INDIANAPOLIS — Hoosiers may have to look deep to find issues that directly affect them in the upcoming session, a leading legislator said Tuesday.
But if residents dig, they might find workforce development and the opioid crisis to be top issue contenders.
"In many ways the coming session seems to lack a spark that many others have had in recent times," Senate President Pro Tem David Long, R-Fort Wayne, acknowledged. "If you look just below the surface, there's a lot of very important issues that we'll be dealing with."
Long and House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, said the legislators would need to tweak workforce development needs and tighten up the battle against opioid addiction.
Both leaders addressed their chambers during the annual Organization Day, usually a ceremonial meeting of lawmakers. The short session begins Jan. 3, leaving legislators about six weeks to prepare bills.
Bosma, however, said that if House members' bills were not passed out of the chamber within the first four weeks of the session, they would have to wait until 2019.
As both leaders talked to their chambers, reports circulated that the state would need to find about $9.3 million for education due to unexpected higher enrollment of about 6,000 students in public schools.
Long said an additional appropriation might be considered, although budget items are not typically discussed in short sessions.
"We're going to take a long look at the count (student populations) and then we're going to discuss potentially moving some money in even though it's a non-budget year to cover that shortfall," Long said. "We're going to have to wait and see some numbers and verify some things, but we have every intention of trying to fix that problem."
This session, legislators need to shore up the connections between business needs for a workforce and training workers in order to fill about 1 million jobs in the next five years, Bosma said.
"Our weak spot is our current workforce," he said. "We rank among the bottom third of states in terms of the availability and quality of our workforce. We simply don't have enough people equipped with the skills for the 21st century."
In the Senate, Minority Leader Tim Lanane, D-Anderson, pressed the Democrat agenda for redistricting reform, raising the minimum wage and legislation to define hate crimes.
Outside of the chambers, rallies were held in support of redistricting reform and passage of hate crime legislation similar to laws in 45 states.
Tying in the opioid crisis, Lanane noted that Indiana could end up footing the bill for Hoosiers' health care if Congress passes reform.
"We're not going to attack the drug epidemic by reducing access to health care in this state. We don't know what's going to happen in Washington, D.C.," Lanane said. "Washington D.C. doesn't know what's going to happen in Washington, D.C., but we better be on guard."