Craig Ladwig is editor of the quarterly Indiana Policy Review. His column appears in Indiana newspapers.
In at least one of the seats on a typical Indiana city council sits a civic hero, a man or woman who tries to cast every vote with the long-term interest of the community in mind. If you are lucky, there are two or three. A majority is historic.
These out-voted and oft-misquoted souls are becoming precious as the public debate grows more emotional and ad hominem. They should wear medals. Our foundation’s next journal is dedicated to them. Particularly, it honors two types: those who push back against factional pressure and those who step forward to assert economic truth — however inconvenient either position may be at any given political moment.
The first type, in striving for fiscal sanity, risks becoming the enemy of every police officer and firefighter in the city, the compensation for which can represent 50 to 80 percent of a typical municipal budget. He does so knowing that members of this constituency consider his point of view an unwarranted threat not only to their livelihood but also their honor, a constituency able to organize pickets on his front lawn and in effect fire him as their boss.
Yet, there are members of this foundation who have faced roomfuls of such men. And it is important to know they not only survived the experience but also won re-election. They did so by marshaling the facts. Voters who get the facts understand who exactly is threatening whose livelihood. Those who don’t, don’t.
Ask Detroit. Ask Harrisburg. Ask middle-class homeowners in Chicago who just got hit with “rolling” property-tax increases to pay for fire and police pensions — increases that are double the two largest recent increases combined. Property owners there, in addition to being out of pocket for the extra taxes, will only be able to watch as their housing values fall and as an exodus of capital begins.
Indiana cities that move away from such policy — even incrementally — will have an advantage in attracting the investment that flees poorly run nearby cities. And that is not small change. Our friend Stephen Moore, author of “Rich States, Poor States,” reports that Illinois in 2013 lost nearly 67,000 tax filers representing $3.7 billion of income.
One of our civic heroes, the past chairman of an appropriations committee, suggests that councilmen begin thinking of their jobs as representing both their community’s residents and potential investors in the purchase of local government services: “That means you can demand that the union provide a comparison of its cost with those of a private provider. You can demand the costs be put to a market test by open and transparent bidding. You can demand that any compensation be based on objective, verifiable and understandable standards.”
We mentioned two kinds of civic heroism. The second is particularly on display in our next edition. It involves overcoming the pressures of the sound-bite politics accompanying government-defined economic “development” projects. If you stand up in the public square to question any of these experiments in economics by command, you will be labeled an “obstructionist."
If Indiana succeeds, it will be in spite of the political convenience that allows unaccountable municipal planners and economic-development directors to hold sway over our cities. In fact, the Indiana Chamber of Commerce reported recently that we have fallen behind in a respected national rating of entrepreneurship.
We’re going to need some more heroes.