the 2023 session of the Indiana General Assembly officially begins Monday, January nine .

Lawmakers will be returning to the state house with the charge to prepare and pass a new two year state spending plan.

What else lies ahead for the legislative group in the General Assembly between now and the end of April?

>> We'll discuss that question and take your questions as well on this edition of Prime Time.

>> Happy New Year and good evening.

I'm Bruce Haines.

Our guests today are Fred McKissic editorial page editor for the Journal Gazette, Leo Morris with the Indiana Policy Review and Andy Downs, director emeritus of the Mixdown Center for Indiana Politics at Purdue Fort Wayne .

And you can join the conversation to just call the number that you see on the screen is widen out and there we all are.

>> The Gang of Four is here.

This is a good good defensive line to see if we can hold our own between now at the top of the hour here on PBS Fort Wayne.

>> We mentioned Happy New Year and on June 30th will be may be saying happy new fiscal year.

>> But I'm kind of wondering what your first thoughts are about how much happy there might be in FY twenty four that'll be now underway between now and six months out.

>> Andy, first of all everybody needs to remember the budget's done every other year.

It's done during a long session year and this is a year that people were thinking was going to be horrible.

They were thinking this is not going to go well.

There's not a lot of money because the economy was tanking and then son of a gun went a lot better than people expected and because of that there is much, much more money available than anticipated and a whole lot of people began talking about ways to use that money, whether that's a new programs or giving it back to taxpayers through tax cuts or other other means.

>> And then there were a few people including a senator from this area who said wait a minute, let's not let's not make like drunken sailors here.

There's more money but we've got to be reasonable about this.

So the nice thing is not really austere by any stretch of the imagination and there will be money to do things.

And so we're now arguing about getting additional allocations instead of cuts and that quite often makes people happy.

>> Yeah, Fred, when you hear about the General Assembly about now what comes to mind?

Well, last month there was a survey I know we talked about sometimes we like surveys and sometimes we go but I thought this is interesting.

It came out of the bellweather company, a group out of Virginia I think they have a Indiana tie with one of their co founders who was an IU grad anyway.

They said they asked a question about what should be the top priorities for the state legislature and thirty one percent said health care costs.

Twenty one percent said increasing affordable housing, 17 percent believed that you know, the top priority should be education funding.

Only three percent thought that restricting access to mail order abortion bills was you the big one.

But I have this bad feeling that we're going to wind up with some of these cultural culture war issues that really haven't done or served well.

You know, Hoosiers well.

This is a time we really should be talking about pre-K. We should really be talking about, you know, funding education.

What was it last I think was last spring.

David RICS, the CEO of I'm sorry the chairman of Liley was at the Economic Club of Indiana and talked about yes, great.

We have low taxes and you know, the infrastructure is you know, OK but we have you know, Indiana has such terrible health care problems where our educational attainment level is not where it should be and I thought that was a wake up call when you know some you know when the leader of Lily, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world is telling you that it's not all about cutting taxes, sometimes we have to invest.

I think it was a a a wake up call.

>> It should be a wake up call for us all regardless of what side of the aisle we're on.

And Leo, you're hearing alarm bells yourself or what speaking of cultural issues and what Hoosiers want, you could throw in marijuana legalization in there so that Hoosiers seem to want but legislators don't particularly care for a back to the budget and you didn't mention that we have what still six billion in the bank or a rainy day fund and the budget forecast or the revenue forecast came out?

I think December 15th predicted a mild recession somewhere in 2004 but pretty good revenue and 24 and 25.

And what's interesting to me about the budget is that the mayor the governor is going into his last two years of kind of a lame duck and he's the one that's proposing huge spending on things like public health and education and infrastructure and economic development and and teacher and public employee raises.

>> And the Democrats are ecstatic about his proposal and it's the republic of his fellow Republicans who are going well wait a minute.

>> So that's just an interesting dynamic to me.

Yeah, it was a large budget two years ago with 30 or seven billion and now with 43 now and now we're moving up to 45 to 43 and it was this week then when Governor Kulka gave us all a peek under the tent to see what was in fact in his budget being presented next Tuesday at seven State of the State address.

You can see that on PBS weren't wing channel thirty nine dash four at seven o'clock but Andy his was one that Chris Johnson the director of the Office of Budget Management said We're now moving to a new economic normal post pandemic about the pandemic certainly disrupted everything and we all know that .

So whatever we end up in is of course going to be the new normal.

I think there is a shared change in understand about what it means to for example, communicate with one another.

I know I'm much more willing and find many more people willing to do Zoome meetings and those sorts of things.

So we're entering a new a new reality but we're always entering a new reality.

And so I understand the point he's making especially given that we're coming out of the pandemic with a lot more revenue than we anticipated.

Still it's sort of a woman say it's an obvious statement but it's kind of an obvious statement.

I do want to go back to Leo's point for just a second here.

There actually are a few bills that were filed early on about marijuana.

One of them decriminalizing it, another one making it not a crime if you are not intoxicated but arrested for operating a vehicle with THC in your system.

So no crime as long as you're not intoxicated while that's going on recognizing you may have done something in another state and both of those bills authored by Republicans.

So there may be maybe on this bipartisan movement on the fringes I think most will hear the governor's line which as long as it's still a schedule one drug and the federal level, they're not going to do too much.

>> And there actually is another bill that specifically says the moment it's not a schedule one drug then it'll be legal for the chemical part of this is is you know, driving through Indiana you see billboards, you know, touting you know, buy your you know, buy your marijuana up here in Michigan I'm thinking you know, this is the weird part of this is right next door.

>> It's their and again instead of I think studying it and actually looking at, you know, the data and the facts that are out there and coming to a conclusion, I think this is just going to one of those things again where you have people on the fringes going this doesn't make any sense.

We need to legalize deal with it.

I kind of like in this with the NCAA and you know you know you know paying players in ill you get to a point where it's just you know, it just explodes and you hadn't thought about you know what to do.

>> You hadn't thought about, you know, putting together a really good package that people could agree to.

Speaking of that and driving, let's not forget just a caveat about marijuana legalization where we would be adding another way for impaired driving and unlike alcohol for which there are there's not nationwide standard for what is impaired driving and what isn't there isn't one for marijuana and you can have marijuana show up in your system two or three days later and you are impaired or you're not.

>> I wish the state would you know it's been legal in another states for quite a while and I wish the state would do some studying of statistics.

What's it like in those states?

>> As a matter of fact, I wish we would do some study of things we've done here for six months now into permit this carry.

>> I know I've talked to a cop or two don't still don't care for the idea.

>> You know, let's wait a year and see and talk to the cops and see what it's like.

>> You know, this study, what we've done as well as what we haven't done yet and there are not a lot of people were thinking when it comes to marijuana whether it's d full legalization we're looking at being this is this is the next version of Sun sales.

You know we're going to be state forty eight forty nine or fifty.

Right.

And finally does something with it.

>> And when you're wondering where Indiana is something that has been studied for about the last two years or so or more three years I guess now is the idea of reforming the state's public health system.

And this was something, Fred, that you were touching on and it's in the governor's budget initially seeking 242 million a year starting in July where indeed more funding goes out to the Indiana counties and you try to get some unanimity along with county independents at the same time this is this is the beauty of when the governor says something there's what the governor said and we have to remember the governor doesn't actually introduce a bill.

The governor says these are priorities.

I have and then the legislature gets to take over and decide what that means when you throw in the fact that the governor is a lame duck, this goes even further into the realm of maybe what he would like to see happen is going to happen.

I think it's safe to say that Governor Holcomb during the pandemic was not in alignment with a number of members of the legislature.

I think it was also safe to say that he was actually trying to help out local public health organizations and he understood because of that pandemic was an issue.

But there are lots of other issues that are public health issues that have come along and so yeah, we should probably be better prepared for a pandemic but let's not avoid talking about the issues that are coming up much more regularly.

>> Well, yeah, you know I mean it is going to sound cynical but I mean he's a lame duck governor and you know, maybe the more when you're in a situation like that you can be braver and you know, throw out what you really want in this situation.

But when it comes to public health here in Indiana, again, we tend to be on the lower end of the scale here in the United States was we I think is it forty eight dollars per person that we pay here in the what is it that we spent here in Indiana where you have other states paying twice as much on public health ?

Right.

We're talking about mental health care issues particularly around young adults.

Plenty of studies plenty of that out is coming out about depression levels.

This state has a problem with with issues with that with drug addiction continues to have issues with drug addiction and that, you know, really is something that we have to get our hands around the grip, you know, grip to bring people out of this again.

In the end, unfortunately this is something that I think people clearly I think these super people, the super majority do see the issue there.

But you really have to be brave about this and say let's spend the money that we have to help people.

>> It seems that there is a question about not too much concept but commitment of how much money to put with that initiative 242 may be a nonstarter but it may well be that something along the idea of one one hundred and twenty in the first year a little over in the second year but to at least take a journey so we can get being in the bottom 20 on a lot of metrics I agree with almost any issue you can name a smoking, obesity, diabetes, infant mortality about it.

I don't know that we're in the bottom probably the bottom 10, you know, but there are a couple of other things going on too.

>> One is health care costs here especially hospital costs are way out of line with other states and the consolidations have created a kind of monopoly situation and it puts a lot of Republicans in the uncomfortable position of having to say do we tax hospitals, insurance companies?

Do we just flat out say you can't charge more than the average, you know, nationwide and on top of that going back to the pandemic, we had a big division between public health and individual liberty and I don't want to dismiss that.

It's an important concern how much liberty we give up for public safety, you know, whether it's vaccine mandates or mask mandates or closing down schools, shutting down the economy, that's an important debate too.

I hope we can have both of those debates more funding for public health .

But how do we balance freedom versus public health without them clashing with each other and that we can have they're both important debates and I think they need to both be happening and I think there are two issues to mention your first of all, I was actually expecting you to talk about the difference between one time expenses and ongoing expenses because if you start cutting taxes and reducing revenue eventually there's a point where the revenue goes down and if you've committed to ongoing expenses that becomes problematic obviously.

>> But we're talking about an issue that has one, two , three senators from this area on the relevant committee.

We're talking about health and provider services Tyler Johnson, Lizz Brown, Justin Busch all on that committee and then in the House we see Martin Kabalan public health .

>> So this is something that really should end up getting discussed in in our region.

You should be able to do this many weeks in a row.

So you're all set, Bruce , but it's something where our representatives are going to be able to our members of the legislature going to be able to influence what happens here and people need to take advantage of that.

They need to go out and talk to legislators, send them emails, send them US Postal Service letters.

>> I think they were called back in the day you got to contact I got to tell them what you think and many of them are still posting their own legislative surveys asking for constituent input and it may well be there's a health question to the pop up on that but nevertheless the development of how the general Assembly responds to the results of this three year commission Lou.

>> Kenley's been chairing Christina Fox has been a part of it and of course now the governor taking it and they worked out the math.

But there there seems to be indeed the context is not about covid but now it's about as you say the the the tax cut that's instrumental and into its full year as well as the idea of getting rid of the the state utility taxes are no longer something that you can be counting on either.

>> Well, this gets to the point I think Fred made it earlier when when you're talking about you need that low taxes are nice.

That's how you attract people.

But we also know if you talk to site selection folks, it gets about quality of life issues.

It's about making sure there's a pipeline of workers who are available to go into places and actually provide the services, the labor that's needed by the organizations.

There comes a point where you actually potentially damage yourself too much and this is I think both both raise this point.

Let's study it.

It's not like there are states that haven't done this are plenty that half the problem is this is not one plus one equals two .

>> This is stuff that takes includes a whole lot of subjectivity that becomes problematic then and when you start looking at it ideologically it's easy to say well here's the data that supports my position.

Somebody else says here's the data that supports my position and whoever's in the majority wins especially if it's super majority.

>> Well, take a look what happened with Amazon.

Amazon moved its you know, warehouse here a couple of warehouses here.

We weren't even in the running for the tech positions.

Those went to North Carolina to try it.

North Carolina just as you know the right dynamics, they've invested enough in their people enough invested enough in, you know, education, health care that it was attractive.

It's not always about cutting taxes and making it a good place to be in terms of , you know, your finances.

I mean if there's not a quality of life, if the if your you know, your students are not attaining the proper academic credentials, if we're not graduating enough people with bachelor's degrees or we have the you know, it's constant brain drain that we're having, it's hard to get those jobs where people are paid 80, 90, 100, 120 hundred fifty thousand dollars a year.

>> Leah, please go ahead.

>> I just it made me think some of economic development even when it works well, I don't want to say this too strongly but that economic development is kind of a kind of game instead when we are we do want to say that strongly instead of creating the situation where you are attractive to all businesses, you keep all these rules and regulations and and red tape in place so that you can pick and choose and you can make employers go through hoops and you can pretend to be the kingmaker even when it works well, you know the Indiana Economic Development Corporation is a quasi public agency so it's not even transparent.

>> So we don't even know kind of what they're doing but they don't always keep up, you know, and if you look at the governor's budget proposal, all millions and millions he's proposing frankly the development are to get jobs, jobs job.

>> We have the jobs.

We don't have the people the economic people in some other places are starting to focus on workforce development.

>> We got the jobs.

We don't have the people to fill them.

I've been seeing a couple of points of commonality among a lot of lawmakers priorities to to get at this with addressing the shortage of qualified workers workforce training clearly and won an initiative to make college more affordable to automatically enroll all eligible students in the twenty first century scholars program.

It improves the odds that those who go through that continue on well the twenty first century scholar program to remind people started out as something you had to sign up for when you were in middle school.

You had to agree to certain things keep a C average I think it was make you never got in significant trouble and then if you did that you got a tuition break at Indiana funded institution so Ball State, IU, Purdue, Indiana State, et cetera, et cetera.

And it's a program that has had pretty good success in terms of convincing some folks, especially folks who are coming from lower economic situations to think about college beginning in middle school and that's good for us from a from a workforce development standpoint.

Obviously automatically enrolling people takes away that step and now the question is what do we do to follow up with those people to make sure those students make sure that they're continually thinking about college is really my my next step in college doesn't have to be the institutions I mentioned it could be Vincenzo could be Ivy Tech.

It could be someplace other than a four year or graduate type institute.

That's important to keep in mind and I think that we need to remember that one of the things that Eric Holcomb's talked about for six years is workforce development.

I mean this has really been a central plank in what he has done all the time he's been in office and he continues to I think you agree we need to have a certain amount of population growth because without population doesn't matter how will you train?

>> You're not going to have people to fill the jobs and there is still money in there too for ready grants to to continue to expand that series with another five hundred million I believe it is.

And the three hundred million for the Indiana Economic Development Corporation for a deal closing fund and as all of these lie will have something to say I think oh I just it goes back to what I said.

>> The second game is actually there there is research about the effectiveness of of tools and the research quite often is mixed.

Sometimes work doesn't work other times what's interesting though is this is sort of like mutually assured destruction.

If you take that evidence to a mayor or you say hey, you want to maybe not do tax abatement anymore, no one wants to be the first person to say we don't do tax abatement here any longer.

Right.

Because it might work and we don't want to be labeled as the place that doesn't have the incentives.

And how proud are we if we take jobs away from Warsaw and you know, we must move jobs from one place to another but at least at least a number of the programs ready etc.

looks at things from a regional perspective so we're less competitive with our neighbors than we used to be neighbors with this sort of Midwest deal with jobs from New England.

>> There you go.

Yes.

OK then I'm OK with it.

Yeah.

What we want to be sure we mention because it will be a part of that larger chunk of pie that funds education is the governor's willingness to commit an eight percent increase in education funding largely directed toward teacher salaries.

Same number I believe it is for increasing funding for state school colleges and universities going forward.

>> Yeah, which I obviously we think is a really good idea as an editorial board.

One of the things that we've seen I think probably and he could talk a bit about this is that the number the percentage of high school students going to college right out of high school is has dropped from what, 65 percent at some point it was about ten years ago to almost 50 percent now kids are just not going to college and when you start breaking it out, women are actually not quite as bad as men.

Young men, African-American men are not going to college at a rate that is surprising to me given what you know and I'll tell you we roll into this we have a two minute warning.

>> But I do want to say as we are going into the new year, what is your wish for the General Assembly is the final question you each get a whopping 30 seconds.

Yeah, but I got to quickly comment on one thing here and that is there's a demographic trends.

It's also problematic not only are fewer people going, the population is not growing at the same rate.

So you're ending up with a compounding problem here in terms of funding of education and that's I'll use my 30 seconds there so I will pass on to the next person that's I use my third.

>> All right.

What I would like to see is not for the supermajority to go down the cultural war path again.

It's ridiculous.

Again, we looked like like a knucklehead dystopia out of a Marx Brothers film.

It just did not make us look good and you know, we're smarter than that.

So what I'm hoping is is that what we've seen here locally with the city council where you're seeing a lot of bipartisanship I'm hoping to see a bit more bipartisanship down there.

>> Dr. Morris, I'm a little less worried about the culture wars.

The culture wars are here and they're going on and they're going to take place in the schools as well as they do everywhere and they'll play out.

>> I'm more concerned about education overall since voice of 2009 when the state more or less changed everything about how it does education and I think we're up to 85 percent funding for state funding day to day operations and when they took over the funding they also took over more and more responsibility for curriculum and everything else.

I would like to see them either back off a little bit or get their act together or maybe find a way to get more local input.

Education has always been best when it's a strongly local issue and it's just not that anymore.

>> We have to go out on that one.

But what a quick overview and there will be more of it every Friday night 730 Leo Morris The Indianapolis Repu Fred McKissack, editorial page editor for the Journal Gazette.

Andy Downs director emeritus of the Mixdown Center for Indiana Politics of Purdue Fort Wayne .

Gentlemen, thank you and thank you as well.

A reminder Governor Eric Holcomb State of the state address Tuesday night seven o'clock on PBS .

Thirty nine explore thirty nine dash four check your local listings and for all of us with prime time we'll see you next week.

We'll have floor Majority Leader Lavan and Democratic leader Phil Gioacchino joining us to Hypers.

Take care.

Have a good weekend