Partisan Labor Fight Threatens Indianapolis’s Game-Changing Transit Vision
This map shows the planned scope of IndyConnect, Indianapolis's bold new transit plan. The proposal is now in jeopardy because of a legislative rider regarding labor rules. Larger version here. Image: Urban Indy
Over the last few years, greater Indianapolis has been thinking big about transit. They developed a plan to double bus service and add new rail lines. They even identified funding (a 0.3 percent income tax hike) and built a viable political coalition around the vision — which represented a dramatic shift away from the old car-centric approach that has dominated transportation planning there for decades.
All that work is now hanging in the balance of a partisan standoff unrelated to the actual transit plan. Network blog Urban Indy reported yesterday that an Indiana House committee had voted down the transit legislation 11-10 after a Republican lawmaker inserted language into the bill that would make the transit system “right-to-work.”
The folks at Urban Indy, who have been advocating hard for this bill, are beside themselves. But a shred of hope remains, explains blogger extraordinaire Curt Ailes:
To be clear, the transit portion of the bill never seemed to be at the heart of the debate over HB1073; it was always the labor. The bickering could be see as an extension of the passionate debate of the past few weeks over Right to Work legislation which passed the House yesterday with Democrats coming up on the losing end of that debate.
This officially puts HB1073 in the failed bills category but does not altogether bury it from being passed in some other form this session.
