City budget proposals presentation, taking over county recycling operations, the mayor's Climate Leadership Summit agenda, downtown art and the economic impact of Municipal Stadium.
On this week's installment of Ask The Mayor, 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.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Hren: Budget proposals must be getting close to being presented. What area are you working the most on?
Goodnight: It's healthcare costs for city employees. It's been a tough year for us. Just had some unfortunate circumstances with our employees or their spouses or dependents. So we're dealing with that and we'll have to make some moderate changes. Someone asked me a couple years ago when will we get to through the operations point when we feel comfortable and my answer was I hope we never get there. We should always continue to do a better job and find ways to be more efficient.
Hren: How are you able to provide trash and recycling services throughout the city with no fees?
Goodnight: Yep, no user fees - we have weekly trash pick-up and bi-weekly recycling and we do that through the city, we don't contract that out. A few years ago we went to something that saved us more than 20 percent, single side trash pick up where we asked our residents to take their trash tote across the street so we could make one pass and we were able to eliminate a lot of the routes, save wear and tear on the vehicles and save fuel.
Hren: You've recently proposed the city taking over recycling throughout the county to reduce costs, when did you realize this was an option?
Goodnight: We made some bold moves over the past few years. We've combined our dispatch, there was a recognizable savings. We instituted a free to the rider bus system, we acquired a waster water treatment plant outside of Howard County and lowered the cost by using our waste water treatment operators to help manage and save money. We think we could provide a better service to residents and combine our resources and do that at a less expensive cost. We think it would save more than $700,000 over five years.
Hren: They postponed a vote until the next meeting. I wasn't there, but from the Tribune article there was skepticism, why?
Goodnight: I think change. It's the same resistance, it's the politics of politics. It's the same people that always say it can't be done. These are the same people that say we can't do this with the dispatch services, that said we couldn't come in and provide services to Prairie Utilities. So we're always trying to evolve as a city. It's nothing I didn't expect, but I think this is a win for taxpayers.
Hren: The Kokomo Jackrabbits finished up their season with a packed stadium, are you able to start measuring the impact the stadium is having on the city?
Goodnight: You can gauge things by dollar value, there's a lot of ways to gauge things, but there's a lot of sense of pride then obviously the economic impact. This year we hosted the state American Legion tournament here, we had the All-Star game so the visitors that come ... we still have high school soccer, but the biggest impact will be the construction around there. The Flaherty & Collins apartments we announced about a year ago, you'll start seeing next week the construction fence going up and the rehabilitation of that neighborhood.
