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, Indiana.

Lawmakers have finished up their fourth week of their short 2024 legislative session.

Joining us this week to discuss the Indiana state legislature and their policy priorities are two members of the Indiana House of Representatives.

They are District six, Representative Maureen Bauer and District eight Representative Ryan Dvorak of South Bend and Northern Saint Joseph County.

Thank you both for being here.

Representative Bauer, let me start with you.

What are your top priorities for this session and what would you like to see happen?

Well, we have just nearly hit the halfway point, so any House bills that haven't received a hearing are officially dead.

But and they, as they say, no language is dead until signing day.

So my area of focus with the bills that I authored focus on continuing and investing in access to affordable, quality health care, especially for pregnant women and children, looking at reducing health care costs and providing more birth options for pregnant women across the state where we have a large area of our state that our maternity care deserts and also addressing violent crime and where, again, we can invest in youth programs, but also look at violence from a health perspective, looking at our first responders and the trauma that accumulates when they are the first on the scene and responding to these violent crimes, but also the health care industry here locally.

The first ever Gun violence symposium was led by the medical profession, E.R.

doctors and trauma surgeons.

And so looking at what we can do to help support their work within the hospitals, that those are the issues that have been important to you from the time you were elected and even before that during your campaign.

How does the abortion ban, how has that affected your thinking about the necessity for that women's health care that you talked about, as well as children and infant care?

And then just recently here locally, we had a death where many children died and first responders are said to be quite distraught about what what they saw.

So I wondered if you, as a legislator, how you see those kind of events affecting the way that Hoosiers are thinking about these issues, what they're saying to you and how you go about your work?

Sure.

Well, that family, as far as I understand, only moved to Indiana in October from Iowa.

And so they were Indiana residents for a very short time.

And Indiana's a state that has very poor renter protections.

We have banned the ability for local governments to enact landlord tenant agreements, for example.

We did that right after the pandemic.

The governor vetoed the bill and we came back immediately and overrode that veto.

So when we look at the real issues that are happening in our district, we are often proposing solutions.

And there were two bills in the Senate that would have allowed us to either create a rent escrow program where one in five states that don't have that.

So if repairs aren't being made on your home, you can pay your rent into escrow until those repairs are made.

Then there was another bill that would have required any essential repairs to be made before you can rent to the next family.

And so I truly believe if we had passed those two pieces of legislation, we could have prevented a tragedy like that.

And you're using past tense.

So that's not something that is a possibility here in this session any more.

One bill did die, 55 in committee was very close.

It was my hope it was just for Marion County, as my hope we could add in Saint Joseph County, maybe create one of those pilot programs.

But I think there's still some ability to negotiate because we're responding to a tragedy, something real that happened in our community.

One of the worst fires, I think, Chief Buchanan said in centuries.

And I hope that's enough for us to act.

And in terms of the ban, have you seen more people contacting you, maybe even from both sides of the aisle regarding women's and children's health and access?

There?

Well, I think more people understand this as a health care perspective.

I think we're getting away of the binary pro-life, pro-choice.

We're looking this as opportunity for women and families to have health care access like everyone else should deserve.

And in a state that has such a high maternal mortality rate, such a high infant mortality rate, we know we aren't doing it right.

So I think from my perspective, I try to listen to the medical community and listen to doctors and use that to form policy going forward.

Do you anticipate any positive move in the bills that you are really paying attention to?

One of mine would be would have been a medicaid reimbursement bill, and since they short shorted Medicaid by $1,000,000,000, I knew that wasn't going to be heard.

But no movement on anything relating to Medicaid.

After that failure by the budgeting agency.

But the only positive that I can point to are that passed out of the House as a bill to allow Medicaid eligible women or anyone who is giving birth, who is on Medicaid to be offered a long acting reversible contraceptive contraception, which is a well overdue for our state to join the others.

Representative Dvorak, what about you?

You know, first, I think it's important to remember one of the problems we have in Indiana is that we have a sort of gerrymandered supermajority that's been in power for almost two decades now.

So minorities ability to get hearings on legislation is limited.

So that doesn't mean we can't get things done.

Maureen and I both we work we have a lot of success in actually offering amendments to legislation, whether it's in committee or on the floor of the House.

This is we're in the first part of the session now where we're considering House bills, but we'll soon be hearing the Senate bill.

So we'll have the ability to change that legislation as well.

And there's conference committee.

So while a minority member's bills don't get hearings, a lot of the time, we can still get things done.

It's just a different part of the process.

So I think we both had fun doing that from time to time.

For myself, I've had a number of bills filed this year that are I think are pretty interesting representing power, and I have both been working for several years on trying to limit the impact of PFAS chemicals in our water.

The bill that I continue to file is asking the state to simply set minimum regulations for what is allowable in water systems.

Right now, chemicals, they're persistent fluorinated chemicals that are in the water.

They don't break down very well.

They last in people's bodies for a very long time and they cause all types of different diseases, cancers, from cancers to even high cholesterol, all sorts of things.

And the problem is there's really no regulation on them and it's their use is more recent.

So this isn't an old problem.

It's as we've moved on in time, there's more and more usage and more and more getting into our water systems.

I think one of the positive things that we've been able to accomplish because of the pressure we've been putting on legislators and the administration to do some regulation on water is why we haven't got legislation passed yet.

We did get item to actually go through and implement full scale sort of testing of water systems across the state.

And I think the most recent data was just updated last month where there's new South Bend numbers.

But they went through and tested almost every public water system in the state for all these different types of chemicals and found, you know, where do we actually have problems where in untreated versus treated water are you seeing different variants of these chemicals?

At what levels are they above or below?

What sort of EPA recommendations are to try to have a better grasp of actually what the state of the problem is in India?

And I think that's a big step forward because before we would only have anecdotal evidence or maybe some municipality would test of their own accord to find out where contamination was or there were obvious sites, places where, for example, firefighters do training, PE, PFAs chemicals are used a lot and fire retardant.

So the materials used to put out jet fuel fires or in fire protective clothing.

There's a lot of chemicals in that.

So fire training sites or military bases, you'd see a lot of contamination there, but there's industrial contamination as well.

So now we're getting a much clearer picture on that issue.

So I think that's really helpful.

Is there anything that people or local governments can do with that data now, or is that all preparing the groundwork to make a stronger case for statewide legislation moving forward?

Yeah, I think well, I think larger municipalities are able sometimes to do those testing on their selves on their own.

I don't know that many of them had.

And a lot of the smaller municipalities and water systems don't have the ability to do this type of testing.

So it's giving all that.

It's making all this data available to every water system in the state.

Now, it doesn't provide data for private well, owners.

So if you live outside of a water system and you just have a well on the ground, no one's testing those people's water.

So there's developing a clear picture of where contamination exists is incredibly helpful for those water systems that are able to put treatment programs in place or mitigation programs in place that actually can help stop some this contamination.

So I think we're moving into an environment where we're able to take more effective action.

That evidence there of the dangers to human health that these chemicals cause seems quite clear.

And yet, I believe even Pat Bauer, when he was still in the house, had started tackling this issue.

Fred Upton tried to address it in Michigan when he was in Congress.

Why don't we see more movement?

It's frustrating.

For example, this year we took a step backward.

Now these there's several thousand fluoridated fluorinated chemicals that we call P fast or P fast chemicals.

So there's it's a wide family and they're used in different applications, some of which are more likely to get into water systems and cause trouble than others.

Some of them are used in the manufacture of, say, prosthetic devices or medical devices that are sort of critical for people to be used in plastics and things like that.

So there was sort of a backlash from industry groups that were afraid that their use of some of these molecular compounds or would affect their industrial processes.

They were able to push through legislation this session that would essentially exempt them if they don't have a water soluble PFAS chemical in use, that they would be exempted from any future regulation.

Now to my mind that was ridiculous.

Representative Bauer offered an amendment to try to mitigate that and passed on or failed on party line vote.

But we don't even have the data.

I mean obviously a non water soluble chemical is going to be less dangerous because it's going to be less likely to get into water supplies where people can drink it.

But lead is not water soluble.

And we know that that's a very dangerous contaminant in the human body.

So we don't have a data on what most of these things actually do and how dangerous they are, even if they're not water soluble.

So it's really discouraging to talk to legislators about the known risks of these chemicals and then see the only concrete action taken this year was exempting a whole class of them from any future regulation without having data in place.

So we're moving backwards in some areas or in others.

These fights are never easy.

They take a long time and I think persistence wins out in the end.

I just wish we had a little more unanimity of purpose so we could protect people quicker.

The it seems like there is this talk about a triple bottom line.

We can do better for the environment and the community and for profits.

But so many of the fights still fall into the old dichotomy that it's driven the economy or or sort of health environmental issues.

Is that fair to say?

Or I think for general sense, industry and manufacturing in particular tend to drive a lot of the policy in the state of Indiana.

We saw pushback of that with some of the more social controversial bills where industry put out statements opposing some of those issues, but their voices were heard when it came to those social issues.

So I took Representative Dvorak's point when I created a amendment to carve out the necessary essential medical use of these chemicals in pacemakers.

They're in the tip of an injectable pen to go in and out of your skin a little better.

They are in inhalers.

Yes.

Inhalers and other essential medical devices where there are no alternatives on the market to be used.

They still rejected it.

So that means we are eliminating from the definition a piece as thousands of toxic PFAs chemicals that are maybe more safe, but they certainly aren't safe because we have no safe level of fat to be found in our blood.

We should not have any, but we all have it.

So a lot of the media coverage on this is focusing on baby products because of course, parents want things that are stain proof.

There are a lot of flame resistant clothing for children as well, and they use pads.

It isn't necessary and it isn't essential.

It's just convenient.

So until industry starts to phase out the use of these chemicals on their own, which many have done, we now see a lot of marketing that says PE is free.

But my concern is in the state of Indiana, if we carve out of the definition thousands of PFAs, you could even put a label on something that says PFI is free because it will no longer be defined as it has people in it.

Yeah, because they changed the definition.

I mean, to your point, other states do a better job at this than Indiana.

I mean, for years one of my top issues I've tried to get legislators to open their mind on is we don't have to live in a toxic cesspit.

I mean, Indiana is annually at the top of the inventory of toxic chemical releases, is at the top of most water polluted and air polluted states in the country.

We have a very bad record of preventing industry from contaminating our public waterways, our airways, the soil for really no reason.

And at the same time, especially when I'm talking with my Republican colleagues who talk a lot about making a business friendly state and trying to attract businesses here, they'll repeat over and over again that Indiana's got one of the top five best business climates to start a business, which is true.

But we're also at the bottom of the list of actual business starts.

That's because companies don't want to move to a state with the horrible quality of life where the soil and water contaminated, where people don't have access to child care, where public health is.

So I think one of the easier ways to make a prosperous state where new businesses can come existing business can thrive, is to create a great quality of life for the people who live here.

Okay, so speaking of a great quality of life, we know that one thing that children need is a good quality education.

At a minimum, they need to be in school and able to read and develop that early literacy that leads to other kinds of learning and successful later in life.

Indiana has had some very disappointing news regarding those third grade reading results, as well as chronic absenteeism.

We've talked about this with legislators a couple of times this season, but it still seems unclear what exactly a legislature and do about this.

Any thoughts?

Yeah, well, we did have a piece of legislation to address daycare facilities, I think was the legislation regarding reading and truancy is in the Senate.

It will be coming over to us.

And for my understanding, there was an aspect of that legislation that would have punished parents if their child was truant.

I think that came out.

But I think it does warrant the conversation of parent involvement and ensuring that kids are held accountable for their attendance as well and strengthening that.

When it came down to the debate on third grade reading level, there was a senator who voted no about the ability to hold back a child because he stated he didn't learn to read until the fifth grade.

And so we do have to look at the consequences of either punishing the adult with criminal charges or holding back thousands of children where there has been proven to show some adverse reaction into the child's development when all their peers move on to the next level and they're held back.

Or how does the school even manage to continue to teach a larger class?

If we were going to be holding back more and more children?

And so I think there's certainly ways that we can address this.

The bill last year initiating the science of reading only has had maybe six months to go into effect.

So we haven't even been able to see the impacts of that legislation before We're saying we're going to hold you back.

I think it's important to take a step back and sort of look at the larger picture.

I mean, every school district has seen worse third grade reading scores the last couple of years after COVID.

I mean, it's it's obvious you look at the data.

I think we've had the retest in place since 2012 around that era.

So about ten years or so of data.

And what's interesting is the first four or five years, the test results for everywhere were pretty good.

And then about 2017, I think there was a change in the test where all of a sudden test scores from one year to the next, everywhere got worse and there was a lot of hand-wringing.

I'm pretty convinced that was the result of simply a change in the test.

As we know, Indiana does a horrible job of implementing standardized testing all changes all the time.

It's ridiculous.

And then in 2020, there was no data because they didn't offer the test because of COVID.

And then the next two years, we've seen the worst data yet as far as the numbers for third grade reading.

And that's it's obviously a case of echo from COVID.

We had almost two years of where a lot of places kids weren't in school.

But looking at the bigger data, it's important to realize that this does not mean the sky is falling.

I mean, we also saw this year graduation rates have gone up, worried about almost 90% high school graduation rate right now.

And I think it's important when we're talking about education, it's easy to always say things are going horrible because it's fashionable at times to do.

But, you know, at the start of World War Two, about 25% of the population hit a high school diploma.

By the fifties, you got up into about a third of the population somewhere in the sixties.

It crossed over to about half the population of the high school diploma.

Up into the eighties, it started getting up to about three quarters of the population.

We're now at almost 90%.

We have made steady, measurable progress in getting students educated.

We're making slower progress in getting bachelor's degrees for people.

And the problem is, I think that, you know, 60, 70% of all new jobs require bachelor's degrees and Indiana's about 43rd, 44th in the country when it comes to bachelor's degree attainment.

And so we only have about less than one third of the population has a bachelor's.

So we need to do a better job there.

Kids are there are some kids that are having problems with reading at an early grade.

And we know who those students are.

They're students that are in poverty.

They're students that come from households where English as a second language.

They're kids in special education.

And the districts that have higher populations of the students are going to have worse numbers.

We know how to help those students do a better job reading.

It takes more resources to get them the help they need to read.

They're oftentimes not getting it at home.

The problem has been is that while we know what we need to do to help these kids, funding to the public schools has been cut year after year after year to fund this other experiment that the supermajority has been trying to fund in charter schools and vouchers.

And the interesting thing is, despite charter school funding going through the roof and traditional public school funding going down, charter schools run 15 points behind traditional public schools.

When it comes to reading scores statewide.

So they're doing a worse job at it.

And that's what's infuriating, is that we're taking the resources we need to actually help students do better and poor get into these experimental programs that don't help kids.

So we know how to change this.

It's just we need the votes to make it happen.

Embarrassing.

Embarrassing you nodding your head.

I think another aspect that you didn't mention is pre-K, and that has proven to also increase third grade reading levels.

And we've had bipartisan support for expanding and funding pre-K. And since it was first created a pilot program, nothing has happened since.

So that's one area where we can address literacy at a young age is option for children to have pre-K education and quality and put some funding towards that.

But also to that point, just to break to illustrate it, when we're talking about funding levels, we've been trying to fund universal pre-K in the state for a long time.

Right now, if you make over $45,000 a year, you are too rich to qualify for state funded pre-K.

But the same year we made that change, we increased the eligibility to qualify for vouchers for families up to $220,000.

So, you know, we're subsidizing families that have already been paying for private school for their kids with vouchers, but not allowing families living below the poverty line and below the median income to actually pay for state subsidized pre-K where they can get reading help for their students.

Right.

These are fixable problems.

And just before and after school programing, that's something the House Democratic Caucus is advocating for investments in.

I think often we're trying to reinvent something.

I think the House Republicans motto last year was reinventing high school.

I don't know that we need to reinvent it.

A new reading program or literacy program.

We have to invest in these areas that we've been asking for year after year, pre-K before and after school programing funding and a child income tax credit, I think is something we could pass as a state as well.

Representative Dvorak You mentioned people who are low income and the fact that there are limited resources for them in terms of having that time to give their children the extra help that they might need.

One of the other big issues has been child care and how to make it accessible and affordable.

There has been some legislation passed in the House and the Senate.

Bill 1102 would allow licensed child care centers to seek renewals every three years instead of to exempt child care centers operating out of schools from licensing requirements and allow unlicensed home providers to care for up to seven.

Instead of just five children and in addition to their own.

How do we balance sort of children's safety and licensing against access and affordability?

And so how did you all vote on that bill and why?

Yeah, I voted against that bill.

Now, child care is a huge concern for me.

I've got three kids my own.

We had to pick when they were younger.

We had to pay for child care every day.

It's a very expensive and Indiana ranks in the bottom ten states in the country when it comes to access to child care.

That is a huge problem for every family that works.

It's a problem for employers who are trying to start businesses here.

Employers are trying to keep businesses open here.

And it's also a problem, as we've talked about, for how we actually look at educational achievement down the road.

I think one of the things we can actually do to fix this problem is to start funding universal pre-K programs, as well as raising the eligibility requirements for state assistance for different income brackets to get childcare.

The majority has had a different take on this.

Instead of actually funding programs that we know work, they want to weaken regulations.

In my opinion, I don't I don't like unlicensed daycares.

I've seen injuries and all sorts of problems in unlicensed daycares, expanding access to bad child care is not what we should be trying to do.

We should be allowing everybody to get more access to good childcare.

Just a few seconds left, So Representative Bower, your thoughts?

And I voted for the bill as it was first introduced.

I probably would not have and it certainly would not have been the way we would have introduced a bill to expand access to quality child care in the state as House Democrats.

But I voted for it because there was an amendment added that would have allowed these home child care centers to become voucher eligible.

So they would have the home inspection.

They would have to reach those standards of care that others with who have the vouchers would be set to.

So I don't believe that the issue would be unsafe.

And I think the author and the chairman also stated that they do not believe it be unsafe, but it will allow more of those facilities to be able to accept those vouchers.

So that's why I voted for that.

And we were able to make that bill a lot better.

I think we both agree completely that we need to really fund these programs and do work.

All right.

Well, unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today.

So I do want to thank our guests, our representatives Maureen Bauer and Ryan Dvorak.

I'm Elizabeth Bennion, reminding that it takes all of us to make democracy work.

We'll see you next time This WNIT Local production has been made possible in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.