In early June, Governor Mitch Daniels proposed a four percent reduction for higher education funding. To Indiana University, that was around 20 million dollars. With budget negotiations ever-changing and going to down to the wire, IU President McRobbie testified in front of legislators last week to plead against the cuts the Governor and others were proposing. While McRobbie says he’s not sure his testimony helped result in the sparing of IU, Purdue, Ball State and others from the ax felt by so many other state-funded entities, he says he can’t help but feel good about what came out of the six-month budget struggle.

Compared to some other institutions in some other states we’ll be in somewhat better position. We’ve actually fared quite well. Especially in what is an extremely difficult financial climate. There are very sober indicators suggest that we haven’t really moved into full recovery yet. And the situation of the state is obviously not good. So, in the circumstances I think we’ve actually done quite well.”

Within a month, McRobbie will present IU’s next budget to the university’s trustees. Proposed tuition rates will like come along next week. McRobbie says the university will have to continue to cut expenses university wide to deal with its drop in state funding.

IU received about 600 million dollars in state support during the fiscal year that just ended. That’s about 23 percent of its overall two-point-seven billion dollar budget. More than 100 million dollars in new building projects also received from funding under the new budget.

The luckiest of Kokomo Local 292 members had three weeks to make dental and vision appointments and fill prescriptions.  The less fortunate heard about the changes for the first time at a meeting last week at Kokomo’s Memorial Gymnasium.  Several hundred members fanned themselves with informational hand-outs as they waited to learn of their losses. The first of these meetings was so full, many members could not even pull into the Local 292 parking lot.  Some — but not all — retirees received letters in the mail with details explaining their new benefits.

Director Mo Davidson said the Voluntary Employees Benefit Agreement, or VEBA, struck between the United Auto Workers union and GM in 2007, requires GM to contribute to the retiree trust fund until 2010.  GM still owes its part of the contribution, but in order to receive federal bailout funds, there has been government pressure for further union concessions.

As part of its concessions, the union has agreed to take $2.5 billion in cash and the rest in GM stock as payment for VEBA funds.  But that still leaves a deficit in money needed to continue benefits retired members and their families have enjoyed for years.  Davidson said if the company rebounds and stocks become more valuable, they can be sold and potentially used to bring back old benefits.

“I was kind of upset.  It seemed like it happened all of a sudden,” retiree Brenda Morgan said. “People didn’t really have enough time to rebound from the announcement.  Now everybody’s running to their eye care and their doctors to get their appointments before their insurance runs out.”

Carole Sitzes was fortunate to make an appointment in time.  “I always went where you can just walk in, but when I called them they were completely booked up through 6 July, which would have been past the date,” she said.  ”So I just looked around and I finally found an appointment and went and had my eye exam there.  My dental I had already went in February and they won’t pay for another one this year.”

The scheduling crunch forced some doctors in town to work overtime in an effort to fit everyone in.  Dr. Kathryn Jones said there’s been a unified effort at her office.  “We’ve been working our days off. We’ve been coming in on vacation. We’ve been doing all that we can,” she said.

Another consequence, Jones said, is that patients may opt for less expensive procedures.  For example, an uninsured client may have a tooth pulled rather than having a pricey root canal.  Jones says she doubts it will hurt her business, but Brenda Morgan said she’ll have to make fewer medical visits to compensate for a smaller budget.

“We were having our teeth checked twice a year,” Morgan said.  “We’re going to have to cut back on that-maybe once a year now.  But me being diabetic, I need to have these things checked.  We’re just going to have to come up with the money some kind of way.”

Morgan’s husband Dennis is a salaried retiree who lost his health benefits from GM several months ago.  Both of them are now seeking new jobs in a job market where nearly one in five people is unemployed. The alternative is retired life with no dental or vision health coverage and a limited prescription co-pay.

“We’re just going to have to hold our head up-to think how we spend our money and thank God for the benefits we still do have.  Just try to be more frugal about what we do in the future,” she said.

Unionized retirees are clinging to the small, remaining portions of union contributions on prescription drugs and emergency room visits, as well as coverage for dependent grandchildren where the grandparents are sole guardians.  Still, members are left to hope that more of their pensions and their remaining health coverage - however scant — won’t be lost as well.

Bloomington Representative Peggy Welch says she voted for the budget only because she feared any more delay would have resulted in a worse compromise between the Senate, House and Governor.

She says the provision promising $27 million for a bailout of Indianapolis’s deficit-rattled Capital Improvement Board, which oversees venues for the city’s professional sports teams, almost changed her vote.

“That was difficult for me. That was something that really made me hold my nose to vote yes,” Welch said. “I tried to look at the big picture.”

Welch says the budget Senate Republicans and House Democrats agreed on in late April was by far a better budget for education. Between the regular and special sessions, a revenue forecast report gave lawmakers one billion fewer dollars to work with over the next two years.

Welch says an impending June revenue report would have resulted in the Governor and legislative Republicans to try to shave more money off the two-year $28 billion budget.

Fellow Bloomington Representative Matt Pierce voted against the budget. He says he was in favor of staying in Indianapolis to try to work out a better compromise. Pierce says public education in Monroe County and around the state will be significantly affected by their funding for the next two years.

“If you look at the Monroe County School System they’re going to get a .69% increase the first year. And about a .24 % increase the second. So over the next two years, with a less than one percent increase the way you have energy costs increasing and health care costs and everything in general,” Pierce said.

“That’s going to make it very difficult for Monroe County schools to do the job they want to do of educating our kids. Which I think should be the number priority of the state.”

The budget flatlined money for higher education, but approved many university building projects. Only three Senate Democrats and 14 House Democrats voted for the budget.

Now that the Indiana legislature has passed a new two-year budget, differing stories of how the six-month process played out are emerging. Last week, Governor Mitch Daniels toured the state delivering the message that Democratic House Speaker Pat Bauer was holding House Democrats’s votes hostage. On his multi-city tour, he claimed House Democrats were too timid to defy their leader’s alleged orders. Rep. Welch says Bauer told Democrats to vote their conscious based on how the budget would affect their individual districts.

“No. He was never holding us hostage. I find that quite offensive. That [Governor Daniels] would think, first of all, that Speaker Bauer would do that. And second of all, that we are such wimps and that we don’t get to make up our own mind. That’s highly offensive. We are equally elected officials with Pat Bauer and the Governor. We make our own decisions,” Welch said.

Rep. Pierce says lawmakers should have stayed and worked toward a better compromise and that a threatened government shutdown by the Governor easily could have been avoided.  Pierce says Daniels had the power to issue an order that would continue appropriations under the previous budget.

In order to improve the lives of Afghan farm families, the ADT is searching for high-value agricultural products for farmers to raise. To research opportunities, Commander Col. Brian Copes leads his team into the heart of the dangerous Khost City market, site of many recent IEDs and assassinations. But after a designated amount of time, a siren sounds and the team must leave, in order to be safe.

Finding high-value products for impoverished Pashtun tribal farmers to cultivate is vital to Afghanistan’s counterinsurgency strategy, Col. Copes said. With 70% of Afghans working as farmers, the country’s government needs to revive its agricultural capacity to regain the trust of the rural population.

“In the very broadest sense, we’re involved in a counterinsurgency to try to separate the enemy, the anti-Afghan forces, from the Afghan population,” Copes said. “To transform the environment so that Afghan people have a different quality of life; a better quality of life, where they live in a safe and secure environment so they will be able to benefit from the fruits of their labor, and hope that their kids do better than they do.”

The ADT has identified walnuts, pine nuts and honey as potential money-making crops. However, the ADT must also determine if encouraging beekeeping will destabilize tribal relations, as certain tribes monopolize the bee trade.

The ADT is also committed to long-term agricultural training. Col. Copes said he pushes the importance of education in conversations with tribal leaders.

“What I say is that knowledge is something that the Taliban can’t take away, and will last long after the coalition forces have left and out money is gone. Knowledge is something the Taliban cannot blow up or burn down. They get that. Every time I’ve thrown that out, they get that; they understand that.”

To improve agricultural education, the ADT is partnering with the Khost provincial government. Part of the initiative includes the support of agricultural extension agents, who will bring modern farming techniques into the villages. The ADT is also forging a relationship with Shaikh Zayed University in Khost City with support for a model farm and agricultural education. Maj. Ronald Crane said there’s also a program helping the school’s journalism department beam radio programs on farming to the rural areas.

“Basically, we are going to help send a message to the people of the Khost Province that the agricultural leaders of the province are here for them. We want to tie the people and the community to their government.”

But insurgents find other ways of disrupting the partnership. The school’s chancellor says a recent Taliban threat caused the cancellation of an ADT meeting on campus, forcing it to be held instead at the ADT’s fortified Forward Operating Base Salerno.

“Two weeks ago we had one night letter… from the Taliban side,” the Chancellor said through an interpreter. “Today that we cancelled the meeting; we did not want that. If you guys come over, some people will kill us. To protect your life and protect the university, we…decide to have the meeting here.”

But, in spite of the Taliban threats, it’s clear the Chancellor wants to continue the relationship, and even expand it.

Next week: a focus on the ADT force protection and security team.

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The tax, if levied, will be used to expand Monroe County’s convention center. Convention Center Director Talisha Coppock, says the $1.7 million she expects to be raised by the tax is the only way expansion can happen.

“At this point in time, the innkeeper’s tax just isn’t strong enough to do it on its own,” Coppock said. “There’s really no other significant source that’s available.”

Dunn Inn owner Riley O’Callaghan, who recently moved back to Indiana from California, says though he isn’t sure he’ll support the tax, he thinks Coppock’s assertion it’s the only way to fund convention center expansion may be correct.

“Everything really runs through the state and that’s some of my own frustration of us not being able locally to say, ok we’ll reject this but come up with a different answer that would allow us to maybe create a special sales tax district where all retail outlets would feed into this somewhat,” O’Callaghan said. “But we can’t do this without running it through the state. Our laws aren’t set up that way.”

Four other counties in the state currently use a food and beverage tax to pay for their convention centers.

“This is on top of property tax caps, this is on top of lost revenue from our income taxes from having a lot of people laid off,” Goodnight said.  “We were looking at $2.8 million in cuts for next year and we were well on our way to finding most of those, not all of them.  But in the mean time — I know this is probably the catch phrase of 2009 — we’re going to have to make some tough choices.”

Speaking on WFIU’s “Ask the Mayor,” Goodnight said if Chrysler is allowed to forgo its payments, it will certainly mean more penny-pinching in the budget and could mean additional layoffs for a city which already leads the state with an 18.8% unemployment rate.

“They may be some [layoffs], it may be short work weeks.  There could be a little bit of everything,” the mayor said. “I think people will tend to buy in and understand it if they see that we’re taking care of the pennies, as well as the dollars.”

As a result of the possible funding gap, Goodnight said he hopes firefighters — who have scheduled talks with city leaders in an effort to see some laid off employees re-hired — understand that a bugdet crunch may make that impossible.