“Shoot for 30%”

The Weekly Standard has a lengthy and great piece on Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. My favorite part:

“But when you meet your goal,” Kitchell said, sitting at his office conference table, “he [Daniels] just moves the goalpost.” He turned to his computer and scrolled to an email the governor had just sent. That morning a transportation official had emailed with the happy news that bids on a new road construction project were coming in 28 percent below projections. No doubt he expected a hearty attaboy for driving a hard bargain to save the taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars. Kitchell read me the governor’s reply: “Shoot for 30 percent.”

Marion County Can’t Afford Stamps

I received an email the other day from my mortgage company telling me they paid my taxes on my behalf. That’s nice.

The same day, later that afternoon, I received my tax statement in the mail from the Marion County Auditor’s Office. That’s not nice.

That means the county sent my tax records to my mortgage company in California and they had time to process it, pay it and alert me all before the same office bothered to mail me my statement all of 8.5 miles away. I don’t like that.

Then, inside my tax statement (which, thanks to Mitch Daniels, is at an all-time low and my taxes have dropped another 28% over last year. Thank you, Mitch) was a form that I was required to fill out so I could prove I lived in my home and qualify for my homestead deduction.

The problem is that they didn’t bother providing a self-addressed and paid envelope. They must think very highly of their residents. First, they assume people will open the envelope. Then, they assume people will read any of it beyond “how much do/did I owe?” and then they assume that people will not lose the form long enough to fill out it’s horrible layout, provide information no one knows (local parcel number, state parcel number and the last five digits of your driver’s license number. Yes, the parcel numbers are on the tax forms you just received, but I doubt anyone notices that) and then they assume people have stamps and an envelope laying around to send it back. No online system, no envelope and a crappy form.

I bet they get about 10% of those forms back. I’m hedging my bets that Monroe County will have the highest return rate in the state because most people there are probably renters because of IU’s proximity.

This, as Doug Masson often points out, is probably a feature. The fewer people return that form, the more people get kicked off their homestead deductions and the more their taxes go up, resulting in more income for the county.

As a side note, yes, I know that when my taxes go down my county gets less revenue to do things – namely, fund schools. And, quite frankly, I don’t give a rip. I don’t have kids and I don’t believe pushing money into the system would fix anything. If it did, we’d have fixed everything by now and we’d be living in an educated utopia. Some kids are smart, some kids are dumb. The smart ones will stay smart and do good things – like filling out that homestead deduction verification form. The dumb ones will stay dumb and lazy and do nothing of value to anyone except pay higher homestead taxes because they didn’t fill out that form. That’s evolution.

Education Dollars That Shouldn’t Be Spent

This won’t win me any points with teachers and school administrators. But, I’m going to say it anyway: you’re awfully redundant.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is cutting $300 million from Indiana’s public school system. Frankly, I have a feeling there’s probably about half a billion dollars in waste across the state that could easily be found. Heck, I don’t doubt that $300 million could be cut from Lake County’s corrupt excuse for a government alone.

But, most of the state operates out of small, local schools. Like my Alma Mater down in Salem. Salem schools operates alongside two other schools in Washington County. East Washington Schools has 1,716 students. West Washington has 896 and Salem has the largest enrollment at 2,125. All together, there are just 4,373 students in all of Washington County.

There are 7 administrators in Salem’s system, 7 at East Washington and 3 at West Washington making 17 administrators. So, Salem has 7 administrators (principals, superintendents, etc.) and East Washington has 7. Yet, East Washington has about half as many students as Salem. And West Washington has about half as many students as East Washington and has 3. It should be noted that 3 is the lowest they’ve had since 1999. They had up to 5 in their hay day when they had 500 fewer students!

Clearly, something is wrong with this picture.

Let’s be conservative and say each of their superintendents makes $100,000 a year. Which, judging by the Star’s metro-area database, is rather conservative. $300,000 a year is made up of just three people. Add in principals, making say, $70,000 a year and you’ve racked up $700,000.

$1,000,000 a year in administrative salaries. That’s $229 per student in Washington County. I can assure you there probably isn’t even that much money spent annually in all of Washington County on food and water.

Don’t get me wrong. Schools need principals and superintendents. Yet, for reasons I can’t explain, Salem has two principals (not a principal and vice-principal, that’s TWO principals) for just grades K-5. They have a principal and vice-principal for grades 6-8 and ditto for 9-12.

Again, something is wrong with this.

Don’t even get me started on the number of assistants to the assistants and assistant assistants. Part of the need for all the assistants is to trudge reports and crap on to the state. Which, may or may not be useful, but much of this manual data-entry into crappy spreadsheets could be easily consolidated into automated systems that follow students rather than following schools. Get on that, IOT.

I’d go as far to argue that superintendents are redundant when you factor in school boards. It’s like having a Congress and a President. We see where that gets us.

Here’s a hallelujah idea:

• Have 1 county superintendent
• Push all administrative duties into one building in Salem. People in East and West Washington’s systems will say this is inconvenient, but it’s no different from having a county courthouse.
• Close the other, now-empty, administrative buildings and sell ‘em.
• I bet with all the consolidation, you can probably lose a couple support staffers through attrition. You don’t need 6 people to answer phones when you have two-thirds less phones.
• Assistant principals can go away through attrition. I can assure you that existing staff and the principal can do the job of discipline and walking the halls during passing periods. Not that big of a deal.
• Save $1.5 million annually.

Or, if you prefer, put half a million towards things people like. Like books. Or computers. Or teacher bonuses. Or heck, put it in savings and give the million back to the taxpayers.

One of these days I’ll get ambitious enough to research Warren Townships schools where I currently pay taxes to. I’m sure that’ll make me scream. I already loathe that they send everyone in this township a quarterly newsletter. And we’re not talking a piece of paper folded in half. It’s a full-scale publication with professional printing and mailing costs.

Maybe someday. For now, the Star has more to say.

US Government, There’s An App for That

Tim O’Reilly, popular for the O’Reilly series of tech books, has an interesting idea: make the US Government function more like the iPhone.

The best way for businesses and developers to think about Government 2.0 as a platform is to look at Apple and the iPhone, according to Mr O’Reilly.

“With government procurement it’s about working with the same group of people and saying we are going to work with trusted partners and them saying here is our handful of offerings.

The iPhone has spawned thousand of apps

“The iPhone comes out and Apple turns it into a platform and two years later there is something like 70,000 applications and 3,000 written every week. They have created a framework and infrastructure and that is the right way we should be thinking about government,” said Mr O’Reilly.

He said past examples of how the government had excelled as a platform were the internet and GPS, the global positioning system, which were both government-funded projects.

I agree with him, in principal, only because I think he has a point here even if his metaphor is a little off the mark. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has repeatedly said, “Government does not create jobs, it only creates the conditions that make jobs more or less likely.” There’s truth to that and if the US Government created something more of an infrastructure than a buddy network, maybe we’d see private sector growth explode.

Then again, this could never work. All that data being hard to find and read is a feature, not a problem. At least not to the government. Making things easy to discover would keep politicians too honest and the public too informed.

Daniels hasn’t heard of the Holiday Inn

I’m not sure how I feel about Mitch Daniels defending his use of the State’s airplane:

Gov. Mitch Daniels on Monday defended his use of a state aircraft for a trip to Washington — a trip that was cut short Sunday when the plane’s windshield cracked.

…

The state Department of Administration said the plane costs $791 per hour for fuel, plus $184 in maintenance costs for each hour of flying time.

Daniels, who came to Washington for the National Governors Association’s winter meeting, said he had to use the state plane.

“I’m the cheapest date as a governor Indiana has ever had,” Daniels said, noting that he hadn’t even taken state troopers or other staff with him on the trip. “There was no commercial option that would have gotten me (to Washington on time). I would’ve had to come the night before and buy a hotel room and I don’t know what else.”

Asked whether it still might have been cheaper to fly commercial, even if that meant another night in a hotel, given the nearly $1,000 per hour cost of the state plane, Daniels said: “I have no idea.”

On the one hand, I don’t like the idea of my governor hanging around in hotels a day or two before and after a conference he legitimately needs to attend. I’d rather he be here in Indiana and hoping that he can get some work done in the meantime. On the other hand, I don’t like the sound of a nearly $1,000 per hour trip. I think it’s two hours one way to D.C., so that’s $4,000 round trip. Even a conservative estimate pegs that number at $3,000.

On second thought, I do have an idea. How about the Governor pack his bags, a laptop, a bluetooth headset with cell phone and trek off to these things on Southwest. Then, when you land, get a room in a Holiday Inn.

I hear that, unlike Indy, D.C. has a decent subway system. Buy a $4 ticket and go to your meeting. There, I just saved Indiana $2,500.