What Makes a Community?

Last night was the second in our three-part series “Electing Our Future.” The panelists were great, and I will post a link when WFYI uploads the video. In the meantime, here are my opening remarks introducing the panel:

What is the difference between cities that are collections of homes and businesses and cities that are genuine communities?

The last forum in this series described the systems we’ve developed—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not—to govern Indianapolis. That forum tried to answer the question: what does Indianapolis look like today? What’s its structure? How do we elect the people who manage the services we expect government to provide? How do we decide what those services are, and—not so incidentally—how do we pay for them?

Whatever we think about our city—what works well, what doesn’t, what isn’t getting done, what is getting done that perhaps shouldn’t be—one fact is inescapable: there aren’t enough resources to do everything that everyone would like to see our City do. Indeed, increasingly we find ourselves trying to stretch limited dollars just to do the very basic sorts of things that all citizens expect.

All cities have to set priorities, and we in Indianapolis are no different. Those priorities need to be informed by those of us who live here. And I want to suggest that those priorities tell the people who live here and the people who might want to start businesses here or live here or even visit, a great deal about us.

If we want Indianapolis to be a genuine, healthy community, rather than a collection of unrelated inhabitants—if we want to marshal the talents and goodwill of our neighbors in ways that will build on our strengths and compensate for our weaknesses—we need to consider what it takes to create that community, and we need to ask ourselves which of those tasks are properly the job of our municipal government.

Setting priorities requires us to agree on the elements that make for a good quality of urban life. In an era of scarce resources, that process also requires us to decide which services are essential, and which fall under the category of  “would be nice if we could  afford it.”

The process of setting priorities requires us to decide what trade-offs are worthwhile, and which ones shortchange us as a community.

Most of us want to feel safe in our homes and on our streets—but we don’t want that security to come at the cost of people’s civil liberties. 

We want to send our City’s children to schools that will prepare them for life in the 21st Century, that will give them critical thinking skills, because we know that great cities don’t exist without great schools and educated populations.

We all want a government that represents us, that is trustworthy and transparent and responsive to its constituents.

Most of us want to live in a city that is inclusive and welcoming, with a citizenry that sees diversity as an opportunity and difference as enriching, rather than a city that is a collection of separate communities walled off from and suspicious of each other.

And most of us want the amenities that make cities such wonderful places to live and work: parks and trails, libraries, museums, great public transportation, clean air and water, well-tended streets, roads and bridges—the social and public infrastructure that facilitates urban well-being.

The question is: how do we pay for all that? And if we can’t pay for it all, which of those public goods must take priority?

Our panelists have been selected because they are in positions that make them ideally suited to address those questions.

Julia Vaughn has been working with Common Cause to fight for good government for many years. She has been a voice for ethical governance and sanity at the Indiana Statehouse and in City Halls around the state.

Kelly Bentley, who is serving her 4th term as a member of the Board of Commissioners of IPS, has been a longtime ardent supporter of public education and educational reforms that serve our city’s children.

Judge David Shaheed recently retired from the bench; he has long been one of the most thoughtful observers of issues in the community involving re-entry,  disadvantaged populations, and diversity in general.

Troy Riggs recently left his position as Indianapolis’ Director of Public Safety, and has a uniquely informed perspective on the issue of crime in our city.

Through her work with Health by Design, Kim Irwin has come to understand that civic health involves far more than the physical health of its inhabitants, important as that is; healthy cities are cities with a great quality of life.

And finally, John Ketzenberger of Indiana’s Fiscal Policy Institute knows better than most of us the challenges we face in paying for our priorities and funding that good quality of life.

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Trash Talking

Back when Indianapolis built its waste incinerator to generate energy, the move was applauded as state of the art, and it was. The “deal” made at that time required the City to provide enough trash to allow the vendor, Covanta, to produce steam used to heat downtown buildings.

But time marches on. As cities across the country have encouraged recycling, Indianapolis has persistently lagged the nation in the percentage of people doing so. (We are one of the few places that charges folks for the “privilege” of recycling, which might have something to do with our lackluster performance.)

Ostensibly to address that low level of participation, the Ballard Administration entered into an agreement with Covanta to build a new recycling facility. But as Carrie Hamilton of the Indiana Recycling Coalition has written:

This facility would move the city’s residential collection to a one-bin system that would mix waste and recyclables in the same bin. Covanta, which already has a contract to burn the city’s waste for energy production, has been contracted to separate recyclables from waste at the proposed MWP facility. In exchange, it gets a minimum $100 million contract putting it in charge of both waste and recycling for all of Indianapolis until 2028…..

There are a number of concerns about this plan, but at the top of the list is this: Covanta secured this contract – and the rights to the city’s recycling future – without having to go through a competitive bidding process.

The contract calls for use of a process known as “Dirty Recycling” –it allows residents to throw all their trash into one receptacle; actual separation is to occur at the Covanta facility. This is a process that is simply not suitable for use in many industries that purchase recyclable materials.

Among the many concerns raised by this contract are its length–it locks Covanta in until 2028– several “put or pay” provisions that actually penalize the city if residents recycle more than the contract anticipates, and the contamination of otherwise recyclable materials in a highly questionable methodology. But the major issue is, once again, the utter disregard of the process by which such agreements should be executed.

There are all sorts of arguments–legitimate and less so– to be made about the impact of recycling (see John Tierney’s Op Ed in last Sunday’s New York Times), but there is no legitimate argument for ignoring the legal processes intended to protect taxpayers against crony capitalism and/or intemperate decision-making.

If the contract with Covanta is good for the City, it would have survived the vetting that the law requires.

If the Ballard Administration were truly interested in protecting the interests of citizens and taxpayers, and genuinely interested in an environmentally-appropriate recycling program, there would be no need to bypass the public bid processes mandated by law.

Garbage isn’t the only thing that smells here.

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Speaking of Education…

David Schultz–with whom I collaborated on a textbook a couple of years ago–has written a thought-provoking article on the coming decline of the “corporate” university.

The corporate university is being undone by the very forces that created it. The defining characteristic of higher education in the last forty years has been its corporatization, which has transformed the university from an educational community with shared governance into a top-down bureaucracy that is increasingly managed and operated like a traditional profit-seeking corporation.

David points out that–at least since World War II– there have been two very distinct “business models” that have characterized American higher education. The first model was based on public investment in education, and it lasted until the 1970s. “The second, a corporate model, flourished until the economic crash in 2008.”

Public institutions were central to the first model.

The business model was simple: tax dollars, federal aid, and an expanding population of often first-generation students attending state institutions at low tuition. Let us call this the Dewey model,after John Dewey, whose theories emphasized the democratic functions of education.

Beginning with the 1980s, support for all public institutions and programs–including but not limited to universities– began to diminish, and a near-religious belief in the power of markets to cure everything that ails us replaced it.

The corporate university took control of the curriculum in order to generate revenue. The new business model found its most powerful income stream in professional education, including programs in public or business administration and law school, which became the cash cow of colleges and universities. This was especially true with MBA programs, which rapidly multiplied. These programs were sold to applicants with the claim that the high tuition would be more than offset by future earnings.

This business model in part used tuition from professional programs to finance the rest of the university. Students in these programs were able to secure loans to finance their training. The model relied heavily on attracting foreign students, returning baby boomers in need of additional credentials, and recent “baby boomlet” graduates seeking professional degrees as a shortcut to professional advancement.

The consequences of this shift are all around us: ballooning student debt loads, the emphasis on narrow job/professional training and the corresponding neglect of the liberal arts curricula that taught students how to think, the ever-growing dependence on poorly-paid (okay, exploited) adjunct faculty, and the rise of for-profit institutions that promise quick credentialing without the inconvenience of an actual education, among others.

David pulls no punches: as he says, the corporate business model is an education Ponzi scheme, and like all Ponzi schemes, it is falling apart.

Those of us who care about education, who fear the consequences for self-governance of a credentialed but uneducated population, need to figure out how to go about restoring the university’s civic and intellectual mission.

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Diversity and Distrust Revisited

Thanks primarily to the wackier GOP candidates for President (okay, that’s virtually all of them), we’re seeing a recurrence of socially divisive arguments about “political correctness,” abortion, religion and immigration–and an elevation, in unfortunate and not-so-veiled forms, of America’s racist impulses.

I was pondering our current unlovely public discourse, with its rejection of “otherness,” when my eyes fell on my bookshelf, and on Stephen Macedo’s 2000 book, Diversity and Distrust. The book was a meditation on the important civic role played by public schools in multi-ethnic societies like ours. I leafed through it to see where I’d highlighted observations (something that’s harder to do on a Kindle app), and I thought I’d share a few of them:

American public schools have been, in many ways, where the tension between diversity and the felt need to promote shared values has played out most dramatically. This institution has, from its inception, been the principal direct public instrument for creating a shared political culture amid religious, racial, ethnic and class diversity.

..some of the the most basic and widely discussed conflicts around public schools have been the consequence of religious opposition to basic civic ideals.

The [common/public school] was meant to pursue a novel set of civic ends: consolidation under public aegises was essential to the institution’s civic agenda.

The proponents of many orthodoxies, especially perhaps integral and totalistic belief systems, will not be happy with educational institutions that include all of the children within a pluralistic community. We cannot pursue shared civic ends without making it harder for the proponents of some moral and religious doctrines to perpetuate their views.

Macedo’s book was a full-throated–and persuasive– defense of the importance of public education in a diverse democratic country.

In Indiana, we’ve turned our backs on the civic mission of the schools, bowing to the demands of those who value particularist dogma, privatization, interest group politics and profits above the need to create and perpetuate a common American culture based upon our particular (and yes, in that sense “exceptional”) historical and legal commitments.

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Tea Party Priorities

Evidently, the theatrics–make that “tea” actrics–will not end anytime soon.

You may remember that, in 2011, when he was still in Congress, Mike Pence was an enthusiastic leader of that year’s “defund Planned Parenthood or shut government down” effort. It’s 2015, but in the crazy caucus, only the faces have changed. Last week, Indiana Congressmen Young and Stutzman were among those voting to shut down government.

Despite last week’s passage of a short-term “clean” funding measure to keep government open until December, the zealots are still intent upon shutting down government unless Planned Parenthood is defunded, and a not-insignificant number of them say they’ll refuse to raise the debt ceiling when the time comes. (That, of course, would cause a massive default by the U.S. on its obligations, including such obligations as military pay, social security and medicare.)

Given so many Republicans’ willingness to do it again, you’d think the last shutdown (in 2013, over Obamacare) had been a rousing success for the would-be extortionists. It wasn’t–at least, not in what the rest of us call the “real world.”

Indeed, as the zealots prepare to play yet another game of chicken, twenty thousand federal workers are still suing over the last government shutdown, and a recent report by the Congressional Research Service calculated the economic damage done by that fit of pique:

Federal employees worked 6.6 million fewer hours during the 16-day government shutdown in October 2013, according to a recent report, with the loss of productivity resulting in a 0.3 percent loss in economic growth.

In other words, sending more than 850,000 federal employees home without pay for at least part of the shutdown took billions of dollars out of the economy.

Although the ideologues refuse to believe it, most government employees work at jobs that actually need to be done. When those jobs don’t get done, the economy slows, hurting everyone.

None of that matters to the zealots. In order to “defund” Planned Parenthood–that is, in order to keep Medicaid from reimbursing the organization for medical services provided to poor women and men (STD tests, breast cancer screenings, birth control pills, etc.), they’re willing to make poor people poorer. And sicker.

Tea Party “patriots” are willing to ignore the reality that there are no other providers with the capacity and reach to substitute for Planned Parenthood, and that defunding the organization would cut off medical care to millions of Americans.

Poll after poll confirms that most Americans support Planned Parenthood, value its services and don’t want to see it defunded. They also don’t want another government shutdown.

Americans would really like to see a Congress that governs rather than postures, but apparently, that’s too much to ask.

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