Q&A: How lieutenant governor candidates plan to use the limited role to tackle economic development

The candidates for lieutenant governor: Republican Micah Beckwith, Democrat Terry Goodin, Libertarian Tonya Hudson

In Indiana, the lieutenant governor is more than just a running mate and a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. The person who holds the second-highest office in the state leads several state agencies focused on rural and agriculture issues.

IBJ interviewed Republican Micah Beckwith, a pastor; Democrat Terry Goodin, a farmer, U.S. Department of Agriculture official and former lawmaker; and Libertarian Tonya Hudson, a real estate broker, about how they would tackle the office’s specific roles should they be elected—and how they see those duties intertwining with economic development efforts.

The lieutenant governor candidates run with their party’s gubernatorial nominees as a team. Indiana voters will cast a ballot for a ticket, which includes each party’s candidate for governor and lieutenant governor.

Republican Mike Braun, Democrat Jennifer McCormick and Libertarian Donald Rainwater are vying to replace Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, in this November’s election. Holcomb could not run for reelection due to term limits.

The winning candidate for lieutenant governor will serve as president of the Indiana Senate and oversee two dozen departments, agencies, boards and programs, including the Department of Agriculture, the Office of Community and Rural Affairs and the Indiana Destination Development Corp.

IBJ: Considering the duties of the lieutenant governor, what are your economic development goals?

Beckwith: First thing is figuring out the tax relief plan. … Farmers are getting crushed by our property tax. … The average property tax increase that farmers experienced from last year to this year is 26%. That is just unfathomable. If it keeps going in that direction, we are going to see small farms just run out of business in Indiana, and we’ve got to protect our farms.

That’s something I’m very passionate about. So, fighting for farmers, fighting for the family farm, and making sure that you can pass it down to your children and children’s children. And, there could be an affordable, sustainable legacy that is actually maintained and not destroyed because the government is overbearing.

The other agency that works with economic development is OCRA. That’s small business development in rural communities. We have some great ideas on private-public partnerships—making sure that we are incentivizing good behavior and not incentivizing bad behavior. Right now, there are a lot of bad incentives that hurt local businesses. …

[Rural areas] need access to broadband. Even in Hamilton County, in the northern parts of our county, farmers and we’ve got small business owners that run businesses out of their homes and they’ve got to use their phone for hotspots to get to the world wide web. … We’ve done a decent job of getting broadband running, but we’ve got a lot more work to do. And, we’re going to do that through using offices like OCRA.

Goodin: As I’ve traveled around the state the last 2-1/2 years as the state director of USDA Rural Development, it seems as though the state has been picking winners and losers. I’ve traveled to small town after small town and small city after small city. After you drive past the McDonald’s and the dollar store, you drive into the downtown square where the courthouse is, and it’s desolate. Businesses that have gone out of business and no longer exist.

We’ve got to figure out: How do we level that playing field where there can be prosperity, not only in the counties surrounding Indianapolis but in all the counties of the state of Indiana. We know that a rising tide lifts all ships, and if we can get the tide high in Indiana, everyone will benefit from that.

We know also with the cities in the urban areas [that] they really, really prosper when the rural areas prosper. Because more disposable income means that people can travel and visit the shopping malls and the sports complexes and all of those things that go along with activity if they have more money in their pocket. We’ve got to make sure that prosperity is extended across the entire state of Indiana, and we’ve got a very specific plan on how to do that. As we move forward, we’ve got to make sure that the folks in White County are prospering just as well as the folks in Clark County.

Hudson: We’re looking out for the more mom-and-pop business, Hoosier farmers, rather than the corporations that come in from out of state, even out of country, that push out the small farms and small businesses. We do need to revitalize our communities, but we have to do it in a way that’s fair and economical to Hoosiers—not just big corporations to come in with their sweetheart deals. …

We also have a problem with the Indiana Economic Development Corp. because they offer so many business tax incentives, corporate tax credits and economic development programs for companies that create jobs and that sort of thing, but that tax incentive is not offered to our local mom-and-pop businesses. We need to curtail that a little bit.

The removal of property taxes to make Hoosier lives better so that people have their own money in their pockets so that they can better buy groceries or clothes or whatever they want to spend their money on. Have more freedoms and liberties to live their lives how our Founding Fathers intended. Not having government strong-arm people and have them get into your personal business.

Overseeing the Department of Agriculture is a major duty of the lieutenant governor. What are your plans for that agency?

Beckwith: I have seven policy points that we’ve created for the LG’s office if we win in November.

I would say some big ones that stand out to me again, property taxes. That’s probably number one.

We need to take a look at the drainage handbook right now. I’m talking to farmers, and I understand that that’s been a problem. They’re outdated. …

I’d love to see the red tape farmers have to go through in order to get things done (get cut). I’m a red tape cutter. I’d like to see that red tape get cut. … This is an interesting one that not too many people are probably aware of, but the Grain Indemnity Fund. We’ve got to have confidence restored in that … .

A huge one for farmers is protecting our land against hostile foreign nations that want to come in and buy our lands or take over our land. That’s something that’s near and dear to my heart—to make sure that we are not allowing nations like China or Russia or other adversaries that we might have on the world stage to come in and basically steal our land. I like what the Legislature did last session to shore up that a little bit. There’s some loopholes that we need to work on closing, but I’ll work on that with the Legislature as well.

I think we’ve got to continue to promote ethanol and biofuels. …

The last thing would be protecting personal property rights of farmers. We’ve got a huge battle between wind and solar right now. We’ve got to thread that needle. I’m a big personal property rights guy, but I also believe the Constitution is not a suicide pact. What you do with your property doesn’t live in a vacuum. When it comes to solar and wind and renewables—while I love the idea of renewables—I don’t want the government, again, picking winners and losers.

Goodin: I understand as a farmer, raising beef cattle, that not every problem on the farm is the same on every farm. We have to make sure the most important thing we do is listen to farmers and try to understand some of the issues that they’re going through.

We’ve got a huge problem with development and urban sprawl basically chewing up farmland, and we’ve lost I don’t know how many millions of acres just in the last decade to urban sprawl. The state of Indiana has a direct role in being able to manage urban sprawl.

We all know that to build homes and to build out, you have to have certain amenities to do that. … As rural development director [at the USDA] … we tried to extend the infrastructure where you don’t need 2 acres to build one house; you can build six houses on two acres. When you start building more houses and you’re making them a little more compact, then you quit chewing up all that farm ground.

The state of Indiana has got a very direct and specific role in trying to move Indiana forward—and agriculture has to play a part of that.

Hudson: As a real estate broker, rural development is somewhat in my wheelhouse. I’ve been doing real estate for 18 years.

We need to reorganize [state agencies] because there’s a lot of redundancy. Even with the Agriculture Department and Rural Development and Community Affairs, there’s a lot of overlap. We can save the state some money by reducing the waste and spending. …

There’s fortunately a lot of people, experts, that are in the agency that have been doing it for a long time that can offer their expertise and job experience on working with the farmers and developers that promote our products. Overseeing that will be a daunting task for me because it’s new, but I’m very flexible. … No one can walk into any new job and claim they know everything and how to do it. That would be naive.

With the agencies you would oversee—such as the Department of Agriculture, Rural Affairs, tourism, etc.—how do you see yourself getting involved with the state’s development strategy?

Beckwith: We can actually be a huge attraction when it comes to tourism. … We are very much set up to be a strong, attractive state for global markets, and we’re doing that with something like different world food championships. I think that’s the kind of outside-the-box thinking that we’re going to need going forward. …

We’ve got Main Street USA awards go into places like Madison, Indiana. And Madison, I think, is a great example for letting the rest of the nation know how cool our downtowns are and could be. People want that nostalgia. They want that historic, antique, laid-back lifestyle, and I think that’s what Indiana has to offer in most of our state. That’s what’s going to be my focus when it comes to tourism.

We’ve got a serious housing crisis right now because we’ve got so much demand but very little supply. I’ve been working already, talking with my team and also the director of housing and just picking his brain on what could we do to meet that demand. When it comes to housing, I would [take on] fighting blight in a local community. Most economic developers don’t want to come in and take over old, dilapidated buildings. They want to just buy a bunch of farmland and build, build, build.

Goodin: I was proud to work on a lot of that [tourism strategy] in the Legislature as a state legislator because Indiana is losing out on millions and millions and millions of dollars from travelers and folks coming and visiting our state. If you travel the state of Indiana, we’ve got one of the most diverse geographic and geological structures in the nation. We’ve got sand dunes, we’ve got rivers, we’ve got mountains, we’ve got prairies, we’ve got it all. There’s no reason why we are not showcasing those beauties that are in our state. We’ve got to do a better job of promoting that.

We’ve also got to put together and fund a project that’s going to create a better quality of life for Hoosiers. We know as we talk about economic development that it is directly tied into the quality of life. We know now that the good paying jobs and those corporations and those businesses that Indiana wants to try to attract, the first thing they look at now is … what is the quality of life in the area where they’re going to be locating? We have to make sure in Indiana that our quality of life is better than the quality of life in the states around us if we’re going to be competitive. You cannot use the term economic development without also using that term “quality of life” in the same sentence.

Hudson: You are the administrator, but it’s very important to surround yourself with good people, to have good people, good managers, good directors in place that are familiar with those lines of work or maybe someone who is more versed in tourism than I would be personally. As lieutenant governor who oversees all these agencies, I can’t, by myself, go into every single agency and run them. That’s impossible. … My role would be more of a leadership position and not actual hands-on. The hands-on is to be held by the people who are in those positions.

How would you approach the role of president of the state Senate?

Beckwith: I see myself as being involved in conversations, and I’ve never shied away from sharing my opinion. I think the people of Indiana want me to share my opinion. I’m looking to work with anyone and everyone that wants to get things done. But at the same time, I’m not just going to pound the gavel and just sit quietly in the corner. It’s the role of everyone in that chamber who has been elected by the people to share when called upon or to share when necessary. …

It’s always better when you have more ideas, have more thoughts in the room, than less.

The Indiana Constitution does give the lieutenant governor the right to participate in debate. Article 5, Section 23 says that. I don’t think it’s been used very much, but the Constitution was written in a way to make it a very beneficial experiment for the people—not necessarily for the system, but for the people.

Goodin: I would like to be involved in the process, and I can be because I know how the process works. I spent 20 years in the Legislature.

It’s not necessarily like you watch on TV what happens in those chambers. It’s about making friends, it’s about reaching across the aisle, and it’s about doing what’s right for all Hoosiers, not just red Hoosiers or blue Hoosiers. We’ve got to figure out how we do that.

I’ve got a long history … of working across the aisle, because I truly believe, not just in the legislative process but everything we do in the state of Indiana, that a lot of us working together on something is much better than just one of us working on a solution.

Hudson: Being that we would be a third party and not part of the two-party system that’s well established there, I would have to take a more proactive role. There is no way we could get things accomplished on behalf of the state of Indiana citizens if I sat on the sidelines and let it be the status quo—because the status quo is the problem.

We need to be proactive, and I would definitely be proactive. Not rude or in your face or anything like that, but definitely have a presence.•