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Sen. Deery Shares Priorities, Part 1
| Sen. Deery Shares Priorities, Part 1 Over the past year, many of you have expressed the need for stronger protections for our farms and water. Additionally, I often hear calls for significant reforms to the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC). I have heard you, and I have introduced several bills to address these concerns, including the following measures: A bill to restore the public’s trust in the IEDC. One of the most important needs in the state is to create a strong economy, but we must never do so without accountability and transparency for how taxpayer funds are invested. My bill would require IEDC to adopt new transparency measures and it would create an independent watchdog that would have full access to all IEDC meetings and materials. It would also require IEDC to offset any development plans that would raise the electric, gas or water rates of everyday Hoosiers. Click here to watch a recent interview I gave on this bill. A bill to pause large water transfers while the General Assembly crafts statewide water regulations. This bill would require a team of legislators and water experts to study the issue for two years. The panel would recommend legislation to regulate large water transfers, improve groundwater monitoring, promote water conservation, and collaborate with neighboring states in these goals. During that period, no entity would be allowed to plan or construct a pipeline that would have a capacity to move more than five million gallons of water a day out of our region until 2027. A bill to establish more local control over carbon sequestration projects and more investments in safety and monitoring. Current law requires 60%-70% of landowners in the project footprint to approve the sequestration. This is not an effective way to ensure that local communities are supportive because much of the farmland in any footprint is owned by out-of-state investors rather than local Hoosiers. My bill would divide the footprint of any sequestration project into land owned by local residents and land owned by nonresidents, effectively allowing local landowners to veto a sequestration project. A bill to stop county governments from subsidizing the destruction of the state’s best farmland. For tax purposes, Indiana already knows where the best farmland in the state is located. Too often, whether for solar projects or other development, counties are pressured to declare prime farmland an Economic Revitalization Area that then transitions the land out of farm production with the help of a tax abatement. My bill would end this subsidy for the best third of all Hoosier farmland. A bill to protect our rivers from destructive net fishing practices stemming from our country’s failed immigration policies. Senate Bill 121 would strengthen existing laws to prevent Indiana rivers from being decimated by migrant net fishing practices that are killing large amounts of fish, turtles and other marine life. I have worked closely with anglers and fishing groups to craft this in a way that will protect sportfishing for future generations. These bills do not always accomplish everything I would like to achieve in the subject areas, but they are solid starts that are designed to be able to pass the General Assembly that we could build on in future years. In the coming weeks, I will provide more details in my future newsletters and on social media. Eventually, the full text of these bills will also be available at iga.in.gov. Next week, I will describe my education bills in Part Two. |