The Regional Chamber of Northeast Indiana.

Advocates for a world class infrastructure, a competitive business climate, 21st century talent and rural investment.

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the Indiana General Assembly began the second half of its legislative session this week as House and Senate committee started reviewing bills from the opposite chambers in the House.

Lawmakers are moving forward with Senate bills that seek to expand child care options in Indiana, address workforce data and cybersecurity issues, increase access to health care services and require more oversight reporting for entities that receive taxpayer dollars for job training.

Meanwhile, Senate committees are reviewing House passed legislation to increase the number of children supervised at in-home care providers, expand the nursing workforce and provide more scholarship opportunities to Hoosiers who want a career in education.

>> One Northeast Indiana lawmaker can speak to each of these legislative matters as her state House service connects to all of these prospective measures.

>> And that person joins us for this week's prime time.

>> Good evening.

I'm Bruce Haines and with us today is 15th District Republican State Senator Liz Brown.

>> Senator Brown is the Senate's assistant majority floor leader for communications.

She serves as well as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and we invite you to join the conversation we'll have here in studio just calling your questions and comments by using the number on the screen as we widen.

>> And Senator Brown, Liz is here and thank you for being with us.

Thanks for having me.

Appreciate that.

As they say coming out of halftime as the second half gets underway.

What your sense of things it seems kind of a blur maybe from January to now it is it's a very short session.

I mean that's what it's called and there's no doubt about it.

I have two more weeks of committee hearings that I can have and you know the rest of the committees I'm on and then then we start reconcile bills that have changed since they came over from one house the other and we're done.

>> Does it seem that the volume of bills this year that had been chaperoned going into the statehouse that the workload then becomes feels like this is actually manageable now from a cut off the switch over to where you are today?

>> I think so.

I mean I don't actually I usually when I run my committee I front loaded with bills in case we run into issues whether I'm hearing Senate bills or when the House bills come over.

And so I think we've managed our time pretty well but it's seems reasonable.

I mean you do some sifting of things if they're duplicative or if you think this is probably not the year to do that or if there's not a groundswell of support.

But I think we've done a pretty good job of managing the numbers priority bills for both House and Senate are holding forth for the most part with the exception of prior authorization and the whole Medicaid situation right before the break occurred.

>> But Senate Bill two is one that is a piece I'd like to focus on because this is child care access.

This is a bill that your colleague Senator Charboneau said is really an infrastructure bill due to the issue's impact on every aspect of the economy.

>> So for you, do you feel the same as the senator in that regard?

I mean anybody who was I mean he had to have not been paying attention to covid it just came to a peak right when parents were working from home they didn't have access to day care or child care and or children were, you know, had to be quarantined at home, things like that.

So it's obviously top of mind.

It's not it's not a new issue.

Employers have brought this to us but I don't think we had enough minds at the table before.

>> And Senator Sharbel Charbel Charboneau chaired a task force this summer and came out all the mines were there and they came up with some great ideas and how we can move forward and so expanding access to child care in a non budget year, what's possible in what are some of the things that can be unpacked and send a bill to right.

>> I mean some things are like who's going to be eligible?

How do we make that happen?

You know, we have these past equality and things like that and so is that the only way you can get an online pre-K or are there ways are we are we over regulating areas that we don't need to how can we have and we this was a conversation we had last I think in my committee that I'm on is how to how do we incentivize and help employers who want to sort of pool resources and have on site or off site but for their employees things like that schools for example or using where they have an empty classroom or space, how can we help all of them and what are the barriers that are unnecessary?

So there are a lot of things moving in that space.

>> I saw a reference to a micro facility pilot program.

Sounds neat.

Yeah, four little micro small well they are small children so that works.

Yes.

I mean that's that's another one of those ideas employers are trying to say if we if we come together how can you incentivize us with tax credits or things like that but no cash because this is not budget year issue breakfast and so with that these opportunities this in fact creates the larger opportunity for the parents of those children to be able to move forward.

>> It goes the thinking and get into workforce opportunity.

Right because it is it is becoming a bigger piece of their salary in terms of going towards this.

And of course we we have to be careful.

This is for those who choose to work sometimes and those who need to work.

But we're not trying to force everyone to be going to work such that your children will be forced to go to this.

And I know that sounds a little maybe odd but there have been some concerns like are we going to require every child to be going to like starting preschool at the age of two or something like that?

And no, that's not the point.

The point is there is a lots of opportunities and the families need to be able to have choices so they can make the decision what's best for themselves.

>> I hope I'm representing this correctly something like 40 percent of children are not able to find daycare.

Yes.

In the state of Indiana right now.

>> Yes.

And you have to be innovative.

You know, we may have financial barriers for example maybe but in rural communities there's just not even a physical place.

Right.

So there's lots of solutions being thought about in some of those physical places.

>> They're actually a home based providers House Bill one or two is one that seems to create an extra seat at the table at least numerically and figuratively.

>> Yes.

Yes.

The idea was to add two more seats, if you will, so that those who are home based so there's those who are regulated and those who aren't regulated because they they're you know, mom dad offering to babysit neighbor's kid kind of thing once or twice.

That's not what we're talking about.

But in that in this case we're talking about can you have one or two more children not counting the the home base person's children if it were me for example, wouldn't be counting my own I'd be counting the children coming in and that seemed to make sense to me.

>> And obviously this is something that's left up to the parent right when they choose their child care facility, they're going to be the ones ultimately making the choice and if it's they think there's too many children in the home then they probably won't choose.

>> That's right.

And under that same heading of innovative physical space, whether it's a micro facility or an in-home care center built 147 wants to broaden out and make for profit child care providers tax exempt property tax exemption for businesses that offer on site that seems a little back to the future in a way.

>> Well, and and I guess that was what I was proposing earlier.

That was kind of the issue.

We had a we had a business come to our committee and talk about how there were some zoning issues as well, how burdensome it was and so that got a little chippy on the Senate floor when that came through people were suggesting that we were incentivized using, you know, wealthy corporations.

You know, when we look around Indiana it's going to be the mom and pop businesses and they don't have the capacity to have a daycare center on site and maybe lesson on your employees you're talking about a handful of children at a time it's not worth it, right.

To have qualified staff.

So how can we help them link with others and undercut some of the at least the startup costs that it would take so that that's the idea behind that one as well.

>> This session is continuing some focus on health activity that you carried forth in twenty twenty three the access to Care for Hoosiers Everywhere initiative and the twenty twenty four piece is quite extensive and I wonder if you can share this with us.

It's the first opportunity to hear a little bit more about what is called on the database professions and professional services but it's it's quite multifaceted.

>> Yes.

Yes I like that you introduced it that way last year was increasing access to care for Hoosiers everywhere I ache.

>> So now this is IEG 2.0 so well one piece that's important had to do with health facilities, nursing homes, assisted living and their administrators have some licensing.

So a piece of that was to take out the redundant licensing or things that are not necessary having interns if you will, learning quickly or quicker in terms of getting that training a lot of language in there about foreign nurses and how they take the same tests in hikes I believe it's called they take the same test but the different language proficiency tests and what qualifies and things like that to streamline and and then of course we had a small piece in there about telehealth to take out some redundant language in our code to make it easier.

We allow telehealth to certain points you have to be licensed in Indiana and this just really removed a form that they you know, was duplicative.

And then another piece was what's called assignment of benefits if I'm the health care provider and you're the patient and you would like to sign the benefit of being paid for the care that reimbursement to me I will get that.

And so that's what it says we're going to allow every patient consumer if you in Indiana to have the choice to assign the benefit directly.

There are some providers for payers I should say if they are not in network they refuse to pay the payer the provider directly and so the insurance company instead will only send the payment to the patient which then you know, can be an issue.

So we thought, you know, we're going to change this around, let the patient be the one to decide the as a consumer right to Matley they can decide if they'd like to sign that benefit if you will.

To me the provider then they can do so and then in the long run hopefully that reduces all the administrative costs because as you all know you referenced the prior authorization bill.

They couldn't move.

There is a lot of administration in the health care space.

>> Yeah.

And so when you hear a phrase of access to health care say we're going to get more because more is always good.

But this is a way of also perhaps providing a little more expediency with within the existing right because every time you have a regulation, whether you're your regular how someone's license to run a nursing home or you're regulating how many forms you have to fill out in order to use telehealth or to be licensed in the state of Indiana.

Right.

I mean it just takes time and inevitably that time costs money to someone and so we all know we have a shortage across the board and health care providers, whether they're mental health workers or nurses or doctors, dentists, et cetera across the board.

>> And so anything we can do to make Indiana the most attractive place to work and practice would be great.

>> And along that line under another one that you can't judge legislation by what they call it in the data professions and occupations as opposed to professions of professional services.

But this one is the one where there are focus points on expanding the care providers and focusing on licensing and tell me how that also is contributing then to that idea of access of health care services.

>> We're trying to make it easier for you to be whether you're a therapist or a social worker, how can you be licensed quicker?

How can you not not reducing the the requirements but you know, can you practice sooner literally practice sooner when you're a student, an intern and how can we remove those barriers when we we've had bills with respect to teaching nursing and do you really have can you be a part time nursing instructor?

Do you have to be full time all those kinds of things?

Those are the kinds of things we're looking at.

Nothing really exciting but every time you do that then you get to train someone faster and they get out into the career faster.

>> I think one of the motivations had to be with statistics that said that Indiana will need an additional 5000 nurses by 2031 equal to graduating about thirteen hundred more nurses a year until that time according to the Hospital Association, one in four Hoosiers will be retirement age or older by the time we get up to that twenty thirty one marker I mean we all saw that writing covid I mean we had all the travel nurses coming in because we didn't have enough capacity and then we saw nurses and a lot of health care providers leave the field because it was too stressful and some of them did not come back and so we already had a deficit and now it's it's a little bit bigger.

>> Our guest today is Republican State Senator Liz Brown here on Prime Time.

We're live in studio.

If you'd like to join us with your question or comment, please feel free to do so.

One other dynamic among several others that are available for conversation is health care on Wheels Community Cares Initiative grant pilot program housecalls they're coming back.

Well, you know, there are some really innovative programs and again particularly and it's either those who are most at risk or in rural communities we need to rethink how we're delivering health care and so that's another way to look at it and can we use people who are already out in our community whether it's an EMT, paramedics, some type of service and to authorize that when I first got to the Senate a couple of years ago, there's an amazing program of Crawfordsville, Indiana and they use their EMT to go out and check on, for example, high risk pregnancies or maybe someone who's just released from the hospital who's got some significant and then, you know, issues and they check on them to make sure you're taking your meds.

Is everything OK because the longer the sooner they get better, the longer you know keeps your baby to term.

>> It's good for everyone.

Yeah, In looking at this session, something we're seeing more of for the first time are pieces of legislation related to artificial intelligence in the real world.

>> Right?

You have one.

Yes.

Talk about that.

Yes.

Last year I had a significant consumer data privacy bill.

We were only seven state to pass that and we've modeled it on other legislation, good legislation, other states and that's important because we didn't want to have a patchwork.

We don't want something that busineses don't understand or can't comply with and it's too expensive to comply with.

And so now the next step we need to take is let's let's make our government agencies understand how important this is and make sure that their policies are more uniform.

>> So a piece of that bill is saying in a nice way you may because it was used to be a shell but it's a non budget year so it's an unfunded mandate.

So we would really like you to make sure that your policies are up to date because ultimately whether you're the city utilities here or local government up to the state, we're all connected somehow, you know.

So if a bad actor gets in at the lower level they can work their way up.

So we want everybody to be secure from hacks and ransomware etc.

And at the same time we need to figure out how well how do we use it as a state but also how is it affect us long term in terms of , you know, nefarious means.

So there is a task force in there and then there's a piece for government entities to get their policies in line and hopefully in the next year we'll have some funding for that.

>> And it sounds like Indiana is right there at the front of all of this among states that are now starting to have very much more in-depth conversations about those relationships.

>> You know, it is kind of amazing because some of the states that you might think traditionally had more tech companies in them or that they would be more progressive on these ideas are actually not and we are really starting to lead in this area because we are willing to get everybody at the table and say are there any barriers in the state for me working here and how can we help us understand how we can do this and so this task force will be significant along with Senate Bill 150.

>> We're just discussing a different bill but yet it is that data driven is Senate Bill one forty eight about workforce data collection.

This sounds like shall we chaperon the funds that are going to help provide the training that people are seeking?

>> Right.

And you know that again that actually was a bill from the Department of Workforce Development.

Their agency Bill seemed pretty simple on its face.

But how do we know where we're spending if we're spending our dollars in the right career development workforce development areas?

We also do that on the Department of Ed side incentivizing kids to take certain career paths.

>> How do we know if we're fulfilling our needs if we don't collect the right data heading into this year?

One of the we're talking about priority legislation at the start of the program and at the start of the year the House had a priority piece of legislation the Senate saw last year which was the idea of defining anti-Semitism, getting that definition out there and calling it religious discrimination in education, an education equal opportunity bill.

pIt was said that Senate President Pro Tem Broderick breaks that this may be the year the Senate passes a bill like this.

>> Any read on where House ten or two is in or actually I guess I mean I know it's not in my committee judiciary I don't pknow if it's in the education bill and I don't believe it's had a hearing yet although there are two more weeks to do that.

>> One of the other notions since it's passing through is one that with it's still fresh it's the idea of calling the disaster emergency and I'll have you explain it because you authored it.

>> It's set at two thirty four .

You know that we had some interesting discussion on the Senate floor when that came through and I think there was some misunderstanding that somehow the Senate or the legislature rather would intervene and decide it's more that after thirty days right.

>> And let's face it except for covid you know except maybe after clean up of our tornado in this state, fortunately we haven't had any significant chemical fallouts or things like that that are ongoing so one can't really imagine anything past thirty days.

But the idea is, you know, significant decisions were made through covid and there were times where there was either money or businesses opening shutting and that doesn't mean we disagree with the decisions that were made but we're a pretty significant piece of that equation and we should at least be at the table which would mean being in session.

>> Right.

We have a little time for this.

I think it's important to go back just a little to twenty twenty three where we got to meet Dora.

>> Yeah.

And that's all all caps designated outdoor refreshment area and this coming year Fort Wayne will be able to take advantage of a designated outdoor refreshment area legislation you helped author and move through and tell us a little bit about how we came to get Dora into the family.

>> Yeah.

So constituents sent me a letter several years ago and said, you know, I can walk around in Ohio at City maybe I don't know is a festival and why can't we do this here?

I don't know why we can't do this year.

And so after three years and getting past this year now we can do this year.

>> But the idea is this is locally driven.

So if a local community chooses not to participate they don't have to and but the I and they they set their own parameters and so I would imagine looking at our downtown you can imagine it would probably extend from the town camps to maybe across Headwaters Park.

I didn't actually look at what the city council finally adopted but the police will be part of that discussion because they have to enforce it and but I think it's it it opens up spaces I'm in I kind of joke for years we used to my husband and I used to be volunteer bartenders at St. Jude's Festival and you know, our little ones were on one side of the orange plastic fencing because we were in the over twenty one ten and you'd be looking over the side and you thought we're all just out here in the parking lot and picnic tables.

>> I don't really think this matters.

I mean obviously that's not part of the district but that's kind of the idea that you can just sort of walk around and I think it's important to know too if there is a restaurant bar or venue that doesn't want to participate, they don't have to.

So if they don't want to be part of this activity in this kind of enterprise so that's fine but I think it'll it'll open things a lot of small communities I was quite surprised came to me the second year when it when it stalled again and are interested because you know they have these downtowns they're trying to revitalize and they there's something kind of exciting and fun about seeing people outside and enjoying the summer days and I noted that Senator Holdman has a bill related to tourism improvement districts and I'm just sort of wondering about the convergence of a tourism district in a community that has an outdoor refreshment area that may also be a downtown improvement district and there could be as they see synergy.

>> Yes, yes.

And and you're seeing that right.

I mean there are a lot of smaller communities that are thinking of unique ways to put their brand name, if you will, on their community and this will help them do that.

>> We have a chance to touch briefly on Representative Haney's bill about encouraging education for those who wish to pursue that as a career to get into the workforce.

>> I believe it's a bill you will be hearing more about you have a sense of that measure at this hour.

>> I think we're always looking at ways to encourage more people to participate.

We have some teacher scholarships.

We've had some minority teacher scholarships come through that we funded and I think we need to be more open to to allowing different people to enter that profession.

I mean I always say the best Spanish teacher my children ever had was a retired individual, Mr. Davies who worked for Lincoln and was proficient in Spanish and all of my children by the time they left eighth grade were proficient in Spanish and I don't think he had a teacher's license but he was a great teacher.->> I think we need to k about things like that.

Yeah, let's think about those closing weeks.

>> What are your aspirations for the remainder of the session?

What do you see coming?

Well, I'd like to get my bills moved to the house.

Two of them are being heard this week and also that are still moving.

And then I'd also like to finish off the list I have committee hearing this week and hopefully we'll end on a good note on both sides of the aisle.

>> There you go.

Best wishes for that as the coming weeks disappear like minutes.

Yes, we just like it has tonight.

Yes.

Our guest here with us this evening is Republican State Senator Liz Brown, District fifteen.

She is also the Senate's assistant majority floor leader for communications.

Again, our thanks and for all of us with prime time, I'm Bruce Haines.

>> Thank you for allowing us to be a part of your evening.

Take care.

>> We'll see you back here again next week.

Good morning The Regional Chamber of Northeast Indiana.

Advocates for a world class infrastructure, a competitive business climate, 21st century talent and rural investment.

One region, one voice.

NEINAdvocates.com.