As school gets underway this month for a lot of Hoosier kids I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the Indiana State Teachers Association.  ISTA has been at the forefront of criticizing education reforms without offering meaningful alternatives.   They’ve also complained about school funding as well.  However, if you take a look at the salaries of some of the unions key players, something just doesn’t seem right.

• Nate Schnellenberger (President) –  $234,811.
• Larry Davis (Dir. of Financial Planning) – $219,231.
• Jennifer Clutter (CFO) – $197,628.
• Sharon Casey (Uniserv Director) – $353,629.
• Marie Giese (Uniserv Director) – $355.736.
• Nancy Pappas (Professional Staff) – $354,668.
• Donald Thompson (Uniserv Director) – $373,981.
• Terry Troxell (Uniserv Director) – $373,578.

This information all comes from the 2010 filing of ISTA’s 990 form with the federal government to keep its not-for-profit status.  The salaries are based in information from 1099s and other “related compensation” (i.e. retirement, deferred compensation, etc).   I’ve embedded a copy with this blog post so you can see the information for yourself.  It’s on page 25.   You can make your own judgment call from here, but had I known I could make $350,000 working for a teachers union, I would have skipped law school altogether.

I wasn’t planning to blog again until Monday, but never let it be said a little thing like an out-of-state trial would stand in the way of me picking up lots of gossip, rumor and blatant political innuendo.  You know you all have been waiting for it, so here we go…

• Last week’s debt ceiling votes by Indiana lawmakers had me scratching my head, especially when it comes to the Tea Party movement in this state.  They blasted U.S. Senator Dick Lugar and U.S. Representative Larry Buschon for their votes in favor of lifting the debt ceiling, but said nothing about Mike Pence and Todd Young who also voted the same way.  There is also talk the Tea Party will try to run a primary challenger against Buschon in the 8th Congressional District.
• Speaking of races, I tried to get some more details on Club for Growth’s poll numbers involving Lugar and Richard Mourdock and got nothing.  The guy who answered the phone was a bit of jerk.  Their poll showed a 2-point difference between the two.  Lugar’s poll showed him under 50%, but with a double-digit lead.  Not spectacular, but I got a lot more info from them, than Club for Growth.
• The Jim Wallace for Governor campaign tells me their recent television ad is paying off, saying since it ran they’ve been “pulling in some serious cash”.
• Efforts by the Marion County Democrats to play the race card against incumbent Mayor Greg Ballard haven’t been working too well, so now they are trying a different tactic.  They are accusing the Blacks who are working with the Mayor of being “Uncle Toms” and on the Mayor’s payroll.  For example, City-County Councilor Vern Brown has been looking to see what checks the 10-point coalition has received from the city so he can say they are on the “mayor’s plantation”.  Several McDems are still upset that the Melina Kennedy’s polling reportedly shows the Mayor running strong in the black community and when you throw in the fact no one got shot at Expo (despite their best wishes) you have to start doing something.
• Speaking of plantations, Al Sharpton is reportedly threatening/promising/vowing to come back to town in the wake of the Justice Department’s decision that IMPD did not violate Brandon Johnson’s civil rights.  I’m not sure what Sharpton is going to protest, seeing how it was the Obama Justice Department who made the call.   I just hope that if he does come he tells Stephen Clay of the Baptist Ministers Alliance of Indianapolis to stop avoiding my question and answer (with a simple yes or no) if he was ever the subject of an investigation by the Indiana Department of Child Services for inappropriate contact with a minor.  I can’t get a straight answer out of that man.  No pun intended.
• IPS Superintendent Eugene White is the gift that keeps on giving.  He penned a letter criticizing David Harris of the Mind Trust because of Harris’ position on education reform.  Just a couple years back, White was praising Harris and the Mind Trust for their efforts.  What a difference calls for accountability can make.
• Speaking of IPS, Dr. Tony Bennett is scheduled to address the IPS School Board at their meeting on Monday night.  That should be interesting.  If I can use an old WWF reference, watching Tony Bennett and Eugene White go back and forth would be like watching Hulk Hogan take on Special Delivery Jones.
• I hear anti-smoking advocates are getting ready to re-introduce another total smoking ban ordinance here in Indianapolis.   I also hear that because of Smoke Free Indy’s shenanigans last session a number of lawmakers are looking at drafting pre-emption language which would prohibit locals from banning smoking in tobacco shops, private clubs and cigar bars.  So if something does happen this year or next year, there’s a good chance it will be short-lived.
• And a big congrats to my friends at Hoosier Access and Capitol & Washington. They, along with Indiana Barrister, made the Washington Post’s list of best state political blogs in the country.   Indiana Barrister also made the list back in 2009.

That’s all for now.  I have a few more items to post over the next couple days, but they get special treatment.  It’s nice to be back, even if it’s a day or two early.

I’m heading out of town today.  Another fun week of playing lawyer, fulfilling other legal obligations and trying to decompress.  Since I will have my hands full Indiana Barrister is taking a break as well.  We will both be back August 8.   Enjoy my time away.

Believe it or not, every time I hear Melina Kennedy offer up a plan I usually hope it is something that will be rooted in logic and reason.  I mean after all, even a broken clock is right twice a day.  So when I showed up to her news conference Thursday morning (no I did not get an invite) I was hoping this time would be different.   No such luck.

The Democratic candidate for Mayor of Indianapolis offered up a “plan” for public safety which included the following points.

• 100 new police officers on the street. (50 would be reassigned from current duty, another 50 would be new hires).
• Stepped up community policing.
• Going after illegal guns.
• More crime prevention grant money.
• The creation of a crime statistics commission.
• A Drug Czar and Initiatives Director.
• A centralized grants office.
• New technology.

I really want to delve into her ideas but I couldn’t get past the first one.  When asked how she would hire the new officers she said she would look in the budget, apply for grants and dip into the $150 million endowment that she would use by taking away money for roads and infrastructure.

If you go to IMPD’s website you’ll find the starting salary for an officer is right under $40,000 annually.  That number goes up to $58,000 by year 3.  But let’s stick with the lower number.  If she wants to hire 50 new officers at $40,000 a year, she has to find $2,000,000 to start.  And remember it’s not just an officer, it’s benefits, insurance (don’t forget the family), the college incentive pay, the vehicle, the sick leave, the vacation leave, the pension plan and the deferred comp.  So that $40,000 is more like $70,000 easily which means that $2 million is more like $3.5 million.  And that’s just for one year.  The average officer sticks around for 20 years.  So her $3.5 million expense is now $70 million or half the endowment.  And she still wants to pay for early childhood education, crime prevention grants and job training.   And since we don’t have the money for rods the city can’t attempt to levy federal matching funds so there’s another $105 million the city can’t use.

So out of the gate, Melina’s plan has eaten up half the endowment, cost the city $105 million in road money, and we still have to pay for her other programs.  In the coming weeks Melina says she will introduce additional public safety plan elements.  If her early ideas are already costing the city this much money, who knows how much she’ll spend if she were ever able to actually get her hands on it.  This is vision?  Only if your Oedipus Rex or Stevie Wonder.  This public safety plan seemed like it was drafted by someone who wanted to be a county prosecutor who never tried a criminal case and let their law license expire and only renewed it four months before forming an exploratory committee before running for the job.

I hope the next time will be better, but I don’t think so. After all I couldn’t get a straight answer from her as to whether she thought the city was safer now than it was in 2006 when we had a record homicide rate.

My question for Melina on Crime

I hadn’t planned to blog about Franklin Township schools in southeastern Indianapolis but they are turning into the gift that keeps on giving, sorry IPS.  As you know a number of parents are furious that the school district is forcing them to pay for bus service.

Although the school district says its necessary because voters turned down a referendum to increase property taxes, there appears to be a little more to the story.  Franklin Township parents have to pay nearly $500 per child to take the bus.  The buses are run by an organization called the Central Indiana Education Service Center, not-for-profit organization whose mission statement is to “foster collaboration for the success of education and educators in Marion and surrounding counties.”  The district reportedly leased the buses to the CIESC for $1.

So what, you might say.  I said the same thing until I went and looked at their board of directors and discovered that Franklin Township Superintendent Dr. Walter Bourke is the chairman of the board.  Call me crazy, but that just doesn’t seem right.  The Superintendent of the school district that doesn’t have enough money for bus services, leases the district’s buses to an organization that he’s the chairman of, really?   This raises a number of questions, does he get paid or reimbursed for any of his work?  Was any of this disclosed to the public before a board vote was taken?  By the reaction on my facebook page, I don’t think so. The folks of Franklin Township are already furious and this little bit of news is only going to make them madder.  And I wouldn’t be surprised if this arrangement doesn’t end up on the Indiana Attorney General’s radar screen.

There are already discussions of boycotts and backing up traffic on the first day of school.  And while I’m not one to advise people on how to conduct their revolutions, but if it were me I’d organize the families of about 500-600 kids and tell Dr. Bourke and the District that if they don’t straighten up and fly right the kids may not show up for school on September 16.  Why is that date important?  That’s the official count day for school districts in Indiana.  The state counts the number of students in school that day and determines the funding formula from there.  So assuming Franklin Township gets $5,000 per child from the state, if 500 kids stay home on count day the district will lose $2.5 million.  I know it sounds like exercising the nuclear option, but you don’t take a knife to a gunfight.

Of course all this wouldn’t be necessary if Dr. Bourke, the school board and Franklin Township school administration would do a much better job of engaging their community, however as you sow, so shall you reep.  Let the reeping begin.

Every once in a while my sense of civic responsibility requires to me play moderator at local town hall forums; Tuesday night took me to Franklin township in southeast Indianapolis. Parents had a meeting to discuss being charged nearly $500 per child per year for bus service. School officials say the fee is necessary because residents voted down a referendum last fall which would have allowed for a property tax increase. Since state law prohibits school districts from charging for bus service once it’s been offered at no charge, Franklin township gave its bus service to a private company for $1 and now the private company is levying the fee. As you can imagine, the natives were not happy.

What struck me the most was the air of bad blood between the school board and the citizens. Only one board member showed up, Aaron Sullivan, two were out of town and the other two declined. In addition, Walter Bourke, the Superintendent declined to show up as well. I understand tough times call for tough measures but this is the classic case of school administrators taking a bad situation and making it worse. There are already questions regarding the legality of the school district’s plan and there is an even bigger overriding issue of whether the district can charge the families of students on free and reduced lunch for bus service.

If the district were smart, it would dip into its surplus and provide bus service for another year while it works with the community to reach a workable solution. But to do that requires trust and if there is one thing that does not exist between the Franklin Township school district and its citizens is trust. There is a lot of anger though. And next year is a school board election. Those two items always make for interesting results.

I’ll be watching this one closely.

Some things just speak for themselves.

With all the talk about the debt ceiling and whether and how it should be raised I thought a nice little primer might be necessary on how much we owe and what got us here.   Here’s a breakdown of who owns our $14.3 trillion worth of debt*…

• U.S. Individuals and Institutions –  $9.8 trillion or 68 %.
• China – 1.16 trillion or 8% .
• Japan – $912 billion or 6.4 %.
• Other Foreign nations – $1.6 trillion or 11.6 %
• United Kingdom – $346 billion or  3.4%.

As you can see, we own most of our own debt. That 68% consists of me, you, our investments, state and local governments, social security, etc.   So how did we get this far in the hole?  Easy, the same way everybody gets into debt, we spent more than we took in*.

• Medicaid/Medicare –  $823 billion
• Social Security – $716 billion
• Defense (Iraq & Afghanistan included) – $702 billion
• Income Security – $421 billion
• Interest on the debt – $213 billion
• Federal pensions –  $213 billion

That totals nearly $3 trillion we’ve spent this year and only taken in $2.2 trillion.  And note, I wrote this Monday afternoon using data from the national debt clock, and were going in the hole to the tune of about $500,000 per minute.  So by the time this blog post goes up between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m.  we will have spent ourselves another nearly another $220 million in the hole.  I think this is the part where I say the first step to getting out of a hole is to stop digging.

Let’s say you’re running for Mayor in a big city.  And while the political demographics of the town tend to work in your favor, you still have some major challenges.  For example you just polled and you found out your opponent has a double digit lead and an approval rating in the 70 percentile range.  Your previous talking points about jobs, crime and education have gotten a little traction, but haven’t really stuck.  So what do you do?  Figure out a way to combine all three, use money designated for other purposes and call it a vision, even if that vision has myopia.

On Friday Melina Kennedy, the Democratic candidate for Indianapolis Mayor, unveiled a “major policy speech” at the downtown Kiwanis club.  Kennedy called on taking $150 million from the city’s transfer of its water and waste-water facilities to Citizens Gas and instead of using it for roads and infrastructure as originally planned, she would create an endowment fund and use it for early childhood education, job training and crime prevention.   Melina’s logic is pretty simple; instead of spending the money on roads, which she says will only last seven years, the city should invest in projects that yield more long term benefits, thus her three areas of focus. The problem with Melina’s argument is that, upon closer inspection, it is full of fallacies.  I’ll walk you through them.

First, it’s not just $150 million the city is spending on roads and infrastructure. The number is potentially closer to $255 million because the city takes the money from the water transfer and uses it to levy federal dollars for other road projects.  Currently the federal government will match local governments up to 70% for certain road projects so that $150 million could potentially yield and additional $105 million in federal road money.  So one could argue Kennedy’s would cost the city an additional $105 million and it hasn’t even been implemented.

Secondly, Melina  makes the claim that the construction projects and street repaving will only be good for 5-7 years before the streets have to be repaved. That would be true if the Department of Public Works did repaving the same way the Peterson administration did.  When the former folks in charge repaved the streets they would only go a quarter-inch deep which meant the roads would have to repaved sooner.  Currently DPW goes deeper than that so the roads can go between 15-20 years before repaving, depending on usage.  In addition the way the city does sidewalks now means they can lat 20-30 years before having to be redone. So fixing roads aren’t the “short-term” projects she labelled them as.

Third, not to bring up the past but Melina was part of the administration that caused the water company deal to be necessary in the first place.  Remember it was the Peterson administration bought it nearly a decade ago and not only overpaid on the deal but also used variable rate bonds which added an additional $500 million in debt service which could have been used for streets and road repair but instead was part of the debt transfer.  And I won’t even bring up the state of DPW vehicles and snow plows prior to 2008.  So if we couldn’t trust them then with the water company, why do it now?

Fourth, Melina says early childhood education will reap long-term benefits for the city.  That sounds good, but is not necessarily true.   The data also shows many of the gains made in early childhood education are lost by the 3rd and 4th grade unless schools and parents stay engaged and keep up the pace of learning.  And even in IPS, the problem isn’t at the elementary school level, the district actually performs relatively well, it’s the middle schools and high schools (as evidenced by a possible state takeover) is where the problems lie.

If Melina wanted to offer a suggestion she should have taken a page out of Governor Mitch Daniels playbook and recommended some of the dollars from the sale be put in a trust fund so that the city could use the interest for road repairs and have a steady source of revenue so the city won’t have to dip into its general revenue fund.   Maybe had she attended one of the numerous pubic hearings on road projects she could have made that suggestion. Speaking of which, if the city followed her plan and diverted the $150 million, whose neighborhoods would continue to be neglected?  Who doesn’t get their streets fixed and who doesn’t get the abandoned home in their neighborhood torn down?  As her campaign staff found out the hard way recently at a church function on the near east-side the people there actually like having their streets and sidewalks fixed because they had been neglected for so long.  And aren’t paved roads and a solid infrastructure crucial to economic development and home values?   She was the Deputy Mayor for economic development, right?

I do believe Melina’s heart is in the right place and I can respect wanting to address issues of job training, early childhood education and crime prevention; of course I could argue there are numerous programs already in place addressing these issues. If she wants to implement her idea use her bully pulpit and start up her own endowment fund and encourage citizens, companies and her donors to give freely.  However, what she proposes is tantamount to robbing Peter to pay Paul.  And not only is Paul getting robbed, the money is being spent on vague ambiguous concepts that may sound good but Melina never provided a lot of details on how any of this would work.  I’m sure she will over the course of the campaign (granted she won’t speak to me) but right now I don’t see how taking money from concrete projects and spending it on abstract ideas is a smart thing to do.

And yes, you can argue I have a bias toward the incumbent, but you can’t argue with the facts.  And as critics of the water deal and parking meter deal like to say, “a big idea is not necessarily a bright idea”.