Gov. Mike Pence insists Indiana can cut taxes, maintain its strong financial position, and fund its priorities, and that the tax cut will stimulate spending and put businesses in a position to add jobs. Whether that’s realistic depends to a great extent on how the state’s priorities are defined and how much should be spent on them.
Eugene White is a towering man with an outsized personality to match. When he took the helm of the troubled Indianapolis Public Schools seven years ago, he seemed to have the confidence and determination to steamroll through the changes the district badly needed.
The Indianapolis budget accord announced Jan. 7 by Mayor Greg Ballard and City-County Council leaders is worth at least some polite applause.
To put in perspective the flurry of activity that has been the eight years of the Daniels administration, one must think back to the state he inherited following a succession of solid, but caretaker, governors.
Incoming Indiana Gov. Mike Pence may have spent a decade as a U.S. representative. But he is a neophyte when it comes to managing the state budget—unlike legislative warhorses such as Speaker of the House Brian Bosma and Sens. David Long and Luke Kenley.
The Indiana Economic Development Corp.’s proposal to create a $30 million venture fund dedicated to life sciences startups is good news for a valuable sector of our state economy that has been losing out to the more investor-friendly high-tech sector.
Any discussion of the state’s transportation priorities would be incomplete without including the one topic legislators have been reluctant to take on: mass transit.
The three real estate developers profiled in our Commercial Real Estate Focus section this week personify that maxim—wisdom that we often lose sight of in the midst of economic hardship.
Tis the season to give—and we’re not talking about the shop-till-you-drop display of conspicuous consumption that started before the Thanksgiving leftovers were even cold.
Mass transit advocates held a rally here to kick off Indy Connect Now, their latest attempt to convince state legislators that voters in Marion and Hamilton counties should be allowed to decide whether to fund creation of a $1.3 billion bus and light rail system in central Indiana.
The number of administrative workers at Purdue shot up 54 percent in the past decade, nearly eight times the increase in tenured and non-tenured faculty, Bloomberg reported. Meanwhile, the cost for room, board and other expenses for attending the university swelled 60 percent.
It will soon be time for newly elected governor Mike Pence to prove his critics wrong. Pence beat challenger John Gregg in a closer-than-expected race in which he was accused of using his campaign’s major themes—jobs and the economy—to hide his conservative social agenda from Hoosier voters.
The board’s dismissal of CEO Randy Bernard seemed to cut a change agent off at the knees, and that could come back to haunt them.
Last week’s IBJ reported on an entirely different consequence of the direct-flight problem that should—must—break us out of our stupor and get something done.
Democrats on the Indianapolis City-County Council who voted to plug a hole in the city budget by charging the Capital Improvement Board $15 million risk creating more problems than they solved.
It’s invigorating to see the big potential of grass-roots economic development efforts. Take, for example, the Reconnecting to Our Waterways initiative, a mammoth plan to use six waterways in the city to attract investment and improve the neighborhoods that surround them.
The projections released last month by Trust for America’s Health were sobering: By 2030, more than half of Hoosiers will be obese.
A few weeks ago in this space, we called for someone—anyone—to step forward to take a leadership role in resolving the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra’s labor dispute. The silence has been deafening.
In a former life, Carmel Mayor Jim Brainard was a real estate attorney. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that splashy development projects have been a hallmark of his four terms as mayor.
We applaud the move by certain Democrats on the City-County Council last month to advance a proposal to expand the downtown tax increment financing district. Now we’re counting on the full council to pass it when it’s eligible for consideration at the council’s Sept. 17 meeting.
