Bill Engle, reporter for Richmond’s Palladium-Item has a good article reporting on the budgetary impact of the city’s contracts with police and firefighters and the resulting overtime costs. It’s the kind of thing that we’ll really miss if and when the newspapers go under. And it’s the kind of thing that newspapers should have been doing more of in years past to avoid some of their current problems.

Solid reporting on local news is where newspapers, in my mind, really add value and provide an indispensable service to the community. I don’t suppose the profit margin on these kinds of stories is as big as running a national wire story or running an opinion piece. But wire stories and opinion pieces turn a local newspaper into a commodity. You can go somewhere else and get the same thing for less or for free. Actual local reporting is something you can’t get nearly as well from legions of bloggers or from a variety of other newspapers. Hopefully local reporting is a critical element in whatever business model for newspapers emerges from the current wreckage.

The Urbanophile has an interesting post that discusses, among other things, the impact of development externalities on suburban communities. Developers create suburban subdivisions with externalized costs and pocket the profits.

For example, the Indianapolis suburb of Westfield is reportedly on its way to 75,000; up from 3,000 in 1990 (and was up to about 20,500 as of 2007). Despite this, no real accounting has been done for development of roads to service the new developments. Instead, Westfield relies on unimproved county roads. The Urbanophile estimates it will take something on the order of $3.5 million per mile to improve two lane arterial roads. The Urbanophile goes on to consider the road construction needs the growth of Westfield is creating and states:

It probably isn’t totally off base to suggest that Westfield alone is probably generating a billion or so in road construction needs as a result of its projected buildout. Maybe more. Is it going to build these roads with impact fees from developers? It doesn’t seem likely given that there are over 20,000 people there and we’ve yet to see any serious road improvements. In effect, these developers have been able to get the taxpayers of the future to subsidize their developments to the tune of a billion or more in roads alone, to say nothing of all the other services above. And that’s just to build them, not maintain them.

So, the suggestion goes, perhaps “the mother of all impact fees” would be in order – charging developers up front the full cost of the total infrastructure buildout their developments create. The ability to run up deferred infrastructure liabilities creates an artificially attractive incentive to build in places were such development costs do not have to be internalized into the price of development.

Well worth a read.

The Fort Wayne News Sentinel editorial board makes this proclamation:

No other General Assembly in Indiana history has failed to pass a new budget, even when a special session was required. Legislators are under tremendous pressure to not become the first ones to fail.

This does not appear to be accurate. Eric Bradner of the Evansville Courier Press informs us that, during the Civil War, Governor Morton – a strong, pro-union type – wasn’t happy with the Democratic resistance to some of his less constitutional actions and had his Republican supporters in the General Assembly flee the area to prevent a quorum. As a result, no budget was passed and Gov. Morton essentially put the budget on the credit card or had supporters with deep pockets fund the state’s activities.

In addition, Professor DeBoer advises that “the legislature adjourned without passing a budget in 1873, and again in 1887. Apparently they muddled through using a combination of balances and borrowing, and a State Supreme Court ruling in 1889 (Hovey v. Foster) approved the use of debt.”

Seems like quite a flub on the part of the News-Sentinel. Fortunately, with education budgets looking to get cut in a number of places around the state, our kids will never learn enough history to spot the errors.

I’m happy to pass along that my old hometown of Richmond has once again been designated an “All-American City.” Fort Wayne was the other Indiana city that received the designation — Fort Wayne’s third. South Bend came close but lost out. The All-America City designation is given out to 10 cities each year by the National Civic League. The ten cities receiving the designation this year were:
Richmond
Fort Wayne
Phoenix, AZ
Inglewood, CA
Wichita, KS
Somerville, MA
Albany, NY
Kinston, NC
Statesville, NC
Caroline County, VA

Richmond won the designation back in 1987, and I remember it seemed like a pretty big deal for the community. I drove back through town recently and, on one of the water towers, there was a very faded “All American City” sign. That faded sign struck me as a very apt symbol for Richmond.

This time around, the kids led the way. From a previous article:

A core group of Logos eighth-graders, including Alaina Keene, Elaine Brady, Matt Sheridan, Haley Owens, Andrew Stevens and Shauna Flanagan, did much of the research and compiled the written application. They had assistance from [Mary Jo] Clark, Pat Heiny, Fonda Wilds, Valerie Westbrook, Kathy Lucid, Judy Studebaker and Francie Klinge.

After the victory, I was particularly struck by this comment:

Later, after the honor began to sink in, Collins told his fellow teammates, “Who would have thought? The ‘drop out factory’ would be come an All-America City.”

That drop out factory designation has apparently stung more people than myself. In fact, the drop out designation seems to have motivated one of the projects that helped Richmond win the designation. It set up a “Third Grade Reading Academy,” “motivated by the Wayne County Learning Corporation’s Education Summit of October, 2007, the entire community set out to address the 30% high school drop out rate by raising third-grade reading levels.”

Anyway, good going Richmond and Fort Wayne.

Ben Zion Hershberg, writing for the Evansville Courier Press, reports on the unfortunate tale of Larry Wilder, a lawyer who represents the Jefferson City Council. Seems Mr. Wilder was found passed out with his head in a neighbor’s garbage can after a night of revelry.

I could make clucking noises about how I don’t see how this could happen to anyone. Except that I can. Back before kids and much in the way of work responsibilities, there may have been an evening or two I had to reconstruct due to excess consumption.

Apparently Mr. Wilder was celebrating a friend’s licensing exam results. They took a limo and, apparently, got really drunk, and he got almost back to his house, but not quite. The neighbor saw a guy in his trash can when he took the dog out in the morning, and called the police. Apparently, Mr. Wilder is a good neighbor, because the guy whose trash can it was seems to feel bad about calling the police. Says that if he’d realized who it was, he wouldn’t have gotten the police involved.

Now, because the guy has a public job of sorts, representing the city council, it qualifies as news. (And blog-fodder for me.) This, in turn, will push the city council to wrestle with whether or not they have to cut the guy loose as a nod toward decorum — apparently the council is happy with his work. I would be remiss if I didn’t note that the folks in the newspaper comments section were having a grand time with this story. Some highlights:

#Lookit–somebody threw away a perfectly good lawyer.

#Where else would you find a good lawyer?

#Yes Your Honor, he was completely trashed.

#This is absolutely disgraceful! How could such a thing happen!?!? Why didn’t his friends leave the can upright with the top securely in place?

Rep. Gail Riecken is going to pull her bill to audit the privatized functions of FSSA in determining eligibility for welfare benefits. (More on that bill here.)

That’s probably good news. A special session should, in my mind, be reserved for bills that are critical to the functioning of the state. There is no legal requirement that this be the case, but that just seems like the right way to go about things. I think the General Assembly should dump this, dump the C.I.B. bill, pass a budget, and go home.

Douglas Walker of the Muncie Star Press has an article about a speech given by Everybody’s Favorite Economist, Larry DeBoer. Professor DeBoer is an economist at Purdue and frequently assists the Indiana General Assembly with property tax matters.

He suggested that Delaware County got hit third hardest by property tax restructuring behind St. Joseph and Lake Counties. The combination of high property taxes and a loss of manufacturers results in Delaware County getting hit hard, and once the impact of the recession ripples through the tax system, the county is going to get hit like a ton of bricks. They have not, apparently, implemented a local option income tax which is the tool given to local governments by the General Assembly for local governments to deal with the General Assembly’s property tax changes. That’s a neat trick by the General Assembly, by the way — they get to “cut” your taxes and leave it to local government to raise them again.

Dealing with the loss of revenue, Muncie has closed two library facilities, closed a fire station, anticipates closing a second fire station, and anticipates laying off 32 other firefighters. So, in a way, Muncie is a little like ancient Alexandria which lost its Great Library to fire. But, in most other respects, obviously, it’s not. I’m sure Alexandria did not have very many great Pizza Kings.

Dan Balz of the Washington Post has an article in the “Republicans are DOOMED” genre. I don’t know why pundits feel compelled to write the obituary of one party or the other. Sure, if the next 3 elections were repeats of the 2008 election, the GOP would be in for some rough times. And, they’ll probably have to do some major retooling, but the U.S. seems to have a pretty short pendulum period.

I suspect the Democrats will fracture a bit, as one or more of its constituent parts feels like it isn’t getting enough of the pie. If they are in power enough, they will inevitably calcify and corruption will set in. Meanwhile, the Republicans will retool. They’ll get rid of their calcified, corrupt politicians. Ideology will, to some extent, give way to pragmatism.

Predicting what it would take for a Republican resurgence is probably just me projecting a wish-list on the party, but I’d hope it would be a “stay out of my pocket book, stay out of my bedroom” kind of party. A party of small business instead of crony capitalism. The religious angle would be tamped down, and the young earth, anti-science crowd would be marginalized. There would be a conservative rather than activist foreign policy. The Nativist strain of the party would be marginalized as well.

I’ll be clear. I’m not unhappy with the Obama administration yet. There are some things I would change — take a harder line on civil liberties; maybe go back in time and spend less under Bush so that less debt would have to be incurred for Obama’s spending initiatives. But, when it is eventually time for the Democrats to leave power, I hope there is a functional non-ideological Republican Party ready to go.

I am nowhere near being an expert, or even particularly well informed, about the internal politics of Iran. But, even so, I wanted to flag yesterday’s election there as a potentially important development. Also, initial media reports seem to have fallen down on the job. There was a Presidential election there, and the two main players were the incumbent, Ahmadinejad and Moussavi, the challenger.

Officials reported a suspiciously high vote for Ahmadinejad, and Professor Juan Cole explains why these vote totals are marked with badges of fraud. In fact, his blog generally is probably the best starting place for analysis of the election. Our media seems to be walking this election back into the “disputed” column, but initial reports were unduly credulous. Probably the Muncie Star Press is not the place I want to go for my international reporting, but its headline – at least for awhile – was “Ahmadinejad wins Iran election in landslide.” Even at present, I think major outlets are referring to Ahmadinejad as the “winner” before providing the information that the election is “disputed.”

Probably they should simply report that he will likely retain control regardless of whether he won the election or not. The New York Times has an article on the continued protests.