Produced by:
Progressive Indiana Network : https://www.progressiveindiana.net
Moderator:
Rachael Chatham: https://rchathampr.com/
Candidates:
Tiffanie Arthur: https://www.tiffaniearthur.com/
Anthony Bolen: https://www.anthonybolen4in63.com/
Adam Mann: Campaign Facebook
SUMMARY:
Three Democratic candidates for Indiana House District 63 debated across five policy categories — healthcare, infrastructure, affordability, education, and housing — covering eleven substantive questions. All three candidates broadly agreed on core progressive critiques: Indiana’s Republican supermajority has consistently prioritized corporate profits over working families, a budget surplus has been accumulated at the expense of services, and the state’s rural communities bear a disproportionate share of the resulting hardships. Tony Bolen, a manufacturing contractor from Dubois County, emphasized workers’ rights and corporate accountability. Adam Mann, born and raised in Dubois County and based in Jasper, focused on troubleshooting bad policy and applying critical thinking to regulatory reform. Tiffanie Arthur, chair of the Daviess County Democratic Party, small business owner, and former preschool teacher, brought community organizing experience and firsthand knowledge of rural healthcare, housing, and childcare gaps. The debate concluded with a rapid-fire speed round covering thirteen issues, followed by closing statements.
BREAKDOWN:
00:01:36 - Opening Statements
• Tony: Blue-collar background, 15 years in service industry, 14 years in automotive remanufacturing; wants to restore connection between government and citizens and return power to the people
• Adam: Born and raised in northwest Dubois County, calls Jasper home; wants to apply critical thinking and problem-solving to reckless lawmaking; sees abortion as a symptom of deeper economic problems; focused on aligning wages to actual cost of living
• Tiffanie: Lifelong community member, small business owner, mom, farm community member, former preschool teacher, and current Daviess County Democratic Party chair; running because working families are doing everything right and still falling behind on energy costs, healthcare, and farmland protection
00:08:14 - Q1: HEALTHCARE — Rural Hospital Access and Medical Workforce
Southern Indiana hospitals are closing or months-booked, injury deaths are 40% higher in rural communities than urban, and medical talent is hard to attract. What will you do to bring healthcare to southwest Indiana?
• Tony: Indiana has 400,000 to 500,000 uninsured residents; after cutting Medicaid rolls, the state built a $670M surplus; hospitals survive through use and funding, not emergency rooms as last resort; get people insured and into the system
• Adam: Assess supply and demand; subsidize hospitals that serve low-density regions even when patient volume can’t sustain them; audit which regulations are driving medical personnel out of Indiana and cut those
• Tiffanie: Ensure rural hospitals receive fair Medicaid reimbursement rates; protect and expand critical access hospital funding and stabilization grants; incentivize providers to work in rural areas; strengthen workforce pipelines through school and training partnerships
00:13:25 - Q2: HEALTHCARE — Medicaid Cuts and the Healthy Indiana Plan
Two in seven Indiana residents are on Medicaid. A projected $985M–$2.4B shortfall is driving significant cuts; over 100,000 could lose coverage. What is Indiana’s obligation to its most vulnerable residents, and do you support expanding the Healthy Indiana Plan?
• Tiffanie: HIP fills the gap for self-employed and lower-income residents, including her own family; while budgets matter, a healthy state requires people be able to access care without falling into medical debt; would look hard at expanding HIP within budgetary constraints
• Adam: Health is degrading in ways that have been normalized; Medicaid and Medicare are necessary for a productive workforce; would work within the budget shortfall to prioritize healthy Hoosiers, though acknowledges limits if federal funding falls short
• Tony: Wants every Hoosier to have health insurance; supports a tiered system for HIP or Medicaid where income levels determine buy-in amounts rather than hard cutoffs, giving the state leverage to negotiate with providers and pharmaceutical companies
00:18:14 - Q3: INFRASTRUCTURE — Rural Road Funding
37% of Indiana roads are in poor or fair condition; INDOT recently delayed 300 projects due to inflation and declining revenue. How will you secure funding for road repairs?
• Adam: Start by reviewing tax revenue and identifying cuts that can be redirected; strongly opposed to toll roads as cost-inefficient and resident-funded; wants existing roads fixed before new ones planned; calls out the MidStates Corridor as wasteful
• Tiffanie: The state ended the last fiscal year with a significant surplus — question is why that money isn’t going to road improvements; US-231 through Martin and Dubois counties was scheduled for upgrades but money was folded into the MidStates Corridor tier-one study; toll roads are just another tax on rural Hoosiers who already travel farther; calls out governor’s helipad and cabinet luxury vehicles as misuse of taxpayer funds
• Tony: Agrees toll roads are just another tax; Indiana has other ways to raise revenue, including rolling back corporate tax cuts and data center tax breaks; the $660–$670M budget surplus means the problem is not collection, it’s delivery of services
00:23:13 - Q4: INFRASTRUCTURE — Rural Road Safety
Indiana ranks fourth nationally for deadly crashes on local rural-type streets; local non-highway roads account for 28% of the state’s fatal crashes. What will you do to improve road safety?
• Tiffanie: Personal and lived issue as a Daviess County resident; narrow roads with no shoulders, slow farm vehicles, and semis create high fatality risk; intersection improvements like a left-turn lane on SR-257 in Washington could make a big difference cheaply; buggy lanes in Daviess and Martin County Amish communities have already helped; widening and intersection evaluation are the tools
• Adam: Most crashes are driver-related — recklessness, speed, poor judgment; improving the economy reduces desperation-driven risk-taking; also supports better police funding to enforce road laws; infrastructure improvements where structurally needed
• Tony: Community feedback is essential — people who drive these roads daily know the danger spots; cites widened US-231 in Spencer County and J-turns as effective low-cost solutions; state should investigate every fatal crash cluster and act quickly when a dangerous intersection is identified
00:28:22 - Q5: INFRASTRUCTURE — Public Safety: Mental Health, Addiction, and Community Trust
Public safety includes mental health services, addiction treatment, stable housing, and trust between residents and institutions. What comprehensive approach would you take, and how would you balance law enforcement against prevention and community-based services?
• Tony: Mental health and drug treatment programs need more funding and better visibility; normalize getting help before incarceration; adequate policing where needed, but focus on community trust and involvement
• Adam: Wants to move away from treating police as jacks-of-all-trades; different situations need different specializations; advocates for shared resources between communities with different police specializations; acknowledges funding limits
• Tiffanie: Safety requires addressing root causes, not just outcomes; opioid crisis has touched nearly every community in the district; unreliable broadband hampers telehealth; school funding cuts reduce school-based mental health access; law enforcement cannot be mental health providers; cites the RISE peer recovery services program in Daviess County as a model worth replicating; stop crises before they start
00:33:08 - Q6: AFFORDABILITY — Rising Costs for Working Families
Gas prices are surpassing $4 a gallon in many areas, grocery prices are up 2.8%, egg prices have spiked from bird flu, and working families are squeezed. What will you implement to reduce costs and ensure measurable impact?
• Tiffanie: Economic policy should be concrete, not abstract; corporations posting record profits while families struggle suggests a tax fairness problem; utility regulation is a state-level lever worth using; cannot let corporations extract from Hoosier families without accountability
• Adam: Much of the cost problem originates at the federal level; at the state level, would require data centers that drive up electricity prices to compensate communities directly; would use surplus funds as grants for utility infrastructure so rate increases aren’t passed to residents
• Tony: Limited state-level control over gas prices, but Indiana has one of the highest gas taxes in the country and that could be examined; trickle-down economics has failed after 40 years and it’s time to tax corporations and high-income individuals fairly, including wealth not derived from traditional salaries
00:38:25 - Q7: AFFORDABILITY — Utility Rates, HEA 1002, and Data Center Accountability
Indiana passed HEA 1002 in 2026 to address rising utility costs and regulate how large energy users connect to the grid. The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission is governor-appointed and utilities are major political donors. Data centers will significantly increase electricity demand. What steps would you support to keep rates fair while allowing economic growth?
• Tony: Stop letting utility companies hide rate increases in surcharges and fuel delivery fees while claiming their rates haven’t gone up; utility companies in Indiana profit 10–20% on every dollar collected; would consider legislation requiring utilities to offer large consumers like data centers the same rates they offer residential customers
• Tiffanie: HEA 1002 takes some steps in the right direction — protections during extreme weather, more predictable billing — but predictability isn’t the problem, the bill amount is; most Indiana utilities operate as regulated monopolies and need more oversight and transparency; data centers that drive up costs for local Hoosiers should not be welcomed, full stop
• Adam: [Note: Rachael inadvertently skipped Adam on this question and looped back mid-debate; Adam supplemented his earlier affordability answer] Data centers getting utility tax breaks is backwards — if they’re taking from the community, they need to put something back; would investigate utility companies’ actual production costs to distinguish reasonable profit from reckless profit
00:42:25 - Q8: HOUSING — SB 285, Homelessness Criminalization, and the Housing Crisis
Indiana’s average rent is $1,399/month and the state has the highest foreclosure rate in the nation. SB 285, effective July 1, 2026, makes camping or residing on public property illegal, with a 48-hour move-or-face-misdemeanor provision. Do you support this law? What will you do about the housing crisis?
• Tiffanie: [Answered first in this section] Punishing people who are already struggling with fines, court costs, or jail time only perpetuates the cycle of poverty and homelessness; the state should lift people up and connect them to services; supports incentivizing renovation of aging homes through grants to put available, affordable housing back on the market
• Tony: Can’t remember being more against a law; where exactly are homeless residents supposed to go — five feet, out of state? The state lacks the infrastructure to support the unhoused; Republican legislature wants to cut township services that help people near foreclosure; supports financing incentives for older homes that get passed over for new construction; criticizes SB 285 without hesitation
• Adam: That bill needs to go; we need to stop criminalizing living; housing cost is a complex problem — building regulations that make homes safer also make them more expensive, and there’s no clean way around that; the answer is higher wages, better access to funding, and businesses investing in workers
00:50:01 - Q9: HOUSING — SEA 1, Property Tax Fairness, and Downstream Damage
In 2025, the Republican supermajority passed Senate Enrolled Act 1, which Gov. Braun called historic tax relief. Homeowners got up to $300 in credits; large property holders and businesses got growing exemptions; cities, counties, and school districts face projected hundreds of millions in revenue losses. What does real tax fairness look like, and what would you do about the damage SEA 1 is causing in District 63?
• Tony: Doesn’t oppose eliminating property taxes in principle, but any cut requires finding that revenue elsewhere or cutting services; SEA 1 got it backwards — big breaks for corporations and multi-property owners rather than single-residence homeowners; wants to restore homestead credits, lower primary residence rates, and fix the illogical disparity that taxes farmer-owned farmland at 2% while their home is taxed at 1%
• Adam: Would want to repeal SEA 1; supports a progressive property tax system that minimizes the burden on single-home owners while requiring multi-property owners to contribute more to community coffers; local governments depend on property tax revenue and that has to be balanced
• Tiffanie: People deserve real relief, but not like this; property taxes fund schools, emergency services, roads, and daily operations — cuts have real consequences; SEA 1 didn’t give Hoosiers meaningful relief ($300 doesn’t move the needle) while quietly gutting local revenue; targeted relief for seniors on fixed incomes and working families, not corporations or large property owners
00:55:09 - Q10: EDUCATION — ABA Therapy Caps and Literacy
Indiana recently capped ABA therapy at 30 hours a week with a three-year lifetime limit. One in five third graders struggle to read. What is your plan to address literacy?
• Adam: Would remove the ABA caps; wants more funding for education overall; acknowledges he’d defer to experts on specific literacy strategies but wants resources restored that have been cut
• Tiffanie: Taking funding from public schools through SB 1 and the voucher program is not how you improve literacy scores; giving the governor more control over education goals doesn’t help either; smaller class sizes, better school funding, livable teacher wages, and retaining good teachers are the levers; public schools teach 90% of Hoosier children and are being systematically defunded
• Tony: Education problems come down to funding; the new charter school property tax sharing provision will deepen public school budget cuts — the state saves $1,400 per student while charter schools still see that money; supports smaller classrooms especially at the elementary level; strongly supports expanding pre-K and Head Start to get kids into learning environments before age four or five
00:59:38 - Q11: EDUCATION — Child Care Voucher Crisis
Indiana’s child care voucher waitlist has topped 30,000 children, closed to new enrollees for over a year, with no new vouchers until 2027. The state simultaneously cut reimbursement rates — infant care down 10%, preschoolers down 15%, school-age children down 35% — closing providers and forcing impossible choices. Republicans passed HEA 1177 expanding employer tax credits and allowing TIF districts to fund child care. Should child care be treated as a constitutional right like K–12 education? What would that look like in practice?
• Tiffanie: Personal experience — applied for the daycare voucher as a single working mother in the early 2000s and was told the wait was years long; dual-income households are nearly an economic necessity today, so cutting child care options while expecting a strong workforce is contradictory; doesn’t see it as a constitutional right per se, but we shouldn’t be punishing young families or single mothers; reimbursement rates must be adequate to keep providers open, particularly the primarily female workforce in that field
• Tony: Doesn’t frame it as a right exactly, but notes K–12 is only a constitutional right because we collectively decided it was for the common good; expanding pre-K and Head Start benefits any child in the public system; baffled by budget cut rhetoric from Indianapolis while the state simultaneously touts a large surplus; the people making those cuts in Indianapolis aren’t using those services — the families losing them are
• Adam: Child care should be treated as a right; you cannot expect families to exist and procreate if you make family life economically impossible; references a Jasper Chamber of Commerce town hall where local legislators admitted they don’t know how to get families to have children — the answer is you have to provide conditions that make family life viable
01:05:34 - Speed Round (Yes / No — Order: Adam, Tiffanie, Tony)
• Conversion therapy ban lift: Adam — pass (unfamiliar with topic) / Tiffanie — No / Tony — No
• Indiana joining National Popular Vote Interstate Compact: Adam — No / Tiffanie — needs more research / Tony — Yes
• AI restrictions: All three — Yes
• Data centers in your county: All three — No
• Mandatory swift path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants: Adam — Maybe / Tiffanie — Yes / Tony — Yes
• Minimum wage increased to a living wage: All three — Yes
• For-profit prisons: All three — No
• School privatization: All three — No
• Healthcare for all: Adam — Yes / Tiffanie — Yes, in an ideal world / Tony — Yes
• Self-driving cars on public roads: All three — No
• Is the American dream realistic for average Americans today: All three — No
• Drones in warfare: Adam — Yes / Tiffanie — Possibly / Tony — Yes
• Cannabis legalization: All three — Yes (Tiffanie added “with guardrails”)
01:09:18 - Closing Statements
• Tony: All three candidates agree on most issues — voters are choosing the person as much as the platform; wants to bring common sense back to Indianapolis and end the system of profits before people; calls for restoring civil, community-focused politics and refocusing on the 99% of issues where working people actually agree
• Adam: Acknowledged “maybe” and “need more research” answers during the speed round as intentional — he won’t use political buzzwords that have lost their meaning; wants to restore accountability and sensibility to government; government should be of, by, and for the people, not captured by business interests
• Tiffanie: This race is about the families of District 63 who are doing everything right and still falling behind; has been all in from the start — out in the community, listening and learning; this is a commitment, not a stepping stone; will show up and fight for working families and make sure that when no one else is listening, she will be
