In this week’s installment of Ask The Mayor, Columbus Mayor Mary Ferdon addresses this issue and more at 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: I know the budget is up for first reading at city council and you'll need to use some reserves next year; how do you plan to fund capital projects?
Ferdon: We're trying to really identify what are capital projects, and we're trying to be more strategic than perhaps we have in the past. We've got a couple of big ones, one big one that we're finishing up, which is our move of our Department of Public Works to a new location, and that should be complete next year.
We've used redevelopment or TIF dollars for that, and then this year we've just launched a new animal shelter. And so we've got the design, we're working on next steps with that. We're doing some fundraising around that, but that will be hopefully completed by 2027, and then, of course, you have to continue to fund Police and Fire and other needs.
So the budget, I think, is around $8 million. We were retrofitting an old building, but it's on a large piece of land. Right now, we don't have a lot of our Department of Public Works and our busses under a roof, and that's really important because that helps the life of the vehicle. We're building a new salt barn, and so we should be able to have everything in one place.
Our current animal shelter was built back in the 1980s at about 4500 square feet, and I think it's probably been filled to the capacity for many decades. And so this is long overdue. We are going to be building a new facility. It will literally be across the street from the current facility.
Hren: I want to get a follow up on just downtown parking. There was debate or study about how long free parking should last. There was some possible, maybe looking into some metering. Has anything moved on that?
Ferdon: There's been a little bit of movement. But now I'm going to segue into our big downtown study. It's called Columbus Downtown 2030, and so there were recommendations around parking that have come out of that.
We're trying to overlay those recommendations with the current parking situation, because the study is much bigger. It looks at infrastructure, it looks at programming, it looks at the real estate that is owned by the city or other entities. And what does the plan talk about parking? Where should it be? What kind of new parking facilities do we need?
Hren: In our last two shows, in Terre Haute and Bloomington, both mayors said that people experiencing homelessness are being transported to their cities, and from out of state and they don't have the resources to help. Is that something you feel happens in Columbus too?
Ferdon: I think it happens in every community, but I can't point fingers any particular place. And when we talk to our police officers and others, they do say that they will see people being dropped off. If I were to take a guess, I would say it's probably coming from communities that don't have the resources that Columbus and Bloomington and Terre Haute have, because it is very resource intensive to address the homeless population.
We work closely with United Way, and they've started an initiative. So we fund them, and they put case workers that go out and work in the homeless population. We formed a task force with United Way and the police department and code enforcement and Department of Public Works, and so we're out there all the time working on it
But a lot of smaller communities don't have those kinds of resources. So it wouldn't surprise me if from their perspective, the best thing to do is to move anybody who's homeless to a larger community. Is that the right way to deal with it, no. But I assume it happens.
Hren: I saw in the Republic newspaper here that the city cleared two homeless camps. What all goes into that?
Ferdon: I just talked about a task force. They identify the camps and then start talking about setting a time. And then the case workers start going in and talking about individually what resources we have, where we can house you in the short term. What do you what do they need? What medical needs do they have? Do they have family that they want us to contact?
And so there's a lot of work that goes in for, you know, many days and weeks before the homeless camp is cleared out. And every time we do that, there's a couple different reasons why we do one is because we know that we're always able to move a few more people into housing. And so that's a huge win. We also know that, unfortunately, those camps can become dangerous places, and there's a lot of health risks there.
