Ruth Holladay has already tackled this one, but I have a couple of thoughts of my own on the recent Nuvo article by Abdul on small towns and Gov. Daniels. (Abdul, of course, being, among other things, the Indiana Barrister.)
His theory, essentially, is that small towns dislike the Governor and big cities like the governor. For purposes of discussion, he designates cities with buildings more than 5 stories high as the dividing line. He is correct that Governor Daniels is more popular in Central Indiana, particularly Indianapolis, than he is elsewhere in the state.
Based on a recent survey, Mitch has a 43-49 percent approval rating; definitely not good by any measure. But when you break it down by region, you get a better picture of who’s mad. The governor’s strongest approval ratings are in Indianapolis at 55 percent. Indianapolis has a lot of buildings taller than five stories. The governor’s lowest approval ratings, by region, are all outside of Indianapolis: Northern, 51 percent disapproval; Southern, 46 percent disapproval; Central (outside Indy), 59 percent disapproval. All places where tall buildings are few and far between, the governor is not a well-liked individual.
However, I think this has less to do with Indianapolis as a big city and is more particular to Indianapolis itself. The opposition to Gov. Daniels, Mr. Shabazz suggests, comes from a resistance to change. But, let’s look at what changes were being resisted. Specifically, the article mentions the Toll Road privatization and Daylight Saving Time. When you look at these issues in particular, it is no wonder there wasn’t much resistance in Indianapolis. These things barely meant change at all in Indy. Folks from the Indianapolis area don’t spend much time driving on I-80/90. You can bet there would’ve been a great hue and cry from Indianapolis if the proposal had been to make I-465 a toll road for the next 75 years. And, as for Daylight Saving Time, the main difficulty to date has been with respect to who was going to have the time zone line in their back yard. It sure wasn’t going to be Indianapolis. They are safely insulated by a county or two from that line.
It isn’t the smallness of the population centers that creates the resistance to the change but the proximity to the change. Look at South Bend — strong opposition to both the toll road and to Daylight Saving Time coming from that sector. And why? Because these things have a strong impact on folks from South Bend, because of the proximity. The time line was in their back yard. Governor Daniels threw away his pretense to be in favor of local control of the issue, going so far as to break a law in order to support Elkhart County’s opposition to St. Joseph County’s decision. And the Toll Road, of course, is something northern Indiana’s motorists drive on all the time. No wonder the Governor isn’t popular. And it isn’t because of the smallness of the communities there.
[tags]DST, Toll Road, privatization, Mitch Daniels[/tags]
Doug,
Great post.I couldn’t agree more.
Thanks Phillip. Re-reading it, I see a few phrases I would’ve reworked a little. I’ll chalk it up to the slight hangover I’m nursing. But, what the heck. It’s blogging, not high literature.
Doug,
Your analysis seems perfectly sound to me.
Abdul is a self-impressed, pseudointellectual hack who knows nothing about Indiana. You are far too kind to him.
I don’t think he is completely off-base in his belief that Hoosiers can be change-averse to a fault. Unfortunately, Abdul and many others take it to the opposite extreme and believe that all change is necessarily positive progress. Good changes should be supported; bad changes should be opposed. Support of change for change’s sake does no one any good. I was in favor of DST. I opposed the Toll Road sale, not to mention the cockamamie outer loop idea. I live in Indianapolis. I don’t like Mitch and didn’t vote for him. And Abdul’s head just exploded.
As for the five-story stuff, what a bunch of bunk. There are buildings that meet Abdul’s standards in South Bend, Fort Wayne, Merrillville, Muncie, Anderson, Lafayette, Evansville, Bloomington, and probably some places I am forgetting. Does Abdul have poll data that specifically breaks these things down? Does he have numbers isolating Muncie or Delaware County from other, more rural parts of eastern Indiana? Probably not. My guess is that because rural areas tend to be more Republican than the cities, that the guv would be more popular in, say, Randolph County than in Delaware County. I would bet my life on Mitch being less popular in relatively urban Monroe County than in rural Lawrence County. Still, I at least acknowledge that it’s a guess. Abdul realy believes this pop-demography.
I’m pretty disappointed in Nuvo. There are plenty of people in Central Indiana who could have provided a nice counterpoint from the conservative side of the aisle. Why let this disc jockey who doesn’t even really live here spread his half-baked musings to a wider audience? I wouldn’t move to Springfield, Illinois, live there part time for a couple of years, and then presume that not only did I have all the answers for all of the state’s problems, but that anyone who proposed any one of my proposals was a dumb hick.
“…but one thing even the people John Cougar Mellencamp writes about in his song “Small Town†have to have enough cerebral activity to realize…”
What a prick. Spoken like a guy who has never lived anywhere where there aren’t five story buildings.
I agree with the overall message of your post, but I will take issue with one point:
You stated that “northern Indiana’s motorists drive on [the toll road] all the time.”
According to a the Indiana Toll Road Fiscal Report for the period ending June 30, 2005, about two thirds of the tolls paid were by out-of-state drivers, making the east and west gates the busiest of all the toll booths.
I, for one, live within 20 minutes of the toll road and only have occasion to drive it but once or twice a year.
There is a condition that I have always thought of as the State Capital Disease – the self-important conviction held by residents of a state’s capital city that the boundaries of the state are the same a the boundaries of their city. In Indiana, because of Indianapolis’ size, actual economic importance, and central location, the State Capital Disease is particularly acute. I have actually had to explain to people living in Indianapolis how to get to Fort Wayne…..apparently these people were remarkably change-averse and not aware the I-69 was built 40 or 50 years ago. This is a silly example of course, but of real importance is the lack of recognition by many of the state’s leaders that the rest of the state is hurting despite the central Indiana boom (this is a non-partisan statement, by the way, having been more true than not for many years regardless of who is running the state).
So I see Abdul’s commentary (and I use that term loosely) as more the ramblings of someone who has a terminal case of the State Capital Disease.
By the way, the surest cure is to move away from the capital. An alternative treatment (which requires constant vigilance) is to read media and talk with people from outside the capital city, and occasionally even venture beyond the beltway for more than a quaint meal.
In response to the comment regarding the toll road being particularly heavily used by out of state traffic one should observe that out of state registered traffic isn’t necessarily through traffic. Out of state registered commercial traffic destined for northern Indiana locations is negatively affected to the harm of the region. Northern Indiana residents can expect to pay slightly more for goods because of increased shipping costs, even if they never use the toll road. And, no gas tax money was used to build or maintain the toll road. Northern Indiana has always had more of its gas tax money siphoned off than other urbanized parts of the state.
I don’t know much about Abdul, but his analysis sounds like little more than the smart people in big cities support the governor and the hicks in the sticks don’t–because we don’t realize that change is good for us. (Whatever!) Maybe there is some truth to the rural/urban divide, but I think that the difference has more to do with Indy’s insularity rather than a proliferation of tall buildings.
Rural and semi-rural areas of the state are being blanketed with CAFO’s, which has made many people angry at the governor–yet there has been little coverage of this issue in the Indianapolis Star. People in the Indianapolis area aren’t directly affected, so why should they care? As you said Doug, people in Indianapolis are not really affected by the toll road, either. As for DST–don’t get me started. ;-)
Karen: I’ve dealt with the Indy-centric folk a lot myself in the last several years. Don’t know how to get to Richmond or even where it is (Um…you take I-70 east and get off at one of the last few exits before you hit Ohio…); can’t understand that a small, mostly rural area doesn’t have the same demographics as Indy, the same services, etc. Sometimes I want to say, “Yes, you can do it! You can leave Marion County and venture into the Hoosier hinterlands and survive! Just take the first step!” I try to have a sense of humor about it, but sometimes it can be frustrating.
The point I’ve made over and over is what kind of position would the folk’s in INDY have or the INDY Star for that matter if the DST legislation put them next to a time boundary.Somehow I don’t think they’d feel as good about DST or the Governor as the INDY Star portray’s everyone to feel about the situation now.
I keep trying to explain to these people what a pain the situation is for people living with this time boundary if they live in one time zone but work in another.Many people have a fair sized commute to work.Take for instance the Crane employees now around 3000 which live in the Eastern zone but work in the Central zone .If they leave work at 5:00pm it’s already 6:00pm back at their homes which make’s it difficult for families with kids trying to attend after scool events and driving them to school activities.If the SW counties switch back to Eastern a few thousand different people will have the same problem.I just don’t feel like the folk’s in INDY get it!
While I certainly do not presume to know why Governor Daniels is popular and unpopular in certain regions of the state, what seems clear from this blog is that Indiana Democrats, to make their case against him, have become very non-progressive.
They oppose him on privatization, yet offer no defense of the status quo. If privatizing the toll road was such a rip off, why did not state government, under years of Democratic control, find a way to make it as profitable for the state? I’ll never forget the TV commercials that menacingly referenced the FOREIGN conglomerate that would be controlling the road. Emphasis, of course, on FOREIGN. I can’t seem to get past the ironic play on fear in that…Progressive?
In this blog, there is a great deal of cynicism with regard to private companies and their capacity to misuse public dollars for personal gain. Yet, the implicit trust and lack of concern for the capacity of public “servants” to do the same seems as naive as the reverse seems overly cynical. Oh, unless that public servant is Governor Daniels. Is the Democratic equation as simple as Government control = Good, Private enterprise = Bad? There is another term for that, but I won’t mention it here.
David Crooks and gang tout a time zone referendum as the panacea for that problem, yet fail to acknowledge that there is no good reason whatsoever–and many, many disadvantages–for Indiana to be located completely in either zone. Furthermore, such a referendum is pure bait-and-switch politics since it will be non-binding, either on State government or the federal DOT.
The time zone question is a regional, not a statewide, issue. A referendum portends to provide statewide “consensus” when it merely boils down regional questions and preferences to a statewide average. People in SW, NW and SE Indiana all have just reason to fear such a referendum. Excuse me for being cynical, but it seems to me a coy and backhanded way for Crooks to force feed Central Time statewide to get the TZ border out of his backyard, the rest of the state be damned. It is savvy, however, in that he comes off looking so “democratic”.
Putting this question to the voters assumes an electorate that knows what it wants with regard to time zones. If anything has been made clear by the DOT process, it is that many county commissioners have been tying themselves in knots trying to please their constituents who don’t seem to know what the implications of their desires really are.
I certainly admire Doug’s analysis of issues, even if I often disagree. I find this blog a source of well-informed discussion. However, I would like to see more concrete analysis of the negative impact of Governor Daniel’s policies beyond just parochial carping about the time zone border and cynical what-ifs about possible corruption in privatization. How have Daniel’s policies actually hurt the great state of Indiana?
First of all, is everything a game of Republicans versus Democrats? If the Democrats didn’t offer anything better then Gov. Daniels’ ideas must be good? Second of all, since when are roads supposed to be a profit center. The problem with the Toll Road privatization is that it locks us in to having I-80/90 be a toll road for the next 75 years. Our children won’t be able to decide the matter for themselves.
Personally, I think the State should’ve gone ahead and raised the tolls at about the same rate planned under the contract and used the revenue to pay off the bonds. When the bonds were paid, the road should have stopped being a toll road.
Is there a single Interstate toll road in the United States that has ceased being a toll road? If there is a history of that, perhaps your idea would be preferable. In a perfect world, your logic would apply to all forms of taxation, surcharge, etc. the basis for which was supposedly temporary. However, politicians have a way of budgeting so that supposedly finite revenue streams (such as stadium taxes, tolls, etc.) are continued indefinitely.
The “profit” the state has gotten for the lease is being used for other road projects in Indiana. The alternatives to Governor Daniels’ plan seem to me to be as follows:
1) Delay, in some cases indefinitely, the road projects thus funded.
2) Raise the revenue for them some other way, such as an increase in gas taxes.
This plan just seems to me to be a creative idea to generate revenue and is no more objectionable in theory than the issuance of government bonds, which obligate future generations to pay them off. Those generations cannot “decide for themselves” not to do otherwise or to “undo” the projects those bonds funded.
In some ways, the lease is preferable because there is no repayment involved for future generations. Instead, in the future, that asset will return to their control.
In a sense, I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. I don’t necessarily think that the Toll Road lease is a great thing. I’m just trying to find out why it is so much more objectionable than other government programs that use long-term debt or other mechanisms to fund. Why the outrage from folks who do not seem to have, per se, objections to long-term government financing (of which leveraging this asset is a form), other than, in this case, the idea came from the loathsome “Not My Man” Mitch?
I don’t know whether a toll road has ever reverted to being “free,” but I do know that the folks in Northern Indiana were promised decades ago that that’s what would happen with this one.
In any case, my objection to privatizing the toll road has nothing to do with the idea coming from Mitch. I dislike toll roads on principle since I think building transportation infrastructure is one of the core duties of government, and I think toll roads serve their function less well than do “free” roads. Funding for the toll road, and other roads should come from other sources – gas taxes seem like a decent source, but the general fund would seem appropriate as well.
My objection to this transaction in particular is that the revenues from the motorists of northern Indiana are being used to pay for projects in the rest of the state. To some extent, one citizen is always going to be paying for benefits accruing to other citizens, but it seems to me that this instance stretches that phenomenon beyond what’s appropriate.
Steve asked if there were any toll highways in the U.S. that had ever become toll-free.
I found a case of two highways in Kentucky as recently as 2003, the Cumberland and Boone parkways.
Ah, but Steve said Interstate highways, didn’t he? I don’t know how that’s essential, as his point would be stronger if tolls were never lifted on any U.S. highways at all. In the case above, the tolls were lifted because the local Congressman used an appropriatons bill[*] to pay off the cost of building the highways two years ahead of schedule.
Anyway, I’ll keep searching for a case to satisfy Steve’s criterion.
Steve, I’m not sure I’ll find a case like this, but what about a situation where a toll Interestate is made free but decertified as an Interstate highway in the process? Decertification does happen from time to time.
[*] Open question: was it an “earmark”?
Steve wrote:
In a word, yes; one example is I-95, hardly an insigificant member of the Interstate family of highways.
According to a 1989 report, Toll Roads: A New Direction for U.S. Highways?, by Elizabeth Deakin of the University of California Transportation Center, “one of ten regional units mandated by Congress and established in Fall 1988 to support research, education, and training in surface transportation”:
(emphasis added)
I hope that answers your question.
Yes, I appreciate the answers. My question was a sincere one as I hadn’t researched the question.
Another theoretical: What about the lottery? Is there a philosophical opposition to that privatization? It may have been discussed here, but I missed it.
On the lottery, just a practical one from me. Why not take the whole rake from the lottery instead of settling for a piece? In fact, I am of the opinion that, if we have decided that gambling is socially permissible (and I’m fine with that), the State is being dumb by not just running the casinos itself. (See my reasoning, here.)
I like the theme of “State Capital Disease”. I have experienced this myself at times– when out in a social setting in Indy in the evening– and someone finds out I am from Lafayette — response: “Wow, you drove all the way down here?” I like to reply, “Yeah, but I have to stay over because my horse is tired.”
Truly the self-importance of the Marion County/ Indy crowd is seen in a hundred ways — and the smug “We can help you live better lives” attitude is enough to make me come unglued. If one more person responds to a complaint about my hometown by saying “you should move to Indy.” like that solves the problem…
BUT.. as change-adverse as Hoosiers are, let’s look at some of the places Abdul probably doesn’t think much of– like Lafayette/ West Lafayette. This city has taken the decay and destroyed downtown and created a booming/ blooming oasis of arts, culture, cafes… and the WL Levee and soon to be non-smoking laws are examples that even Indy would admire. Oh wait.. that is if they ever bothered to see it. Or thought anyone else had an idea worthy of consideration.
TWO CENTS
Steve:
I was ready to come out guns a’blazin’ against you, but Doug’s always nice–and it is his blog. And frankly, I’m tired of being reactionary. Also, your subsequent posts display a measure of respect toward others and a willingness to discuss issues.
Nevertheless, I don’t think that the anti-Daniels comments on this blog are some sorto reflexive, Democratic whining. I have read posts from people of all political stripes who don’t like Daniels and who give valid, substantive reasons for disliking his changes. I am not always against him, either. I applaud Daniels’ efforts to get junk food out of schools, for instance.
What I have read here is that many people who don’t like change for the sake of change and change being rammed down their throats.
Steve and Doug: as to your questions in comments 12 and 13 above, there have been a number of toll roads “go free”
Denver Boulder Turnpike (U.S.36) built in 1957, this has been free since the 1970s
Dallas Fort Worth Turnpike (Interstate 30) another 1950s road that went free I believe around 25-30 years ago
Kentucky Turnpike (Interstate 65 Louisville to about Munfordville) this was built in 1956 and tolls removed in late 1967 or early 1968
Other highways in the Kentucky Turnpike system were built in 1963 and afterwards. Tolls have been taken off the following:
Blue Grass Parkway
Western Kentucky Parkway
Bert T. Combs Mountain Parkway
Daniel Boone (now Hal Rogers) Parkway
Pennyrile Parkway (these went off around 1980-82)
Julian Carroll (Purchase) Parkway
Louie B. Nunn (Somerset) Parkway
Only the Natcher (Green River) and Audubon remain toll roads. The rest were truly paid off. Kentucky is proof that honest administrations can pay off toll roads.
Connecticut, as mentioned above, I-95 (Connecticut Turnpike) had the tolls removed in the mid 1980s by Governor O’Neill. The major impetus for this was a fatal crash of a truck ( I believe carrying flammables) slamming into a toll booth, causing the death of a toll attendant and I beleve others. What is interesting, they still lease the service plazas. I like that and hope the state makes money for the road fund from it.
The Merritt Parkway (built 1940) also had its tolls removed wen the bonds were paid off.
Several of the New York Parkways had tolls at one time. These were mainly built from 1919-1950 (some were extended later).
Richmond-Petersburg (Interstate 95) was a still a toll road in 1979. These tolls were removed some time in the 1980s.
There may be others, but these are the ones I know of.
Gary,
You rock. :)
I drive extensively long distance through the eastern part of the USA and bridge tolls are quite common. You cannot cross into PA from the east without paying for the bridge crossing over the Delaware river. Maryland has a $5( last time I crossed) toll over the Susquehanna River on I-95 north of Baltimore,and the city of Baltimore has too many tolls to count.I counted 8 Ohio river bridges connecting KY and IN. That’s a lot of tolls! Make them all toll bridges and Indiana’s fiscal woes would be greatly dimished ! ( and KY would be helped too as the tolls would have to be split)Indianapolis could set up toll booths over the White River ( if they can find it)
You’re right Gary, I-65 south of Louisville used to be the Kentucky Turnpike. That was before I moved here. I have lived in Louisville since 1996 and it has been a toll free road since I have been here. I have an audit client in Campbellsville, KY and I-65 is a great interstate (4 lanes in both directions from Louisville at least as far south as Elizabethtown, KY where I exit) to go to Campbellsville. Thanks to the Lincoln Highway from E’town to Hodgenville, which is a 4 lane highway, I can make it from my house in the St. Matthews suburb where I live to Campbellsville in about an hour and a half. Go Colts!
Glad to know I generated discussion. You guys are right, I am not from Indiana, but Illinois; Chicago in particular. But I still love my fellow Midwesterners. I just need to bring you into the 21st Century.
It’s good to be looked after!