Mayor Mary Ferdon says six months in, and things are going strong, but to be patient, there's a number of studies underway to help determine plans for housing and transportation.
In this week’s installment of Ask The Mayor, Columbus Mayor Mary Ferdon addresses these issues and more during a visit to Columbus City Hall. 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. Here are some highlights.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Hren: We're six months into your first year of your first term as Mayor of Columbus. A milestone so to speak. How's it going so far?
Ferdon: It's been a great six months, and it's been a busy six months, I keep waiting for the downtime and never comes. Right now, I think we're kind of in the midst of a lot of studies, we have a housing study that we started earlier this year. RDG is doing it, I think they did the housing study for Bloomington in the past couple of years. So we should have the reports from that in late August.
We just started a public transportation survey, and report our study. And so we're going out to the community trying to get their buy in and their thoughts on where we want our transit system to go. We just finished a performing art study. And we're just starting a Columbus downtown 2030 study.
Hren: Cummins is planning to lay off workers to streamline their operations. Is that something you're concerned about? Is there a workforce development to help those people?
Ferdon: Cummins has been here for 100 years, right. So we've seen some of the ups and downs and understand that there's times that they need to align their workforce, it's always difficult to watch that happen. Both from an economic development perspective, as well as just a personal because, the affected individuals, and hopefully, they can stay here and find a job - we hate to see them have to leave. But you know, Cummins has always been a great partner and such a great employer.
Cummins works very hard whenever this happens, they work very hard with their employees to help them find new jobs.
Hren: We have an email from Allison who started a petition on change.org calling on the Columbus Parks and Recreation Department to address the deteriorating condition of Freedom Field, which the city responded to?
Ferdon: I think it's 17 or 18 years old. Parents got together back then and wanted to build a playground that was inclusive that kids with disabilities can use. And so the community raised a lot of funds to build that. But yes, it's at the place where it's inlined for a lot of improvements. There were a lot of tiles that were missing and needed to be fixed. So we did fix that, we've been in contact with the designer, we'll probably bring them back in and look at the design, it may be time to kind of update a lot of the playground.
I appreciate that group of, I think it's moms coming together and doing that. Right. There's mom-power. And so because it will be a public private partnership, we will need to raise some funds from the community to help do that.
Hren: Last time I was here a few months ago, we were talking about the city looking at a new place to put a conference center. And I know recently I read where the city did buy the former Sears building. So is that anticipating a new conference center?
Ferdon: We just started recently, I think a study called Columbus Downtown 2030 because there's a number of properties like the former Sears building that I say they're in play. They've recently been purchased by either the city or another entity trying to figure out what do we want our downtown to look like over the next 5, 10, 15 years.
So the redevelopment commission did purchase the former Sears building, it was purchased, actually, after Sears by Cummins and then they sold it to the city. And that's part of the discussion that we're having over the next year is what do we envision putting in at Sears. Could it be a conference center which we've talked about prior to COVID? We still believe that there's a need for it and that we can use it. So, who knows.
Hren: Are you seeing commercial entities interested into the commercial places in the mall as part of Nexus Park?
Ferdon: We've got a couple of tenants who are working through the lease, we've got a couple new ones interested. Mother Bears is still not open. We want to get that open. But yeah, we're beginning to see more impact. A lot of potential tenants wanted to wait and see what kind of number of people that were coming through. So we're beginning to get that data.
Hren: The city is working with United Way for a county homelessness initiative. How is that coming along?
Ferdon: We approached United Way. Mark Stewart, who is the President, has a history of working in housing and from Indianapolis, and he's been with us with United Way for many years. And so he kind of embraced our requests, which is can we ask you now to help us as a community, figure out next steps. So he's been having a number of stakeholder interviews, he's had some public sessions where we've had, I think we had 100 people at the last one a couple of weeks ago.
Then he'll come back to the city with recommendations for the next steps. And so I'm assuming we'll get that late this summer, first part of the fall. So they're moving full steam ahead. They talked about it recently at their United Way, annual meeting. So we're very appreciative of the work they've done. And we think that they're the right people to help us kind of work through what we should be doing as a community.
