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: The riverside project has been underway, and we had flooding a couple months ago too. How's that coming along?
Ferdon: It's coming along great. I just talked to some of their staff this last week, and so they're really not behind schedule. Yes, they've had times when their working areas were underwater, but I keep reminding people it's a river, we know it floods, and so it's designed in such a way that there'll be a couple weeks out of every year that we can't use it.
We've got the trail, and we'll have the amphitheater, and it's coming along very well. And just as a reminder, again, this is a safety project. First, the dam will come out in July or August. And then we're fixing the erosion on the banks, armoring the banks to protect an old landfill, and then we're adding a trail to make it safer.
Read more: SR 46 traffic diverted due to water main break in Columbus
Hren: I'm sure gas prices are affecting the city budget, they've been up for a while now, despite the relief of the state sales and gas tax. What are cities doing to stay on budget?
Ferdon: The city of Columbus is in fairly good shape, because we buy our fuel a year at a time, so we get a fixed price, and so we're still under a lower fixed price, but that will end sometime in the future, so our departments just work hard on economizing where we can, typically as we replace vehicles, we're always looking for more fuel efficient vehicles.
The flip side is that's less money that's available for the state to do for state projects, so you know, we will have a lot of projects delayed because we aren't collecting those state taxes, so it's a double-edged sword.
Hren: In Columbus, if you want to save some money on gas, you can get a golf cart now and drive on city streets?
Ferdon: That's right. City council passed a golf cart UTV ordinance, which started June 1, and so we'll see how that works.
There are a lot of requirements - it's not ATVs, it's UTVs, which are utility vehicles and golf carts, but you have to be a licensed driver to drive, you have to have seat belts, you have to have lights, you have to have a lot of safety features that a typical golf cart may not, so it's really important that if people choose to use this, that they understand that there are requirements.
All of our public safety officers have been well trained, and so hopefully they'll be able to manage any questions that people have as on the streets.
Hren: A new state law criminalizing sleeping on public property takes effect in July. Have there been discussions, meetings with officers on how to enforce this?
Ferdon: We're in conjunction with the county - and they have a pretty robust homelessness project that we work through with United Way, we have helped fund that program.
We have a police representative who goes around to the various homeless camps, who knows the people who live there, and so we have taken a very proactive track as to making sure we understand who the homeless are in our community and what help they can use.
We have really, really focused on the preventative side with evictions, and so we have a good enough handle, we believe, on the homeless that we have here, that we don't foresee having to constantly be moving people around in the way that some communities who have much larger populations do.
Hren: A report indicated Bartholomew County is on pace to record its fewest overdose deaths in nearly a decade. We did a story on that in Monroe County as well, and saw the same, what do you account to that?
Ferdon: Because we have a number of programs through our adult drug court, through our in-jail treatment, as well as our ASAP hub. The city and Bartholomew County have spent a tremendous amount of funding over the past five or six years focused on preventative treatment, and so I'm hoping that this is a sign of that. I also know that we have really worked hard and trained our public responders into how to deal with any time that they meet with people who have addiction issues.
I know that Columbus Regional Health has spent a lot of time and effort with their treatment program called Task, so it's really, I would say it's a joint effort, and it's probably the same in Monroe County. There's not just one entity that can make inroads, unfortunately, with the overdose statistics, you know, they go up and they go down, and sometimes it's hard to understand why, but I think the reason that they're at least, we see them in a declining mode, is because we just have constant work going on to prevent deaths.
