INDIANAPOLIS – This week, let’s talk about some of the good things that have happened at the Indiana House of Representatives here in Indianapolis.
Too often, it has been difficult to find anything positive from this session. We continue to ignore the needs of our middle class. We have done nothing to help them find jobs. We haven’t helped shore up our local public schools. We’re about to spend more time than we should on divisive social issues.
But there have been some highlights here and there. Bad bills have been defeated or pulled from the calendar. We have tried to point out some of the mistakes in what the majority is trying to do, and sometimes they have listened.
And recent days have seen passage of two initiatives that have long been advocated by House Democrats.
For more than a year now, we have demanded greater accountability from the state’s Department of Child Services (DCS), which has been shown to be tragically bad in following through on its mission to protect abused and neglected children. To put it bluntly, too many kids have been dying and DCS has not demonstrated that it can work quickly to protect them.
After a summer of study and an unprecedented show of bipartisan cooperation, we now are considering a series of reforms to make DCS better. One of those reforms—contained in Senate Bill 125—passed out of the Indiana House a few days ago.
This bill calls for a more immediate review of reports of child fatalities, with committees of local officials taking the lead on review to recommend to the statewide review committee what can be done to better protect children. It calls for more legislative oversight of DCS to ensure improved responses to reports of children in trouble. Just as importantly, we begin the process of taking a long-range view through a Commission on Children in identifying the core problems that lead to abuse and neglect of children, and working to find solutions that can head off these problems before they start. Prevention is the goal.
Our second success comes in demanding more accountability from the state in job creation.
Recent years have seen a familiar pattern from administrations: loud talk about thousands of jobs coming to Indiana, to be followed by silence when it turns out the claims don’t turn out to be so truthful. In many instances, millions of dollars of taxpayer incentives have been used to attract companies, only to get little or nothing in return.
Senate Bill 162 injects a little truth in our economic development efforts.
It requires the state to tell us the actual numbers of jobs that have been created in return for taxpayer help. It makes sure that incentives are being used to create jobs. Finally, it calls for an independent review of our state’s job creation efforts.
These are all good things. It’s your tax dollars being used to pay for these incentives, and it’s high time we find out what we’re getting for the commitment we make.
As good as Senate Bill 162 is, it could have been even better if the majority had accepted our amendments to provide the same sort of accountability from the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT), another state agency that has lost some credibility in the public’s eye for questionable dealings in the recent past that involve billions of state and federal tax dollars.
All we asked for was that the Indiana attorney general review all road contracts from the past four years and recommend ways INDOT can conduct its contracting transparently. We requested that INDOT make all its land dealings public. Our ultimate goal was to get rid of the risk of fraud, waste, abuse, mismanagement and misconduct in the way INDOT does business.
These good government proposals were rejected by the House majority. I hope to see them revived before the end of this session.
We have a month to go before our April 29 deadline for this session. We have time to do more. As you have just seen, we can do more. I remain optimistic we will do more.
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As always, please contact me if you have any questions, comments or concerns related to our state government. Here is how you can stay in touch: call my office toll-free at 1-800-382-9842; write to me in care of the Indiana House of Representatives, 200 W. Washington St., Indianapolis, IN 46204; or email me at h77@iga.in.gov.
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State Representative Gail Riecken
Indiana House District 77
