Still Hope For Legislative Sanity: Kenley Drops Sponsorship Of Mass Transit Boondoggle

It looks like some lawmakers, and I'm talking about lawmakers who have an "R" behind their names, are starting to think like Republicans instead of the out-of-control tax-and-spend crowd running our municipal governments who want to sucker you into agreeing to yet another local income tax to support some pie-in-the-sky mass transit undertaking. A key Senate lawmaker who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, Luke Kenley (R-Noblesville) has pulled his sponsorship of the multi-billion dollar mass transit plan pushed by Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard and Carmel Mayor James Brainard a day before a key committee vote on the measure. From the IBJ:

Already skeptical of a mass-transit plan for the Indianapolis metro area, influential Sen. Luke Kenley has dropped his sponsorship of a related bill that’s due for its first Senate hearing Wednesday.

Kenley, R-Noblesville, said he decided it was inappropriate to be listed as a sponsor without giving the bill his unqualified support.

“I’ve never been too persuaded by the need for this,” he said Tuesday morning . . .

Earlier this month, Kenley told IBJ that he had doubts about transit promoters’ financing plan, but he was willing to give local government the opportunity to put the question to voters.

Kenley said he reconsidered giving the referendum a green light after seeing that 60 percent of his constituents oppose the plan, according to a poll he conducted on his website. Many wrote notes to express just how strongly they oppose the plan, Kenley said.

Kenley, chair of the Senate appropriations committee, also serves on the tax and fiscal policy committee, which is likely to hear the bill if it passes the first committee. He downplayed his influence over colleagues. “I don’t know of anybody in the Senate that votes the way I want ‘em to vote,” he said.

I'm happy to hear that Kenley is listening to his constituents, unlike many of his Republican colleagues who are drunk with power and who are more interested in currying favor to the pay-to-play crowd wining and dining them and their cheerleaders in the editorial room of the Indianapolis Star than the people they were elected to represent. My guess is that Kenley also grew skeptical that the proponents of mass transit really have no concrete vision of what it is they plan to do with the billions of dollars that will fall into their hands if, God forbid, this ill-conceived plan becomes law. The proponents' plan changes from day-to-day depending on what they believe they need to say to mollify skeptical lawmakers, but the breadth of the taxing authority vested in an unelected, unaccountable metropolitan transit authority remains intact. Let's hope more Senate Republicans rethink this boodoggle.