Special sessions are rough on a legislator. Without one, you can simply tell a constituent or a lobbyist to forget about their pet project for a little while. However, with a special session, the pressure gets turned back on, with many constituents and lobbyists pressuring legislators to put this or that thing into the budget bill or get just one more bill introduced for consideration.
Lesley Stedman Weidenbener has an article about disagreement between the chambers as to what should be considered during the special session. David Long, President Pro Tem of the Senate, says that gambling won’t be considered as a way to deal with budget problems.
House Speaker Pat Bauer, on the other hand, says that if a fix for Marion County’s Capital Improvement Board is included, then the special session is properly considered not as simply a budget session, but as an effort to deal with economic crises – and, he points out, there are economic crises in places other than Indianapolis.
Gov. Daniels is opposed to gambling legislation. He says that this special session is about the budget and “special interests will have to wait.”
I don’t have any strong interest for, or against gambling — though I think it odd that a population gnashing its teeth about burdensome taxes has sufficient money to piss away on gambling — but, politically, I think that Bauer has the upper hand on this one: if Marion County’s Capital Improvement Board gets injected into the special session, then the flood gates come open. Telling Indianapolis “yes” while telling everyone else “no” is going to be unpalatable out here in the sticks.
As regards gambling and taxes, the difference is found between choosing to throw your money down a rat hole, and having it forcibly taken from you to be thrown down a rat hole you didn’t choose to throw down into.
I’m with Indy’s City-County Councilor Ed Coleman, who says that the CIB stortfall is a local, not state, issue. Don’t want those floodgates opened. Once you make a local problem regional, local people stop taking care.
Wait a minute, Mike. How come your taxes are a philosophical issue and mine (and the rest of Indianapolis’) are “somebody else’s problem”?
Let’s recap: in 1967, in the midst of White Flight, Republicans got control of the mayor’s office (with Dick Lugar) and the City Council. They rammed through the annexation of the rest of Marion County (Uni-Gov) which gave them all those lost white voters back, plus a few more to spare, and a twenty-five year lock on city government. Services went to the unincorporated areas of the county, but the Township system, particularly the school systems, and the politically-powerful sheriff’s department, remained intact. The old city school district would wind up footing the bill to “desegregate” the suburban districts.
The second order of business was to address the crumbling downtown area, also a result of White Flight, specifically the crumbling property values of land owned in large part by the city’s Old Money, and leased to the owners of rapidly-depreciating tall buildings. Most of the land was leased for 99 years, and most of those leases were going to run out between 1980-2010.
So the Republican-controlled city asked the Republican-controlled state to create the Capital Improvements Board, a private, municipally-owned corporation (!) designed to tax the citizens of Indianapolis without all the pesky democracy getting in the way. First they built a convention center, and when the tax revenues generated by a food and beverage tax exceeded expectations they simply kept the difference, refusing to retire any of the debt early. They’ve built a basketball arena and a football dome, and torn those down to build new ones; they built a duplicate Camden Yards and just left our venerable old duplicate Wriggly Field to crumble in on itself. They built a mega-mall. And that’s just what gets the headlines. There are office buildings, a hotel, a renovated ballroom, and Who Knows what else; we don’t even get a dishonest accounting. A lot of that money finds its way to the Simons, who now say they want $15 mil off the top or they’re going to take their ball, and whatever players aren’t in prison, and find some other city to extort. The Colts deal is an effing insult. And the guy who seized control of it is one Mitch Daniels, and he currently occupies the lower 1/3 of our governor’s office.
So, digs to the ribs aside, I don’t blame anyone else for wishing this to be an Indianapolis problem, but it’s a political grab that’s been going on since I was thirteen, and I’ve never had the opportunity to vote on any of it either. The citizens of the doughnut counties drive to and from games on roads I help maintain with a wheel tax, using police, fire, and medical protection I pay for not just with property taxes but with a city surcharge, courtesy the grandstanding over property tax relief. The citizens of Lafayette, Petroleum, and East Donnybrook may have nothing to do with this, but their legislators, and their governor, are up to the neck in it. And if you think your taxes = theft, you ought to be down here, helping us build a big enough gibbet.