Pay-To-Play Crowd Gets Tens Of Millions In Public Dollars For Mass Transit System Yet To Be Approved By Voters

When the Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee ("GIPC"), Indianapolis' shadow government, met in secret and decided there would be a multi-billion dollar regional mass transit system constructed in Central Indiana, that effectively ended the public debate. The puppet masters of the elected officials you mistakenly believe represent you had their marching orders, and their shills who control major media in the Indianapolis market carefully craft the message to fit their agenda. In short, there's no room for dissenting views.

Allegedly, voters in Marion County and the surrounding suburban counties are being allowed to decide at a referendum no sooner than next year whether our local income taxes will be hiked to support the latest boondoggle dreamed up by the downtown mafia to line their pockets at our expense again. But just like the proposed criminal justice center for which tens of millions of out tax dollars have already been encumbered before a single public appropriation has been approved by the City-County Council, tens of millions of dollars are already being doled out to the pay-to-play contractors.

Earlier this year, the unelected municipal government known as IndyGO, unveiled "a sleek, $20 million transit hub" to be built downtown near the City-County Building, which is scheduled for demolition to make way for new development under plans already decided in secret, once all city-county offices are vacated and moved to the site of the planned, more than half billion dollar criminal justice center as part of a 10-year, second phase of that project. The feds kicked in a $13.5 million grant for the transit hub project. City taxpayers will pick up the $6.5 million balance.

Today, Ballard and his fellow feaux Republican mayors from Carmel, Greenwood and Westfield announced their plans to move forward with the development of a 28-mile bus line, the so-called Red Line previously unveiled by mass transit planners at IndyConnect, that will connect Westfield in the far northern suburbs to Greenwood in the far southern suburbs. About $3 million in no-bid contracts will be handed out for environmental and design study work for a transit line that is projected to cost  as much as $128 million. As an added twist, the powers that be want the bus line to utilize all-electric buses to run the 28-mile route that will include 40 stations. The feds kicked in $2 million of the planning costs, while the four communities are required to provide a $1 million matching appropriation for the spending. Not surprisingly, Indianapolis taxpayers are being required to provide more than two-thirds of the local match funding despite the fact that the only reason for constructing the bus line is to force taxpayers to pay to transport low-paid workers from the inner city to the suburbs whose own development plans are designed to exclude low-income workers from relocating from Indianapolis to their communities.

The Central Indiana Regional Transit Authority ("CIRTA") already administers a daily luxury bus service, helped in part by federal grant money, equipped with bathrooms and WiFi to brings suburban workers to their jobs in downtown Indianapolis that is subsidized by Carmel and Fishers. Barely 100 daily commuters take advantage of the inexpensive, $5 a trip luxury bus rides, which has forced the private bus service to cut back the number of daily trips offered. Mass transit proponents are now suggesting that at least the Red Line portion of the mass transit bus service can be developed without approval of a dedicated income tax revenue stream. It makes me wonder if we're not going to see a plan going before the IURC soon that will ask the electric utility companies serving the three-county region to levy higher electric rates on residents of Hamilton, Marion and Johnson Counties to finance the electric bus line, just like Ballard is now trying to force Indianapolis ratepayers to pay for his electric car share plan.