The Indy Star is reporting that the Martin County Council hasendorsed a plan to try to get all of southwestern Indiana to request a shift to Eastern Time.

The Martin County Council asked its attorney this week to draft a resolution calling for a united move by all southwestern Indiana counties for Eastern time.

Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, a story that follows up on a prior entry, Pulaski County has decided to go renegade if it doesn’t get what it wants from the Feds. It wants to have the USDOT reverse its decision to grant Pulaski County’s request to shift to Central Time. I guess this is a “be careful what you wish for, you might get it” situation.

The County Commissioners and County Council both voted unanimously Monday to declare “home rule” and stay on Eastern time if a federal agency does not grant an appeal to change the time-zone ruling made last month.

The meeting on the time-zone issue drew a crowd of local residents that filled a courthouse meeting room and spilled out into the hallway and down the stairs. Many people spoke against the U.S. Department of Transportation’s decision to shift the county to Central time beginning April 2, when daylight-saving time begins.

“I can count on this hand, the ones who want Central, and of those, three of them don’t even know why,” Pulaski County Commissioner Terry Young said.

Commissioner Young’s statement is at odds with Pulaski County’s petition to the USDOT. The petition said:

The question of which zone we should be in was talked about [at the public meeting]. Should we be in Eastern or Central Time Zone? Everyone present had the opportunity to give their thoughts, and they did. There were no citizens who were in favor of Eastern. All were in favor of leaving the tjme alone, by not having to change time during the year. But, if we have to choose one of the two, the choice would be Central Time. Some citizens called or talked personally to a Commissioner or the County Auditor to give their opinion. Their opinion was the same as those who were in attendance of the public meeting.  The public meeting came forward with the following considerations for making the choice of Central Time.

The most important consideration is the time of sunrise. A late sunrise will expose school children and morning commuters to undue hazards because of the extended darkness, the winter weather, poor road conditions, low visibility, drivers not being fully
 awake. These are very dangerous combinations. Comments were made that it is better for school children to get onto buses in daylight and off the buses after dark. They wait in the dark for a bus, but go directly to the house after being let off the bus.

Local business and industiy will benefit more by Central Time. Pulaski County is still a farming community, with some light and medium industiy. The farmer can still get to town in daylight after farming for a full day. Industry receives and ships more goods and services to and from the Chicago business hubs than to any of the Eastern hubs.

It sounds like there were more than a handful of Central Time supporters, and they had sound reasons for their opinions. With the denial of the petitions for central time of nearby counties, I understand Pulaski County’s unhappiness with being moved to Central Time when their neighbors were not. This whole process was screwed up from the start, and they ought to be resentful of the position they were put in by the Governor’s half-baked time zone scheme. But I do not understand Commissioner Young’s minimization of the sentiment for Central Time.

Tracy Warner has a good blog entry following up on an editorial in the Journal Gazette on the subject of disclosing the losing Toll Road bids. Both state that current law requires disclosure of the losing bids. It’s been a few months since I read IC 5-23 governing public-private agreements, so I’ll take their word for it. The Toll Road sale enabling legislation, HB 1008, doesn’t require disclosure of losing bids until closing on the bid has taken place.

Chuck Schalliol has this disingenuous explanation for the provision:

“If I am bidder No. 2 or 3 or 4, and I know what the lower bid is, I could come back and say I’ll walk away from my $75 million letter of credit and bid $1 more than the next lowest bidder,” he told members of the Senate Finance Committee last week.

I presume he means that he could do this if he was the highest bidder. But that’s what bid bonds are for. You could really put stiff penalties in place through the bidding process for this kind of shennanigan. That’s like free money to the State if someone walks away from the deal in that fashion and has to cough up a ton of money as a result.

The bottom line is that the Indiana Coalition for Open Government is right:

The Indiana Coalition for Open Government has protested the legislation’s provisions: “Under the proposed HB 1008, the losing bids will not be available until the final contract is signed and the state receives its check – considerably too late in the process for citizens, media or other bidders to question provisions in the selected bid.”

This whole process has been bass ackward. Solicitation for bids first, followed by a request for authority to do what they requested bids for, with the whole process done in secret. Meanwhile, the Governor has misrepresented what the terms of the proposed lease actually are (no requirement specifying at least $4.4 billion in maintenance, no enforcement mechanism for maintenance standards, only a 90% Buy Indiana “goal” rather than a requirement.) All of this the Governor is trying to ram through the legislature with heavy pork for waivering Republicans in affected counties.

A 75 year lease of a major piece of Indiana’s transportation infrastructure is too big a decision to be made in this slipshod fashion. It needs to be conducted under the full glare of public scrutiny under a well-considered process.  This may well be a good deal for Indiana — I certainly have my doubts, but I could be wrong.  But the Governor’s efforts to cut corners has made the current process unreliable. We should not be asked to have faith in the Governor. To make this decision, we should have a sound process in place that inspires confidence in the outcome.

The Indy Star is reporting that “an employee in the House speaker’s office has been isolated after opening an envelope filled with an unidentified powder.” (The original headline on the RSS Feed was “State House Locked Down” while the current another headline reads “Powder spooks Statehouse” and yet another headline reads “Statehouse closed while powder threat checked.”)

The Indianapolis Fire Department and Marion
County Health Department responded to a call to the office of Speaker Brian C. Bosma shortly before noon. An envelope addressed to Bosma, with no return address, was opened by an employee of his staff, said House Republican spokesman Tony Samuel.

She immediately washed her hands, he said, and was avoiding contact with others. The employee, who Samuel declined to identify, was not suffering from any health problems after opening the envelope.

The Indianapolis Fire Department or Marion County Health Department is expected to test the substance this afternoon, Samuel said. The Department of Homeland Security and the Indiana State Police were notified. Bosma left the office after the incident, his staff said.

Spookie. And difficult to track down, apparently. Judging from the fact that nobody every tracked down the person who sent the anthrax to Tom Daschle’s office in October 2001.

Update Rep. Dvorak has a story here.

Over at Indiana Barrister, Abdul notes that toll road tolls have not gone up in the past 20 years. He characterizes this as the folks in Northern Indiana “basically driving for free.” Perhaps I’m missing something special about the Toll Road, but shouldn’t the bonds on building that road have been retired by now and the tolls eliminated? Is there a principled reason for imposing a tax on that road that we do not impose on the rest of Indiana’s roads?

I can see the reasoning for imposing tolls to pay for construction of the road in the first place if the road simply would not have been built any other way. But once the construction bonds were paid, the tolls should have stopped. I seem to recall hearing that when construction was started that promises were made for an end to tolls once the bonds were paid. At most, it seems to me that tolls should be set at a level sufficient to pay for maintenance of the road and no more.

But, road funding being what it is, I would not be surprised if there is a twist of which I am unaware. I’d be happy to know what that is.

Bruce Smith, writing for the Indy Star, has an article entitled ‘Major Moves’ endorsed.

Rep. Jerry Torr, R-Carmel, said the investors “will give us a check for $3.85 billion, and we don’t give them anything back. This is like the state has a big ‘easy’ button.”

I’m a little disturbed that Rep. Torr thinks of policy choices in terms of Staples advertisements, but for legislators in Central and Southern Indiana thinking purely in terms of their regions’ self-interest, he’s right. This is an easy decision. The lion’s share of taxes for this $3.85 billion will be paid by motorists in northern Indiana. Residents of central and southern Indiana will pay almost nothing. In exchange, they’ll get road money for their districts. It’s a bad policy choice for Indiana generally and Northern Indiana specifically, but in terms of regional self-interest, it’s something for nothing for citizens of central and southern Indiana. What they have to watch out for, of course, is the time when residents of other parts of the state see an opportunity to exploit the resources of their part of the state.