course, but this discrepancy seems rather blatant.)

 

The dollars IPS will lose cannot legally be replaced with stimulus money, which is one-time, tightly targeted money in any case. And the loss can’t be made up by closing more schools, although that will certainly happen. IPS says every program not legally required will be in jeopardy: Art and music programs, high school electives, field trips, magnet programs, and a variety of other alternative programs, many of which serve our most at-risk youngsters. IPS has made considerable progress over the past few years; a loss of this magnitude will wipe out those gains and cripple the system for years to come.

 

What the city’s leaders have given no indication of understanding, moreover, is the incalculable damage the evisceration of IPS will do to Indianapolis.

 

Whatever their other failings, Dick Lugar, Bill Hudnut, Steve Goldsmith and Bart Peterson all understood that efforts to make Indianapolis a world-class city depend first and foremost on quality of life—that our ability to lure employers and grow the tax base requires urban amenities like parks, museums, libraries, public safety, decent public transportation and above all, good public schools. Despite the best efforts of our political and business leaders, Indianapolis continues to lag other cities in many of these categories. To the extent we do, we lose our competitive edge. We lose employment and tax base—which means those of us who remain will pay higher taxes for fewer services. That, in turn, will encourage more out-migration. It’s a vicious cycle.

 

I don’t dismiss the civic benefits of major league sports teams, but I find it difficult to understand why so much more effort and attention has been lavished on the CIB’s troubles than on the threat facing IPS.

 

Bill Hudnut used to say that a successful city is like a cookie—solid clear through—and not like a doughnut with a hole in the middle. If IPS is allowed to disintegrate, we will have taken a giant step back to becoming a doughnut.

 

Mayor Ballard wrote a book about leadership. If he is ever going to demonstrate that leadership, now is the time.

 

 

           

 

The Hunt for Blue November

A few days ago, a politically savvy friend of mine asked if I’d seen the 1990 movie, “The Hunt for Red October.” I hadn’t. “You should rent it,” he said. “It explains the whole CIB situation perfectly.”

 

Intrigued, I rented the movie. In it, a Soviet submarine captain, played by Sean Connery, plans to defect to the United States with the Soviets’ newest, cutting-edge sub. The plot is discovered, and he is pursued by a significant portion of the Soviet submarine fleet, among whom is a Russian captain who is absolutely determined to blow him out of the water. So determined, in fact, that he risks arming a torpedo sooner than he should have, and ends up destroying his own ship.

 

It was hard to miss the analogy.

 

In  2005, Bart Peterson was Mayor of Indianapolis, and the then-conventional wisdom was that he would be easily re-elected. He had just concluded negotiations with the Colts, and was lobbying the General Assembly for the financial assistance needed to build the new stadium. He got his stadium, but—as Matt Tully recounted in a series of contemporaneous articles—not the way he’d wanted. Indiana’s newly elected governor, Mitch Daniels, forced Peterson to make a major concession: Peterson would get his stadium only if Daniels got total control (including the patronage that comes with big construction projects). The Mayor would get to choose only two of the members of the Capital Improvement Board; the rest would be chosen by Daniels and statehouse Republicans.

 

The Republicans insisted that the shift was necessary because Daniels knew how to run a big project, and the city didn’t. As Tully reported “Bosma said the mayor initially sought $72 million a year for the project. Luke Kenley said the gap made clear to many lawmakers that the state was better equipped to oversee the project. Daniels questioned the ‘financial acumen’ of Peterson’s financial advisors.”

 

At the time, Peterson’s “naïve” financial advisors protested that the state’s fiscal plan “could leave the city without the money to run or maintain the new venue.” Under the city’s plan, it would “set aside money from the taxes to operate the stadium. Fred Glass, president of the city’s Capital Improvement Board, said the state’s plan does not include money to run the stadium and will ‘bankrupt’ the Board.” [Star, April 27, 2005]

 

It is possible, of course, that the Daniels Administration simply miscalculated. But none of the players in this particular drama are dumb, so it is equally likely that a new Republican Governor decided to kneecap a popular Democratic mayor who was cruising to re-election and would then be his most likely opponent in 2008.  

 

Peterson would be faced with a massive deficit, and an array of unattractive options for fixing it.  His problems would confirm GOP accusations of fiscal fecklessness. It was a brilliant plan—except that Peterson lost in 2007, and a Republican won.

 

The missile was armed and deadly. The problem was, it hit the party that launched it.

 

 

Going the Wrong Way

When I was practicing law, it wasn’t uncommon for clients to express apprehension about going to court. Among their concerns was the relationship between the judge and the lawyer representing the adverse party—were they poker buddies? Had the lawyer contributed to this judge’s campaign? Did he or she practice with a law firm that had hosted a fundraiser for the judge?

 

Let me hasten to say that in my seventeen years of active practice, I never personally encountered a judge whose rulings appeared to be influenced by political contributions. (The one exception was a widely reported corruption trial of a judge in an adjoining county, who was convicted of trading favorable decisions for campaign cash.) In other parts of the country, however, elected judges have increasingly been found guilty of “selling” justice for campaign contributions and other electoral assistance. This has become a matter of considerable concern to the profession; Justices Kennedy and Breyer have recently expressed concern that judicial campaigns may be undermining judicial integrity and independence. A wide variety of “good government” organizations are working to take judicial selection out of the electoral process.

 

What’s wrong with electing judges?  The answer to that question involves the nature of a judge’s job.

 

The ideal jurist should have solid legal skills, a “judicial temperament,” and unquestioned integrity. Most importantly, he or she must be guided by the rule of law—not the desires of the electorate. People who argue for judicial elections in order to get judges who will be “responsive to the voters” do not understand the role of the judiciary in American law. (If judges  answered to the “will of the people,” America would still have segregated schools, bans on interracial marriages and poll taxes.)

 

In our system, the legislature is the branch of government accountable to the electorate; the judiciary is accountable to the constitution and the law. And because law is a specialized field, deciding who is qualified to be a judge requires specialized knowledge on the part of those who are doing the choosing. At the very least, it requires that judicial candidates be screened for the necessary skills by their peers in the legal community.

 

Just as every M.D. isn’t qualified to perform heart surgery, every lawyer isn’t qualified to be a judge. As a lawyer friend recently put it, “Politics will never be absent from judicial selections, but at least with merit selection you can hopefully avoid having a charming nincompoop chosen by an ill-informed electorate.” Judges ought not be selected on the basis of nifty bumper-stickers and catchy jingles.

 

In Indiana, judges are elected in every county but two: St. Joseph and Lake counties. Now the legislature is proposing to change judicial selection in St. Joseph County from appointed to elected. No one seems to know what triggered this change, which has quietly sailed through the session despite opposition from the State Bar Association, the local Chamber and the Indiana Lawyer, among others.

 

Your Indiana legislature–proudly moving Indiana backward.

Legislative Fiddling

The one thing that Republicans, Democrats and Independents all seem to agree on these days is that the country is in a big mess, and business as usual isn’t going to fix it.

 

As bad as things are nationally, states are arguably swimming in even more treacherous waters, because most state constitutions—including Indiana’s—require balanced budgets, a requirement that gives state lawmakers very little maneuvering room in times of economic duress. So we might expect our state legislators to forgo the usual efforts to protect their fellow partisans and  ingratiate themselves with narrow constituencies, and instead work in a bipartisan manner to solve the very difficult fiscal problems we face.

 

We might expect that, but we would be wrong.

 

So far this session we have seen efforts to designate a state pie (harmless enough, but really! Choosing an official state pie couldn’t wait?); a bill to allow students at state universities to carry guns on campus (in addition to the mayhem this would promote, if you think we have grade inflation now—how many of us faculty types would give poor marks, no matter how richly deserved, to students “packing heat?”); and yet another effort to amend the state constitution by inserting a ban on same-sex marriages (never mind that such unions are already illegal in Indiana, and that the prospect of Adam and Steve filing joint tax returns isn’t exactly topping Hoosier worry lists these days).

 

And then there’s State Senator David Long. If you think solving the problem of gun violence by arming more adolescents is counter-intuitive, to put it mildly, what is there to say about Long’s effort to have government restructuring decided by local referenda? Leaving aside the obvious cowardice of this effort to avoid casting a vote that will make some people unhappy, this is a suggestion absolutely guaranteed to make an already bad situation even worse.

 

The problem with Indiana government right now is that we have too many overlapping and duplicative units of government, and far too many elected officials. These multiple layers of government are inefficient, they make it difficult for citizens to know who is responsible for what, and they are all being paid for with tax dollars desperately needed for service delivery. (In a very real sense, we are being asked to choose between paved roads and township trustees.) The Kernan-Shepard report identified a number of problems stemming directly from the crazy quilt that is Indiana government.

 

If each county held a referendum to vote whether or not to streamline government in that county, we would be addressing the problems that have been caused by one incoherent patchwork by creating an even bigger, even more incoherent patchwork. This is like treating a cold by taking bird flu virus.

 

Is it too much to ask our state legislators to stop fiddling while Indiana burns? To put aside the game playing, pandering and politics as usual, at least for the duration of the economic crisis? We citizens would sure appreciate it. 

Respecting Government

Remember comic Rodney Dangerfield and his “I don’t get no respect” routine? Recently, a faculty colleague told me a story that illustrates perfectly why so many of us view government with a mixture of bemusement, annoyance and even contempt—why so often, government gets even less respect than Rodney Dangerfield.

 

My colleague’s fiancée had just completed renovating a double in Lockerbie Square. He’d finally moved in, and needed garbage cans. Lockerbie is one of the central city neighborhoods in which  homeowners are required to use garbage cans provided by the City that have been engineered to be picked up by automated garbage trucks.

 

My colleague called the Mayor’s Action Line and asked for two garbage cans. She was told that she would first have to call the police and report the old cans as stolen. Once she had obtained an incident report number, she was to call back, and the cans would be ordered.  She patiently explained that no cans had been stolen; they simply hadn’t gotten any because no one lived there during restoration. She was told that truth was immaterial; if they wanted garbage cans, they had to follow procedure and report that the old ones were stolen.

 

When she called IMPD, she felt compelled to tell the person on the phone that there hadn’t really been a theft. (As she said when telling me this, “Isn’t filing a false police report a felony?”) The person on the other end of the line said it didn’t matter, this was “procedure.” She was then required to give her driver’s license/social security number in order to get the report issued.

 

Eventually, she got the incident reports, called back to the Mayor’s Action Line with the required numbers, and the garbage cans were duly delivered. Why the “theft” charade was necessary remains a mystery.

 

In the scheme of things, the saga of the garbage can is a minor irritation. But there’s a lesson here.

 

So often, Americans remain fixated on policy itself, on the question “what should government do?” In this case, for example, policymakers have determined that municipal governments should collect garbage. Public administrators then decided how to deliver the service—should employees be hired, or private companies contracted?—and how to fund it.  Those are all proper matters for public discussion and debate, because decisions about what government should do and how are most likely to be driven by ideology, and thus most likely to generate political conflict.

 

Those of us who teach public administration must focus on a different question, however, and it is equally important. Once policymakers have given administrators a job, how well do they perform?  Are they efficient? Ethical? Competent? Do they treat citizens equally and constitutionally?

 

Respect for our governing institutions has taken a real beating lately. Local governments can’t do much about the daily drumbeat of reported corruption and incompetence in Washington. But citizens might feel better if we didn’t have to visit an alternate universe just to get a garbage can.

 

 

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