INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana Farm Bureau (INFB) leaders and delegates spent a recent Saturday discussing the organization’s priorities for the 2022 legislative session.

Among the topics covered during the Aug. 28 delegate session were broadband, the carbon market, control over legal drain projects, and renewable energy. The 225 delegates who participated in the virtual session had the opportunity to change, add or delete items.

The list of potential legislative priorities started at the county level. In early August, the organization’s resolutions committee met to talk over recommendations. The INFB board of directors is expected to release a list of top priorities in early- to mid-November.

“It’s the grassroots that make this organization great – what we’ve been, what we’ve gotten done,” said Randy Kron, INFB president. “Our clout comes from the grassroots.”

Broadband was a top priority for INFB during the 2021 legislative session.

“The big highlight out of the 2021 session was $250 million for grant funding for broadband deployment,” said Andy Tauer, INFB’s executive director of public policy. Farm bureau and partner organizations are offering a speed test (www.infb.org/speedtest) that will “help us and help the state find where unserved and underserved areas are across the state,” he explained. “It’s important to have that connectivity not only in the office on the farm but as they’re moving up and down the fields.”

The speed test is available to members and non-members. If there is no connection, there’s an option to list an address and note the lack of connection. Participants may also provide the cost of their connection.

During the session, the delegates approved new language stating INFB supports affordable and reasonable costs for connection and monthly fees. The organization also supports increased efforts to speed-up installation of broadband infrastructure in rural counties for high-speed internet service.

The topic of the carbon offset market brought a great deal of comments and resolutions, Tauer said. “As that whole market continues to evolve, our members want it to remain voluntary. They want guidelines at the federal and not the state level.”

The delegates support minimizing the authority of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) and Indiana Department of Environmental Management to regulate the cleaning and maintenance of local regulated drains. They also support local county drainage boards maintaining their authority over local drains.

For wind and solar leases, the delegates voted in favor of requiring a decommissioning bond be in place before any construction begins.

“The reason for the bond is that we wanted to make sure that after the lifetime of this energy system, whether it’s wind or solar or whatever it is, that there is money left available to take care of the closing down or the removal of all that material,” a resolutions subcommittee member explained during the session. “Over a period of time, it’s going to eventually wear out and they’re going to have to do something with it. We didn’t want the local entities to be on the hook for all this disposal.”

As for control over locations of wind and solar projects, “the members think the best government is the government closest to them,” Tauer noted. “Currently, (the authority) resides in local control for those who have adopted zoning planning. Our members want control to remain with local government.”

There was also discussion around continuing to find opportunities for liquid fuels, especially biofuels, as talk increases in Washington, D.C., regarding the use of electric vehicles, Tauer said.

The delegates want landowners and county planning and zoning officials to be notified prior to the implementation of changes to floodplain and floodway maps.

“What we’ve run into is with DNR in particular updating the floodplain/floodway maps and then landowners finding out that they’re suddenly in a floodway or floodplain,” said Jeff Cummins, INFB associate director for policy engagement. “Maybe there’s already construction that’s gone on or being planned for that area or a parcel has been acquired and the guy wants to farm it and now he’s having problems disturbing the soil or doing work on the ground because it’s now in a floodway.”

A Wayne County delegate said when DNR issued new flood maps (in 2019), the county’s government and planning officials didn’t know of the maps. “(The county) issued permits to build houses that were outside of the federal floodplain, but DNR came in and stopped that because it was in their new maps, which they implemented without local input, without notification. We have a small town in the county that the DNR map put every parcel in that town, other than two, in their floodplain. None of those parcels are in the federal floodplain map. I think it’s critical that DNR stop their overreach.”