Although I may have quietly suspected this for a while, I am convinced that Indianapolis City-County Council member Brian Mahern does not like Black people in general and must have personal disdain for Black children.
I know what you’re thinking, “Abdul, that is a pretty strong allegation! I hope you have some proof to back up that allegation.” Of course I do.
I present to you as proof of my allegation Mahern’s proposal to charge a 3 percent administrative fee to the mayor’s sponsored charter schools. Mahern says the fee is necessary because it costs the city money to oversee the charter schools and the city should collect those dollars from the charters. State law does allow for the fee to be levied so one might think that Mahern was acting within the spirit of the law, right? Wrong. If you do dig deeper, you’ll see that Mahern’s proposal is borderline illegal. In fact, it is so out of whack that one can only speculate he is not doing it for any rational, logical reason.
Under Indiana law, the authorizer of a charter can assess up to 3 percent administrative fee to cover the costs of overseeing the school. It costs the city of Indianapolis about $600,000 annually to oversee charters. That figure is the cost of the budget of the Mayor’s Office of Education Innovation which has that responsibility. But Mahern’s plan would collect $1.8 million from the charters. So if it costs $600,000 to oversee the schools, but Mahern is collecting $1.8 million, what is the other $1.2 million paying for?
Mahern told my colleagues at RTV 6, “That would free up money with the general fund for other priorities. We could look at things like educational engagement, maybe related to violence we’ve seen in schools.” Hmmm.
Here’s the other problem with that. Under the state law that allows charter authorizers to levy a fee, there is also a provision that prohibits the authorizer for levying a fee against the school that has nothing to do with the services it provides.
So what exactly would that extra $1.2 million pay for? Mahern’s plan runs afoul of the statute. And seeing how clear this is on its face, one can only speculate that only a political idiot would offer up this proposal or someone with more sinister motives has something in mind who would want to take dollars away from the instruction of Black children and send it somewhere else?
While the first alternative seems very reasonable since it was Mahern who offered up the plan to levy a PILOT against the Capital Improvement Board even though it was clearly against state law, no one could be so idiotic as to offer a second proposal which shows they have no clue as to what is going on. Remember, this is also the same person who went out of his way to undermine Council President Maggie Lewis’ authority, sees Vop Osili as a major obstacle to his Don Quixote ambition to become mayor and opposed the tools to create economic development in some of the city’s poorest African-American neighborhoods.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is an attorney, political commentator and publisher of IndyPolitics.org. You can email comments to him at abdul@indypolitics.org.
