Indiana Republicans promise utility bill relief, but fail to deliver

Indianapolis Star

22-05-2025

Hoosiers deserve a legislature that works for them, not against them.
In an economy riddled with day-to-day uncertainty, utility prices in our state soar at rates that outpace both wages and inflation, burdening families with a weight that is often too much to bear.
The devastating reality of more than 174,000 of Indiana's underserved households losing access to power — sometimes during the most dangerously hot days of the year — forced Statehouse Republicans to enter the last session pledging that relief is on the way.
Words are one thing, action is another.
The utility legislation prioritized this session doesn't just continue the supermajority's pattern of promising financial relief and failing to deliver — it also unravels years of progress toward reducing coal dependence, forces ratepayers to fund projects that may never materialize and locks Indiana's natural environment even deeper into a dead-last national ranking.
Furthermore, my efforts to assist Hoosiers by creating an option to expand the income-driven utility assistance program were shot down. It is a moral failure that we ask Hoosiers to fund nuclear research for large corporations. This failure is only amplified when we refuse to support families facing shutoff in a world where the summer's hottest days only get hotter every year.
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With the threat of bill increases from Senate Bill 424, we are doing a disservice to every ratepayer in our state. Whether it is the family struggling to keep the lights on, our hospitals, the schools that are already facing budget cuts from legislative fallout or the municipalities weighing reduction in service or higher taxes, we can, and must, better serve them.
This means our leaders have to commit to putting working Hoosiers first: not state sanctioned monopolies, not major corporations and not allegiances to Washington, D.C.
And when our state's executive has shown that he is willing to be lockstep in the national endeavor to gut the mechanisms that protect lives from the fossil fuel industry, that cannot be ignored.
Just weeks after the Trump administration vowed to drive 'a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion,' in response to overhauling the social cost of carbon, Gov. Mike Braun signed Executive Order 25-49, 'rejecting social cost of Greenhouse gases and climate action plans.'
And just three days after the White House issued executive orders under the umbrella of the 'beautiful, clean coal' misnomer, Indiana followed suit with Executive Order 25-50, which potentially stalls the retirement plans of coal plants throughout Indiana.
By disregarding the social cost of carbon while doubling down on coal to appease national political interests, Braun is not only defying decades of science — he is knowingly putting Hoosier families in harm's way and pretending not to see the damage.
The social cost of carbon is more than just a number: It is the children growing up in already impoverished areas destined for worse health outcomes because of fossil fuel combustion, the increased risk of cancer from Indiana having more coal ash dumpsites than anywhere in the country, the 460,000 premature deaths caused by coal in the U.S. between 1999 and 2020 and all of the Hoosiers who will face that same outcome on our current path.
We are vested with the responsibility to be the stewards of this land, to truly represent those we have been elected to serve and to deliver a future that is better than our present. It is past time that more leaders of our state live up to that obligation. Hoosiers do not have the time to wait.