Broad Strokes of a Better Budget
Friends,
I hope you've enjoyed your weekend. Mine suffered a few curveballs: I foolishly sprained my elbow while doing some work around the house, which hurt a bunch and stopped me from working out and making it to a second canvass yesterday. Then today, my wife came down sick with COVID, which threw our afternoon and evening for a lurch. Still, life goes on and we'll survive.
As we get closer to the end of budget season, I wanted to share with you the broad strokes I've proposed to my peers as the direction we should move as a Council. I'd love your thoughts and feedback on any part of this!
A Vision for Indianapolis:
Indianapolis is our home - a world-class city full of the best people on Earth. But our city is dealing with a growing number of problems. Road deaths are spectacularly high, with over 100 pedestrians and cyclists struck by vehicles in August 2024 alone. The world is being thrust into environmental crisis, yet our city invests far too little in protecting the natural world and mitigating the worst local impacts of climate change. Our streets are in horrific disrepair, where even the lines on the streets have faded away into invisibility. Unmet mental health problems continue to cost lives and cause despair. Five hundred evictions are being filed every week in Marion County, leading to tent encampments of unhoused people all over the city, crimes of desperation, and drug addiction. We are left with a city that looks and works great for tourists, but is severely lacking in terms of quality of life for residents.
It doesn't have to be this way. There is enough money in this budget to make bold progress on not just one or two of these issues, but all of the above.
We can have a dedicated team to fight hard for the safety of those on our roads. We can preserve 150 acres of forest in order to fight the ravages of climate change and create new recreational spaces for citizens. We can invest our public safety dollars into mental healthcare and traffic enforcement. We can invest in affordable housing that builds family wealth at the same time.
But only if we, as a Council, have the courage necessary to meet this moment.
The proposed budget submitted by Mayor Joe Hogsett is a cynical and unimaginative document. The budget defunds parks and neighborhood services, cuts funding for violence reduction and addiction recovery services, and ignores the lethal crises on our streets by hiding away tens of millions of dollars of current tax revenue rather than spending them to help our constituents. Under the proposed budget, homelessness would worsen, violence would increase, traffic violations would continue to be unenforced, and our forests would be clearcut by developers, worsening our stormwater issues and speeding up climate change.
The people of Indianapolis are crying out for effective and visionary leadership. Mayor Hogsett has failed to meet the challenges of the moment, mired as he is in scandals. Without bold action from this Council, we will continue to fail. The Council must rise to the challenge and provide the leadership so absent in Indianapolis. We must do this with every tool at our disposal. That includes holding the Hogsett Administration accountable for what appears more and more to be a culture of rampant sexual abuse and mismanagement. It includes both amending the dollar amounts in each city fund, and amending the budget to be more effective. And it includes proposing specific sources of new revenue.
Fiscal Amendment:
Allocate $26 million from unassigned funds to the quality of life of Indy residents.
Indianapolis keeps a certain percentage of its funds in reserve in case of unexpected need. These funds are proposed to have $73 million more in them in 2025 than required by statute. The administration states that keeping more than the required amount in the bank makes us look good to credit agencies.
Indianapolis’s creditworthiness is vital for the future of our city, and we should continue to pass a balanced budget. However, there is no need to keep such an absurdly high balance while Indianapolis residents are dying and becoming homeless. The “rainy day” is today for many of our constituents, and we should act like it in our funding decisions. If we moved $26 million from the Unassigned Fund to the following programs, we would still leave ourselves with $125 million in the bank in case of unforeseen problems - that's still almost 50 million more than the statute passed in 2016 requires. And look at what we could do with the money:
$8 million for a Pedestrian and Cyclist Safety Team
-This mirrors Cincinnati’s successful recent work and ensures that the Vision Zero Administrator that the Council insisted on hiring has support to specifically look at how to protect vulnerable road users. This funding would include hiring staff members and providing additional resources a la our Spring Fiscal to make it easier for constituents to take leadership in these projects. The new staff members would serve as a Tiger Team to help create crosswalks, curb bump-outs, and other quick build road design elements, as well as liaising with IMPD and other agencies to ensure full city support to protect lives.
$6 million for forest land acquisition and preservation
-The Indiana Forest Alliance made the request for this money to go to purchasing mature forests at risk of being sold to developers and cut down. Investing in mature forests is investing in sustainability both in terms of carbon sequestration and in terms of stormwater mitigation. As climate change continues to grow more dire, investing in protecting our natural environment, especially forests, can no longer be considered optional.
$2 million for the Indianapolis Arts Council
-Republican Mayor Bill Hudnut funded the Indianapolis Arts Council to the tune of $1 million a year back in the 1980s. An additional $2 million a year would barely even catch the Council up to inflation. The IAC does immensely important work around the city, including by offering grants to small arts organizations that otherwise would not be able to survive. Art has a profound impact on both quality of life and safety.
$10 million for housing
-Homelessness is getting worse in Indianapolis. 500 evictions are filed every week in Marion County, and many of the most common-sense and widely-used tenant protections in the world are banned in our city due to the Republicans in state government. However, there is still much we can do on a municipal level. We should drastically increase the number of apartment units we are including in our Master Lease plan, create a Milwaukee-style Housing Trust Fund to help build and restore affordable housing, increase the amount of funding for the Community Land Trust, and hire a staff member to help facilitate the creation of housing co-ops.
Budget amendment:
Reallocate $20 million in Public Safety money to life-preserving public safety programs.
$20 million is the rough amount of money that is being proposed to pay for empty desks and empty squad cars for a number of IMPD officers that all administrators agree will not possibly be hired and retained in 2025. Since we have tried and failed to grow the number of officers in our police force, we should instead look at alternative ways to offer support to the officers we do have. Helping officers continue responding to urgent calls for violent crime is the best way we can help them stay focused on their primary job duties. This means that the city should invest public safety dollars not in empty desks and empty squad cars, but rather continuing to expand on our successes in the CLCR program and the gun violence reduction strategy, and to invest $250,000 in piloting a civilian traffic enforcement program, starting in front of our schools near high-injury and high-fatality traffic intersections.
Revenue sources:
Residents of Indianapolis are not fools. We understand that regardless of what name is used or what mechanism leads to our money going to pay for services, what matters at the end of the day is how much of our money is being collected, and how much of our time, energy, and money is spent privately solving problems that should be solved by our government. The current administration has frequently touted its refusal to raise taxes - even though regardless of the tax rates changing, most Marion County homeowners have seen the actual amount of their money paid in taxes rising consistently. Worse, this increased amount of property tax collection has not seemed to provide greater public services. Each year, constituents pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to fix flat tires, bent rims, and suspension systems in their vehicles due to the disrepair of our streets and roads. We pay due to bites from stray dogs due to the lack of funding for our animal care and control services. We pay for rideshare services due to the lack of funding for our public transportation systems. We pay for access to data and books due to the lack of funding for our public library systems. We pay in the emotional and spiritual harm of watching children suffer homelessness and poverty due to the lack of funding for affordable housing. And we pay in the lives of our loved ones due to the lack of violence reduction systems, anti-poverty measures, and enforcement of traffic laws.
Taxpayers deserve to be treated with respect - and that includes having sober and transparent discussions about the appropriate funding mechanisms to provide them with public services. The Council should take the lead in proposing new sources of revenue for the City and discussing these openly with taxpayers.
Again, all of the suggested changes above could take place without raising any new revenue. But there’s so much more work to be done. Though I still need to research many potential forms of raising revenue, I feel confident in proposing the following two sources of new revenue:
1. Each neighborhood should create an Economic Improvement District as outlined under Indiana Code 36-7-22. This would allow local communities to decide a fair tax rate for residences and businesses within neighborhood boundaries to pool money to fix local infrastructure and keep pedestrians safe. These special districts would be run by a board of property owners in the area, so they could find the best solution for their particular area. (Note that I will be working on this idea independently in District 13 - contact me if you’d like to work on a special district in your neighborhood).
2. Solid Waste: the Solid Waste fees in Indianapolis have not gone up since 1987. Currently, homeowners are paying roughly 50 cents per week for trash collection. It’s not hard to see how this is not a sustainable way to fund trash collection. And it’s no wonder that as a result, Indianapolis is the largest city in the country without municipal recycling collection, much less composting. Though solid waste fees are fairly “flat”, and thus regressive, updating these fees to be appropriate for 2024 is a small step in the right direction towards realistic funding of our government.
City government works best when citizens are involved in the decision-making process. What do you think of this proposed set of amendments to our budget? What would you do differently?
And on the more tactical front, how would you spend a million dollars on infrastructure or parks in the district? My next newsletter, likely coming within the next 48 hours, will focus on the ideas I've heard so far for the use of this money. But it's not too late to share your ideas!
Thanks as always for the support you all have shown during this crisis of leadership in Indianapolis. Together, we will keep fighting to bring vision and purpose to the city we call home.
In love and solidarity,
Jesse