Unknown Speaker
Hello and welcome to ask the mayor on WFIU I'm Joe Hren - Today we're in Nashville, Indiana, a busy hustling bustling Nashville. Town council President Nancy Crocker joins us once again. Thank you so much. This is the busiest time of the year, and you're still taking 15 minutes to talk to us. So thank you so
Unknown Speaker
much. And I'm working in one of the galleries while we're talking.
Unknown Speaker
That's what I wanted to say. For those who are listening to this program. We were at B three
Unknown Speaker
gallery, a three gallery a little bit about it be three galleries owned by three women, two women, partners and their daughter, Sharon, Jessica busser. And Heather busser. They've had the gallery for about 10 years. And we are on the second floor above Miller's ice cream is the best way to find us. We represent about 85 artists from all over Indiana right now. So we have a real diverse. Featuring of artists, anything from oil paintings to my crazy upcycling art. So lots of lots of great things up here.
Unknown Speaker
So you are part owner? No,
Unknown Speaker
I'm not part owner. I'm one of the 85 artists.
Unknown Speaker
Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. How do you balance being town council president, but also being an artist here as well? Well, I'm working.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I just started doing some painting recently. And I, and I haven't been doing anything much at all lately. But I also moved and did some other things like that had some other things going on. But yeah, it is a balance. It's an interesting thing. Your brain has to work in different ways. But I think that's what makes me more successful in town council because I have that creative side. And I can think out of the box. Being a an upcycling artist, I automatically think out of the box. And so when it comes to problem solving, and things like that, my art is basically putting puzzles together that have never been put together before. So there's all kinds of puzzles that go on with with running a town. And so it kind of just evolves into, you know, working working well, as far as like how my brain works. Maybe not everybody will agree with me, but
Unknown Speaker
Well, we have talked about tourism, because it's that time of the year. This is your what bread and butter. Oh, this is just driving in today. You see all the people. Can you give us an update now on what's today? October 24? Yeah, no, this airs on the 26th. Yeah. How's it going? So far? What kind of crowds are you seeing how many people have been here?
Unknown Speaker
I'm not sure if numbers but there's a whole bunch of people here. So we, the weekends, especially I would suggest if people are going to come between now and Christmas, come during the week, if you can, it'll be less busy. But it has been insane. The traffic is back been backed up for miles trying to get into town. All of our hotels are booked restaurants or have a at least an hour. Wait. I know the birds nest where we were at one time. She told me one day they had to turn away 50 people, which is heartbreaking, because you want to be able to you know serve them but at the same time, that's how busy they are. So it has we have had the most amazing weather and really for the past month and people have been coming, peek leaves. I might have already peaked. But I hear talk that there's another wave that might possibly come through. And so we might get some more color coming up again. Some of the trees that haven't quite turned yet. So there's still that go to the park. Take a hike. It's all beautiful right now. And I don't think the forecast is all that bad, either for the next couple of weeks. I think it's it's looking good. But hopefully we'll get some rain and that's what might bring back some color. So things have been fabulous.
Unknown Speaker
A lot of people here have you heard Are they are they buying things?
Unknown Speaker
They're definitely buying from me. I can tell you so yeah, I've heard a lot of of that people are spending money. And we so appreciate that because this is small town America. This is our only industry here in Nashville and Brown County. And so we so appreciate these people that are spending their time to come here but then their money to help support our community. Because without them we'd be nothing.
Unknown Speaker
So just through this season, is there a number that you can give to them that the number of people you need to talk to the visitors visitors center they have all that in that vote Yeah, all that. Now I know you guys were busy preparing to Back when we talked in June and even July, what are some of the new things or things that you've improved upon here for the drag to make the experience better?
Unknown Speaker
Right? Well, we've got, well, we've got new striping and parking spaces, which, which I mean, it's just a simple little thing, but it does help, especially on would be West Main Street. We reconfigured that a little bit, and so the traffic is flowing better there. And we've got amazing police officers that not only are enforcing things, but are helping people. And, you know, if you have trouble in any way, you know, they're there for you. Luckily, I haven't really heard about a lot of bad accidents or things like that recently. So that's really good. But we have a great staff of people. We've got a new guy, his name is Jamie. He's our town maintenance man type person, and he's keeping our streets swept and keeping the trash up. And we've got an amazing restroom attendant that is working almost 24 hours on our restrooms, trying to make sure that they are clean. So you know, we, we, we all work overtime during this time of year to make sure that your experience here is as amazing as you remembered it when you were a kid.
Unknown Speaker
I wanted to bring up something we haven't had a chance to talk about. And it's it's affecting tourism. And that's Indiana's latest near total abortion ban. Because we talked about that in Monroe County, and they're debating about building a convention center. And the state is saying, Well, you might want to think about that now. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts or concerns about that?
Unknown Speaker
Well, I have concerns about that policy. Personally, I think a woman should have a right choose whatever she does. I don't think anybody should tell her what to do, especially a man. I don't really see a lot of that here. That's one thing really interesting about Nashville and Brown County. I mean, yeah, we have our politics and we have both sides of the Republican and Democrat Party are represented here. But no, I don't see a lot of issues concerning that. That is that are affecting us. People are still coming here. And, and I have talked to people Louisville, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago, a lot of people from Chicago are coming down. So yeah, I haven't really seen it affect us. Hopefully, it won't in the future. But that brings us to another point that people need to get out and vote. I don't care what you're voting for. Just need to vote. Just get out there and vote.
Unknown Speaker
It's so fascinating to me to think that when we were talking about food and beverage tax and the the money that was coming in that it was almost the same, if not more during COVID. Yeah. So this is a place that seems to be somewhat in the tourism keeps going here. Right,
Unknown Speaker
right. People love us. They think they consider us a safe neutral place. And we're trying to keep that impression up. And even town council we are all are all independent. We don't have Democrats and Republicans on town council. So we try to keep that, you know, off to the side. We focus on come here, have fun, eat good food, ride the train that's driving past the window right now, and or ride a horse drawn carriage. My grandchildren were just in town last weekend, and we rode the carriage and they thought they were little princesses waving at people. So you know, try to get get away from all of that when you come here.
Unknown Speaker
So one of the follow up what I think I just heard you say you said on Town Council, there's no Democrats or republican now
Unknown Speaker
we all ran independent. It's not like it's not like it's required. But we just, we it's that's the way it's always been. And everybody just always does that so that we don't have that conflict on Town Council. We are here to serve the town not here to have an agenda. That's what we try to do anyway.
Unknown Speaker
So if there's someone let's say Nashville Town Council, or is it divided into districts?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, hear well, or well, it was but now we're all at large. Oh, at large. We are all at large. So we do have districts but we don't the town council itself doesn't have a district. We felt like that it opened it up so more people could run for town council, if we did that. So we did that about a year or so ago. And we got rid of the districts. So we're all at large. So now we have five people running for council and we have three open seats.
Unknown Speaker
And as many people can can run for an open seat, right,
Unknown Speaker
exactly. Well, not right now. But because it's too late. Well, no, but say absolutely. Yeah, in two years when Then we have another election, it's still all at large. So anybody that lives in town limits can run for those seats. So it makes it again, a little bit more available. The districts were are so weird, and we're such a small little town. It just made sense to open it up.
Unknown Speaker
So I mean, you could have five people running when you go vote. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah. Well, there are five people. And then you vote for your top three, or you vote for one that you'd like, you can go for more than one. You can vote for one or you can vote for three because there's three seats open. Okay, so yeah.
Unknown Speaker
And then the top three. Take a position
Unknown Speaker
then. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I mean, because not when I ran last time, I think for my position, and we were district at that point, right, Around 500 people voted. So you know, it can be really those numbers can be really close. So interesting. You never know. You know, it's over. Yeah. So, but but I think that I can say that this last four years, I'm very proud of what we've done. We've done a lot of organizing of the town, the the town employees themselves, know more about their jobs and what to do. And we've created this great utility board. So we've done we've done that, just just listening to people I was thinking about our interview this morning. And what I wanted to say and I think that the main thing that we've changed is that the people of this town know that this town council, listens to them. And I don't think they felt like that before. And so I do think that people, this community, feel like that we and I am proud that we've been able to change that. Even the parking down there that I was just talking about, the reason it happened is because the residents down there came to me and said, This is a mess down here. We got to fix those. And we looked at it, and we did. So you know, sometimes it works government work sometimes.
Unknown Speaker
Talking about government working been busy coming up with a budget like everyone else has, how was that gone? What's new, what's different?
Unknown Speaker
I don't think a lot is different. Obviously, the police are an issue there. And when I got on council, you know, I was coming in saying we're spending too much money on the police, bla bla bla. And what I've learned is in this town with all the tourism and stuff, we have to spend this money on the police, this chief is amazing. She has created a five year plan now for us. And once we get established and get her caught up, then we can just go forward. And so that's a big difference in the budget, the planning, planning for the future. And we've started planning, we're continuing to plan we have we have the ADA plan. Now we're working on the water plan. Now we've got the police plan. So we're going to kind of keep doing that, and then bring them all together into one plan. And that will help us when we do our budget next year to look okay, we've got this five year plan. This is what we have to do this year so that we can keep up with that. So yeah, I mean, we did we never have any problem with the budget. Our town clerk is so great. She doesn't. She's She watches everything and make sure that we do a good job.
Unknown Speaker
So is she the one that are who drafts it or writes it up?
Unknown Speaker
She pretty much drafts it. Yeah, for us. But we plug in the numbers. And unlike past years, the last two years, we've actually sat down and gone line by line through things and said, Okay, this is how much we spent, you know, do we still want to budget this much. And we really went line by line through the budget this year. And I plan on doing that in the future to
Unknown Speaker
be able to give any salary raises for employees, yes, they'll they'll get
Unknown Speaker
they'll get a normal race at the end of the year, they always get a little percentage at the end of the year. So yeah, and and this year, we hired a town manager to so that's been a huge benefit for her as far as like organizing the activities. She and I are planning to do a Community Calendar starting next year. And this is not a calendar for tourism. It's calendar for the community so that we can get all the community activities on this calendar so things aren't overlapping and, or if they, if they work together, we want them to overlap. So we're going to be working on things like that, again, just organizing planning. I'm very proud of how we've been able to kind of rein things in and look to the future and say, you know, we can't just keep piecemealing things. We need to start planning because we want Nashville to be here. 50 years from now. We want the kids that are coming here to come Back here with their kids. And we we need to make sure that now
Unknown Speaker
well, it's something else should have budget for I hear security cameras going up in a few places in town. Is anything precipitate that? Or is it just something you feel like it's time to do
Unknown Speaker
it? Yeah. And really, as far as the restrooms for quite a while now we've had some vandalism at the restrooms. I think it's just kids that are bored. But so well, that we'll be able to hopefully preempt that. And in one of our parking lots just had some activity that we didn't like down there. So we do feel like you know, some people say cameras don't stop crying, but they definitely detour criminals, if they look up and see a camera and things like that there are some statistics. And if we see that, after a year or two, that these are not necessary, and they're not helping things, then We'll reevaluate at that point. So
Unknown Speaker
is that coming? What budget is that coming from?
Unknown Speaker
I think it's just coming from the General General Fund. Yeah, I think that that's where the money I know some of it's coming from food and beverage for the restrooms. Yeah, some of it's coming from there. So there's two at the restrooms and one at the parking lot. So I think it's a little from food and beverage and from general fund
Unknown Speaker
and you know, the total I don't cover your head
Unknown Speaker
now I need my town manager
Unknown Speaker
manager to tell you details like we're we're actually out of time. I thank you so much. But I always like to give the last word to you. So is there anything else new any announcements that need to be made?
Unknown Speaker
I'd say just vote. That's the that's the main thing right now. Just get out there and vote and let and make your voice heard. No matter what you support. Get out there and vote and and get involved. We're going to need people on our Commission's we're going to be putting people in our Commission's coming up, so get involved in the community. It's a great community to be involved with, so why not? Thank you. Thank you. Happy fall.
Hello and welcome to ask the mayor on WFIU I'm Joe Hren - Today we're in Nashville, Indiana, a busy hustling bustling Nashville. Town council President Nancy Crocker joins us once again. Thank you so much. This is the busiest time of the year, and you're still taking 15 minutes to talk to us. So thank you so
Unknown Speaker
much. And I'm working in one of the galleries while we're talking.
Unknown Speaker
That's what I wanted to say. For those who are listening to this program. We were at B three
Unknown Speaker
gallery, a three gallery a little bit about it be three galleries owned by three women, two women, partners and their daughter, Sharon, Jessica busser. And Heather busser. They've had the gallery for about 10 years. And we are on the second floor above Miller's ice cream is the best way to find us. We represent about 85 artists from all over Indiana right now. So we have a real diverse. Featuring of artists, anything from oil paintings to my crazy upcycling art. So lots of lots of great things up here.
Unknown Speaker
So you are part owner? No,
Unknown Speaker
I'm not part owner. I'm one of the 85 artists.
Unknown Speaker
Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. How do you balance being town council president, but also being an artist here as well? Well, I'm working.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I just started doing some painting recently. And I, and I haven't been doing anything much at all lately. But I also moved and did some other things like that had some other things going on. But yeah, it is a balance. It's an interesting thing. Your brain has to work in different ways. But I think that's what makes me more successful in town council because I have that creative side. And I can think out of the box. Being a an upcycling artist, I automatically think out of the box. And so when it comes to problem solving, and things like that, my art is basically putting puzzles together that have never been put together before. So there's all kinds of puzzles that go on with with running a town. And so it kind of just evolves into, you know, working working well, as far as like how my brain works. Maybe not everybody will agree with me, but
Unknown Speaker
Well, we have talked about tourism, because it's that time of the year. This is your what bread and butter. Oh, this is just driving in today. You see all the people. Can you give us an update now on what's today? October 24? Yeah, no, this airs on the 26th. Yeah. How's it going? So far? What kind of crowds are you seeing how many people have been here?
Unknown Speaker
I'm not sure if numbers but there's a whole bunch of people here. So we, the weekends, especially I would suggest if people are going to come between now and Christmas, come during the week, if you can, it'll be less busy. But it has been insane. The traffic is back been backed up for miles trying to get into town. All of our hotels are booked restaurants or have a at least an hour. Wait. I know the birds nest where we were at one time. She told me one day they had to turn away 50 people, which is heartbreaking, because you want to be able to you know serve them but at the same time, that's how busy they are. So it has we have had the most amazing weather and really for the past month and people have been coming, peek leaves. I might have already peaked. But I hear talk that there's another wave that might possibly come through. And so we might get some more color coming up again. Some of the trees that haven't quite turned yet. So there's still that go to the park. Take a hike. It's all beautiful right now. And I don't think the forecast is all that bad, either for the next couple of weeks. I think it's it's looking good. But hopefully we'll get some rain and that's what might bring back some color. So things have been fabulous.
Unknown Speaker
A lot of people here have you heard Are they are they buying things?
Unknown Speaker
They're definitely buying from me. I can tell you so yeah, I've heard a lot of of that people are spending money. And we so appreciate that because this is small town America. This is our only industry here in Nashville and Brown County. And so we so appreciate these people that are spending their time to come here but then their money to help support our community. Because without them we'd be nothing.
Unknown Speaker
So just through this season, is there a number that you can give to them that the number of people you need to talk to the visitors visitors center they have all that in that vote Yeah, all that. Now I know you guys were busy preparing to Back when we talked in June and even July, what are some of the new things or things that you've improved upon here for the drag to make the experience better?
Unknown Speaker
Right? Well, we've got, well, we've got new striping and parking spaces, which, which I mean, it's just a simple little thing, but it does help, especially on would be West Main Street. We reconfigured that a little bit, and so the traffic is flowing better there. And we've got amazing police officers that not only are enforcing things, but are helping people. And, you know, if you have trouble in any way, you know, they're there for you. Luckily, I haven't really heard about a lot of bad accidents or things like that recently. So that's really good. But we have a great staff of people. We've got a new guy, his name is Jamie. He's our town maintenance man type person, and he's keeping our streets swept and keeping the trash up. And we've got an amazing restroom attendant that is working almost 24 hours on our restrooms, trying to make sure that they are clean. So you know, we, we, we all work overtime during this time of year to make sure that your experience here is as amazing as you remembered it when you were a kid.
Unknown Speaker
I wanted to bring up something we haven't had a chance to talk about. And it's it's affecting tourism. And that's Indiana's latest near total abortion ban. Because we talked about that in Monroe County, and they're debating about building a convention center. And the state is saying, Well, you might want to think about that now. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts or concerns about that?
Unknown Speaker
Well, I have concerns about that policy. Personally, I think a woman should have a right choose whatever she does. I don't think anybody should tell her what to do, especially a man. I don't really see a lot of that here. That's one thing really interesting about Nashville and Brown County. I mean, yeah, we have our politics and we have both sides of the Republican and Democrat Party are represented here. But no, I don't see a lot of issues concerning that. That is that are affecting us. People are still coming here. And, and I have talked to people Louisville, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago, a lot of people from Chicago are coming down. So yeah, I haven't really seen it affect us. Hopefully, it won't in the future. But that brings us to another point that people need to get out and vote. I don't care what you're voting for. Just need to vote. Just get out there and vote.
Unknown Speaker
It's so fascinating to me to think that when we were talking about food and beverage tax and the the money that was coming in that it was almost the same, if not more during COVID. Yeah. So this is a place that seems to be somewhat in the tourism keeps going here. Right,
Unknown Speaker
right. People love us. They think they consider us a safe neutral place. And we're trying to keep that impression up. And even town council we are all are all independent. We don't have Democrats and Republicans on town council. So we try to keep that, you know, off to the side. We focus on come here, have fun, eat good food, ride the train that's driving past the window right now, and or ride a horse drawn carriage. My grandchildren were just in town last weekend, and we rode the carriage and they thought they were little princesses waving at people. So you know, try to get get away from all of that when you come here.
Unknown Speaker
So one of the follow up what I think I just heard you say you said on Town Council, there's no Democrats or republican now
Unknown Speaker
we all ran independent. It's not like it's not like it's required. But we just, we it's that's the way it's always been. And everybody just always does that so that we don't have that conflict on Town Council. We are here to serve the town not here to have an agenda. That's what we try to do anyway.
Unknown Speaker
So if there's someone let's say Nashville Town Council, or is it divided into districts?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, hear well, or well, it was but now we're all at large. Oh, at large. We are all at large. So we do have districts but we don't the town council itself doesn't have a district. We felt like that it opened it up so more people could run for town council, if we did that. So we did that about a year or so ago. And we got rid of the districts. So we're all at large. So now we have five people running for council and we have three open seats.
Unknown Speaker
And as many people can can run for an open seat, right,
Unknown Speaker
exactly. Well, not right now. But because it's too late. Well, no, but say absolutely. Yeah, in two years when Then we have another election, it's still all at large. So anybody that lives in town limits can run for those seats. So it makes it again, a little bit more available. The districts were are so weird, and we're such a small little town. It just made sense to open it up.
Unknown Speaker
So I mean, you could have five people running when you go vote. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah. Well, there are five people. And then you vote for your top three, or you vote for one that you'd like, you can go for more than one. You can vote for one or you can vote for three because there's three seats open. Okay, so yeah.
Unknown Speaker
And then the top three. Take a position
Unknown Speaker
then. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I mean, because not when I ran last time, I think for my position, and we were district at that point, right, Around 500 people voted. So you know, it can be really those numbers can be really close. So interesting. You never know. You know, it's over. Yeah. So, but but I think that I can say that this last four years, I'm very proud of what we've done. We've done a lot of organizing of the town, the the town employees themselves, know more about their jobs and what to do. And we've created this great utility board. So we've done we've done that, just just listening to people I was thinking about our interview this morning. And what I wanted to say and I think that the main thing that we've changed is that the people of this town know that this town council, listens to them. And I don't think they felt like that before. And so I do think that people, this community, feel like that we and I am proud that we've been able to change that. Even the parking down there that I was just talking about, the reason it happened is because the residents down there came to me and said, This is a mess down here. We got to fix those. And we looked at it, and we did. So you know, sometimes it works government work sometimes.
Unknown Speaker
Talking about government working been busy coming up with a budget like everyone else has, how was that gone? What's new, what's different?
Unknown Speaker
I don't think a lot is different. Obviously, the police are an issue there. And when I got on council, you know, I was coming in saying we're spending too much money on the police, bla bla bla. And what I've learned is in this town with all the tourism and stuff, we have to spend this money on the police, this chief is amazing. She has created a five year plan now for us. And once we get established and get her caught up, then we can just go forward. And so that's a big difference in the budget, the planning, planning for the future. And we've started planning, we're continuing to plan we have we have the ADA plan. Now we're working on the water plan. Now we've got the police plan. So we're going to kind of keep doing that, and then bring them all together into one plan. And that will help us when we do our budget next year to look okay, we've got this five year plan. This is what we have to do this year so that we can keep up with that. So yeah, I mean, we did we never have any problem with the budget. Our town clerk is so great. She doesn't. She's She watches everything and make sure that we do a good job.
Unknown Speaker
So is she the one that are who drafts it or writes it up?
Unknown Speaker
She pretty much drafts it. Yeah, for us. But we plug in the numbers. And unlike past years, the last two years, we've actually sat down and gone line by line through things and said, Okay, this is how much we spent, you know, do we still want to budget this much. And we really went line by line through the budget this year. And I plan on doing that in the future to
Unknown Speaker
be able to give any salary raises for employees, yes, they'll they'll get
Unknown Speaker
they'll get a normal race at the end of the year, they always get a little percentage at the end of the year. So yeah, and and this year, we hired a town manager to so that's been a huge benefit for her as far as like organizing the activities. She and I are planning to do a Community Calendar starting next year. And this is not a calendar for tourism. It's calendar for the community so that we can get all the community activities on this calendar so things aren't overlapping and, or if they, if they work together, we want them to overlap. So we're going to be working on things like that, again, just organizing planning. I'm very proud of how we've been able to kind of rein things in and look to the future and say, you know, we can't just keep piecemealing things. We need to start planning because we want Nashville to be here. 50 years from now. We want the kids that are coming here to come Back here with their kids. And we we need to make sure that now
Unknown Speaker
well, it's something else should have budget for I hear security cameras going up in a few places in town. Is anything precipitate that? Or is it just something you feel like it's time to do
Unknown Speaker
it? Yeah. And really, as far as the restrooms for quite a while now we've had some vandalism at the restrooms. I think it's just kids that are bored. But so well, that we'll be able to hopefully preempt that. And in one of our parking lots just had some activity that we didn't like down there. So we do feel like you know, some people say cameras don't stop crying, but they definitely detour criminals, if they look up and see a camera and things like that there are some statistics. And if we see that, after a year or two, that these are not necessary, and they're not helping things, then We'll reevaluate at that point. So
Unknown Speaker
is that coming? What budget is that coming from?
Unknown Speaker
I think it's just coming from the General General Fund. Yeah, I think that that's where the money I know some of it's coming from food and beverage for the restrooms. Yeah, some of it's coming from there. So there's two at the restrooms and one at the parking lot. So I think it's a little from food and beverage and from general fund
Unknown Speaker
and you know, the total I don't cover your head
Unknown Speaker
now I need my town manager
Unknown Speaker
manager to tell you details like we're we're actually out of time. I thank you so much. But I always like to give the last word to you. So is there anything else new any announcements that need to be made?
Unknown Speaker
I'd say just vote. That's the that's the main thing right now. Just get out there and vote and let and make your voice heard. No matter what you support. Get out there and vote and and get involved. We're going to need people on our Commission's we're going to be putting people in our Commission's coming up, so get involved in the community. It's a great community to be involved with, so why not? Thank you. Thank you. Happy fall.
