A heroin overdose response initiative, economic development opportunities at the airport, a new parks director and the Columbus Children's Choir is celebrating 20 years with a big concert.
On this week's installment of Ask The Mayor, Mayor Jim Lienhoop addresses these issues and more. Listen to the full conversation with Indiana Newsdesk anchor Joe Hren by clicking on the play button above, or read some of the questions and answers below.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Hren: During your State of the City address, you talked about collaboration with other cities in preventing drug abuse. What have you learned?
Lienhoop: This is a regional problem, and it will require a regional response. We announced our heroin overdose response initiative. Here locally that's a cooperation between the police department and the sheriff's department. And what they've established are some common protocols for investigation for data collection and for storage of that data so it's readily accessible by each agency.
Hren: I saw a report where the parks board leader resigns and sounded like he was frustrated at his post. Were you surprised?
Lienhoop: That was the first time I heard about it. He wrote me an email saying he wanted to spend more time with his family, and then a month later he sent a news release off to the newspaper that said that he was frustrated. And I still don't know any specifics, so we just take it as what it is. He resigned and we move on.
Hren: We did get an email from a Ken, he writes that you ran on a campaign of not losing experienced city employees, but yet you terminated the city fire chief, the city attorney, community development director, city engineer ... Let's clarify his claims, were they terminated?
Lienhoop: Well you had a long list there and I'm not sure they were all terminated, but there were a few instances we felt it was necessary to move on. In general, we replaced three people. We replaced the fire chief, city engineer and the city attorney. We also changed the administrative assistant. What we talked about in the campaign was the excessive turnover among department heads and we made an effort to keep that to a minimum. We've got well over 20, the mayor has an opportunity upon taking office to make changes there, we made three. So I don't feel like we were at all excessive. In fact, we can't talk too much with personnel related stuff, but I'm very comfortable with what we did.
Hren: What other projects do you have in front of you right now?
Lienhoop: We're still working on the Walesboro Industrial development. We're preparing to put applications before FEMA to rewrite the flood map and remove that property from the flood plain. We also have an application that we will submit to the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense so they can release some 50 to 60 year old restrictions that they have on that property.
A little closer to home, we're going to continue to talk about the railroad and what kind of response the community might need to put together for it.
I was in a meeting yesterday about State Street implementation and I'm still hopeful we can begin construction yet this year.
