Besides incumbent Dave Wedding’s Vanderburgh County Sheriff win and State Representative Gail Riecken holding onto her seat in district 77, the local elections were dominated by republicans.
Congressman Larry Bucshon took to the stage Tuesday night during the Republican Watch Party at Tropicana in downtown Evansville after learning of his reelection to Indiana’s eighth district.
“Hoosier values are going to Washington and we are going to change this country,” he said to the crowd. “Conservative values are right for the American people. They’re right for everyone, no matter who you are.”
He spoke to The Shield afterward about the affect an entirely republican congress would have on education.
“Let me just say that everybody in Washington DC, on both sides of the aisle, know that college is becoming too expensive for students,” he said. “I think that the people on both sides are going to work to find solutions to why that is. It’s a complex problem, but the solution is not to just continue to not address the cost and to make students go in further debt to pay it and so I think we will do a lot, I think we will make some headway.”
But Bucshon said most education issues aren’t federal. Local and state issues have caused the cost of education to climb, he said.
“There are a number of smaller things I think we can do to encourage colleges to get the cost down,” he said. “The cost of energy that IU or USI has to pay to heat and cool their buildings – that increases the cost for students. So we got to have low cost energy.”
As for the job market, Bucshon said there are things that can be done about it as well.
“Healthcare is still too expensive and the affordable care act hasn’t really changed that trajectory, it’s still very expensive,” he said. “So that is putting stress on businesses and inhibiting their ability to expand and create new businesses and jobs.”
State Representative Wendy McNamara beat Tony Goben for the district 76 seat.
McNamara, who is director of Early College High School in Evansville, said she is intimately involved with education everyday. She drafts pieces of legislation related to education, but it tends to be K-12.
The job market, though, has a lot to do with retaining college students, she said.
“In the state of Indiana we are looking at significant ways to have our students stay here for college and keep them here after they graduate,” McNamara said. “That is going to require us to get pretty creative as far as making sure we incentivize keeping students here after they graduate. That could be as much as offering in state tuition to out of state folks so that we can keep those folks here after graduation.”
