From: Tom Heller
Columbus
More than a month ago, I submitted a written request to our county auditor’s office for the amount of money her office distributed over the past seven years to all Tax Increment Finance (TIF) districts in Bartholomew County. I still have not received the data I requested.
I checked a tally of my campaign activity this fall. I found that in less than one month, I had personally hand-delivered campaign doorhangers to over 6,000 homes. Yet over the same number of days, a full-time, paid public employee cannot pull up semi-annual reports of monies distributed to TIF districts over seven years.
I was seeking the office of county Treasurer, with one single mission: to rectify egregious errors that five years of careful, in-depth research had uncovered. (Those errors produced a trajectory by which the Columbus Redevelopment Commission would harvest $40 million of unearned tax revenues.)
My research was entirely reliant upon accessing the auditor’s database and the annual TIF “neutralization” filings that office prepared for the state Department of Local Government Finance.
Now, that entire database has, in effect, been placed under lock and key of newly-reelected Auditor, Pia O’Connor. Within one week of my public information request, she informed me that her deputy “will compile the information and I will review. This may take until February. Merry Christmas.”
There is no need to “compile” reports that are already completed. They reside in their computer system’s data/file archives and would only need a couple of keystrokes to retrieve them. It doesn’t require a month to compile — and another month to review — prior to providing them to a citizen requesting them.
There’s a bigger story here. It’s more than simply a recalcitrant public official lording it over a member of the public when one occasionally shows up to request public information.
It’s yet one more instance of a breakdown in the performance of those we’ve elected to public office and placed in control of our taxes and facilities, from our courthouse to the offices and chambers we provide them. Thanks, however, to the dominance of a certain political party and insufficient examination of candidates for office generally, public officials — whose duties are owed to us — continue to be returned to office time and time again, even performing a game of “musical chairs” rotating among offices. Accountability is missing.
To ignore and deny. Is that the standard of their duty to us? Is that acceptable? Will the public continue to elect officials on the basis of nothing more than name-familiarity or party affiliation? Isn’t it time we demanded more? A lot more, I’d say.
