Mishler, Snow Talk State Budget During Legislative Review
Mishler, Snow Talk State Budget During Legislative Review
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
Mishler, Snow Talk State Budget During Legislative ReviewIndiana’s budget for the next two years is being developed this legislative session, and that’s mostly what elected officials taking part Friday in the Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce virtual 3rd House Session Legislative Review discussed.
State Sen. Ryan Mishler and Rep. Craig Snow took part in the event. Mishler serves as the chairman of the Appropriations Committee and serves on the State Budget Committee. Snow is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Snow said the first half of the legislative session has been busy. The House got about 178 bills through, he said, including three of his own.
One of his bills was House Bill 1003, which attempts to lower the healthcare costs in Indiana.
“Indiana is about the seventh-highest state in terms of healthcare costs,” Snow said. “My bill, specifically, dealt with small businesses getting a tax credit. If the business has 50 or fewer employees, then you get a tax credit of $400 the first year and $200 the second year. If they transition from traditional insurance to an HRA, or begin an HRA if they don’t have insurance, it’s a way for small businesses to maybe get in on the game in terms of getting insurance for their employees.”
Many small businesses can’t afford to provide insurance to their employees, and Snow said this is one way to help them do that.
“We’re hopeful that that will create competition in the marketplace, therefore, possibly lowering the cost the insurance companies have on these things,” he said.
There’s six weeks left in the legislative session and the bill is in the Indiana Senate now.
Mishler said since this is a budget year, he doesn’t carry too many bills. “Everything I do pretty much goes into the budget,” he said.
He did carry two bills in the state senate. One was for the city stadium in South Bend for the Cubs, which is at maximum capacity, so they can add on to the ballpark. The second one was for Gary schools. The state took over Gary schools a number of years ago because of its failing academics and the state is trying to transition the schools back to Gary slowly. “We’re trying to put a school board together and superintendent and things like that,” Mishler said, to get them out of state control.
As for Indiana’s budget, he said the House passed the budget out and moved it to the Senate.
“The gist of it, the first thing I’ll point out, is that they (the House) forgot one thing. They forgot the pre-96 billion dollar paydown that we’re supposed to do after this summer. So I’ll just chalk that up to they forgot. The governor didn’t forget, the House forgot,” Mishler said, adding that the Senate will put that paydown back into the budget.
The TRF Pre-1996 account was created as a pay-as-you go plan in 1921. In 1995, the General Assembly created a special Pension Stabilization Fund to protect Pre-1996 account retirees against any disruption in benefit payments, according to the state’s website.
There was an income tax reduction in the 2021 budget. The House wants to speed that up, he said.
“Two things. One of the things we did in ‘21 was we said the pre-96 pension liability had to be paid off before we extend the credit after ‘26. They took that out. I don’t know why the House is so against paying down this liability, but it does free up over $1 billion a year,” Mishler said. “And the other thing I’d say is, we do these little tax cuts and we really need to figure out what’s our long-term (plan). The government doesn’t do that, they don’t do a long-term plan. So, the Senate has a bill out there - I believe it’s Senate Bill 3 - to have this tax commission decide should Indiana just eliminate income tax. If we don’t, what should that tax rate be? We just make these changes every couple of years, but let’s look ahead and put a master plan together and say, ‘Where do we want to be in five years?’”
To eliminate the income tax is about an $8 billion hit. If the state pays off the pre-96, that frees up over $1 billion, but Mishler said that still leaves a big gap there.
“One thing I brought up from years ago is, there was the proposal to eliminate property taxes. And I was against it, and I’ll just say mainly because of Kosciusko County because they would pay their LIT (local income tax) in their home county and Kosciusko County would get no money for any of those homes on any of the lakes. So it wasn’t going to work,” Mishler said. “So I kind of revisited that and I saw where, actually, what would work is if you did homestead-only exemptions. So your homestead exemption would just be 100%, and if we did that it would be a $2.8 million hit, and if we paid down the pre-96, we’re over a third of the way there.”
He said the state is always going in and adjusting the exemptions. Mishler suggested, “But you could do it, everyone gets one exempted property. And that would cost us about $2.8 billion.”
So he amended in, in committee, in Senate Bill 3 to have that discussed as part of the tax commission study committee.
Mishler said they’re putting money in the budget to increase the pay of the Indiana State Police as they’re one of the lowest-paid state police in the country.
Medicaid is a big topic with the budget, he said.
Years ago, Arc - which works with parents and their children with intellectual and developmental disabilities - wanted to pay its employees more money so the state put more money in the budget for them.
“But what that did is it increased their Medicaid reimbursement rate. And when I found out, I’m like, ‘Oh my! Now everybody’s going to come and ask for an increased rate, and that’s exactly what happened,'” Mishler said.
Everybody, from physicians to home health care, is now bypassing Medicaid and coming to the state legislature and asking for increases in their provider reimbursement rate. Mishler said, as legislators, they don’t have enough information to make that decision on the rates.
“I really want to stay out of the rate business as far as being a legislator, and work with FSSA and have them re-evaluate these rates on a regular basis,” he said. “It’s created a lot of problems because it affects the Medicaid forecast, which affects the whole forecast of the budget. Just about every organization is asking for a rate increase.”
Additionally, Mishler said about every organization is now coming to the statehouse asking for a handout.
“I said this at your last meeting: We created bad behavior with all that federal money, the Covid relief money, and so now everybody is coming back for more and they don’t understand we don’t have that money anymore. But almost every nonprofit now comes to the state. I said, ‘Crap, we’re going to put banks out of business because they’re going to keep coming to us for money,'” he said.
He said nonprofits used to do fundraisers and ask for money, but now they just want to come to the state and ask for money.
“So that’s something I’ve seen increase this year quite a bit,” Mishler said.
