The Crux of the Matter

As Indianapolis prepares to enter into a 50 year contract with ACS, under which it will hand over management of this asset–and an estimated 1.25 billion dollars that would otherwise come to the City during that period–I thought I’d share an observation from my son, made in response to a letter from the Mayor’s office to City Council members, defending the proposal against criticisms. I think he gets to the heart of the matter.

“Having scanned the administration’s response to the analysis of the non-partisan Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), and particularly the Administration’s view that it is leveraging a “non-core asset” (parking meters), it finally struck me why the Mayor continues to press this deal to give so much money, and particularly control, to ACS.  Ultimately, there is one glaring analytical flaw, which is really at the heart of the City’s analysis: The Administration fundamentally doesn’t understand the “value” and “purpose” of the asset it is selling. This leads to a fundamental error in the financial terms and structure of the deal and explains why the city is willing to give away so much in the deal.

The Administration’s ignorance of the true value of the parking meter assets is evident in its label of parking infrastructure as “non-core assets.”  From a revenue raising perspective, they are right in a very limited sense: the city hasn’t used parking meters as a “core” revenue raising tool.  But as Aaron Renn has forcefully argued, parking meters and control of rights-of-way are NOT, first and foremost, revenue raising tools/powers, but instead are central or “core” to a city’s ability to plan and control its use of public space and, ultimately, to control and encourage economic development. The Administration’s analysis actually ignores the “core value” of parking meter assets to the city: that is, control over parking meters gives the city control over how it manages development, transportation, land-use, etc.  And by ignoring this “core value,” or by failing to see the value in it, the Administration is failing to properly value the asset…. Or to fully understand and protect those other rights and benefits that are tied to control of its rights of way.  (It’s kind of like a landowner selling a plot of land that he thinks is barren or only useful on the surface, when there are mineral/oil rights below ground that he is giving up without receiving value.) It’s the City’s ignorance of the true value of the asset that is leading it to agree to terms that it should never agree to.

As some councillors have observed in their very well-stated remarks, the City is not simply striking a very bad deal – it is striking a deal that future councils and future administrations will be effectively unable to undo and will have to live with for decades… As Bill Hudnut observed a few weeks ago in an interview with WTHR, there is no need for the city to give up so much revenue or control.

There are other flaws in the analysis forwarded by Mr. Cochran to City Councillors, but perhaps the most telling one is that they apparently don’t understand the true value of the asset they are selling and so, as day follows night, they have incorrectly valued it and placed inappropriate restrictions on it’s future use.”

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Sanity And Taxes

A couple of weeks ago, fifty-five assorted residents of Indianapolis boarded a chartered bus and headed to Washington, D.C. for the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert “Rally for Sanity.”  It was a pretty diverse group—college students and retirees, black and white, varying religions and political parties—but we all wanted to demonstrate that the cable shouters, insult-throwers and nasty political ads dominating the airwaves don’t represent most Americans.

There were plenty of clever signs on display, but two more serious ones summed up what I think was the “message” of the Rally. One said “Turn Your Caps-Lock Off!” And the other read, “I pay taxes because I’m an adult and that’s the way it works.”

Ah, taxes. We have just emerged from an election season that was high on heat and low on light. Candidates of both parties were on my television—with their “caps-locks” on—promising to deliver services and balance budgets while cutting—or at least not raising—taxes. (On those rare occasions when a reporter challenged a candidate to identify what cuts he would make to accomplish this miracle, the lack of response was revealing.)

Here in Indiana, voters overwhelmingly agreed to place property tax caps in the state constitution, despite the fact that the negative consequences of the statutory caps are already being felt. The political golden rule—“He who has the gold, rules”—has shifted spending authority to the state, and made it much more difficult for local governments to deliver even basic services.

Mayors are desperate. They have fewer resources with which to meet the demands of citizens who want their public services improved, but who don’t want to pay for them.

Some—like Mayor Ballard—resort to gimmicks like the proposed contract with ACS to take over the city’s parking meters for fifty years. In return for giving away significant future revenues, the city will get some up-front money; more important, it will contract away its responsibility for deciding whether and when to raise parking fees.

Stripped of all the fancy rhetoric, this is best understood as a deal to outsource the taxing power. That is what the state did with the Toll Road. Recognizing that the legislature lacked the political will to raise tolls, the Daniels Administration “sold” the right to do so. That is also what motivated the sale of the Water Company to Citizens Gas; ratepayers essentially will be “taxed” in order to recover the up-front payment that is being used to pave streets and repair sidewalks.

Citizens, as a public trust, may prove to be a more prudent operator than the city. The parking proposal has no obvious merits and many obvious drawbacks. But good deals or bad, this is not the way adults make decisions.  Eventually, services must be paid for. That doesn’t mean we cannot deliberate over the proper type of tax, or who should pay it, or how high it needs to be. But games cost more than taxes in the long run.

Adults know that.

Bad Monkey

I’m writing this before the November 2d elections, knowing that it won’t see print until the election results are known. The timing won’t keep me from making a prediction: voters will reward sleazy tactics, outright liars and buffoons of all political persuasions.

That’s because the election season that will (mercifully) be over when you read this has been dominated by two parties—not Republicans and Democrats, but those I’ll dub “denialists” and “enablers.”

Denialists have a variety of motives, but essentially, they are fleeing the complexity and ambiguity of modern life. They span a spectrum from the outright delusional—the so-called “birthers” who have convinced themselves that President Obama was born in Kenya, and the one in five Americans who believe he’s a secret Muslim—to the various groups of creationists, climate change deniers and others who are suspicious of science and empirical evidence and looking for any opportunity to reject findings that do not confirm their own beliefs or serve their own interests. They include the revisionists who cling to carefully selected and edited versions of America’s history and constitution.

There have always been denialists on the fringes of American political life. What is different today is that they are being enabled by the emergence of a media landscape in which the time-honored function of genuine journalism—truth-telling—has been pushed aside in favor of what sells, and telling people what they want to hear is a sure winner.  The fact that paying talking heads to spout uninformed—occasionally deranged—opinions is so much less expensive than paying journalists to do actual reporting is just icing on the cake.

In this intellectually dishonest, morally distasteful environment, can we really be surprised that candidates of both parties have participated in a content-free, ugly exchange of untruths and half-truths?

In the run-up to November 2d, it has been impossible to avoid the hammering of negative, misleading ads. I am supposed to be outraged over the “government takeover” of Medicare (and too stupid to know that Medicare is a government program). I am supposed to believe that a candidate for prosecutor who once represented a defendant accused of child molestation is thereby disqualified for office (and to ignore the profoundly unethical conduct of a candidate who would make such a charge). Presumably, I am supposed to listen to the out-of-context charges and counter-charges, the grainy photographs and gloomy atmospherics and make my candidate selection based purely on my emotional response.

No wonder Jon Stewart held a rally for sanity. If the antics of this electoral season are any indication, it’s in short supply.

Actually, it was Stewart who came up with the best description of our current politics. In an interview, Terry Gross of NPR asked him about his focus on politicians and the media, and who was most culpable. Stewart said “Politicians are politicians. If you go to the zoo and monkeys are throwing feces, well—that’s what monkeys do. But you’d like to have the zoo-keeper there saying ‘Bad Monkey.’”

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

Dickens’ classic book “A Tale of Two Cities” begins, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” That’s a pretty apt description of the world Americans inhabit right now.

On the plus side, advances in transportation and communication allow us to travel the globe and connect with others in ways our parents could never have imagined. Medical science has given us longer, more comfortable lives. Technology has improved our productivity, and brought education, books, and the arts to millions who otherwise would lack access to them.

The best of times.

And then there is our experiment with self-government, which isn’t going so well.

It’s partly the economy, of course. During times of economic distress, people get testy. Prejudices emerge. (Attacks on immigrants and Muslims, especially, are getting ugly.)

But it’s not just the economy. We also seem to be in the throes of a massive cultural backlash, driven primarily—although certainly not exclusively—by old, angry white guys.   Most of these angry folks cannot articulate what it is that makes them so furious—probably because they really don’t know themselves. They just know that the world they were born into (or think they were born into—that “leave it to Beaver” world that existed, if at all, for a very few families) has changed.

If you listen to Tea Party activists for even a few minutes, you cannot help but be struck by the fact that they cannot describe policies they support, although they can certainly identify what they are against—much like a cranky two-year-old, or that character from “Broadcast News” who was “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.”

Conventional wisdom tells us this rage will translate into the election of several of the crazier candidates who have emerged from the primaries. We are two weeks away from an election where a lot of irrational folks are energized and large numbers of reasonable citizens are dispirited.

If, as many of our pundits predict, this angry electorate votes indiscriminately against moderates and incumbents, opting for extremists who display little or no recognition of the complexities of the issues (or even basic understanding of the world we inhabit), we will all suffer the consequences. If we turn the apparatus of government over to the “simple answer” ideologues—the creationists and climate-change deniers, the folks who want to repeal Social Security and the Civil Rights Act, the conspiracy-theorists who have convinced themselves that President Obama is a Muslim who wasn’t born in the United States—the consequences will be grim.

We have never needed sane and steady public servants more than we need them today.

Which brings me to another quote that seems apt right now: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”

If reasonable people don’t vote in large numbers, and the ideologues and crazies and know-nothings take the reins of power, “the best of times” will become “the worst of times” in no time.

Cookies and Savvy Politics

Many years ago, when I first became what we now call a “straight ally,” working for equal rights for gays and lesbians, the only members of the community who were politically visible tended to be “in your face” activists. These were not people who appreciated nuance. Of course, this has been true of every political movement, from civil rights to women’s rights; they were started by the more passionate—okay, the more strident—members of the group suffering discrimination. As cultural attitudes changed and the mainstream became more receptive to the message, the movements themselves became more strategic. The movement for gay equality has been no different.

Case in point: a recent episode in Indianapolis, Indiana, involving—of all things—cookies.

The controversy occurred when “Just Cookies,” a bakery with a lease in the Indianapolis City Market, refused to fill an order for cookies with rainbow sprinkles. The order was placed by the local university’s gay rights organization, to celebrate Coming-Out Day. (The owner—clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer—said he had two young daughters and couldn’t fill the order because he needed to model “morality” for them. I’m not sure what is immoral about rainbow sprinkles, and the daughters turned out to be college-aged, which certainly didn’t help, but bigotry is seldom logical.)

The City of Indianapolis has a human rights ordinance, passed relatively recently, that prohibits discrimination based upon sexual orientation, and there was an immediate hue and cry, accompanied by lots of publicity featuring individuals leveling accusations of discrimination. The Mayor’s office promised to investigate whether the Ordinance had been violated. That in turn animated the usual suspects—the local unit of the American Family Association among them—to leap to the defense of the owner and his right to his religious beliefs. It seemed likely that the controversy would devolve into the usual name-calling and righteous indignation, allowing the right-wing to generate anti-gay hostility and ramp up their fundraising.

But then, the gay community and its allies did something politically brilliant.

The sponsors of the Human Rights Ordinance and the presidents of two major gay rights organizations wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper. That letter made several points:

  • The Ordinance prohibits discrimination—for example, a refusal to sell cookies to gay groups or individuals.
  • The Ordinance does not—and constitutionally could not—require a business owner or individual to support a political cause with which he disagrees.
  • Just Cookies had never (to the authors knowledge) refused to sell cookies to gay people or groups; it had, however clumsily, declined to endorse a political position.
  • The authors strongly disagreed with the political position of the owner, but—echoing Voltaire—defended his right to hold that position. (To which they added the hope that those who disagreed with their advocacy of equality would be equally supportive of their rights.)

The letter was both legally correct and politically brilliant. The Indianapolis Star—never noted for a pro-gay-rights bias—ran a favorable front-page story and an editorial, the latter commending the gay community for its “graciousness.” Both the story and the editorial made the bigots look small and extreme. The electronic media followed suit. Rather than the typical “fringe vs. fringe” coverage such conflicts tend to generate, the gay community came out looking mainstream and reasonable, and the anti-gay activists were deprived of a favored tactic: accusing those of us who are pro-gay-rights of “religious bigotry.”

And at the end of the day, thanks to the amount and kind of publicity generated, a lot of people will demonstrate their disagreement with the owner’s political position—which he has every right to hold—by buying their cookies elsewhere. Which they have every right to do.

A consequence sweeter than cookies.