Black legislators: Need help against GOP supermajority
Democratic lawmakers from Northwest Indiana co-sponsor town hall
If it feels like the state’s Republican supermajority is moving ever so slightly back toward the middle, you wouldn’t be wrong in that assumption, some Democratic legislators said Saturday.
Legislators want to keep their seats, after all, so they appear to be backing off the worst of their positions because they haven’t worked, state Rep. Vernon Smith, D-Gary, said during a town hall meeting at the Glen Theater. How long that’ll last, he said, depends on how willing constituents are to push back.
He’s heard, for example, the anger and frustration of parents and alumni who are concerned about the future of Roosevelt High School, and he agrees wholeheartedly. But those feelings aren’t coming downstate like they need to, he said.
Smith said he went to a session regarding the Gary Community School Corporation and said he was told there would be a lot of people, but there were only six people there.
“When the legislature was going to close all our license bureaus, we sent down seven busloads and we got what we wanted,” Smith said. “We have to work as a community.”
Northwest Indiana’s black state legislators co-sponsored the town hall and shared a number of things on which they have been working. Attending were Smith, Rep. Earl Harris Jr., D-East Chicago, Rep. Ragen Hatcher, DGary, Sen. Lonnie Randolph, DEast Chicago, and Sen. Eddie Melton, D-Gary.
Hatcher’s focus is on removing bail for misdemeanor offenses, easing the hurdles of getting a hardship license and removing an automatic one-year suspension if you choose not to take a Breathalyzer during a traffic stop.
Harris has put forth a bill guaranteeing a person entering college as a freshman would have their tuition remain the same price throughout their college career.
Harris also worked on a bill to tackle college student homelessness, but it didn’t get a hearing. A bill eliminating township assessors that passed the Senate, meanwhile, looks to be a nonstarter in the House, he said.
But in a supermajority, a nonstarter can always find a way, he said.
“These things can always come back as amendments to something else,” Harris said.
Most of the constituents were concerned about SB 416, which deals with Gary Community School Corporation. One of the points in the legislation is that the school corporation, under the control of state management company MGT, has to be in the black financially before it can be given back to local control, Hatcher said.
“But MGT has no incentive to be ‘in the black,’ so it’s spending more money,” she said. “Its contract is up in June, so are we going to have them or someone else? We have to have oversight into MGT’s spending.”
“Most contracts are set for five years, but (the MGT) contract is
open-ended, so their goal is to ‘work on the problem,’ not end it,” Harris said.
Melton said he and Sen. Karen Tallian, D-Ogden Dunes, asked for $100 million to give to teachers in the form of “appreciation grants,” but that got no traction.
Under SB 416, they have asked that the monthly $558,000 the state takes to pay back the Gary school corporation’s $60 million debt be stopped for three years and put into a school improvement fund for repairs and new builds, noting the General Assembly has f o rg i ve n charter schools’ debts.
After the first three years, the second three would have 75% of the $588,000 per month go into the improvement fund and 25% toward the debt, and a 50-50 split between the debt and improvement fund the last four years, Melton said.
“That would give us more than $40 million for rehabilitation and new construction,” he said.
Melton said he knows a lot of what parents wanted to see SB 416 do isn’t in it. That’s where the politics kick in, he said.
“It wasn’t going to get a hearing, so sad to say this was the negotiating process. We had to find a way to open up a dialogue with the supermajority, because the people leading the Senate and the House have no sympathy for Gary and often come up with creative ways to make it worse,” he said.
Some constituents praised the black legislators for their work.
“I walked away with a lot of appreciation for them,” Charlene Mahone, of Gary, said. “I feel protected.”
Michaela Spangenburg, also of Gary, said she felt her questions were addressed, but the lack of constituent presence downstate doesn’t mean apathy on their part.
“It’s not that we’re not trying to organize; it’s just that in Gary, we have a few more obstacles,” she said. “It’s very hard to coordinate when people are trying to discourage us.”
But Spangenburg said it’s important that people have the opportunity to improve the school corporation so it’s not being done by well-meaning people who don’t live in Gary.