A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Not that the calendars are binding, but here are the bills the House & Senate have a great number of bills set for 3rd reading today. The House has something like 80 (plus the bills set for 2nd reading). Included on the House Calendar (pdf) are Daylight Saving Time, Judicial Compensation, and the speed limit bill. The Senate has something like 30 on 3rd reading. Included on the Senate Calendar (pdf) are vouchers, Sen. Long’s statewide broadband bill and speed limits for sections of US 20, US 31, and the Toll Road.

In honor of the deadline for bills to pass the first House by Tuesday, the Muncie Star Press has a legislation roundup. Mentioned are:

Daylight Saving Time. Rep. Tiny Adams thinks it has a shot if everyone is there at the time of the vote. Sen. Allen Paul has doubts about whether it would go anywhere in the Senate and mentions that his constituents are about 50-50 on the issue.

Gambling. Pretty much all gambling legislation is dead except for raising taxes on gaming revenues to pay for the Colts Stadium. Well, as Miracle Max might say, gambling is only mostly dead. Both Rep. Lutz and Rep. Adams have hopes of getting their respective gambling bills stuck into a live bill somewhere and passed.

Vouchers. The voucher bill seems to be stalled. Rep. Adams was quoted as saying, “I am getting tired of hearing there is no money for public education, but there will be money for charter schools.”

Voter ID. The Voter ID bill requiring a voter to produce a photo ID gets a passing mention. “This could cause a problem for the elderly and homebound to be able to vote,” said Rep. Craycraft. Rep. Davis said photo identification was used for many business transactions. “It won’t disenfranchise voters,” he said.

Sunday’s Indy Star had a column entitled Legislation flying under the radar wherein the paper weighs in on 6 lesser known bills:

HB 1530 Mandatory school attendance age.

Raises the age of mandatory school attendance from 16 to 18 years of age. Specifies that a student may withdraw from school before becoming 18 years of age only for the reason of financial hardship, provided the student is employed and supporting the student’s family or dependents. Requires a student who seeks to withdraw from school before becoming 18 years of age or graduating to sign a written acknowledgment that the student and the student’s parent or guardian understand that withdrawing from school is likely to reduce the student’s future earnings and increase the student’s likelihood of being unemployed or incarcerated in the future. Requires the department of education to develop a written consent to withdraw from school form for a school corporation to use in implementing the written acknowledgment. Expands the reasons a work permit and driver’s license may be denied. Requires the principal of the school the student last attended to notify the department of child labor and the bureau of motor, if a student has not received consent to withdraw from school and the student fails to return to school.

The intent is laudable which the Indy Star notes while pointing out that it could boomerang. As a student, I recall being glad when I got to a grade where the dropouts had left the school. That’d just be another factor I’d urge the General Assembly to consider: the effect on the other students of forcing kids to be there who have absolutely no interest in their own education.

HB 1484 Capital funds for charter schools. Allows the state to use interest from the Common School Fund to seed charter schools. The Indy Star notes that this would help charter schools get federal matching funds and help them get on a more even footing with regular schools. I have nothing against charter schools, but in a time of such budget austerity where schools are losing funding or having meager funding increases, I don’t think Indiana has the money to spend on experimental start ups. I think our biggest problem is that we pay our teachers very, very poorly and, by and large, we get what we pay for. Another real problem we have is that working class wages have fallen such that both parents have to spend a great deal of time away from their kids to earn enough to make ends meet. I don’t expect the legislature to solve this problem through school funding, obviously.

HB 1174 Jury duty. Gets rid of exemptions for IPS board members, veterinarians, and dentists; lets potential jurors off the hook after one day if they show up and are passed over. The Indy Star focuses more on the elimination of exemptions than the quick release provision. Symbolically, I can see why. But I don’t think the elimination of those exemptions will matter a great deal to the jury pool. The quick release provisions will probably lead to quicker rotations in the jury pool. I don’t know if that will have any important implications or not as far as the performance of the jury, but it will probably mean you can get called to jury duty more often.

HB 638 Merger of townships. I commented on this one earlier. The Indy Star notes the merit in this proposal. My take is that I haven’t personally seen townships perform functions that couldn’t be performed by another unit of government. I don’t know how much redundancy there actually is or how much it costs, but if it is significant, then merger is the way to go. This bill provides a county with the option but doesn’t require it. It might also be useful to allow counties to simply dissolve the township level of government and choose to perform the functions at the county level. I also discovered a significant amount of blogging on the subject (links at my previous blog entry.)

The remaining commentary concerns SB 8: Arbitrations in Family Law Cases and SB 422: Clarifying Law Concerning Adoptions. I avoid family law in my professional life and I’ll avoid it here. I would take issue with the Star’s characterization of SB 422 as “clarifying” the law. To say you are “clarifying” a law implies that the law exists in some form that simply has not yet been precisely articulated. You are not changing it, you are simply expressing it more clearly. This is inaccurate because the law is entirely a human construct. It is nothing until it is articulated. So, by passing a law or an amendment, you are not “clarifying” the law, you are making the law. When writing digests, I always liked to use the term “specify” when lobbyists urged me to say that the law is being “clarified”. Just picking a nit — I’m sure my blog here would be easy pickings for anyone who wanted to apply the same level of scrutiny.

The Hoosier Review brings up 4 bills before the General Assembly:

HB 1439 which requires a voter to produce state or federal ID at the polling place. On the one hand, sure, you want to minimize or eliminate voter fraud. On the other hand, I think this is probably being done to discourage voting by the wrong sorts of people. I don’t think it’s any secret that poor, disorganized, uneducated people who don’t have all of their papers in order are less likely to vote Republican. I don’t think they’re terribly likely to vote in any case, but if they do, they probably vote for the Democrats. By the same token, if you see Democrats pushing a bill that cites security problems with absentee voting, you can probably assume there has been a calculation that absentee voters are more likely to vote for Republicans. In any event, there are some interesting amendments proposed by Representative Mahern for this bill. One amendment would greatly expand the permissible forms of identification — gun permits, tax documents, vehicle title or registration, major credit cards, utility bills, bank statements, etc. Another amendment would require a county voter registration office to produce and issue an acceptable identification to a voter for free. A third amendment goes with the “good enough for Iraq, good enough for us” approach and requires a voter to submit a fingerprint with indelible ink that remains on one’s fingers. And, a fourth amendment would require the secretary of state to mail to each registered voter a notice of Indiana’s identification requirements for voting.

HB 1009 A voucher bill. I commented on this one a few days ago. The linked entry contains more commentary and a link to an Indy Star article on the subject. But, as I stated then, my main problem with vouchers is that some kids are more expensive to educate to others. I think we have 3 choices: 1) Decide we only want to spend $x dollars to educate a given child, let schools kick out kids who cost more than that to educate, and implement vouchers with no additional money; 2) Raise taxes so we can keep spending money on the hard to educate students and let kids migrate out of schools with hard-to-educate children; or 3) keep the system we have in place. I think society benefits in the long run if we educate every child we can, and I don’t really want higher taxes, so I’d vote for option #3.

HB 1726 Food and Beverage Tax for Monroe County. I have no idea what the needs of Monroe County may be, so I don’t particularly have an opinion on this bill. I do sort of think it’s ridiculous to pass these sorts of taxes county-by-county, year after year. A better approach may be to issue County Option Food & Beverage Tax and allow counties to implement it or not as their county councils and commissioners see fit.

HB 1434 Interior Designer Registration. Requires an interior designer to register with the secretary of state and pay a fee. Prohibits registration if the interior designer has a civil judgment against him or her for a breach of the standard of care for practice of interior design. This can’t be a pressing matter of state concern. My guess is that the National Council for Interior Design Qualification and/or whoever administers the Architectural Registration Exam is pushing for this one. See proposed IC 25-20.7-3-3 which requires that an interior designer pass an exam “administered by the NCIDQ or the ARE” before being allowed to register. My guess is that those exams aren’t given for free. Just remember the Latin phrase cui bono (who benefits) when you see ridiculous bills like this. (I’ve probably butchered the Latin phrase now that I went and used it gratuitously.)

Hear that? That’s the sound of hundreds of bills begging for their lives. Tuesday, March 1 is the last day for bills to pass the Senate and the last day for the Senate to receive bills from the House. That pretty much lets the Senate dictate to the House when it has to complete 3rd reading of its bills. The House rules state that it has until March 4 to complete 3rd reading.

Thinking about it a bit, I suppose it would be possible for a bill to pass 3rd reading in the House on March 4, have the bill itself die because the Senate refuses it as untimely, and then have the bill’s text get amended into a bill that was still eligible to pass the Senate. If the bill’s subject matter never passed the House at all, then it couldn’t be incorporated into an Engrossed Senate Bill. I don’t know if that kind of thing ever happens though.

Introduced Version, House Bill 1184 was amended and adopted by the Committee. The amendment altered the bill (as one would expect). The bill alters the common wage law which directs a political subdivision to convene a common wage committee to set the wage for a public works project that exceeds a certain dollar amount. Under current law, the common wage law kicks in when the project exceeds $150,000. The introduced version raises that threshold to $500,000 and indexes that amount to inflation, looking year-to-year for the amount of inflation. The amendment lowered the threshold from $500,000 to $300,000 and required the inflation to be averaged over 5 years.

Then, I believe an unusual procedure took place. I’m not positive, because I’m not entirely familiar with the normal procedure, but I think that, typically, a committee report is simply approved in a pro forma vote of the House — probably a voice vote. This bill now has a roll call noted in its action list showing that something, I presume approval of the Committee Report by the House, passed 46 to 39. My guess is that labor is fighting this one tooth and nail.

The Palladium-Item has an Opinion on SB 310. If I get some time later, hopefully I can expand on the subject.

The Indy Star’s Michele McNeil has an article entitled Senate OKs bill mandating use of seat belts in pickups

According to the article:

Motorists in pickups and passengers in the back seats of cars would have to buckle up under legislation approved 34-16 Thursday by the Indiana Senate. This expansion of the state’s mandatory seat belt law would mean that Indiana would join 48 other states that don’t exempt pickups.

. . .

This year, House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, thinks it’s probably a good idea to make occupants of pickups buckle up. But he’s not sure which committee he’ll assign the bill to. If it goes to Roads and Transportation, Chairman Cleo Duncan, R-Greensburg, has said she doesn’t know if she’ll hear it.

Rep. Bob Alderman, R-Fort Wayne, said he wasn’t inclined to hear the bill in his Public Policy and Veterans Affairs Committee. “I’m not a believer in birth-to-grave legislation. I don’t want to live your life for you.”

Rep. Alderman’s comment is a good reason not to have seat belt legislation at all. I’d like to hear a cogent explanation for requiring seat belts in cars but not in pickups.

Sen. Dillon makes another excellent point:

But Sen. Gary Dillon, R-Columbia City, a doctor, said the state forks over about $66 million a year on health care for those injured in accidents because they weren’t buckled up.

“When we’re paying that kind of money, it does become our business.”

Maybe, as tbailey says in one of the comments to an earlier post, “Make it an implied consent situation. If you don’t wear a seatbelt you consent to waive any medicare/medicaid/disability payments from the government and agree to pay cash for any longterm nursing home care you may require.”

The Indy Star reports that: Daylight-saving vote postponed. Apparently the vote will take place on Monday or Tuesday. More importantly, neither Representative Torr nor the Associated Press seem to realize that “Democrat” is a noun and not an adjective:

“We need Democrat votes and I am certain we will have all the votes we need to pass this bill on Monday or Tuesday before the deadline midnight Tuesday,” Torr said.

The bill is backed by Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, and fellow Republicans control the House 52-48. But Torr has repeatedly said that Republicans would need some Democrat support to reach the 51 votes needed to pass it.

Maybe if you use the name of the party properly, you might get someone to vote with you.