Budget Season

Friends,

It’s almost July!

Thank you so much to all of the constituents who showed up to the Listening Sessions that Jacob Barnes and I hosted on the 18th and the 27th this month.

My original plan was to write up an email about the state of affairs in the Democratic party this week. But after watching the debate between President Biden and Trump, I need a bit more time to process my grief there.

Then I thought I would type up a summary of feedback from the listening sessions and include that in this email - but it’s taking a bit longer than planned to reformat that feedback into a legible document, so I’m saving that for next week. This gives Jacob and me a chance to sit down together to make sure we both had the same understanding of each piece of feedback and to develop a plan of attack for addressing all of it.

So for now, I wanted to once again return to the subject of money. Specifically, I wanted to discuss the city budget.

Many of you asked questions about what the city is prioritizing with its tax dollars - as folks have seen their property tax bills skyrocket due to assessed values, we want to know what that money goes to and why we still aren’t seeing the results of this larger public investment.

The city actually provides a great starting point for budget discussions on our public websites. Here is a page that provides an overview, and here is the open data portal where you can look up many more documents, including historical ones.

As a result of these excellent websites, it’s easy to see a few things pretty clearly:

-In 2010, Indianapolis had a total city budget of $1,222,654,697. In 2024, we had a budget of $1,561,420,993. That’s a 27.7% increase. So more money is definitely being budgeted and spent. But when you look at the fact that the rough estimate of total cumulative inflation since 2010 is well over 40 percent, that means our government actually has less ability to purchase goods and services and hire people than it had in 2010.

Year
Budget
Increase2010  $1,222,654,697  2024  $1,561,420,993  27.7%

-IMPD: Since 2010, the police budget has seen a 31% increase. As the Indianapolis Recorder presented, Patrol Officers second year made $47,651 in 2017 (the furthest back I could quickly find records for) and in 2024 made $ 75,402. That’s a 58% increase in 7 years - before this year’s union negotiations. These changes were made to help make it easier for IMPD to attract new recruits, as they are currently budgeting for over 300 officers that thus far our city has not been able to hire.

YearBudgetIncrease2010  $209,977,818  2024  $275,110,496  31%

-IFD: Technically speaking, the Indianapolis Fire Department has seen a 102% increase in their budget over 14 years - but that’s very misleading, as the IFD of 2024 has a far broader scope of duty than the 2010 department had. Townships and independent towns like Beech Grove merged with IFD in that amount of time, and the tax revenues that had been more or less paying for the independent fire departments are now funding IFD - so this does not seem like a misallocation of funds to me despite the growth over time.

YearBudgetIncrease2010  $125,988,181  2024  $255,012,408  102%

-DPW: The Department of Public Works is drastically underfunded.  They have seen only a 15% budget increase in 14 years, in a department that likely suffers more inflation-related materials cost increases than any other. Remember that cost of living has gone up 40% since 2010. This is the department that handles illegal dumping; keeping roads clear of mud, snow, and water; trash pickup; and all road maintenance, pothole fixing, road improvement, sidewalk additions, and new road construction across the city.

YearBudgetIncrease2010  $200,211,447  2024  $231,862,218  15%

-Parks: Technically speaking, since 2010 the Parks and Recreation budget has seen a 69% increase - though 2010’s Parks budget was considerably lower than the two years preceding and following it, so it might be more accurate to pretend 2010’s number was $32,000,000. That would still be a 42 percent increase in Parks budget, not even counting the over $100 million that went into parks last year as a special one-time funding. I constantly hear feedback from constituents that matches my own beliefs: Our parks are cherished and are still vastly underfunded when compared to the level of service that we expect and deserve.

YearBudgetIncrease2010  $27,179,690  2024  $45,992,949  69% (nice)

A million caveats should be applied to this data. Some of the biggest ones:

-I'm not an accountant and I may have made some simple mistakes
-There are a lot of agencies and departments I didn't compare - many of them both important and costly.  For example, I believe the Marion County Public Defenders are funded in a totally insufficient way, but they still do receive millions of dollars from our budget - and now that they have won a union, they deserve more to pay their workers better.  
-This is back-of-napkin math as departments have changed in structure significantly and often it's unfair to compare 2010 departments to 2024 due to this structural change.  

I still find looking at these numbers helpful for a starting point for conversation!

How do you feel when looking at your tax bills and looking at the city’s budget? I, for one, am not even close to being satisfied.

Every year, the administration asks the city controller and finance team to meet with each Councilor independently to allow Councilors to indicate their budget priorities. In my meeting last week, I was told immediately that there was no money for anything new due to increasing costs to maintain the status quo, and due to negotiations this year for overdue cost of living increases for the Sheriff’s Department, the Park Rangers, IMPD, IFD firefighters, and DPW AFSCME members.

The current mayor is a strong believer in balanced budgets. As a homeowner myself, I don’t disagree - paying one’s bills is the best way to avoid letting expenses creep up past income.

The current mayor also is a strong believer that constituents would not support new taxes. That’s one area where we strongly disagree. I believe that the rich in our city are paying nowhere near their fair share of taxes into our public coffers, and I would happily raise taxes on the wealthy today if it were within my power and if it was democratically supported as it appears to be based on my conversations with constituents.

But that’s not within my power, as one Councilor out of 25. So I took a look at this last year’s budget to propose my recommended changes to better meet the needs of the priorities my constituents are asking for. Here’s what I recommended:

-Based on all the numbers we just reviewed at the top of this email, and based on the fact that IMPD leadership has consistently told the Council for months that they will not be enforcing traffic laws due to both staffing and equity issues, I don’t believe IMPD needs an increase compared to last year’s budget. In fact, I would cut the portions of the budget going to police staffing and to their equipment by 10% each this year.

-Those cuts would pay for an extensive list of transformational changes this year. Here’s a list of programs we could fund using just those cuts:

1. The Black Church Coalition’s demands (from last year’s Safe and Healthy Communities push)

-$1.2 million more dollars for the Clinician-Led Community Response team to expand to another IMPD district, saving officers the anguish and work of responding to mental health calls that cannot be adequately handled by armed police officers. (this program started out two years ago downtown, and expanded to the East district this year!)

-$5.2 million for the Office of Public Health and Safety’s Gun Violence Reduction Strategy “

-Money in the budget to allow the Indianapolis Fire Department to explore following the lead of Columbus, Ohio’s RREACT team to allow firefighters to help out with addiction issues.

-Make sure IMPD allocates part of their budget for civilian data analysts to track pretextual stops and use of force incidents to prepare that data quickly and openly to the community.

2. The Pedestrian and Cyclist activist community’s demands for Vision Zero:

-$8 million per year to fund a Pedestrian Safety Team to do triage work on the most dangerous roads in the city. This would follow the successful example of Cincinnati, Ohio.

-$25 million per year to address the High Injury Network and High Crash Intersections (which we have already defined as part of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Planning Organization’s research and have reconfirmed multiple times in multiple studies over the years)

-These expenses would help us follow along with Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and other midwestern cities that have shown great reductions in serious injuries and fatalities along their roads - for drivers, passengers, and vulnerable road users alike.

3. The Indy Arts Council’s request for $3 million in public funding for the arts through their grants program.

-In the late 1980s, Bill Hudnut started funding the arts through this program to the tune of $1 million per year. Today, we only pay $1.5 million per year, and the $3 million that the Arts Council is asking for would merely catch them up with inflation. This is frankly too low of a number, but I think an increase on this scale would be easily absorbed into useful projects right away without waste, so I support the number for this year.

4. The Indiana Forest Alliance’s request for $6 million for the city to purchase urban forests.

-The IFA has identified several mature urban forest sites within city limits that are at high risk of being sold to developers who would clear-cut them. Forests are becoming more economically valuable all the time, and Indianapolis has a dearth of forests and other green spaces compared to other cities in the Midwest.  

5. Increased funding for the Parks Department to make sure pools stay open and trash is cleaned up regularly.

-These maintenance issues have caused dozens of constituents to send me emails with complaints. For relatively small amounts of money we could have a much more reliable parks system, which I believe would pay dividends in public safety as well as general enjoyment for families.

6. Double the budget of the Office of Sustainability

-This tiny team works to help make the city not only a more sustainable place, but also a place better prepared for climate change, better able to address concerns of equity and justice, and better prepared to offer resources to private sector businesses trying to improve their footprints. I also appreciate that they are the best department in the city when it comes to providing the data to back up their work. I feel that departments that take metrics and performance seriously should be rewarded in the budget.

7. Increased funding for Indianapolis Animal Care and Services.

-Despite the hope brought by excellent new board members, a new director, and the groundbreaking for a new IACS kennel for the city, the current state of the Animal Care department is abysmal. I defy anyone to tour the IACS facility on Harding Street and deny that we need immediate and large-scale funding to help turn things around for the sake of our animals and our people in this city.

-New funding should also include more funding for the FACE clinic in our district that provides vaccines and sterilizations for animals under IACS’s care.

This is a long list, and it’s easy to add up all the money involved and feel like this would take massive changes in how we fund our city. What do you think: would you rather pay to keep 300 empty chairs open at IMPD, or would you prefer to have the list I offer here?

What would you change about my budget priorities? What am I missing? Where else do you think needs some cuts or increased funding?

In love and solidarity,
Jesse