By Jessica Wray
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Gov. Mike Pence named two new members Friday to the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission.

Angela Weber of Franklin and Carol Stephan of Indianapolis will both begin serving on the commission in early March.

The IURC is a fact-finding body that hears cases brought by customers and utility companies. The organization exists to “ensure the utilities provide adequate and reliable service at reasonable prices.”

Weber currently works for Ice Miller and has previously worked for the Indiana Department of Education and the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office. Stephan has worked for the Indiana Department of Workforce Development, the state attorney general and as general counsel for the state Office of Utility Consumer Counsel.

Both have previously worked for the IURC.

“I extend my utmost appreciation to the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission nominating committee for their diligence, integrity and commitment to public transparency throughout this process,” Pence said.

Members of the nominating committee are Chair Gwen Horth, Eric Scroggins, John Blevins, Larry Buell, Win Moses, Michael Evans and Michael Mullett.​

TheStatehouseFile.com

 INDIANAPOLIS – Scott Shepherd tells me the story of how he became a racist – and then how he stopped being one.

At one time, he was a serious, determined and dangerous racist. He was a high-ranking official in the Ku Klux Klan and he ran for

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com

public office in Tennessee twice as a white supremacist. He didn’t win in his campaigns for governor and state representative, but he acknowledges that he did a lot of damage along the way.

Shepherd and I are talking on the radio, along with race relations expert and author Daryl Davis. Davis, a black man, has made a practice of establishing relationships with white supremacists and attempting to lead them away from the path of racial animosity. He’s had success. He’s persuaded more than a few dragons and wizards to renounce their racist ways.

Davis and Shepherd both have interesting stories to tell, but I find myself pitching more of the questions Shepherd’s way.

Maybe it’s because, in these angry, angry times, I want to try to understand what makes someone adopt hate as a lifestyle, a passion, a mission.

When Shepherd tells his story, that story’s pedestrian nature makes it clear how well-trod the path to bigotry is.

He was born in Mississippi in 1959. His hometown – Indianola – was the birthplace of the White Citizens Council, a racist organization dedicated to preserving and promoting segregation.

Integration came to Indianola when Shepherd was in elementary school, but the fuse for his rage already had been lit long before the classrooms were desegregated. He came from a troubled family – one that struggled with alcohol and dysfunction.

When Indianola’s schools were integrated, the white families in the community who had money sent their children to an all-white private school. Shepherd’s family didn’t have money. He went to a public school that was overwhelmingly black.

Every school day was a reminder not just of the changes in the South’s racial politics, but also of just how far down on the social totem pole Shepherd and his family sat. Each day was yet another reason to feel resentment about his life and everything around him.

He drifted to the KKK because the organization meshed with his stored grievances, the well-stoked fires of anger he carried within him. Being part of the Klan made him feel “welcome,” as if he “belonged somewhere,” he says.

He rose in the ranks and worked hard at baiting, belittling and tormenting blacks, Jews, immigrants and just about anyone who wasn’t just like him and his friends.

When Shepherd was running for governor of Tennessee as an avowed racist, he got pulled over while driving under the influence.

He had to go into treatment as a way of avoiding harsher legal penalties. The treatment forced him not just to confront his drinking and substance problems, but other issues, too.

“I learned that the problem wasn’t all the other people I blamed,” he says. “The problem was Scott Shepherd.”

He renounced his racist views and began working to achieve racial reconciliation. When he encounters people he tormented in his earlier days, he tries to make amends.

“I know I’ll never make right what I did, but it’s important to try,” he says.

I ask Davis, who has spent a quarter-century studying white supremacist groups, how common stories like Shepherd’s are – stories that lead to bigotry and hate.

“All too common,” Davis almost sighs.

People veer to racist organizations, he explains, when they are unhappy with their lives and change seems to overwhelm them. They look for people to blame for their misery – people they don’t think are like them.

Both Davis and Shepherd say the key is simple but hard: Getting racists to stop looking at types and get them started seeing people, individual human beings. It’s intensive work and it has to be done on a person-to-person level.

Doing the work that way takes a lot of time, but there’s a good reason to step up the pace.

Membership among the KKK and other hate groups is growing rapidly.

Davis and Shepherd explain at least one of the reasons: There’s a black man in the White House, which has made a lot of already unhappy and angry people even more unhappy and angry.

That makes for a fertile field of racists from which to grow a good crop of racists.

John Krull is director 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.

TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Gov. Mike Pence has appointed Dennis Bassett to be a the director of the Department of Financial Institutions, a cabinet-level position in his administration.

“I’m confident he will serve Hoosiers with the highest integrity,” Pence said.

Basset has had four decades of experience in managing financial institutions. Most recently, Bassett was the chairman of JPMorgan Chase Indiana, where he served from 2005 until he retired in 2013.

He also served as the Indiana chief executive officer for Bank One, Indiana president of Huntington Bank and senior vice president and manager of large corporate banking for the Midwest division at First Chicago NBD.

“Dennis Bassett’s breadth and depth of knowledge is incomparable,” Pence said.

Erika Brock is a reporter for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

 

By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com 

INDIANAPOLIS – So, Indiana Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, took a trip to the woodshed.

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com

The Indianapolis NBC affiliate WTHR reported that Delph met with Senate leaders a few days after his epic Twitter-fueled self-immolation. During a three-day rant on social media that concluded with an emotion-heavy but substance-free press conference, Delph lashed out at timid evangelical church leaders, liberals, the media and just about everyone else who didn’t agree completely with him that Indiana’s constitution should ban gay Hoosiers from marrying or entering into civil unions.

More important, he railed about legislative leaders he thought weren’t truly conservative or lacked the courage of their convictions – which most observers read as shots at the Senate leadership in general and Senate President Pro Tempore David Long, R-Fort Wayne, in particular.

Long and the leadership apparently didn’t like being the objects of Delph’s ire.

Following Delph’s rant, Long and the leaders decided to punish Delph in various ways.

Two of the punishments are straightforward.

Delph’s seat on the Senate floor will be moved away from the Republican leadership and put next to Democrats. (Perhaps moving Delph’s desk and chair to Mars was discarded as too expensive an option.)

And Delph also will lose his position as ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The other two raps on the wrist carry with them some delicious irony.

Delph will lose his press secretary. (That’s not much of a punishment. There isn’t much evidence that he was listening to the one he had, anyway.)

And he’ll be stripped of his position as Senate Assistant Majority Floor Leader of Communications. (I’ve asked this before but I’ll ask it again here: When real life is this strange, why do people bother writing fiction?)

Delph reportedly accepted the punishment but has promised another statement next week.

Oh, joy.

As political punishments go, this one is pretty severe. Delph’s Senate Republican colleagues are saying to him:

We don’t want you to hang around us, we don’t want people to think you’re one of us and, most important, we don’t want you to talk.

Good luck with that last one.

The GOP leaders opted to make Delph go sit in the corner primarily because he broke the Mafia-like seal of secrecy by which most political caucuses, Republican or Democratic, operate. What gets said in the caucus meeting stays in the caucus meeting. No one speaks outside the family – er, caucus.

And that’s part of the problem.

Because so much of Delph’s Twitter outburst and press conference veered from idiosyncrasy to self-aggrandizement, the fact that he may have had at least one valid point got lost in the mix.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether House Joint Resolution 3 even should have been part of the legislative process this year. Given that such measures face constitutional challenges almost everywhere and the outcome is in doubt, the prudent thing from the start probably would have been to wait to see what the outcome of the litigation would be before engaging again on the issue.

But the fact is that the state’s leaders didn’t choose to wait. They made HJR 3 a top priority – shifting it from one House committee to another to make sure that it made to the floor and taking other extraordinary measures to force the state’s citizens to confront the issue.

Then, when it became clear that HJR 3 could be a political liability for them, GOP leaders in the Senate decided to shut down the public conversation they helped create.

And the most important meeting, discussion and decision involving an issue the state’s leading Republicans pushed Hoosiers to consider took place behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny, under vows of silence.

That isn’t the way the process of self-government is supposed to work.

So, Mike Delph got taken to the woodshed – for transgressions that merited punishment.

But Delph’s not the only one involved in this mess who should have his hand slapped.

Not by a long shot.

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.

By Olivia Covington
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Local governments could lose the ability to buy firearms back from citizens under a Senate bill that was considered in the House Public Policy Committee on Wednesday.

Sen. Jim Tomes, R-Wadesville, said he authored Senate Bill 229 because he’s “never understood the logic” behind firearm buyback programs.

He said rather than allowing local units of government to buy and destroy firearms, law enforcement should take the guns and sell them at public auctions, where prices are usually higher. They could then take the revenue from auctions to buy supplies, such as bulletproof vests, ammunition or new firearms.

Damaged weapons could only be sold to federal firearm license dealers.

SB 229 would also prohibit law enforcement agencies from destroying guns, unless the serial number has been obliterated.

The bill allows citizens whose weapons are confiscated by law enforcement to request to have those weapons sold. The revenue – minus 8 percent that would stay with law enforcement – would then be returned to the weapon’s original owner.

“I don’t see where anybody is harmed in this,” Tomes said.

Bill Dowden, legislative director of the Indiana State Rifle and Pistol Association, said he thinks buyback programs are “feel good” programs meant to make cities appear safer. And, he said the revenue law enforcement agencies would gain under the bill would enable them to do more firearms training.

But law enforcement officials expressed concerns about the bill’s regulations on destroying firearms.

Warren County Sheriff Rusty Hart said he and the Indiana Sheriff’s Association think law enforcement should be allowed to destroy weapons that are taken from crime scenes or meth labs. He said when firearms are destroyed, companies pay for the guns and recycle the salvageable parts.

Hart said destroying quality guns is “the exception, rather than the rule.”

And, Hart said he is concerned that criminals would buy guns previously used in crimes to harm or kill more people. But Dowden said there is no nationwide evidence that supports this concern.

Stephanie Crandall, a Fort Wayne legislative and business liaison, said very few of the guns that are confiscated by law enforcement have obliterated serial numbers, which she said could lead to stockpiles of guns in police stations if they cannot be destroyed.

But both Hart and Crandall said they support eliminating the buyback program because they think it is ineffective.

A representative for the Association of Indiana Cities and Towns said the organization does not support eliminating the program, because its members want to have the authority to decide if the program is right for their community.

The committee took no vote on the bill.

Olivia Covington is a reporter for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.