Margaret Avenue is still on schedule, the 2018 city budget is approved and balanced, would new tolls on I-70 help or hurt Terre Haute and the Hulman Center is no longer being considered as a venue for convention center space.
On this week's installment of Ask The Mayor, Terre Haute Mayor Duke Bennett 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: Let's get caught up with the 2018 budget, it's been a couple months since we've been able to talk, especially for those who follow this show, what have you accomplished and where does this leave the deficit?
Bennett: Back in October, we got the budget approved. We reduced the overall budget by about $2 million. It will be overall balanced for the third straight year. We're making progress.
We'll take $3 million off the ($8 million) deficit permanently at the end of this year and then we're extending a loan that will take care of the issue. We're still going to have a little bit of a deficit, it won't show it, but we have to pay that loan back next year so we're still dealing with about $4.5 or $5 million of deficit.
Hren: I know there are still many items you need to fund, one being the wastewater utility. From what I've read in the Tribune-Star, the next step is a $70 million sewer bond, but it doesn't look like it's going to gain approval due to the high cost – but it's an unfunded mandate. There's this notion that council members were in the dark until the bill came, so to speak, is there a lack of communication with this process?
Bennett: If the council decides they want to reduce the amount to approve it, that puts us in a real bind because we are committed to doing these projects. First of all we need to stay on schedule. The next step we have to do is design work. The bond is structured in two pieces. $15 million to do the design and roughly $60 million to do the project starting a year from now.
The council is balking at the number because it went up, I didn't like the number either. So we're looking to get something resolved for Thursday night. We don't share all that information with the council, nobody does. That's the administrations responsibility. Their responsibility is to approve the bond. Of course, they want to know what's in it - I get that, but some of these things we wouldn't normally tell the council ever. There's probably hundreds of other things out there we've not informed the council on because that's not their role, that's not their part of this.
Hren: A new report Monday says local officials plan on pursing construction of a downtown Terre Haute Convention Center without the support of Indiana State. The original plan had a city/county joint renovation of the Hulman Center on the ISU campus, but the university went ahead with the renovation without the city.
Bennett: I don't know if they felt we were moving too slowly, but we still have our commitment of $25 million and believe we need a convention center. So they're moving ahead with the Hulman Center remodeling, we're going to pursue what might be available to us through a public/private partnership, not including ISU. They decided to move on without us, but we're going to continue to pursue something.
Hren: Is that partnership with ISU complete... and the Hulman Center cooperative effort off the table?
Bennett: It doesn't look like it at this point, ISU wanted it to be on the back side and we totally do not support that. We wanted it to be on the front if it was going to be connected to that building. So I think there are some other opportunities that would put it in the same general vicinity, but we'll have to see what kind of public/private partnership we can put together to make it reality.
