Wednesday, February 05, 2014

Republican-Controlled Senate Passes Mass Transit Boondoggle

Taxpayers are once again learning that having a Republican-controlled legislature in Indiana does not equate to having a pro taxpayer legislature. The Indiana Senate voted 28-20 to pass the mass transit boondoggle legislation being pushed by the pay-to-play crowd that promises higher income taxes for individuals and corporations, all of which will be controlled by an unelected, regional transportation authority handpicked by the same people who are stuffing money in the politicians' pockets. The only good thing the Senate did before passing SB 176 was to strip out a provision unrelated to the underlying bill that would have transferred bonding authority from the Indianapolis City-County Council to the state so Mayor Ballard can have a few hundred million more dollars to pass out to his campaign contributors for streets and sidewalks.

I would also like to take this opportunity to complain about the horrible website the General Assembly rolled out this year. This website was clearly designed to hamper, hinder and frustrate the public's desire to gain access to information being acted on by the legislature. Nothing on the website is intuitive. The website doesn't allow you to view bills and roll calls as separate PDF files, making navigation extremely difficult. I wasted 20 minutes trying to find the roll call vote for SB 176 before concluding that it simply wasn't there. This isn't done by accident. It is deliberately done because these SOBs have total contempt for the public. They want to keep you in the dark. They only want the lobbyists hanging out in the hallways every day who are stuffing money in their pockets, buying dinner for them at St. Elmo's and taking them to Colts and Pacers games having any idea what is taking place. If their desire is to make the public think any less of them than it already does, they are succeeding. Once upon a time, there were State House reporters who would get their editorial bosses to take on lawmakers for lack of transparency. If there are any watchdogs left over there, please point me to them. I can't find any.

3 comments:

Unigov said...

i agree 100% about the website. adobe blows chunks to begin with. the navigation and search are awful. it'd be extremely difficult to check status and updates on a number of bills. plus, the state's GA site would be unusable on dialup. all by design.

Anonymous said...

Is this the bazillion-dollar project pushed by downtown metrosexuals so they won't have to take a bus to the airport?

This is a lot of money spent to put the cabs out of business because the effete don't have a friend to run them out to Plainfield and they're too Euro to possibly take the bus.

Timb said...

The CIRTA is the best idea in Indiana since the House stripped sentence 2 from HR-3. Most other decent cities have good public transportation; why can't backwards Indiana have a "metro"?

because backwards conservatives hate clean, convenient transportation:?