The Indiana Barrister has the text of furlough letters sent to state employees by Gov. Daniels. The man just can’t help himself.

According to the letters, he is blameless. In fact, if anything, he went too far in trying to assist the General Assembly in passing a budget. His magnanimous concessions in this regard were “foolhardy.” State employees should make clear in their voice mails and e-mail responses that it is the General Assembly’s failure (not the Governor’s) that the government shut down. Rather than simply advising that the state employee’s office is closed until a budget is passed, the employees are directed to specify that the offices are closed “due to the failure of The Indiana General Assembly.” This seems like kind of a dick move. So, does this tie his hands on a veto – since that would mean the General Assembly did, in fact, pass a budget?

I don’t think my last attempt at fixing my rss feeds worked. The problem is that, since a recent WordPress update, my feeds are providing only excerpts instead of the full text. I know some folks like excerpts because, theoretically, it could drive traffic to their actual sites – and potentially increase ad revenue. In my case, that’s not what has happened. It’s merely a case of technical illiteracy. I’ll get this fixed eventually.

Something about my last upgrade for WordPress seems to have broken my full feeds to feed readers, sending only excerpts. Changing the options didn’t have any effect. So, I’m trying the fix listed here.

I’m not sure this amount of text is enough to test the full v. excerpt, so enjoy a little poetry:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Today is the deadline for passing a budget. News reports indicate that legislators might have a deal that could pass. It’s “Republican flavored” and resembles the Senate version more than the House version. The budget will almost certainly pass the Senate, but it is reportedly questionable in the House. Whether the uncertainty is real or mostly posturing on the part of Speaker Bauer is hard to tell. In any case, it looks like Minority Leader Bosma will have to deliver some votes instead of the House Republicans’ customary bellyaching.

Mainly the individual representatives need to check the final numbers to see how their particular school districts are affected. The budget will probably need bipartisan support in the House, primarily because no one wants to be holding the political bag on this decision.

Bill Engle, reporter for Richmond’s Palladium-Item has a good article reporting on the budgetary impact of the city’s contracts with police and firefighters and the resulting overtime costs. It’s the kind of thing that we’ll really miss if and when the newspapers go under. And it’s the kind of thing that newspapers should have been doing more of in years past to avoid some of their current problems.

Solid reporting on local news is where newspapers, in my mind, really add value and provide an indispensable service to the community. I don’t suppose the profit margin on these kinds of stories is as big as running a national wire story or running an opinion piece. But wire stories and opinion pieces turn a local newspaper into a commodity. You can go somewhere else and get the same thing for less or for free. Actual local reporting is something you can’t get nearly as well from legions of bloggers or from a variety of other newspapers. Hopefully local reporting is a critical element in whatever business model for newspapers emerges from the current wreckage.

The Urbanophile has an interesting post that discusses, among other things, the impact of development externalities on suburban communities. Developers create suburban subdivisions with externalized costs and pocket the profits.

For example, the Indianapolis suburb of Westfield is reportedly on its way to 75,000; up from 3,000 in 1990 (and was up to about 20,500 as of 2007). Despite this, no real accounting has been done for development of roads to service the new developments. Instead, Westfield relies on unimproved county roads. The Urbanophile estimates it will take something on the order of $3.5 million per mile to improve two lane arterial roads. The Urbanophile goes on to consider the road construction needs the growth of Westfield is creating and states:

It probably isn’t totally off base to suggest that Westfield alone is probably generating a billion or so in road construction needs as a result of its projected buildout. Maybe more. Is it going to build these roads with impact fees from developers? It doesn’t seem likely given that there are over 20,000 people there and we’ve yet to see any serious road improvements. In effect, these developers have been able to get the taxpayers of the future to subsidize their developments to the tune of a billion or more in roads alone, to say nothing of all the other services above. And that’s just to build them, not maintain them.

So, the suggestion goes, perhaps “the mother of all impact fees” would be in order – charging developers up front the full cost of the total infrastructure buildout their developments create. The ability to run up deferred infrastructure liabilities creates an artificially attractive incentive to build in places were such development costs do not have to be internalized into the price of development.

Well worth a read.

The Fort Wayne News Sentinel editorial board makes this proclamation:

No other General Assembly in Indiana history has failed to pass a new budget, even when a special session was required. Legislators are under tremendous pressure to not become the first ones to fail.

This does not appear to be accurate. Eric Bradner of the Evansville Courier Press informs us that, during the Civil War, Governor Morton – a strong, pro-union type – wasn’t happy with the Democratic resistance to some of his less constitutional actions and had his Republican supporters in the General Assembly flee the area to prevent a quorum. As a result, no budget was passed and Gov. Morton essentially put the budget on the credit card or had supporters with deep pockets fund the state’s activities.

In addition, Professor DeBoer advises that “the legislature adjourned without passing a budget in 1873, and again in 1887. Apparently they muddled through using a combination of balances and borrowing, and a State Supreme Court ruling in 1889 (Hovey v. Foster) approved the use of debt.”

Seems like quite a flub on the part of the News-Sentinel. Fortunately, with education budgets looking to get cut in a number of places around the state, our kids will never learn enough history to spot the errors.

I’m happy to pass along that my old hometown of Richmond has once again been designated an “All-American City.” Fort Wayne was the other Indiana city that received the designation — Fort Wayne’s third. South Bend came close but lost out. The All-America City designation is given out to 10 cities each year by the National Civic League. The ten cities receiving the designation this year were:
Richmond
Fort Wayne
Phoenix, AZ
Inglewood, CA
Wichita, KS
Somerville, MA
Albany, NY
Kinston, NC
Statesville, NC
Caroline County, VA

Richmond won the designation back in 1987, and I remember it seemed like a pretty big deal for the community. I drove back through town recently and, on one of the water towers, there was a very faded “All American City” sign. That faded sign struck me as a very apt symbol for Richmond.

This time around, the kids led the way. From a previous article:

A core group of Logos eighth-graders, including Alaina Keene, Elaine Brady, Matt Sheridan, Haley Owens, Andrew Stevens and Shauna Flanagan, did much of the research and compiled the written application. They had assistance from [Mary Jo] Clark, Pat Heiny, Fonda Wilds, Valerie Westbrook, Kathy Lucid, Judy Studebaker and Francie Klinge.

After the victory, I was particularly struck by this comment:

Later, after the honor began to sink in, Collins told his fellow teammates, “Who would have thought? The ‘drop out factory’ would be come an All-America City.”

That drop out factory designation has apparently stung more people than myself. In fact, the drop out designation seems to have motivated one of the projects that helped Richmond win the designation. It set up a “Third Grade Reading Academy,” “motivated by the Wayne County Learning Corporation’s Education Summit of October, 2007, the entire community set out to address the 30% high school drop out rate by raising third-grade reading levels.”

Anyway, good going Richmond and Fort Wayne.

Ben Zion Hershberg, writing for the Evansville Courier Press, reports on the unfortunate tale of Larry Wilder, a lawyer who represents the Jefferson City Council. Seems Mr. Wilder was found passed out with his head in a neighbor’s garbage can after a night of revelry.

I could make clucking noises about how I don’t see how this could happen to anyone. Except that I can. Back before kids and much in the way of work responsibilities, there may have been an evening or two I had to reconstruct due to excess consumption.

Apparently Mr. Wilder was celebrating a friend’s licensing exam results. They took a limo and, apparently, got really drunk, and he got almost back to his house, but not quite. The neighbor saw a guy in his trash can when he took the dog out in the morning, and called the police. Apparently, Mr. Wilder is a good neighbor, because the guy whose trash can it was seems to feel bad about calling the police. Says that if he’d realized who it was, he wouldn’t have gotten the police involved.

Now, because the guy has a public job of sorts, representing the city council, it qualifies as news. (And blog-fodder for me.) This, in turn, will push the city council to wrestle with whether or not they have to cut the guy loose as a nod toward decorum — apparently the council is happy with his work. I would be remiss if I didn’t note that the folks in the newspaper comments section were having a grand time with this story. Some highlights:

#Lookit–somebody threw away a perfectly good lawyer.

#Where else would you find a good lawyer?

#Yes Your Honor, he was completely trashed.

#This is absolutely disgraceful! How could such a thing happen!?!? Why didn’t his friends leave the can upright with the top securely in place?