Tag Archives: corruption

News as a Public Good

I know I harp a lot on the deficiencies of contemporary media. That’s because I worry a lot about the consequences of those deficiencies.

I was reminded of the importance of good journalism the other day, during a discussion in my Media and Public Policy class. The reading assignment was an article by Paul Starr, a highly respected scholar, titled “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption).” Starr began by describing news as a “public good,” noting that newspapers have “been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm system,” and–in response to those who point to the internet as a sufficient replacement–pointed out that a significant proportion of actual news found on the internet originates with and is aggregated from newspaper reporting.

Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it is subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny.

Starr worries that more and more of American life will “occur in the shadows. We won’t know what we won’t know.”

That last sentence really struck home–in more ways than one. Not only is it true generally, it is especially true that we don’t know what we don’t know about local and state government.

When I was in City Hall, in the late 1970s, there were four full-time reporters covering Indianapolis government–and they had all been there long enough to acquire what we call institutional memory. They knew what questions to ask, and who was responsible for what. Today, the Star has two opinion columnists who write about local governance issues, augmented by occasional reports by actual reporters. If any reporter has an exclusive city “beat,” it isn’t apparent from the coverage.

My class considered a number of City initiatives that received far too little attention, from the  50 year Parking Meter contract, to the Broad Ripple Garage financing, to the “recycling” contract with Covanta.  These projects were reported, but without the detail and context that would have permitted citizens to understand and evaluate them.

The same superficiality characterizes coverage of the Governor’s office. Reporting on the Governor’s decision not to apply for an 80 million dollar grant to support preschools was a perfect example: supporters of that decision claimed–among other things– that “the research” shows preschool interventions aren’t valuable; critics countered that this was a deliberate mischaracterization. If reporters investigated the research to see who was telling the truth, I missed it.

As far as reporting on the Statehouse, we finally did learn about Eric Turner–but only after his behavior was so egregious it couldn’t be ignored. More circumspect misconduct goes unreported.

And of course, we don’t know what we don’t know.

We don’t need paper newspapers, but we desperately need journalism.

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Longing for a Little Competence

Back in “the day,” Bill Hudnut used to make speeches about the importance of being a city that worked. The basic message was simple: we can’t do the big things if we can’t get the day-to-day mechanics right. The first order of business for any public manager is to ensure that public services are being delivered properly and the public’s business is being handled prudently.

If Bill was right–and I believe he was–then all I can say is “Houston, We Have a Problem.”

According to news reports, Mayor Ballard and 100 “city leaders” are leaving on a trade mission to Germany.  And the City is putting together another SuperBowl bid.  (Let’s just ignore that 6 million dollar cricket field…) Big things, check.

But how are we doing with the humdrum everyday stuff? How is that “city that works” thing going?

Is the public’s business being handled properly?  Paul Ogden has the truly jaw-dropping details of a lease between the City and a  campaign contributor for an uninhabitable  Regional Operations Center that wouldn’t pass the smell test of a first-year law student. I spent 17 years practicing real estate law, and I have never seen anything remotely that egregious.  Either the lease was the result of corruption, or it was negotiated by the most incompetent lawyer in central Indiana. Either way, it represented a colossal waste of ever-more-scarce tax dollars.

How about those public services? My commute from my home in downtown Indianapolis to IUPUI is about a mile and a half. Usually, it takes 5-8 minutes, depending upon the time of day. But for the past several weeks, it has taken nearly half an hour. Traffic has been bumper to bumper, thanks to poorly managed street repair projects and (evidently unregulated and unsupervised) private construction that has brought traffic on some of our busiest downtown streets to a virtual standstill. Some  congestion is obviously inescapable, but it is clear that much of it is a result of poor–or nonexistent–management. The resulting mess increases drive time, air pollution and frayed nerves.

The city isn’t the only inept manager of local construction projects, of course.  The state has closed I65 and the downtown split, in order to raise bridges that keep getting damaged because trucks keep hitting them. Barely ten years ago, the much-ballyhood “Hyperfix”  shut down those same portions of the interstates, so that multiple repairs could be made. For reasons that have never been explained, the Hyperfix project didn’t include work to raise the bridges–and this isn’t a new problem.

What’s the old saying? There’s never time to do it right, but always time to do it over?

Managing curb and sidewalk construction, ensuring that highways are safe, vetting contracts to ensure that taxpayers aren’t getting ripped off–these and many other municipal tasks aren’t glamorous. But they’re necessary and important. They are essential elements of a city that works.

You’ve gotta drive to the airport if you’re going to fly to exotic places on that junket. The fifteen people in Indy who play cricket need to drive to the game.

And eventually, if you keep flushing tax dollars down friends’ toilets, there won’t be any left.

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Ship to Shore

For the past week, I’ve been on a cruise ship in the Atlantic, mercifully isolated from local news—except for the few minutes in the morning when I allow myself to log on to the ship’s expensive internet. I check my email and post to my blog—then it’s off to read a good book, eat (and eat, and eat) and marvel at the advanced age of all the other passengers. (Seriously, the average age on board looks to be in the mid-80s. One fellow told us that all of his children are on Social Security. I’ve rarely felt so young….)

That said, several friends have forwarded articles about the FBI’s arrests in the City-County Building earlier this week. Others have forwarded Matt Tully’s acerbic column about Greg Ballard’s continued absence from those pesky executive responsibilities that are thought to accompany a mayor’s position. Still others have shared a post in which Paul Ogden pointed to the enabling effects of the Star’s lack of reporting—let alone investigative reporting—on matters at city hall.

I find all this depressing, but not surprising.

As many of the readers of this blog know, I served as Corporation Counsel and my husband served as Director of the Department of Metropolitan Development during the Hudnut Administration. No mayor is perfect, and Bill Hudnut certainly had his faults, but lack of oversight wasn’t one of them. Both he and my husband were well aware of DMD’s power, and the potential for its abuse, and both were vigilant overseers of the Department’s activities. (As were the four full time reporters who covered the City-Country Building at the time.)

But then, both of them were deeply immersed in municipal management issues; they were long-time students of urban politics and policy.

Then there’s Greg Ballard.

Ballard campaigned as an outsider who touted his lack of knowledge and experience as a virtue. His self-proclaimed “leadership” qualities (as set out in a self-published book on the subject) came from his experience as a Marine. He hadn’t even lived in Indianapolis during most of his career, and he certainly hadn’t been involved in municipal governance. His initial campaign website was replete with cringe-worthy statements that displayed a total lack of any background or knowledge that would make him fit to run a major city. A participant in his first interview with the Star editorial board told me he had been appalled by Ballard’s utter absence of depth or relevant knowledge.

The only thing worse than a chief executive who knows very little is a chief executive who knows very little but thinks he knows a lot.

We had a chance last year to replace Ballard with someone who actually knew what a city was, but for a variety of reasons (including but not limited to gender) we re-instated Mr. Clueless.

So we have a Mayor who is absent from the legislature when that body is debating issues of great importance to Indianapolis. We have a Mayor who sees no reason to communicate with the City-County Counsel (conveniently, his cronies in the General Assembly have now relieved him of that obligation).

We have a Mayor who relishes traveling with an outsized entourage but who can’t be bothered to supervise—or even understand—what city departments are doing.

We have a Mayor who hires people who are too young and inexperienced to know what they’re doing, or to recognize what their boss doesn’t understand.

We have a Mayor who insisted on controlling all public safety personnel, but then lost interest in the hard work of actually providing for the public’s safety–a child Mayor who has ignored a soaring crime rate while focusing on fanciful (and costly) projects like Cricket fields. (China Town didn’t pan out.)

We have a Mayor who is selling significant pieces of the City–making complicated deals with implications he clearly doesn’t understand—deals that benefit clients of cronies at the expense of taxpayers.

We have a Mayor who is not being held accountable for any of this, because local media is effectively AWOL.

So while Ballard sells the city off, unsupervised city employees are selling the city out.

Maybe I can just stay on this ship. At least I’m getting value for my dollar.

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Even While We’re Falling Off a Cliff…..

A couple of days ago, the New York Times reported on a little-noticed provision inserted in the “fiscal cliff” legislation. The report is a prime example of what ails our broken Congress.

According to the Times, a bare two weeks after pleading guilty in a major federal fraud case, Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology firm, scored what the Times called “a largely unnoticed coup” on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers inserted a paragraph into Section 632 the “fiscal cliff” bill that delays the effective date of a set of Medicare price restraints on a class of drugs that includes Sensipar, a lucrative Amgen pill used by kidney dialysis patients.

The provision gives Amgen an additional two years to sell Sensipar without government controls. The company’s chief executive immediately informed investment analysts of this measure and its likely positive effect on the company’s bottom line.

That one simple bit of language may gladden the hearts of corporate investors, but it is projected to cost Medicare up to $500 million over that period. 

And there you have it–the deep corruption that lies at the heart of the current legislative process. At the same time sanctimonious Congressional “fiscal hawks” are wringing their hands over “runaway” health spending and demanding reductions in Medicare coverage and benefits for millions of seniors living on fixed incomes, they are voting for costly measures to benefit big Pharma. In this case, adding insult to injury, a big Pharma company that had just admitted to defrauding the government.

Economists warn about the growing inequality in America, and the pernicious effects of the growing gulf between the 1% and the rest of us. This was a vote to take from the middle-class and give to the rich. Political scientists warn of political cynicism and its corrosive effects. This is the sort of blatant quid pro quo that feeds that cynicism.

Pollsters tell us that Americans prefer head lice and cockroaches to Congress.

This crap is why.

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