Bennett says Dr. Chris Himsel will be a good fit as superintendent of Vigo Schools, American Rescue Plan money funding meetings are continuing, and the convention center needs more hotel rooms.
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: Dr. Chris Himsel is the new superintendent of Vigo Schools - have you met him yet, will he be a good fit for the community?
Bennett: I've not had a chance to meet him. But I've heard a lot about him. I've talked to numerous school board members about just kind of the process. And as they made their selection, they welcomed him last night, I was unable to attend that meeting, had another commitment. But so far, so good.
I think our schools are critical to sell the community, to have a wide variety of the economic development side, just producing great students, and hopefully some of them will stay here. I mean, it's such an integral part. It we all kind of live in our little worlds. But I think this one's a critical move, to get somebody in here as quickly as they did and hit the ground running. So I'm looking forward to developing a relationship with the new superintendent.
Hren: I know American Rescue Plan money funding allocation meetings are continuing. A Vigo County Commissioner is asking to table a request from ISU because the university wants some money for the early childhood learning program. But I think it just shows how much money there is and how vast that the money can be used for. Is the city going through something like that as well?
Bennett: That particular scenario, the county committed $3 million for the project, the city committed $1 million to it, that gets some READI money, and of course, their own funds to expand their daycare. Well, we all know here locally that we need to do much more in the daycare area, that's not something that typically government gets too involved with. But when you're talking about economic development opportunities, and bringing business where people have to have a place for their kids to go, you want it to be more than just a drop off daycare, you want it to have some educational components to it. And that's what I see us doing.
We have a pool of money to support small businesses. So we're going to use the United Way here to facilitate that, will develop a application process and a scoring process. And then there'll be an advisory team that will make the final recommendations. So soon, we will bring an appropriation to the Council for money to go to the United Way that then they will allocate through sub recipients. Other things are funded directly or city projects will be funding ourselves.
Hren: We talked convention centers with Columbus Mayor Jim Lienhoop last week. And it's interesting on this show, because three different cities with three different ways to approach things, but you were able to get your convention center going well before the pandemic. I know it's hasn't even been a year yet, I think since it's open, but so far how's it working out?
Bennett: Going great Joe. As I've talked on this show before, we need more hotel rooms downtown, but we're getting a lot of conventions, just in the last month or so. We had the firefighters union convention here, Ivy Tech, brought in all their Ivy Tech folks from around the state for a shorter conference. We've had the chamber executives conference was here last week.
So a lot of these folks have never been to Terre Haute, because we didn't have any conference space. Then they come in, some of them hadn't been here in years, maybe they went to ISU or some another school. But now the feedback has been phenomenal. But then talking to people outside of the conference space. Wow, you know, lots of great things happen in Terre Haute, I had no idea. This is tremendous facility, all the kinds of things that make you feel good about what you've done as a community to make those investments that it pays off.
And we get these other two hotels, roughly 200 rooms, we're going to be able to book, the larger conferences, the multi day, four, five day events.
Read More: City, county government resume talks on convention center expansion
Hren: There was always this concern will people want in person meetings after the pandemic?
Bennett: No, I think things are back to normal, I guess the new normal. We talked about that so much throughout COVID. What's it going to look like after? Well, it seems like there's a lot more in person meetings, people wanted to do that they wanted to get back together. Yeah, Zoom and Microsoft team meetings still continue, but people also want to be in the same room. They want to see facial expressions and be able to have those conversations.
Hren: We heard someone ask about the Larry Bird Museum. Do you have new info?
Bennett: We've selected all of the vendors that will do the build out inside - all the display cases and the videos and all the things that go along with this. It's been a challenge just because the NBA controls all of this. Larry Bird owns his own stuff. But you got to get approval from I mean, it's it's kind of maddening in a way of how much legal work goes into this, to get things agreed to to be able to actually open a museum like this.
We're still shooting for first of the year, kind of a thing. Things are being built and things will start to be installed over the coming months, and it'll start taking shape. A lot of NBA, Boston Celtics fans, people call and contact us all the time in some way to say when's it going to be open, we want to travel from Boston or wherever. It's going to be a big hit. And so we want to do right.
