Mayor Ferdon says a new Designated Outdoor Refreshment Area would boost tourism and the local economy.
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: City council members are talking about a possible water sewer rate hike. Why is it needed? What are you hoping happens in the upcoming meetings?
Ferdon: Tuesday night is just a discussion. The actual rate increase approvals will come later this fall. It's really just an opportunity for City Council and the community to understand the need for water and sewer rates. I spent, actually, over the weekend, spent a lot of time looking at the projects. It's probably close to a 100 million dollars worth of water and sewer projects that need to be done over the next 10 years. And so it's just really important that our rates keep up with the necessary improvements.
Read more: City Council Packet - September 3, 2024
It's under a lot of our major roads, and so anytime we tear up a road, we want to make sure that we get that particular utility infrastructure replaced. It is aging, and we've been fortunate, because we have not had a lot of major collapses like some communities have. But when you think about the use 100 years ago, and the use now, we need to have updated equipment, larger sizings of our water and sewer infrastructure.
Hren: Anything else on the agenda we should know about?
Ferdon: We have the second reading of an ordinance creating a DORA, which stands for a Downtown Outdoor Refreshment Area, which is a state statute that was passed, I think, in 2023 and a number of other cities around the state have been approving DORA's, and so it's basically setting up boundaries of a recreation area which allows people 21 and older to be able to walk around with an open cup of alcohol. That cup has to be branded a DORA.
This is something that the downtown community has really expressed an interest in having, so the first reading was a couple of weeks ago, and then this is the second reading. There's a map that had to be approved with boundaries and so it's not throughout the city, it's not all of downtown. It's just specific places. And the idea is just to kind of boost your tourism and allow people to kind of move from venue to venue.
Hren: Has there been any pushback on this?
Ferdon: No, we haven't. We've tried to be very careful about where we set those boundaries, and so we'll take it very slow and see how it works. Schools and churches have to give permission. I think we only had one church that was right along the boundary line, and so they gave permission. We'll just try to be very mindful of the fact that the church is there, and we don't want to create any havoc for them.
Hren: In some latest results in the Point in Time Count, numbers of people experiencing homelessness decreased in Bartholomew County this year, but some more people are opting to not stay in a shelter than last year. What has changed about how Columbus is reaching its homeless population?
Ferdon: I think social services have already started working together a little bit better to try to understand that. Our goal is always to decrease our numbers, but we don't necessarily know that means that we have a decreased number just because our count is decreased. We've asked United Way to kind of take the lead on initiative about what would best serve the community of Columbus, because we're going to be different from surrounding cities and counties.
We've already been given some preliminary data. I know they're out talking with stakeholders, primarily other social service agencies, and so we're anxious. I think sometime this month, we'll have some recommendations that we can start moving forward on. But as I say to everybody on the community, this isn't something that just the city can fix, it's really going to take a multi faceted approach, and it's going to take some time.
Hren: The city of Bloomington, Monroe County is in Region 10 and Columbus and Bartholomew County are in Region 11. So some Region 10 service providers are looking to temporarily focus efforts on reunification of people coming from outside of the region, asking or trying to get them to go back to where they were originally from, which could mean going back to Columbus or another region. How would that affect operations in Columbus?
Ferdon: I know historically in Columbus, one of the things our social service agencies have done up front is when they meet somebody new, who is homeless, is trying to figure out if there is anything that we can do to get them back home? I know that we've driven people to other regions. I know that we've given people bus tickets, and if we know that they can connect in family in Tennessee or Kentucky or someplace. We're not just going to put somebody on a bus and create a problem for another community, right? But that's what happens, so I'm glad to hear about the reunification efforts.
That's kind of the first step is that making sure that if somebody wants to get home and has somebody who can help them, that we get them there, because that's probably the best solution for them to begin with, and then the next step is getting to know our homeless individuals. What you might need, might be different for someone else. I know that collectively, they all share a need for housing, but often times it's that housing is based upon maybe they've lost their job, maybe they've been through divorce, maybe they've got an addiction.
So there's lots of different reasons. And we're talking with United Way, how can we identify people one by one and help them in an individual level? And so what would it take to do that?
Hren: So budget hearings are over, how was it first time as mayor? Did you get everything in you wanted?
Ferdon: Much easier because I had other people doing the bulk of the work. But I have to say, we have a great team here at the city. Our city council members wanted to be much more engaged in the budget this year than in years past, so they formed a budget subcommittee. They formed a Personnel Subcommittee, so we met with them much more regularly, so that they kept up with some of the recommendations that we were going to be making, we kind of revamped how we did the capital, made some of the capital decisions.
So I'm not going to say it was an easy process, but I think it got a lot more input from everybody along the way. And so it feels good to have it over. It was a much more efficient process than maybe we've done in the past $51 million general fund, and probably about $110 million overall.
The biggest push that we typically do is public safety. And so this year we were able to do a few things around public safety. We are trying to get NexusPark finished all the way. And so we've put some new monies in different places. So what we hope to do over the next year or so is, once we start getting some results from some of the studies that we've been doing, we'll have funding available to move forward on that.
NexusPark is not still fully sustainable, but it's very close. We knew that it would take several years to get there.
