We are approaching the halftime point for the 2023 session of the Indiana General Assembly as committee report deadlines have passed. This means any bill that did not receive a committee hearing is now considered dead. An important note: the bill number itself is no longer alive, but that doesn’t restrict legislators from including any of the language from those “dead” bills in any legislation which may be germane to that subject matter that is still alive and moving through the process.

We monitored many committee meetings and watched numerous bills on the House and Senate floors last week.

We attended the Senate Environmental Affairs Committee in solidarity with a number of young climate activists and many of our allies, all of whom have been working the legislature in search of meaningful climate solutions. The result was Senate Bill 335 which would have created a Climate Solutions Task Force to reveal the myriad of data surrounding climate change issues in Indiana such as land acquisition for nature preserves, the creation of a carbon credit market, energy efficiency, and mass transit. This is the second-year youth activists with Confront the Climate Crisis have worked with lawmakers and the first year their bill received a hearing, though no vote was taken.

After the Senate Environmental Affairs Committee passed Senate Bill 451 back on February 13th,  it has been languishing on the Senate calendar, signifying that the bill may not have the necessary votes for passage. As a reminder, SB451 is yet another attempt by Wabash Valley Resources to take away the rights of property owners to enable their Carbon Sequestration science experiment in Vigo County that we’ve been fighting successfully for years. 

House Bill 1623 was on the floor calendar Monday. It received a 73-24 vote. We updated you on this bill last week, when we testified in opposition to the amendments that went in during the committee hearing. HB1623 is an administrative rulemaking bill which would restrict the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) from implementing requirements stricter than federal law on Indiana coal plants — specifically coal ash storage ponds. The bill now heads to the Senate for further action.

We also updated you last week as to the progress of Rep. Carolyn Jackson’s (D-Hammond) House Bill 1138. HB1138 is a follow up bill to her 2020 Legislative Session House Bill 1265, which is now state law requiring lead testing in schools. Since daycares were not included in the 2020 bill, the sole aim of HB1138 is to include those daycares. The bill passed the House unanimously and heads to the Senate for further action.

The state budget (HB1001) passed the House on Thursday without much fanfare, 66-29 in a partisan vote. The Senate will now get to hash out testimony on HB1001 and the process will begin again. 

In Senate Utilities Committee this past week, the Committee heard Senate Bill 9, which was amended heavily walking in the door, by its author Sen. Jean Leising (R-Oldenburg). The bill as introduced would have required the utilities to seek approval from the IURC before retiring any electric generation facility of at least 80MW, which would primarily be Indiana’s dirty and expensive fleet of coal-fired power plants. However, the amendment adopted by the committee removed the IURC approval, and instead, would merely require that the utility notify the IURC if they intend to retire a coal-fired unit and only if that retirement was not indicated in the utlities short-term action plan in their most recently filed Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) filed with the IURC.  We were fully prepared to testify in strong opposition to  the bill as introduced, but ended up speaking from a neutral standpoint. While we believe this bill is unnecessary, we do appreciate the legislature proposing some level of accountability to the utilities to complete an honest and transparent IRP.

This week...

This week we’ll see the next set of deadlines which will officially bring us to the halfway point of the session. Monday is Second Reading Deadline in the Senate and Third Reading Deadline in the House. As we mentioned, we’re still awaiting SB451’s vote (if it indeed occurs), and Senate Bill 390, which passed Senate Appropriations last week. SB390 is a post cursor to last year’s Senate Bill 411, which set voluntary standards for renewable-friendly siting ordinances at the local level. SB390 was reduced to a shell of its original subject matter since the appropriation was removed in Committee. Despite that, it still rubs some of the Senate the wrong way and the vote may be mixed. 

To follow these bills in real time, make sure you follow us on Twitter. We tweet throughout the week as to the progress of bills we mention in our reports and on the Indiana General Assembly page of our website. 

Respectfully Submitted,

Lindsay Haake & Kerwin Olson