Rep. Austin’s HB 1414 has passed the House and has been assigned to the Senate Committee on Corrections, Criminal, and Civil Matters. It creates the crime of human trafficking: A person who knowingly or intentionally recruits, harbors, or transports another person by force, threat of force, or fraud to engage the other person in forced labor or involuntary servitude or to force the other person into marriage or prostitution commits promotion of human trafficking, a Class B felony. It’s a Class A felony when the victim is a minor. A person who knowingly or intentionally pays for a trafficked individual also commits human trafficking. It creates a civil cause of action against a trafficker. The bill also creates a task force as well as a work group to develop written protocols for delivery of services to human and sexual trafficking victims without regard to the immigration status of the victims.

I guess I’m surprised there isn’t already a statute on the books for this. In any case, the bill jumped out at me because last night I saw a Frontline documentary on the trafficking of sex slaves. It’s an excellent documentary that manages to really bring the horror of human trafficking crashing down on you. It follows one case where a Moldovan woman who was 4 months pregnant left with an acquaintance to go to Turkey to buy cheap goods for her mother to sell back home. The acquaintance sold her in Turkey as a sex slave for $1,000. The Frontline crew followed her husband in his effort to get her back.

I wonder how much of a problem this is, if at all, in Indiana. In Turkey, the cops just looked the other way and, in some cases, were in on the deal. Indiana law enforcement is held to a higher standard. Another question I have is whether prostitution being illegal aggravates or mitigates the problem. I would presume that availability of willing sex workers and legal brothels would make “customers” less likely to frequent the shadier places. But that presumption could be wildly off the mark. Not that legalized prostitution is likely in Indiana any time soon. Heck, we’re a little scared of unlicensed interior designers. (The interior designer bill was defeated 30 to 68, by the way.)

In any event, I really like the provision that requires assistance to the victims to disregard immigration status. The Frontline documentary suggested that when the women were discovered in American police raids, they were typically just sent to INS and summarily deported.

Niki Kelly, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an article on the fate of HB 1001 which was heard in the Senate Tax & Fiscal Policy Committee yesterday. The bill has some provisions that would provide some temporary relief from the, in some cases double digit, property tax increases local governments would need to impose as a result of the failure of the 2005 budget to provide adequate funding. (State legislators might disagree, but essentially the State “balanced” its budget on the backs of local government.)

Senator Kenley appears to have a philosophical disagreement with the short-term fix. He wants a more comprehensive approach to reduce local dependence on property tax revenue by allowing local governments to obtain revenue from food & beverage taxes, innkeepers taxes, and local income taxes. This more comprehensive approach is unlikely to get support from House members during an election year. Another source of irritation for Senator Kenley is the, frankly, irresponsible provision stuck into the bill by the House that purports to eliminate property taxes by 2009 but does not do the hard work of suggesting replacement sources of revenue or cuts in government services.

I came home from work early yesterday because of some illness or another I’ve picked up and been wrestling with since Friday. So, I was home when a nice young lady acting on behalf of the Citizen’s Action Coalition of Indiana knocked on the door asking for our support in opposing Sen. Hershman’s SB 245 and Rep. Murphy’s HB 1279 which would deregulate local telephone service in Indiana after 2009. The CAC characterizes these bills as “pro-industry telecommunications bills that would allow monopoly telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon to unilaterally raise rates for basic local telephone service.”

An earlier news release from the CAC is dated January 31 and addresses only HB 1279 but it is more detailed and I have no reason to believe that the details of the telephone deregulation bills changed significantly between January 31 and the present. The CAC characterizes the content as follows:

• Effective July 1, 2006, HB 1279 prohibits the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) from exercising jurisdiction over the price, terms and conditions of basic telecommunications service or any provider of basic telecommunications service in an exchange area where broadband services are available to at least 50% of households.

• Although HB 1279 allows the IURC to set service quality standards, it does not require the setting of standards or specify what those standards must include. A telecommunications provider can be fined for violating a service quality standard only if the IURC can show that the provider demonstrated a “willful disregard” for its obligation to comply. This would significantly limit the IURC’s current powers to regulate quality of service.

• As with basic telecommunications service, HB 1279 does not place any limits on rates or quality of service for broadband service, nor does it contain any build-out requirements to ensure that broadband is uniformly available to all customers, including rural households, in an exchange area.

• If an incumbent local exchange carrier continues to offer basic telecommunications service in an exchange area on June 30, 2006, it must offer a flat monthly rate with unlimited local calling for basic telecommunications service. Once again, however, HB 1279 does not place any limits on rates or quality of service for the flat monthly rate.

• HB 1279’s prohibition against local measured service does not prevent an incumbent local exchange carrier from charging unreasonable rates for basic telecommunications service, nor does it prevent a carrier from failing to ensure quality of service.

• HB 1279’s future requirement, that a telecommunications provider notify a residential customer about any regulatory pricing or service quality the customer would forego by switching to non-basic service, falls far short of protecting customers against unreasonably high rates and poor quality of service.

• HB 1279’s increase in eligibility for Indiana’s Lifeline Assistance Program to 150% of the Federal poverty level, while serving more households, does not go far enough in protecting low-income individuals from unreasonable rate increases, nor does it ensure quality of service.

• HB 1279’s video service franchise provisions essentially protect the status quo, making its passage unnecessary to ensure competition in the video market.

• After conducting a formal two-year investigation, the IURC held that the status of competition in the telecommunications industry in Indiana is unclear, particularly due to the recent mega-mergers of SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI. The IURC concluded that continued regulation of the telecommu-nications industry is essential, and has opened another investigation into the status of competition.

• Passage of HB 1279 will eliminate the IURC’s jurisdiction to protect consumers from unreasonable rates until such time as meaningful competition exists in the telecommunications market in Indiana.

On the issue of quality, The Indiana Law Blog had a recent entry revisiting the year 2000 where Ameritech apparently had to be goaded in a significant way to get its service quality up to snuff.

Meanwhile, Tracy Warner had a good column (which I found via the Indiana Law Blog) in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. A point Mr. Warner raises is that of cable franchises — the Senate Bill has a provision that would take negotiations for cable franchises away from local authorities and place it at the state level. The contention is that localities would still get the franchise fee, but once you put it at the state level, it’s inevitable that the folks at the State House will begin taking in a rake of the proceeds sooner or later.

The huge flaw in the bill as a whole is that it relies on competition for local phone service to keep those rates down in the absence of regulation. There isn’t any significant competition at the moment, particularly for poor people in rural markets. If, as a policy matter, Indiana still wants to guarantee poor citizens who happen to live in rural areas basic telephone service at a low rate, that service will have to be subsidized. Such subsidies will inhibit any real competition, either because the need for subsidies will inhibit new competitors from being interested in the low-profit areas, or because the presence of subsidies provides existing providers with an advantage in other areas. At the very least, the bill should specify standards of what constitutes adequate competition in a market area and, either not deregulate until those standards are met, or provide a date upon which regulation will return if those standards are not met.