Some Indiana Senate lawmakers are hoping for a study committee that will focus on a program to reduce food deserts.
First, they must convince legislative leaders to direct a committee to examine a potential program to make fresh food more accessible.
Republican Senator Randy Head, R-Logansport, authored a bill last session to reduce food deserts, or areas where fresh food accounts for less than 10 percent of accessible and available food.
His grant program would incentivize new or existing businesses to provide fresh food to those areas – encouraging more grocery stores to open, for instance.
But the idea encountered resistance, mostly, says Head, from Republicans who think it’s a new welfare program, something they oppose.
Yet, Head argues it’s the opposite.
“We’re trying to give families ways to save more of their own money, to budget responsibly, to learn from that to make better choices going forward so that they can get off welfare and stay off welfare,” he says.
Head says he thinks more time, and a summer study committee, can help convince his colleagues the program will work.
The legislative council, made up of the House and Senate Republican and Democratic leaders, meets this week to announce the study committee agenda, and whether Head’s program will be part of it.