The holidays are right around the corner, how the city is doing what it can to be efficient with taxpayer money, volunteers plant 120 trees in the aftermath of last year's tornado and the Kokomo Wildcats are headed to the state football championship in Indy.
On this week's installment of Ask The Mayor, Kokomo Mayor Greg Goodnight 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: It's almost December, 2018 is right around the corner. I know Governor Holcomb touted a historic year for Indiana job commitments and wages, looking back is that something that was seen here in Kokomo?
Goodnight: Yeah, Kokomo's unemployment is hovering at 3 or 3.4 percent, the worst county in the state is at 5 or 5.2 percent which 4.5 percent unemployment is pretty much full employment. There's always going to be people in transition, so the biggest increase percentage wise in the Kokomo economy has been construction jobs. Indiana University Kokomo just did their economic forecast for next year and that was the biggest increase.
Hren: You were on a panel for the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Public Policy Institute and you talked about how cities can be more innovative and efficient… especially with tight budgets and the fact it's taxpayer money, efficiency is really important.
Goodnight: We try to make strategic investments with limited funds, but the name of the game in economic development is talent attraction. Amazon proved that... they set out a strict criteria of what they expected and which communities they were looking at, and that's what all businesses look at.
How do you attract top talent, you attract top talent through your economic development needs, quality of life, making clean cities, safe cities, all those things we talked about for years and years. For us, it's how do we take our money that will have the biggest impact on the quality of life.
Hren: We had a good talk last month on the opioid epidemic and now I see the county held a town hall meeting last week to roll out a plan to help combat this issue, does the city have a role in this as well?
Goodnight: We do, it's a challenge. We have sub-groups, our deputy mayor serves on one of those sub-groups with some other community leaders. The state says it will probably get worse before it gets better. We still haven't stopped with creating new addicts through pain medicine and we've slowed that down, but we're still over-prescribing much more than we were 10 or 15 years ago.
Hren: We're getting to the end of the year, any projects you're looking to finish up?
Goodnight: We've really focused on building construction. Those do have some streetscapes that will be incorporated with them, so some of that is happening right now. Unfortunately we ran out of weather and ran out of time so we hope it's a mild winter and short winter, we've got things lined up for next spring to get started and hopefully get more pedestrian friendly and walkability and all of those things, so we've got some neighborhoods we're going to focus on next year and hopefully make a lot of aesthetic improvements.
