Some residents are still picking up from this weekend's storms, Lienhoop discusses Statehouse bills, the county gets its first solar farm and a State Street bridge construction update.
On this week's installment of Ask The Mayor, Columbus 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. A portion of this segment airs 6:45 and 8:45 a.m. Wednesday on WFIU.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Hren: I read in the Columbus Republic that there was some concern the sirens were late in warning people about the thunderstorm warnings, has that been looked into?
Lienhoop: It's a manual activation. They did go off later that we would have thought. I've talked to Ed Reuter who is the director of the emergency operations center and he's going to do an in depth study to try and understand what happened. Initially he indicated there was high call volume that may have led to a delay, they also indicated the storm came across pretty quickly.
Hren: Was there any Statehouse legislation you were keeping an eye on now that Governor Holcomb has been signing many of these into law these past few days?
Lienhoop: The road funding was important to us. We need to pave 25 miles of asphalt every year and we're probably not getting that done, so we'd like a little bit of help. The Airbnb bill was on our radar, there were some people in the state that wanted to prevent the city from restricting folks ability to be able to do Airbnb, I thought that should be left to the locals to decide.
Hren: You had an open meeting to address community response to the heroin epidemic and had about 500 people show up?
Lienhoop: We had a strong presentation and establish some public education to help people understand the dilemma we're in and begin to outline in broad terms what will likely become our public response. The mayor's budget has about $5,000 to help pay for some studies and travel, the majority of funding is coming from Columbus Regional Health Foundation that will pay for salaries for a couple of people who work in this in addition to some training
Hren: We have an email from Brian who wants to know more about the river front development. He asks if the city is considering the In-water park? He's for it saying it could be a good use of space and appears to have worked for other communities. He adds how would the city fund it?
Lienhoop: With respect to funding, we divide this up into three different pieces. What we've identified is the pump house side of the river, we got the river itself which includes the dam and then the other side of the river. The pump house side we want to snake the People Trail through there to complete the downtown portion of the trail. Then, yes we've taken a look at what we might do in the water. At the end of the day we got four feet of fall, which isn't much but gives us an opportunity for a little bit of fun. So if it doesn't cost a lot of money or maintenance I think we'll go for it. Then on the other side of the river what we've talked about there is more of a park like atmosphere.
Hren: City Council meeting tonight, explain more about the additional budget appropriations that's under consideration.
Lienhoop: When we put together the budget for 2017, we did that in October of 2016. The Department of Local Government Finance had given us some revenue numbers that were pretty low. They told us they were low, we knew they were low. We didn't want to pass an unbalanced budget, so we deferred a big portion of capital projects that we would routinely consider, we're talking $2 million. So when we get the final numbers, we'll return and add those numbers in when we get enough money and we did.
