[3] Pat Bauer attended St. Joseph High School, followed by the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies.
He then moved to serve as the Vice President of External Partnerships for Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana, of which he has since retired in 2016.
[8] On March 28, 2011, after negotiations and compromising on a number of issues, including postponing the controversial right-to-work law, the walk out ended, and Democrats returned to the statehouse.
While some of the Democratic demands were met, including the removal of three out of the twelve bills the minority opposed, a total of twenty-three bills[9] "timed-out" and were killed by the right-to-work dispute, and Democratic lawmakers accrued up to $3,500 in fines, imposed by the House Speaker and Governor as a means to get the legislators to return to the House chamber.
His demands were that Speaker Brian Bosma should hold additional hearings and statewide public meetings on the bill as a solution to end the walk out.
The bill made it unlawful to “use, sell or otherwise dispose of” phosphate detergents after January 1, 1973, due to the harmful effects it posed to our water supply, including The Great Lakes.
The bill was signed into law by Governor Whitcomb in April 1971, which made Indiana the first state to pass a phosphates in detergent ban.
[17] Rep. Bauer played an important role in the passage of the Indiana Felony Arrest DNA Sampling Law SB322 to help solve crimes.
Building a larger DNA database has shown to reduce crime rates, especially in cases of murder, rape, assault and vehicle theft.
[20] In 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a DNA cheek swab sample upon felony arrest is “a reasonable and legitimate police booking procedure,” much like fingerprinting or photographing.
It look three attempts to bring the bill to a vote, and was successfully passed in 2017 and went into effect January 1, 2018 with Indiana being the 31st state to adopt this legislation.
Rep. Bauer is also responsible for enacting legislation to ban the sale of products containing plastic micro beads in the state of Indiana.
These micro was products are small enough to pass through water treatment systems, and have been found in the Great Lakes at high levels.
While this bill did not leave House Committee, language was added to Senate Enrolled Act 2 which limited the number of bus drops offs that require a child to cross lanes of traffic on highways and high speed roadways.
It was reported by The American Farmland Trust that Indiana lost 500,000 acres of fertile farm land to development in the past 30 years.