Wisconsin Churches vs. Cemetery Lobbying Fight; N.C. Budget Scuttles Light Rail Project

Here’s some of what we’ve been reading today…

MADISON, Wisconsin: Churches appear to have run up against the cemetery lobby in the Badger State. Three cities have blocked churches from installing columbaria, which are basically cabinets of drawers made to house the ashes of cremated believers. Cedarburg, Port Washington and Brookfield say that columbaria is just a church word for mausoleum and that mausoleums can only be built at cemeteries. Churches say they’re not housing bodies, merely ashes, which people can keep in their homes and pose no health risk. The Journal Sentinel reports that lawmakers have introduced a bill to lift the city bans on columbaria. But the newspaper also notes that the business of cremation is on the way up and that the business of burial is on the way down. Forty-five percent of people who die in the U.S. are now cremated, up from 24 percent in 1998.

Rev. Kevin Carroll, dean of All Saints Cathedral in Milwaukee, said he thought the cities were “stepping into an ant hill ... getting into the line between church and state." [Journal Sentinel]

RALEIGH, North Carolina: Republican legislative leaders squelched funding for a $1.5 billion light-rail project that has been in the works for years and would connect Durham to Chapel Hill in the high-tech region of the state known as The Triangle, home to North Carolina State University, Duke University and the University of North Carolina flagship campus at Chapel Hill. Lawmakers proposed capping any rail project funding at just $500,000 but would provide $700 million to build and repair roads and bridges. The budget would also eliminate 29 Department of Transportation jobs, even while hiking Division of Motor Vehicle fees, reports The News and Observer.

GoTriangle, the regional transit agency that wants to build the 17-mile Durham-Orange rail line, secured approval for $138 million in state funds this year when the state Board of Transportation approved the 10-year State Transportation Improvement Program. But prospects for actually getting that money were cast in doubt when House and Senate Republican leaders released their budget Monday night with no explanation for the new cap.

Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt told the paper that the cap on rail funding was a “project killer.” [The News and Observer]

HONOLULU, Hawaii: How are seniors in residential facilities in the Aloha State being treated? Are their beds clean? Are the lights working in the hallways? Are there handrails in the showers? It’s still difficult for the public to find out, despite the fact that the state passed a bill unanimously in 2013 requiring the health department to post inspection reports online by January 2015. Department officials say they just don’t have the resources. Gov. David Ige said they do. Honolulu Civil Beat reports:   

Advocates for the elderly and good-government groups … heralded the new law, which signaled an end to the practice of forcing the public to submit written requests to access the inspection reports, wait for the department to find the records and redact portions and then pay for the copies and the time it took to do so.

Nine months into 2015 and no inspection reports have been posted for any of the 500 adult residential care homes and 13 assisted living facilities in the state. [Honolulu Civil Beat]

COLUMBUS, Ohio: Here’s another dispatch from the trenches of education finance in the school-reform era. The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Akron-based White Hat Management company and ordered publicly funded charter schools to pay the management company for textbooks, furniture and computers the company bought with tax money, The Associated Press reports. Justice William O’Neill dissented from the opinion, saying it went by the letter of the law but not the spirit. He said White Hat seemed to be engaged in a boondoggle. Tax money is intended to be used to buy supplies for schools. What the company is doing is using tax money to buy supplies and then turning around and selling the supplies to the schools. That should be illegal, he said. “This is a fraudulent conversion of public funds into personal profit."  [The Associated Press via the Weirton Daily Times]

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky: Twitter is not a formal medium, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t rules, many of which remain unwritten. Mayor Greg Fischer is drawing attention for apparently violating one of them, reports Business Insider. He tweeted a photo of a Courier-Journal article that he seems to have taken while sitting in a bathroom stall—i.e., “pooping,” as one Twitter user put it. In our cheerfully coarse culture, Fischer’s tweet may have been a bridge too far. It landed at the popular site of media critic Jim Romenesko, who ribbed the mayor for playing “media critic (from the toilet stall)." Fischer is so far not responding to requests for comment, from wherever he does his business. [Business Insider]