From term limits to bus lanes, Indiana lawmakers fight locals for control – IndyStar
Westfield city councilor Troy Patton thought he had come up with a decent public policy that had broad community support: term-limit the mayor and city councilors to allow more opportunity for fresh voices to lead the growing community.
Patton informally polled the public. The council held public meetings with little fanfare and the councilors voted the proposal through 5-2, then overturned the mayor’s veto by the same vote.
A few months later, in early 2023, Patton found out from a reporter’s phone call that his state representative wrote a bill to undo the term limit ordinance and, further, prohibit local communities from passing laws on elections in general. Gov. Eric Holcomb signed that bill into law in early April.
“It just blew me away,” Patton, who didn’t run for reelection for other reasons, said recently. “The thing that probably drove me the craziest is, they didn’t once ask any of us why we did it.”
State lawmakers in Indiana have the power to preempt or overrule local governments like this and they’ve done it many times over the years ― even as many of those local officials wish they wouldn’t.
But this year, the perennial fight over “local control” ― a state vs. local government dance in which state legislators file bills that seek to change or flat-out undo laws passed by cities or invent new ones ― seems to have reached a fever pitch. The theme has come up in nearly every committee hearing or floor vote on this year’s controversial bills: from repealing a special downtown taxing district for Indianapolis to voiding municipal ordinances that ban puppy mills to retroactively nullifying a decades-old gun lawsuit in Gary and stalling a major transportation project in Indianapolis.
“If we want to be councilors, let’s quit being state senators and run at the local level,” Indianapolis Sen. Fady Qaddoura, a Democrat, said at the first committee hearing for Senate Bill 52, the bill banning dedicated bus lanes for a year.
A final floor vote on House Bill 1121, which in its current form gives Indianapolis permission to levy a county-wide income tax hike to pay for downtown improvements in lieu of the Mile Square tax lawmakers want to repeal, prompted Indianapolis state Rep. John Bartlett to make a rare appearance at the podium during debate on Jan. 30.
“What are we doing?” he asked, pounding the podium with each syllable. “What are we doing? Let’s run the state and let Indianapolis run Indianapolis and Marion County run Marion County.”
Indianapolis tends to take the brunt of state lawmakers’ attention. Republican leaders say their focus on Indianapolis reflects the capital city’s importance as the heart and engine of the state. Not that state lawmakers have never helped Indianapolis: They passed legislation enabling the $800 million deal in 2019 to upgrade Bankers Life, now Gainbridge Fieldhouse, to keep the Pacers in town. They made investments in the IUPUI campus. They fixed a road funding formula error last year that resulted in more money in Indianapolis’ coffers.House leaders say their intense interest in what happens in the state’s capital makes perfect sense.
“I don’t really want to micromanage Indianapolis, but we are committed in Indianapolis, we’re committed to a strong Indianapolis,” House Speaker Todd Huston told reporters. “Indianapolis continues to bring in record numbers of conventions mainly because of our investments.”
Why does this happen
State governments already have a constitutional upper hand. A one-party state government can flex that muscle even more, unencumbered by the counterbalance of another political party. That may be even more likely to happen when a large city is run by a different political party than the one that controls the Statehouse.
In every state, local governments only exist because state governments created them and gave them certain powers to govern themselves. Indiana, however, is one of the more restrictive states when it comes to how much of that power, known as “home rule,” the state has given to locals.
“It’s very disturbing to me,” Paul Helmke, director of the Civic Leaders Living-Learning Center at Indiana University and former Republican mayor of Fort Wayne, said of state government stepping into local affairs. “It’s often been an issue, but it seems like it’s getting worse every year.”
Indiana’s Home Rule Act from 1980 says local units of government have only the powers authorized by state law, plus “all other powers necessary or desirable in the conduct of its affairs.” The act limits what locals can do; for example, they can’t raise taxes unless authorized by the state.
Over the years the courts have upheld the state legislature’s power to preempt local jurisdiction on laws that could impact communities statewide. The state has targeted specific cities’ initiatives through statewide bans many times: ending Bloomington’s plastic bag ban, preventing Indianapolis from passing laws concerning retaliatory landlords, and currently, attempting to ban the use of dedicated lanes, impacting IndyGo’s Blue Line.
More:What’s the future of the IndyGo Blue Line? Here’s what to know.
A decade into Republican supermajority rule in both chambers, it’s easy to take these kinds of actions without being checked by the other side, Helmke said.
“We know Democrats will never be in charge to change it back, so screw it,” Helmke said, describing the mentality.
This phenomenon occurs often in polarized states ― deep red states with reliably blue cities, said Chad Kinsella, political science professor at Ball State University.
“Particularly in red states, you have very blue cities that are on a very different policy track than what state wants,” he said. “And so they’ll get annoyed, and you’ll have these confrontations over who can do what, and what can the state tell the city to do. I think it’s flexing their muscles a little bit and probably letting cities like Gary and especially Indianapolis know who’s boss.”
Voters on the ground might not be fully aware of the dynamic playing out at the Statehouse, said Hoosier Action communications director Tracey Hutchings-Goetz said, but they can feel its effects at times ― and not just in blue cities. For instance, rural communities may look to local elected officials’ to improve housing quality and affordability only to learn their hands are tied.
“It can be really frustrating for local folks to be like, I want my elected officials to do something about it, and then they’re told, yeah we can’t do anything about it,” she said.
Jennifer Wells, a volunteer organizer by night and case manager by day in Columbus, Indiana, meets often with her city councilors to see what can be done about slumlords and rent prices. She herself has dealt with sewer backups and black mold.
“There’s always a roadblock,” she said. “Even though they’re on your side, there’s something stopping them. Ninety percent of the time it’s state government.”
Is the fight more intense today?
Battle lines have only intensified in the last decade, Helmke said. Republicans in charge of redistricting in 2010 redrew the maps to carve up more densely populated areas like Fort Wayne and Evansville, diluting the urban voters. Fewer state representatives today represent majority-urban interests. National politics has become consumed with a mentality that prioritizes winning over bipartisanship.
More:2024 primaries look like ‘tipping point’ for Indiana Republican’s future
Some say, however, the fight is no more intense than it was in the past. David Bottorff has observed the pattern for a long time from his perch at the Association of Indiana Counties: A local group or constituent is unhappy with a local policy, goes over the heads of local elected officials and complains to their state legislator; that lawmaker may take action to respond to their constituents, even as other lawmakers lack the same context. Still, the other lawmakers in the same party may follow their colleague’s lead.
“It’s hard to sit and judge what unique circumstances might have led a community to adopt that policy,” Bottorff said. “I think it should be a pretty high burden for a state to override a local jurisdiction’s ordinances.”
This happened recently with the most local of issues: zoning. State Rep. Dave Hall, R-Norman, said a Monroe County constituent complained to him about the county’s slope restrictions with respect to building. Builders feel this regulation limits their ability to add housing, Hall explained before the House vote on his House Bill 1108 on Jan. 23. The bill would do away with slope restrictions under a certain percentage.
Speaking against the bill, state Rep. Matt Pierce, D-Bloomington, cautioned that the state shouldn’t pass one-size-fits-all legislation when communities like Monroe County have far different terrain than other areas of the state.
“Today, it might be my county, tomorrow, it might be your county,” Pierce said. “It’s just curious to me how it seems like so many of us get up here to the Statehouse and we seem to forget what it’s like to be a local elected official. Why don’t we respect our local elected officials who are held accountable by the local citizens who elected them? Why do we have to override their decisions from here?”
State Rep. Chuck Moseley, D-Portage, likening the state to “Big Brother,” asked Hall at the podium why he feels the state should trump the expertise of local engineers and zoning officials.
Hall responded with his own definition of “local control.”
“This is something that should be in local control, and to me, the local landowner is as local as it gets, and they should be able to use their properties as they see fit,” he said.
Constitution bars ‘special laws’
It is possible in the eyes of the state constitution for the state government to pull too hard in this state vs. local tug-of-war.
The Indiana constitution prohibits the state from passing “special” laws that target a certain place, person or case. But it makes exceptions for laws that address a specific situation but can have broader applications across the state.
For example, a bill this year to prohibit cities from suing firearm manufacturers clearly targets Gary’s decades-old lawsuit ― and the bill’s author said so ― but the text of the bill accomplishes this by prohibiting all local governments from doing this, retroactive to before the date of Gary’s lawsuit. House Bill 1235 passed the House by a party line vote and is working its way through the Senate.
More:Indiana lawmakers trying to kill historic lawsuit seeking gun industry accountability
The General Assembly in 2015 tried to halt the suit by amending an existing immunity law to a retroactive date before Gary filed suit. An appeals court allowed the suit to continue, but the court also decided that the City of Gary had not proved the law was unconstitutional.
Laws that target Indianapolis come even closer to this threshhold. A law passed in 2023 specifically bars “a consolidated city” from passing a no-turn-on-red ordinance. There’s only one consolidated city in the state: Indianapolis.
House Speaker Huston said state lawmakers believe this kind of language would survive a challenge.
“A lot of bills have been passed over the years around this issue,” Huston said. “That’s been litigated, and we’re conscientious of that. Ultimately, we feel like what we’re doing passes muster.”Indianapolis had its own workaround: It passed its ordinance in the months before the new state law went into effect. So this year, state Sen. Aaron Freeman floated a new bill to make that state law retroactive to before Indianapolis’ ordinance. He’s since compromised, calling instead for a moratorium on new signs while the state can study the efficacy of such a policy.
When the Indiana General Assembly passes laws undoing those of its cousins in local government, the only recourse city officials have is to bring suit. That decision means expending political capital fighting the state in court, Helmke said. Plus, with bills such as House Bill 1235 saying only the attorney general can sue gun manufacturers, the state is now attempting to exert control over the courts, potentially further weakening the power of municipalities.
“It really does call into question, why do we have local government?” Helmke said.
Contact IndyStar state government and politics reporter Kayla Dwyer at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter@kayla_dwyer17.
:quality(85)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/infobae/XN2QDPKNH5C6HFOEF6IA4KQTSM.jpg)
