Indiana's 2023 legislative session is now behind us. While we went into the legislative session with all the optimism a new Indiana General Assembly warrants, our experience in the Statehouse told us to gird our loins with a healthy amount of skepticism every morning. During the four months of legislative proceedings, we tracked more than 75 bills that promised to impact the affordability of our monthly utility bills  and influence the direction of Indiana’s energy policy.

This session, CAC staff testified more than 30 times in committee, while CAC members and supporters from every corner of Indiana weighed in on critical legislation by sending more than 11,800 messages to their elected officials—making an incredible impact on the process, that would otherwise show consumers the door. 

But our work isn't over. We know that legislators are supposed to weigh the pros and cons of legislation before them but this year consumers got the short end of the stick. Legislators may have acknowledged there’s a utility affordability crisis, but they did little about it. In fact, by granting just about every wish from the investor-owned utilities, the actions of Indiana legislators this session will deepen the affordability crisis. The Anderson Herald-Bulletin editorialized on the challenges of this legislative session and encouraged all of us to not lose hope and to keep speaking truth to power. 

As a reminder, this is CAC’s 2023 Indiana General Assembly webpage, and you can find our Statehouse Reports here. 

Our staff at the Statehouse is our Executive Director, Kerwin Olson, and our Organizer, Lindsay Haake. Also appearing from time to time is Bryce Gustafson. Our entire staff supports our work at the legislature, with staff providing subject matter expertise as topics arise in Committees and working hard to activate, educate, and inform the public throughout the process. 

This year proved to be a detrimental legislative session for ratepayers. Investor-owned utilities pretty much got anything they wanted this session, and as a result, Hoosier families will be hit hard with even more unaffordable utility bills in the coming months and years.

We were quite taken aback by the swiftness with which Senate Enrolled Act 9 moved through the process. It was amended to significantly change its original scope and intent during the House Utilities, Energy and Telecommunications Committee on March 14th, 2023.  This amendment was at the behest of Duke Energy as weeks before this amendment was offered to SEA9, the Indiana Court of Appeals reversed a decision from the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) and found that Duke Energy couldn't charge its customers $212 million in costs they incurred while cleaning up their dirty coal ash mess. The amendment’s intent was to reverse that Court decision. 

It was signed into law by Gov. Holcomb not seven days later. Now state law, SEA9 is a huge bailout for Duke Energy, as well as a blank check for all Indiana electric utilities to spend enormous amounts of your money on projects which may or may not be necessary, with no requirement for pre-approvals from any Federal or State agency.

In their opinion, the Court of Appeals followed the lead of the Indiana Supreme Court who previously ruled against Duke Energy regarding charging customers for cleaning up coal ash saying it was "retroactive ratemaking" because Duke didn't get preapproval from state utility regulators to collect those extra costs. The amendment added to SEA9 removes the requirement that utilities get pre-approval from the IURC, or any other administrative agency, before they begin spending money on projects to comply with any federal mandates (like cleaning up coal ash).  You can read more about this in the Indiana Capital Chronicle, the Indiana Daily Student, and the Indy Star. 

House Enrolled Act 1417, also dealing with charging ratepayers for coal ash cleanup costs, was introduced because of that Supreme Court decision against Duke Energy. That bill effectively allows utilities to self-approve just about any expenditure they make and virtually guarantees that they will recover those costs plus a profit from customers in a future rate case, with or without pre-approval from the IURC. CAC helped secure an amendment in the House that makes this bill a little less dangerous for consumers, but we still opposed this legislation. It is simply stunning that Duke Energy loses twice in the Courts and has the political influence to muscle through two new laws, SEA9 and HEA1417, which promise to override those court decisions. HEA1417 was signed into law by Governor Holcomb on April 20th. 

House Enrolled Act 1421, also signed into law by Gov. Holcomb on April 20th, incentivizes the investor-owned utilities to build expensive, dirty fossil gas plants by adding fossil gas to the technologies eligible for Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) tracker. CWIP forces ratepayers to be the involuntary financiers of expensive and risky projects by charging customers for power plants before they produce ANY electricity, and even if they fail to produce any electricity, ever.

In the closing weeks of the session, House Enrolled Act 1420 was the only bill left that Indiana's monopoly electric utilities asked for that hadn't yet passed, and they ratcheted up their lobbying to get it rammed through in the final days of the session. It was probably the most lobbied bill in the entire building those last few days of session.

House Enrolled Act 1420 further entrenches the control of the monopoly electric utilities by granting them ROFR, or the “right of first refusal." ROFR further undermines competition in the marketplace by allowing monopoly utilities to build, own, and operate any transmission lines proposed to be built in their monopoly service territory, avoiding competitive bidding for the ownership and operation of these highly expensive transmission projects that customers ultimately must pay for. Sadly in the final days of session, lawmakers actually made this bill worse, as Kerwin Olson discusses in the Indiana Capitol Chronicle: 

“[House Enrolled Act 1420] ...removed that competitive bidding process and, as a result, removed the most meaningful, if not only, opportunity for ratepayers to save money,” Olson said.

So that was a hefty amount of legislation passed by the utility industry, all to make more profit on the shoulders of ratepayers. But there were a few dodged bullets, too. House Enrolled Act 1007, a priority bill for the House Republicans, could’ve been way worse without our work to encourage the Committee to remove the mandate requiring the IURC to implement Performance Based Ratemaking (PBR). At CAC, we are generally opposed to these rate design methodologies because they tend to enhance and protect utility earnings and revenues at the expense of affordability. However, we support the IURC studying regulatory reform, so we were very relieved when the bill was amended to merely study the issue rather than outright implement. House Bill 1007 moved through the process with relative ease.

There were also some bills that provided some relief to situations that had grown out of hand. One such situation was the ongoing saga of landlords failing to pay utility service, resulting in tenants going without basic human needs of water and/or electricity. 

Senate Bill 114 speaks to a receivership process for those past due utility bills. This issue has been in the news in Central Indiana and we were proud to support a potential solution to this longstanding issue. The bill was signed by the Governor in April, before the session adjourned sine die.

Also signed by the Governor was Senate Bill 180 which will allow recently acquired distressed wastewater utilities to link a small portion of the costs associated with environmental investments, like wastewater treatment plants, to water customers, with IURC approval.

Senate Bill 298, a bill to address the cost recovery of infrastructure improvements by municipal and non-profit water and wastewater utilities was signed before session adjourned. Thanks to our work with the committee, an amendment clarifying that the legislation did not apply to investor-owned utilities was adopted in committee.

Senate Bill 390, authored by Sen. Mark Messmer (R-Jasper) was a post cursor to 2022's Senate Bill 411, which set voluntary standards for renewable-friendly siting ordinances at the local level. While neither the 2022 nor 2023 legislatures chose to fund the incentive for locals to write the ordinances—this year’s bill does provide language to guide federal dollars towards those projects.

Another bill cleaning up some previous session’s leftovers is Rep. Carolyn Jackson’s (D-Hammond) House Enrolled Act 1138. HB1138 is a follow up bill to her 2020 Legislative Session bill, House Enrolled Act 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, though the legislature chose to exclude faith based daycares from the bill. We were very honored to attend the bill signing for House Bill 1138 in May.

Senate Bill 33 was signed by the Governor - the bill seeks to study the decommissioning and recycling of devices used to generate solar and wind power. We sure wish they’d add all other (*cough* *cough* fossil fuel) generation into this study. 

Senate Bill 221 failed to reach final consensus in the legislature. The bill, whose funding was axed during Senate Committee, sought to recommend the state conduct an energy audit of the Indiana Capitol Complex. Seems to us this should be standard operating procedure for the Department of Administration.

A small victory

House Bill 1547 would have raised existing rates on large subprime loans from 25% to 36% - plus additional fees as high as $200 per loan. Thankfully it died without a vote in committee. In fact, we were on the way to the House Financial Services Committee on a cool February morning when we learned that HB 1547’s hearing was canceled. We continued to monitor all legislation until the end of session, especially since we’ve seen a number of Hoosiers forced to choose predatory loans as an solution to pay for unaffordable utility bills. Predatory lending seems to pop up ad nauseum so we will continue to watch for harmful lending legislation next session.

A really terrible bill

Toward the end of the session, we were in staunch opposition to House Enrolled Act 1623, an administrative rulemaking bill, which would restrict the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) from implementing stricter requirements than federal law on Indiana coal plants - specifically coal combustion residuals, or coal ash. HB1623 allows electric utilities to further manipulate loopholes in the existing EPA rule regarding coal combustion residuals. This is a dangerous prospect for Hoosiers since we have more coal ash ponds than any other state, and our ponds are leaking toxins that threaten our water supply. The bill was signed by the Governor in May.

And another terrible bill

Senate Enrolled Act 451, is another bill by Wabash Valley Resources that takes away the rights of property owners to enable their Carbon Sequestration science experiment in Vermillion and Vigo Counties that we’ve been fighting for years. While the bill is extremely controversial, it received Governor Holcomb’s signature in May. That said, the facility still doesn’t have a federal Class VI permit that’s required to store carbon underground.

And another one...

Senate Enrolled Act 176: Small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) was signed into law in April. This bill increases the megawatt eligibility of SMRs for CWIP (Construction Work in Progress) established last year in Senate Enrolled Act 271 from 350 to 470, to include the Rolls Royce SMRs being developed in the UK. We were opposed, especially since the new higher megawatt threshold now accelerates well past the traditional definition for “small” modular reactors. More on SMRs can be found on our website here. 

Some sad news is that the Climate Solutions Task Force bill, SB335, did not receive a vote in committee. Confront the Climate Crisis has been working 24/7/365 on this issue and we were proud to submit testimony in support of their clarion call for action. SB335 would have created a climate solutions task force to study and make recommendations on how Indiana can take steps to reduce the severity of climate change; be resilient in the face of severe storms, increased rainfall and flooding, and other climate-related changes.

Unfortunately, two of the bills that CAC was championing - Senate Bill 40 and Senate Bill 254 - did not make it through the first half of the session.

Senate Bill 40 would have added a summer disconnect moratorium for low income households (similar to the winter disconnect moratorium that currently exists) to protect vulnerable households during the hottest time of the year.

SB254 would have put protections in place so that Hoosiers have a better chance of paying off utility debt. It would also have prevented utilities from charging deposits and down payment fees to enroll in a payment plan. 

Despite more than 4,400 emails to legislators and Senate Utilities Committee members encouraging them to hear these bills, the Chair of the committee, Sen. Eric Koch, refused to give either of these bills a vote, so they never made it out of committee.

Some good news

The Governor signed Senate Enrolled Act 265, which is long overdue in bringing TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) funding up to date. If you can believe it TANF hasn’t been increased or adjusted since 1988. 

And some more good news with Senate Enrolled Act 414, which does not have the harmful wetlands language that was amended in House committee. Senate Enrolled Act 414 was amended during the last days of conference committees and does not have any of the wetlands language whatsoever. We worked together with our colleagues at Hoosier Environmental Council to ensure wetlands language did not end up in the bill.

Some bittersweet news

While House Bill 1290 did not make it out of the Senate Tax and Fiscal Policy Committee, a portion of the bill was included in the state’s biennial budget.  While the Earned Income Tax Credit will not be increased to 12%, Indiana’s EITC will be recoupled with the federal EITC. Even without the increase, this excellent news for low-income families in Indiana.

These victories are not possible without your support. Your time and dedication to these issues is critical to consumers and we cannot work without your support.

Thank you for following along this year. We appreciate you!

Respectfully submitted,

Kerwin Olson & Lindsay Haake