Park It

Mayor Ballard’s proposal to privatize the city’s parking continues to spark bipartisan concern. Last week, the Sunday Star ran a “point-counterpoint” between Deputy Mayor Michael Huber, the proposal’s architect, and Aaron Renn, a respected urban affairs expert who has criticized it. Star editor Dennis Ryerson noted that many open questions should be answered before the City-County Council makes a final decision.

What are those questions?

Why would any city turn over an important part of its infrastructure to any private company for fifty years? Even if the deal were less one-sided fiscally, decisions about where to place meters, how to price them, what lengths of time to allow and so on have an enormous impact on local businesses and residential neighborhoods. They are decisions requiring flexibility in the face of changing circumstances; they are most definitely not decisions that should be held hostage to contracting provisions aimed at protecting a vendor’s profits.

Why would we enter into a contract that will add significantly to the costs of downtown development? Indianapolis has worked hard to encourage construction of hotels, retail establishments and residential units in our urban core. Often, that construction interrupts adjacent parking. Now, the city can choose to ignore that loss of parking revenue, or to charge the developer, based upon the City’s best interests. This contract requires that ACS be paid whenever such interruptions occur. It has been estimated that such a provision would have added over two million dollars to the cost of the current legs of the Cultural Trail.

Why ACS? Much has been written about the problems with Chicago’s parking privatization, but far less about ACS’ track record in places like Washington, D.C., where an audit documented mismanagement, overcharging, over-counting of meters, and the issuance of bogus tickets (ACS gets all the revenue for tickets). Washington lost $8,823,447 in revenue and experienced a twenty-fold increase in complaints from the public. And it wasn’t just D.C. Police officers in Edmonton, Canada, were tried for accepting bribes from ACS, and a few years ago, the company’s CEO and CFO stepped down after admitting to $51 million in stock fraud. Why enter into such a disadvantageous deal for so long a term with a company having so troubling a track record?

One of the problems with privatization in general, as we learned during the Goldsmith administration, is that it leads to speculation about cronyism and political back-scratching. In this case, the Mayor’s personal advisor is a registered lobbyist for ACS through Barnes and Thornburg, the same law firm that employs the President of the City-County Council. Whatever the facts of the situation, those relationships raise an appearance of impropriety.

Finally, why not simply retain control of our infrastructure, and issue revenue bonds for the necessary improvements? Interest rates are at a historic low, making it an excellent time to do so. If this administration simply can’t manage parking, create a Municipal Parking Authority, as Councilor Jackie Nytes has suggested.

However we proceed, we should park this proposal. Permanently.

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Woe is Mayor

These are rough days to be a mayor. If you don’t believe me, look at just two of the issues bedeviling Mayor Ballard right now: police and parking.

In both cases, the Mayor has correctly identified a problem. But in both cases, there are substantial questions about his chosen solutions.

Managing the police is a perennial problem for mayors. Controlling crime and keeping citizens safe is an essential foundation for all the other things a mayor must do. It is no exaggeration to suggest that economic development, service delivery and a city’s quality of life all depend upon the safety of its citizens.

Given the importance of public safety, it’s understandable that Ballard wanted to control IMPD. When he assumed office and wrested control from Sheriff Frank Anderson, he made clear his belief that the Mayor should be the one held accountable for the department’s performance.

Those of us who disagreed pointed out that, in Indiana, the Sheriff is a constitutional office. Unlike the Director of Public Safety, he is elected by and answerable to the voters. Unlike mayors, who have multiple responsibilities, a Sheriffs’ duties and focus all involve law enforcement. If the Sheriff has responsibility for police behavior and public safety, and scandals erupt, voters can express their disapproval quite clearly at the ballot box. If the Mayor controls IMPD, voters must balance approval or disapproval of his public safety performance against their approval or disapproval of other initiatives, sending an inevitably mixed signal.      

The Mayor’s current policing woes stem from that decision to seize control early in his term. Both that decision and his current proposal to privatize parking enforcement will hamstring future mayors as well.

Once again, the Mayor has identified a legitimate issue. Our parking meters are old and outdated; our parking fees have not been raised in many years. It is time to take a holistic look at all aspects of downtown parking—revenue to the city, the effect on downtown businesses, the placement of meters and so on. None of the solutions identified for existing problems, however, requires the City to give a private company control of our parking decisions—and a significant portion of our parking revenues—for fifty years.

As several people have pointed out, had a contract of this sort been in effect a few years ago, the City would not have been able to give permission to build the Cultural Trail. 

The Mayor’s office defends the proposed privatization by pointing to the large capital outlay needed for new equipment, but the City could easily issue a twenty-year revenue bond for that purpose, and keep both control and all revenues in excess of those needed for bond repayment.

One of the most significant leadership challenges mayors face is deciding when to keep control of a public service and when to vest that control elsewhere. These are structural decisions, and they are especially consequential because they tie the hands of future administrations.

They are ultimately the decisions that determine a Mayor’s legacy.

When Will We Ever Learn?

There was an anti-war song from the sixties that I always loved, titled “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The refrain was “oh, when will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”

I’ve thought about that refrain a lot lately, as America has increasingly retreated into one of the ugliest nativist episodes in a history dotted with them. It’s ironic, in a way, that just as we seem poised to accept the justice of GLBT claims for equality—a recent CNN poll actually found a slim majority in favor of same-sex marriage for the first time ever!—hostility to immigrants and Muslim-Americans has become vicious. And make no mistake, this mindless lashing-out at those considered “other” threatens all of us who come from groups that have been or could be demonized, because it strikes at the very heart of what it means to be an American.

What makes Americans out of our diverse and disparate population is fidelity to a certain set of social/legal principles; a particular approach to the age-old question “how should people live together?” The very heart of that approach is our belief in judging people on the basis of who they are and what they do—on the basis of their behavior rather than their identity. It is that fundamentally American approach that has allowed the gay community—and Jews, and Catholics, and African-Americans, among others—to argue the unfairness of discriminatory stereotypes used to justify unequal treatment.

The arguments against the community center/Mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero are based on just the same sort of anti-American stereotyping that we recognize as pernicious in other contexts. Treating all Muslims as if they are terrorists is no different than treating all Germans as Nazis, all Catholics as pedophiles, all Irish as drunks, all women as weak and emotional, all gays as promiscuous. Every community that has fought for the right to have its members treated as individuals rather than as part of some monolithic whole, and every American who believes in our constitutional principles, should be standing up for our peaceful Muslim neighbors.

I know we’ve been through times like this before, but I can’t help worrying that the internet has dramatically increased the reach and immediacy of the craziness. Propaganda outlets like Fox “News” and political opportunists like Newt Gingrich play on the fears of the economically and socially insecure. It has never been easier to disseminate outright lies: Obama is a Muslim who wasn’t born in the U.S., the Imam of the proposed Mosque is funded by Saudi Terrorists, illegal immigrants are having “anchor babies” who will be raised as terrorists and sent back into the country to attack us…Ridiculous as these and similar claims are, there is a cohort that really does believe them.

They believe them because they want to. And in today’s media environment, it is so easy to create a “bubble” where you hear only those things you want to hear, listen only to those who will feed your paranoia.

My friends and family are tired of hearing me say this, but here’s my theory of what we are living through right now. A group of old, pissed-off white guys (and they are disproportionately old and guys—the average age of Fox’s audience is 65 and it’s largely male) woke up one morning and looked around. There was a black man in the White House, a woman running Congress, gay people getting married, brown people speaking Spanish. And they are throwing a world-class tantrum. They want “their” country back: the country that privileged white, heterosexual, Protestant males over the rest of us.

I hope and believe that this is a final eruption—a last gasp of spleen and bigotry—before their cohort dies off. But it is doing a great deal of harm while it lasts.   

When will we—and they—ever learn?

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Paging Civics Teachers

Where are all the high-school civics teachers when you need them?

During the past few weeks, we have been treated to an absolute bonanza of constitutional ineptitude: we’ve had Dr. Laura explaining her departure from radio as an effort to get her First Amendment rights back; continuation of the ugly, ginned-up controversy over Muslims building a community center three blocks from Ground Zero; and an equally retrograde proposal to eliminate portions of the 14th Amendment, among other embarrassments.

Dr. Laura (whose doctorate, we should recall, is in physiology—not logic, and certainly not law) seems to equate the disapproval of her sponsors with denial of her First Amendment rights. Someone should gently explain to her that the First Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, is a limit on government action. It prevents the government from censoring her. Unfair as it may seem to her, her sponsors also have First Amendment rights—and in this case, they have evidently decided to exercise them by disavowing her message.

That’s the problem with those darn constitutional rights—people who disagree with us have them too.

Aside from the southern Congressman who questioned whether Islam is “really a religion,” those who oppose allowing Muslims to build a community center and mosque three blocks from Ground Zero have generally conceded that the Constitution gives them the right to do so. Instead, they have fallen back on what First Amendment lawyers call the “heckler’s veto” argument. The “heckler’s veto” was most prominently used in the 1950s, during the Civil Rights movement. When Martin Luther King would ask for a permit to make a speech in a public venue, the city or town would argue that allowing the speech was likely to cause a civil disturbance and thus the permit should be denied in order to protect the public’s safety. Courts weren’t receptive to the notion that some people’s rights should be held hostage to other people’s hostility; nevertheless, opponents of the mosque argue that it is “insensitive” and “offensive” to build near the neighborhood where the Twin Towers went down (and just down the street from the Pussycat Lounge strip club).

When we come to proposals to amend the 14th Amendment, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that some of our dimmer political actors have noticed that it exists. It wasn’t all that long ago that a Georgia governor denied that the Bill of Rights applied to the states—a rather clear signal that he hadn’t encountered this particular Amendment. On the other hand, there is something surreal about watching people who claim to revere the Constitution when their own rights are at issue blithely proposing to shred that document when other people are its beneficiaries.

It’s hard to know whether these folks are really constitutionally illiterate or simply playing cynical political games. As one pundit has wryly noted, there are two ways we can understand the meaning of the word “base” in the phrase “playing to the base.”

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Mirror Images

There must be a special blind spot that allows people to engage in precisely the same behavior that they (correctly) criticize in others.

 In one particularly distasteful example, the Anti-Defamation League, an organization founded to counter religious prejudice, recently opposed locating a mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero. Evidently, the ADL’s commitment to civil rights doesn’t extend to Muslims.

Closer to home, a number of local Democrats have savagely attacked three Democratic City-County Counselors for voting to sell the water company to Citizens Gas. They have been especially harsh in their criticisms of Jackie Nytes, one of the most thoughtful, productive and hardworking members of the Council.

These are members of the same party that has complained—justifiably—about the Party of No in Washington. Democrats criticize the GOP for its sustained and uniform opposition to anything the Obama Administration proposes; in just the past few weeks, Republicans have blocked votes on the DISCLOSE Act (increasing disclosure and reporting requirements in the wake of the Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to make direct campaign contributions), a bill to provide medical aid and compensation for 9-11 first responders, and a bill to expand credit to small businesses.   The Party of No has also blocked votes on at least twenty judicial nominees who received bipartisan support in committee.

What is appalling about this behavior is its transparent motivation to deny the Administration any credit for getting anything done, even when the measures being proposed have previously been supported by Republicans.

Local Democrats have been among those who have strongly criticized this conduct, and it is ironic—to put it mildly—that they are now engaging in it by suggesting that a vote for a plan put forward by a Republican mayor is an act of disloyalty.

If I were on the Council, I don’t know how I would vote on the water company sale. I think the transfer itself makes sense; what I don’t like is that we are getting money to fix our decaying infrastructure by shifting the tax burden to ratepayers. We are pandering to the purveyors of the fiction that we can run a city on the cheap, and our cowardice will inevitably come back to bite us in the future. That said, the infrastructure needs are critical, and a direct tax increase is politically untenable.

Councilor Nytes has a well-deserved reputation for integrity and responsiveness to her constituents, and the accusations of betrayal by more partisan members of her party do not reflect poorly on her—such accusations diminish her critics, and reduce the effectiveness of their justifiable criticisms of the Party of No. 

We elect people to the Council to make decisions on our behalf in the exercise of their best judgment, not to play politics. It is one thing to disagree with a colleague’s vote on the merits—that’s fair enough. It is another thing altogether to insist on lockstep partisan voting.

It’s wrong to be the Party of No in Washington—or in Indianapolis.