The missed casino, proposed site of the new Vigo County Jail, budget borrowing, public safety tax, fire inspection fee and Ubering in Terre Haute.
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: Vigo County Commissioners selected the site of the former International Paper Mill for the site of a new county jail. Some are not happy with that spot saying it's in an area of economic development, what are your thoughts?
Bennett: I guess I wasn't surprised because they own the property, but public reaction has been pretty strong. It's a tough place for the commissioners to be in. They want to move ahead with this and decisions need to be made. I don't think they're going to change their mind on that, but that remains to be seen. I just support the fact that it's going to be in the city, that's the big deal for us.
I don't think it's as bad as some make it out to be and I want the riverfront to develop too. Putting a $70 million jail there and it's not going to look like a typical jail like we have now, so I've already seen the renderings. I know there are jails next to brand new high schools in placed around Indianapolis, so it can work.
Hren: I know you were counting on a 1.25% public safety tax that would be split between the city and county – and would free up a portion of the budget to work against that deficit and pay for the jail, but that might not happen. What have you heard on how to fund the jail?
Bennett: I understand why the county council would want to do the minimum amount of an increase. But the problem is, there are other factors coming down the road. There's additional revenue losses that face us, so if you're going to do this tax, let's plug in the right amount jail and pay for public safety current costs. It's not to make the budget bigger, it's to pay for existing things where we lost money from the people want those services.
Hren: This time of year the city borrows money to get through the budget year as tax revenue comes in. How far can the city go before needing more funds?
Bennett: I wanted to remind people again, for our general fund which is one-third of our overall budget, about 80 percent of our income for the general fund comes in after June 15th. So we have to survive the first five months with reserves and every community does, but we've been tightened with the tax caps. So we borrow that money internally so we can spread that out across the whole year. And there's an interest cost to that, but it lets us keep operations going normally throughout the year.
We've done this six times and hopefully within the next couple of years we won't have to do that.
Hren: I see Terre Haute now has Uber so I wanted to ask you about what we saw happen in other city's regarding the business sparking lawsuits over safety and licensing concerns… has this come up?
Bennett: I'm not really concerned about it at this point. Our taxi services are required to file with us, there's an ordinance for that, Uber is a little bit different. They always seem to work around the fringes. So I think it will be something we'll have to update for our ordinances to reflect that kind of a service because we want to make sure it's safe.
