The Journal and Courier has an article where once again Lt. Gov. Becky Skillman is traveling the state touting agriculture as Indiana’s future. Oh, and doubling hog production.

As I’ve discussed before, I think this lack of vision contributes to our much bewailed brain drain. A healthy agricultural base is a good thing for Indiana, but I don’t think agriculture is the way forward.

As I mentioned in the prior entry:

Indiana ranks 46th in the nation in terms of adults with college education. 21.1% of adult Hoosiers have a college degree, compared to a nationwide average of 28%. But it’s not because we don’t educate our kids. 63% of Hoosier high school graduates go on to college, 10th in the country. But they don’t graduate and they don’t stay – Barely half graduate within 6 years and, of those who do, 20% leave for other states. The article says that the jobs for graduates are located elsewhere, and the manufacturing jobs we did have are going away.

Indiana awarded the food service contract for the Indiana Dept. of Corrections to Aramark Corporation. The estimated savings will reduce meals from 1.41 per meal to $0.99 per meal. The Indy Star has an article entitled: Prisons go to the 99-cent menu.

Daniels and [DOC Commissioner J. David] Donahue said neither quality nor nutritional value will be sacrificed. And, they said, the ARAMARK contract won’t necessarily result in DOC employees losing their jobs.

Well, as long as they say so. The main thing is to have some sort of quality control. Government contracts with private providers to supply food to captive populations hasn’t always worked out so well. Rancid meat being supplied to Indian reservations comes to mind.

The only thing I know about Aramark is that they were recently hit with a $105 million verdict because one of their beer vendors at Giants Stadium sold beer to an extremely intoxicated fan after the 3rd quarter last call. (The vendor had also apparently sold the fan 6 beers at half-time which is in excess of the 2 beer per purchase limit.) The fan drove away from the stadium and turned a 7 year old into a quadriplegic. Allegations were that the fan bribed the employee for the special treatment.

I have no idea if the New York Giants vending situation is at all representative, but in a prison setting, there ought to be steps to make sure that Aramark employees are properly trained and paid well enough so that bribes aren’t overly tempting.

Another in the Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette’s series, “Enacted Legislation, Everyday Lives” entitled New speed limit to cut travel time for local mother

The article opens by saying, “The Indiana legislature gave Kathy Carrier the gift of time.” — basically, Ms. Carrier runs a business that involves frequent commutes from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis. They say that increasing the speed limit from 65 to 70 will save her 24 minutes round trip on the 220 mile drive. I don’t get the math. At the risk of sounding like a math text book:

1. If Kathy Carrier drives 220 miles from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis and back at a speed of 65 miles per hour, how many minutes will the drive take her? Answer: 202 minutes.

2. If Kathy Carrier drives 110 220 miles from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis and back at a speed of 70 miles per hour, how many minutes will the drive take her? Answer: 188 minutes.

3. What is the time difference between Kathy Carrier’s drive at 65 miles per hour and her drive at 70 miles per hour? Answer: 14 minutes.

So, the increased speed limit will save her 7 minutes each way, assuming that she is able to drive full speed on the entire Interstate portion of her journey — a big assumption when she gets around the I-69/I-465 interchange.

Of course, the legislature was considering a move that would have taken away any gains. Ms. Carrier mentions that on her drive home, she “teleconferences”. (I assume that’s a fancy way of saying she talks with people on her cell phone while she’s driving.) The legislature considered a bill that would have prohibited talking on a cell phone while driving.

Update 5/19/05 Fixed a typo caught by Brenda (see comments). Thanks!

The Journal Gazette has what looks to be a series entitled, “Enacted Legislation, Everyday Lives”. Today’s installment: Bartenders: No cheers for server’s licenses

The law is SEA 382 concerning alcohol server training. It was authored by Sen. Alting and Hershman and sponsored by Rep. Alderman and Duncan. The article interviews a long-time bartender who doesn’t think the classes will do much to supplement his 8 years of experience. He grudgingly acknowledges the possibility that such classes could be helpful for new servers. The article reports that no fee is currently set by the Alcohol and Tobacco Commission but that the Commission is authorized to set fees. The article quotes one owner as being of the opinion that the legislation is just one more way for the state to get money.

New employees have to become licensed within 90 days of employment. Current employees have until January 1, 2008. I always judge the licensure and certification bills by their grandfather clauses. If the threat is dire enough that it needs to be dealth with through government regulation, I figure the public’s safety can’t be jeopardized by allowing unqualified individuals to remain in place through lengthy grandfather periods. According to the legislature, it’s acceptable to have unqualified individuals continue to serve us alcohol for the next 3 years.

Kevin Corcoran, for the Indy Star, has an article entitled Prison debts force hike in property tax

Many counties owe the state money for the cost of incarcerating juveniles. While the state is responsible for the full cost of incarcerating adults, it is responsible only for paying half the cost of incarcerating juveniles. Counties are obligated to pay for the other half. As the economy headed south, many counties got behind in their payments. Marion County represents 2/3 of the total $85.8 million owed to the state.

The new budget requires counties to either pay the debt over 4 years from existing funds or all at once by selling bonds and raising property taxes. A few years back, the state restructured property taxes in effect jacking them way up. To ease the pain, the state has been providing property tax subsidies. Now, the state is using those subsidies as a club. If counties don’t pay up, the state is going to withhold the subsidies. (I’m seeing a disturbing habit on the part of the state legislature of forcing counties to be the one to raise taxes. That way county commissioners and council members take the heat while legislators can run around pretending they managed to fund state government and never raised taxes.)

I wonder how the Department of Corrections’ balance sheet is looking. Last time I heard about the juvenile incarceration issue in my county, the county jail had been holding Dept. of Correction inmates and was owed roughly the same amount for that service as the county owed the state for juvenile incarceration. Could be interesting if counties retaliate by calling all the state’s debts due.

The Indy Star has an editorial entitled Flawed law puts Hoosiers at risk. They say that our fireworks law is a joke. They’re exactly right. They mention the fact that a person can sign an affidavit saying they’ll take the fireworks out of state to be sold fireworks that are illegal for use in the state. That’s one aspect showing the law to be a sham. There is another dodge which I believe is still legal where you pay a nominal fee to join a “club”. You buy the otherwise illegal fireworks under the pretense that you will then take the fireworks to the club’s designated fireworks zone where a licensed handler will ignite them for you. I’m fairly sure that the going interpretation is that our Sheriffs’ departments and police agencies are not authorized to enforce the fireworks law. Only the state fire marshal is given that authority. Obviously, even when the will is there for enforcement, the resources are not.

But our first clue that the law is a sham is reading the thing. The law is here. It reads like a pretzel. In Indiana, where our legislation tends to be clearly written –even if you disagree with the policies,– a law doesn’t get this obfuscatory by accident. There was an intent to have this law be full of sound and fury, but signify nothing.

So, the Indy Star is being overly kind when it calls the law “flawed.” The structure of our fireworks law is an abomination.

To be clear, I don’t really have strong feelings about which fireworks should be permissible and which should not. As a kid, I ran amok with illegal bottle rockets and lived to tell the tale. But, legislators should set the policy and make the law clear. They shouldn’t try to cater to both concerned parents and the fireworks industry by passing an inscrutable law that pretends to regulate fireworks but in fact fails to do much of anything at all.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an editorial entitled Rich schools, poor schools. This year, the General Assembly decided on a formula that generally sends more money to richer, suburban schools and less money to urban schools. The Journal Gazette quickly notes the problem with conservative legislators nice-sounding explanation that “the money follows the child.” Some kids cost more to educate:

Conservative legislators talk earnestly of how they changed the school funding formula so “the money follows the child,” a noble idea that has lots of difficulties in practice. In general, the 2005 General Assembly is sending more money to wealthier suburban districts at the expense of urban and rural districts. Urban districts may generally have declining enrollment, but the students they have are often more difficult to educate – more are poor, more are at risk of failing and more don’t speak English – and their education comes in older buildings that cost more to maintain.

If legislators want to abandon the notion that Indiana children in public schools should get a more or less equal opportunity, they should make it explicit instead of disingenuously shrugging off the inequities with simplistic explanations.

The Indy Star has an editorial entitled Can bigger utilities actually be better?

The Star notes that Hoosiers do not often benefit from corporate mergers, notes that the old utility, PSI, merged with Cinergy, but still maintained a local feel even though the company was run out of Cincinnati. Now Cinergy is merging with megacorp Duke Energy. The Star grumbles, and probably rightly so, about the utility’s further removal from its Hoosier roots. But then, incomprehensibly, the editorial seems to call for the nationalization of utility regulation and to take regulatory authority out of the hands of the state. Consolidation is bad when it comes to utility mergers but it’s good when it comes to regulation?

The Star apparently fails to remember that the Bush administration’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission studiously failed to act when energy mega-corporations, Enron most prominently but also apparently including Duke and El Paso, were running scams to drive up prices and causing rolling blackouts in California’s deregulated energy market. The line from the Bush administration at that time, most prominently from Dick Cheney, was that California’s problems were being caused by too few oil refineries.

So, for the Star to ask that the same folks be put in charge of Indiana’s energy policy seems misguided at best.

The Indy Star has an article entitled Nonprofit profits Daniels’ agenda describing how Daniels’ inaugural fund has morphed into a new organization acting like a Political Action Committee. I haven’t had time to digest the article, but it sounds like a tactic that is effective, technically legal and somewhat shady. Sort of a metaphor for Daniels’ generally!