01/25/11 The Indiana General Assembly has just wrapped up the third week of its 2011 session and Representative Nancy Dembowski offered her statehouse report Monday morning.
The current leadership in Indianapolis tells us that there is a need to take action as quickly as possible on issues that concern us all: finding jobs for Hoosiers, passing a balanced budget that doesn’t increase taxes on Hoosier families, and improving the quality of education for our children.
To date, their words have not been matched by action.
By this time a year ago, the Indiana House already had passed legislation designed to put Hoosiers back to work. It had passed a plan to require more ethical conduct from both the Legislature and the governor’s office. Finally, House members paved the way for the 1-2-3 property tax caps to be put into the Indiana Constitution, and approved legislation to close the gaps in those caps by restricting growth in tax bills for homes and farmland.
So far this year, the House has passed only three bills. None of them will create jobs, keep taxes low, or help our children get a better education. After being in session for three weeks, it is disappointing to see so little work from those who have promised so much.
I can tell you that the House Ways and Means Committee already has started work on a new state budget.
More than any other bill in the legislative process, the budget goes through the most revisions. Each chamber relishes the opportunity to craft the budget to reflect its priorities, and we are still a long way from seeing a final product. Based on what I have seen so far, it needs the work.
As proposed by the governor, the plan cuts funding for K-12 education and state support for our colleges and universities by close to $700 million over the biennium. It shifts state support away from our public schools toward a voucher plan that benefits for-profit private schools.
Setting aside the whole debate on the merit of vouchers, a person must ask whether we need to be creating new education programs that will require state funding at the same time we are proposing cuts in funding for existing programs.
There will be plenty of time to go through the details on this bill in the weeks to come, but I want to spend a few minutes talking about one part of the process.
While advocates of this budget proclaim that they achieve their work without any kind of gimmickry, let me show you two instances where they are engaging in that kind of maneuver.
In order to balance the current budget, the administration used federal stimulus dollars and took millions from a series of trust funds designed for other purposes.
One of those funds was set up to accept fees charged to boaters to pay for lake and river maintenance. By shifting these fees – which were created for a specific purpose – to the state’s general fund to pay for government spending, we have essentially turned the fee into a tax. In addition, the lake and river maintenance that boaters wanted to pay for didn’t take place.
As part of its plan to balance the new budget, the administration uses another gimmick by taking $200 million from the Public Deposit Insurance Fund, which is designed to protect your tax dollars in event there is a bank failure.
Perhaps these moves are needed to balance the books. They have been used by past administrations. My point is that they were criticized by this administration as being less than honest. It is hard not to see the irony in finding out that this group of officials must rely upon the same “tricks” to pass a budget.
Once again, I want to remind area students about the Indiana House Page Program, which gives children 13 years of age and older the chance to visit me at the Statehouse for a day and see the Legislature in action.
If you want to get more information about the House page program, or if you simply want to talk to me about some of the issues that will be addressed during the 2011 session, here are a few ways to stay in touch.
You can call the toll-free Statehouse telephone number of 1-800-382-9842, write to me in care of the Indiana House of Representatives, 200 W. Washington St., Indianapolis, IN 46204, or send a message to my web site at www.in.gov/H17. While visiting my web site, you also can sign up to receive regular e-mail updates from the Legislature.
