As COVID restrictions loosen, more buildings and places are opening. Human bones were discovered during sewer work. Sewer rate proposal heads to city council. And FairOaks Mall will soon be renamed.
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: Memorial Day was yesterday, for some a three day weekend, one of the biggest holidays since loosening COVID restrictions - especially with better weather. Things have are really starting to open up, but still not really close to herd immunity. What's the plan right now?
Lienhoop: Well the plan is that we're gonna follow the governor's guidelines, which in essence, says if you're vaccinated, you're not expected or required to wear a mask. If you are not vaccinated, we expect you to wear a mask. We understand that's going to put a lot of people on the honor system, and we understand what that means. But so far, the information that we've been given is that the vaccines are very effective.
We had opened the pool over the weekend, we've still got some limitations in place with respect to the number of people that we allow in the facility at one time, even though you're outdoors, we're nonetheless concerned about crowding.
We celebrated Memorial Day Friday night here with a concert, we call Salute. It was outdoors, we tried to limit the attendance to about 1000. That wasn't too hard to do, given the weather.
Hren: Do you feel it's safe to say normal again?
Lienhoop: Well, it depends on how you wish you'd called normal. But I think we're getting there. I mean, the folks from Columbus Regional Hospital told me the other day that I think we vaccinated 48 or 49,000 people in Bartholomew County. You've probably got 10,000 people under the age of 12 really not eligible for a vaccine yet. So you put those two together, and we're beginning to get a percentage that approximates where we thought we wouldn't be able to get in terms of herd immunity and so forth. So, given another month, my guess is we'll be at a point where we can take one more step toward normalcy.
I still think probably through the rest of the summer, we'll be encouraging social distancing. If you've not been vaccinated, you may get through the summer here and think that you're in the clear, and then find yourself at Disney World or a Colts game or someplace where there's a large crowd. And guess what, the coronavirus is still sort of blowing rain in the breeze and you got it. So I would encourage everybody to get vaccinated. And hopefully by the end of the summer, we'll have numbers that exceed 75%. But time will tell.
Hren: Does the new development Columbus Regional Health is working with on the former Clarion hotel site have any effect with their FairOaks Mall involvement?
Lienhoop: Not to my knowledge. Any effect relates to the pandemic, and just trying to understand what our revenue streams are going to be, and how people are gathered. I think at one point, they had very ambitious plans to put a great deal of facilities and a great deal of people into what had been the former Carson's space. And so those have changed, I think they've scaled back their plants a little bit. And, and we have to, the staging is all changed, and so forth.
We're going to be spending this year in a planning stage with the architects and engineers, where we design first conceptual plans, and then once those are approved, then we get some more fine tuned drawings. But hopefully, we'll take a step forward this evening to help with City Council. They'll be asked to appropriate funding for architects and the construction manager. And so we'll start the process soon, with respect to trying to configure what it is exactly that we want to build.
We've talked from time to time about the size of a field house, and the type of structure. But until we get some harder numbers from those folks, we really haven't been able to hone in on final decision.
We picked a name, we want to call it NexusPark. That'll be your connection to health, wellness and recreation.
Hren: Interesting report... I know this was a few weeks ago, but human bones were discovered at a construction site what will be the new probation department? And then the report was it could be an Indian burial ground. What do you have any updates on that?
Lienhoop: No, it's not an Indian burial ground. That is not true. But these are some old bones. It's just a little surprising, but the contractor was out there on site and trying to uncover a sewer line. And the sewer line was built or installed back in 1910 or 1920. So, sometimes the sewer line's about 20 feet down. They found some human bones mixed in with other types of bones - there were some cow bones and pig bones.
The next protocol is when you uncover bones like that you contact the county coroner, whose initial determination was whether or not there's a crime scene there - and he quickly determined that no, I don't think that exists. Soil had not been moved since the building was built on that site back in the 1970s, or 80s. Then they have to focus in on the age of the bones. And if they think the bones are aged prior to 1940, then we contact the Department of Natural Resources, which we did. And they sat down at an archaeologist, who further determined that the bones were likely a couple thousand years old, and that we needed to do some anthropological work as well as contact a couple of tribes.
And so the DNR will, on our behalf, contact representatives of a couple tribes and basically ask them what what would they like for us to do? Do they want us to leave the bones? Do they want us to rebury them somewhere else? Should we send them to the tribes?
At the same time, construction on the site will continue. We'll just work around the area where the bones were found, the sewer line that we were trying to locate, we will reroute.
Hren: I also believe tonight, this is being recorded on Tuesday, there's a sewer rate increase proposal?
Lienhoop: Yeah, we'll consider revising the sewer rates, wastewater and water rates. It's kind of a situation you find yourself in government where we are loath to increase rates, or prices or taxes or any of that kind of stuff. And so we find ourselves where every so often you just have no choice. And I want to say with respect to the wastewater rates, it's a significant increase, but it's been 25 years. And so you may look at it and say, well, that's 75%, or whatever the number may be, well, yeah, you divide by 25, it's 3% a year, which, again, is not that by itself is not a big number.
We're doing this because we really are close to running out of cash. And we've got a significant building projects that we need to pursue. We've got some sewer lines in the city that are 100 years old, and they're doing what you would think a sewer line 100 years old would do in many cases, they collapse or we've ended up with sinkholes, particularly in the Third and Fourth Street areas by California and Chestnut streets.
We've also got a little bit of an issue out on the west side there by the Interstate, we need to add to the sewer capacity that serves the hotels and restaurants out there. I can share with you that right now Columbus is among the least expensive of any community in Indiana. And even after the increases, we will still be among the least expensive. So a $34 bill may become a $40 bill.
Columbus is just kind of fortunate with respect to water, we sit here on a very large aquifer. And it means that when we drill a well, it's really a high producing - the water is cheap for us to get to, there's a lot of pressure. And then we're fairly flat. So the requirements to the pump this water all around the community, is just not that expensive. It'll be a little bit of a jolt I'm sure for some industry and for some homeowners, but it'll still be less here than it is most other places.
