A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

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.