The 2010 short session of the Indiana Legislature wasn’t a total waste of time. Almost, but not quite.
A few important pieces of legislation were passed, though none of them compare in scope of importance to the over-arching issue — how to account for adequate funding of public services in Indiana, namely education.
Sure, late in the session a bill was passed that enables schools to borrow money from capital projects budgets and use it in the general fund to pay for teachers’ salaries and other operating expenses. But the bill offers no relief to districts like Anderson Community Schools that don’t have large capital project reservoirs. ACS is facing a projected budget deficit of $22 million in coming years and is in desperate need of help.
As the session closed, legislators reached an agreement to delay for a year an increase in business taxation for the state’s unemployment insurance fund. Some legislators touted this as a move of great significance. The legislation, however, is counter-intuitive. The state needs money to combat high unemployment much worse than it needs to hold the line on that particular tax. Indiana University economist Morton Marcus argued forcefully that delaying the tax increase won’t lead to the creation of new jobs, accusing the Legislature of session-long “foolishness.”
If not foolish, the Legislature was mightily distracted during its short session. State representatives and senators spent an inordinate amount of time haggling over peripheral issues, such as whether workers should be allowed to have firearms in their vehicles while parked on company property. (Isn’t that a decision that companies should make?)
Perhaps the Legislature’s most consequential move was to approve a voter referendum on constitutional limitations to property taxes. That decision was particularly wrongheaded, as it allows public whim to fiddle with the state constitution and tie the hands of future lawmakers. Legislators moved quickly to approve the referendum, perhaps because they were happy to pass the responsibility on to their constituents.
The short session wasn’t all folly. There were some small victories:
* At the behest of newspapers across the state, the Legislature voted to tighten its ethics laws, enacting a one-year waiting period before former state legislators can become lobbyists and stepping up requirements for reporting lobbyists’ gifts.
* Scott Reske, D-Pendleton, authored a bill that forbids people charged with violent crime from having contact with their alleged victim for 10 days after release, giving officials time to process protective orders and file charges in cases where the accused is released without a hearing.
But all of this amounts to hopping over mole hills while a mountain looms overhead. Nothing was done to move decisively toward a solution to the budget crunch that is crippling education and slashing public services.
When the Legislature reconvenes in January, citizens can hope that the funding formula for public schools and other important services is tackled head-on. But don’t hold your breath. Gov. Mitch Daniels, far from blameless in this whole fiasco, issued a warning Monday that his top priority for the rest of 2010 will be fiscal austerity — not public education.
