Seth Slabaugh, writing for the Indianapolis Star, reports that the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) will be holding hearings on utility tree trimming practices.

I’m biased on this issue after having had my own run-in with an electric company that wanted to cut down some of my trees. I had a line of trees blocking my house from a busy road to the west and, beyond that, a big expanse of field where the wind could really get howling. The line of trees were a barrier to the wind and the road. They were under some electric transmission lines, but the tops of the trees were something like 15 feet below the power lines. One day, my wife found people working on behalf of the electric company starting to take a chain saw to one of the trees and, naturally, asked them what the hell they were doing. They said they were with the electric company and apparently mumbled something about how we should have received notice. In fact there had been notice and my wife made them get off our property. I went and dug up the easement for the power lines, read it, and exchanged letters with counsel for the power company where I explained why their easement gave them no right to cut down my trees. The company never formally agreed with me, but they just sort of disappeared and our trees remained untouched until we eventually moved. I forget the exact language, but the easement gave them the right — understandably — to take reasonable measures to keep vegetation from interfering with their power lines.

And that’s the problem, as I see it. Power companies usually just want to take a chainsaw to the trees which is probably the cheapest solution but isn’t necessarily permitted by the terms of their easement if there are less intrusive (even if more expensive) ways for them to keep trees from interfering with their power lines.

In Muncie, the IURC hearing is scheduled for 8/31 at 6 p.m. at the Central High School auditorium. On the pro-property owner side of the issue is Charlie Goodman who has a website. He reports that the IURC will also hold these additional hearings:
Indianapolis – Pike High School – September 2
Seymour – September 8
Merrillville – September 23
Fort Wayne – September 29
Evansville – October 7

The Office of the Utility Consumer Counselor has more information here.

I’m mostly posting this for my own future reference. But the Indiana Department of Correction has proposed amending the rules concerning county jail standards. Some points of interest (to me):

#Amends required intake information to include Name of health insurance carrier; Name of primary care physician; Education level, to include the name and location of last school attended if no high school diploma; Prior commitments; Nationality or citizenship; and Social Security number, and if any Social Security benefits are currently being received.

#Specifies that each cell have hot and cold running water is required (and not just running water).

#Requires installation of CCTV cameras in numerous places.

#Requires creation of a BAC policy establishing the blood alcohol content, above which a jail may refuse to accept a prisoner.

#Each sheriff shall have a policy providing for the provision of private medical, dental, and optometry services when requested by the inmate. The services shall be at the inmate’s own expense.

Brian Zimmerman, writing for the Richmond Palladium-Item, reports that Richmond High School has suspended 169 kids for dress code violations. The article says that, under a new dress code, students have been prohibited “from wearing clothing with any logos or designs of any kind — even stripes, plaid or floral prints. Additionally, students cannot wear excessively tight or baggy clothes or low-cut shirts.” Someone I know who is a parent of an RHS student has said that “low-cut shirt” means something that shows the collar bone.

Seems to me that, when you have this level of noncompliance, you have to consider that the system being implemented is to blame. And, if a school is going to ban a big percentage of normal street clothes, it should probably just go to uniforms and be done with it.

I’ve been hearing a lot of sound and fury about health care “rationing.” Currently, if you don’t have the money, you are already rationed. If you do have the money, nobody is going to forbid you from buying an extra 10 MRIs out of your own pocket –even if they are utterly unnecessary– if that’s what you feel like you want. What am I missing?

The Economist has a column urging an American strategy to deal with the decline of our landline telephone system. (h/t The Urbanophile.)

Copper telephony is becoming increasingly obsolete even though America’s wireless coverage lags other industrialized nations. (“Despite some of the flakiest mobile-network coverage in the developed world, one in four households has now gone mobile-only.”) Our broadband penetration is also not very good. (“15th in broadband penetration among OECD countries.”)

The decline of the traditional telephone system is not only a technological issue, but also a socioeconomic one. (“Landlines are the platform for many public services, such as emergency response. And taxes on landlines are the basis of the complex system of subsidies to ensure universal service, meaning an affordable phone line for all.”) Additionally, the column says that landline operators support more pensioners than even the auto industry.

The Economist column suggests that wireless phone service be assured for rural areas by means of a reverse auction system (as India has used) whereby the provider who asks for least cash to supply a particular area wins the contract. With respect to broadband:

[T]he role of the state has less to do with limiting handouts than increasing choice. Fibre-optic networks can be run like any other public infrastructure: government, municipalities or utilities lay the cables and let private firms compete to offer services, just as public roadways are used by private logistics firms. In Stockholm, a pioneer of this system, it takes 30 minutes to change your broadband provider. Australia’s new $30 billion all-fibre network will use a similar model.

The Associated Press is reporting that the ACLU has asked the Indiana Supreme Court to overturn a Plainfield ordinance banning sex offenders from public parks. In September, the Indiana Court of Appeals rejected the challenge (pdf). This case is one in a growing line (via the Indiana Law Blog) of challenges involving sex offenders. Part of this has to do with how fearful we are of sex offenders and what an easy political target they are.

Legislators respond to the fear of their constituents by attempting to drive sex offenders further from the public sphere. Whether these laws and ordinances are Constitutional – at least as they apply to offenders who committed their crimes before the laws were passed – depends largely on whether the new law is regarded as a civil regulation or a criminal penalty. The former are generally permissible, the latter are not.

I’m a father of little kids, and I have recently been involved in a couple of cases involving horrible things happening to children. So, I get the fear. But I question the efficacy of laws in keeping us safe in this area. Close supervision of your kids is one good approach to protecting them — but I kind of feel like our kids are over-supervised, in a sense. I was talking with some other Dads at a soccer practice, and we were commenting on how our parents let us “run” a little more. Having said that, I’m not sure I would be brave enough to put my money where my mouth is and take a chance by letting my kids play outside, unsupervised more than I do.

Another safeguard is probably to try to overcome the taboos our society has about discussing sex with kids so that they have enough understanding to keep out of a situation where a sex offender might harm them. No amount of education is going to stop a forcible abduction, but my understanding from watching Very Special Episodes of 80s sit-coms is that would-be molesters take advantage of kids’ confusion.

Given the heavily emotional nature of the issue, legislators will continue to impose laws and ordinances, and sex offenders — who are, much as we want to ignore the fact, people trying to live lives — will continue to challenge those laws and ordinances. So, whatever the best non-legal approaches to protecting our kids might be, we will have to take them. Even if we execute or imprison as many sex offenders as we can and impose all kinds of draconian rules on sex offender registrants; the fact is not all of them will get ensnared in the legal system before they cause harm.

An Indianapolis Star article I caught in the Muncie Star Press discusses Beech Grove’s consideration of discontinuing school busing if a property tax referendum doesn’t pass. The article states that transporting children to school is not required of school districts and that might be one of the places where the hatchet falls if the deep cuts have to be made.

“The . . . only place we can really cut when this (property tax cap) is fully implemented is . . . transportation,” said Beech Grove Superintendent Paul Kaiser, “and then I’ve got to eliminate a big part of capital projects” if the district’s Nov. 3 referendum fails.

Several school districts are turning to public referendums to stave off drastic cutbacks, and even more districts are expected to follow suit in the coming months.

A major factor squeezing the schools is the state’s 1 percent property tax cap, which was offered as a solution to homeowners facing skyrocketing taxes after a court-ordered overhaul of property-assessment rules.

One of the problems with this is that a lot of our urban and school district planning decisions have been made with school buses as an assumption. The districts are too big, often, for kids to walk to school. The roads leading to and from school frequently are not pedestrian friendly. In my case, we would just drive our kids to school — but this isn’t necessarily an option for every family. For a child to walk from my house to the elementary school would require 2.5 miles of walking, most of which is through narrow, heavily traveled two lane road with no shoulder and no sidewalk.

Is busing really one of the first targets of budget cuts? Or is this the most visible, most painful cut a school administrator could publicize in order to encourage a voter to vote in favor of a property tax increase? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Obama is taking a smarter approach to the health care debate now. Over the past few weeks, it seems that the discussion was of the proposed system in a vacuum — in other words, there was no real discussion of how it would compare to what we have now. Obama is trying to shift things by comparing the proposed system to the present system. When critics complain of a health care bureaucracy, they should have to explain why the proposed bureaucracy is worse than the present one — why employees of for-profit insurers are easier or better to deal with than government employees; why a tax to pay for health care is intrinsically worse than an insurance premium; etc.

As an aside, I was a little amused by the headline in the linked article: Obama criticizes ‘scare tactics’ in health debate. For some reason, it amused me that “scare tactics” was in “scare quotes.” I’m easily entertained.

The 2009 Blog Indiana “BLINDY”s were awarded and, while Masson’s Blog was nominated, it was Hoosier Access that took home the coveted prize. So, congratulations to Josh Gillespie and the boys. Shawn Plew and Noah Wesley really deserve a lot of credit for organizing Blog Indiana. Once again, it was a good time and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in Indiana oriented blogging and technology.

Going there did remind me how much of an online ghetto I occupy. For me, the political blogosphere is pretty central to how I experience the Internet, but it’s such a minor part of what’s out there overall. It’s good to mix and mingle with the rest of the world. Indiana has a pretty good technology scene, and I’m glad for the opportunity to experience some of it.

I just learned that former Rep. Heeke has passed away. The write up from WAMW/DLC Media:

Former Indiana State Representative Dennis Heeke has died…he was 81.

The poultry farmer from Dubois, Indiana was first elected to the Indiana House of Representataives in District 73 in 1965 representing Dubois and Warrick Counties. Later that district also covered portions of Crawford, Perry, Spencer, Harrison, Scott and Washington Counties. He served 17 consecutive terms through 1998.

He served as caucus chairman for 22 years and as a member of the Legislative Council. He was instrumental in development of the Patoka Reservoir and organizing the Wabash Valley Association and later served as president of the association. He also helped organize the Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District. He served on the Wabash Valley Interstate Commission between Indiana and Illinois as an appointee of Gov. Roger Brannigan and Gov. Ed. Whitcomb. He was named the outstanding young farmer of Dubois County in 1959. He was an organizer of the Dubois Volunteer Fire Department and served as its president. He was a past advisory board member of Memorial Hospital and Health Care Center in Jasper. He also was a member of the Dubois Development Corp.

The funeral will be at 10 a.m. Monday in St. Raphael Catholic Church in Dubois. Burial will be in the church cemetery. Friends may call from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday at Becher-Kluesner Downtown Chapel in Jasper.