State lawmakers and Indianapolis officials are looking to regulate the gold-buying business, which police say provides an easy outlet for stolen goods. Cash-for-gold stores have multiplied as prices more than doubled since 2007.
Stores with crime problems that wanted to remain open overnight would have to do one of the following: have two employees working, install a bulletproof enclosure, have a security guard or conduct business through a pass-through trough.
Hoosier mayors say they're concerned that decision-making authority has been removed from the local level and transferred to state lawmakers in recent years.
Senate Education Committee chairman Dennis Kruse said he would not introduce a creationism measure again this year, choosing a lighter tack instead. His new proposal, he said, would encourage students to question a broad range of topics in the classroom.
Key lawmakers are playing their cards close to the vest heading into the 2013 legislative session with a new governor and a list of big priorities.
Matt Whetstone is taking a break from his job as a lobbyist at Krieg DeVault to work as the House parliamentarian.
Indiana's budget picture is slowly taking shape, but the big questions about tax collections, tax cuts and how much will be spent on education remain to be seen.
State tax collections—the lifeblood of the budget and everything from road-paving to classroom sizes—could remain stagnant as the state continues to crawl out of the recession.
House Speaker Brian Bosma used the ceremonial opening of Indiana's legislative session Tuesday to call for bipartisanship, even though Republicans now enjoy a supermajority that largely allows them to circumvent Democrats to push through their plans.
The session will focus on creating the next two-year budget, implementing the federal health care law and other priorities including education and jobs programs.
Indiana lawmakers can add confusion over the federal health insurance law to their already overflowing plate when they return for their 2013 legislative session in January.
But with a legislature that could be unreceptive to environmental policy, HEC is also guarding against an unwinding of existing laws.
Group plans full-time presence at Statehouse to guard against governor, Republican legislature rolling back environmental protections.
Election Day brought 24 new members to the House of Representatives. That huge freshman wave, plus the return of 18 reps who were newly elected in 2010, means 42 percent of the House will begin the 2013 session with two years of experience or less.
The new chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and the GOP's top lieutenants on the panel will have the task of writing Indiana's next biennial budget during the 2013 session.
Republicans held on to their supermajority in the Indiana Senate, maintaining a 37-13 edge after Tuesday's election.
The veteran Republican lawmaker tweeted early Wednesday that the GOP had gained nine seats in the Indiana House, giving the party a two-thirds supermajority of 69 seats.
Republicans will keep control of both houses in the Indiana General Assembly although it wasn’t certain late Tuesday whether they’ll win the supermajority needed to thwart boycott threats from House Democrats.
Indiana voters stood in line for up to three hours in some cases Tuesday to cast their ballots in a series of races for the White House on down that Republicans hoped to dominate.
Many Indiana Republicans want to use the Healthy Indiana Plan to expand Medicaid coverage in Indiana to more low-income adults. But the program—which offers health insurance based on health savings accounts to uninsured adults—has managed to attract just one-third of the Hoosiers it was designed for and has cost about twice as much per enrollee as predicted.
