Remember earlier this week when I said Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard has put every piece of municipal real estate, including City Hall, on the potential auction block? Yeah, that’s totally true. If you don’t believe me, read this story in today’s Indianapolis Business Journal:

The Mayor’s Office has quietly agreed to consider selling some of the city’s more than 1,100 properties, including police stations, maintenance buildings and parks, in a bid to raise cash to help balance the budget. The city awarded the potentially lucrative no-bid contract to Venture Real Estate Services, a politically connected real estate firm led by John Bales.

The local firm has the responsibility of scouring the city’s real estate holdings for cost-saving opportunities that could result in sales or sale-lease-backs of everything from Bush Stadium to the former state museum. Even the City-County Building is on the table.

City officials say the idea is to make sure taxpayers are getting the best value out of properties they own. The move sets the stage for a potentially aggressive drive toward privatization of city assets.

“Nothing is off the table,” said Michael Huber, director of enterprise development for Mayor Greg Ballard. “If your costs of owning an asset are much higher than your cost of leasing that asset, then the taxpayers are paying too much.”

Every property is different, and any disposition of property would require public input and local government approval, Huber said.

Several of the city’s top real estate professionals say a city review of its property holdings is a good move, but they question the two-year exclusive deal with Venture. The agreement provides a strong incentive for the firm to find potential buyers for city properties: It won’t be paid a dime unless deals are made or savings are realized.

Word on the street is that Mayor Greg Ballard isn’t just looking at selling off tiny public parks for a one-time infusion of cash.

Everything is on the table, including the potential sale of City Hall.

Yeah, you heard me right. City Hall.

The Mayor who once said he’d bring government back to the people is now thinking about selling whatever he can to the highest bidder. That includes parks of all sizes, city land, city services and the very building that houses our municipal government.

Who wins in all this? Ballard’s ethically questionable real estate broker, John Bales, and all the other powerful people involved in any future real estate transactions.

Who loses? Us. Oh, and the dude who stuck the “Everything Must Go!” sign on our government.

Heck, even Mitch Daniels knew better than to put the Statehouse on the hypothetical auction block.

Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard has put a copy of his proposed budget on the Internet. If you are a total geek it will be fun reading. If not, it’s the cure for what keeps you awake at night.  Thank the Lord I have a little bit of geekdom in me.

We’re a little more than eight months into Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard’s term of service, and his wheels are starting to fall off.

First, he backtracked on his promises not to bring powerful lawyers and lobbyists into his inner circle. Then he hired a bunch of washed-up political hacks, even creating new, high-paid positions for some of them. (Yes, I’m talking about you, Sarah Taylor.)

More recently, Ballard violated his stringent campaign pledge to never cut public safety funding by slicing more than $5 million out of the Marion County Jail budget. He’s also pushing a secretive plan to privatize the Mayor’s Action Center, and he’s now entered into a no-bid contract with an ethically questionable real estate developer to analyze and subsequently sell off small city parks. Ballard, in a recent interview with the Indianapolis Star editorial board, said he just doesn’t “make the connection between a property the size of this room and green space.”

What’s happened to this average fella, who not long ago was the poster child for every aspiring pol hoping to take on a Goliath administration?

Allow me to explain.

Ballard came to the dance as an outsider. He brought no date. He just showed up with a lot of hope and an empty dance card. Though he was born with two left feet and a tendency to hover around the punch bowl, he somehow wound up prom king. And then everyone lined up to get a piece.

That’s where his problems began.

See, there are people who understand that life, to a certain extent, is politics, and there are people like Ballard — middle managers who take orders and sometimes get to give a few, too. Politics is chess. Ballard plays checkers.

Ma and Pa Wags taught me that you can count your true friends in life on one hand; everyone else wants something.

Ballard hasn’t learned that lesson yet.

And so we get people like Bob Grand and Joe Loftus and John Bales running our city and carting off large pieces of the taxpayer pie behind closed doors.

Don’t get me wrong: They’re not bad people, but they wouldn’t be returning Ballard’s phone calls if he didn’t have “Mayor” in front of his name. In fact, had he lost last November, they’d be doing their best to bring in business from the other side of the aisle. These people exist in every administration and also in the business world; you just have to know how to handle them.

A Republican friend and I were talking a few weeks back about the need for every elected official to have a close adviser with no vested interest, someone who’s there to say, “Hey, friend, I wouldn’t do that because [insert unpleasant consequence here] will happen, and you’ll look bad.”

In other words, someone to deflect the thousand fake smiles and upward-turned, freebie-seeking hands that follow power around like a wheedling pup.

Unfortunately for Ballard, even his team of press folks, his conduit to the people who buy ink by the barrel, are defensive amateurs who were cast off from the better-oiled Republican machine at the other end of Market Street.

I’m going to say one more time that I don’t think Greg Ballard is a bad guy.

I will say, however, that I think he’s tremendously naive, and he’s going to be a bad mayor because he doesn’t have the wherewithal to stick to his core values amid an onslaught of requests from people who have their, not his, best interests at heart.

My friends, I’d like to share with you this week a page from the Republican privatization handbook.

The process of selling off our critical assets and services goes something like this: Ohmygawd, we just got into office and this stuff is soooooo messed up. We’re too dumb to fix it ourselves, so we’re going to pay the private sector to do it.

You know, the private sector, with its companies like Halliburton, the kind of entities you know you can trust with taxpayer dollars and essential services.

At the state level, Mitch Daniels’ privatization fixation has given us prison riots, Hoosiers stuck on hold trying to get food stamps and a Toll Road that will turn a profit for foreign companies for 65 years.

Now we’re watching Greg Ballard do the same thing with the Mayor’s Action Center.

Behind closed doors and without asking for input, he decided to issue a request for proposals to take over the front lines of customer service in city government.

It’s sad to me that in America, a country that prizes ingenuity, our public servants are all too eager to throw in the towel and admit they can’t solve our problems.

If that’s the case, why don’t we just elect HAL or Joshua to office? Computers aren’t accountable to anyone, but then again, neither are these people.