The Indy Star has a story on public access compliance somewhat misleadingly entitled Keeping secrets. The text of the article explains that the public access ombudsman reported that government agencies wrongly withheld records in more than half of the cases investigated. However, the article suggests that the number of violations probably are not up, the public’s awareness of their rights has increased. And the cases cited don’t seem to be any desire by the government to “keep secrets” but rather a concern over competing laws requiring confidentiality and general bureaucratic inertia over a task they are not set up to do and are not funded to do. Most governmental agencies have specific tasks they are designed to accomplish. The funding levels for these agencies are geared toward accomplishing the tasks — usually inadequately these days. Retrieval and copying of records for random requests are not something generally taken into account in the design and funding for the agency. Not to say the public doesn’t have the rights under the public access laws, but rather the Indy Star’s suggestion that the agencies are “keeping secrets” seems unfounded.

The Evansville Courier Press has an article on the new bankruptcy law scheduled to go into effect on October 17, 2005. The new law will make it tougher to file bankruptcy generally, and Chapter 7 specifically. The article mentions the following specifically:

Means Test: Clients seeking eligibility for Chapter 7 bankruptcy must have their income compared to their state’s median income. If their income is above a certain level, people are not eligible for Chapter 7, which relieves filers from paying some debts.

Mandatory credit counseling: Those seeking to file must undergo credit counseling before filing. Before a case can be discharged under Chapter 13, debtors must also undergo a course in financial management.

Additional documentation: In addition to a list of creditors, a schedule of liabilities and a list of income and expenses, debtors must file a certificate of credit counseling, evidence of payment from employers, recent tax returns and other documents.

Attorney verification: Attorneys must verify that all claims on a bankruptcy petition are “well grounded in fact.” Some say this puts additional burdens on lawyers.

The article also mentions a local attorney who stopped taking new bankruptcy cases for filing before the deadline. Coincidentally, I heard of a bankruptcy attorney in my area who quoted a debtor a figure of $2,000 to take a bankruptcy case. Sounds like bankruptcy attorneys will be working on and filing cases at full throttle from now until the 17th of October. The Lafayette Journal Courier has a listing of the area bankruptcies filed every week. Two Sundays ago, the paper had about 100 people named. Last Sunday there were about 125. Also coincidentally, my Dad, a bankruptcy attorney in Colorado suggested I cross over to “the right side” of the creditor/debtor equation and move to western Colorado which he suggests is a target-rich environment.

Anyway, I still don’t think the bill will actually do any good as far as getting creditors much extra money, and I think it will cause a whole lot of extra hassle and make a bunch of judgment proof debtors grind it out in poverty without getting their fresh start. The credit counseling services should do much better business though.

Today’s political notebook from the FWJG is entitled Legislators hope short session swift; Daniels differs. The jist of this entry is that the folks who have to get re-elected in ’06 want to “do no harm, go home, and get re-elected.” Daniels, who doesn’t face the voters until 2008, wants to be bold. Apparently, he’ll regain his timidity some time in 2007 (or whenever someone asks him about time zones.)

Philosophically, the short-session should just be about house keeping. Indiana’s General Assembly is set up under the premise of being a ‘citizen legislature,’ meaning these are just ordinary folks who take some time out of their regular lives to go to Indianapolis, do the people’s work, and come home. The bulk of the work is to be done every other year. A lot of this is a fiction of course. The modern world tends to make the position of legislator full time and tends to demand that legislation be ready to go on short notice. But, I think it’s a fiction to which we should aspire.

To me, it often seems that government –unthinking beast that it is– tends to expand as far as technology will allow it. The notion that every problem requires a governmental solution is problematic. Once upon a time, I suppose, physical limitations on travel, communications, and (more prosaically) even document production, limited what government could do, and so legislators had a built in excuse when a concerned citizen “needed” something done. Certainly we shouldn’t let rigid adherence to tradition get in the way when something actually needs to be done quickly. But I think the fiction of a citizen government that meets primarily once every other year is a good way to help keep the state government just a little bit smaller and may tend to help us avoid trading deliberation for speed.

Those interested in more details should go on over to Kemplog or to the Indiana Law Blog both of which have been covering the Indiana Confined Agricultural Feeding Operation (CAFO) much more closely than have I. But, I thought I’d point out Ruth Holladay’s column entitled County not following governor’s farm plan. When Blackford County displeased the Governor’s office by deciding it didn’t want a 2,000 dairy cow acre on 70 acres in the county because they tend to be smelly environmental threats, the Governor’s office began intervening with the County on behalf of the factory farm.

However, being an avid (some would say obsessive) follower of the time debate, I had to grin when Ms. Holladay wrote the following:

The loudest noise came from Indiana’s agriculture chief Andy Miller, 35. Like others in the hard-line Daniels administration, he did not waste words in Sept. 9 letter to the commissioners.
What is your vision for your future, he asked. Is Blackford County unwilling to accommodate confined animal feeding operations? How about ethanol plants, since one of those is slated for Blackford?
He requested answers quickly. Because if Blackford is not on board, he said, other counties are waiting in the wings.
Then, Miller made his letter public. To trigger debate, he said.
That he has. Rae Schnapp of the Hoosier Environmental Council said the issue is bigger than one county. “I see it as a centralization of decision-making,” she said. Is the state really going to usurp local control of confined feeding operations?
No way, said Miller. “This is a local decision.”
Still, the state has a vision it is eager to share, if not impose — and whatever the administration’s faults may be, lack of a plan is not one of them.

From the time zone debate, we learn that the Daniels administration can very decisively get us into a mess. Then, once the mess is upon us, it throws up its hands and says that dealing with the mess is a local issue. (Then again, that is reminiscent of how the State “balanced” the budget this year and how the Feds dealt with Katrina.) So, I have no doubt that the Daniels administration would be very efficient at getting the CAFO installed. Then, once the vast ponds of manure started contaminating the local waterways, it would do absolutely nothing and begin singing the virtues of home rule.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has a story suggesting that Democratic challenger, Tom Hayhurst, may pose a credible threat to Mark Souder in Indiana’s 3rd District, at least insofar as fund raising is concerned.

A summer of asking Democrats to rally around him to run against Rep. Mark Souder, R-3rd, next year has garnered City Councilman Tom Hayhurst $57,000, an unusually strong showing for a northeast Indiana congressional challenger a year before the election.

Souder has apparently averaged campaign funds of $250,000 while his challengers have averaged about $100,000.

Hayhurst is an Airforce Veteran, a doctor who has led the rallies with Vets to keep the VA Hospital open in Fort Wayne. Souder apparently opted out of Viet Nam for religious reasons. Souder may also be vulnerable for pouring money down the rat hole that is Iraq, not to mention Souder apparently ran on a “term limits” platform back in ’94 and now he’s running for his 7th term.

The Indy Star has an article entitled Tax amnesty’s take: $24M and counting, reporting –as the title may suggest– that the tax amnesty has brought revenues of $24 million in the first half of the program. However, frustratingly, the article seems to assume that the number $24 million is significant in a vacuum. I think to make useful judgments about that number we need to know how much debt the State had to forgive to get that money. If the $24 million was recovered on a total bill of $26 million, well then the program is pretty good. If the $24 million was recovered on a total bill of $100 million, then that’s not so good.

And, of course, there is always the question of whether the Daniels Administration has collected $24 million in the same way IDEM closed 90 cases. Or, possibly, we have to use a Daniels-administration-to-reality conversion chart which would bring the revenue to about $12 million.

Sen. Miller has decided to drop the draft legislation which would have restricted the ability of single individuals to obtain medical assistance in having a child according to the Indy Star. Sen. Miller issued a one sentence statement saying “The issue has become more complex than anticipated and will be withdrawn from consideration by the Health Finance Commission.”

Thanks to Jim for the heads up. The South Bend Tribune has a column which expresses dissatisfaction with Governor Daniels for his lack of leadership on the time zone issue.

Gov. Mitch Daniels has said that he believes counties should be permitted to determine their own time zone and that the U.S. Department of Transportation most probably will accede to their requests. That permission, the governor continued, likely will arrive without much if any red tape: in the form of a letter with DOT’s unqualified OK.

The principle of respecting local decision-making is an admirable one. But in this case we do think it ought to come with a bit of gubernatorial guidance.

. . .

Daniels chose not to make an Indiana time zone recommendation to DOT at the beginning of the selection process. While that may have seemed like a good idea initially, if the current choices are approved there will be such confusion that any economic advantage to being on daylight-saving time will be undermined. It is time for Daniels to stop and bring some statewide logic to this issue.

The Tribune cites the jaggedness of the time zone line if the Dept. of Transportation simply rubber stamps the requests and does not move anyone into Central unless they asked for it. In particular, they mention (without naming) the oddity of Warren County remaining in the eastern zone while counties to the north, south, east, and west are in central time.

Once again, the potential map:

Update: Only tangentially related, but if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then reader and frequent contributor Paul O’Malley has an admirer. He noticed that at least one submission to the USDOT docket bears a striking resemblance to a comment he made back on September 30. I find that a little entertaining for some reason.

Another update: A recent addition to the USDOT docket is a letter from the President of the Carroll County Commissioners dated September 12, setting forth their reasons to supporting Central Time. Carroll County was a county that surprised me. I did not suspect they would vote for Central Time. The Commissioners’ reasoning had mostly to do with their businesses – agriculture and meat packing, both of which look to the west and with the expressed preferences of the community. Apparently many citizens expressed a strong preference for Central time while not very many expressed a desire to be in the Eastern time zone. There was also mention of the ever endangered child waiting for a school bus.

The Elkhart Truth appears to be unhappy with Governor Daniels’ approach to the time zone issue.

As if the time-zone debate weren’t frustrating enough, now our governor is saying that it should be as simple as a letter from the U.S. Department of Transportation for most counties that asked for a change to get one.

“In most cases, it will be a simple ‘yes’ from the DOT,” Gov. Mitch Daniels told a Truth reporter last week. In others where a decision is not as clear cut, there will be hearings, he said.

That creates a couple of concerns.

First of all, his comments run counter to what the DOT has been saying is its protocol.

. . .

Remember, it was Daniels who sold a slim majority of legislators on daylight-saving time under the guise that the DOT would decide the time-zone boundary for most of the state by having between eight and 10 hearings throughout Indiana.

After the bill narrowly passed the General Assembly (with some help from a couple of local legislators, as you might recall), Hoosiers learned quite the opposite was going to happen. This decision wasn’t going to be regional and there weren’t going to be hearings across the state. The DOT said that individual counties were going to have to petition them for a change.

. . .

Meanwhile, Daniels recently said that it would have been wrong for him to ask the DOT for one time zone for the entire state and that he never considered it. (Wrong because DST never would have passed the Legislature? That’s our guess. But that’s the only DST decision that really would make any sense for Indiana.)

The second scenario, and one that should be of greater concern to residents in Elkhart County, is that if what Daniels said is true, there is little doubt that we’ll be on a different time than St. Joseph County.

Makes me think of a good campaign tag line for Daniels’ opponents: “Mitch Daniels: All over the Map on Indiana’s time zone” — then maybe flash up the jigsaw puzzle of Indiana’s potential time zone. Probably no good since Daniels isn’t up for reelection for 3 years. Maybe someone could reengineer it if they were running against an incumbent who voted for DST.

Sorry about the title, but to me, just about anything II is Electric Boogaloo. The Evansville Courier Press has a column on steps being taken to merge the Evansville City and the Vanderburgh County government. First, a pro-consolidation faction apparently made a presentation to a legislative study committee. On Wednesday, the county council is expected to adopt a resolution favoring the idea of a county-wide referendum on the issue. The paper stresses that right now the issue is whether the county should be able to decide for itself. The question of whether consolidation is the right move comes later.