The final Crawfordsville Chamber of Commerce Legislative Breakfast, sponsored by the League of Women Voters, offered a revealing snapshot of what’s on the minds of Montgomery County residents and how the three of our Statehouse delegates in attendance – Sen. Brian Buchanan, Rep. Beau Baird, and Rep. Jeff Thompson – are framing the just-completed legislative session as they look ahead.
Across the three breakfasts this year, the need to correct previous legislation and executive action stands out. From the unintended and alarming consequences of the 2025 property tax reform to the sudden cut to childcare funding, citizens and local leaders appealed to elected officials to understand the impact county residents are experiencing.
When Governor Braun signed an executive order that shut off childcare vouchers and training funds, he impacted a piece of infrastructure. A large swath of households cannot afford childcare, and not because providers charge inflated rates. Almost all facilities and providers work for low wages themselves. Because the average warehouse, manufacturing, or retail employee cannot afford to pay the equivalent of their own wages to a provider and meet all their own bills, Hoosiers stay in a catch-22 without government investment in childcare as infrastructure.
The hard stop on childcare funding throttled efforts by county and city officials, churches and nonprofits partnering to mend a hole and empower more Hoosiers to go to work. By December, multiple church-run childcare centers closed their doors and families were waitlisted for vouchers. In practical terms, the rollback stresses marriages and household budgets, and parents juggle for interim or pop-up help to be able to show up to work. Employers are struggling to find and keep workers. This is both an economic and a human problem. Childcare is inseparable from workforce participation, household economic stability, and community economic health; but also, children need stable routines and caring providers. The heightened stress on parents and kids impacts learning outcomes and increases dependency on other social safety nets.
Rep. Beau Baird pointed to the governor’s move to restore significant funding to the childcare voucher program, effectively conceding that earlier decisions had gone too far, too fast. In their comments, Baird, Buchanan, and Thompson all treated this session’s childcare experience as a lesson learned: sudden cuts to such a critical system ripple quickly through the local labor market and family life. The lawmakers appeared open to rethinking how childcare funding is structured and sustained in future sessions.
The conversation also surfaced quieter, but no less consequential, gaps in the system — especially for retirees. Local educators and public employees raised concerns about Medicare’s birthday-month enrollment rules, which can leave newly retired teachers and others in a no-man’s land between employer coverage and full Medicare protection. Citizens wanted to know, “What can Indiana do to help retirees avoid coverage gaps or crushing out-of-pocket bills?” The representatives acknowledged they didn’t understand how the birthday rule worked and would look into solutions.
Perhaps the most vivid metaphor of the morning came in a question about property taxes and last year’s highly touted SB 1, which was supposed to make sure the whole state wasn’t “fighting over slices of one cake.” Rex Ryker asked what happens to communities where the assessed value is so low that they “can’t bake a cake big enough” to serve everyone? In other words, if the local tax base simply can’t sustain the needs of schools, public safety and basic services, how does the new framework help them?
On this point, Sen. Brian Buchanan was candid: the state is still working on 2025’s SB 1, and “there is more work to be done” to ensure that each taxing unit receives the funds it needs and is entitled to. Baird seemed to echo that the intent of SB 1 — to distribute resources more fairly across Indiana —has collided with the reality that some counties and municipalities are starting from a much smaller cake. The implication is that future sessions will need not just minor “technical corrections,” but serious thought about how to prevent lower-assessed-value communities from falling further behind, even under a reformed system.
As he has at all three sessions, Thompson focused most of his comments on why SB 1 was the right political choice for the state.
Residents also pressed their representatives to broaden the conversation about health care costs beyond the often-blamed Medicaid budget line item. They pointed to the way premiums, deductibles, utility bills, and medical expenses are devouring household budgets, even for those not on public programs. The legislators responded by acknowledging that health care inflation is a major driver of financial stress for families, alongside rising utility rates, and that simply scrutinizing Medicaid expenditures is not enough. Their reflections on this session made clear that the problem is not just what the state pays, but what individual households are being forced to shoulder—a challenge that remains largely unresolved and will require sustained work over multiple years.
Environmental concerns threaded their way into the discussion as well, particularly around clean water, clean air and conservation. In a county that relies on both agriculture and manufacturing, residents asked how the state plans to protect natural resources without sacrificing economic opportunity. The lawmakers linked these questions to soil and water conservation efforts and to ongoing collaboration with local and state agencies. Their reflections hinted at a recognition that environmental policy is not a separate silo but is bound up with public health, agriculture policy, and long-term economic planning—even if comprehensive solutions are still in early stages.
Additionally, Wabash College Professor Shamira Gelbman raised concerns about the disenfranchisement of young voters — including students who struggle with residency rules, ID requirements, and basic access to polling places should the early voting window be narrowed. The legislators emphasized the importance of civic-mindedness among young people, but they also heard the underlying challenge: if the rules make it hard for students to vote where they live and study, the result is a quieter, less representative democracy. Their comments suggested an openness to further conversation, even as they were cautious about revisiting existing election laws too aggressively.
Questions from the floor and the reflections from Buchanan, Baird, and Thompson remind us all that no law is “forever,” though policy is hard to change. It takes involvement and clamor from the citizens. The legislators, for their part, seemed to recognize that the work of this session is not complete, but rather it continues from year to year. Next year will be a budget year. With Medicaid taking up a 26% of the current budget, up from 8% in the early 2000s, Thompson said it would be a win if Hoosiers could agree upon solutions that keep the state proportion around 22%. It will require lawmakers to look at the entire ecosystem, not just the nebulous 3 boogeymen, “waste, fraud and abuse.”