Kosciusko County Benefits From State Budget, Legislators Say
Kosciusko County Benefits From State Budget, Legislators Say
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
Kosciusko County Benefits From State Budget, Legislators SayWhen Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Rob Parker began the 3rd House Session legislative review, he called it a “celebration” of “some really amazing legislative work” by state Sen. Ryan Mishler and Rep. Craig Snow.
“Your guys’ hard work and dedication and commitment to Kosciusko County really showed in this session,” he said.
Snow said he thought they had a great session, too, and got a lot done.
“The bills were highlighted on mental health, health care, those type of things. A lot of different stuff that I worked on in terms of the Department of Local Government Finance bill, that was a very large bill, a lot of things went into that, and I was honored to carry that bill and I learned a lot through that process,” he said.
On the Ways and Means Committee this year, Snow said he had his hands on many different things this legislative session and learned how it all plays out.
“Specifically to Kosciusko County, there’s a number of different buckets, as I’ll say, that has been made potentially available to us if we do the right planning and get some things put together. We’ll go back before the budget hearing this summer and next summer and make some of those asks for the appropriations,” he said.
The Warsaw Municipal Airport was able to get about $2 million for the executive taxiway cement replacement.
There’s also some buckets along the northern part of the state, as well as a bucket specifically for OrthoWorx, for $30 million each, Snow said.
OrthoWorx is a nonprofit formed in 2009 with initial funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc. to preserve and extend the region’s legacy as the Orthopedic Capital. Based in Warsaw, OrthoWorx works with orthopedic industry members, academic partners and community leaders to capitalize on the resources and expertise across the region and in the industry to achieve common goals, according to the website.
“We’ll have opportunities to have discussions around maybe some appropriations from each of those buckets,” Snow said. “Specific to OrthoWorx, we were able to get $30 million that is directed to OrthoWorx that we would be able to go to the budget committee starting July 1, 2024 ... it’ll give us a year to plan.”
The specific purpose is to attract and retain talent for the orthopedic industries, Snow said. It is to be used for capital projects only.
“Furthermore, IEDC (Indiana Economic Development Corporation) has received roughly $1.2 billion. READY 2.0 will be a half billion of that, of which we will be able to present application to the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership to see if” the projects the county puts in for that can get funded, he explained.
There’s another half billion dollars for “deal-making funds” for the IEDC to use to close on deals to get companies to come to Indiana. Another $150 million was budgeted for site acquisition to be used for the purchase of ground.
On the OrthoWorx bucket, Snow said, “Those are to be used for capital projects, specific to quality of life, again trying to attract the talent and retain that talent we have here to work in this industry.”
The goal of that $30 million, he said, is to get a 10-to-1 match when it’s all said and done from investments, developers and industries that want to come to Kosciusko County.
Parker said he doesn’t think anything like this has happened before for Kosciusko County.
Mishler said the finalized budget for the next two years is $44.5 billion. He said it’s a lot of spending, but the state learned after the budget forecast that it would have another $1.5 billion to spend.
“I’ve learned I can’t get government to save, so that was kind of off the table. I keep trying to pay down some of the liabilities and saving. In government, that’s tough,” Mishler said.
He said on this two-year budget they did a lot of one-time investments so that if the economy turns, those one-time investments aren’t ongoing.
“With all those one-time investments, it’s easy for us to then back off if it’s not a year-over-year cost to the revenue stream. If the economy does turn, we do have some tools there to back off,” Mishler stated.
One of the biggest expenses in the budget is K-12 education.
“We did a $2.9 billion increase in K-12. That’s $1.5 billion in the school funding formula, that’s almost half of our budget right there,” Mishler said.
On Medicaid, he said that’s $7.9 billion and the second largest part of the budget, and an increase of $2.4 billion over the biennium.
“So here’s what I would say: So our revenue increases at 3% and our Medicaid costs are increasing at 6%, so at some point we can’t sustain these increases,” Mishler said. “One thing I noticed on the school funding formula, we used to be at 50%. We’re down to 47, and then Medicaid went up 3 ticks. So Medicaid is actually taking away from K-12 so that’s something we really have to be careful of.”
He said they brought back the Medicaid Oversight Committee.
“Everyone wants to expand services. We had so many bills of members that want to expand services and we’re already blowing up Medicaid and we have to be very careful of expanding services,” he said.
The oversight committee will vet the policies before the legislative session to get a handle on the costs. The committee will be a mixture of the fiscal teams and the health committees, Mishler said.
He said economic development was huge for the legislators this time around.
On the airports, Mishler said $9.8 million went to Gary, $7.4 million to South Bend, $5 million to Fort Wayne and then $2 million to Warsaw for the airport’s taxiways.
“When we talk about the taxiways at Warsaw, somebody said something to me about, ‘Oh these wealthy people have their airplanes, you’re just trying to help them out.’ Actually, it’s not. It’s more of the economic development. It’s the corporations that use that airport for business. Some of our larger corporations that really need the improvements to the taxiway. It’s not necessarily for the recreational flyer, it’s for these corporations. It kind of goes with the retention ... working with these corporations to fill their needs,” Mishler said.
He also mentioned they upped the state’s tourism budget to $20 million a year, up from about $5-$6 million. He said Indiana has a lot of great places to visit, but a lot of people don’t know about them because Indiana doesn’t market them well. Michigan has a $40 million annual tourism budget.
“If we want to compete with the neighboring states, we thought we needed to expand our marketing so most of that money is for marketing to bring people in,” Mishler said.
Indiana has a large revenue stream off of athletics, he said, in talking about the funds in the budget for sports and athletic economic development.
“But, the big ticket items I think up in our area, I just did the math, in our northern region, which would be the north central, north east, I count $215 million ... of state investment going into our area, and I can’t think back to a time where we’ve had so much investment from our state,” Mishler said. “... I think we did really well this time around.”
The reason the state had the additional $1.5 billion to spend, he explained, is because of all the investments Indiana has made over the last 10 years.
