Legislature’s Dunes deal just stinks

Ever heard of crony capitalism?
You should have. It’s alive and well in Indiana, and its existence threatens the integrity of the Indiana General Assembly.
Exhibit A is the push to allow a privately-owned restau-rant/attraction being developed in the Indiana Dunes State Park to have a liquor permit.
The developers insist that the ability to serve alcohol at their new facility is crucial to its success. But instead of getting that sorted out in advance, the investors went forward with the project without having a permit in hand.
Then they ran into a complication: The local Alcoholic Beverage Control board nixed the permit application. Local authorities in the dunes area thought it was a bad idea, both for the park and the larger community.
Understandably, that didn’t go down too well with the money people.
Their response: Lobby our state legislators to attempt an end-run around local control.
Senate Bill 188 would allow the Alcohol and Tobacco Commission to issue a liquor permit to the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, bypassing local control. House Bill 1135, which is similar, has also been introduced.
There are at least three different issues at play here.
The first is the entire question of private development on publicly-owned state park land. Those park properties belong to the people of Indiana.
Allowing well-connected investors to make a buck on a public asset deserves a long, skeptical look.
The second is the propriety of state government overriding local decisions to put a thumb on the scales in favor of business interests.
And now there’s the whole unseemly, odoriferous matter of private developers lobbying lawmakers, making contributions and working the halls of power to circumvent the public will.
It’s capitalism, of course. But it’s crony capitalism, inside dealing where not all parties are created equal, where money talks and our elected lawmakers run the risk of being compromised.
And it stinks to high heaven. — J.R.