Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. June 22, 2024.
Editorial: State’s new quarter-billion plan for welcome centers ridiculously excessive
The State Budget Committee last week approved an Indiana Department of Transportation plan to invest $256 million in highway welcome centers, even as such roadside rest areas are disappearing in some states.
INDOT is executing a 10-year plan to improve interstate rest areas and welcome centers statewide to modernize facilities, construct new buildings, improve parking and convert some to tractor-trailer parking facilities. Plans call for a total investment of more than $600 million to 20 rest areas, welcome centers and truck-parking facilities by the end of fiscal year 2034.
The current $256 million is being used for improvements to the welcome centers at Black River in Posey County, Centerville (Wayne County), Clear Creek (Vigo County), Kankakee (Jasper County), Lebanon (Boone County) and Pigeon Creek (Steuben County). The latter, located 11 miles south of U.S. 20 on the southbound side of Interstate 69, opened in October 2020 with a price tag of $4.4 million.
The cost of Steuben County’s welcome center — which will receive a new sanitary sewer system with the new funding — was $30 million less than the ridiculous $34.8 million price tag of the Kankakee Welcome Center, under construction in northwest Indiana since 2021.
Spanning 11,304 square feet, the Jasper County welcome center will be the largest and most expensive in the state when it’s completed in September. Built around natural wetlands, it will include a large retention pond with a walkway, murals and interactive displays.
Visit Fort Wayne President and CEO Jill Boggs said welcome centers can impact first impressions, portray a welcoming spirit and create a lasting brand for Indiana, its people and communities.
“These new facilities specifically built for travelers, with a menu of amenities being offered, encourage travelers to linger and allow time for reading tourism information provided at the rest area,” she told The Journal Gazette Monday. “Maybe they will consider returning to another part of the state in the future, or make a stop along the way to their destination.”
For more than half a century, no-frills rest stops have welcomed motorists looking for a break from the road, a bathroom or a picnic table where they can eat. But some cash-strapped transportation departments are closing old ones to save money, because they don’t attract enough traffic or are in such bad shape that renovating them is not cost-efficient.
Florida, Michigan, Ohio and South Dakota are among the states that have closed traditional rest stops over the past decade. Advocates of maintaining rest areas, however, say shuttering them is a disservice to drivers and a safety concern.
Steve McAvoy, INDOT’s statewide facilities director, said the rest-area modernization plan was spurred by a need for more overnight parking for tractor-trailer operators, where they can rest or sleep safely.
“We’re adding over a thousand additional truck parking spaces across the state with this 10-year program. That’s the biggest push,” he told The Journal Gazette Thursday. “Plus, we’re revitalizing old, outdated rest areas with reconstruction and providing more amenities for the traveler.”
Last year, the newly renovated Pigeon Creek Welcome Center had a bit fewer than 80,000 visitors, said Steuben County Tourism Bureau Executive Director June Julien. But she hasn’t received a single inquiry from a person who stopped at the welcome center seeking more information about Pokagon State Park or other county attractions.
“On the Indiana Toll Road, we used to put our visitor guide out there and went through 40,000 of them in a year easily. It got to where we weren’t even going through a thousand of them there,” she told The Journal Gazette Monday. “People, especially a lot of younger people, just don’t pick up flyers at rest areas; they’re looking on their phones and that’s where they’re getting their information.
“I’m not going to say it’s a bad idea to have rest areas, but I know some states are not even building them anymore.”
Perhaps the largest factor leading to rest-area closings is the 1960 federal ban on commercial services at interstate rest areas, which remains in effect. Service plazas, places on an interstate that offer an array of commercial services, are legal only on toll roads that were not developed with federal funding or were in existence prior to the ban.
To grab a bite or to fill up an empty gas tank, most motorists still must exit an interstate.
Safe and well-lit rest areas and welcome centers for the sake of convenience and safety make sense. Motorists appreciate clean restrooms and areas to stretch or walk a dog. Truckers, mandated by federal law to take breaks, frequently pull in for overnight stays.
But spending a quarter- billion dollars on just six welcome centers is excessive, particularly when lawmakers must budget for ballooning Medicaid costs and want to examine overhauling the state’s road funding formula and tax system in the next legislative session.
INDOT should stop trying to make welcome centers into travel destinations and turn its attention instead to making them brighter, cleaner and more convenient for motorists.
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Anderson Herald Bulletin. June 22, 2024.
Editorial: New law gives gun industry special immunity
The following are among the worst of many bad kinds of legislation:
• New laws that seek to deal with an isolated case
• New laws that seek to satisfy a political agenda
• New laws that endanger public health
With House Bill 1235, which became law in March, the Indiana Legislature’s Republican supermajority has hit the bad-law trifecta.
As explained in a recent news article by CNHI State Reporter Carson Gerber, the new law will bar Indiana cities, towns and other political subdivisions from suing gun manufacturers, sellers, dealers or trade associations for any reason.
You read that right — the state will forbid municipal lawsuits against the gun industry while still allowing such suits against other industries.
But here’s an even stranger twist to the legislation: It’s retroactive 25 years, all the way back to Aug. 27, 1999.
That date might sound arbitrary, but it’s not. The GOP’s primary motivation for pushing the law through was to render moot the City of Gary’s longstanding lawsuit against a cadre of American gun manufacturers and sellers. That suit was filed Aug. 30, 1999, by a community reeling from gun violence.
Indiana Statehouse Republicans are clearly in bed with the gun industry, choosing its interests over Hoosiers’ right to litigate against bad actors in business and industry who willfully endanger the public.
As noted by Paul Helmke — a former mayor of Fort Wayne and a professor in the school of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University — in an opinion piece published by the Indiana Capitol Chronicle, “Five of the defendants in Gary’s lawsuit sit on the board of the trade organization that has endorsed and promoted this bill.”
The Gary lawsuit was based on a police investigation that exposed local gun shops for selling firearms and ammunition to agents posing as people who are ineligible to own guns, such as under-aged patrons and convicted felons.
The new law undermines the state judicial system by, essentially, rendering gun shops and manufacturers immune to litigation from local government bodies.
Indiana isn’t alone in protecting the gun industry. More than 30 other states, acting on signals from the national Republican Party, have enacted similar legislation.
There’s a chance the new Indiana law could be struck down by the courts. Next month, a Lake County Superior Court judge will hear arguments over whether to dismiss Gary’s lawsuit in light of the legislation. Previously, appellate courts have twice deemed that the lawsuit has merits.
Here’s hoping the Lake County court, for the third time, will find merit in the Gary case, exposing House Bill 1235 for what it is — a piece of legislation that defines bad law.
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Terre Haute Tribune-Star. June 21, 2024.
Editorial: No excuses now for restricting mail-in voting
Indiana Republican state legislators have learned to dislike voting by mail.
Former president Donald Trump has taught his followers to distrust and restrict mail-in voting almost daily since losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden by 7,059,526 votes. Trump’s claim that he was the victim of widespread voter fraud was found baseless in more than 60 court challenges in multiple states, and refuted by local, state and national election officials from his own Republican Party. Nonetheless, he has continued to repeat the canard, and Republican-dominated state legislatures, like Indiana’s, have dutifully restricted voting, as a result.
Hoosiers must have one of 11 state-approved excuses to receive a mail-in ballot for an election.
By contrast, Hoosier legislators have only flimsy excuses for not expanding mail-in voting for most or all Hoosiers.
One of their foundational excuses — Trump’s relentless attacks on any method of casting a ballot other than in-person Election-Day voting — just eroded recently. The former president has undergone an epiphany. Actually, the more accurate term is “self-serving flip-flop.” After years of denigrating early voting, absentee voting and mail-in voting, Trump has recorded a video message for a “Swamp the Vote” campaign, urging his supporters to vote “any way possible,” including by mail.
Republican campaign experts have apparently gotten Trump to understand that expanded voting methods do not favor one party or the other.
Of course, Trump’s stances and policies are frequently incoherent and mercurial. And, his endorsement of expanded voting methods like mail-in balloting came with his typical rants about being cheated. Still, as he once famously said, it is what it is — Trump has told his followers to use those varied outlets to vote, for him of course.
Thus, Republicans controlling the Indiana Statehouse should end their constriction of voting opportunities for Hoosiers. Voting by mail should be an option for any registered Indiana voter, instead of being limited to those who can offer one of those 11 excuses the GOP lawmakers find acceptable.
“They have no explanation for why Indiana still has 11 excuses in place to request an absentee ballot,” Barbara Tully, president of Indiana Vote By Mail, told the Tribune-Star earlier this week. “How is the state served by knowing why a voter can’t show up on Election Day? Nor are these excuses monitored by county election offices, who don’t have the time, money or staff to do so. So how is this even enforceable?”
It’s not. However, the law does manage to do one significant thing — it discourages people who might not vote Republican from getting involved in the electoral process. Those folks also might not be Democrats, but the state’s ruling party cannot be sure so it leaves the hurdles in place.
Voter turnouts in Indiana reflect the hoop-jumping path faced by would-be voters. The state ranked last in the nation for turnout in the 2022 election, according to the Indiana Civic Health Index. Legislators seem OK with that, given their unwillingness to expand voting access.
“There seems to be a good number of legislators in key positions who still believe the myths about fraud and aren’t interested in making mail-in voting more accessible,” said Julia Vaughn, executive director of Common Cause Indiana. “In a state that ranked 50th for turnout in 2022, that is extremely unfortunate. Indiana lawmakers should do anything and everything at their disposal to encourage voter participation and voting by mail is an important tool in their toolbox, if only they would use it.”
More than half a million Hoosiers, including hundreds of thousands of Republicans, embraced the state’s lone foray into a universal mail-in voting option. Indiana allowed any registered Hoosier to vote by mail in the 2020 primary, when COVID-19 spread through the state, nation and world. A few months later, the Indiana Election Commission nixed the idea of allowing it in the more consequential general election. Why? In late summer of 2020, Trump was already ranting about mail-in voting, sensing the reality that he was going to lose in November.
Four years later, he is OK with it. So, Hoosier legislators — what’s your excuse now?
END