In 2025, the legislature passed SEA 1 and called it property tax relief. Look at who actually got relieved.
A 10% credit on your property taxes, capped at $300 a year, no matter how much your home is worth.
Businesses with under $2 million in equipment pay no personal property tax at all by 2027. On $400,000 of equipment, that is about $12,000 back every year, with no cap.
The bottom line: Homeowners statewide split a few hundred dollars apiece. Businesses statewide split an estimated $5.1 billion over three years.
Local schools run on property taxes. SEA 1 cuts that revenue without sending a dollar of state money to replace it. Meanwhile the state is sitting on a multi-billion-dollar surplus that keeps growing.
The Bartholomew County Public Library is projected to lose $761,490 between 2026 and 2028. Then the legislature passed HB 1406, removing the cap on how much a county board can cut a library's budget in a single year. Ryan Lauer voted yes.
Township volunteer fire departments depend on property tax revenue. SEA 1 cuts it. The only fix offered is letting the county raise your income tax to backfill. That is a tax shift, not tax relief. I sit on the Harrison Township Volunteer Fire Company board. I see the pressure up close.
The state is not broke. Indiana's surplus is projected to grow toward $5 billion by 2027, under the very same forecast that says our library, our schools, and our fire departments will lose funding. Ryan Lauer voted for a property tax cut that doesn't cost the state a dime.
He cut your services so the state could keep your money.
Twenty years of one-party supermajority control has a record. Here's what it's produced.
Hoosiers lost the right to make their own decisions about their own bodies and families. Government shouldn't be in that room.
SB 76 bars local governments from setting their own immigration-enforcement priorities and threatens $10,000 fines for stepping out of line. That is the state overriding your community's judgment about how to keep itself safe.
Indiana cut public health funding from $100 million to $40 million a year, while more than 70% of our counties are medically underserved and our maternal and infant mortality rates rank among the worst in the nation.
SB 182 and bills like it single out who can use which space at school. Indiana kids deserve to learn, not to be made into a wedge issue.
Last in the nation for pollution. 70% of our waterways unsafe to swim in. A business climate ranking that fell from 5th to 12th in a single year. Our young people leaving. This is the record. We can do better, and we have to.
Some fights are about your wallet. These are about your freedom.
Freedom to Read
Book banning has come to Indiana. I've stood with the Freedom to Read movement because reading is a right, not a privilege. The same legislative session that cut our library's budget also made it easier to cut further. Funding and freedom, squeezed from both sides at once. The Bartholomew County Public Library belongs to every resident, regardless of age or background. I'll defend it.
Who's Watching the Roads
Those cameras on our poles and stoplights aren't traffic cameras. Most are Flock Safety automated license plate readers. They photograph every passing vehicle and upload the plate, make, model, and color to a private company's servers. That company owns the data. They sell access to it.
Indiana has no law governing this. No limits on how long the data is kept, no rules on who can see it, no warrant requirement. ICE queries these networks. In other states, the same data has been used to track people seeking abortion care and to surveil protesters. Bloomington dropped its Flock contract in 2026 after residents pushed back.
I support statewide rules: strict data retention limits, real access controls, and a warrant requirement before anyone shares your movements. Privacy is a Hoosier value.
I work in technology. I bring broadband to rural Indiana for a living. So hear me clearly: I am not against progress. I am against handing our water and our power bills to out-of-state corporations while the people who live here get no say.
Hyperscale data centers drink. A single proposed Meta facility would use around eight million gallons of water a day. Up north, near the big Amazon and GM sites, neighbors' wells have run dry and the DNR has been investigating why. No utility can simply make more water. Once it's gone, it's gone, and our farms, our homes, and our rivers are first in line to lose.
One large AI data center can use more electricity than every home in a mid-size utility's territory combined. To feed that demand, utilities are proposing new gas plants and keeping old coal plants alive, and they want to pass the cost to you. If a data center closes early, it's ratepayers, not the tech company, left holding the bill.
Too many of these projects arrive through shell companies and rezonings dressed up as warehouses to dodge public notice. In one Indiana county, a 7-million-square-foot data center was waved through as industrial warehousing so the neighbors never got a hearing. That's not how you treat the people who live there.
I'm a member of the Sierra Club, and I work alongside our local Winding Waters Group right here in the Columbus area. Here's what I'll fight for:
- You come first. No sweetheart tax breaks or subsidies without a real, enforceable community benefit, and data centers pay for their own power and water infrastructure, not your monthly bill.
- Protect our water. Hard limits on water withdrawals, with independent review before a single permit is approved.
- Clean power, not more coal and gas. New demand should be met with solar, wind, and storage, not by extending the life of the plants that make our air and water worse.
- Sunlight on every deal. No shell-company land grabs, no projects reclassified to skip public notice. If it affects your town, your town gets a vote.
When residents show up, they win. A data center rezoning near Indianapolis was pulled in 2026 after neighbors organized. That's the whole idea: show up, do the work.