With the district that includes Gary, Hobart, Lake Station and New Chicago newly redrawn, two Gary attorneys are vying for the chance to serve as state representative in District 3.
City of Hobart Attorney Heather McCarthy is challenging incumbent State Rep. Ragen Hatcher for the spot. McCarthy was previously an attorney for the city of Gary until January.
The Republican Party does not have a candidate on the primary ballot but has until early July to slate a contender for the general election if they so choose.
Hatcher, who was first elected to the District 3 spot in 2018 when Charlie Brown chose to retire after 35 years, is proud of her work thus far. She touted her sponsoring Gary Mayor Eddie Melton’s SB 434 — the Lake County economic development bill — as one of the bigger achievements of the short session.
“That’s the convention center bill, and it benefits all of Northwest Indiana, even if we don’t know where it’s going to be built,” she said.
A second bill on which she was a co-author, HB 1004, covered state pension matters, she said. In it, public employees who’ve retired on or before July 1, 2025, or their beneficiaries, will receive a 1% cost-of-living increase and a 13th check, according to the bill.
Hatcher said she also voted in 2022 for HB 1313, which tests elementary school children for lead poisoning and that she, along with then-State Sen. Melton, were instrumental in getting passed HB 1454, the bill that allows 25 years for Hobart and five other units to repay the $20.8 million to Southlake Mall’s owners after it won a tax appeal, though neither she nor Melton’s name is on the bill.
State Rep. Ragen Hatcher answers a question during a debate with Heather McCarthy, a Gary-based attorney. The debate took place at the Gary Public Library and Cultural Center on Thursday, April 11, 2024. (John Smierciak/for the Post-Tribune)
If she’s re-elected, Hatcher said she wants to work on giving back the portion of Ridge Road that goes through Hobart, New Chicago and Lake Station to the Indiana Department of Transportation and getting the Gary Community Schools’ Common School Fund Loan forgiven as it was for charter schools.
“There needs to be parity between the public and charter schools,” she said.
McCarthy, who earned her law degree after first getting a master’s in English, then a master’s in public health while she worked for a nonprofit mental health organization as its vice president, said she decided to run because “things aren’t fine” in the district.
Former Hobart Mayor Brian Snedecor chose McCarthy to set up the team who worked with legislators on HB 1454; he also tasked her with writing a Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission grant to get funding to fix a stretch of Ridge Road spanning Hobart, Lake Station and New Chicago that’s gotten worse, she said.
Heather McCarthy answers a question during a debate with State Rep. Ragen Hatcher, D-Gary, at the Gary Public Library and Cultural Center on Thursday, April 11, 2024. (John Smierciak/for the Post-Tribune)
When the grant didn’t score high enough, Hobart did get a Community Crossings grant, she said; as such, the city is helping with New Chicago’s portion of the road.
After going through the process of getting HB 1454 passed, one of McCarthy’s goals if she’s elected is to get a handle on how a handful of businesses, such as U.S. Gary Works, are able to self-assess for property taxes.
“We need to have qualified assessments; the way they do it, we don’t know what that means. We should know how they do it,” she said. “Let’s look at this to see if it’s fair or not, because the trigger (to finding out) shouldn’t have been the (now likely dead sale to Nippon of Japan).”
Having testified before the Food and Drug Administration when her son died after a violent reaction to fluoroquinolones — a broad-spectrum antibiotic — and getting a “black-box” warning on them as a result has also primed McCarthy for working with people with disparate views, she said. She spent 10 years advocating for families who went through the same thing she did with her son after that victory.
The lessons she took from that experience, as well as her municipal legal work, are why she believes she would be an effective representative.
“(Our work on HB 1454) wasn’t about ‘party’ — it was about keeping Hobart from going bankrupt,” McCarthy said. “It’s about doing things at the local level and working with both Democrats and Republicans, and having a singular focus on all the communities.
“A state representative’s job is to know these things, because how do you know if legislation around the state will be good for us if we don’t know what we need here?”
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
