A Few Minutes with Becky Skillman

After the Governor’s presser, and the usual round of retirement speeches and wide arrays of legislative mutual congratulations, your humble correspondent had a chance to sit down with Chris Mann of Veritas Rex and Josh Gillespie of Hoosier Access to talk with Lieutenant Governor Becky Skillman.

Photos of the event are available here.

More after the leap.

Josh and Chris did most of the questioning; I mostly took notes and tried to avoid twitching from the prolonged withdrawal from the Internet caused by the interview and my inability to politely use my computer during it (well, not really; they just covered all of the topics I was interested in, and my note-taking skills are not what they were when I was in college).

Nobody, Skillman noted, expected an early completion to the session.

This year’s batch of legislative interns, she noted with a wry smile, were not disappointed in the amount of activity required of them; the short sessions are usually boring for the interns, at least relative to the longer sessions when the budget is being written.

Veritas Rex being present, questions quickly turned in a social conservative direction, in particular HB 1153 and the expansion of gambling.

Some regions, Skillman said, have focused on gambling as an engine of economic development, though she noted that she personally (a distinction she wished to emphasize) prefers other avenues toward economic development.

She then noted that she always preferred the Reagan position on gambling.

Color me surprised to see The Gipper come up at all in this interview, since the Lieutenant Governor is not (insofar as I know) running for President.

I later looked the exact quote up in my handy and well-worn copy of The Quotable Ronald Reagan so that I could accurately transcribe it here:

“I would hate to see legalized gambling in California, nor do I favor a lottery. We ought to finance the state by the strength of our people and not by their weaknesses.”
- Ronald Reagan, Remarks at Boys’ State, Sacramento, CA, June 21, 1973

It was an artful dodge, but still a dodge; I get the distinct impression that the Governor is going to sign HB 1153.

It will be awful if he does; it’s bad public policy regardless of your views of gambling as a moral issue.

The LG was pleased with the property tax reform passed by the General Assembly (obviously), and noted that of particular importance were the greater restrictions on the growth of spending (the caps and the various referendum requirements in particular), and the increased levels of local control of spending (referendum requirements, again, and the subordination of the spending authority of non-elected boards to the County Councils).

Josh asked a question about a Congressional initiative to expand the availability of Internet broadband (an effort supported by a strange alliance of righty-blog Red State and Illinois lefty loon Dick Durbin).

Skillman seemed to prefer a more market-oriented approach to that, noting the state’s efforts in creating a Broadband Authority within the State Finance Authority in 2005 and in passing telecommunications reform in 2006. All progress, she said, but conceded that much work remains to be done.

The conversation then steered back toward property taxes, in particular questioning what concession the Governor had to make that she found to be most disappointing.

In this, the Lieutenant Governor was circumspect; the Governor seems quite pleased with the outcome, particularly as it retains the four original core elements.

Skillman noted that the “four pillars” of Daniels’ original plan, as laid out to the General Assembly in the State of the State address in January, are still intact.

(Those being immediate relief, permanent relief, a streamlined assessment process, and restrictions on increased spending but with an increase in local control.)

She said that she was disappointed to see the absence of a central point of authority for all spending in the county, something contained in the original plan and called for under Kernan-Shepard.

This being said, non-elected boards (as noted above) are subordinated to the elected County Council under the measure that was passed, so that is a significant improvement.

With the interview wrapping up, we again returned to social issues.

In response to a question about the perception that social conservatives “got nothing” out of the session, Skillman noted that Indiana remains a conservative state regardless of party affiliation, and many of the measures hoped for by social conservatives would have passed handily if they had just been “given a vote” (an oblique reference if I ever saw one to the Speaker’s refusal to give the marriage amendment a vote).

With a bit more minor discussion, the interview wrapped up.

Once again, thanks to the Lieutenant Governor and her staff for hosting us, and for giving us a few minutes of her valuable time on such a busy day to talk with us.

This post is also available at Hoosierpundit.