Republican Indiana State Representative Kendall Culp is planning to submit some bills for consideration during the Indiana General Assembly when it opens for the short session Monday, January 8.
A bill Representative Culp will present in this session is one that would prohibit adversarial countries to purchase or lease farmland, mineral rights, water rights, or riparian rights in Indiana. Those countries include North Korea, Iran, China, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela.
Another agriculture bill Culp will present will aim at promoting argi-tourism.
“This is kind of a carve-out for those small, seasonal ones that may have a pumpkin patch, or a corn maze, or an apple orchard or something like that and they open it up on the weekends for the public to come to,” explained Representative Culp. “They are really highly regulated and that’s through the Department of Homeland Security in Indiana so they regulate those. It sets those seasonal ones aside and instead of having an annual permit they will have a five-year permit. They have to submit a safety plan so they have to continue to show that it’s a safe operation, but we don’t want to over regulate those. A lot of those are just a small family with some small acreages just trying to diversify their income.”
A workforce bill that focuses on youth workers will be presented by Culp for consideration in this legislative session.
“The government is saying that you can’t work past 9 p.m. So, basically when I looked into it, we have more restrictive laws, regulations, on that youth employment in Indiana than the federal government does. This bill just aligns our standards with the federal standards which means we’re going to allow youth, maybe, in some cases, to work more hours than Indiana is allowing them. In a time where we have a workforce issue in Indiana, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, to me, to tell our youth you can’t work because it’s too late for you to work when the parents say it’s not too late.”
Representative Kendall Culp represents District 16 which covers portions of Jasper, Pulaski, Starke and White Counties. Constituents with questions or concerns can email h16@iga.in.gov.
More on what Culp will introduce in this year’s legislative session will be featured Monday.
