How many other 2019 council candidates support restrictions on redevelopment commission activities?

Thanks to SW for this link, which dates back three years to a period when Carmel's city council was rolling back previous reforms aimed at taming an amok Redevelopment Commission.

All the themes here are not applicable to our own situation in New Albany, but some certainly are. I concur with the school of thought advocating a curtailment of Redevelopment Commission powers, greater city council control over vast sums of money currently being wielded by a clique of redevelopment cronies, and an enhancement of transparency for everyone involved.

Right now in New Albany, we don't have enough sunshine. Breaking a few comfy, entrenched strangleholds would help with that.

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Carmel removes restrictions on redevelopment commission, by Chris Sikich (IndyStar; 4 Feb 2016)

The Carmel City Council continues to eliminate constraints previously placed on the mayor-controlled Carmel Redevelopment Commission.

Monday, the council unanimously removed a restriction that prevented its own members from serving and reappointed Jeff Worrell.

The restriction was a problem for Worrell. He has served on the commission since 2006 but was elected to the council in November and took office this year.

Worrell is one of five council members Mayor Jim Brainard supported financially in the May Republican primary, a move that swept a majority of candidates onto the council who support his vision for the city's future.

New council members have moved fast to validate Brainard's trust. On Jan. 4, they eliminated a restriction that the commission must seek approval for professional service contracts exceeding $25,000. The council on Jan. 18 eliminated a requirement that the council approve certain debt entered into by the redevelopment commission or its affiliates.

During the mayor's past two terms, the political landscape was different. Political opponents who controlled the City Council were growing increasingly concerned by 2010 that the mayor was using the redevelopment commission to enter into long-term debt without council oversight.

The mayor had been using the commission to bypass the council to financially back redevelopment projects, most notably construction related to The Center for the Performing Arts, City Center and the Arts & Design District.

In 2010, the council passed the restriction on its own members from serving on the commission, saying that doing so was a conflict of interest. Ron Carter, who was the commission's president, was booted off the body.

He is now the City Council president.

The council enacted the financial restrictions in 2012 after passing $195 million in bonds to bail out the commission when it could no longer pay both long-term obligations and ongoing operating costs.

Now that supporters of the mayor control both bodies, Carmel is moving forward with $242 million in bonds to build up to 32 new roundabouts and other infrastructure projects during the next three years.

Worrell said he is comfortable with the direction the redevelopment commission has taken in the past and believes in its mission for the future. He is president of Advantage Medical Rehab Equipment, helps organize the annual CarmelFest celebration and runs the website GoodDayCarmel.com.

He wants to use his experience to see current projects through their completion and to continue to build Carmel for the future.

"There has always been this discussion about transparency," Worrell said. "How much more transparent can you be if you have a representative who is on the City Council participating on the redevelopment commission who can then have some responsibility for making sure the council is aware of what is going on? I never understood the logic of it going the other direction."

Brainard said he wants the most qualified people to serve on the redevelopment commission and serving on the council should not be a disqualification. He also thinks the restrictions the council had passed on the commission were an overreach of authority.

In addition to reappointing Worrell, the council also reappointed Centier banking executive David Bowers to the five-member commission.

Brainard has reappointed Bill Brooks, chief operating officer emeritus of DWA Healthcare Communications Group, and Bill Hammer, a vice president at Simon Property Group, and will appoint Henry Mestetsky, a lawyer with Bingham Greenebaum Doll. He will replace Bob Dalzell, a Wells Fargo financial adviser.

"Carmel, Indiana, is showing suburbs how to go big on biking."

Holy Caesar!

A councilman who rides a bike?

Meanwhile, it's almost as if Carmel has a plan. Just imagine if Jeff Gahan had coherent, organized plans pertaining to bicycling, walkability, street trees and other vital matters -- apart from luxury dog parks and public housing putsches.

Gahan only knows monetization ... but a boy can dream of better things.

CARMEL, INDIANA, IS SHOWING SUBURBS HOW TO GO BIG ON BIKING (People for Bikes)

You’ll sometimes hear that it’s almost impossible to make biking truly desirable in American suburbs. Carmel, Indiana, is proving every day how wrong that is.

The booming city of 90,000, immediately north of Indianapolis but with a distinct and dense downtown of its own, is actually evidence of the opposite idea: The country’s newer, faster-growing cities are where connecting great biking networks has the most potential to transform American life.

As explained in the video above, released Monday by the City of Carmel, the scale of Carmel’s investment in better biking since Mayor Jim Brainard first took office in 1996 can almost be hard for an outsider to believe. The city currently has 190 miles of off-street bike paths, with 20 more miles on the way in the next two years ...

Whither boice.net and the Reisz Furniture Building?

The Reisz building in 2006.

The Green Mouse's ear turns to the rumorama, and specifically, a recent hint that New Albany's boice.net will purchase and rehabilitate the long-moribund Main Street structure known locally as the Reisz Furniture Building.

The rumor was relayed with a puzzling caveat: Boice would be compelled to quantify the amount of money the company intends to invest in restoring the building for contemporary use, to the tune of $3 - 4 million. But to whom is this as yet unverified commitment being made? Seller or city?

The rumor may or may not be true. However, if factual, the obvious question asks itself: Will boice.net be receiving enticement in the form of credits commensurate with sewer tap-in fees waived for the Indianapolis-based developer of apartments on the former Coyle site?

If not, a follow-up: As a city, why do we persist in subsidizing outside entities, and not empower ourselves?

At least we're not the only ones asking this question (emphasis ours).

Carmel to consider incentives for $60M development, by Chris Sikich (Indy Star)

Anderson Birkla is negotiating for tax incentives to build a mixed-use development costing up to $60 million at the former Party Time Rental site on land the city owns in Carmel.

Mayor Jim Brainard and the Carmel Redevelopment Commission have been searching for a partner to redevelop the 6.5-acre site into homes, offices and retail for years, as a component of the city's emerging downtown. The shuttered warehouse is in a prominent location along the Monon Parkway and Rangeline Road, south of City Hall and City Center.

The mayor and redevelopment officials believe the proposed public investment — valued at roughly $9.85 million — is crucial to completing the deal and adding a blighted property back onto the city's tax rolls.

"We always conduct a financial analysis of our redevelopment projects and feel strongly that this project is in the best long-term financial interest of the community," Brainard said. "Mixed-use projects such as this have consistently shown to generate far more tax revenues for the city than the amounts invested."

Critics of the mayor's redevelopment policies, though, continue to wonder how long the city will subsidize development before the private sector will build at market rate.

Speck in Carmel; meanwhile, in New Albany, we wait for ANY Democrat to "get all New Urban" about ANYTHING.

Jeff Speck tweeted this link (below).

By the way, the city of New Albany is spending $194,000 on a "toilet room" at Binford Park. Living and dead trees fall while too few are replanted. We flaunt strange suburban pride in housing demolition without plan one to replace the structures. Heavy trucks keep speeding through downtown residential areas on streets where they should not be. Parking rules are enforced only variously.

Is this the most tone-deaf mayoral term in the city's history?

Better stated, how many "leading" Democrats overall exist in Floyd County even capable of fathoming the following passage in terms of basic reading comprehension, much less actively working to implement the principles enunciated within it?

ROGUE ELEPHANT: What happened when the Republican mayor of Carmel, Indiana, bucked his party and embraced sustainability? He got reelected—four times, by Kim Larsen (One Earth)

 ... Since first assuming office in 1995, Brainard has been steadily transforming his city into a model for how other small cities of the 21st century can use sustainable urban policy to court economic growth, increase populations, beautify public spaces, and greatly improve local quality of life—all while reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

On this last point Brainard long ago established his bona fides. Since 2005, he has been cochairing the Energy Independence and Climate Protection Task Force for the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which has been instrumental in convincing American cities to adopt goals toward lowering their carbon emissions. A year ago President Obama selected him to sit on the president’s State, Local, and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience. After four White House meetings, the 26-person panel is now winnowing a slew of recommendations to present to Obama in November.

Meanwhile, back in Carmel, the Brainard administration continues to find new ways of folding sustainability into the workaday business of city management. Municipal workers, for example, now drive hybrid and biofuel vehicles down roads newly planted with hundreds of trees as part of a citywide goal to achieve 50 percent tree-canopy coverage on all of Carmel’s streets. A new, interconnected system of pathways and sidewalks encourages cycling and walking. And when it came time to update the local wastewater treatment plant, the city opted for a technology that kills bacteria with ultraviolet light rather than chlorine. (Even trace amounts of residual chlorine in treated and discharged wastewater can be harmful to aquatic life.)

It’s significant that Brainard is doing all this as a Republican (one of only four on Obama’s Local Leaders team). He shrugs off any suggestion that his sustainability ethic somehow represents a break with Republican tradition, citing such conservation-minded GOP forerunners as Teddy Roosevelt, who vastly expanded the National Parks system; Dwight D. Eisenhower, who created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; and Richard Nixon, who signed the papers to establish the Environmental Protection Agency. But more to the point, he maintains, no daylight exists between the Brainard administration’s approach to city management and the Republican Party mandate to generate and maintain stable, prosperous communities unburdened by high taxes.

Brainard, loyal Republican that he is, is doing all that. But he’s also doing a lot more—which is apparent to anyone who spends a day or two, as I did, walking around the city he leads. Carmel is being reconfigured according to planning principles that, for many centuries, organically guided the way cities developed—but that, in the era of the automobile, required a renaissance. This renaissance began to take shape in the 1980s in the form of New Urbanism ...

Best guess: You can count 'em on the fingers of one hand, all the while sadly and safely assuming that the absurdly low number is twice or three times that of the total of Republicans hereabouts who've so much as heard of Theodore Roosevelt.

And that, dear readers, is why we're going to screw up this opportunity. In Geico horror movies and New Albany, we make bad decisions.

That's what we do.