I'm Steve Hinefeld. I'm your moderator today. I'm a contributor and board member for Limestone Post
Magazine. And we're getting started just a tiny bit late here. So please, if you haven't already, and
I think most people have, mute your audio. It's like the number of participants is going way up. A lot
of people on today, I'm sure, have questions.
So if you have a question, what you'll do is to send a direct message in chat to one question moderator.
Open up chat, select one question moderator, and send that person just a message that says,
I have a question. And then after the legislators give their opening remarks, we'll recognize you. And
in the order that you
contacted and you, you know, raised your hands, so to speak. We'll recognize you and ask for you to
give your questions. So stay muted until you have a chance to do that. This, all the state legislators
representing Bartholomew, go to the next slide if you like. Thank you. Representing Bartholomew, Brown,
Johnson, and Monroe counties.
have been invited to legislative updates. And that's a long list. I think it's something like
10 representatives and six senators covers a wide range, wide area. And a few of those people represent
parts of Johnson County, maybe Bartholomew County. So we'd like to invite them all. Obviously, we're
gonna hold here.
Things to keep in mind, there's their names if you want to check it out. But again, things to remember,
this is an informative meeting, an information meeting. It's not a debate. Please be civil and respectful.
Be civil and respectful to the people who are here and to the people who aren't here and to the people
who are in
on the meeting and are maybe anonymous. We're going to open with each legislator's summary of significant
bills that passed this session. I'd say also on significant bills that didn't pass is an important topic
as well and their views of what will happen over the recess between now and really election and then
after that they'll be back in to organize in November
and back in for the next session in 2027. So again, we're going to look to participants to name the
issues and raise questions to participate. Once again, send a private chat message to one question moderator.
Say simply, I have a question. You'll be called on to unmute and present your question.
in the order the questions are received, and if time permits, you may ask follow-up questions or raise
other issues. We do have two legislators here. Let me have Pierce's join us as well. You can direct
your questions to an individual legislator, but both or all, if others join us, may respond if they wish.
Near the end of the meeting, something new we're trying, participants will be asked to choose from topics,
discuss their top priorities for legislative consideration. We're doing kind of a poll within the meeting.
After we do that, we're going to give the legislators an opportunity to close and we're going to moderate
questions and answers to try to get as many people an opportunity to participate as practical. We're
going to end by 10 30. Community Access Television Services CATS is recording this session, including
the questions, so anticipate that you might be on TV. And with that, we can go ahead with opening remarks.
Are we going to record this?
We are recording this, yes. Thank you. And I believe these are posted to the League website later. Someone
can provide information about that. Senator Yoder, since you were here first, you want to go first?
Thank you, Steve, and excellent job in stretch, stretch. So I'm texting Matt. So glad you're here, Matt.
It would have been a great but long hour and a half.
I just want to say thank you. Here we are at the end of session. I will go over maybe the Senate majority
priority bills and then maybe Matt can do the House priority bills and how they did. But based on our
conversation at the beginning, before the session even started, you voiced your
desires on what you would like to see what's important to you and a poll that was conducted and so I
tried to take that into consideration and I filed some bills accordingly. One was a bill that actually
came out of an interim study that I successfully got through the legislature and actually had studied
last interim and it was looking at the
economic value of our public lands. And based on those recommendations, I met with DNR and we together
went through all of the recommendations that were unanimously voted on in support. And we identified
the just few as three of them that had zero fiscal impact that DNR could get behind and support. So
I turned that into a bill. You said the environment was important to you. I worked that bill and all
the bill did was basically ask
the Department of Natural Resources to partner with either IU or another state university on the impact
of Indiana's public lands on public health indicators. And also create a mitigation plan for natural
disasters. Okay, so we get this, the bill is heard the first week after the two week redistricting
success that we had in December. When we came back in January, it was heard the first day of natural
resources and it was voted through unanimously. It had all kinds of support. In that meeting, most of
the Republicans were like, add me to the bill. It gets to the floor and it hits a wall. And they're
like, what is this trying to do? We don't trust a Democrat carrying this. I'm just telling you,
what they said. You have words on here like mental health. What are you trying to do? And all the legislative
services agency did was use the language that was already in code. And so it got gummed up in what I
later learned was a desire to sort of send a message from what happened in December with redistricting.
And so I worked that bill.
I ended up getting it through the Senate. It was controversial. You can see it was Senate Bill 67. It
goes over to the House. I'm in constant contact with DNR. I met with the governor about it. I think
basically it was what we do with most bills. This isn't needed.
the department can do this without this bill. And so the bill ended up dying and didn't get through
the House. It didn't even get a hearing, but that was frustrating. I'm still gonna go back to those
recommendations that we gathered from the interim study and try to push some that had a few fiscal notes
to it and see what we can do for next legislative session. So I'm still gonna work on it, but I wanted
to give you an update on that bill of the joys of politics. There was another bill that I filed
IU had approached me about a desire to do a feasibility study looking at their master's degree programs
in the behavioral health space that they could realistically keep the quality high, but Nate Turner
two year program into a one year program. So a student who is getting a master's degree in three years,
because we made that possible through the legislature a few years ago, could add on, could start that
and add on an additional year and finish with a master's degree in four years. Or if a student was doing
a four year degree, master's degree, they could finish that master's in an additional year. So it would
turn a three into a four or a four
into a five. And it was just a feasibility study targeting certain degrees that the state of Indiana
has a need for throughout the state. It didn't get a hearing. But I kept pushing that bill. And we were
able to get it into another bill. But then the
they call the Germaine police. The Germaine police on the sand side came out and said, it's not Germaine,
it has to come out. So that language came out, but then I was able to successfully get it into an education
bill partly. It wasn't the full bill, but the important part of the bill got into 1266. So that was
a minor success. So shifting a little bit to some wins that I was able to get for our district, our county.
Real quick, in House Bill 1001, which was a housing bill, I'll just say the Bloomington Housing Authority
had approached me because they want to purchase an apartment complex in our county that is not well
maintained. But the way that the Indiana Code is written, they're not eligible to make those purchases
and receive the benefits to do workforce or affordable housing. So I worked with the
authors of 10.01 and we were able to get that through. So that was a minor win for our specifically
for our community. And there was also some language that was targeting Bloomington in 10.01 and I worked
with the author to get that language out. So that was a win as well. I'm not saying anything about the
policy per se. It was just that don't really want the legislature to come in and undo what we've elected our
folks to do in Monroe County or Bloomington specifically. So I got that language out and it stayed out.
That was a win. I also was able to in a Senate priority bill, it was Senate bill. No, that was also
a House bill. The Senate bill priorities, honestly, outside of Senate bill one, which I'll get into, were
I don't know, lackluster. They were trying to conform to the one big, beautiful bill, H.R.1,
the Reconciliation Federal Bill, Reconciliation Budget Bill. So let me transition to what the Senate
majority, the Republicans in the Senate, what their priority was. Number one, it was to what they stated
was to right-size Medicaid according to what the federal government is requesting of all the states,
of Medicaid and of SNAP.
to deal with the abundance of administrative error in states. And Indiana has an above average administrative
error rate in both Medicaid and in SNAP. So Senate Bill 1 didn't just reconcile to what the federal
government was doing. It took a think tank
piece of legislation that no other state has tried and took it as far to the edge over the edge of throwing
people off of access to Medicaid and SNAP than any other state. It goes so far beyond what the federal
government is requiring.
I've really challenged the Senate majority on this, you know, and fought back that they're not, this
is not a reconciliation bill. This is a bill of brutality. This is a bill that we will feel the healthcare
impact on each and every one of our bills in the space of healthcare. And I think there was, you know,
some partnership with, I have the name of this think tank. It's like the government oversight and transparency,
think tank, they're out of Florida, but it's a DC think tank. And they wrote it and basically we passed
it. No amendments. I mean, that's what was so frustrating is there wasn't even an ability to have a
conversation about the space of SNAP benefits and Medicaid. It was like a deal that they made to see
just how far a state could go, not just with austere measures, but really
brutal. And that's going to be, I think, tough and felt. It's going to reverberate throughout the state,
I think, over the next couple of years in their attempt to right size Medicaid and SNAP. What's interesting
is the argument was Indiana has an above average administrative error rate in both SNAP and in Medicaid,
not from the provider side, but from
of individuals who need Medicaid and SNAP. Administrative error is not the beneficiary. It's not the
fraud of an individual. This is mistakes made at an administrative level. So now with SB1, they're putting
in a more administrative burden to address the fact that the federal government is saying, we're gonna
fine states pretty hefty
fines, penalties if you have administrative error. And so Senate Bill 1 is going to try to throw people
off of Medicaid and SNAP in hopes of reducing error by putting in more administrative burden. Doesn't
make sense, but that's Senate Bill 1 and it did pass. Senate Bill 2 was a bail bill where you're going
to see on your ballot this fall, an amendment, a ballot initiative, it's exciting, to change the amendment
on who can be denied bail.
and gives more discretion to a judge based on even a misdemeanor, actually. It'll be in the discretion
of the judge on who can be denied bail, going beyond treason and murder. And Senate Bill 2, which was
a priority because they needed to finish this quest to put this ballot initiative on for this coming
election. But Senate Bill number 2 was sort of fixing some of that. Senate Bill 4 was a,
the tax reconciliation or sort of a tax bill to make it in line with what the federal HR one, the one
big beautiful bill that was the tax side of it. In Senate bill four, they did extend SCA one from last
session that was devastating for our local for
every local government unit, including our schools. It just kicks it down the road another year because
they know that they did not get it right and they need to have another budget session, long session,
to really get in there and figure out how they're going to fix this because every community, you know,
north to south, east to west was crying out that what you passed is not good for our communities and
it needs a major fix. So they just pushed that down one more year in Senate Bill 4.
They also did, they addressed childcare by not opening up the budget with our sort of, if you want to
talk right sizing, let's right size what's in reserves because what is sort of seen as best practice
is between like 10 and 13% of your general fund. And Indiana now after December is going to have between
a 13 and 15%
reserve compared to the general fund. So that is above average in holding on to taxpayer funds when
we have serious needs in the state. And one of those is in childcare. And what Senate Bill 4 did was
add that out of this new fund that last year's budget bill created, that if you need to, you may use
these funds, $300 million to,
fund CCDF vouchers. Well, that's a May provision. And you can't do much with the uncertainty of May.
It needs to be a shall. And this money is going to be used for child care so that our child care centers
and families and businesses in Indiana can actually build something
with some certainty, can sustain something with certainty. But that's how they addressed, that's how
the super majority address childcare. And I was on lawmakers this weekend and this issue came up. And
what the Republican leadership said was, because I was pressing saying, we would not say may in creating
an infrastructure for our roads and bridges.
We want our roads and bridges strong. Child care is just as important. It's just as much infrastructure
in terms of the strength of this state's economy and supporting families. So until we look at it that
way, we're always going to be floundering. And the response was, child care is in no way comparable
to infrastructure like roads and bridges. It's not as critical.
you know, there's definitely some value differences there. And if you ask any family in Indiana, it's
they would probably say something quite different. So that's a little bit about what's happening in
the Senate. Some wins, some really frustrating misses. And with that, I'll pass it over to Representative
Pierce. OK, thank you, Kelly. Appreciate that. First, I'd say that
This was, I think for me, the most challenging session I ever had just to keep up with everything that
was coming at us. I mean, we've had short, you know, short sessions are always kind of hectic to begin
with. But, you know, wasting two weeks on the front end on the redistricting effort and then chopping
two districts, two weeks off the other end. So you could avoid people complaining to you about how you
wasted a lot of money, you know, for two weeks that ended up
really compressing things even more. And so you just had to really struggle to keep up with what was
in all these bills and things coming at you. I kind of thought of it was like, you know, having four
wildfires coming at you from every direction. And you're kind of standing in the middle with your garden
hose, trying to decide, like, which fire do I try to put out next? You know, and you kind of know that
eventually you're just going to be overwhelmed. And that's that's all there's going to be to it. So
the I think that
You know, it's kind of low expectations for this session, I think. The other thing that's interesting
to me for the last couple sessions, what traditionally has happened is the House Republicans will say
the first 10 bills introduced, like 1001 through 1010, are our official agenda items, you know, and
usually those are the bills that, you know, are going to pass in some form in some way because,
you know, they have to say they were successful at their agenda.
For the last couple years, they have not come up with 10 bills to be on their agenda. And I've kind
of described the Republican super majorities who've been in power for so long, kind of like these tech
billionaires who have like completely gone through their bucket list. They've launched themselves in
the space. They've done everything they can think of, and they're kind of out of things on their bucket
list. And so the House Republicans only had four bills on their exciting agenda list.
And in the beginning, I had a little bit of hope because they were talking about affordability, right?
And for the first time, I sensed that the majority felt they might be a little vulnerable about people's
just frustration with the cost of everything. And so they had two bills that were supposed to address
affordability. The first one was 1001, supposed to be their housing affordability bill. And the premise
of the bill was that
the way you're going to bring housing prices down is basically just wipe out a lot of planning and zoning
regulations. And the home builders who have several members of their association actually are members
of the General Assembly. So they don't even need lobbyists in the hallway. They have the lobbyists like
right in the chairs. They were driving that bill. And so it started out wiping out all kinds of local
zoning requirements, but it included an opt back in process. So
You know, Bloomington wanted to maintain its zoning. It would have to basically go through, I guess,
and pass an ordinance and say we officially opt in to keeping what we had. So I thought that was a little
bit of an illusion. That was kind of strange. And so it went over to the Senate and it got even further
stripped down by the time it came back to the House. It essentially was this weird dereg bill where
it limited what you could do for mitigating like water runoff, like how big your retention ponds could
be, which I thought was
kind of odd as a housing affordability bill. There are a couple safety features that could be mandated
to be in homes as far as technology, the sense when the wiring is going crazy and you might have a fire
start or something, which I quite frankly never heard of. And the home builders saying, oh, these are
expensive and they don't really work. And so they outlawed them. And it's like, what is going on here?
The only thing that really left is left in this bill that matters, maybe,
is it's mandating that every local, every county and every town have a hearing and have a process to
think really hard about all their planning and zoning requirements and what they might get rid of to
theoretically make housing more affordable. And then after they do that, they have to send a report
up to the General Assembly about whether they actually did anything. So it kind of seems like an
Yeah, I just don't know how that translates into affordable housing because the biggest problem with
the bill is, OK, let's let's totally accept the premise that all these regulations are making housing
too expensive. There's nothing in the bill that required the homebuilder to actually pass the savings
along to the person or even build workforce housing. You could be using that to build your McMansions.
There's there's actually just no guarantee at all. So I thought the whole thing was kind of misguided
from the beginning.
The other attempted affordability was House Bill 1002, which addressed utilities. And the Republicans
are really on the run on utility costs and affordability, particularly in Northern Indiana. I mean,
there is practically a pitchfork rebellion going on up there in the Nipsco territory. People are getting
bills for five, $600 combined gas and electric bills up there. And they're just outraged. So I guess
the best way you can put it.
And I actually went up there several weeks ago to a town hall meeting in Munster, Indiana to talk to
these NIPSCO people about basically who did this to them? Why are these bills so high? And
so the affordability bill, again, we had some hopes we could do some real immediate things. And so what
the bill essentially ends up doing, which is good, but it's kind of minimalist, is if you're
have a low enough income that you're part of the LIHEAP program, the low income heating assistance program,
then you automatically get put into this thing called levelized billing, which utilities would call
budget billing. But the idea is they would estimate your average use and you would just pay that same
amount every month. And then once or twice a year, the utility would do a true up and adjust that. And
so if you didn't pay enough, you'd have to
of even things up and if you paid too much I guess somehow there'd be credits or you get a rebate or
something. And the idea was that would help out lower income people from having huge spikes during the
winter or the summer when maybe they're heating or their cooling costs are really high. It also added
in you know currently now they're the winter months the utilities cannot disconnect you because we don't
want people freezing to death in their homes.
The bill now adds in a more complicated component that says when the heat index gets really high in
the summer, during those periods, you can't be disconnected. So it's a recognition that cooling can
be really important, particularly to seniors. And so that's an advantage. And probably the biggest potential
thing in the long term, this bill might do, but it just remains to be seen,
is right now we have a rate regulation system called rate of return. And what you essentially do at
the IORC is the utilities say, this is what it's gonna cost us to provide the service. And then there's
usually a big fight amongst the consumer groups about whether that's accurate or not. The IORC determines,
okay, this is how much money we think it's gonna cost for you to provide service. Then they decide what
kind of profit should they make on that? And usually that's around nine, 10, maybe 11%,
And so they set that. And what that means is you have this weird perverse incentive in the system that
the more gold plated your utility system is, the more expensive it is to provide the service, the bigger
your profit. And so what 10.02 will do is it's kind of tipping the toe in the water of something called
performance-based rate making.
The idea is, what's going to happen is they're going to set the rates the old-fashioned way, but then
they're going to keep them level the same for three years. The rates will either go up or down depending
upon the performance of the utility. If the utility does a good job of keeping the lights on, responding
during storms, there's a whole bunch of metrics. They'll measure what they're doing. If they do well,
they'll be allowed to have some more profit. If they do poorly, if they do a poor job of customer service,
then they would be penalized and have some profit taken away. But they're very small percentages right
now. So it's really almost like an experiment to just see how this thing will actually work. But there's
a possibility that this could be the beginning of a transition to a whole new system of rate making,
which theoretically would remove this kind of reverse incentive to make things as expensive as possible
because then you get greater profit because you have a higher kind of expense level.
I said in the House floor, it's like, at least you're doing something. You know, I'll vote for something
that's better than nothing. But they really missed a lot of opportunities. And, you know, Democrats
had a number of amendments of things that could have been done to strengthen the bill. The thing that
I was really pushing is. Right now, we pay a 7% sales tax on utility bills, which is kind of crazy because
theoretically you shouldn't be paying sales tax on necessities like food, food and clothing. Clearly,
energy is a necessity.
So I had an amendment to remove that 7% tax, you know, starting on July 1st. So we can give an immediate
7% reduction in everyone's bills and they really need some relief like right now. But, you know, I thought,
oh, it wouldn't be fiscally responsible. We can't do that. Oh, we can't give away all that money. And
so that got rejected in committee. So then I came back to the House floor and I said, well, how about
this? We'll do the 7% reduction
on the residential, we'll do it just for a year. And then we can get into the budget cycle and we're
going to have a discussion about making it permanent. And in order to make sure that it doesn't like
blow up the budget, let's take away the tax break for data centers who pay zero sales tax on their energy
consumption. And they didn't go for that either. You know, the data centers that are in the state already,
they save 40 million dollars because they don't pay sales tax on their
energy utilities. So it seemed kind of odd when you make the residential people pay, but the data centers
don't have to. So, you know, the efforts to make the bill really strong, meaningful, more immediate,
they were kind of rebuffed, but, you know, at least something passed. I'll give them a little bit of
credit for that. House Bill 1003 was billed as this big government efficiency bill. And it was just,
again, another kind of an illusion. You know, what Governor Braun did, along with a committee of the
legislature,
is they went through the Indiana code and they looked at all the boards and commissions that exist.
And they basically tried to eliminate them all under the theory that it would make the world more efficient.
But what they found is the bill began to move through that a lot of these boards and commissions actually
had some value to them. And so there were big fights back and forth and the bill just kept constantly
changing, huge hundred page amendments,
It was kind of nutty, but at the end of the day, they passed kind of a stripped down version
that consolidates some commissions and gets rid of others. And so again, I looked at that as more of
a message bill and a serious attempt to really make government more efficient. And then finally, House
Bill 1004, the fourth and final bill on their agenda was being billed as the education or schools
deregulation bill.
They seem to have one of these every four or five years. So what happens is the Republicans under the
leadership of the chair of the election committee, they basically spend four or five years screwing
up the education system by passing requirement after requirement. And then about every fifth year, they
announced they're going to save education from all the over regulation and then go back and repeal a
lot of the stuff that they already put in. It's a very strange thing, but they can never resist.
putting in at least something that messes with the teachers. And so in 2004, the one thing that they
put in there is they said that the administrators, the schools could now basically just tell teachers
how long they have to work. Right now, I guess that needs to be bargained and discussed. And so literally
now you could just tell a teacher, I expect you to work 60 hours a week. And the teachers would not
have any recourse on that, which is insane.
So I voted against the bill for that reason. And so most of these agenda bills really weren't
very significant, or they actually did a little bit of damage. I'd say 10.02 on the utilities, moderately
OK. At least did something. But the rest of them, really not very impressive. Finally, let me just talk
about a few other kind of crazy stuff that happened.
talked about before. So House Bill 1343 is the bill that included the military police force that the
governor can deploy to be used against civilians and effectuate arrests and searches and seizures. They
did go ahead and send that on through the system. They tried to respond to my criticism and criticism
to others in the Senate. They put in that this force would have to follow this national incident management
system, which
doesn't mean a whole lot. It just means you've got to fit into whatever structure is dealing with the
national emergency or something. But of course, I think the governor can deploy it in the law whenever
it's necessary. So there doesn't have to be like a natural disaster or terrorist attack for it to be
deployed. So that was kind of meaningless. And then I think it said they need to coordinate with the
state police or something. But the one thing that I said they should have been doing, which they refuse
to do, is only allow this military police force to be deployed to a community if the community requests it.
It's one thing to say, hey, I've just suffered this huge natural disaster. My law enforcement's
overstretched. Please come down and help me. That's a different situation than the governor sitting
in his seat in Indianapolis and saying, oh, I think it's necessary to deploy the military police to
Bloomington because maybe they're not being as tough on immigration as we'd like. Or maybe we need to
send the military police to Indianapolis because, you know, too many crimes are happening downtown.
So we'll just put an MP on every street corner.
and downtown Indianapolis, and that'll take care of it. So it remains to be seen how that's gonna happen.
The other thing is higher education, again, they just cannot resist messing with the universities. So
they've got this crazy provision that says you cannot have a degree, a major if it doesn't, if the graduate
is not likely to make at least as much money
I think as least maybe more than a high school graduate would. I think they're supposed to look at some
three-year window or something. Who knows how they're going to figure that out. That's just a crazy
provisional. I have to see how that plays out. Then also there seems to be a complete obsession in the
general some of these days with the adversarial nations, particularly China. They've been passing all
these bills that
are supposedly going to keep the adversarial nations from buying our land and doing all kinds of horrible
things. They put in a provision that now, if you have anybody coming from one of these adversarial nations,
and really the only one, we're not really bringing people in from Cuba, I don't think, but it's mostly
aimed at China. Now, if you have a Chinese student who's going to come in to be a graduate student in
certain STEM fields, the university is going to have to do this full
kind of crazy background check, which is probably just duplicating everything the State Department already
does before it hands out a student visa. And the interesting thing to me is through all this complete
silence from all the universities, just chirping crickets out there, not a single concern raised by
any of these universities. Now, maybe they were saying things in the back room someplace that I couldn't
see, but I mean, we've been reduced to the point where
You know, in the past, you would go on a committee and you'd have someone from a university saying like,
well, okay, if you're gonna do this, you should know that these are some of the impacts that are gonna
occur that might not be positive. And they don't even bother to do that. They don't show up and really
do anything at all. So I guess I've taken a fair amount of time and we'll just get to people's questions
now. Thanks, Shelley, and thanks, Matt. We don't have a lot of questions yet, so a reminder,
that there's a bunch of people on the call or on the meeting. And I'm sure some of you have questions
to ask. To ask a question, send a private chat to one question moderator and say, I have a question.
And we will call on you as soon as we can. We have a question from someone who calls themself undecided.
So undecided, if you're out there,
Will you unmute yourself and ask your question? Hi. Okay. I do have a couple of questions and I know
one at a time. So my first one is for Shelly. First, I want to say to both of the representatives that
showed up today that I appreciate you and thank you for everything that you are doing. Shelly, I know
I've seen you at other events. So I want you to know that it is seen by voters.
I am an undecided voter and I have leaned Republican prior to twenty twenty four. You stated that the
impact of Senate Bill one will be felt in the communities and I'm curious how soon is that likely to
start to be felt and will will that likely be felt in time for the voters
Thank you, Undecided. I appreciate your question very much. And the way that we'll all be feeling the
impact of Senate Bill 1 in all of our healthcare expenses is probably more slower than immediate because
as people lose access to healthcare via Medicaid, as people fail to, you know, one of the provisions
of this bill is you have to
And this is what they could not state clearly how they were going to fix this. But the bill's language,
currently, you can be put on Medicaid and then be determined medically frail. But now you have to be
determined, how is it, medically frail before you can receive Medicaid, but you can't receive Medicaid
unless you're defined as medically frail. And so that language is in conflict with each other.
And as I kept asking for clarity on how someone is supposed to access Medicaid, it wasn't seen as a
problem. No, the details of Senate Bill 1 will be worked out. But in the process, people will lose access.
In the process, people will delay getting the help that they need, getting the healthcare that they need.
It will result in people going to the emergency room and these decisions that people make even when
they do have healthcare and health insurance because it is just expensive. It drives up costs because
it more frequently will create more expensive healthcare outcomes. That expense is shared among all
people who are
you know, trying to receive health care. So that's how we're going to feel it when we begin to make
those austere, I would call them brutal cuts to Medicaid access. Now with SNAP, this is what was frustrating.
In the space of SNAP benefits, the state decided again that it would not participate in the summer sum
bucks program, which costs the state between five and $6 million to feed hungry children. I mean, this is,
knowing that who's receiving this benefit are hungry kids. But it's a matching program where the state
has to match what the federal government is saying, this is going to cost Indiana between five and $6
million. Then the state has to come up with funds to pull down those dollars. And the state is saying,
we simply don't have, we don't have that as a priority to use that money. Because I can't say we don't
have that money to spend, we do.
but it was just a choice. And what I heard from Mitch Robe, who is the director right now over this
space, they made a decision to spend that $6 million in hiring administrative oversight. So they didn't
incur those administrative penalties and making the mistakes. So they took that money that,
they could have used with supporting son bucks and hungry kids in the summer and are going to hire,
they said about 60 additional individuals at the state level to be able to cut down on the administrative
penalties that they could incur if they make errors with the federal government. And that is a choice.
And I think when you have hungry kids, that impedes somebody's ability to learn,
to have some stability in their life. And that is felt throughout the entire community. I know I'm hearing
from our food banks, many of our, where people can go and access food, they're feeling the strain. And
right now, especially in the summer, that need is greater than ever. So to me, that's how we're going
to feel the impact
of Senate Bill 1. It won't be felt immediate. Some people will. Some people who have come to rely on
being eligible for Medicaid, who are receiving it now and will lose access. So just so we know, this
is trying to target where Indiana made the choice to expand access to Medicaid dollars when the Affordable Care Act.
was put into place. States were allowed to have Medicaid expansion. And we did. And Indiana benefited
from that, very much so. I'll leave you with this. When I hear that
Indiana is so competitive in the space of being competitive where businesses wanna come and they wanna
expand here, they wanna start their business here. Indiana is strong in the world of business. Well,
why is it then that our Hoosiers being able to access healthcare and nutritious food isn't part of that
formula of what makes us an attractive state on where
to grow and build your business? Why is that always conveniently left out? Because I think when I talk
to employers, being able to be innovative, having employees that are healthy, that are cared for, all
of that is attractive to businesses. It might be a while before we feel that impact, it won't be immediate,
but it will be felt. My second question,
My second question actually goes to both of you. This goes to people who were registering for candidacy
to run in the upcoming primaries and Indiana law that seems to be disenfranchising some of those people.
This happened on both the Republican side and the Democrat side. There were candidates or people who
filed for candidacy
And on both sides, the chair of the party waited until after the candidacy deadline and then utilized
that little gap between their deadline to challenge their applications. They challenged them based on
Indiana law. And I want to know a couple of things. One, your personal feelings on that in a time when
so many people are coming forward
to try to oppose what is going on at a state level, to oppose what's going on at the national level.
I find that that's really unfortunate. And what you are looking to do or have considered, maybe done
in the past or looking to do in the future, to change the law so that more people aren't having to,
say, have voted in the prior to primaries under your party.
Thank you. First, I'll jump in and talk about that. So that's something the Republicans did many years
ago. And I think they've tightened it down since then. The problem that they say they're solving is
they think that Democrats were filing in the Republican primaries to basically see if they could masquerade
as a Republican. And their argument is that
you know, these parties are separate entities and they should be able to decide who's going to represent
them and who's actually qualified to try to be nominated to be the nominee for the particular party.
And so they basically said if you hadn't been in some way voting in primaries for that party to show
that you're actually consider yourself a member of that party, then you would have to get the county
chair to essentially sign and say, okay, you're kind of a legitimate person even though you haven't
voted in the
required primaries to show you're actually a member of our party, I as the chair consider you a member
of our party and you can run. The way it works is when you file your candidacy form, you have to check
a box that says, I voted in the correct number of primaries or my county chair has said it's okay for
me to run and you have to sign that and directly you commit perjury if you don't do it.
You know, if you're not checking that box, then there is a period of time for the county chair to come
in and say, hey, they didn't meet the statute, and therefore I don't think they should run. And so I
personally think that that's not worth all the time and energy that's there. I think that voters can
probably figure out who are big, the party diehards, who's actually a legitimate member of their party.
The other thing that used to happen too, and I've heard people talk about this, if you go back even
20, 30 years ago, what would happen is if you had an incumbent, and maybe the incumbent is often unopposed,
but the opposite party has until sometime in the summer to go ahead and have a caucus and basically
nominate someone, basically fill the slot.
you know, when the filing ends in February, you might say, oh, this is awesome. I don't have a,
you know, an opposite party opponent in the fall. You know, I'm home free. But then sometime in the
summer, they could drop in and they could recruit a candidate and put them in a place and then you would
have a fall opponent. So one of the things that was happening is the other party, they would just basically
hang out there for like the last 15 minutes of the filing period. And if no Republican say had filed
against the Democrat,
the Democrat would get one of their friends to file to be the Republican nominee, which would then freeze
out the party from being able to fill the vacancy in the summer. And that was, I think, becoming kind
of a routine thing in both parties to basically have like a straw person in the corner that they could
put into place. And so I think that's what the law was attempting to stop from happening. But I agree
that it does create additional hurdles
for people who want to run in a primary and participate in the process. It has made the news that the
Democrats did implement this this year as well. The Democrat chair has challenged applications this
time as well. It's up to each county chair. Both Republicans and Democrats are using that law.
Now here, for example, the person who's running against me in the primary has never voted in any election,
let alone a primary. And the county chair said it was fine for her to run. So each county chair gets
to decide whether they use that law or not. And I also should point out to you that this law got a lot
of scrutiny because you remember there was a millionaire poultry farmer who wanted to run against,
I think, Todd Young, a guy named Rust.
And he hadn't voted in the right number of primaries. And so the party moved to get him off the ballot.
He sued, took it all the way up to the state Supreme Court saying that, hey, this violates my rights.
It's not a legal law. And the courts upheld it and said that it was legal or constitutional. Shelly,
do you want to respond? I do.
a little personal to me because as somebody who grew up in Indiana, in a really conservative community,
family, I thought I was a Republican. I mean, I don't know how to get more, try to remain nonpartisan
here, but I thought that's who I was. I didn't really understand a lot of that. So when I first started
voting, I voted Republican.
And it wasn't until like my mid to late, you know, around 25 that someone said, you should read both
platforms and see, you know, you don't really, you're not really vibing here with one of these parties.
You should probably go read the platforms and see where you more accurately fit. But if I have decided
to run like I did 20 years later, and I'll tell you how that started and decided, wow,
I want to get involved. I didn't even know that I am a crowd Democrat. I didn't know. I mean, under
those kind of choices, I couldn't have run for anything. And I think that is happening. I haven't heard
so much in Monroe, but because I go back and forth to Indianapolis a lot, I know they're struggling
with this quite a bit in Marion County. But fast forward 20 years when I did decide just
out of the blue to get involved in politics. Like so many people are this year or right now because
they're, you know, they want to do something and we want them to do something. So they are filing, whether
that is to be a precinct chair. Thank you. I don't know why we would decide who can and cannot be a
precinct chair or a delegate or run for school board or whatever the case may be.
I know that is, you know, the prerogative of a county chair, but that kind of enthusiasm, you know,
when I decided to run later on, 20 years later, after 25, earlier than that, but I did have a, you know,
I had pulled that Democrat ticket, you know, enough that there was no question, as a nobody getting
into public service and running for the first time, there wasn't a question.
You know, it does happen, and I think this experience has created a lot of heat and opportunity for
us to revisit that, just as the different parties. You know, we're in a super majority, so we can't
change the rule, but you know, when we do reorganize, it's always a good question to ask who's running
for county chair, how they would approach these decision-making,
in their tenure as a county chair, what their values are. I think that's a good question to ask.
Excuse me. Undecided, we have another questioner and I'd like to move on to the next person if you don't
mind. Thanks for your questions. Good discussion. We have a question from Ethan Fairbanks. Ethan, can
you unmute yourself and ask your question?
Hi, thank you, Steve. So I have a question, but also a comment for undecided question regarding SB1
and the effects on general Hoosier health and well being as a result of that. So real quickly, I'm a
fourth year medical student. I've been in Indiana my whole life, Hoosier through and through. I'm going
to find out where I'm going to be placed for residency in about two weeks. I also do a lot of work sort
of behind the scenes on
health care advocacy and have been doing a lot of work on SB1 as it was in the legislative session.
So I did want to provide a little bit of information on some specifics that we can expect from the harm
from that bill and also as well as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act too. So in terms of short-term impact,
I mean, Hoosiers are going to be feeling the pain of having
reduced services at hospitals, especially those in rural areas. We've already seen a few examples of
these with OB clinic closures, as well as reduced services at Columbus Regional Hospital, for example.
In terms of long-term impact, and this is the thing that really worries me as someone that wants to
practice medicine in the state, is concerns for rural hospital closures. I know that we are already
expecting at least 12 to close as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
We're going to be pushing off hundreds of thousands of users off of Medicaid. That's not just going
to have short-term harm for them in terms of being able to keep up with their checkups or pay for their
medications or just go about their day-to-day life. That's going to have long-term impacts across the
state when we end up seeing more people go to ER visits as opposed to primary care clinics,
pushing off care, delaying care. Eventually, those ER visits will lead to unnecessary deaths and frankly
increased costs
since we are essentially going to be pushing people away from preventative healthcare long-term.
And frankly, a concern that I have is, again, as someone graduating from medical school in this state,
has always wanted to practice medicine in the state, is that I and many of my peers fear that we're
going to be watching a slow-motion collapse of our state's health infrastructure, which in addition
to the harms to patients I've already mentioned, will likely, I expect, to increase the already
and nursing shortages that we're having across the state. So my questions to both Shelley and Matt,
and it's a bit of a proposal as well, is what is the counter argument or counter narrative that you
and your caucuses at State House have when trying to combat this upcoming disaster, this slow motion
disaster that we're walking into? And if you do not currently have one, which frankly, fair enough,
this is an extremely complicated issue,
There are groups of physicians and medical students that are trying to work on this. And if you're willing,
we would love to work with you as well. Thank you, Ethan. Just out of curiosity before I answer this
question, are you looking at Indiana to be placed? Indiana is on my rank list, yeah. Okay, good. I hope
it works out that you are here. No, you
You're absolutely right in so many of your comments. I did file a bill this year that was a
It did not, I mean, the fiscal impact was such that it just required FSSA to bring about some accountability
and transparency in the department. Like what is the definition of being medically frail? When you send
out these letters, have them be understandable, meet some threshold of knowing what to do. Many times
the notices that go out, they are so confusing, they contradict themselves within the letter itself.
It's old language. So that bill that I filed,
You know, I know it's not everything, but at least give an opportunity for individuals who are eligible
to receive Medicaid. So that bill, I think that is an important piece here for going to have it put
some responsibility on FSSA to make the process better. Additionally, if we're going to require performance
I think it should be the same for our state agencies. When you call, it's very, very difficult. They
have cut back on staff so much that it is a long, long wait. On the floor of the Senate, we were dealing
with a bill, and I don't remember what the number was, but it was addressing long-term care.
And it was mainly Medicaid through our Pathways program, different than the Medicaid that we have through
our Medicaid expansion program. So SB1 is technically trying to address throwing those individuals off,
those who received Medicaid through the expansion. The Pathways program was intended to give
individuals more ownership and self-determination in staying home and receiving healthcare and you would
receive a waiver and you wouldn't have to go into a facility, especially nursing facilities because
the care is so expensive. But when we heard that bill, I have received so many pieces of communication
from individuals in navigating that space of just the Medicaid waivers.
being put off, being on the waiver. We have a large wait list and individuals who could be served at
home, but because they can't get off the wait list, they're put into a full term nursing facility, which
is so much more expensive to the state of Indiana. So even in our Medicaid space for the aging and disabled,
it's right now not
Not healthy, I was gonna say disaster, but it too is frustrating. And what can we do? I think we continue
to file bills. I'm in the process of trying to figure out, you know, what are other states doing that
can be something that we can at least file and fight for in Indiana. Instead of always being on the
defensive, be on the offensive. And I think there was some,
wins in that space. Matt said that about utilities. We've talked about affordability, and for the first
time, finally, the Republicans are talking about affordability. But I think in this space, it would
be good to continue pushing it and be on the offensive and give us something that we can really fight
for. So I'm with you. And if you're not, everybody on this call should
see the good work that good trouble is making, which is. Shelly, you've muted yourself. I did. I didn't
even touch anything, but OK. It's a miracle. I think my computer is telling me, be quiet.
So I was just saying, if you haven't, I don't know if this is who you work with, but for all those on,
if you can follow what Good Trouble does, Good Trouble Coalition is Indiana's sort of a more progressive
wing. You know, you have your Indiana State Medical Association, which tends to be more conservative,
good group. I mean, I've worked with them, but Good Trouble Coalition is for
medical students and providers, health care providers in the state of Indiana who want to see
more progressive policy. And it's a good group to follow. I benefit, they are in good communication
with me on where they are with certain bills and they're very helpful in terms of education and policy
insight. Good trouble coalition.
Yeah, all those points that you raised, those are raised during a debate. The Republicans are well aware
of them. I mean, when that bill came through the House, I think we had 17 amendments offered on the
bill trying to address all these different impacts to make the point, try to hold them accountable,
make sure they understood what they were doing. But what you have to understand is the mindset of the
people in charge now. They have one single-minded goal.
And that is to reduce the cost of Medicaid. And they're going to do that by getting as many people off
of Medicaid as possible. Now, they know they can't just stand up and say that because people might think
that's a little cruel. So instead, they say, just as the federal government has, oh, we have all this
horrible waste, fraud, and abuse in our Medicaid program. And you know what? A lot of that's
from undocumented immigrants. They use a little less kind description.
So that's the premise of the bill, and that's how they're pushing it, because they're not taking what
the approach they should be. They should be saying, asking themselves, why do we have so many people
in our state that don't have health care, that don't have insurance, that can't afford it? Why are so
many people coming on to Medicaid? What is wrong with our system? How do we overhaul this whole thing
to make it work better? And in the meantime, how do we find the resources to actually serve the people
that need this. And it's frustrating because it's just a bunch of political soundbites. All of these
new requirements that will be designed to create bureaucratic trap doors so they can dump people off
the program, that system will actually cost taxpayers more than the existing system. And that was proven
before when they put in all these work requirements. But it's good politics to go out and say, hey,
you got to work to get your health care.
You're probably in a crappy job you don't like because at least it has health care and you can't go
do what you really want because then maybe the other employer doesn't offer health care. So those people
should have to get out and work too. Right. And it ignores the facts and disabilities and all the other
kinds of things. And so this is this is not a bug in the system. This is how the system is designed.
They want lots of people off this program. They're going to use these requirements. That's why they
went even beyond the federal government
to require this constant documentation and reporting. And it's all going to be designed to trick bag
people and get them off the program. So the question is, how quickly will the train wreck be apparent
to everyone in the state? When will enough people be negatively impacted by this, where they begin to
ask the question, who did this? And what are you going to do to fix it? And then at that point, we might
get to actual some real solutions. But right now, it's just a single-minded,
drive to get the cost of this program way down, and there's no concern about how many people get kicked
off. That's the whole goal, is to kick as many people off as possible. Thanks. I think Ethan may have
a follow-up, but we also have a question. I want to get to as many people as we can who haven't asked
questions. I think Stephanie Carmer has a question. Stephanie, can you unmute yourself and ask your
question? Yes. I wanted to get your opinion
between SB1 and SB285, what do you think this administration's goals actually are for Hoosiers? What
is the goal with the combo of these two bills? What are they trying to achieve? 285, again, is the one
where they're gonna jail or arrest homeless people. Well, thank you.
a great question. I think it wasn't on Senate Bill 1, but you're connecting these dots. I connected
these dots on the bill that we talked about earlier, 1343. Because in 1343, there is this language that
they put in there that growing the military police force in our National Guard, that language was so
striking and disturbing that it got a lot of attention. But also in this bill was language in pulling
back on support from the Military Family Relief Fund. It put up greater barriers to be able to access
it. And now that bill passed and the language was that a military family could not access. We're talking
small. It's a lifetime check for
Military families who have some issues with needing support, needing to cover your necessities,
it's $2,500. And it's out there for every military family can access its lifetime. One $2,500 grant
of support. I'm sorry, it's $2,500. But they increase that, that you cannot even prove that you need it.
those who are eligible cannot make more than two times the federal poverty level, which is about $31,000
a year. And then you have to prove, you have to make your case in front of administration that you will
use the $2,500 to cover your bare necessities, that it is absolutely needed. Well, if you're making
$31,000, anything is gonna be absolutely needed for $2,500. But we argued that, and I made this connection
with 285 because we know that
It can be some nights, 44% are veterans who are experiencing homelessness. And so we are putting up
these barriers to actually access needs to help our veterans. And yet we're criminalizing homelessness
without a real path forward in helping local communities. One of the really bothersome pieces of 285
was this day limit.
And communities like Bloomington were actively trying to create partnerships with law enforcement and
the homeless community, homeless individuals. And the arbitrary cap of days, we were hearing from both
law enforcement and from local municipalities that have programs that it was just not enough time. They
needed more time. And that did not get changed.
you're correct. We have vulnerable individuals who need access to healthcare, who need access to nutritious
food, and SB1 is just sort of unraveling any kind of safety net that's there that, as Ethan was sharing
earlier, is going to have a greater impact across our
local communities that are already feeling the pinch of what we did last year with Senate Enrolled Act
1. So it's a terrible recipe for disaster. And I'm glad that you're connecting these dots because they
need to be connected. And I don't see how this makes Indiana stronger. If we're going to truly create
programs to help our homeless Hoosiers,
It is not Senate Bill 285. If we truly want a healthy citizenry, it isn't Senate Bill 1. So we've got
a lot of work to do, and I appreciate folks being on this call and asking these really important questions.
Matt, would you like to comment? Yeah, it can be difficult to psychoanalyze what drives the Republicans,
but I think the core of their philosophy
is that government should be as small as possible and government can't do anything right. It always
does everything in a wasteful way. And so they're not fans of these assistance programs and they don't
look to the government as an instrumentality through which the people can solve the problems that confront
them. It's just not really in their DNA. And so on 285, you know, a bill like that, I mean, you might
take a look at it and, you know, from the other viewpoint and say, what does it take
to scale up the services that are needed to address the underlying problems that are causing people
to be unhoused in the first place. But instead, they always want to treat the symptom and never the
cause of the disease. So in this case, what's the symptom? Oh, I don't like being confronted by homeless
people when I walk around downtown Indianapolis. So what's my solution? I need to get them off the streets.
How do I do that? I basically have a zero tolerance approach. And I basically say, if you don't get
out of here,
We're just going to arrest you. Now, that bill last year didn't get through. It got through this year
in the House. You know, we beat them up pretty hard on it and they they they've put in like three or
four different things which they think are off ramps that can avoid actually getting arrested and put
in the jail. The police officer supposed to think about whether an involuntary commitment might be better.
There can be diversion programs and said jail. You know, there's just all these
off ramps they put in there to try to basically shut up the people are complaining about how you really
shouldn't just be jailing the unhoused. The ultimate problem is the programs don't exist. So when that
bill came to the floor of the house on second reading, I offered an amendment that said the bill cannot
become effective until the state has three regional substance use disorder and mental health residential
treatment facilities.
that have the capacity to treat the population of the unhoused as it's counted every year. And I told
them that, you know, you are going to end up in jail and the sheriffs really oppose that bill. And we
told them that you're just going to fill up the jails, make them overcrowded. They're already kind of
overcrowded now. And the sheriffs have been telling us for years
that they are basically the mental health treatment facility in most of these communities and they don't
have the ability to do it. And it frustrates them that they kind of have to deal with the people who
really need mental health services and they're just stuck in a jail where they can't get them. And so
on one hand, they kind of knew that it looked bad. So at least they tried to put in all these theoretical
off ramps to avoid the misdemeanor part of the bill. But at the end of the day,
They just want the problem to be out of sight. They are not really looking to solve the problem.
To them, the solution is just getting it out of sight. I think that's what was going on there. Thank
you for your response. Sorry. Thank you. We're nearing the end of our Q&A time. Ethan, did you have
a very quick follow-up?
Hopefully quick, yes. And I also want to say in comment to Stephanie's question, Indiana also ranks,
I believe, ninth in terms of the prison population that goes to private prisons. So maybe that's part
of the dots we should be connecting as well. But my follow up is regarding the, again, the Medicaid
issues. I wanted to ask Matt and Shelley, if either of you are familiar with Connecticut's transition
away from managed care entities back in 2012,
to administrative service organizations and the associated costs, savings from that, as well as increased
enrollment in Medicaid in Connecticut. I'm not familiar with the Connecticut program, but I can tell
you we've also had many, many, many long discussions about managed care. I am not a fan of managed care.
And again, I think that the powers to be
have tried managed care because they think it's a way to cap their costs. They can do some kind of capitation
fee or something and have more predictable costs. But I think it's interesting because I'm pretty sure
that Mitch Rove, the Secretary of the Family Social Services Administration, had criticized the Holcomb
administration for offloading that Pathways program, the Medicaid for the aged, to a bunch of managed
care organizations. And I think he might have fired one.
There might be an opening here to do something differently on the managed care front. He did fire one.
It was the only Indiana based one. It was the only nonprofit one, but just saying. Agreed. I'll take
a look, Ethan. Great, thank you. And just to clarify on that as well. And also, Matt, thank you for
that SB 285 amendment that was followed quite closely by those that were watching it.
For Indiana, we would be expected to save between $490 to $870 million annually by going this direction.
I brought this up in testimony against SB1 in the State House and the Ways and Means Committee. And
there are other people like me in medicine that are trying to push this more. So if this is a conversation
you're open to having down the road, I think be on the lookout for a message from us. We're about to
have open a poll.
on zoom where we're going to ask you to select your top we take about a minute everyone who's on this
and select your top three i believe items that you'd like to see the legislature addressed and we're
going to kind of pull this together really quickly and give some feedback to matt and shelly so go ahead
and do that it should be popping up on your screen if it hasn't already select
three of those items that you would like to see addressed and we'll try to get results as we get Matt
and Shelly to make their final, their closing remarks. We have 14, so 14 items. Just scroll down, be
sure you see everything.
such a challenging thing. There are so many topics to address and everyone is complex and needs to be
addressed in some detail and with some complexities. So we could go all day, but people have other things
to do probably.
that we have 70% of people participating, I'm going to stop the poll and share the results.
It looks like the top ones were healthcare, Medicaid got 57%, 32% for housing affordability and zoning,
and then 29% on data centers, on education, and homeless support for people with experience, homelessness
and childcare funding. And then 25% for natural resources.
summarize that for anybody who needs that additional detailed information. Stop sharing now.
Very interesting. Big tie for third place there. So I think we're about ready for
legislators to conclude. Can you maybe each take about five minutes or so and maybe look to the future
a little bit as to rather than being depressed about what just happened. I'll go first real quick Steve.
I want to thank everybody. You know I was looking at health care number one, housing number two, and
for me it was child care. There were a lot of in the
high 20s, but child care is a tough one because as somebody who, I'm not going to deny it, had some
long cries and frustrations and felt like I was just white-knuckling it with three kids and trying to
figure out child care and how grateful I was that
when they transitioned into public school, it was just like, we made it. That's how I felt. And it's
kind of like when you're sick. When you're not sick, it's hard to really remember how bad it was when
you're sick. And when you have kids and you're going through this, it's hard to care about it when you're
not, and you just let it go. But when you're in it, it is all consuming, which is why
as a state, we really need to, it doesn't get the attention because not every person is worried about
childcare. It's kind of like access to abortion services, quite honestly. If it doesn't impact you,
your passion isn't there. So I just wanna give a little shout out to childcare because it's so important
and serves such a critical foundational piece to an individual's overall
trajectory of success in being able to access high quality childcare in those early years. I look forward
to the interim and really getting down. I am going to look at the way Vermont is approaching childcare.
Their employers have said, yes, we know we want to be part of the solution, but we don't want to get
into the business of childcare, which is the approach that Indiana has taken. Indiana said, we're going to let
Employers take care of this and will offer a tax credit to those employers who offer childcare. And
so it requires our employers to get into the business of childcare. What Vermont is doing is those employers
said, We would rather pay a small tax and pool our money and give it to the state.
to manage, you know, have our public school systems expand their pre-K, expand their childcare centers
because we trust those areas. So I'm gonna look at Vermont. Thank you, Ethan. I'll look at Connecticut
and to see how, what they're doing in the space of managed care and how they're unraveling what they
thought was a good direction and how they're undoing that and saving the state money. And I also wanna
make sure that we,
Do continue to do what we can in housing. I filed a bill this session and it was based off of what Kentucky
is trying to do. It's kind of it's called Yigby. It's just yes in God's backyard. That's the it's the
catchy phrase, but. Some of that language was in 1001, but it got taken out. But what I filed in the
Senate side was our.
religious institutions are the second largest property owner in the country. First is government, then
it's churches. What my bill said is, if a religious institution wants to get into the space of affordable
housing and partner and workforce housing, they can do that.
but those savings have to be passed on to those either starter homes or if there's going to be a different
kind of zoning on their religious institution property. Well, how that was different, what was filed
in the house was it didn't require that those investments from religious institutions be affordable
or go to workforce housing or be a path for first time owners or be starter
or be about addressing the housing crisis with people who need access to housing. But the bill I filed
did, it required that. My bill didn't get a hearing and the language in the House got brought out, got
taken out of the bill. But there has to be more that we need to do in the space of housing because 1001
and 285 seem to be
also a contradiction with one another. So I thank everyone. We've got a lot of work to do. We're also
in a time of the election and I encourage everyone to get involved and stay involved and stay connected
to Representative Pierce and myself. I'll put my email in the chat so you can reach out to me. Thank
you so much.
So on a positive note, you know, looking forward to the next session, I have had some discussions with
Republicans. I serve on the courts and criminal code. So we tend to we work together on criminal code
reform, which was pretty successful, got rid of mandatory minimum drug sentences and really tried to
redirect the system away from mass incarceration into actually kind of effective programs that will
actually help people be productive citizens, not just warehouse them.
And so we've been able to get some significant stuff done in the past. They have suggested to me that
they want the next session to be the session where we finally create the infrastructure to have residential
treatment facilities so we can actually get people where they need to be to get the help they need.
And so I have a little bit of hope there. I'm kind of cynical because what happens is even if you have
people that are kind of in the subject matter area like courts and criminal code, it's got to get through
the money people.
And they're just like a whole separate universe under themselves. And if you can't convince them to
put the money in, you just don't get the money. And so I'm hoping it's just not the same old nothing
happens kind of thing. But at least there is some interest in the other side of the aisle. So I'm hoping
that maybe we can get that done. I would just say that overall, I mean, I know people are frustrated.
I mean, it's really frustrating to see
You know, the real challenges that people are facing not getting addressed at the same time, a lot of
crazy bad policies, agenda items that just don't seem to connect to reality. And so this is things that
cause people to want to kind of give up. Quite frankly, this the frustration almost grows into hopelessness.
And I guess that's the message that I want to tell people is this will never change unless we get
people activated in Indiana, half the people don't vote. They've checked out. And the irony is the people
who have checked out are the people who are struggling the most and could benefit the most from a government
that actually wanted to address these real challenges. And so, you know, for people who constantly ask
me, what are we going to do? What can we do? How can we stop this? How can we reverse this trend? What
can we do? The answer is we have a window now. The legislature is done. There'll be some study committees
probably in the fall, maybe a few meetings in the summer.
on some topics, but this is the window now for the voters to decide who's gonna run the state, who's
gonna be running the legislature. And if half the people stay home and are not interested, you're probably
gonna get the same result you've always gotten. And so my message is, be politically involved, work
for the candidates you think are gonna best support your policy goals,
And get your friends and family engaged. Make sure they're registered to vote. You know, make sure they
understand what the choices are and get them to the polls when it comes time to do that. And that's
the only way this is going to change. And even if you end up having, you know, even if you don't take
over the state house in one shot, which, you know, might be a little bit unrealistic. But if the Republicans say, wow,
a lot more people were voting and they weren't voting for me. And even though I won, there's like something
going on out there. I might want to modify my approach to some things here because there's going to
be another election two years later. And all that can work together to push the legislature in the right
direction. And so that's just my number one message is be politically involved, channel your energy
into figuring out how you can get people into elective office that are going to be
addressing your needs and your challenges and the policies that you want to see enacted. And thanks,
everyone, for being in these forums through the session and trying to follow all the craziness that
was coming at us at Warp Speed. Thank you. Thank you so much. So final legislative update for the 2026
session signing that happened a week ago, eight days ago. So we're on to the new year. Check vote.
The League of Women Voters Online Voter Guide Vote 411 for more information and join us for future candidate
forums and so on. In the fall, we'll have a preview of the 2027 legislative session. You can follow
the work of the General Assembly at iga.in.gov.
and thank you to our legislators, especially Matt and Shelly who joined us today. Thank you to all of
you who are on the meeting. Thank you to Community Access Television Services, team members that pulled
this together today, and to our sponsors, LWV Bloomington Row County, LWV Brown County, LWV Johnson
County, also the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce, Limestone Post Magazine,
the NAACP branch for Monroe County and Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbus, Indiana. Thank
you and we'll see you in the fall.