From the Terre Haute Tribune-Star:
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The governor wants to lower the income tax rate. If he wants to keep spending down, he could give each taxpayer a one-time fixed sum of money ($30). He need not, however, lower the tax rate and make financing state government even more difficult in the future.
The Republican dominated legislature wants to decide three things for Indianapolis instead of leaving them to the people of our largest community. 1) They want to give $100 million to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway from state money. 2) They plan to change the structure of the city-county council to favor the GOP, and 3) they assume the right to tell the people of metro Indianapolis whether they can decide for themselves the future of public transit in the area.
All the while, no one pays attention to a sentence buried in the middle of a recent news story out of IU: “54 of Indiana’s 92 counties lost population last year.” Doesn’t this send alarm signals to all of us?
All right. You don’t want to take one year’s evidence as cause for concern. Try this: over the past 10 years, 39 of our 92 counties have lost population. The biggest losers include the urban counties home to the cities of Muncie, Marion, Richmond, Anderson, Logansport and Kokomo.
Does the legislature or the administration have any policies for reversing urban decay? They seem happy to let matters take their course. During the past 10 years, six Indianapolis metro counties have accounted for 59 percent of the population growth in the state. We hear no discussion of this increasing centralization of economic, social, and political power.
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Communities that lose population have growing fiscal problems as they must maintain the infrastructure of a larger population. When houses become empty or have fewer residents, the same miles of streets need to be maintained and plowed in winter. Growing communities typically have an increasing tax base; contracting places suffer from declining revenues.
No one recommends the state take action to retard the growth of population in central Indiana. However, we could consider how to revive our slowly decaying urban centers before they deteriorate further.
http://tribstar.com/business/x765744997/Eye-on-the-pie-Population-losses-in-counties-raise-alarms
