INDIANAPOLIS — He is the “Builder Governor.” The lasting impression of Eric Holcomb’s eight-year tenure as governor could be measured on what he built, and how he did so and with the steady assets he had at his command. He calls it the “new Indiana” emerging under his watch.
He finished I-69 to Evansville, including the hard part through suburban Johnson and Marion counties, with the new Ohio River bridge into Kentucky sited. He completed the $600 million double-tracking of the century old South Shore Line from Chicago to South Bend at the West Lake spur line. There’s the new $1.2 billion prison at Westville the state is paying cash for. There is the new combined $655 million Indiana Deaf and Blind School campus, the new Fall Creek Pavilion at the State Fairgrounds, the new State Archives Building, as well as the first new state park lodge being built in 85 years.
There is the combined $300 million Gov. Holcomb is funneling into the 92 county health departments. There’s the amicable IUPUI divorce with twin campuses rising up just blocks from the state capital.
As the governor drove from Culver to Potato Creek State Park earlier this month to monitor the first new lodge since 1939 after the initial groundbreaking 14 months prior, Holcomb told Howey Politics, “I want to be graded and measured on the results, not the rhetoric. We don’t just want to build trails, we want to be the trail leader. We want to finish I-69.
“We want to stay state-focused on always trying to do big things,” Holcomb continued.
It will take a decade or so to fully know the impacts of Holcomb’s eight years in office. He spent a decade as an apprentice to Gov. Mitch Daniels, serving as deputy chief of staff. While running a campaign for U.S. Senate, Gov. Mike Pence plucked him from relative obscurity to replace Lt. Gov. Sue Ellspermann in March 2016. Four months later after Pence joined the Donald Trump presidential ticket, he won a second-ballot Republican Central Committee nomination, launching a 106-day come-from-behind victory over Democrat John Gregg.
Holcomb had unusual assets. He’s the only Hoosier governor to serve with Indiana General Assembly supermajorities for both entire terms. Earl Goode, his only chief of staff, is finishing an unprecedented 14 years at that job. He signed the most far-reaching abortion restrictions in state history.
Holcomb’s Indiana received a stunning $6.7 billion from the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including $868 million for rural broadband expansion and $100 million for electric vehicle charging stations.
He never had to deal with a recession. The state’s jobless rate was always below 5%. The Holcomb administration has, so far, been scandal free.
The result is what Holcomb calls an emerging “New Indiana.”
“For us, when you look at the progress we’ve made across the economic development front, the workforce development front and the community development front, Indiana is a new Indiana,” he said. “We have a New Albany, a New Haven, New Castle, New Carlisle and there truly is almost a new Indiana when you think about our health innovation industry, LEAP, manufacturing of isotopes and planned genetics and where we’re taking life sciences and the future of mobility being determined here. We’re working on small modular nuclear reactors. Being in a center of the country gives us an advantage of being in the core.”
And there were galactic challenges. He faced two pandemics, the first was the opioid crisis and a triple digit increase in overdoses. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic found President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Holcomb shutting down much of society in late March 2020 for several months, infecting 2 million Hoosiers and killing 26,115, the most lethal public health episode in state history.
There was no written pandemic plan on the shelf other than for the flu. “We were transparent and very accessible,” Holcomb said of the weekly web-streamed press conferences that he held with state health officials like Commissioner Dr. Kristina Box and Dr. Lindsay Weaver.
“It was like Indiana went to Oz and when the curtain was pulled back and they got to see their government, which was just like them,” Holcomb said.
Despite the criticism from Republicans like Secretary of State Diego Morales, who said he had overstepped his authority during the pandemic, Holcomb won reelection with 1.7 million votes (56.5%). “I had all kinds of people tell me politically this is going to be the end of me and lo and behold we got more votes than anyone who has ever run for governor in the history of this state, still do this day by the way,” he said.
What was the most surprising or gratifying thing he witnessed or learned?
“To learn of the innovation and ingenuity that comes off the family farm or the family factory floor or the small business that has been taken to scale by someone needing to solve a problem on a bigger scale,” he said.
His biggest disappointment? “I would have liked to see pregnancy accommodations done for the state, not just state government,” Holcomb said.
What wisdom would he impart to a future governor?
“Approach with the attitude that every day you’re gonna learn if you stay connected to the ground,” he said, adding that in “remaining humble” he was “courageous and forward-looking, understanding you are not going to please everybody all the time.”
Brian A. Howey is a senior writer for Howey Politics Indiana and State Affairs. Find Howey on X @hwypol.
