Welcome to Politically Speaking.

I'm Elizabeth Bennion, chancellor's professor of political science and director of Community Engagement and the American Democracy Project at Indiana University, South Bend.

Joining us this week is Kevin Brinegar, who has been at the forefront of economic development, policy, advocacy and legislative affairs through his role as the president and CEO of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce.

It's a position he has held since 2002, after previously served serving as the chamber's senior vice president of government affairs and on its advocacy team.

Today, we explore his career with the chamber and discuss his greatest accomplishments.

Thank you for being here.

My pleasure.

Glad to.

Glad to visit with you and particularly, I have three degrees from IU, so it's kind of near and dear to my heart.

Wonderful.

I wonder if you could just start by sharing some key experiences that shaped your path into politics and ultimately led you to assume the role of CEO and president of the Indiana Chamber.

Well, thank you, Elizabeth.

It was a very, very unlikely path.

I fact, I did a some closing remarks to our board of directors meeting a couple of weeks ago, and I said I probably had a one in a million chance of being and ending up in this role given where I started.

My parents were teenagers when I was born.

My father was orphaned when he was seven years old, when his parents were killed in the railroad crossing accident.

And my mother's father was a laborer who fell off a roof and became paralyzed.

And so it was my mother that was working as a back then.

They call her a bookkeeper for a local construction company.

And there was a blended family.

So our our first home was in the trailer park.

And two years later, my parents divorced.

So then there was just my mother and me.

And she worked very hard.

She she worked in a factory during the week and then waitressed at a steakhouse on the weekends and then eventually remarried.

And so I was fortunate, you know, we lived on kind of the other side of the tracks growing up.

But they she and my stepfather worked hard and I was deep into athletics and various sports.

And I was fortunate that by the time I got to high school, she had found a job accounting job in at IU Bloomington and saw kids getting their degrees and going off to college and getting good jobs.

And all that.

And she decided she wanted that for me and she had some leverage on me because I still remember I came home the first nine weeks of my freshman year of high school and I had B's and C;s and I'm like, Yeah, I'm eligible to play football and basketball in the fall and, you know, go on.

And, you know, all life was good.

And she sat me down and said, This isn't good enough.

This is from now on, if you bring home anything less than a B, I won't let you play for next semester.

And so that forced me to get with it academically.

And by the time I graduated, I was on the National Honor Society and I rank in my class and I set my sights on being a state trooper.

And IU had a program where I grew up in Bloomington, where you could get your law enforcement training over the course of two summers, be a fully full fledged licensed police officer to work for IU PD part time during the school year and go to school full time and be then well positioned to have both the degree and the experience and already be a licensed police officer.

Fill out your state police application.

So that's what I did.

I was going to be in Bloomington in the summers anyway since I was where I was from, but by the time I was a senior year, I got interested in in public administration and policy and tax and budgeting.

I had a mentor, professor named John Meisel, who also served on the state's revenue forecasting committee for many, many years.

And he sort of inspired me to just go right on to graduate school and got my master's in labor relations and public finance, and that led me to be hired by the Legislative Services Agency.

So I gave up the state police dream for other things.

I was very fortunate during a recessionary period in 1981 to be hired at the Legislative Services Agency, which is the nonpartisan support staff to the General Assembly and worked there as a management analyst for three years and then had an opportunity to fill a position staffing the Senate Finance Committee as their tax and budget analyst.

And so those were just great experience.

You know, any bill that had any significance to it had money attached to it.

And so it went through the Finance Committee.

I got to travel in the summers with the state Budget Committee, visiting state funded facilities, whether it was, you know, universities, prisons, mental hospitals, state parks, all that.

And we would look at their capital needs and that would help us put together the capital budget.

So some state funded entity came and said, hey, this building needs a new roof.

We could say, Yeah, we've been there and it does need a new roof or something that.

And those were interesting experiences and that built on the ideas up in campus many times over the years.

I tell people I've walked down Death Row, which was an area experience, been to the state mental hospitals when they were sort of repositories for adults and children that families couldn't deal with or whatever, you know, kids were wearing helmets and all those very sad things.

But I learned so much about state government, about policy it and while I was working for the Senate, I started and finished an MBA in corporate finance from the Catholic school in Indianapolis campus and was ready to really interested in business and was ready to try something different.

And the chamber has been the perfect place, and particularly this job for me because I get to lead an organization that represents businesses and make a difference in public policy over these many years, 31 years now, the Chamber, almost 22 at the helm.

And also I had the experience with my MBA of running a medium sized business that now has we've grown it to $13 million in revenues and 60 employees, and we're the second largest state chamber in the country, even though Indiana's by far not the second largest state.

So it's been a great experience and my only complaint is it's gone by too fast.

Now, it sounds like both your experience as a business owner and with the legislature have turned out to be incredibly important in your role with the chamber?

Yeah, I mean, having the policy experience and the relationships and the knowledge of state government and its processes was very important to coming to the chamber because the state of the Chamber is a statewide business advocacy organization.

So we have a team of seven individuals who lobby, including myself, and so I was able to lead that.

No, no, the processes, you know, how to get bills passed, how to get bills defeated if you don't like them, how to work with legislators, how to work with leaders from other organizations that are in the hallways as well as we say.

And then but the chamber is also, you know, like I say, it's a medium sized business.

I tell people I have all the joys and the headaches that come along with that.

And so, again, it's really been the perfect job for me, given my passion for policy.

And during my time, one of the things I'm proud of is the chamber has sort of expanded its viewpoints and perspective from just doing, you know, pursuing legislation that benefits business to recognizing that for people of Indiana need to do well also and prosper.

And when they prosper, the businesses will prosper as well.

And so when we developed our our now prior long term economic vision plan for the state, we revised our chamber mission statement to say that we want a world class economy that supports so that the people and the enterprises of Indiana can prosper.

And we consciously put people first and enterprises, i.e., the businesses second.

Now, speaking of changes, given that you've been in your position for over two decades, what changes have you seen in the political landscape and how has that affected the priorities and advocacy focus of the Chamber?

Well, I'd go maybe go back even further.

The biggest change I've seen around the statehouse in the legislature are changes in technology and transparency.

That's tell people the first budget that I worked on for the Senate and did our Senate version of the budget as it was going.

The budget bill going through the process, worked with folks in the budget agency on a on a Wang word processor.

It had no computational power whatsoever.

Obviously, the wiring company is was one of the first word processing companies and they're no longer in existence.

All the numbers were crunched on a big calculator that I still have on my desk, and they gave it to me as a memento when I left the Senate.

And it's all the plastic is all yellowed, but I still use it to run tapes on expense reports and things like they did not have their own printing capabilities.

Everything got shipped out to a place called Central Publishing, which is a company over in Lockerbie, is familiar with that area of downtown Indianapolis.

They now have their own printing capabilities and obviously wonderful technology.

The floor sessions of the House and Senate were not televised.

Neither were the committee hearings.

I tell folks back then when I started that you go to a conference committee where the House and Senate are trying to work out the differences on a bill, and that meeting might take place in a bar or in a hotel room or, you know, someplace outside of the state house.

Whereas now all those meetings have to be posted to 2 hours in advance, at least, and the meetings have to take place in the state house.

And they're there.

They're televised as well.

You can watch them on the Internet.

So big improvements there.

I I'd say the other big changes for the chamber is the makeup of the General Assembly excuse me.

And fundamentally, you know, four of the years that I worked for the Senate where I worked for the Senate Republican Caucus, their majority was 26, 24.

And the lieutenant governor who presides over the Senate was Democrat Frank O'Bannon.

You know, now the Senate has a the Republicans have a 4210 margin During the late eighties and 1990s, the House was frequently 50 several times 5050 or just barely one one side or the other had the majority.

A lot more need for compromise with the minority party.

And in the nineties the chamber was on defense a lot from because the frankly the Democrat majorities would sometimes file and push bills through the House that we opposed to a much greater degree than than what we have now.

But super majorities are a problem too, because sometimes there are what we call populist bills that are not good for economic growth and for businesses.

And so it's just as much of a challenge.

And in some respects, to have these Republican supermajorities as it was to have the other pendulum swing the other way.

So you have to adjust and adapt and work your relationships, bring good data and information to the legislators as to why, you know, this bill would further job growth and economic development or why it would be bad for job growth and economic development.

We then we produce a document every session that gives specific positions on specific bills that we have positions on and the ones that are really bad.

We put a little tag on them that says job killers and the legislators don't like to have their bills identified as job killers.

But it helps us get the point across.

I want to follow up on that idea of populist legislation that you would say is good for government and ask if you can give us an example of that, but also ask about the overall political climate.

Now, particularly at the national level, though, we sometimes see it at the state or county or local levels with negative partizanship and party polarization where elected officials and even many constituents define people who don't agree with them as a threat to the nation or enemies.

I want to define groups as liberal or conservative.

It seems to me the chamber doesn't fit neatly into one of those categories.

Some people see that and the pro-business focus as necessarily conservative.

But then you've taken positions on many issues like driver's permits for undocumented immigrants, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and hate crimes legislation that many conservatives didn't like and so have.

Do you find it difficult to sort of navigate in this political climate?

And do you get a lot of backlash from folks both on the left and the right as you do your work?

It is at times challenging to negotiate this.

I've seen articles where it suggests that in this political climate that business doesn't have a home anymore.

But, you know, we look at things through the lens of, you know, what is good for job growth, economic growth, and, you know, moving our state forward, making Indiana as competitive as possible.

We've been very successful in accomplishing that over the last 20, 22 years, You know, with our legislative victories and I know my mantra has been just let's keep putting score on the border each and every year and on the things that are challenging or that we oppose, we'll deal with them, you know, as they come along and make our case.

But yeah, and obviously the change in the makeup of the General Assembly has played an important role.

The other thing I sort of I want to use the word blame, but I guess I assign the the not responsibility, but sort of the source.

That's the word I'm looking for out of this hyper partizanship, frankly, to the growth of social media and the fact that, you know, when I was growing up, you had three TV stations, the three networks, and you got to watch either Huntley-Brinkley or Walter Cronkite, you know, or Peter Jennings.

And they were reporting the news and you could pretty much hear the same things no matter what channel you watched.

Well, now you've got both on radio and television.

Folks can watch the news and tend to choose the news based on their political leanings.

And so they hear things that they want to hear rather than sort of hear objective news.

And you've got news makers that want to make news rather than just report news.

And so people aren't getting the same news because it's filtered.

And in fact, I've got on my car radio sort of from right to left, I have, you know, Fox Business, Fox News, I've got the local ABC station and then I've got CNN and MSNBC.

And I'll often, you know, slip back and forth and hear completely different stories about the same news item or I'll hear one channel, you know, talking about Trump impeachment and another channel and talking about, you know, Hunter Biden and his his difficulties.

And neither one is talking about the other the other part of it.

So I think that's led to this hyper partizanship, I guess.

And to say it in a nutshell.

And has that made it difficult to do your job or do you feel like if folks on the right and the left are both upset from time to time, it probably means you're doing things right?

Well, we'd like to think so for sure, but yeah, it creates different kinds of challenges than we've had in the past.

But we've also been very, very successful.

We had a great session earlier this year with a lot of accomplishments, particularly bringing focus on some things that we needed to do to improve outcomes in K-12 education and better prepare our young people for college and careers and workforce.

And give you some examples.

We had now passed legislation that makes enrollment in the 21st century Scholars program automatic.

We were we looked at a cohort of recent incoming high school freshmen, and only half of them who were eligible signed up, got signed up, and only half of them in their freshman year did the three activities that they were supposed to do to be eligible to earn the scholarship.

And those activities were not extensive.

They were playing your high school curriculum, which you need to do anyway, watch a paying for college video and then do some sort of extracurricular service project.

Well, now we won't lose that house by who Don't get enrolled because they're automatically enrolled by the Commission for Education.

Another related bill was making the filling out the fast form and expectation for high school graduation.

We had the lowest pass for filing rate in the Midwest and one of the lowest in the country.

And there was research presented to House and Senate Education committees in the 2022 session that estimated that Hoosier families were leaving some $65 million in student aid on the table because they didn't fill out fast form, which you have to do to get married.

So we got that legislation passed this year.

And then thirdly, a crackdown on on high school graduation waivers.

We had school districts that were giving out waivers where the student doesn't meet all the requirements to earn the regular high school diploma.

But the school, principal, high school, whatever was saying, you know what, Lizbeth?

You didn't meet all the requirements, but you're close enough.

And so we're going to give you that regular diploma, even though you didn't earn it, because we're going to give you a waiver.

We had school districts in Indiana that were giving the were both boosting their graduation, their reported graduation rates by giving as many as 25% of their students waivers.

And along with their regular diploma.

And so there are some things and we've got an ongoing focus there that, you know, we feel like we were grateful that the General Assembly listen, we had we do a panel with the four caucus leaders every year the day before Organization Day, which was Monday of last week.

And we had four leaders in.

And I was very pleased to hear the president pro tem of the Senate and the Speaker of the House say that they're they're not necessarily going to have a big agenda this session, like we had during the long session earlier this year, but that two of their key priorities were to further work on enhancing the reading skills of students, particularly first to third graders.

My wife, who's now retired fourth grade teacher, will tell you that, and many others will say, you know, from kindergarten to third grade, you learn to read and from fourth grade on, you read to learn, but you can't read to learn if you haven't first learned to read.

So they're putting emphasis on that.

And then I don't know if you've seen this data, but in the last couple of months I've become aware that we have a really serious truancy program problem in the state where the the absentee rates are much higher than they were before the pandemic and unacceptably high because, you know, I was like, see, you must be president to win.

And if you're not there in the classroom, there's not much learning going on.

So we're encouraged that this focus on lifting up the achievement of our K-12 students and lifting up the skills of our adult workforce are remaining priorities because we think that that's probably the number one area that's going to make or break or determine.

Indiana's competitiveness in the future.

Now that focus on human capital and what it means for the economic condition of the state and the future economic forecast as well as other our businesses have, those skilled, educated employees they need seems to bring us full circle to your story about your own upbringing and your mother's decision, despite all odds, almost against all odds, to focus on education for you and making sure that you could do more and have more than than she did.

You know, Elizabeth, it really does, because I have this deep passion for or education or growth.

And that's why I felt it was so important to get those 21st century scholar kids automatically enrolled.

Because having access for low income families to a three post-Second degree education, I mean, that's a life changing opportunity and, you know, could really steer you in one direction or another, depending on whether you take that up.

And I'll tell you another story about my mother.

She started working towards her undergraduate degree in business when I was in middle school.

She took one class this semester, but she was working full time, taking care of a family and one class and a semester.

You imagine earning 120 credit hours for a bachelor's degree, taking one class a semester, maybe one in the summer.

She started when I was in middle school.

She finished two years after I finished my graduate degree and I am far more proud of her for her college degree than all three of mine.

One of the things my wife and I decided years ago with our two children who are now 31 and 29 and have both our professional degrees, best thing we could give them if we could afford to do so as possible while we were on the on the earth was a debt free college education and not everybody can do that.

And we made some sacrifices to do so.

But we were able to do that both for their undergraduate degree.

And my daughter has a doctor and physical therapy and my son has both an MBA and a law degree.

I'll try not to get emotional, but when my daughter was in her last semester of physical therapy school, most of that semester they weren't doing clinical stuff.

They'd done their rotations and things they were learning, getting ready to go out into the world and BPT, so was resume writing, interviewing, etc.

And this lady came in one day before lunch and she had a stack of folders and she'd go around and say, okay, now what's your name?

Your name's Elizabeth.

Okay, here's your folder.

Here's the student loan that you accumulated as an undergrad student.

Here's the student loan that you've accumulated as a student.

Here's when you have to start paying, here's how much it's going to cost, you know, your months, etc.. And she got to my daughter and she couldn't find the folder.

And, you know, and she's looking to look.

And finally Kathleen says, I don't I don't have any loans.

And the lady said, Well, okay, I understand about undergrad, but this is also for the art school and she said, I don't have any loans.

And as soon as the class is over and it was lunchtime, she called me and I happened to be at my desk at the lunch hour and she was in tears and she said, Dad, I finally get it.

I get the significance of the gift that you and Mom had given me because she had a couple of friends who were really close that shared what was in their folders, and one of them was $80,000 and one of them was over $100,000 because they had said classmates who were married and, you know, had children living in apartments and were borrowing money not only for their tuition, but for their living expenses.

And so, again, we were very fortunate to be able to do that.

But we felt like, again, this passion for education and college education or post-secondary, I'll say it more broadly, was something that my wife and I agreed to read on very early on.

And in some ways I feel like that's one of my biggest accomplishments.

Well, we look forward to hearing more about the Chambers legislative agenda as we talk again with you or with your successor, Vanessa Green Sanders, who will be taking over as president and CEO of the Chamber.

Unfortunately, that's all the time we have.

Thank you for being here.

Kevin Brinegar president and CEO of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce.

And Elizabeth Bennion reminding you that it takes all of us to make our communities and our democracy.