SB 1 – Indiana Commerce Connector and Illiana Expressway. Sen. Wyss.

The Governor’s Toll Road bill passed the Senate by a vote of 36 to 13. Theodore Kim has the story for the Indianapolis Star.

The digest:

For purposes of the statute concerning tollways, permits the designation of the Indiana Commerce Connector, the Illiana Expressway, or both (instead of a part of Interstate Highway 69) as a tollway. For purposes of the statute governing public-private agreements concerning toll roads, deletes the prohibition against a public-private agreement (without legislative authorization) that would permit an operator to impose tolls for the operation of motor vehicles. Provides that, for purposes of statutes governing public-private agreements concerning toll road projects, neither the Indiana finance authority nor an operator may issue a request for proposals for or enter into a public-private agreement (other than for the Indiana Commerce Connector or the Illiana Expressway) unless the general assembly enacts a statute authorizing that activity. For purposes of the statute governing public-private agreements by the department of transportation: (1) authorizes public-private agreements for the Indiana Commerce Connector, the Illiana Expressway, or both (instead of a part of Interstate Highway 69); and (2) deletes the current authority for offerors that submit a proposal on a project that consists in whole or in part of a tollway to submit alternative proposals based upon the assumption that a different part or none of the project will consist of a tollway. For purposes of the statute governing the designation of state highways as tollways, permits the designation of the Indiana Commerce Connector, the Illiana Expressway, or both (instead of a part of Interstate Highway 69) as a tollway without legislative authorization. Creates legislative review committees for proposals concerning the Indiana Commerce Connector and the Illiana Expressway.

Seems like those I-69 provisions (wise or not) were integral parts of the Toll Road privatization deal. Certainly one General Assembly can undo what a previous one has done, but I can’t help but wondering if any gentlemen’s deals are being renegged on here.

[tags]SB1-2007, Privatization[/tags]

Spinal cord and brain injury trust fund. Rep. Mays

Creates the spinal cord and brain injury registry and the spinal cord and brain injury research board to advise the state department of health on the registry and plans to fund spinal cord and brain injury research and grants. Creates the spinal cord and brain injury fund to be funded with additional court fees for certain motor vehicle violations and an additional motorcycle registration fee. Appropriates continually money in the fund to the state department of health.

The bill also has a $10 increase in motorcycle registrations, all of which goes to the trust fund. $500,000 annually goes from the fund to Purdue and $500,000 annually goes to IU, for the purpose of studying spinal and brain injuries.

[tags]HB1813-2007[/tags]

House Bill 1007 – Property taxes. Reps. Kuzman and Bauer. Among other things, this bill transfers the authority to employ a professional appraiser to the county assessor alone, rather than jointly with the township assessors. (The current structure of the statute contemplating agreement by the county assessor and the township assessors has raised some issues lately in Tippecanoe County.) The bill requires a county assessor (outside of Marion County) to verify the accuracy and completeness of a real estate disclosure form before the form is filed with the auditor.

The bill creates a local government capital project property tax control board for the purpose of approving proposed bond issues and lease rental agreements for a political subdivision. Permits a county to impose an additional 1% County Adjusted Gross Income Tax or County Option Income Tax on individuals and corporations to provide property tax relief and additional revenue for taxing units in the city. Revenue not used for property tax relief must be used for public safety expenditures. Limits the flexibility that counties currently have with respect to using their economic development income tax revenues to certain specified purposes.

Freezes a county’s obligation to provide funding for child services at the lesser of its 2005 or 2007 level. The Department of Child Services is required to provide any additional money necessary. The budget agency is required to reimburse a county for child services expenditures in 2006 or 2007 that exceeded the contribution for such services in 2005.

Permits a taxing unit to impose a local judicial mandate levy to pay capital, financing, and operating costs incurred to comply with a court order.

Today, there are a number of hotly contested Amendments that appear to be failing primarily on party line votes. I browsed through a number of them, but couldn’t really get a sense of what the Amendments would have done if approved.

Updated 2/13/07 HB 1007 failed for lack of Constitutional majority, getting only 49 votes in favor versus 48 votes against. The three Representatives excused from voting were Reps. Behning, Pond, and Richardson. I don’t always recognize Republicans and Democrats by name, but I noticed that at least two Democrats, Rep. Dvorak and Rep. Fry, voted against the bill. I think Rep. Fry is from Mishawaka and Rep. Dvorak is from South Bend. I wonder if there was an aspect particular to that area of the state they found objectionable or if there were more general concerns. I think Rep. Fry in particular tends to be fairly close, politically, to Speaker Bauer; so I doubt the concerns, whatever they were, were trivial.

[tags]HB1007-2007, taxes[/tags]

HB 1678 – Regulation of hospitals. Provides that a hospital must contain an emergency medical service facility. Provides an exemption from the emergency medical service requirement hospitals that provide only long term care services. Rep. Brown. Passed the House by a vote of 60 to 37.

I don’t have any direct knowledge of the problem here, but I’m going to guess that emergency rooms tend to be money losers for hospitals. A lot of the people who go to emergency rooms are poor and need expensive treatment. So, perhaps hospitals think that maybe they’ll make more money if they can just treat the non-emergency cases. On the other hand, if I am even correct that this is the problem the legislature is seeking to address, it’s only a band-aid. Emergency room treatment is a really expensive and inefficient way to provide medical care to the poor.

The vote was mostly, but not entirely, along party lines with Republicans mostly voting “no.” So, it will be interesting to see if the bill will be dead on arrival in the Senate. Senators Miller and Simpson are the sponsors, so it should at least get a hearing.

[tags]HB1678-2007, health care[/tags]

House Bill 1237 Motor vehicle restraint systems. Rep. Welch. This is the bill that requires all occupants of a motor vehicle (with certain exceptions) to wear a seat belt. In practical terms, this means that all occupants rather than just the front seat occupants are required to buckle up. Also, occupants of pickup trucks and SUVs are no longer exempt.

Whatever you might think of the seat belt requirement generally, I don’t think a good argument can be made that the distinction between SUVs and pickup trucks on the one hand and other automobiles on the other hand made much sense. I don’t know what the safety studies say, but there was probably a better argument to be made for the distinction between front seat occupants and back seat occupants.

[tags]SB1237-2007, motor vehicles[/tags]

Senate Bill 94 Individuals with disabilities. Sen. Landske. Changes terms used to describe individuals with disabilities.

Perhaps I’m not sensitive enough, but this one strikes me as a waste of paper. It changes: “hearing, deaf, and hard of hearing individuals” to “individuals who hear, individuals who are deaf, and individuals who are hard of hearing.”

It changes “participant who was permanently disabled” to “participant who had a permanent disability.”

It changes “children who are mentally retarded” to “children who have mental retardation”.

It changes “developmentally disabled adults” to “adults with a developmental disability.”

And it goes on like this for 177 pages. I mean, I get the point. “My disability doesn’t define me!” But, if you’re picking through the Indiana Code making changes at this level of subtlety, perhaps it does. In any event, it passed the Senate 47 to 0.

[tags]SB94-2007[/tags]

David Hunter, a blogger at the Star’s INTake Weekly, has a good post entitled “Rejecting Radical Rhetoric on SJR-7.” SJR-7, as readers probably recall, is the proposed amendment to Indiana’s Constitution which would assert that marriage in Indiana consists only of the union of one man and one woman. But, that’s only half of it. It would also prohibit any incident of marriage, whatever that might be precisely, from being extended to unmarried couples.

Hunter reacts to an Expresso entry by Tim Swarens where Swarens asserts “It would be the height of arrogance to think that we could radically redefine an institution that has been the cornerstone not only of families but civilizations for millennia without suffering severe repercussions.” (The height of arrogance, mind you. Not just arrogant, but the most arrogant one can be.)

Responds Hunter:

My gut reaction asks for the next few lines of his argument. What are the “severe repercussions?” Give me a list; give me three repercussions. Mr. Swarens doesn’t list any. He gives nothing specific for his entire argument.

That’s always a good question to ask – “name 3.” I’d probably qualify the question by requiring that these be repercussions not already visited on the sacred institution by Brittany & K-Fed or by Newt serving his first wife with divorce papers while she was in the cancer ward (or requesting a divorce from his second wife over the phone.)

At the moment, I’m not sure family life couldn’t do with a little tweaking. As I was composing this post, I was called away to clean up a poopy diaper followed closely by the need to clean up some dog vomit on the stairs. And that’s probably not the worst of it. The worst of it is that I’ve become so desensitized to such things that I barely batted an eye.

Finally, I take issue with Swarens assertion that marriage, as currently defined, has formed the cornerstone of civilizations for millenia. Check out the brief history of marriage entry over at Wikipedia. Marriage has been redefined quite a bit across cultures and over time. Historically speaking, marriage hasn’t even been a religious matter for all that long. For the first half of Christianity’s history, it wasn’t even a sacrament. The Protestants did their own redefining when they came along. Swarens sweeping statements seem to demonstrate a disinterest in history in favor of an interest in merely arguing for his own personal preferences.

Perhaps redefining marriage does would have unintended consequences we would not like. But, that eventuality notwithstanding, SJR 7 paragraph (b) certainly will have unintended (or at least unadmitted) consequences that we (or at least I) won’t like. I advocate throwing out SJR-7, drafting something coherent, and debating the hell out of it. This is, after all, our Constitution we’re talking about.
[tags]SJR7-2007, culture wars[/tags]

This Constitution or any other Indiana law may not be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents of marriage be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

(Keep that passage in mind as you read the following).
Senate Joint Resolution 7 – The proposed Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage and prohibiting same sex couples from being granted any of the legal incidents of marriage was passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. A copy of the vote is here. It passed out of committee on a party line vote.

Advance Indiana and bilerico both have posts on the subject, particularly the dissembling in which proponents are engaging with respect to subsection (b) of the proposed amendment.

Micah Clark of the American Family Association has said:

SJR 7 does not prevent the legislature from creating civil unions, what it does do, is prevent an unelected, runaway judge from telling the legislature that it must reject 200 years of state law and centuries of common wisdom and embrace homosexual marriage. SJR 7 does not take away any rights that do not currently exist under state law. All SJR 7 does is allow the people of Indiana to decide this issue, instead of a court or an ACLU lawsuit.

Senator Lubbers, a proponent of the resolution, has said:

[I]t is my opinion that this resolution does not prohibit legislators from passing laws to provide new protections [based on sexual preference.] Subsection B of this resolution speaks to the powers of the judiciary and not the actions of the legislature. Likewise, I do not believe, based on the testimony I heard and my personal study, that SJR-7 prohibits the establishment of domestic partner benefits by employers.

Both of these statements ignore the pretty fundamental requirement that judges interpreting the Constitution are required to look at the plain meaning of the text. The text of SJR 7, SECTION 2(b) reads as follows (yes, I’m posting it again for emphasis):

This Constitution or any other Indiana law may not be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents of marriage be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

At it’s root, this means no law may be construed to require the legal incidents of marriage be conferred on unmarried couples. It’s remarkable that Mr. Clark and Senator Lubbers can, with a straight face, tell people that this passage does not tie the hands of future General Assemblies or that it does not prevent civil union laws. I suppose in a very technical sense, Mr. Clark is correct. It does not prevent the General Assembly from passing civil union laws. They can pass any damn thing they want. Courts will simply be powerless to enforce such laws.

I gave my interpretation of the proposed amendment several days ago:

But, the proposed Constitutional amendment goes much, much further than the current Indiana statute by prohibiting any Indiana law from requiring a legal incident of marriage to be conferred upon an unmarried couple. In other words, as I read the proposed amendment, if there is a right that is an incident of marriage, Indiana law is not permitted to extend that right to same sex couples. Think of marriage as creating a bundle of rights. This amendment not only says that the bundle can’t be extended to same sex couples. It’s saying that if there is a stick in that marriage bundle, same sex couples cannot be given the same type of stick. In my mind, that is simply abusive.

[tags]SJR7-2007, culture wars[/tags]

A number of bills passed the House by healthy margins today:

HB 1018 – increasing the maximum speed limit of a school bus from 55 mph to 60 mph. Passed 90 to 8.

HB 1027 – The minimum wage bill, increasing the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.50 by 9/1/08. The bill also doubles the inheritance tax exemption from $100,000 to $200,000. Passed 71 to 29.

HB 1075 – Individual development accounts. Adds repair of a primary residence as a permissible use of an “individual development accounts” and tweaks some of the dollar amounts involved with IDAs. Passed 98-0.

HB 1119 – Prohibits the Department of Revenue from charging a fee to a custodial parent who seeks to seize the federal or state income tax refund of a parent who is delinquent with child support. Passed 97-0.

HB 1165 – Provides an income tax credit to a taxpayer that installs an auxiliary power unit in the taxpayer’s semi-tractor. Passed 96-0.

HB 1183 – Authorizes the transfer of service credit and contributions from the 1977 police officers’ and firefighters’ pension and disability fund to the public employees’ retirement fund (PERF) for appointed police and fire chiefs. Passed 97-0.

HB 1208 – Education programs for veterans. Provides free tuition for 124 semester credit hours to a state school to veterans of the armed services who suffer a service related disability while serving between 9/11/01 and such time as the President declares an end to the War on Terror. Passed 99-0.

HB 1364 – Reestablishes the sentencing policy study committee. Passed 98-0.

HB 1546 – Provides that a military discharge record is not available for public inspection and copying. Allows the veteran who is the subject of the record, a veterans’ service officer, an employee of the Indiana department of veterans’ affairs, a funeral director, and other persons under a court order to have access to the record. Passed 95-1. (Rep. Murphy was the 1 nay vote.)

HB 1722 – Coal gasification tax credits and cost recovery. Provides that a facility that produces synthesis gas as a substitute for natural gas is eligible for a coal gasification technology investment tax credit. Requires the utility regulatory commission to allow a utility that purchases substitute natural gas to recover any costs arising under the purchase contract through rate adjustments. Amends the definition of clean coal and energy projects to include a project using coal to produce substitute natural gas. Passed 84-11.