A Democrat newcomer will take on the Republican leader of the Indiana Senate in the general election next month, and both have differing priorities in terms of the state budget and Indiana’s COVID-19 response.
Senate President Pro Tem Rod Bray, R-Martinsville, is running for a third term in the Indiana Senate representing District 37. Tom Wallace, an environmental engineer from Martinsville, will face Bray representing the Democrats.
District 37 encompasses a small portion of the west side of Johnson County, including Bargersville and Trafalgar, and most of Morgan County.
State Senators author and vote on bills that come before the General Assembly, as well as approve the state’s bi-annual budget. The Senate President Pro Tempore, the position Bray holds, is the leader of the body elected by the majority party, and is largely responsible for setting the agenda of the Senate each session. If Bray is not reelected, the Republican party will vote for a new leader.
Bray, 51, is a lifelong Martinsville resident, and he’s practiced law at his own firm in the city for the last 25 years. He was elected to the Senate in 2012 and was later chosen to serve as President Pro Tempore during his second term in 2018.
“It’s been a wonderful experience for me, so far. I feel like what we’ve been able to do is pretty meaningful,” Bray said.
Bray plans to continue to address several priorities he started work on this past session, including lowering the cost of health care and planning for redistricting in 2021, he said. But this next session is going to be particularly challenging with drafting the state budget in the wake of the economic impact caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Bray said.
The bi-annual state budget normally sits around $35 billion every two years, but the state is expecting major shortfalls this year.
“We’ve seen revenue kind of head south on us,” Bray said. “Coming up with a budget in this time is going to be of paramount importance.”
That shortfall could greatly affect school funding, Bray added. In 2019, the General Assembly added $763 million new dollars to public education funds and charter school vouchers, but that likely will not happen in the budget session next year, he said.
Earlier this year, Bray sent a letter to Indiana school leaders, saying that public schools that did not offer an in-person education option risked major cuts in state funding, depending on the student population of the school district.
COVID-19 will also be a big-ticket item on Bray’s agenda for the next session if he’s re-elected. The General Assembly plans to focus on ways to create a better plan to deal with future pandemics, so the state does not have to rely on emergency executive orders used by the governor, Bray said. These new plans will better layout the roles of the executive and legislative branches to work together during a health crisis like this.
“Some people have asked me, ‘Well shouldn’t the legislature be involved in this?’ Yes, in some ways … but it’s hard for 150 members of the House and Senate to make decisions on something that can be changing on an hourly basis,” Bray said. “By definition, we don’t make quick decisions.”
Wallace, 70, is also a lifelong Martinsville resident. He is an environmental engineer, who dedicated the last several years working to study and clean up PCE and TCE contamination throughout Martinsville. PCE and TCE are volatile organic compounds and carcinogens, and the contamination is something the city has dealt with for 30 years, he said.
This is the main reason he decided to run, to try to bring change and awareness to the environmental issues across Indiana, he said.
“There’s been virtually no activity done on it, until four years ago I started Martinsville, Indiana Superfund Site Association, which is essentially a public forum looking at data on what is happening and what has been happening,” Wallace said.
He worked with the environmental health services department at Purdue University to conduct several studies on the contamination in Martinsville by taking air samples from houses, breath samples from residents and tap water samples, he said. This was the first time any study had been done in Martinsville, and all the samples returned with traceable amounts of PCE, he said.
Environmental health will be one of Wallace’s top priorities if he is elected to the Statehouse, along with jobs, education and health care, he said. Those four priorities are all dependent on each other, Wallace said.
“When you look at jobs in Indiana, if you have an industry that comes in, they look at location and quality of life, and the environment affects that,” Wallace said. “They’re going to look at a healthy workforce, and they are going to look at a trained and educated workforce. So all these elements, they have to work together.”
Other top issues Wallace wants to address, if elected, are the state budget and Indiana’s COVID-19 response. Like Bray, Wallace recognized Indiana’s budget shortfalls will be a big issue, he said.
Wallace, however, wants the state budget particularly to restructure K-12 funding, and put more towards public schools instead of charter school vouchers, he said.
“The very first thing is they’ve got to restructure the money they have and put it toward public education,” Wallace said. “Charter schools and voucher schools have proven to be a fatality in a lot of ways.”
He also said he wants Indiana to do more in its response to the pandemic, particularly by mandating counties to test more residents, and open testing sites with federal funding they have received from the CARES Act, he said. How the General Assembly responds to COVID-19 during the 2021 session will depend on if there is an uptick in cases this fall, instead of focusing on what already happened this year, Wallace said.
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”About the job” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
Indiana Senate District 37
Term: Four Years
Duties: Senators draft and vote on legislation brought before the General Assembly, including the bi-annual state budget.
Salary: $26,400 (2019)
A President Pro Tempore, Bray made $78,000 last year.
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