The Columbia Club has hired Maarten van Wijk as general manager and chief operating officer to replace Edward Albany. Albany stepped down early this year after the not-for-profit hired a St. Louis consulting firm to help it reverse declining membership and other problems. Van wijk was general manager of the Four-Star Mobile award Hotel Hershey […]
While most eyes were on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s 2-1/2-mile oval this month, Kevin Long was more interested in what happened in the media room. Long is not a news reporter, but he’s been focused on every word spoken to the media this month by drivers, team managers and owners. It’s Long’s job to make sure those speaking into the mike maximize the benefit for themselves, their teams and sponsors. He owns and operates MVP Sports Media Training LLC, a…
But that axiom doesn’t seem to apply to Baldwin & Lyons Inc. The quiet trucking-fleet insurer headquartered in Indianapolis happily let its revenue slide last year 7 percent, ending a four-year run of rapid growth. Why? Because new competitors have aggressively entered Baldwin’s traditional trucking market with lower prices. The industry’s margins have been slashed by half or more. Most businesses would call that trend a threat. But not Baldwin. President Joe DeVito disdainfully calls these new competitors “naive capital,”…
Campaign finance records through the first quarter of 2007 show Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, has raised $176,950
in Indiana. That’s more than twice as much as one-time Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, his closest Republican rival.
I once spent a day serving as an Allen County election official. I was 20-something. I worked for Fort Wayne’s mayor. And on Election Day, the mayor expected us to work the polls. For the sake of nostalgia and monotonyinterrupting conversations, I got myself assigned to the precinct at my high school. On the appointed Tuesday, I showed up at 5:15 a.m., did my voter-watching/guardagainst-shenanigans-by-the-other-party thing for 12 hours and helped with votecounting for two hours after that. Then I…
A surge of new products could drive Cummins Inc. sales to $20 billion by 2012, CEO Tim Solso told The Republic, a newspaper in the southern Indiana city. That would be about twice the $11 billion the diesel engine maker reported for 2006. Much of the increase would come from light-duty diesels the company is […]
The 2007 session of the Indiana General Assembly is now history. Whatever else might have been involved in shaping its outcome, nothing was so determinative as the revelation in the closing days that property taxes-driven by the first application of trending, rising property values in general, the elimination of the inventory tax, and some old-fashioned political legerdemain on the part of some assessors in different regions of the state-were expected to rise an average of 24 percent for taxes payable…
The new Indiana State Museum building–a 230,000-square-foot study in glass, steel and limestone–opened in 2002 to blockbuster
attendance, with nearly 260,000 of its 614,000 total visitors checking out the exhibits. Fast forward to its five-year anniversary
and the news isn’t so rosy.
As I write this, we have no way of knowing what the 2007 session of the Indiana General Assembly will mean for gambling, property tax relief or the biennial budget-the three overarching items looming over the heads of lawmakers as they entered their final week of deliberations. But that won’t prevent us from making a few pertinent observations about the context, and how that atmosphere was shaping events. Each legislative session possesses a flow of its own, based on incidents,…
Businesses, including Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co., have poured $1.7 million into coffers of chairmen of U.S. House of Representative committees since the start of the year. That’s nearly twice as much as corporations gave when Republicans controlled the House during the same stretch of 2005, according to Bloomberg. Interests including pharmaceutical makers, like Lilly, […]
Longtime readers of this column will recall how we traditionally analogize conference committee time to the NBA playoffs, and compare some of the legislative players to Indiana Pacers great Reggie Miller in the closing minutes of a finals game. With Reggie retired and the Pacers out of the playoff picture this year, those analogies don’t seem quite so appropriate. But we still can talk some hoops. A sage Hoosier native, speaking about a tradition sacred to generations of Hoosiers, once…
Ivy Tech Community College–charged with cranking out workers to fill high-demand jobs in critical occupations–has an output
rate reminiscent of an old, state-owned Soviet assembly line. Incoming President Thomas Snyder is taking over a community
college system that graduates only 12 percent of its students within three years.
For those who thought this had been a fairly boring session of the Indiana General Assembly to date, wake up from your deep slumber. Nap time is over. We’ve reached the point where the lowhanging fruit has been picked by lawmakers and passed on to the governor, and the heavy lifting remains. Lawmakers embark upon the conference committee stage of deliberations. To understand conference committee time, forget all your conceptions to date about the session and begin with a clean…
Fred Glass, president of the city's Capital Improvement Board, headed historic transitions in both the mayor’s and governor’s
offices and has become the go-to guy for some of the city’s biggest initiatives, most of them sports-related.
This week will see the final round of action by the House on Senate bills and the Senate on House bills, and then the real work of the Legislature begins. Legislation that has passed both chambers in different forms may be reshaped in a manner acceptable to both, and legislation that has passed only one chamber remains eligible for inclusion in related bills and final passage by both the House and Senate. Few people gave much credence to this year’s…
The first version of the $25.6 billion state budget, passed by the Democratic majority in the Indiana House of Representatives
Feb. 22, didn’t include any money for the Indiana 21st Century Research and Technology Fund, which provides financial assistance
to promising high-tech startups.
April 2 will start a busy-and important-week in the life of the Indiana General Assembly. House and Senate c o m m i t t e e s w i l l effectively wrap up their respective work, hearing the bills they choose to after the legislation moved across the Rotunda from their opposite chambers. The following week, you can look forward to a few days of floor votes on amendments and final passage in each chamber, and then legislators…
Leaders of Indianapolis’ mass transit movement don’t expect to benefit—at least not immediately—from Gov. Mitch Daniels’ giving up on his push to build the Indiana Commerce Connector toll road. “I never felt they were either/or projects, said City-County Councilor Joanne Sanders, a Democrat and vice president of the Central Indiana Regional Transportation Authority. “They both […]
We recently told you how revenue growth was lagging the December fiscal forecast. One prominent Republican senator tells his constituents that his colleagues are now planning for a growth rate in this fiscal year of only 2.5 percent, not the 4.2 percent to 4.5 percent they had planned on at the beginning of the session. While lawmakers will not have a new fiscal forecast for the biennium until the middle of April, they are clearly girding for a new fiscal…
After about seven months without a leader, the Indiana Small Business Development Center network has found one in Jeff Heinzmann. An attorney by training, the 39-year-old is charged with getting the statewide system of 11 regional centers on track in their efforts to help entrepreneurs get started and grow. Despite their connection, the Indiana centers for the most part have operated independently, and some-like the central Indiana office serving Marion and the surrounding counties-have struggled for stability. Heinzmann aims to…
