An Indy Star article by Michele McNeil entitledNo cut is too tiny for ‘The Blade’ reports that Governor Daniels is bragging on himself for allegedly saving the State $150 million. That’s nice, if true. But if you’re going to mention Daniels stint as White House budget director, I think the nickname “The Blade” can be used only ironically given the record breaking deficits that marked his tenure in that office.

Some of the cuts:

A little here, a little there

Here are some of the more unusual savings the Daniels administration says it found in state government:

• Agriculture: The Department of Agriculture stopped giving grants to a bed-and-breakfast, saving $100,000.

• BMV: The Bureau of Motor Vehicles stopped mailing notices for driver’s license renewals, saving $200,000, and stopped buying bottled water for offices, saving $35,000.

• DNR: The Department of Natural Resources is switching from Ford Expeditions to less-expensive Chevy Trailblazers, saving $100,000.

• Maps: Indiana road maps will be printed every two years, not annually, saving $175,000.

• Prisons: 650 Indiana prisoners living in Kentucky prisons have been moved back to Indiana, saving $6.6 million.

• Lottery: The Hoosier Lottery switched from color to black-and-white newsletters, saving $21,670 a year.

Meanwhile, Mary Beth Schneider writes of 27 legislators headed to Seattle for an NCSL conference at an expense of approximately $2,000 per person.

Thanks to Paul for flagging this article by Bill Medley in the Evansville Courier Press on Gov. Daniels remarks at an Evansville Chamber of Commerce function. Most interesting to me were Daniels’ comments about the time zone issue.

The governor addressed the issue of the time zone in response to a question from the audience. Daniels said he anticipated many counties in Indiana would choose to be in the Central time zone.

He said confusion over what time it was in Indiana was costing businesses. He relayed the experience of an Indianapolis businessman who expected to lose about $30,000 because a partner in Los Angeles missed a conference call because of time zone confusion.

While he expects the Central time zone will be the most popular option for counties, there will still be some areas of the state that will choose differently.

“Everybody on one time zone is probably not attainable, given our position on the globe.”

It strikes me as odd if Gov. Daniels said that he expects most counties to want to be in the Central time zone. My personal sense is that the opposite will be true. I think Indianapolis will choose Eastern Time. I think everything east of Indianapolis will choose eastern time. And, I think some counties west of Indy will want central time, but due to Indianapolis’s economic sphere of influence, will choose eastern time anyway.

Counties already in the Central time zone are: Lake, Porter, LaPorte, Jasper, Newton, Gibson, Posey, Vanderburg, Spencer, and Warrick. I’m probably going to miss horribly here, particularly with respect to the southern part of the state, but looking at this map I’d guess counties prone to switch from eastern to central are: Perry, Dubois, Martin, Davies, Pike, Knox, Daviess, Sullivan, Vigo, Clay, Parke, Vermillion, Fountain, Warren, Benton, White, Pulaski, Starke, Marshall, St. Joseph, St. Joseph, Elkhart, and Kosciusko. I doubt all of those would actually vote to switch, but if they do, that would mean about 33 counties. That would mean 59 counties still on eastern.

There are some fairly interesting issues before the Health Finance Commission. I don’t know that I’ll have time to go back and really analyze it, but the minutes from the 7/5/05 meeting are linked above. (I presume the minutes don’t get posted until they are approved by the Commission, meaning a month or more lag time. I don’t suppose there is any way around that.)

Quite a bit of testimony from FSSA Secretary Roob. Also there is a link to the KPMG Audit of FSSA (Looong PDF document). Among other things, Sec’y Roob commented about “staff apathy and a lack of cooperation in investigating crimes within the agency.” (The flogging will continue until staff morale improves.) He also wants to reduce the number of FSSA operated hospitals from 7 to 1 but still have FSSA fund the other hospitals. (You know, if I wanted to funnel state money to people I liked without the bother of helping people and without liability for substandard care, that’s probably how I’d go about it. I’m not saying that’s what Mr. Roob has in mind, just saying what I’d do if I lost my scruples.) He wants to cut the annual Medicaid increase from 10% to 5%. “Secretary Roob stated that FSSA is going to alter the manner in which health care is delivered in the state. FSSA will be a health care financing agency.” (Again, see my comments about how I’d go about funneling money if I ever became a cartoonish supervillain.)

Former Gov. Joe Kernan has a guest column in the Journal & Courier. Something about taxes. I haven’t read it as I have Sesame Street-related obligations at the moment. According to my boy, it appears to be fairly urgent.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an editorial calling for a study of how court user fees affect access to justice. The General Assembly dramatically raised (among other things) small claims filing fees in large part to fund a judicial pay increase. The Journal Gazette expresses a concern that the fee increases may price average and poorer citizens out of justice.

By way of disclosure, this issue affects me directly. I represent clients who file a lot of small claims suits against debtors who owe in most cases between $300 and $2,000. On their behalf, I probably file something on the order of 600 cases per year. The small claims fees jumped from $46 to $70 plus $10 per additional defendant plus $10 per garnishee-defendant. Ignoring the additional defendant fees, the General Assembly has essentially assessed a tax of $14,400 on my clients. They’ll be able to recover some of that from the debtors — but, keep in mind, most of these individuals are debtors not because they dispute the debt, but simply because they didn’t have enough money to go around. So, a lot of this fee increase is on the backs of the folks who have the least.

More irritating to me, however, is the garnishee-defendant fee. For those of you unfamiliar with the term. A garnishee-defendant is anyone who owes a judgment debtor money. Typically, it’s an employer who owes the debtor a wage. If you hold a judgment against an individual, you can serve the individual’s employer with court papers that bring them within the court’s jurisdiction. If the court concludes that the judgment debtor is employed, it will order the debtor’s wages garnished and the employer is obliged to honor the court’s order. Debtors typically aren’t the most stable employees, they move from job to job, creating a need to name several employers as garnishee defendants. Now, these aren’t defendants in the traditional sense. They don’t take up anything close to the same judicial resources as a traditional defendant. They simply get some mail, answer it, and possibly send garnishment checks into the Clerk. And yet, to add them to the case, a plaintiff has to pay the same $10 they would have to pay to name a defendant who would present an array of defenses and require a week long jury trial.

The garnishee-defendant issue should produce some interesting litigation. Apparently, the trial rules apparently refer to just a “garnishee” without the term “defendant”. (I’m going off of a second hand statement on this, so don’t take it as gospel.) The term is, however, commonly used in the business. The statute creating the fees just refers to “defendant”. Apparently the Clerks association told the county clerks to collect the fee out of an abundance of caution. If they guess wrong, the county clerk potentially becomes personally liable for the uncollected fees. But, not all counties are interpreting the statute to require fees for garnishee-defendants. At least one judge in Carroll County has issued an order with his interpretation that the statute doesn’t require a fee for garnishee-defendants. (Bless you, sir!) So, we’ll see.

Jeff Sagarin, of Sagarin sports rankings fame, has prepared All 92 Indiana Counties: Sunrise/Sunset Day-By-Day Charts for 2006 which include day-by-day entries, for each county, of the time for dawn, sunrise, true noon, sunset, and dusk under both eastern time and central time.

He has more information on Indiana’s proper placement in the Central Time Zone here. Unlike me, he doesn’t simply spout off. He backs it up with numbers. I particularly enjoyed this passage:

Things such as 8:06 am sunrises and 1:51 pm noons are the kinds of bad consequences that manifest themselves when people begin to feel that they can override the immutable facts of astronomy with legislative strokes of a pen. Our clocks are at their closest to the sun-earth relationship when we’re on Central Standard at all times and furthest from reality when on Eastern Daylight.

(Makes this debate somewhat reminiscent of the Indiana General Assembly’s efforts to legislate pi back in the 1800s.)

Mr. Sagarin also argues an economic model that has the Central Time Zone being most advantageous to Indiana.

[The economic model] assumes that we want to maximize the business to be done by Indiana firms with the other states in the six time zones of this country: EASTERN, CENTRAL, MOUNTAIN, PACIFIC, ALASKAN, HAWAIIAN_ALEUTIAN. And that potential business in a region is proportional to the population of that region. And it then assumes that the “coverage” of that region is proportional to the number of common hours of the business day that Indiana would share with that region. The reasoning being that the number of hours of common business hours is the number of hours when you can do business with that time zone.

Based on those arguments, central time wins. And, it wins going away because the population in the U.S. continues to shift westward.

According to the Indy Star in an article entitled Voting machine company to pay county $1.2 million, Es&S will pay Marion County for problems starting in 2003.

Problems first surfaced in 2003 when ES&S provided software that was not fully certified by the Indiana Election Commission for the optical scan machines.

Also, officials discovered ES&S had installed uncertified software on the touch-screen machines. The company replaced the software, but that new software was incompatible with software that compiles the results.

In fall 2003, more than 9,000 absentee ballots for the City-County Council election had to be hand-counted over two days because ES&S had not obtained certification for software on a central counting machine.

Michele McNeil reports for the Indy Star that the Indiana Court of Appeals rejected the BMV’s stricter ID rules because the rules were not adopted in accord with Indiana’s Administrative Rules and Procedures Act (IC 4-22-2).

Those rules made it tougher for individuals to obtain an Indiana driver’s license. Potentially relevant to the political scene in that it’s now necessary to have a state or federal ID to vote. I would expect that issue to be raised if the BMV actually bothers to follow the rule making process.

The South Bend Tribune is
reporting:

Central time gets nod from council members

It appears that St. Joseph County will ask to be moved to the Central time zone, WSBT-TV reported.

Indiana counties have until Sept. 16 to petition the federal government for a change in time zones, the U.S. Department of Transportation said Wednesday.

Rafael Morton, president of the St. Joseph County Council, says he’s talked to council members, and the county will meet the deadline.

“They have expressed that they would prefer Central time. A lot of it is based upon the public forum held at the Century Center a few weeks ago. A majority of people who came out for that meeting said they prefer Central time,” Morton said.

The Department of Transportation says counties must provide detailed evidence that a change would help business.

Morton says the businesses he’s heard from are more aligned with Chicago’s Central time.

Although it would seem to me that the decision rests with the St. Joseph County Commissioners and not the Council.

The United States Department of Transportation has opened a docket on Indiana Time Zone matters. Hopefully that link is static and will take readers to the appropriate USDOT page. (Even having the docket number, I couldn’t seem to get the page through the docket search page.) The proceeding is entitled “Time Zone Boundaries in the State of Indiana” and the docket number is: OST-2005-22114.

From the above linked page, individuals can submit comments and documents. The PDF of the notice is available at http://dmses.dot.gov/docimages/pdf92/341938_web.pdf. The Notice “invites local officials in Indiana that wish to change their current time zone in accordance with Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 127 to notify DOT of their request for a change.” Local officials are directed to submit their requests by September 16, 2005. If the submitted petition(s) affirmatively ask for a specific change and provide adequate supporting data, DOT will issue a notice of proposed rule making.

The “supporting data” should be “detailed information supporting the requesting party’s contention that the requested change would serve the ‘conveniene of commerce.’ Convenience of commerce is defined broadly as all impacts upon a community of a change in its standard of time. At a minimum supporting documentation is required to address:

1. From where do businesses in the community get their supplies, and to where do they ship their goods or products?
2. From where does the community receive television and radio broadcasts?
3. Where are the newspapers published that serve the community?
4. From where does the community get its bus and passenger rail services; if there is no scheduled bus or passenger rail service in the community, to where must residents go to obtain these services?
5. Where is the nearest airport; if it is a local service airport, to what major airport does it cany passengers?
6. What percentage of residents of the community work outside the community; where do these residents work?
7. What are the major elements of the community’s economy; is the community’s economy improving or declining; what Federal, State, or local plans, if any, are there for economic development in the community?
8. If residents leave the community for schooling, recreation, health care, or religious worship, what standard of time is observed in the places where they go for these purposes?

Counties or other governmental representatives are free to petition after the September 16, 2005 date, but such petitions may not be included in any rulemaking covering those petitions received by that deadline.

Prior entries on USDOT and the time zone issue:

June 8, 2005

June 10, 2005

June 17, 2005

July 18, 2005

July 19, 2005

July 20, 2005

The jist of a lot of those entries are that Governor Daniels messed up his obligations under SEA 127. That bill, which enacted Daylight Saving Time, required Governor Daniels to submit any data required by the USDOT to obtain hearings on time zones. That means, in my opinion, he was required to submit data about whether shifting the time line serves the “convenience of commerce” for all of Indiana or parts thereof. Under the system outlined by the USDOT, the data submission burden has been shifted from the Governor (as required by the statute) to county officials (under the USDOT notice). It also skews the debate. The convenience of commerce for a particular county is going to be different than the convenience of commerce for the entire state. The legislature seemed to have a statewide approach in mind.