The mayor reflects on a year of COVID, the vaccination supply is still good, a new attraction at Fairbanks park is just getting started, and a casino groundbreaking could come in April.
On this week’s installment of Ask The Mayor, Terre Haute Mayor Duke Bennett addresses these issues and more on a Zoom conference call. 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: It's hard to believe it's been a year, and we're still talking COVID. Walk us back over the past year as we approach the one year anniversary of the pandemic and your thoughts when it all started becoming reality.
Bennett: Looking back at last January and February, I thought, this won't be that big of a deal, then we get into March, where things really started to take off. And it was a lot more public conversations about it and kind of understanding what potential impacts there might be. And I still thought, well, it's gonna be bad, it's not gonna be that bad. And so each month thereafter, you just kind of get a better feel for it. Like this is a pretty big, long term kind of a thing. But I still didn't believe we'd be talking about it a year later.
At the same level I feel things are getting better. I mean, I really do. But still, it's huge. Right in front of you every single day, you think about some impact that COVID is having a tad or what is still to come. And I don't think anybody and I said this before. Nobody knew what really to expect. And so in your mind, you think, okay, we just got to hunker down and get through it. And I believe that we did that. But we've learned a lot along the way, things that I didn't even have a clue about, or really any reason to ever dig into it and understand it.
And then it became politicized throughout the process last year, so much at the national level, that I think we all lost a little ability to figure out what was true and what's not true. And, you can't believe everything you read on the internet. But everybody reads things on the internet. So you have to fight those battles, too.
In hindsight, would I do anything different? Probably not, that I'm sure gonna be prepared for another one, whether I'm the mayor or not the mayor, I think we'll all have a better understanding of what these things can do to us, and how we do what we do to mitigate it. And it's been a very interesting, challenging and frustrating all at the same time.
Hren: With the vaccine now, do you see a little bit of a light at the end of the tunnel? Is it too early to start relaxing restrictions? You may have seen a few states have relaxed the mask mandate.
Bennett: I think that's probably a little premature, but I understand why they want to get their states open and kind of get back to normal, I completely get that. And I support that, in essence, but I still think we need to have some precaution. So let's open things up that people if they continue to be mindful of social distancing and, wearing a mask for a while longer, then you get the best of both worlds.
To me, it's more of a common sense approach. But, it's become such a political hot potato for both sides. No matter what anybody says if it's a Democrat, Governor, republican governor, we had a republican president or now democratic president, the other side's skeptical, and so we got to get beyond that, it's got to be based on the facts and some common sense.
Hren: In terms of the economy, who's going to need the most as the recovery ramps up?
Bennett: It really to me is exclusively small business. Most of our manufacturers here, we were very pleasantly surprised that we as a community worked through this. And most of them did not have any major impacts of loss of employees due to being off from COVID. And their orders kept coming in. And so they all have done pretty well. Our small businesses are the ones that have suffered, people didn't go out to eat, they didn't go out shopping, you know all those things. And they're the ones that continue to struggle, whether they got a PPP loan, or they didn't, they're still continuing to struggle.
Hren: Have you seen the new economic relief package from Congress? Do you feel positive? I see there's a line in there for $350 billion to states and municipalities.
Bennett: I don't know what the rules are going to be attached to that yet. I haven't got any clarification. But when you think about back to that small business thing, I would throw in there museums and other kinds of entities like that. So the money that we received in the first COVID rounds of reimbursement didn't allow us any flexibility to help any of those businesses or anything. Indianapolis was able to do it, because they haven't had a different set of rules. The rest of us weren't able to use those funds for that.
Hren: I want to ask you about a bill that the governor vetoed, that was overturned by the Indiana Senate, it blocks cities from regulating rental properties. Some say it takes away the ability of local officials to protect tenants from abusive landlords. And I was thinking about cities like Bloomington and Terre Haute, other college towns, where you have a lot more rentals. What's your take on on this bill? Is this government overreach?
Bennett: I've got mixed feelings about it. So I like having some control. We have a lot of college housing here, no question. Some of it's not the best and some of the landlords, they just kind of provide a place for people to live and don't put a lot of money back into it. And I suspect and know that some of them are probably not nearly safe, from a fire perspective. But without the ability to go in and do some things, we just can't barge into a place and dictate what they do. And I don't want to do that.
And I understand the pushback from landlords and others. But there has to be a compromise in where we can ensure that there's a safe environment. Some communities jumped in there and did that early. But a lot of us really wanted to find a way to compromise that. I kind of come at it where I understand that they'd like some overall strategy, but telling us that we can't do anything is probably not the answer, either.
Hren: Still a lot of casino news, we should say a lot of that lies outside of the the Terre Haute casino, which is now under Lucy Luck Gaming. You last month said you were hoping for groundbreaking soon, but we haven't heard anything yet.
Bennett: Well, I believe most of the issues have been resolved with the Gaming Commission, which was all positive. I am told that we'll be having a scheduled date for a groundbreaking very soon. So I would say I don't know, it's probably not going to be March, but I would say it's probably April. But it's going, the plans are moving now.
Hren: And how about an update on the Fairbanks Park project?
Bennett: We've been thinking about different ways to bring people to the river. So it's part of our overall riverscape planning as part of our community plan. As we bring more people to our community, we want more destinations. And then for the people who live here, too, in Fairbanks Park is our park on the river in the city of Terre Haute. And so we've always felt like we needed to do more provide more amenities down there.
So some of the things we're looking at is the new boathouse that the rowing crew will be using. They'll be having some regattas on the river in the future. We're looking at rehabilitating a piece of artwork. It had water that came down off of it into a garden area, we're going to put a splash pad in in conjunction with adding a kind of a water destination for people to come and cool off in the summer with native Indiana plants. Looking at some rehabilitation of the amphitheater and the Chauncey Rose Memorial that's both located in that park.
And then a river walk, beginning stages of some sections of river walk. So, right now we're going through the preliminary planning steps to get to a Rose-Hulman class that's helping us with that. And we'll turn it into a more formal planning process. And I would hope some of those projects will then begin next year, and then go over in the next couple of years.
Hren: Where is the funding coming?
Bennett: Most of the money will come from either EDIT or the casino funds. We don't have a budget quite yet, because they're kind of pieces. My guess is we'll do probably two or three phases of this. But you know, we're talking about a couple of million dollars minimum just to kind of get the project going over the next few years. That'll be some engineering work up front. And then we'll begin to implement those projects over the next two or three years that I would suspect will be in that $2 million range, probably, for the majority of it. But we'll know more here in the next few months as we get it, get some engineering estimates.
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