Four Republicans vie to succeed state Sen. Wyss

April 28--An Allen County seat in the Indiana State Senate is open, without an incumbent, for the first time in a generation. Now a novice with a successful background in business joins three well-known officeholders in the competition for the Republican nomination.

State Senate District 15, now represented by Tom Wyss, who is retiring, includes a broad swatch north-to-south through Fort Wayne, including much of northeast Fort Wayne and north-central Allen County. The challengers include Allen County Sheriff Ken Fries, Allen County Councilman Darren Vogt, former Fort Wayne City Councilwoman Liz Brown and Jeffrey Snyder, the founder of a vending business that employs 75 people.

Liz Brown

During Liz Brown's four years on Fort Wayne City Council, 2008-2012, she won the admiration of some and the hostility of others through her direct, even confrontational style. In retrospect, she prides herself on digging deeply into the financial details and operations of individual departments of government.

If she's elected to the General Assembly, she sees it as a good chance to do the same in state government. "I wasn't a political insider," she said. "I learned how things work."

Besides looking for waste or inefficiency in state government, Brown said she'd be alert for "agency creep," departments of state government that are exceeding the authority the Legislature intended for them. "We can write laws making sure they stay within their boundaries," she said.

That search for agency creep would be part of one of her major interests as a state legislator: making state government more transparent.

A second area is working to refine the balance between cutting taxes or trimming the expansion of state spending and pushing duties onto local governments without means to pay for the extra work. There's no pat answer to what the correct formula is, as she sees it. Local governments may need new streams of revenue to compensate for taxes eliminated by the state, but Brown said she's not in favor of allowing local governments extremely wide latitude to spend and tax as they choose, either.

As is the case with many legislators and aspiring legislators, Brown said that education would have to be a third strong focus for her in the General Assembly. Of particular concern to her is workforce development, making sure that high school graduates are trained to either take on work or to succeed in post-secondary education they will need for more specialized careers.

Ken Fries

Allen County Sheriff Ken Fries said he was disappointed to see legislators burn up so much time on the anti-gay-marriage amendment this year. "I would have liked to have seen it go through with both sentences and let the people vote on it," he said.

It wasn't just that he disagreed with the outcome; spending so much energy on that proposed amendment to the state constitution left less room for matters that should have drawn more attention. An example looming for local governments: A revision in the criminal code that will mean more prisoners are housed in local jails, Fries said.

"If the state (Department of Correction) thinks it's going to save a million dollars, somebody else is going to be spending that money. We're still going to have bad guys still committing crimes, still being incarcerated, still being arrested. ... My biggest concern is that shift is going to go from the state to the counties, and come July, we're going to find out our jail's not big enough," he said.

He sees the three biggest priorities of the General Assembly as infrastructure, education and public safety.

Where public safety is concerned, Fries has some quite specific items on a legislative agenda, such as changing county jails' responsibility for inmate medical care to exclude pre-existing conditions.

Jeff Snyder

Jeff Snyder, who has not held elected office, says that his 40 years of familiarity with small business are the biggest advantage and distinction he would bring to the Legislature. He runs Snyder Food Services, based in Kendallville with offices in Fort Wayne, and he's been involved in the vending and food distribution businesses since his parents started the business.

He says he would bring "a good basis of understanding business and business needs" to the General Assembly as a state senator. But he knows that what seems good for business isn't automatically the best thing for the state as a whole.

A case in point: He has mixed feelings about legislation that allows counties to eliminate the business personal property tax if they choose.

"As a business person," he said, he favors it. "As a constituent, as a citizen, (I'm) concerned about funding some of those things once that money is missing. I'm still thinking that one through myself."

He said he thinks public education needs to do more to take account of the needs and opportunities of students who decide not to go to college.

"I have huge concerns about whether everyone needs to go to college to be successful. ... I have an associate's degree, but I'm not sure how critical that was to my business success," Snyder said.

He said he'd like to be known as someone who represented people in his district fairly, but he doesn't want to paper his office with bills he writes.

"I'm not one of those people who intends to go down and author 52 bills a year. Less is more," Snyder said.

Darren Vogt

From his vantage point of more than 11 years on Allen County Council, Vogt sees evidence that too many state legislators have lost touch with the needs and constraints of local government.

Like Fries, he's concerned that legislators enacted a massive cost shift onto local jails without "doing their homework." Similarly, he believes that the General Assembly moved too quickly to pare back the business personal property tax, failing to consider that it was a seemingly stable source of income that counties had planned around and even earmarked for debt service.

He says he would press for greater home rule for local governments as a member of the Legislature. He said he wants the state to both be more consistent and to provide more authority to local governments as it shifts obligations to the smaller units of government. Vogt said that after more than a decade holding office in county government, plus a career running an insurance agency, he can bring perspective that seems to be lacking among legislators.

As with many candidates this spring, Vogt thinks public education needs to work in a bigger role for vocational education to prepare more students for opportunities that actually exist -- and are often unmet -- in northeast Indiana's economy.

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