https://www.vanderburghsheriff.com/jail-recent-booking-records.aspx
IPS Is In A Stable Financial Position For Now, But It Could Be Hard Hit By A Recession
IPS Is In A Stable Financial Position For Now, But It Could Be Hard Hit By A Recession
Indianapolis Public Schools says it is in a strong financial position in the short term, despite the upheaval caused by the coronavirus pandemic. But the district could eventually be hard hit by the deepening recession.
The state’s largest district is more financially stable than many school systems across the country for several reasons: The state has not cut this year’s education funding, voters recently approved a referendum to boost local dollars, the district has access to bond funding, and the Indianapolis economy is strong, said Weston Young, the district’s chief financial officer.
“IPS is positioned well, in my opinion, for the short term to navigate the recent historic and severe COVID-19 economic impacts,†Young said during a media briefing ahead of an IPS board meeting Thursday. The district will also receive about $21 million in federal coronavirus aid, which can be used to cover a wide range of costs.
Over the long term, however, the financial implications for the district are far less certain. Unemployment in Indiana has surged, while sales and income tax revenue have fallen in recent weeks.
Although it’s unclear how bad the recession will be or precisely how it will impact the school system, the district may need to begin making decisions to save money to build a cushion for the future, said Jason O’Neill, a consultant with Policy Analytics who is advising the district.
“The impact of a recession on school finance is not immediate, at least the majority of the impact is not immediate,†O’Neill told the IPS board, “but preparations should be made in the short term.â€
Noting that state revenue is “going to diminish significantly,†IPS Board President Michael O’Connor said at Thursday’s meeting that the district must “be prepared to make some very conservative, very difficult decisions about preparing for those cuts.
If tax revenue continues to decline, the state may cut budgets for schools next year or the years after, Young told the board. “A state can’t pass dollars to schools that it doesn’t have.â€
Some Indiana districts have raised concerns that they could also lose state funding, which is awarded on a per-student basis if parents decide to keep their children home in the fall due to health concerns.
As the pandemic unleashes turmoil across the country, many school systems are facing severe financial challenges. The Los Angeles Unified School District estimates that it has shouldered $200 million in emergency coronavirus costs. As New York City grapples with severe drops in revenue, schools could see $827 million in budget cuts. And in Denver, district officials said the pandemic would cost its schools about $10.5 million this year — a figure that includes the unplanned cost of purchasing about 9,000 laptops for students.
In the early weeks of the crisis, IPS has not taken a severe financial hit. In fact, it spent less than anticipated because school closures reduced costs in some areas, such as transportation, extracurricular activities, and facilities, Young said.
The district, however, is in the midst of making a huge investment in technology. Amid fears that schools could be closed in the fall or the need for some form of social distancing could continue, IPS is spending about $12 million so that every student has a device. That will pay for 14,000 Chromebooks, 7,000 iPads, and 9,000 mobile hotspot devices for students without broadband at home. The purchases will be funded with several sources, including reserves and philanthropic giving.
Next Up In Coronavirus Indiana
A Southern Mayor Had Careful Plans To Reopen The City. His Governor Had Other Ideas.
A Southern Mayor Had Careful Plans To Reopen The City. His Governor Had Other Ideas.
“Tennessee doesn’t have the adequate or accurate data to be opening,” a union leader said, despite the state’s decision to reopen businesses this week
By Ben Kesslen and Phil McCausland
Andy Berke, the mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee, was scheduled to visit New York City in mid-March to speak about the immense economic growth of his small Southern city. The flood of the coronavirus into the United States, however, caused Berke to cancel the trip and — with an ongoing dearth of testing — pump the brakes on sharing financial prospects that have since dimmed.
Remaining in his city of 180,000, instead, Berke became one of the earliest leaders in the South to enact measures to prevent the spread of the virus, quickly closing gyms, bars, restaurants, and other nonessential businesses. By March 16, Chattanooga was effectively shut down. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, ordered the same measures a week later statewide, and on April 2, he ordered residents to stay home.
Cases in Chattanooga have remained low, which Berke, a Democrat, sees as evidence that social distancing is working, but he said it’s a challenge to responsibly reopen the economy because testing capacity is still low. Testing for the virus would allow federal, state, and local leaders to track the spread of the virus and intervene before it overwhelmed localities.
“There was a long period of time where we had 40 tests for our community. On top of having very few tests, we couldn’t get them processed,” Berke told NBC News, explaining that it was all Hamilton County, where the city lies, was able to acquire while also facing challenges in developing relationships with labs.
Testing capacity has since increased, but not by as much as is needed. Nevertheless, Lee announced Monday that the “vast majority” of businesses in the state were allowed to reopen — regardless of whether city officials like Berke or individual business owners felt it was safe to do so. The mayor said he can’t promise it’s safe if he doesn’t know how many cases there are in his community, and he can’t do that without help from the federal government to expand the city’s testing capacity.
The development puts Chattanooga at the center of growing partisan tension between Democratic city leaders in the South who want to pursue a slower approach until testing has increased and Republican governors who want the economy reopened as quickly as possible.
As the country as a whole lag behind on the amount of testing public health experts say is required for safe reopening, city and state leaders have asked for federal government support with testing as well as economic relief — only to get a muted and even contrary response from President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
“Why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states (like Illinois, as an example) and cities, in all cases Democrat-run and managed, when most of the other states are not looking for bailout help?” Trump tweeted Monday morning.
Your health or your paycheck? A devil’s bargain
The issues around reopening safely aren’t confined to Tennessee. Chattanooga, located on the southeastern border, is part of a tri-state area with Alabama and Georgia, and people from both states commute to the city for work. Decisions made by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who is also moving forward with reopening his state and Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey will also have significant impacts on the city and the region.
Jennifer Gregory, the treasurer of the Chattanooga Beverage Alliance, a union representing service workers in the area, thinks her members are being forced to return to the front lines without much choice.
“Tennessee doesn’t have the adequate or accurate data to be opening,” said Gregory, who praised Berke’s leadership on the virus. The state has 10,735 reported cases, including 199 deaths, linked to the illness. Hamilton County, the fourth-most populous county in the state, accounts for just 1.4 percent of that.
Gregory knows that many in the city are suffering because of the lockdown, including members of the alliance, but she added, “How do we talk about economies when people are dying?”
“And what does that say to someone who works in a restaurant or Walmart or Whole Foods?” Gregory asked. “That our most vulnerable populations, people that have to be there, are treated with that level of disregard, it’s disturbing.”
Hamilton County, which controls the local health department, is now testing asymptomatic residents, but Berke is doubtful it will be enough. Nearby Knox County essentially ran out of swabs almost immediately after starting testing, he said, and experts say the country needs universal testing.
“We’re trying to figure out what the actual turnaround time and capacity is,” Berke said of the newest testing measures, calling them a “leap forward” but one that barely goes far enough. Chattanooga, he said, can’t safely reopen under the governor’s plan.
“It fails to account for the growing number of positive cases across the state, and especially in southeast Tennessee,” the mayor said about Lee’s decision. “It goes against the warnings of public health experts and doctors. It lacks the groundwork we need to ensure that restaurant owners and managers understand their responsibilities and have the supplies they need to keep people safe.”
Plans for a rich future dashed
Before the pandemic, Chattanooga had plans to bring new companies to the city, had recorded multiple years of growth, and was in the process of revitalizing its downtown. Without access to testing, that all feels in jeopardy. And the lack of testing means residents aren’t ready to go back to work, even if their governor says they are.
In November, Volkswagen announced that it would expand its plant in Chattanooga and add 1,000 jobs to build an electric-powered SUV. But five months later, on April 9, the Volkswagen plant announced that it had furloughed 2,500 employees.
Eager to get back up and running, Volkswagen said it would stagger the return of its employees beginning May 3, implementing nearly 100 health measures, including new personal protective equipment and temperature checks for its workers. But the company postponed its plans to reopen Wednesday, citing “the readiness of the supplier base, as well as market demand and the status of the COVID-19 outbreak.”
Even as states reopen, city leaders, employers, and workers continue to face a difficult question shared by Americans across the country: Can this once-booming economy open again without the coronavirus wreaking further havoc?
“I don’t see what has changed in the past four weeks where it’s now safer for anyone to go back,” said Steve Cochran, a worker at the plant. “Best-case scenario we could test everyone. That’s not feasible.”
Before coronavirus shutdowns, “people came to work sick as they could be, because they didn’t want to use their vacation,” said Cochran, who said he and other employees didn’t have sick leave and hadn’t been consulted on how to reopen the plant.
“I could go to work and get the virus a lot easier than at the store. There are 3,000 people,” he said.
Small manufacturers are affected, as well.
Aaron Hoffman’s Chattanooga-based hot sauce company was hoping to grow by 200 percent by the year’s end when the pandemic hit. But, Hoffman, the co-founder, has laid off six of his 10 employees, with just one person fulfilling orders drawn from three months of inventory he has left in stock.
“I’m just waiting on the testing,” Hoffman said of bringing people back. “I’m not a medical expert. I’m just hanging on to what Dr. Fauci says.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned states wanting to reopen their economies not to “leap over things” that would potentially allow the coronavirus to rebound.
Can Chattanooga Bounce Back?
Chattanooga’s relatively diverse economy should insulate it somewhat, as major employers like insurance and distribution centers remain operational, said Dr. William Fox, the director of the University of Tennessee’s Center for Business and Economic Research.
But without sales tax, a major source of revenue in a state without earned income tax, the budget of a city like Chattanooga will take a real hit.
“Our city is struggling financially. There is just no other way around it,” Berke said — a problem exacerbated by Easter tornadoes that caused an estimated $300 million in damage and displaced more than 400 residents.
In a Hamilton County economic impact survey published in late April, 41 percent of the 243 businesses that responded said they had had to lay off or furlough employees, and more than 50 percent expect to see the impacts last more than seven months. Only 5 percent reported experiencing no impact.
For Nick Wilkinson, the executive director of the Tivoli Theatre Foundation, the stoppage has been devastating — especially as the future remains unclear.
Wilkinson runs the iconic Tivoli Theatre in downtown Chattanooga and two other spaces that put on about 150 shows a year. When the foundation took over the theaters from the city in 2015, it grew the number of shows by around 900 percent, and Wilkinson just acquired a new building while undertaking a $40 million renovation.
Now, that’s all on pause, and Wilkinson — like many other business owners — isn’t keen to pack his theaters for concerts and plays any time soon without proof that it will be safe for attendees. He also isn’t sure how he can go out and try to raise needed money for his nonprofit theaters when there is so much immediate need around him.
The city, he said, can’t recover alone.
“It doesn’t matter how good Chattanooga has been,” Wilkinson said. “At the end of the day, if the cavalry ain’t coming from D.C., there is nothing any local small community can do to address the needs they have. It’s just impossible.”
Senator Braun’s Weekly Update | Produce Supply Chain, Senate Returns, Smart Reopening
Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) is calling on the Trump administration to include fruit and vegetable processing plants in an executive order meant to keep meat processing facilities open during the coronavirus pandemic.
Braun requested the administration include canneries and frozen food suppliers in the order President Trump signed Tuesday evening to secure the U.S. supply of non-perishable foods.
“I urge you to use this authority to ensure that our nation’s supply chain of canned and frozen fruit and vegetables remains secure,†Braun wrote to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue on Wednesday.
He noted that produce has a short harvest and processing window and is particularly vulnerable.
“For example, our nation’s annual supply of canned and frozen corn, green beans, tomatoes, peaches and peas are harvested and packed within the span of two to three months,†he wrote.
“Our job is to get nominations across the finish line, and I’ve put so much time and effort into health care reform and climate,†said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.). “I almost feel like that wanes every day you’re not there.â€
Senator Braun joined Fox59’s INFocus Coronavirus Town Hall on Wednesday night to answer viewer questions about the federal coronavirus response and the path to getting Hoosiers back to work and our economy back to growth.
“For government leaders, for individuals, for businesses, we are going to have a new normal,†U.S. Sen. Mike Braun of Jasper said. “This is a very challenging and tricky virus that we’re up against. We have to wait on therapies to be perfected; we’re gonna need to wait on a vaccine.â€
The country has been waiting and adhering, for the most part, to strict health guidelines since March. Soon, it will be time to start getting the economy going again, Braun said.
“The quicker we can get back to reopening businesses in a smart way and getting people back to work,†he said, “that’s what’s going to bring us out of this, but also realizing that we need to stay disciplined.â€
Braun explained that President Donald Trump’s plan for reopening the economy is more so a guideline for states to use if needed.
Troopers Investigate Fatal Head-On Crash on SR 64
Friday morning at approximately 10:10 a.m., Indiana State Police and Pike County Sheriff’s Office responded to a crash on SR 64 west of Meridian Road that claimed the life of a Winslow man.
Preliminary investigation revealed Anthony Woolsey, 33, of Winslow, was driving his 1996 Ford pickup truck westbound on SR 64 approximately ½ mile west of Meridian Road when for unknown reasons drove left of center and into the path of a 2018 Freightliner truck that was traveling east.
Woolsey was pronounced dead at the scene by the Pike County Coroner’s Office and had to be extricated from his vehicle by the Patoka Township Volunteer Fire Department.
The driver of the Freightliner truck, James Coffey, 47, and his passenger, Jason Gordon, 46, both from Louisville, KY, were taken to Jasper Memorial Hospital where they were treated for non-life threatening injuries. SR 64 was closed for approximately four hours while the crash was investigated.
This is an on-going investigation and toxicology results are pending.
Investigating Officer: Senior Trooper John Davis
Assisting Officers: Sergeant Kylen Compton, Trooper CJ Boeckman and Trooper Jonathan Lukeman
Assisting Agencies: Pike County Sheriff’s Office, Gibson County Sheriff’s Office, Oakland City Police, Patoka Twp. Volunteer Fire Department and Pike County Coroner’s Office
What Happened to the Land of the Free?
What Happened to the Land of the Free?
American Institute Of  Economic Research
We live in a country where one may be arrested for opening her store or having too many friends at her house for a social gathering. Whiling away the hours under a modified house arrest, we wait for a relative handful of megalomaniacs in government to tell us when we might hope to return to normal life.
Strangely, the American people seem to have swallowed this new reality whole—no questioning, no scrutiny, but complete, embarrassing credulousness at the claims of politicians, bureaucrats, and pundits frantically waving around little more than shoddy, dubious models and barely hiding a lust for tyrannizing innocent people.
This suggests that Americans, thought to be freedom-loving people, will now believe almost anything, conditioned to be fearful and obedient. Even those who had long since abandoned belief in this myth of America as the Land of the Free might have expected at least some resistance in the face of such open attacks on basic freedoms.
The St. Louis Fed estimates that the economic losses associated with the lockdown orders amount to $25 billion every day, a staggering figure is given that in places like Chicago, for example, the lockdown order has been extended through at least the end of May. The severity of these policies was supposed to be justified by the necessity of preserving hospital capacity, spreading out the volume of cases over time, and thus preventing a tidal wave that would overwhelm the medical system, resulting in further loss of life.
As a matter of fact, however, hospitals are now so empty of patients that their healthcare professionals and other staff have been sent home by the tens of thousands. In a recent survey conducted by Merritt Hawkins, a company that recruits physicians, more than one in five of the responding doctors “said they’ve experienced pay cuts or have been furloughed as a result of the crisis.â€
Pay cuts, furloughs, and layoffs have reached even the urban centers hardest hit by a coronavirus, leaving us to wonder what all of this is for, though know what they say about best-laid plans. Could not our betters in government offices foresee that arbitrarily decreeing the shutdown of all civil society would result in tens of thousands of lost medical jobs? If they did, is this the course they would choose during what they themselves call the worst medical crisis in generations?
Here in Illinois, one state representative, Darren Bailey, dared to challenge Governor Pritzker’s imperious lockdown order, arguing in a lawsuit that the extension of that order exceeded Pritzker’s legal authority. To his eternal credit, Judge Michael McHaney found the extended lockdown order unlawful, issuing a restraining order that blocks enforcement of the order against Bailey.
Addressing lawyers for the governor’s office, Judge McHaney said, “Every second this Executive Order is in existence, it violates the Constitution and shreds the Bill of Rights.â€
Utterly without shame or self-awareness, Pritzker suggested that Bailey is playing politics with a crisis, “devoted to ideology and the pursuit of personal celebrity.†Pritzker seems not to realize that it is he who is blinded by ideology, a totalizing authoritarian ideology that can imagine only top-down, command-and-control solutions to problems. Bailey is merely asking to be treated like a co-equal adult with rights that governments can’t just take away absent due process.
William Graham Sumner eloquently exposed the problems with supposing that every social or economic question is susceptible to solution through the “inelastic and arbitrary†means of legislation or regulation. He saw the “mania for interference†as revealing “the prevailing ignorance of what a society is and what methods of dealing with it are rational.†Faced with a particularly complex, vexatious social question, Sumner teaches, “the last thing to do is to legislate about it,†“for it is not possible to experiment with a society and just drop the experiment whenever we choose. The experiment enters into the life of the society, and never can be got out again.â€
Wise and benevolent though they may regard themselves, politicians and bureaucrats cannot see where the course on which they have now set us leads. Any student of history knows that horrors have sprung from policies far less extreme and authoritarian than the lockdowns that plague millions of Americans today.
Those who favor a free and open society recognized early on that an appropriate, measured response to the virus was always out of the question, that governments would jump at the chance to use the bluntest instruments, the lack of reliable information notwithstanding.
Politicians, after all, aren’t the most scientifically or statistically literate lot, and Americans seem to deify them just in accordance with their willingness to abuse their power—and arrogate ever more of it to themselves. Like Sumner, we ought to look skeptically at “the manipulation of social doctors,†whose remedies are too often worse than the diseases they purport to treat.
FOOTNOTE: This article was posted by the City-County Observer without opinion, bias or editing.
This article was sent to the CCO by our good supporter. Ron Riecken of Evansville.
White House Blocking Fauci From Testifying Before Congress About Coronavirus Response
White House Blocking Fauci From Testifying Before Congress About Coronavirus Response
But the White House will let him testify before the Senate Health Committee the following week.
By Alex Moe, Dareh Gregorian and Julie Tsirkin
The White House has blocked Dr. Anthony Fauci from testifying about the response to the coronavirus crisis before the House Appropriations Committee, a spokesman for the committee told NBC News on Friday.
“The Appropriations Committee sought Dr. Anthony Fauci as a witness at next week’s Labor-HHS-Education Subcommittee hearing on COVID-19 response. We have been informed by an administration official that the White House has blocked Dr. Fauci from testifying,†the spokesperson, Evan Hollander, said.
He’d been asked to appear on May 6.
But the White House said they will allow Fauci to testify at a Senate Health Committee on May 12, according to a spokesperson for committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., told NBC news.
Fauci, the head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been a key adviser in the Trump administration’s fight against the coronavirus, and until recently, a fixture at the White House coronavirus briefings. He’s also sat for numerous media interviews on the virus, including on sports podcasts.
In a statement, White House spokesman Judd Deere said the May 6 hearing is not an “appropriate” time for Fauci to go before the House
“While the Trump Administration continues its whole-of-government response to COVID-19, including safely opening up America again and expediting vaccine development, it is counter-productive to have the very individuals involved in those efforts appearing at Congressional hearings,” Deere said. “We are committed to working with Congress to offer testimony at the appropriate time.”
In a joint statement, Appropriations chair Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., and subcommittee chair Rosa DeLauro, D-CT, said, “Congress and the American public deserve a clear-eyed view of the path forward for responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
They said the hearing will proceed with hearing next week with testimony from Dr. Tom Frieden, who was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Obama administration.
Fauci last testified about the virus before the House on March 11, when he warned, “We will see more cases and things will get worse than they are right now.†His testimony was cut short when he was called to a meeting on the virus at the White House.
“Right Jab And Middle Jab And Left Jab†MAY 3, 2020
“Right Jab And Middle Jab And Left Jab†MAY 3, 2020
“Right Jab And Middle Jab And Left Jabâ€Â was created because we have a couple of commenters that post on a daily basis either in our “IS IT TRUE†or “Readers Forum†columns concerning National or International issues.
The majority of our “IS IT TRUE†columns are about local or state issues, so we have decided to give our more opinionated readers exclusive access to our newly created “LEFT JAB and Middle Jab and RIGHT JAB† column. They now have this post to exclusively discuss national or world issues that they feel passionate about.
We shall be posting the “LEFT JAB†AND “MIDDLE JAB†AND “RIGHT JABâ€Â several times a week.  Oh, “LEFT JAB†is a liberal view, “MIDDLE JAB†is the libertarian view and the “RIGHT JAB is representative of the more conservative views. Also, any reader who would like to react to the written comments in this column is free to do so.
HOT JOBS IN EVAANSVILLE
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