By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
INDIANAPOLIS – Chris Cotterill, former chief of staff for Mayor Greg Ballard, says outsourcing made it possible for Indianapolis to upgrade the technology and improve the service of the city’s parking meters.
John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com
He says it was the only way to get it done because all government budgets are tight and options are limited.
Rep. Pat Bauer, D-South Bend, says outsourcing management of the Indiana Toll Road has been a huge mistake. Bauer, the former speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives, says the money Indiana collected for leasing the toll road to a private consortium for 75 years now is gone with more than 65 years remaining on the lease.
Bauer, Cotterill and I – along with Indiana University Prof. Sergio Fernandez, co-author of a study on government outsourcing – are sitting in a radio studio talking on the air about the ups and downs of having government enter into agreements with private companies to provide public services.
Indiana has been at the vanguard of the outsourcing movement. It also has been at the forefront of the controversies about the practice.
The toll road and parking meter deals are prime examples of both outsourcing’s upsides and downsides.
The toll road lease won national attention. The state secured nearly $4 billion in the deal – although it had to return a portion of that money – and it was able to plow those funds back into more road and bridge construction projects than the state had seen in a generation.
Those funds, though, now have been spent and the toll revenues will flow into private hands for the next six decades and change. Reports on the service and maintenance of the toll road since it moved into private hands have been mixed.
Bauer says the deal’s premise was flawed. He says that the toll road became a toll road only to fund first its original construction and then some upgrades. The decision, with the lease, to make it a permanent toll road, he says, amounted to a breach of promise to the taxpayers, but, then, he’s not exactly a fan of outsourcing.
Cotterill says that the parking meter deal provided the best option to bring parking in Indianapolis into the 21st century. He says that the city couldn’t have acquired and implemented the expertise and technology to make it possible for people to pay for parking with credit cards and their smart phones anywhere near as efficiently as a private company could. He says that upgrading the parking system relieved pressure on businesses and made parking more cost-effective around the clock.
That’s the problem, a caller says. She says that before the parking meter deal, people could park free downtown after certain hours and that now it costs everyone more to park.
Bauer jumps in on that point.
He says that the problem with outsourcing is that it introduces a new factor into the public service equation. He says that people pay taxes so that government can afford to provide certain services and that the taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay anything more than what those services cost. He says that outsourcing brings in companies and people who want to make a profit from serving taxpayers and that breaks down systems of accountability and opens the door to corruption.
Cotterill shoots back that the for-profit motive encourages efficiency and that encouraging efficiency serves taxpayers better. He says that one way to achieve a profit is to figure out how to provide a service less expensively and that private companies often are better at that than government is.
“The only people who benefit are the officeholders who can get a lot of cash while they’re in office,†Bauer retorts.
It gives those officeholders a way to finesse problems without raising taxes, he says, and allows them to leave the more enduring problem for the next office holders and the next generations of taxpayers.
Cotterill disagrees, of course. The hour and the show end with Bauer and Cotterill still at odds.
Fernandez’s study shows that government outsourcing is on the upswing.
That means that both the practice of outsourcing and the arguments accompanying it are likely to continue.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits†WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.
