Opinion

There’s no doubt Tell City and Perry County people will continue to answer the calls of their community, their state and their nation as members of the Indiana National Guard, but they will no longer assemble in what was until Thursday the Tell City Armory.

From a grammatical standpoint, it’s not proper to capitalize armory in that usage. Technically, it has always been an Indiana National Guard armory in Tell City. The National Guard is a state organization, and when ordered into service, falls under federal control.

April 6 found a statewide smoking ban turned down by an 8-1 vote from the state Senate Public Policy Committee assigned to review the issue.

House Bill 1018, according to a recent Indianapolis Star article, had split senators on the committee between not wanting a state mandate for banning smoking and believing that the current proposed bill was too weak to do any good.

The state officials most responsible for ensuring Indiana’s children are educated seem to be doing all they can to stifle the process most likely to ensure the state’s prosperity.

High-schoolers who are able will get the chance to move ahead to college a year early if Senate Bill 497 makes it into law. That’s wonderful, but it will affect the schools those students will leave behind.

When the NCAA started requiring 820 SAT or 68 ACT scores for freshmen to be eligible for college sports, longtime college basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian predicted that there would be cheating on those standardized tests to make star athletes eligible.

He’s been proven correct in several cases. The most notable one involved current NBA star Derrick Rose, who led Memphis University to the NCAA men’s Division I championship game in his only season there.

It’s no secret that Hoosiers – and Hoosier politicians – disagree on the roles labor unions should play in the 21st century work place. So-called right-to-work legislation in the Indiana House was effectively killed last month after Democrat lawmakers in that body left the state, literally. In doing so, they denied that body a quorum and added Indiana to a list of states in which lawmakers have fled their seats to stop legislation they opposed.

That our public school system has severe flaws is a popular premise in government and among many education reformers. And $300 million in recent spending cuts to Indiana’s public schools necessitated by the state’s need to balance its recession-riddled budget certainly haven’t helped solve the schools’ problems.

The Perry County Council will meet Wednesday evening to discuss changes to the retirement fund currently offered to deputies employed by the county sheriff’s department. As The News has reported, Sheriff Lee Chestnut wants the county to fund a transition from the current program under the Indiana Public Employees Retirement Fund to another geared toward police officers and firefighters.

One of famed cowboy philosopher Will Rogers’ best known quotes is his reply when asked which political party he belonged to. “I’m not a member of any organized political party — I’m a Democrat,” he said.

One might say the same thing about both major American parties now, as one would not expect an organized party to try to overthrow some of its most powerful and respected members.

Two announcements from City Hall over the past week give us hope that Tell City’s downtown has a bright future.

A story in last Thursday’s issue reported on the likely sale of the former Dat’s Kajun restaurant to Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana, a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving buildings with significant history or architectural value. Many of us remember the building at the corner of Main and Pestalozzi streets as the Glow Room Tavern and we’ve all seen the imposing structure’s gradual decline over the past few years.