A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

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HB 1536: Crime of Intimidation

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Rep. Hatcher has introduced HB 1536 which would modify the definition of the crime of intimidation. The new definition would simply be “a threat to another person, with the intent that another person be placed in fear that the threat will be carried out.” The current definition is a threat: 1) with the intent that the person engage in conduct against their will; 2) with the intent that the person will be placed in fear of retaliation for a prior lawful act; and/or 3) the intent that a dwelling or vehicle will be evacuated or interfering with the occupancy of the dwelling or vehicle.

Obviously the new definition would be much broader. For example, it would encompass fear of retaliation for a prior unlawful act which I could envision being both good and bad. “I’m going to kick your ass for bullying my daughter” is more sympathetic than “I’m going to kick your ass for selling me bad heroin.” I’m sure the change has broader implications than that, but it’s early, and I’m not coming up with anything that’s much more sophisticated.

Sheila Kennedy on Voucher legislation

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Sheila Kennedy has a good post on legislation to be introduced by Rep. Forestal (I can’t currently find the bill listed under the list of bills he’s involved with.) The legislation has to do with preventing discrimination by private schools that operate with public money — particularly having in mind the Roncalli situation where the school fired an otherwise qualified guidance counselor because she’s married to a woman. The school says this violates their religious beliefs.

Pro-voucher legislators say that they want to improve kids’ educations by giving them a choice. They want to improve schools by unleashing market forces and competition. They want to help poor kids access alternative to the failing public schools they are in. That was more persuasive before the voucher policy was actually put in place. Now we know that a lot of the money goes to kids who never went to public school in the first place — let alone were stuck in a failing school. Voucher don’t improve educational outcomes. If anything, they harm those outcomes. What’s really going on is that pro-voucher legislators want to: a) hurt the teacher’s unions; b) re-direct education money to friends and well-wishers; and c) subsidize religious education. Forestal’s bill, as described, would target item “c.”

Sheila writes:

The bill that Representative Forestal proposes to introduce addresses another glaring defect of the voucher program: the lack of standards imposed on participating schools.

A colleague and I recently surveyed voucher programs operating around the U.S., in order to see whether any of those programs required participating schools to teach civics. You will probably not be surprised to learn that none did. I’m relatively confident that if we conducted a follow-up survey, we would be equally unable to find programs imposing non-discrimination requirements. Any nondiscrimination requirements, not just those protective of LGBTQ students and faculty.

There is something very disturbing about taking money away from our public schools and sending it to religious schools without attaching any meaningful conditions. Taxpayers may well be funding schools that teach creationism, that refuse to teach evolution, and that discriminate against students and faculty members who violate tenets of their theologies. (In Louisiana, schools participating in that state’s voucher program were found to be doing all of these things.)

I hope such legislation moves forward, but doubt it will. Pro-voucher legislators likely view permitting such discrimination as more of a feature than a bug. One of the main purposes of voucher legislation was to subsidize this kind of thing.

Loss of a Brother, Reflection on Childhood

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So, I had a complicated family life growing up. My folks divorced when I was two, my father married the woman who had lived across the street — my old neighbors became my step family. They lived for a time in rural Wayne County (near Richmond where I lived) before moving out to Colorado. I guess I was probably about six years old when they moved to Colorado. I guess my sisters and I went out to what we called “the farm” every other weekend, but I don’t really know because it was so long ago. After the Colorado move, we saw them for several weeks during the summer and I recall going out there one Christmas. I believe the last summer, Colorado visit would have been in 1980 when I was eight. Then there were some child support issues, and we didn’t go out there anymore. Then my father and step-mother got divorced, so I never saw that set of step-siblings again.

I’m prompted to write this for a few reasons, chief among them is that I learned that my step-brother (or ex-step-brother, I suppose), Mike Masson, died. I have to specify a last name because due to my mother getting remarried once and my father getting remarried three times, I have three step-brothers named Rick and, up until yesterday, two step-brothers named Mike. All told, I have eight brothers and eight sisters. I couldn’t tell you all of their names on a bet. Despite having met them all at one time or another, some of the names from my father’s third and fourth marriages escape me. I was friends with Mike and one of my ex-step-sisters on Facebook which is how I learned of his death. I’m not close enough with her to feel comfortable asking about the details of his death, so I’m stalking the comment thread to find out the details.

[Fun side story about Facebook and this slice of my family: It was the period between signing the purchase agreement and closing on my house in West Lafayette. My step-sister also happened to be moving and posted something about moving. I chimed in on that thread saying, “I’m moving too.” Then, oddly, the woman I was buying from jumps into the thread and says, “I think you’re buying the house from me.” I responded, “I think that’s right. How do you know [step-sister]?” Turns out it was my step-sister’s cousin. I had actually met her in 1980 on the drive to Colorado when they lived in St. Louis and we stopped there to visit on the way. We went up in the St. Louis Arch together!]

The other, less pressing, reasons for writing this blog post are: a) Despite having made a few aborted efforts at keeping a diary or journal, I never keep up with them and never know where to find the book or whatever I was using when it occurs to me to record personal thoughts. This blog is the closest thing I have. So occasionally I write one of these things that the public doesn’t necessarily need to know about or have any particular reason to care about. I thank you for letting me indulge myself; and b) Mike’s death has me dredging up some long-forgotten memories of that time in my life. As I get older, those memories get more distant, and I’m afraid that if I don’t write them down, they’ll be lost entirely.  I know it’s bad form to turn someone else’s death into commentary about yourself, but I didn’t really know him that well, so here we are.

My memories from “the Farm” are really just disjointed scenes:

  • The other kids were carrying me as a “patient” on a stretcher that was really just a blanket. They dropped me and I smashed my knee into the stair rail bannister which gave me a scar on my knee which has faded but which I can still find if I really look.
  • There was a boulder that we just called “the Big Rock” that we went and climbed and jumped off of. 
  • There was a creek with a shady spot that widened out into a sand bar. 
  • There seemed to be a lot of daddy longlegs spiders. 
  • The house had a big porch and there was an afternoon where we jumped from the rail out into the yard, yelling “naked ladies!” for some reason. 
  • This may not have been the Farm and could have been later, but I remember spending the night outside with Mike, and we’d get all excited when we saw a satellite. They were so rare back in those days. We’d shine a flashlight up into the sky and talk about how the light wouldn’t stop until it hit a star.

From a little later on when they moved to a town in western Colorado (Austin, CO, not that far from Delta):

  • Mike was born on July 7, 1970. The bank in town gave him seven silver dollars on account of him turning seven on 7/7/77.
  • You could sometimes hear sonic booms as jets broke the sound barrier.
  • As the youngest family members, we were put in the far back of the station wagon on a drive from Indiana to Colorado. We figured out that cards would fit under the door as we drove — so we entertained ourselves by watching Uno cards fluttering off into the Kansas countryside. However, we got busted when one of the adults opened the door at a McDonald’s stop and the cards that hadn’t escaped were piled up under the back car door.
  • Mike got a radio that only seemed to get two radio stations out in that part of the country. That summer, Billy Joel’s “My Life” and “Le Freak” by Chic seemed to be getting a lot of airplay. Must’ve been 1978.
  • I got the flu one summer and felt horrible. I can think of only one other time when I may have been sicker. They gave me Sprite or Seven-Up to settle my stomach.
  • To get to the house, you had to go up what seemed like the time to be a gigantic hill. It got really hot and it was really dry out there. So, as I was sitting down resting on my journey up the hill, I had my very first encounter with red ants. They hurt.
  • There was a general store at the bottom of the hill. The daughter of the owner was a girl named Michelle who was about my age. She was my first crush. I want to say I kissed her, but maybe I only wanted to.
  • I helped Mike raise pigs for 4H or some such. It may have been unrelated, but we ended up going to a rodeo for what seems like a couple of days. I don’t know where Mike was — maybe participating in an event? — but I hung out with some other kid who taught me that, even if you had no money, you could get mustard packets for free. So, me and a random kid in western Colorado hung out at a rodeo sucking down a bunch of mustard packets.
  • In the car going to the airport for my sisters and I to go back to Indiana, Mike and I were stuck in the back as per usual and were having a great time repeatedly and loudly singing the theme song to the “Godzilla” cartoon. We took great delight belting out the high notes when the song got to the words “. . . and Godzuki.” I’m not positive if this would have been the summer of 1980 (Wikipedia says the cartoon had two seasons, released in the fall of 1978 and of 1979), but if it was, it’s entirely possible that this was the last time I saw Mike.
  • My step-mother told me she was going to buy me some winter gloves. I was really looking forward to them, and we’d picked out a pair. She was giving me a lecture on how I had to take care of them, and I was agreeing to do so. Then, for some reason, she changed her mind and decided not to get them. I never got any gloves.
  • In the summer of 1980, my father and step-mother were moving from a house in Austin to a house in Crawford. There was work to be done, bailing hay out at the new property, I believe. Mike and I weren’t much help with that and, instead, spent the afternoon intertubing down the creek that was on or near the property.
  • There were a couple of Korean kids who lived down the road. They taught us the proper way to throw a karate punch which we thought was pretty cool. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with karate and was a horrible way to throw a punch.
  • We had a Japanese exchange student named Chizaru visiting one year. On the way to pick her up, Mike told me not to mention Iwo Jima or Hiroshima. I had no idea what those were at the time, so no problem keeping mum.
  • We had some pretty sweet Battlestar Galactica toys. He had the Cylon, and I had the Colonial Warrior.
  • Maybe the first time I was in Colorado, there was a drought. I could have misunderstood, but my sense was that the adults were mad about water restrictions because some of the water was diverted to Denver. (It was, I now realize, the aggrieved tone rural folks often take about city dwellers.) At some point, I flushed the toilet and said, “there goes the water to Denver!” That got big laughs.
  • Mike had a toy shotgun that you could stuff dirt into the barrel and, when you fired it, it looked like smoke coming out. Later on, he had a pellet gun we liked to shoot and a bow and arrow that we shot into a target on some hay stacks. The trouble was that we’d often miss and the arrows would get lost in the hay pile.

Just as a general matter, I remember being a sensitive kid and feeling somewhat intimidated by and lesser than Mike. He was bigger and louder than me. Beyond that, the family seemed to have an outdoorsy, active orientation and activities along those lines didn’t come naturally. I was more of a smart, studious rule follower — those qualities were not well-regarded in any demonstrable kind of way. I wasn’t athletically horrible or opposed to the outdoors, but that generally wasn’t my wheelhouse. It wasn’t until I learned to be funny that I got much in the way of positive reinforcement.

At the time, everything seemed normal. I was little and didn’t know any better. In retrospect, things seem a bit chaotic, and there is a distinct lack of parental involvement in most of my memories of those days. I think the lack of structure contributed to my overall anxiousness. Anyway, that’s my trip down memory lane. I might add more if anything else occurs to me. R.I.P. Mike.

Consent and Rape by Fraud Legislation

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Pro-tip: Whether it’s a crime or not, don’t have sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you.

Dave Bangert, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, has an article about introduced bills that might address the situation at Purdue where a guy had sex with a woman after climbing into her boyfriend’s bed where she was sleeping, causing her to believe it was her boyfriend. (I wrote about a Buzzfeed article on the subject a month or so ago.)

The first is HB 1489 introduced by Rep. Errington concerning rape and sexual battery. The main thrust of this bill is to define “consent” and add the concept of lack of consent to the rape and sexual battery laws. Currently, rape requires sexual intercourse where the person is compelled by force or is mentally incapable (e.g. unconscious or significant mental disability) of consent (which is undefined under current law). Under the new law, intercourse without consent would be rape and touching for one’s own sexual gratification without consent would be sexual battery. The legislation defines consent as follows:

Sec. 57.7. “Consent” means a free, voluntary, knowing, and mutual agreement to engage in a specific sexual act or contact, including positive and affirmative cooperation in words, act, or attitude pursuant to the exercise of free will. Consent may be withdrawn at any time, and any expression of lack of consent, by words, act, or attitude, means that consent does not exist or has been withdrawn. The: (1) existence of a current or previous dating, social, sexual, or marital relationship by itself; or (2) manner of a person’s dress; does not constitute consent. Submission under the influence of fear, deception, coercion, or surprise does not constitute consent.

I’d defer to the prosecutors and the defense attorneys as to how this would actually play out in criminal prosecutions, but I agree with the general concept. Defining “consent” in the context of the criminal law such that it survives a vagueness challenge strikes me as tricky. (Courts tend to review the language of criminal statutes more closely because it involves the power of the government to take away the liberty of its citizens.) As such, I’m not sure I’d include “free” in there because I don’t know that it carries any freight not already covered by “voluntary.” I’m also not sure I’d include “mutual” because, do you really care if the offender is part of the agreement? It’s the agreement of the person on the receiving end of the action that you’re worried about.

I’m also a little concerned by the change of words in the middle. Up top, it says “consent means agreement.” But then, at the end, you say “submission under the influence of fear, deception, coercion, or surprise does not constitute consent.” So, you’ve switched from talking about agreement to submission. I’m not sure whether as a practical matter that switch in terminology would cause mischief, but that’s the kind of thing I worry about when I’m drafting legislation. And, of course, there are the line drawing problems that detractors of consent legislation have raised. Some is kicking up dust because they don’t want things to change, but some is worth discussion — e.g. if he says “I love you” but he really doesn’t, does that constitute deception which turns the act into criminal behavior? Should it?

The other is bill is HB 1584 which seems aimed more directly at the Purdue incident. It adds to the crimes of rape and sexual battery intercourse or sexual touching where “the person knows or reasonably should have known that the other person believes that the person is the other person’s spouse or significant other. “Significant other” means “a person with whom someone has a dating relationship or an ongoing personal relationship. The term ‘ongoing personal relationship’ does not include a family
relationship.” I guess my problem with this is confining the crime to spouses or significant others. It seems to imply that rape by deception is more or less o.k. if you’re impersonating someone the victim didn’t know very well.

However this plays out, I did like Rep. Campbell’s comment at the end of the Bangert article:

“I don’t know if this bill or any other like it will be heard in committee,” Campbell said. “If it doesn’t, this is something we’ll keep pushing for. No one should have to go through what (Finney) went through. It’s a crime. Indiana should say so.”

SB 605: Indiana-Michigan Boundary Commission

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Sen. Doriot has introduced SB 605 creating the Indiana-Michigan Boundary Commission. The members will be five professional surveyors, one of whom must be from one of the boundary counties of Elkhart, LaGrange, LaPorte, St. Joseph, or Steuben County. The commission is to oversee the resurvey and placement of new boundary monuments for the Indiana-Michigan border. In particular, the survey is required to install “relatively permanent monumentation at the mile post positions and other positions at or near lakes or large rivers as established by the original government survey of October 1827.” However, they aren’t allowed to replace lost monuments unless the State of Michigan participates in the project.

This one appealed to my sense of history. Also, for some reason, it brought to mind the Lou Riccetti character in Joel Rosenberg’s “Guardian of the Flame” series. The conceit of the series was that a bunch of college students who played something like Dungeons & Dragons got transported into the fantasy world. One of the students was a civil engineer who was excited because, in our world, all of the great projects (e.g. Hoover Dam, the Interstate System) had been done and now civil engineers were confined to small bore projects. I’d imagine this project would be kind of fun for a professional surveyor. Who gets to survey something like a state boundary now?

 

SB 127: Referendum for School Safety Levy

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Idea: Lets allocate more security dollars to low population, high value areas and less to high population, low value areas and see how that works out.

Sen. Holdman has introduced SB 127 concerning the ability of schools to conduct referendums to raise taxes for school safety. Nobody likes taxes, but schools, local control, safety — all of that’s good, right? Unfortunately, this legislation hinges on the presumption that the security needs of a school corporation is somehow correlated with the property values within that district. If anything, my guess is that the relationship is inverse. As a per-pupil calculation, the discrepancy can result in one school district generating 14x as much revenue per pupil than another district. It also ignores the transaction costs involved with conducting these referendums. The legislation provides that “A school corporation may impose a school safety referendum tax levy for the school corporation’s fund in the amount allowed under sections 6 through 19 of this chapter, but the amount may not exceed five cents ($0.05) on each one hundred dollars ($100) of assessed valuation.” It then has language talking about the school safety purposes for which the referendum money can be used.

This works out better for school districts with high assessed valuations and lower student populations and worse for districts with lower assessed valuations and higher student populations. This is counter-productive if it turns out (and I think it does) that school districts with a lot of kids living in areas with low property values end up having more security needs. It also does not seem to have a realistic view of what kind of money it takes to conduct one of these referendums. My second hand understanding is that the expense of paying to have one of these elections can vary quite a bit, but $25,000 – $50,000 is not out of the ball park.

The fiscal note for SB 127 has a nice breakdown of how much could be realized per school district with the $0.05 cap in place. Cannelton School Corporation maxes out at $9,931 per year. Meanwhile, down the river in Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corporation, the revenues could be up to $3.4 million. It’s true enough that Evansville-Vanderburgh has more students than Cannelton, but on a per pupil basis, this plan is maybe even more off-kilter.  Using the 2017 Average Daily Membership numbers,  Cannelton has an ADM of 242, so this would bring in $41 per pupil versus an ADM of 21,930 in Evansville for about $155 per pupil. Mishawaka, with about 5,100 kids could generate about $346,284 for $67.77 per pupil. Meanwhile, Hamilton Community School Corporation up in the northeastern part of the state has about 327 kids but would generate $188,731 for approximately $577 per pupil.

A system where Hamilton Community School Corp can generate 14x as much per student as Cannelton despite having similar population sizes and 8x as much per pupil as Mishawaka despite having, I suspect, fewer security concerns, is not a great system. Cannelton might even lose money on the deal, depending on how much it costs to conduct the referendum. To make matters worse, the legislation prohibits a school that passes a referendum from receiving a grant from the Indiana secured school fund.

If the State is going to tell schools how to spend their education dollars, it should do so in a way that’s equitable and more or less rational. So, if it’s going to provide that tax dollars have to go to security concerns rather than other educational concerns, more money should go to schools with greater security needs, and we shouldn’t have a system where low population, high AV school districts are generating 14x as much per student as other school districts.

HB 1522: Children’s Overnight Camp Criminal Background Check

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Rep. GiaQuinta introduced HB 1522 which would require overnight camps to be licensed and require criminal background checks for employees and volunteers of the camps.  An “overnight camp” means “any area or tract of land established, operated, or maintained to provide more than seventy-two (72) continuous hours of outdoor group living experiences away from established residences for: (1) educational; (2) recreational; (3) sectarian; or  (4) health purposes to ten (10) or more children who are less than eighteen (18) years of age and not accompanied by a parent or guardian.” The state division of family resources is directed to create rules for the licensing and inspection of such camp. The main thrust of the provision is to require that the people running those camps and employees and volunteers who have direct contact with the kids are required to pass a national criminal history background check.

Makes sense to me. But, I’m biased in that I was once involved on the periphery of a lawsuit having to do with a kid who was sexually abused by a volunteer at a camp.

HB 1430: Mandating Defiance of Court Orders Protecting Reproductive Rights

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Rep. Nisly has introduced HB 1430 which contains this startling language on abortion:

Sec. 4. Indiana’s interest in protecting innocent human physical life from the moment of conception shall be enforced by Indiana government officials and agencies, regardless of any court decision to the contrary.

(Emphasis added). The bill generally abolishes abortion rights in Indiana and includes some hand waving about the 9th and 10th Amendments, natural rights, and the Declaration of Independence attempting to ignore federal law on the matter and the Supremacy Clause. It also directs state officials to refuse to cooperate with the federal government (making Indiana something of a sanctuary state on the subject of abortion).

Mandating defiance of federal court orders is pretty radical and didn’t go so well when Arkansas tried to defy a court order to desegregate the schools in Little Rock. President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to enforce the court order.

Rep. Nisly has also introduced HB 1469 which would create a “Don’t Tread on Me” license plate.

Take Your Joy Where You Find It

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Alex Biese, writing for the Asbury Park Press, has an article about the new Jonathan Coulton album “Some Guys.” I’m the kind of middle-aged geek that fits squarely in Coulton’s nerdcore demographic.  The new album is somewhat different, “a set of 14 note-perfect renditions of soft rock hits from the 1970s, such as Gilbert O’Sullvan’s “Alone Again (Naturally),” Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” and Michael Murphey’s “Wildfire.”” I haven’t listened to it yet and so am not making a recommendation. What prompted me to comment here was Coulton’s description of the push back he got from other guys if he dared to say he liked this soft rock:

“I’m sort of exploring this aspect of my influences,” Coulton said. “But also as it relates to – you know, I’ve always loved this music – so as it relates to me being a kid and feeling shy about that, being afraid to tell people that I liked soft rock, being afraid that someone was going to say I was weak.

“You know, it’s always that thing when you’re a kid where you say you like a band and somebody else says, ‘They suck.’ And it’s even harder when you say ‘Dan Fogelberg’ and they’re like, ‘Dan Fogelberg?!’ Like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’”

Soft rock wasn’t particularly my thing, but back in the days liking computers and science fiction/fantasy novels wasn’t exactly the sort of thing that ensured coolness and acceptance among the rest of the kids at school. The thrust of the article focuses on toxic masculinity as a force that kept a guy like Coulton from being forthright about his appreciation of soft rock. And, that’s appropriate given the zeitgeist at the moment. I was particularly interested in the discussion of “the romantic overtures of a supervillain in “Skullcrusher Mountain,” the frustrated worldview of a software programmer in “Code Monkey” or the sci-fi heartbreak of “The Future Soon.”” They all make hay out of the trope of the frustrated nerd trying to get the girl. I don’t think any of them is advocating toxicity, but in both stories, I’d say the girl is mostly a prop in a way that is maybe problematic. I don’t think this particularly registered to me as an issue prior to the #MeToo movement. For his part, Coulton says:

“You know, it has been pointed out to me several times that characters like those are sort of classic examples of typical awful male behavior. And you know, when I wrote them I don’t think I had the context to really understand them that way. You know, I had to ask myself, ‘Where did those characters come from?’ and the answer is inside my head, but that makes me feel a little weird. How did I know how those characters felt? The answer is, I think, probably, that I have experienced those kinds of feelings on some level and I recognize that they’re wrong, which is why those characters are behaving badly but they also lack a self-awareness. And I think that is the joke of those songs, that they are completely unaware of how monstrous they are. And that has always been a theme that has run through a lot of my work. I don’t know why but it’s there.

“But I sing those songs now at shows and I wonder, ‘This is maybe hitting people in a different way than it did when I first wrote it.’ Or I guess, more to the point, I’m understanding that it’s hitting everybody in very different ways, in a way that I didn’t understand when I first wrote them. I first wrote them and it just meant what it meant to me and I thought it meant the same (thing) to everybody else, but now I realize that some people might be receiving those messages in a different way. I don’t know, it’s been a very interesting time.”

Even beyond the issue of gender relations, I think there is a lesson to be taken that we should take joy where we find it. If you find something you like, be it soft rock, computer games, medieval cosplay, entomology,  blogging about state government, whatever — delight in the fact that you have found something that makes your life happier. There are limits, of course. That doesn’t mean have fun at someone else’s expense. But this thing where people avoid what they like because other people will regard it as uncool is tragic. Life is short enough and hard enough without intentionally depriving themselves of joy.

SB 463 – Mandatory Helmet Requirement for Bicycles, Skates, Skateboards, and Scooters

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Sen. Merritt has introduced SB 463 which would mandate that a minor wear a helmet while riding a bicycle, skateboard, skates, or scooter on public property. Public property isn’t defined, but I assume that would include sidewalks, streets, cul-de-sacs, and what have you in addition to parks and other governmental real estate holdings. It would be an infraction, penalized by a $50 fine and potential impoundment of the bicycle, skateboard, skates, or scooter. The impoundment would last until the kid’s parent came to the office and provides “assurance that the violation will not be repeated.” It would also be a violation for a parent to permit a violation by the kid.

My gut reaction is that this is a little micro-managey, but then I know that others have the same reaction to seat belt laws which I think are a great idea that have prevented all kinds of pain and suffering, outweighing the relatively minor government intrusion. So, for me, it’s a line drawing issue rather than a black and white ideological issue.