With the first half of the Indiana legislative session wrapped up, Sen. Ryan Mishler and Reps. David Abbott and Craig Snow updated Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce members Friday on what’s been happening down at the statehouse.
The current session, which is working on the state budget for the next two years, is required to be concluded by April 29.
Budget Bill
This session has been Snow’s first opportunity to help craft the state budget.
“When we started off with a lot of these requests, I knew we were going to be pretty tight. I just didn’t realize how tight,” he said. “... We really need to be fiscally responsible with our budget more than ever, and let’s focus on ‘27, ‘29, future budgets.”
In the future, Snow said, the state will have its 396 Teacher Pension Fund Debt paid off “so that will be a billion back to cash, which we can be creative for where that goes by way of investment and those type of things.”
In the House version of the budget bill, he said they said no to universities’ capital projects, but did provide funding for maintenance for state buildings.
“We did pass the budget over to the Senate. Like Ryan said, I’m sure they will correct it, but at this point in time, there’s a structural surplus of roughly $160 million, and as I’ve learned, it cost the state $60 million a day to operate. So if you think about $160 million in structural surplus, that’s about 2-1/2 days. That doesn’t take it very far,” Snow stated.
On top of all that, Snow said he wasn’t as optimistic about the April revenue forecast for Indiana, especially when it comes to other people’s money. Mishler also wasn’t upbeat about the April forecast.
“I’m afraid we’re going to open that treasure chest and my assumption is that it’s going to be empty. And that’s just the way I’m operating,” Snow said.
Take that and add President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and what’s going on at the federal level - which Snow stated he wasn’t against - “that stuff at DOGE, federal level, when they make those cuts, it’s going to flow downhill and I’m not going to assume the money will follow it. So I don’t know how to protect against that.”
In the budget, Gov. Mike Braun’s administration put in a 5% cut with his agencies. “And we added another 5% cut in the budget, but not taking it out of the budget per se. We’re keeping it off to the side, and then you can go to the state budget agency to request that money if you’re an agency that just can’t get that extra 5% savings,” Snow said.
Senate Bill 1
Mishler said he’s getting the fewest number of calls from people on SB1, but he’s reading and hearing the most about it through the media. The bill is said to be a property tax relief bill.
“The governor’s plan, no one has been able to tell me what it does. So let me tell you what it does,” he said, using himself as an example.
“I have more commercial property than I do residential property. And I have commercial property in various counties that I do not live in. And under the governor’s plan, the only way for locals to make up any of that money is called a LIT (local income tax), that you pay locally. So here’s what happens,” Mishler explained. “So, in Kosciusko County, my commercial properties would all be reduced. I’ll pay my LIT in St. Joe County. So guess who pays for my commercial relief? The homeowners of Kosciusko County. So what this does is it shifts the liability of all the LIT - because only individuals pay LIT, corporations don’t pay it. And so, the problem you have is your homeowners who pay the LIT are going to make up for all those commercial properties who sought relief. Basically, I’m shifting it to the homeowner.”
While he said he would benefit from the governor’s plan, it just isn’t fair.
“So what the Senate did, we just - the growth is in the homestead piece anyway, the majority of the growth. So we just focused on homestead properties. And the biggest problem with homestead properties are seniors,” Mishler said. “... So ours focuses on that. And, also, if a local government does need to do a LIT, the people paying the LIT are only paying for that same category reduction of just homeowners. They’re not paying for the commercial and all of that.”
The fact that no one is talking about that, he said, tells him that it’s all too complicated.
“And that’s the problem with some of these tax policies, is they’re too complicated,” Mishler said.
Anything the state does now won’t affect this year’s property taxes. It’ll affect next year’s.
The House added HB 1402, which has since died. Mishler called it the “most convoluted, complicated” piece of legislation he’d ever seen. No one in that committee could explain it to him.
Medicaid
Part of the budget is Medicaid.
“Our Medicaid now has grown $5 billion in four years. That rate of growth is higher than our entire revenue growth,” Mishler stated. “We can not sustain this. It will bankrupt us. Medicaid will bankrupt us. I’m looking at other states, they’re having the same issue as well.”
Senate Bill 2 is the Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP).
“Right now, we’ve lost control over it and if the federal government makes a cut, we’re stuck and it’ll kill us financially. ‘Cause right now we have a 90-10 match - the federal government pays 90, we pay 10. Based on what Craig said about DOGE and all these other things, let’s just be honest, the federal government can not afford that. ... So do I expect them to continue paying 90-10? You can say, ‘How are you going to cut us?’ How can they not? They’re operating at a deficit. So we’re expecting that to change, but the way ours is written, let’s say they go to 50-50, then we’ve got to pay half instead of 10%. So we have no control,” he said.
SB2 basically has the state negotiate with the federal government, so if those percentages are changed, the state can change the plan.
Mishler said the Democrats are just beating him up on the plan over the work requirement. He found that amusing because there’s 11 exemptions for the work requirement.
“So, basically, there’s so many exemptions in there, that for you to not want the work requirement, you basically have to say, ‘I plain don’t want to do anything.’ And I have not met a taxpayer yet who is okay with that,” he said.
The work requirement is not in the entire Medicaid program, just in the HIP, because a lot of people on Medicaid are the elderly, the ill or not able to work. The work requirement is just for those on Medicaid who actually would be able to work.
Lake Pilot Program
A body of water is described as eutrophic when it’s so rich in nutrients that it supports a dense plant population, which then deprives animal life of oxygen as the plants decompose.
Abbott reported on a pilot program he’s working on regarding lakes going eutrophic.
“We’re seeing our lakes going eutrophic. Eutrophic is what happened in the west basin of Lake Eerie. If you remember, how that water became so toxic with toxicity algae that Toledo couldn’t even pull water to treat for drinking water in the city of Toledo. They started looking at trying to pump water from an aquifer from Northeast Indiana,” he said.
Abott said there’s a similar situation with Indiana’s glacial and stream-fed lakes in the northern part of the state, mentioning Winona Lake as an example.
“All of these are going eutrophic, at different rates. It’s a natural process, but it’s been accelerated because of man,” he said. “The bottom line, the big contributor is phosphorous. Phosphorous is the fuel that makes plants grow, and unfortunately, when you get an abundance of phosphorous in the system, it trickles down off fields, it comes from a variety of sources. It will come into the watershed and down into the lakes where it resides and sinks to the bottom.”
It then becomes a never-ending cycle of weed growth, the weeds die and become algae and toxic.
Abbott said he’s worked with Dr. Nate Bosch, from The Lilly Center for Lakes & Streams, on Lake Wawasee.
“It’s creating a problem where you can’t even swim in the water at times. Dogs could die from drinking it. It’s seasonal, it doesn’t happen all the time, but I want to address this with a bill,” Abbott said.
Working with Braun, he said they want to provide funding to do a pilot program on the worst lakes in the state with the highest amount of data - Henderson Lake in Kendallville and Bruce Lake in Fulton County. The funding would treat the problem on those lakes, and then they would gather the data they get from the pilot program to apply toward a statewide policy.
“So we’re in the infancy stages of this right now. It’s funding for this budget, looking at a couple different opportunities. I’m working with the governor’s office and his staff,” Abbott said.