A New Reality for Local Government

Bless you Mitch Daniels! Your proposal to fix Indiana's property tax fiasco is starting to gain traction. Even our dim-witted legislators are having a difficult time trying to dismember it. It seems that his simple formula of taxing homeowners property at 1% of their market value is leaving the coffers of unaccountable local governments a bit shy of their recent spending habits.

For example, Lake County(East Chicago & Gary) is going to come up about $250 million shy of a balanced budget while Marion County(Indianapolis) is light $100 million. Hamilton County(Carmel) which is the richest county in the state will empty the coins in the ashtrays of their BMW's to pay off their $5.8 million deficit.

Kudos to Indianapolis Mayor Ballard for making sense of the problem. He won't cut the police budget, but "everything else is on the table". I guess the previous administration was planning to have a $2 million party to celebrate the opening of our new $1 billion airport terminal. He's already shot that one down. Uh, honey, put away my tuxedo.

As for Lake County, let's just give it to Chicago.