We must hold corporations accountable for their actions.

Across the state, companies take advantage of weak penalties for running overweight trucks – $1500 or less each time they get caught! This accelerates wear on public roads and increases the burden on the state budget. It also puts the public at risk. It’s time to increase the penalties and enforcement for ‘running heavy’ so that it isn’t worth it.

Indiana’s roads are patches on patches on patches. in some places. We must demand stronger and longer warranty periods from paving contractors so that our roads are not on a constant cycle of pave/repave with a series of damaged car suspension in between.

Public funds built the power transmission lines and natural gas service lines. Public organizations used to manage the service, but now corporations like AES, Blackrock, and Duke run the show and squeeze ever last penny of profit – to the tune of $1.5 BILLION in the first quarter of this year. They even cite the cold winter as “favorable weather” that added to their profits.

There’s a lot of heavy lifting to be done in the short-term:

In addition to the heavy lifting of overcoming decades of deferred maintenance, we have other infrastructure to manage as well.

Our drainage infrastructure is not up to the task of handling the massive flood events that we are getting more frequently. It will take a lot of work by survey crews, working with the Army Corps of Engineers to revisit a lot of our levees, dams, ditches and spillways and make sure they are able to handle the next 40 years’ rainfalls, instead of struggling to keep up with this year’s rain.

Indiana was once a model for town-to-town railway travel.
We could be again.

100 years ago, you could bike to a train station in Greensburg in the morning, and spend the night in Chicago. Train travel is an efficient way to move a lot of people long distances, and there is a peaceful elegance to riding on a train through the rolling fields, even on an uncomfortable AMTRAK seat.