Another one of those “deserves a book – I’m going to give it 15 minutes before coffee” posts; so I apologize. It seems to me that there is a continuing trend toward consolidation of power away from local government and toward state government. I’m not enough of a student of Indiana history to know whether, if this sense is accurate, it’s something new or just one of those ebbs and flows you get. (For example, on the federal level, the tug of war between the Presidency and the Congress is cyclical.)
Mainly what brought this to mind was reading Kyle Stokes report on State Superintendent of Education, Tony Bennett’s, desire to give the State more power to run local school districts; along with a recent observation on this blog about efforts to increasingly regularize the functioning of trial courts under state, judicial governance.
There is also, off the top of my head, the Kernan-Shepard report which had a lot of (as yet mainly unimplemented) ideas for government reform that included state funding of the local judiciary. In 2008, the General Assembly passed legislation that took away local property tax levies as a source of school general fund revenues. The State also shifted funding for child welfare services from county property taxes to the State.
Like I said, a lot more to unpack than I have time for. I’d be interested to know if anyone else has felt a shift in power from local to State and whether that’s a good, bad, or indifferent.
Having worked for local government for 17 years under mayors of both parties and partisan match-ups of all kinds (Democratic Mayor/Republican Governor, Republican Mayor/Democratic Governor, Democratic Mayor/Democratic Governor) and as a local elected official with a Democratic Mayor/Republican Governor, I have nothing particularly good to say about Indiana state government. What they lack in competence, they make up for in arrogance. Mostly the Indiana General Assembly has been hellbent on screwing local governments (which provide actual services to constituents) in an effort to make themselves look good, and a majority of legislators seem to harbor an irrational hatred of cities. As an administrative organization, the State of Indiana has nothing to commend it that I have seen and yet continues to operate as if local governments are all run by idiots. Yeah, I’m not a fan.
The move of power from local to state, and state to federal, is a good deal of the issues I think we’re having with politics.
When laws are made locally, the lawmakers have to deal with both the outcome of the laws and the citizens that are affected by them. Republicans and Democrats are far more interested in the health of the community than their party’s whims it seems.
I see the move to higher levels as a way to force your side to win in the short term, or as a way to get people outside your community to behave the way you think is best. The problem with that is that your side won’t always be the one in power at the higher levels, and when they are not, you’re screwed.
The end result is that fights for governor and president become far more bitter, since there is far more power in the role.
I moved to IN from WNY in 2007. I’m old enough to remember when WNY had strong local governments and lots of local participation. And I watched more and more local power consolidated by the state, in the name of efficiency and fiscal responsibility. Local elections began not to matter at all. Local politicians just fell in step with state leadership.
When I visited here before I moved, I recognized the difference between Indiana Republicans and the kind I was familiar with–I don’t want to say NY Republicans, because a lot of them came from elsewhere. national Republicans, I guess–right away. Local politics was being reported on the local news as if it mattered, and people were TALKING about local politics as if they mattered, too. I heard about local politicians on the street who were proud to be serving and honored to be selected to help. It had never occurred to me that such places still existed. It’s one of the reasons I moved here. The local schools still had the kind of autonomy I hadn’t seen since I was in elementary school. But shortly after I enrolled my kid in school here, lots of that local autonomy was taken away. I didn’t know anything about Mitch Daniels, except that he seemed more like one of those national Republicans than an Indiana Republican.
I’ve paid attention to what’s gone on in State Government here. I don’t believe it’s cyclical. I believe it’s as deliberate a consolidation of power as I saw happen in NY. In state elections, who you are matters less. People don’t know the candidates personally. How much money you have matters more. And once you win, you aren’t as accountable to the people. They have less recourse. It’s much easier to award lucrative state business contracts to your friends or put irresponsible businesses in places where citizens object to them.
State consolidation hasn’t helped NY any, and it’s pretty sad it’s happening here.
Good point to ponder – couple thoughts:
1) When I hear about doing something about our schools, I ask one question – will it fix IPS ? Nothing’s worked in a generation. Arlington’s ISTEP passing rate is 20% again.
2) In New England, two opposing approaches to central vs local control. Connecticut eliminated its (seven) counties about 20 years ago, to reduce overhead. OTOH, every tiny burg in New Jersey has a full complement of officials and overhead.
Very much agree with concern for movement of authority to the state level. I agree with efforts to consolidate local government where feasible as administrative costs are a major cost to many programs and in some cases it works better for citizens such as situations where paying for both town/city and county services in many programs. The capping of property taxes has created a serious funding problem for local government in many communities and likely impact others sooner or later (on the other hand I would be very interested in consideration of doing away with property taxes altogther but we are where we are.) And remembering the old point that he who pays also controls so for example with education look for even more state “taking over”. Just interesting that state establishes how a local community might want/agree to fund programs and sets limits too. And, the amount of information that the state requires is increasing and thus increasing difficulty and costs of all the reporting.
I have said for a while to friends and family that I find it so interesting Mitch Daniels, who hates the federal government so much, has turned Indiana into a strict federal system regarding local government units and schools (with occasional shades of his dictatorial tendencies). His administration consolidated control over those units and quickly. If the federal government had done even half of the crap to Indiana that Mitch Daniels’ state government has done to local units, he’d have a fit about it. Tony Bennett’s in the same league, it seems.
Another dangerous thing I see the Daniels administration doing regarding local vs. state control is seen in his executive offices; for instance, with DWD, FSSA, DCS, etc., he consolidated much of services (using the “business model” which I am not convinced works in state government) to Indianapolis. The unemployment claims adjudicators, welfare case workers, and child services hotline are based in Indianapolis now.
While I was at DWD, I don’t know how many times I had a claimant (or employer) who cursed the governor for taking away their local unemployment office to move everyone to Indy. It saved money that first year, but afterwards proved to be a miserably-failed experiment. The results (owing the federal government over $2 billion in debt) and overpaying unemployed claimants over $2 billion the last 7 years) have been bad. I don’t have to say much of what the results with FSSA’s and DCS’s consolodations have done to poor people in this state with the lives lost and a lot of money lost, too.
I couldn’t decide whether to reply to Bradley, Karen or draft my own comment. Here are a few assorted musings of my own:
1. Karen is right that state legislators steal from the counties to make themselves look good. Federal does it too from the state (or tries). Unfunded mandate types of stuff….
2. Mitch probably does hate the federal system. Why? Because it has unelected bureaucrats doing so much. I bet that Mitch doesn’t mind the unelected bureaucrats of Indiana nearly as much, as he was able to pick them. This is human nature. People at the state level don’t like the federal level putting their nose in…. until they run and win at the federal level.
3. There seems to be an overall trend of power from state to federal and from county to state. I’d call it a slow power grab. As you can probably tell from my other posts, I am a limited government guy who generally prefers govt. being closer to the people. One reason for this is it gives Indianapolis less power to decide how much of Evansville’s money goes to Terre Haute, and vice versa. School funding formulas is a great example of this. I do recognize this becomes a problem though in the poorer counties.
It takes someone incredibly self-aware to avoid the human tendency to be opposed to rules except those that you impose yourself. That is simply human nature, as Paul points out. However, toward the other end of the spectrum – where we’re not talking about minor hypocrisies, but Full Blown Drunk with Power, lies Indiana state government and at the far, far, far end of the line is the President-Elect of Purdue University. He dislikes unelected Federal bureaucrats? He used to BE one. As I mentioned above, my dislike for Indiana state government is a non-partisan statement, but even by Indiana standards Mitch is in a league of his own.
I don’t think that local government is perfect, and I do think that there are too many local elected officials. When there are too many people on the ballot, voters rely less on information about candidates (it’s overwhelming) and more on parties or name recognition. Still, it is the height of arrogance for the General Assembly to believe that it needs to govern the use of, say, fireworks so that people who live in the country have the same rules as people who, say, live in houses that are 25 feet apart. The level of control that the General Assembly exercises over local governments is remarkable and generally unknown to citizens, who can’t understand why no one seems to be able to do something when the crazy neighbor across the street starts shooting fireworks into their aluminum siding.
As a rule, responsibility comes with power. State education authorities may not have fully processed that. Many Indiana residents homeschool their children, a relationship that often turns out well for children, but an unknown number of parents play fast and loose with that, using their kids as babysitters or as extra hands around the house, among other reasons. Some children are simply not educated. When the state claims authority over education, including the general fund, but neither local nor state authorities monitor those being homeschooled, the state stands to learn some interesting lessons about accountability.
These days it seems a county administrative official can’t make a decision without kissing the DLGF’s ring beforehand. I’ll never forgive Mitch Daniels for throwing all the county assessors under the bus in 2007 to deflect heat from himself and his administration. Sure, there were some who shouldn’t have held the office, but he brought the property tax wrath down on some very good hard working officials as well. Not to mention the propensity of the party of smaller government’s penchant for peering uninvited into everybody’s bedroom windows.
Has Mitch tried to peer(peek?) in your bedroom windows Steve?
I refer to those who seem obsessed with the passage of an anti gay marriage amendment in Indiana, not Mitch in particular.
There doesn’t need to be a shift in power from local government to the state. The state already has the power. Indiana state government has always treated its local governments with contempt. Indiana has an old Constitution which barely mentions local government.
I believe that Indiana evolved into a state with only half the population of nearby Illinois, Michigan or Ohio because of its unfacilitating state government. We are entering an age, however, where entire states compete with other entire states for employers. Now might finally be a good time for a strong central government.
I’m late to the party, of course, but could not agree more with Bradley and Karen. No need for me to go off on Mitch Daniels yet again. You’ve written what I would have written and then some. He seems to have forgotten that the local officials and government workers that he and his agency heads hold in such contempt are largely Republicans and pretty conservative ones at that.
One thing I observed in my previous job, which was state funded but not technically part of state government, was the utter cluelessness of Indianapolis people about the rest of the state. I worked with a lot of local branches of state agencies, and we’d always laugh about “the people from Indianapolis” and their ludicrous demands and expectations. As an example, we were told, “Such-and-such high school in Indianapolis does our printing for a very low price. You can just go to one of your local high schools and get print jobs done.” It never occurred to them that local high schools outside Indianapolis may not do print jobs for outside organizations.
I was always exchanging stories with local agency people along the lines of, “You won’t believe what our Indianapolis-based liaison suggested today.” We just had to laugh and roll our eyes at their cluelessness and arrogance. Things were bad before, but they became much worse under Mitch Daniels, whose agency heads seemed hell-bent on creating friction with locals.
My office was frequently asked to bring Indianapolis-based organizations to town to do something that local organizations could do. I had no choice in the matter, and had to step on a lot of local toes just to keep the Indianapolis people happy. Of course, when I wanted or needed to work with said local organizations at another time, they did not want to work with me. When I alerted the Indianapolis office about the problem , they would say, “Too bad. We’ve already contracted with such-and-such to do state-wide whatevers.”
I wish that Indianapolis people would realize that their metro area is the anomaly in this state and would not assume that local people don’t know what is good for them.