Category Archives: Local Government

Let’s Get Serious

Marion County’s dramatically—if erratically—increased property taxes have been the topic of non-stop conversation and exhaustive media coverage for the past two weeks.  I’m hearing lots of complaining. What I’m not hearing is serious consideration of the causes of the problem (finger-pointing doesn’t count) or suggestions for sensible measures to reduce unnecessary costs.

 

I know that one person’s “unnecessary costs” are the next guy’s “absolutely essential public services,” but—at risk of enraging more readers than usual—let me suggest just two measures that could reduce taxes and improve services at the same time.

 

  • Marion County supports eleven school systems. That’s eleven superintendents, making over 100,000 each. That’s eleven administrative structures, each with its own buildings and staffs full of deputy superintendents, curriculum experts, human resources departments and the like. Eleven transportation systems, bus fleets and dispatchers. Eleven food service operations. Eleven separate school boards, with per diems, travel budgets, and other expenses. Each school system hires its own lawyers, negotiates separately with the teachers’ union, builds its own schools, provides its own counseling, policing and standardized testing. Meanwhile, enrollments have been declining in several of those districts, even while costs continue to accelerate.

 

            The savings that would accrue from consolodating those districts would be         significant. (In 2006, the budget for IPS alone exceeded five hundred million            dollars.) We could also redirect resources from overhead into our classrooms, and            equalize services—and school tax rates—across the county.

 

  • A similar argument can be made for consolodating (or preferably abolishing) the outdated Township Trustee system. Over the years, most of the duties originally discharged by individual trustee offices have been assumed by other agencies. And repeated studies have confirmed that trustees are not cost-effective providers (to put it kindly) of poor relief, their  major remaining function.

 

So why are these two measures, which could yield substantial savings without sacrificing service, essentially off the table? Simple: politics and patronage.

 

In the case of the schools, it has been the politics of money and race. When Unigov was enacted, it was common knowledge that including the schools would have been the kiss of death—privileged white parents weren’t going to send their children to school with poorer children, especially if they were black. Demographics (and, one hopes, attitudes) in Marion County have changed considerably since 1971. It’s past time to revisit the issue. 

 

In the case of the Township Trustees, patronage is the culprit. As the county has become increasingly Democratic, suburban Trustee’s offices are among the last Republican strongholds, while the Center Township Trustee is a longtime source of Democratic jobs, especially for minorities.

 

Meanwhile, political game-playing hasn’t helped. When President Bush “cut” federal taxes, states were stuck with the costs of services those taxes had paid for. Then state governments realized that two could play that game, and shifted costs to local units of government.

 

Now local government has to decide who it will hurt: property taxpayers, or those with vested interests in keeping things as they are.  

 

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A First Step

If you criticize someone when you think they are wrong, you should be fair enough to applaud them when they do something right. Speaker Brian Bosma has recently done something right, by strongly endorsing HB 1009, Rep. Jerry Torr’s bill to replace gerrymandering with a nonpartisan redistricting process.

 

The way lines are drawn now is for the majority party to draw as many “safe” seats as possible—more for itself, of course, but also for the minority party, because in order to retain control, the winners need to cram as many of the losers into as few districts as possible, and those districts are also safe. Neighborhoods, cities, towns, townships—even precincts—are evaluated solely on the basis of voting history, and then broken up to meet the political needs of mapmakers. Numbers drive the process—not compactness of districts, not communities of interest, and certainly not democratic competitiveness. And computers have made this process very precise. Most state legislative districts in Indiana are safe for one party or the other. In this system, the interests of real communities are secondary.

 

Safe districts facilitate special-interest legislation: if you are guaranteed victory every election, it is less important to listen to constituents; easy to become lazy and arrogant. Party preoccupation with gerrymandering consumes an enormous amount of money and energy that could be better directed, while safe seats allow politicians to scuttle popular measures without fear of retribution.

Lack of competitiveness also makes it impossible to trace campaign donations, since unopposed candidates send their “extra” money to those running in competitive districts. (The current scandals surrounding Tom Delay are a case in point.) The most consequential results, however, are voter apathy (why play when the deck’s been stacked?) and the extremism—left and right—that is produced when elections are won or lost in primaries dominated by both parties’ most fervently ideological voters.

 

HB 1009 is not perfect. It raises legitimate state constitutional issues, and sets arguably incompatible goals. For example, competitive districts are desirable, but it is also important to respect natural community boundaries; if these two goals clash, which is most important? I would argue that an overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic neighborhood or city is entitled to have its majority viewpoint reflected, that the point of redistricting reform should be to move away from districts drawn to achieve political goals, worthy or not. The Torr bill also makes the recommendations of the nonpartisan panel advisory, rather than binding. This was probably an effort to avoid state constitutional issues, but it’s an invitation to partisan wrangling and wheeler-dealing. 

   

Nevertheless, while it will be very important to do this carefully and avoid making the current mess worse, HB 1009 is a welcome step in the right direction.

 

For Hoosiers interested in more detail, including information about what other states are doing, and nonpartisan analyses of HB 1009, a new Indiana nonprofit, the American Values Alliance, has valuable resources on its website (www.valuesalliance.org). This is an issue all citizens should care about.

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Is Less Really More?

 

Our governor’s approach to economic development has prompted some folks to indulge in gallows humor.

 

After the State Ethics Committee ruled that the “Guv-mobile” (the Governor’s spiffy RV) can no longer be used at fundraising venues, a friend of mine sourly suggested alternate uses:

·        Use it as a mobile office to replace those being closed by the Bureau of Motor Vehicles;

·        Press it into service as an extra classroom, while school corporations engage in the lengthy new process of demonstrating to state bureaucrats that they really do need that new building;

·        It could be used as a mobile clinic for the folks who are being dumped from Medicaid;

·        It could be a mobile unemployment office, offering outplacement advice to laid-off state workers.

There were others, but you get the idea.

 

Fair or unfair, these gibes underscore an important difference of opinion on economic development strategies. The Administration clearly believes that the best way to create jobs is by cutting taxes and services to the bone. Make Indiana a cheap place to do business, the theory goes, and we’ll be more competitive. As a theory goes, it is certainly defensible. The problem is, it doesn’t work.

 

Take a look at the states that are cleaning our clocks when it comes to new job creation. They have tax rates considerably higher than ours—even our Midwestern neighbors. But they have something else—something those higher taxes have bought them: a level of public services that makes their quality of life better.

 

Think it doesn’t matter? Recently, several Southern states were in hot competition for a new Toyota plant. They offered tax incentives (reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars), and they offered low tax rates–the same strategies Indiana has been using. In June, Toyota announced that the new plant would be built in Ontario, Canada, despite the lack of incentives and higher tax rate. Why? Two reasons were given: the quality of the workforce and the quality of life.

 

Think about it. If you were an employer looking to locate a new facility, would you choose a site where taxes were lower, but the quality of the schools virtually guaranteed that you would have to spend money on remedial education, in addition to providing health care and other social benefits? Or would you opt for a location with a higher tax rate that did not require you to provide either education or health insurance?

 

Americans like to congratulate ourselves because we pay lower taxes than other industrialized countries. It doesn’t seem to occur to us that those lower taxes don’t save us money—we don’t pay the government for our health care, but we pay for it (in fact, we pay much more for it). We starve our schools, and pay not just for remedial education but for the costs of wasted human capital. We support cultural tourism, but not if it means paying librarians.

 

And then we wonder why no one wants to live here.

What’s in a Name?

Quick—what’s the difference between civil liberties and civil rights?

 

If you aren’t quite certain, you have a lot of company. The distinction is lost on most of my students, and—far more troubling—on a good number of city and state legislators.

 

Civil liberties are rights that individuals have against government. Citizens of the new United States refused to ratify the Constitution unless a Bill of Rights was added, specifically protecting them against official infringements of their “inalienable rights.” Among our civil liberties are the right to free expression, the right to worship (or not) as we choose, and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. After the civil war, the Fourteenth Amendment added the Equal Protection Clause, prohibiting government from treating equally situated citizens unequally. The Fourteenth Amendment also applied the provisions of the Bill of Rights to all levels of government—not just the federal government, as was originally the case, but also to state and local government agencies.

 

Only the government can violate your civil liberties.

 

Civil rights took a lot longer, and were a lot more controversial. It was 1964 before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. Civil rights laws protect people against private acts of discrimination—discrimination in employment, in housing or education. The original Civil Rights Act applied to businesses engaged in interstate commerce—businesses that held themselves out to be “public accommodations” but were, shall we say, “selective” about which segments of the public they were willing to accommodate. State and local civil rights acts followed. Civil rights laws generally include a list of characteristics that cannot be used to favor some people over others: race, religion, gender, and so forth.

 

There was a lot of resistance to civil rights laws, and there is still a widespread, if covert, attitude of “What business does government have telling me I can’t discriminate?”  That resentment has redoubled as new groups have lobbied for protection.

 

The fiercest resistance has come from people opposed to extending civil rights to gays and lesbians. Those opponents have taken advantage of the widespread confusion of civil liberties with civil rights to argue that the Fourteenth Amendment already protects gays, so amending Indiana’s civil rights law, or Marion County’s Human Relations Ordinance is unnecessary. (After all, that’s easier than taking a public position that “those people” don’t deserve equal civil rights.)

 

I remember the astonishment of one of my African-American students when she realized that, in Indiana, people can be fired just because they are gay. “There is still a lot of discrimination against black people,” she said, “but at least there are laws on the books! They may not always work, but they’re something.”

 

A few months ago, the Indianapolis City-County Council failed to pass a measure that would have made discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation a violation of the City’s Human Relations Ordinance. Several of those voting against it said it was “unnecessary” because the Fourteenth Amendment already protected gays.

 

They knew better.

 

      

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