Indianapolis, IN – The Indiana State Police, in accordance with state law, conduct inspections of all school buses used to transport children to public and private schools. All buses are inspected annually. Buses more than 12 model years old are inspected biannually.

While school bus inspection reports are a public record, historically there was not a simple way for parents, school officials, or the public in general to view the thousands of inspection reports prepared by state police personnel each school year. To make school bus records more accessible the Indiana State Police Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Division, in collaboration with the Indiana Office of Technology (IOT), and Indiana Interactive, a subsidiary of e-government provider NIC USA, developed a public access portal website where school bus inspection records can be viewed from the comfort of a parents’ home computer.

The all encompassing goal of this public access portal website is to provide parents, school officials, and the public in general, an easy to navigate website with up-to-date school bus inspection information. To that end, other website owners are invited to make a direct link to the Indiana State Police school bus inspection public access portal website.

The public access portal website became operational on July 1, 2013. The website contains records from more than 30,000 inspections and will automatically update within days after future school bus inspections are conducted.

Access to this new service can be made in several ways:
Visit this Indiana State Police website link at http://www.in.gov/isp/2988.htm. Read the introduction information and then click this link: https://secure.in.gov/ISP/BusInspections/Public/Index.

You may also go directly to the site at: https://secure.in.gov/ISP/BusInspections/Public/Index

Once on the site, simply select the county where the school is located and follow the on screen directions to view selected school bus inspection records.

Refer to this helpful guide:
1. Select the County of the School Corporation
2. Select the School or School District
a. A pie-chart summary of the most recent annual inspection is displayed reflecting the initial inspection results.
b. The initial annual inspection results DO NOT reflect the current status of the bus fleet
i. To see only the Approved, Ordered Repaired or Out of Service inspection results from the original annual inspection, click on either Total Approved, Total Ordered Repaired, or Total Out of Service
ii. To see definitions of these categories, hover the mouse over the selection
3. To see the current status of any bus, select ‘View Inspections’
a. Select the PDF to the right to view the printable inspection record
b. To see historical inspection records of any bus select the bus number on the far left side of the screen
i. This displays all records for a specific bus dating back to Oct. 2011
ii. Select the PDF to the right to view the printable inspection report

The Indiana State Police encourage parents to use this valuable resource to track the inspection reports of their child’s school bus. The only information a parent needs to successfully navigate the website is the bus number of their child’s bus.
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BURSTEN/KATH
Contact Information:
Cpt. David Bursten
Public Information Office
317-232-0064
dbursten@isp.in.gov

State Representative Ron Bacon (R-Chandler) issued the following statement in response to the announcement of the delay of a key provision of Obamacare:

“Two weeks ago, I chose to write my weekly column about the unintended effects of Obamacare. I expressed my concerns upon seeing many companies in Indiana cutting employee hours or cutting jobs all together in order to get around the employer mandate to provide health insurance. Yesterday however, we learned that a key provision of the Affordable Care Act has been delayed by one year.”

“I am very pleased to see this delay and simply regret that it did not come sooner. I’m afraid that for many Hoosiers, the damage has already been done. I consider this delay a small victory; but it doesn’t do anything to change what has already taken place.”

The start of the 11th annual Cops Cycling for Survivors bicycle ride across and around Indiana. A departure ceremony will be held at 8:30 a.m. EDT at the Law Enforcement/Firefighter Memorial, adjacent to the State Capitol, in downtown Indianapolis. This year there are 51 cyclists participating in the ride. They will depart shortly after the key note comments of Spencer Moore, survivor of Officer David S. Moore of the Indianapolis Metro Police Department, end of watch January 26, 2011. Their 9:00 a.m. departure from the memorial will take them east toward Greenfield, Indiana on the first leg of journey that will last 13 days and cover nearly 1,000 miles bicycling the perimeter of Indiana.

Cops Cycling for Survivors Foundation, Inc., is made up of active and retired police officers, law enforcement survivors, law enforcement family members and friends of law enforcement riding their bicycles around the perimeter of Indiana to raise money and awareness about the sacrifices made by Hoosier law enforcement families across Indiana. Funds raised from this event are used to aid surviving family members and co-workers of officers killed in the line-of-duty. Previously raised funds have been directly donated to the Indiana Chapter of Concerns of Police Survivors (COPS), National COPS, Illinois COPS, The Unity Tour and Project Blue Light.

This year the cyclists are recognizing the sacrifices made by Lake County Corrections Officer Britney Meux and Indiana Department of Corrections Officer Timothy Betts. Corrections Officer Meux was killed instantly when struck while on a training run around the perimeter of the Lake County Jail. Three co-workers were also injured in the hit and run crash. She was a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and had served with the Lake County Sheriff’s Department for three years. Officer Meux is survived by her daughter, mother, father, and four sisters. Correctional Officer Betts suffered a heart attack while escorting an unruly prisoner to the segregation unit at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility. Officer Betts had served with the Indiana Department of Correction for 15 years. He is survived by his wife, children, and grandchildren.

The ride is scheduled to conclude on the afternoon of Saturday, July 20, 2013, at Crown Hill Cemetery, Heroes of Public Safety Section, where the riders will reunite with their families and other law enforcement survivors. There will be a short closing ceremony beginning at 2:30 p.m. To see the route the cyclists will follow, please visit their website: http://www.copscycling4survivors.org/route.html Additional information on specific locations of meals and overnights can be found by clicking on the Calendar tab of the website.
Cops Cycling for Survivors Foundation, Incorporated was granted 501(c) 3 status as a not-for-profit in late 2011, and the inaugural 13 day tour around Indiana took place in July of 2012. However, the spirit of this ride began many years before. In 2001 a group of police officers decided to support survivors by riding their bicycles from Indianapolis, Indiana to Washington, D.C. to honor officers who had been killed in the line of duty and to support their survivors.
The ride has gone through many changes over the years, but one thing has remained constant…the cyclists’ dedication to honoring fallen law enforcement heroes and supporting their survivors left behind.

Two people who were integral to the success of Cops Cycling were Lt. Gary Dudley of the Indiana State Police and Retired Chief Gary Martin of the Lake County Police Department. Lt. Dudley took the organizational and emotional lead and kept the wheels rolling after the first two years riding to Washington, D.C. Wanting to do more to support survivors on a local level, Gary brought the ride home to Indiana.

On August 22, 2006, Lt. Dudley and Chief Martin were both killed during the ride when a large box truck struck the rear of the support truck, pushing the support truck into the cyclists. Several of the cyclists who had participated in the ride for many years and were cycling the day of the crash determined to keep Lt. Dudley and Chief Martin’s memories and motivation alive. Those memories and motivation have developed into what the ride is today, Lt. Dudley’s vision and legacy in supporting law enforcement survivors. To date, the cycling event has raised over $300,000 for IN Concerns of Police Survivors.

For more information on the ride please visit the Cops Cycling for Survivors Foundation web-site at: http://www.copscycling4survivors.org/ or Rich Crawford, President of Cops Cycling for Survivors Foundation, Inc. at 317-650-8961.

The EVSC Board of School Trustees approved an agreement to sell the former Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation Administration Building located at 1 S.E. 9th Street to Professionals Plaza, LLC for $740,000. The sale makes the former administration building the final building to be either sold, leased, repurposed or divested since the EVSC consolidated unneeded or underutilized facilities into other locations three and a half years ago.
“We are pleased that this facility will once again be in use and that a local company will now take ownership of the building,” said EVSC Superintendent David Smith. “What’s even more notable is the fact that all our buildings that became available when we consolidated facilities – 12 in all – are now either sold or leased to tenants, are being reused or have been divested.”
In 2010 the EVSC undertook an initiative that helped bring nearly all EVSC offices under one roof by revamping existing warehouse space that was no longer being utilized and relocating the EVSC Administration Building to 951 Walnut Street. By consolidating buildings, the EVSC was able to bring together offices at the new Administration Building location that had been previously divided into three different locations, and allowed the school corporation to operate more efficiently. As of tonight, all three former administrative locations are either being leased or have sold.

Detroit’s Greek tragedy

By Charles Lane

Liberal economists have a ready response to conservatives who fret that U.S. debt might spiral out of control, a la Southern Europe: “America is not Greece.”

It’s true. Greece has much more public debt than does the United States, relative to economic output. Unlike Greece’s euro-denominated obligations, U.S. debt is in U.S. dollars. The U.S. economy is far more competitive than Greece’s tourism-and-tomatoes operation.

Certain parts of the United States, however, are like Greece. Just read emergency manager Kevyn Orr’s 134-page report on Detroit, which has $20 billion in unpayable debt.

Couched in the workmanlike prose of a bankruptcy lawyer — which is what Orr is — the document nevertheless tells a harrowing story of institutional rot and social collapse, brought on by decades of government of, by and for special-interest groups.

Prominent among them are public-employee unions — 47 in all, from organized crossing guards to the Association of Professional Construction Inspectors. Contracts permitted employees to “bump” from job to job based solely on seniority, “without regard to merit, relevant qualifications or experience,” the report says.

Generous pension and retiree health benefits gobbled up tax dollars — more than 38 percent of the city’s revenue in fiscal 2012 alone — that would otherwise have paid for public services.

Small wonder that, per the report, the effectiveness of Detroit’s police force is “extremely low” and the city’s rate of violent crime is five times the national average; or that the average fire station is 80 years old; or that the number of city parks has dwindled from 317 to 107 in the past half-decade.

Detroit could not have financed its bloat without Wall Street. Like German and French banks that bought Greek debt long past the point of reason, Detroit’s financial enablers cheerfully synthesized such securities as $1.43 billion in pension-funding “certificates of participation” — about whose “validity and/or enforceability” the Orr report expresses circumspect but ominous doubts.

Spare some blame for Detroit’s log-rolling and — it must be said — mostly Democratic politicians, including spectacularly corrupt former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who faces more than 20 years in prison on bribery and extortion charges related to rigging city contracts.

Greece’s state-owned money pits include a railroad and ports. The political class in Detroit saw fit to own water works and parking garages. Much as Greece ended up contemplating renting out the Acropolis, cheap, to foreign film crews, Detroit is pondering the sale of masterpieces in its art museum.

Obviously, corruption and interest-group selfishness on a Grecian scale do not explain all of Detroit’s problems. Orr’s report details the city’s chronic job losses, brought on by the long, slow contraction of the auto industry.

Orr does not go into Detroit’s devastating history of racism and racial conflict, including horrific riots in 1967, though he could have.

All of the above contributed to the depopulation of the city, which went from 1.9 million residents in 1950 to 700,000 now — a minority of whom earns enough to pay taxes.

Yet difficult as Detroit’s economic issues were, bad governance made all of them worse. For too long, too many people whose first concern was supposed to be serving citizens concentrated instead on feeding off whatever public resources Detroit had.

Even now, with municipal bankruptcy staring them in the face, some of Detroit’s creditors are resisting Orr’s plan to restructure the city’s debt and devote $1.25 billion in savings over 10 years toward, well, saving the city — block by burned-out block.

At last check, the 54-year-old Orr was planning to take some bankers on a bus tour of devastated neighborhoods, an effort to raise what Stephen Henderson of the Detroit Free Press calls “empathy capital.”

One can only hope for his success. Certainly the Michigan law under which Gov. Rick Snyder (R) appointed Orr authorizes him to do what is necessary — from ripping up union contracts to blowing the whistle on alleged pension fund malfeasance. German chancellor Angela Merkel could only wish for such quasi-dictatorial power over her Greek clients.

Of course, Detroit should never have reached the point where it needed an enlightened dictator. Motor City residents, public employees, financiers and politicians should have practiced the shared sacrifice Orr is belatedly attempting to impose.

Yet they are hardly the only ones to fail. In California, the cities of Vallejo, San Bernardino and Stockton have declared municipal bankruptcy, from which only Vallejo has emerged; Harrisburg, Pa., is insolvent. Last month Fitch Ratings warned that it might downgrade $8.7 billion of Chicago debt due to a growing unfunded-pension liability.

Maybe Americans have nothing to learn from Greece. Detroit, though, is closer to home, and its lessons are not so easily ignored.

Source: WP Opinions

Obamacare Is Coming Undone

Peter Suderman

Obamacare is coming undone. You can see it happening day by day, provision by provision, as the administration postpones or scales back key parts of the law, and other signs continue to suggest that the law as written simply won’t work.

Last Tuesday, in what was apparently intended to be a pre-July 4 holiday news dump, the administration made the embarrassing announcement that it would delay by a year the health law’s requirement that employers with 50 or more workers offer health coverage or pay a penalty. The administration also said it would delay the law’s reporting requirements for employers who offer health coverage.

That raised a major operational question about the law’s health insurance exchanges. How would those exchanges be able to determine whether someone applying for subsidies to buy individual coverage on an exchange already had access to employer coverage? The law says that people whose employers provide coverage aren’t allowed to get subsidies.

Late on Friday, we get another news dump—and an answer. The 16 exchanges run by states won’t have to verify an individual’s health insurance status at all. Nor will the state-run exchanges have to verify an individual’s income level.

Instead, they’ll rely on “self-reported” information. And then subsidies will be available to anyone who simply attests that they do not get qualifying, affordable health insurance from work, and that their household income is low enough to be eligible for subsidies.

As Ben Domenech writes in this morning’s Transom, what this means is that “the most significant entitlement increase since the Great Society will be operating on the honor system.” And as Yuval Levin says, it may turn out to be “an open invitation to fraud.” Even if outright fraud does not become a major issue, the combination of the delays may increase the cost of the law relative to what it would have been: No employer penalty, and no health status or income verification, means that more people will end up on the exchanges, receiving subsidies. And more subsidies means a more expensive law. The deficit reduction it was supposed to have achieved, already significantly reduced, is almost certainly reduced further—and perhaps gone entirely.

The delays also constitute an admission that the administration simply could not make the law’s verification technology—the infrastructure that is arguably the core functionality for the exchanges—work properly before the October 2013 launch of the exchanges. Doing so, according to the rule issued by the Department of Health and Human Services last Friday, “would involve a large amount of systems development on both the state and federal side, which cannot occur in time for October 1, 2013.”

The postponements were unexpected—even, apparently, to the officials running the exchanges at the state level. But trouble with the verification technology should not have come as a surprise. Obamacare’s critics have warned about the potential difficulties practically since the law was passed. In my October 2010 feature on implementating the law, for example, I noted that “fast, accurate income verification presents a particularly serious difficulty,” and spoke to several health policy experts who warned of difficulties ahead. Nor were critics the only ones seeing trouble. It’s been clear from the reporting for over a year now that officials in charge of implementing the law were having serious problems making the exchange technology work. By the time that the official in charge of the exchange technology told insurers that he was “pretty nervous” and had resorted to working to “make sure it’s not a third-world experience,” it was pretty clear that the project was a mess.

The delays aren’t only recent sign that Obamacare is struggling.

Just a few days before the employer mandate was postponed, Bloomberg News reported that a third of the hospitals involved in a high-level test of the law’s most vaunted health care savings programs—its Accountable Care Organization (ACO) program—are threatening to cease participation. The 16 hospitals were part of the ACO “pioneer” program, which was intended to show off how some of the law’s most ambitious health care payment reforms would work. Right now, however, it looks suspiciously like they aren’t.

The same goes for a lot of Obamacare. Earlier this year, officials in charge of the law delayed the essential functionality of the law’s small business exchanges. The law’s early retirement program ran out of money and shut down early. The law’s high-risk pool program signed up far fewer people than anyone predicted—and yet, thanks to unexpectedly high per-beneficiary costs—still had to cut payments to providers and cease enrollment in order to stay afloat. The availability of national health plans that were supposed to be part of the exchanges is in doubt, probably because of insurer reticence. Large swaths of rural, low-income Mississipi may end up with no insurers at all to choose from in the exchange. Officials in states that are building their own exchanges continue to say they are struggling to meet deadlines. The list goes on.

None of this means that Obamacare will collapse under its own weight. The most likely scenario at this point (though not the only one) is that the exchanges will still open on time, enrolling all who claim eligibility in subsidies. But the law’s rocky implementation continues to reveal the significant flaws in both the law’s legislative design and management. There’s still much that’s unclear about the inner workings of the exchange-creation process, but the fact that the administration is jettisoning key provisions this late in the implementation calendar suggests that it is not going well, and it is reasonable to suspect that the bad news for the law will continue. The big question, then, is which piece of the law will come undone next?

This is a link to the official paperwork available right now from the authorities in Marshall County, KY with respect to the arrest of Evansville City Councilman John Friend. The Marshall County District Court currently has no record of the arrest and no court date scheduled on the docket. Councilman Friend was released without bond on three charges.

FRIEND ARREST