Terre Haute's Duke Bennett has a challenger in the race for mayor, the statehouse session is complete, the city is meeting on how to spend ARPA funds, and the police station is starting a new program.
On this week’s installment of Ask The Mayor, Terre Haute Mayor Duke Bennett addresses these issues and more on a Zoom interview. 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: The Indiana May Primary is over and you have an opponent for the fall. Now you can gear up for the general election?
Bennett: You never know how these things are going to shake out. As I tell everybody, every time we go through this cycle, every election is different. And you never know who's going to be in it, who's going to run how they're going to run. And so this dynamic this time was a little bit unique, because we had two Democrats running and I was running unopposed on the Republican side. And I really wasn't sure who was going to win. So it was kind of a toss up to me. And it kind of turned out that one of the gentlemen was an unexpected win on that side. So yeah, now I can figure out forward with the strategy of who that opponent will be.
Hren: The state legislature wrapped up a week or so ago, it's a budget year - $44.6 billion budget. Any adjustments, cuts, more income to coming to Indiana cities and towns?
Bennett: I'm still going through some things. But our lobbyist is really good about keeping me up to date every day of what's happening with the session. And all the things I was worried about, kind of faded away or became not quite as big of a deal. I'm still anxious to see what they're going to do with property taxes for next year, because I don't really know by reading what they did.
We do locally got the funding for the Goodwill Center that we want to create here to help young people go back and get their high school diploma. That's a big deal for our workforce development side of things. So I was excited about that. I know there's some mental health money out there, but I am not quite as clear how that's going to work its way back to our county. But excited that's happening. And so I think I see it as a good session, especially being a budget year.
Hren: Speaking of funding and processes, the city and county are working on a big meeting coming up this week on allocating ARPA funds?
Bennett: Yeah, it's a meeting that we've been working towards for a couple of months. Baker Tilly will be there RJL Solutions, who's our local kind of helping us work together with the city and the county on this, we've invited all of the city council and all the county councils. There's no public input in this particular session. But people can come and listen to the process of how this is going to work. And then there'll be additional public meetings in the future, both only not only to give public input, but to be able to specifically give input on those things that we're going to spend the monies on.
And so we're talking about housing, we're talking about small business support, we're talking about not for profit support, we're talking about city projects, the county has their list of things. And so we're trying to make sure we utilize these funds in a way that we can use it to as leverage for a match for grants for READI grants that we know are coming again, out of this legislative session. We're trying to make the money go as far as we possibly can get it to go. And so it's a very detailed, long, ongoing process, we will have thousands of man hours in this by the time we complete the process. We've got about $32 million roughly left to spend and the county hast about $20 million.
Hren: I see the Terre Haute Police Department is looking to hire a social worker as part of a program to reduce calls for officers to do welfare checks. What spurred this this new program?
Bennett: We've been looking at it a couple of years now, one of the communities we looked at was Bloomington, I think they're in their second year of having a caseworker. This caseworker is not going to respond to calls, that's not their job, it's to follow up on calls, to hopefully reduce the amount of future calls at that particular address. And to help with a lot of internal things when it comes to dealing with crisis situations.
So there'll be working with mental health providers and local health care providers and not for profits. And there'll be the connecting piece of that. So our police officers can respond to the call, complete that call as quickly as possible and turn over the follow up to our caseworker. I'm gonna guess that we're going to need more assistance down the road with this because I think it works, the model works. It's just doing something that's a little bit different.
We asked police officers to be caseworkers and social workers and things every day. And we want them to focus on dealing with crime. And some of the folks that get caught up in the crime really need mental health and addiction services or some other support system besides the criminal justice system.
