Greg Weaver: In 2025, let’s strive for open government

When it comes to government transparency laws, Indiana often ranks near the bottom in terms of what it requires public officials and political activists to disclose.

The most recent nationwide study conducted by the Coalition for Public Integrity in 2022 ranked the state dead last in terms of disclosure requirements and limits on contributions to political campaigns.

That’s largely because Indiana puts no limits on campaign contributions by individuals or political action committees. It also requires no disclosure of spending by so-called super PACs and certain nonprofits that buy television ads or other services to support candidates but don’t coordinate the spending with the candidates’ campaigns.

A 2015 assessment by the Center for Public Integrity, another nonpartisan nonprofit, gave Indiana a grade of D- and ranked it 29th in terms of overall accountability and transparency.

It earned F’s in the categories of public access to information, political financing, state budget process, judicial accountability, ethics entities and civil service oversight.

The only things bringing the state’s overall grade up a bit were the B’s it received for state pension systems (B+) and internal auditing practices (B-).

And, by the way, the F’s came after an upgrade in the state’s ethics laws, prompted by controversial moves by then-Rep. Eric Turner, who in 2014 privately lobbied his fellow lawmakers to ditch a proposed ban on nursing home construction that would have hurt his family business.

Among the changes added to lawmakers’ financial disclosure forms in 2015 were requirements to list close relatives who are lobbyists and to note business ownerships worth at least $500,000.

But not much has changed since that time, and transparency regarding the financial interests of Indiana’s state lawmakers remains murky at best.

As an Indiana Capital Chronicle investigation reported in 2023, at least 15 lawmakers were working as consultants, and nothing required them to report who their clients were unless the business relationship met a high threshold.

That left the public in the dark about whether those clients, almost all unidentified, also had business before the Legislature.

Meanwhile, questions about more obvious potential conflicts of interest continue to arise with regularity. In recent years, for instance, lawmakers who happen to be homebuilders have leveraged passage of a bill to make it easier to build on wetlands and have pushed for other measures that would benefit their businesses.

In my decades of reporting on or guiding coverage of the Indiana General Assembly, the reluctance by lawmakers to be more transparent or be subject to an outside ethics review board never changes, regardless of which party is in charge.

Lawmakers like the insular way they operate, and they prefer to police themselves. Nothing ever changes until there is a huge scandal. Even then, the changes are incremental and not nearly enough to cause the state to rise from being a cellar dweller on transparency.

This year, I invite lawmakers to prove me wrong, to do something significant before another shoe drops in the Centaur and Spectacle Entertainment casino probe that already has sent three former state lawmakers to prison.

But I’m not holding my breath. I enjoy breathing too much to do that.•

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Weaver is editor of Indiana Lawyer.