It wasn’t the worst of legislative sessions, but it certainly wasn’t the best, either. In reviewing the accomplishments of the Indiana General Assembly, which adjourned last Thursday, what emerges is a mixed bag of good, bad and could have been better.
Consequently, if we were to assign a grade to this year’s capital confab — to use a gimmick lawmakers employ to rate public schools — we’d have to give it a D+.
• Indiana’s public schools got a mulligan from the Legislature on this year’s A-F school grades, acknowledging that, for a variety of reasons, the flawed results of ISTEP testing in 2015 shouldn’t count against schools or affect teacher evaluations. Schools won’t have to bother with ISTEP after July 1, 2017, thanks to legislation that scraps the test after that date. However, teachers might worry what a special panel comes up with to replace it since Republicans get to appoint most of its members.
• Indiana Gov. Mike Pence didn’t get all the money he wanted to fix state highways and bridges, but legislators made sure the folks in their districts will get a wad of cash in an election year for local infrastructure needs. All together, about $900 million will be going to local governments for road and bridge repairs.
• More people coaching school sports will get training on the signs and treatment of concussions. A new law will require the head coaches and assistant coaches of any interscholastic sport in grades 5 through 12 to complete certified, player-safety education. With more awareness of the long-term term damage caused by concussive injuries, it benefits all young athletes to have people on the sidelines trained to keep them safe.
• Indiana already boasts some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation, but the General Assembly raised the bar this year with a bill that would prohibit a woman from getting an abortion solely because of a diagnosis or “potential diagnosis of Down syndrome or any other disability.” That is just one of “thou shalt nots” in a bill that is repugnant and unnecessary on many levels, if not unconstitutional. But it is unfathomable that lawmakers would vote to remove a decision about a potential lifelong disability from a woman, her family and her physician.
• To continue that theme, lawmakers again failed to demonstrate a commitment to inclusiveness and basic, human dignity by not extending civil rights protections to people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Those four words and a comma — “sexual orientation, gender identity” — were all that were required to erase the stain on Indiana’s image left from the 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act debacle. Instead, religious fundamentalists and social conservatives split definitional hairs and concocted hypothetical obfuscations for what should have been a very straightforward decision to do the right thing for all of Indiana’s citizens.
• A third strike against Indiana’s reputation came when the Indiana House failed to act on a bill passed by the Senate that would have created a hate-crime enhancement for sentencing proceedings that would take into account a victim’s “perceived or actual race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, disability, national origin, ancestry or sexual orientation.” So, when the Legislature concluded this year, Indiana remained one of five states without a hate crime law.
• And then, there was this: A sweet deal for a longtime Republican Party supporter who wants to sell alcohol at a renovated beachfront pavilion at the Indiana Dunes State Park. Valparaiso developer Chuck Williams denied being the recipient of political favoritism, but he did hire a lobbying firm to push for a special liquor license through the Statehouse, after being denied one by Porter County and the state Alcohol and Tobacco Commission. Looks like it was money well spent.
The could have been better
• Legislators got it only partly right with a bill to fix over-voting in election contests in which there are multiple seats at stake, such as in at-large council races, for instance. The solution lawmakers agreed on was to not count straight-party ticket votes in these races with more than one seat on the ballot. We would have preferred that straight-ticket voting be eliminated altogether, but at least, it was a start.
• Lawmakers agreed on a measure that gives the public a way to gain access to police body camera video, but if a law enforcement agency chooses to withhold video, challenging that decision will require a trip to the courthouse. It would have been better to have the shoe on the other foot — with the burden of proof on police not to disclose the contents of video in certain situations. However, this is an emerging area of public records law that always can be revisited in future sessions.