Holcomb Secures Most Of His Legislative Agenda In 2017 Session

Gov. Eric Holcomb’s legislative agenda was broken down into what he called the five pillars, including upgrading infrastructure, attacking the drug epidemic, and strengthening the workforce.

Within those pillars were 28 individual legislative initiatives. And Holcomb secured all or part of 26 of them.

Holcomb praised the collaborative effort between his office and lawmakers.

“Now it’s time for us to take these tools and our new resources and put them to work. It’s time to pivot and execute with the plans that we have,” Holcomb says.

Part of his successful agenda includes economic development efforts that, late in session, didn’t seem like they’d get legislative approval: money for the Regional Cities Initiative, incentivizing direct flights at the Indianapolis Airport, and an entrepreneurship fund.

Lawmakers didn’t give Holcomb all the money he wanted for those efforts, but they did boost funding in an existing business promotion fund to be used for Holcomb’s requested items.

And Office of Management and Budget Director Micah Vincent says that arrangement gives them more flexibility.

“And so you can actually take your dollars a little further than when they were separately allocated,” Vincent says.

The two items Holcomb didn’t get: exempting all military pensions from the state income tax and incentivizing more venture capital investment.