Bennett says crafting next year's budget is top priority this month, the city needs a workforce that's ready to work with housing on every level, and his reaction to the Danville casino opening.
On this week’s installment of Ask The Mayor, Terre Haute Mayor Duke Bennett addresses these issues and more on a Tuesday 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: You say crafting next year's budget is your top priority this month, Are there any areas in the budget from this past year that maybe saw a lot of overtime or went way over budget that you'll have to adjust?
Bennett: Yeah, good question, a couple. Sometimes they're the regular things like our fire department, it all depends, when we're fully staffed. And when we're not, our call volume keeps going up every year. So we have mandatory overtime. And we always are a little bit out of whack, two out of every three years. And we're off a little bit this year on that one.
Fuel costs have been all over the map, they're back up again this week. Costs based last year was a bad year for gas prices. But this year, we had some relief for a few months, but now it's back again. So, we're thinking we're gonna have to build a little bit more for next year, because I have no idea what gas prices are going to do.
We'll run a little over in some departments, mainly street departments. One because of the storm we had a little over a month ago, we've been running those trucks six days a week, all day.
Hren: The Indiana Chamber of Commerce leaders say the state is a lap or two behind its competition when it comes to workforce development, educational attainment, they have a new economic vision plan. I bring this up because it's a big deal in Terre Haute with a new casino, convention center, the $1.5 billion investment with the battery parts producer - more than 1000 new jobs in Terre Haute coming up. Is the state doing what it can to help?
Bennett: The Indiana chambers got their strategy. And obviously, they put a lot of research into that. We have to have a workforce that's ready to work. So that means we've got to get kids graduated from high school, step one, some of them are going to go to college. So they have to be able to afford to go to college and be able to get in and get the training they need to prepare for the workplace.
If they don't go to college, we've got to have a pathway for those students to get some technical skills to go into the workplace. We have to have housing for all these people. That's a big thorn in our side. And we have to have childcare, because we still have a lot of parents, one or two of those parents are staying home because they can't afford childcare. Or they can't get in because there aren't any open spots.
We got to figure out how to one make our giant pool bigger, we need more people here. So we have to increase our population, have to increase the numbers of people that are available for the workplace, or we're not going to be able to recruit these businesses. But government's going to have to tag along here to figure out what role government plays because government isn't going to solve everything. They can sure help facilitate and fill the gap to get the private sector to do what it needs to do. So it's a it's a tag team effort.
Hren: You mention housing, where's Terre Haute right now in housing, you know, what do you need and where?
Bennett: We need all levels of housing from, $150,000 single family homes to $500,000 single family homes. We need duplexes and triplexes, we need multi unit apartment complexes, we need lower end, subsidized housing, we need high end apartment buildings, apartments available for people.
So we're trying to develop our housing program that we've talked about, where the city's putting in $5 million, and the county's putting in $5 million to help developers to build these projects out. We met with some developers recently, last week, out of Indianapolis area, we were looking to do some bigger projects, we're working with our local home builders and developers. We need to be able to look at that bigger picture where we can build 50 at a time or under at a time.
Hren: Bloomington and Columbus still trying to get convention centers off the ground. What was key in getting the Terre Haute one moving forward?
Bennett: Be on the same page. And I think sometimes even in our past, the commissioners and the mayor weren't on the same page. We had different political parties, there was lots of reasons. But over the last 10 years or so we have worked so well together, that we're able to accomplish some big things.
The hard part was to get everybody to work together to fund it and get a bill. So it's a model based on sometimes you just gotta shove everything out of the way and figure out how would you do what's best for the community. It's not a city thing. It's not a county thing. It's a community thing. And I think we really jumped a big hurdle on that one. From our perspective here locally, we continue to find projects that we're working together on to advance the community. And so that's how you get things done. It's not always easy. You know, we have our struggles here, but we're really clicking on all cylinders now.
Hren: I read in a news report the Danville, Illinois casino opened not far from there. I read that they were getting about 30% of Indiana residents. I believe there was some concern back when Terre Haute was vying for a casino that these two would create too much competition? Was that ever on your mind or even moreso now?
Read more: Terre Haute's new casino hiring for March opening
Bennett: It can be competitive, no question about that. But when you talk to the all the folks that put in proposals for our casino, they took that into consideration, and they really believe that more people are likely to come from Indianapolis to Terre Haute and they already go from Indianapolis to Danville. And when the distance being almost identical, it's just kind of the nature of people to want to go to the closest best place. And we really believe this casino will stand out from Danville. They'll probably steal some business from up in the northern counties. But I really believe that we have a niche here between Danville, French Lick, the Indianapolis area, Anderson, Shelbyville, will be drawing people from Illinois over here, because of the quality of this casino.
