COVID-19 hospitalizations in Columbus reached record highs last week, unemployment is hurting the community, the city is creating a safe voting center at Fair Oaks Mall, and officials are still grappling with how to fund the city's golf courses.
On this week’s installment of Ask The Mayor, Columbus Mayor Jim Lienhoop 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: I know you talk a lot about hospitalizations - the metric for coronavirus severity here. I believe you had a record number earlier, Monday? But the numbers are decreasing again?
Lienhoop: Oh, we did. It was late last week, we were up to 21. And that beat the previous high watermark of 20, which was back in April. So we were a little concerned about where that was headed. But those numbers have moderated. The last number I got was down around 10. So, so we feel like we've maybe turned a bit of a corner there.
Hren: Do you see this being one incident? Or is it just something that happens across the county?
Lienhoop: It's really hard to say I mean, our community, the population is small enough that these numbers can be moved by a pretty localized event. We've had a couple of retirement communities, nursing homes, where there were more than 30 cases apiece, and when something like that hits the system, it makes a big jump in the percentages that we see and so attracts your attention and makes you think that perhaps something's going on in the community when in fact, it's just a couple of institutions, a couple of buildings actually.
And, and more to the point, it doesn't really give us any indication that a particular business or a sector of the economy, or the schools, for example, or a church, you know, should change its behavior. So it's always important for us, even when we see the numbers go up to understand what's behind that. And today, it's simply been some bad experience in a couple locations.
Hren: We hear people talk about evictions, utility shut-offs, unemployment. What are you hearing the most about in Columbus right now where people needing help the most?
Lienhoop: Well, most of it is just unemployment. I mean, numbers have gotten better and then the percentages of the unemployment percentage has declined from about half of what it had. But, but I'm concerned that if we don't get people back to work in greater numbers, pretty soon, we will begin to see some evictions, we've begun to see a an increase in delinquencies that are utilities, people paying the water bill late or not at all. And and we can ride some of that out and help those folks. But yeah, after a certain point, it becomes an issue for us.
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Hren: As elections start to creep in, there's been a lot of talk about mail-in voting. The state has been pretty adamant that there will be no mail-in voting for COVID-19 reasons. What's your stance on voting by mail if people don't feel safe in November?
Lienhoop: I don't see a problem with it. But, you know, it's not my decision. What we're going to try to do is accommodate the voting process as best we can. What that means is that in Columbus, we will accommodate voting at Fair Oaks Mall.
You're probably aware that the city and CRH Columbus Regional Health bought that some while back. And we're continue to look for uses while we're waiting to pursue the redevelopment. And so one of the uses that came up was a voting center, particularly for early voting. We can do all the appropriate social distancing, we can allow one exit or one entrance and a separate exit. We can accommodate quite a few people there and should be able to make everybody feel comfortable.
Hren: I don't remember if it was last month or two months ago, we talked about the Greenbelt Golf Course. And basically the city just has too much golfing. And you were looking at trying to get to another way of, I guess, privatizing a golf course, whatever happened to that?
Lienhoop: The first of this year, Cummins decided to reduce its involvement with Otter Creek for the past 50 years. But that brought that more or less on to the city's responsibility, and it also doubled the monetary commitment that city was making. Golf went from about $200,000 a year to about $400,000.
Columbus has got 54 holes of golf, we got 27 out at Otter Creek, 18 and a par three course on Rocky Ford road. And then nine holes at Greenville. Our our initial assessment was to close Greenbelt and to do that about the middle of August. And we found that there was a great deal of consternation in the community about that. And we also heard from a number of folks that there might be some private interest in managing Greenbelt and sort of conserving that or preserving that for the community.
We were prepared to lease that at a buck a year to anybody who wanted to run a golf course there. And we had a few people call us up and express a little bit of interest. We had four parties that did so, three who showed up at a parks department event to answer questions and tours. But at the deadline, middle of the day, last Friday, no one applied or submitted a proposal.
We're going to meet this afternoon with the administration at the parks department, and some of the staff at City Hall and we'll just come up with a proposal to take to the parks board and to the City Council, and we'll see. We'll see where that goes.
Hren: And then I know you've delayed plans to build a new conference center/hotel, downtown, but you're still getting some of the groundwork done?
Lienhoop: We've continued to go ahead with the relocation of the Bartholomew Court Services Building, what some people call the probation department. That's a building that sits on the south east corner of Third and Franklin. And we're going to try to move that to a location south of the jail, and then redevelop that parking lot so that it is ready for the hospitality item when it comes forward.
It actually in terms of timing in the construction, this delay works in our favor. We were a little concerned that we might have to find some temporary workspace for the probation department. But that doesn't appear to be going to be an issue where hopefully we can get their new location constructed within about a year and that should be about the right time to break ground for the hotel conference center that the people involved, the Sprague's, the developers and their contacts at Marriott are still committed to the project.
Hren: And I just pulled up The Republic to see that the December Festival of Lights parade has been canceled already.
Lienhoop: Yeah, you just hate this stuff to happen. We would have about 1000 people as part of the parade. And then you would have several thousand who would line the streets of Washington Street. But it was really hard to see how we were going to get that number of people spread around and there were concerns that we would create a bit of a spreader event so best thought was just cancel it out this year.
The notice is a little earlier than we typically find. But you know, some people put a lot of work into their displays. And so we were hesitant to get started on a float or some such thing and then had it canceled, say a month out, that just wouldn't be fair. So the folks who run the parade, it's actually not a city event. It's a privately run activity and they're the ones who made the decision to cancel for this year.
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