REMINDER to Mayoral Candidates: Evansville’s 10 Most Important Things to Get Right in 2011!

City County Observer Readers Respond

As part of our December reflection period, we at the City County Observer solicited our readers opinions on the 10 most significant things that we need to get right in 2011 and how those things will impact day to day life for the people of Evansville. Our readers have nominated a list of 18 items that they hope to see come out favorable for the people of Evansville in the next year. The top 10 were chosen based on the frequency in which our readers suggested each item and on how realistic the probability is that this will be able to be done well.

THE TOP TEN

The 2011 City Elections: The entire City of Evansville slate of elected officials is up for election next year. It is expected that unlike the election of 2007 when Team Weinzapfel dominated the ballots that nearly every office will have serious contestants vying for office. The public’s discontentment with government’s performance of the past four years in many ways reflects the illusion of an 85% mandate that having weak opposition created in 2007.

For the first time in 30 years the elections for the governance of the City of Evansville appears uncertain in most offices. Only Dan McGinn and Connie Robinson seem invincible on the City Council and the race for Mayor of Evansville is really turning into a race that anyone can win. Will 2011 be the year that Republicans take back the Mayor’s office and control of the City Council? For the first time in a long time that is a possibility.

What constitutes getting it right? From a City Council perspective right is a council of nine independent thinkers who have both the curiosity and awareness of what it takes to get Evansville on track to perform minimally at national averages in all economic categories. Party affiliation is not important and should not be a yardstick when choosing who to vote for. The best City Council will be a smart principled City Council with a 5 – 4 party make-up. Which party? It does not matter as long as the partisan block of 5 who seem to vote in unison is stopped.

An Evansville for the next Decade Plan: Other cities had plans for the decade that just ended and Evansville did not follow any plan whatsoever. The most recent Downtown Master Plan still shows a baseball stadium where “the District” is and shows no Arena. The time for planning is now and the time for winging it must end. It is also time to engage in comprehensive planning with attention paid to economics, lifestyle, attractiveness, and competitiveness of the entire city not just the downtown.

Evansville has many plans going back to the 1960’s that seem to provide nice fat checks for out of town consulting firms and become dust gathering paperweights afterward. Is it possible for our current City of Evansville leadership to put together a plan for the decade that is both achievable and desirable? 2011 will tell us that answer.

Civic Beautification: Will 2011 be the year that Evansville finally embarks on a program that instills enough civic pride in our citizens that they will stop littering and start cleaning? This has been a problem for half a century with no solution in sight. The solution is for every person to stop littering and pick up 3 pieces of litter each day for all of 2011. If this simple plan happens at the end of the year the problem will be solved and it will be FREE.

Come on Evansville, LET’S GET PRETTY!

The Hiring of a new Executive Director for the Evansville Convention and Visitors Bureau: Let us all cross our fingers that everything that needs to be done to hire someone to this position can happen in 2011. We continue to tout our attractiveness, our favorable, weather, and our facilities as things that are great for tourists. Let 2011 be the year that the board of directors of the Evansville Convention & Visitors Bureau figures out who to hire and convinces their funding entities to allow them to do so.

CSO Plan for EPA: Through most of 2010 Evansville was suffering through daily fines from the EPA for consolidated sewer discharges into the Ohio River. Near the end of the year the Weinzapfel Administration reached an agreement with the EPA to abate the fines for a period of two years with the condition that a plan is in place to solve the problem by the fall of 2012.

This is a difficult and expensive plan to develop. We are not able to find even a penny in the 2011 budget to work on this plan. This is not the kind of task that can just be pushed off to the next administration. It is quite important that 2011 is the year in which much of the planning to solve the legacy problem of CSO’s needs to be completed. It can also be used as on chapter of the decade plan referred to above.

The MLK Entertainment Complex: Simple tasks here. First finish the Arena on time and on budget and have a knock the ball out of the park opening act and a sellout for the UE vs. IU game which UE will win. Secondly the convention hotel must be authorized, permitted, and well on the way to completion by the end of 2011.

Mental Health Services Improved: Evansville and Vanderburgh County continue to be among the leaders of the nation and even the world in suicide. This is not an outlier as this troubling statistic has haunted us now for more than 5 years. Coroner Annie Groves has done a great job of promoting awareness during 2010 and it seems to have sunk in to the collective psyche of the people that we have spoken with. After over five years we finally seem to accept that this is a real problem. Let’s make 2011 a year that the awareness continues and some solutions start being formulated and implemented.

Improving the mental health services may even lead to a reversal in the arson rate which has soared during the last several years and to beginning to reverse the acceleration of drug arrests, particularly meth which our region is seen as having a particular problem with.

Pay Scales: 2010 was defined and will be remembered to a very large extent as the year that the scheme to pay Tom Barnett a competitive wage was discovered and corrected. From a government perspective this problem of non-competitive wage scales needs to be corrected. The governance of the region and even the business base of the region need to get a handle on what national competitiveness means and adjust the pay schedules accordingly.

This effort should be led by the City of Evansville since it was the city that was exposed for having to circumvent the pay scales to be competitive. It says something about a place when it can’t compete nationally. It says something much worse when a place like Evansville can’t compete with small southern towns like Paducah, KY and Eustis, FL.

2011 needs to be the year that the pay scales of the City of Evansville, Vanderburgh County, and even some of our local businesses are updated from the 1980’s to 2011.

Consolidated Government: What constitutes getting this right? We are not sure what will make this right but we are sure that unless the people of the City of Evansville and the unincorporated parts of Vanderburgh County think that their opinion has some importance, consolidation is heading for defeat.

Consolidation votes have faced difficulty in every case when the population of the city and county is one sided in favor of the city. Evansville currently has a 2 to 1 population ratio advantage over the county. Other cities that have approved consolidation at the ballot box have typically had a 2 to 1 population ratio in favor of the county. Why is this the case? Typically, prior to consolidation the “city” is not doing so well and has experienced population losses and economic decline while the “county” is doing fine. When the population of the “county” is sufficiently large and to have both the economic capacity to absorb the “city” problems, then and only then does consolidation pass.

The case of a city in decline and a county on the rise are mirrored in Evansville and Vanderburgh County. If the consolidation committee does not produce a plan that convinces the county residents that consolidation will benefit them, this is headed for defeat. 2011 will be the year that definition is either done right or not.

Smoking Ordinance Revisited: 2010 saw a deadlock at the Evansville City Council on strengthening the smoking ordinance for the City of Evansville. That was one vote short of passage. The Vanderburgh County Commissioners lead by recently defeated Commissioner Troy Tornatta made this one of the first places in America with over 100,000 people to reverse a smoking ordinance.

Recent polls show that only 27% of the adult population of Evansville smokes and that only 19% oppose a strong ordinance to eliminate smoking in the workplace. Several City Council members asserted that their constituents overwhelmingly opposed a smoking ordinance in last year’s tie vote. Polls show that they were mistaken in their assertions.

The Vanderburgh County Commissioners are on record that they will pass a comprehensive smoking ordinance in early 2011. Some City Council members used the excuse that both the city and the county should be the same to justify not passing a smoking ordinance.

This will be an election issue in 2011. With numbers like only 27% smoke and only 19% oppose smoking ordinances the 2011 Evansville City Council members who wish to keep their jobs had better read those numbers closely when considering how to vote when this comes up again. Our prediction is that either the 2011 City Council will pass a stricter smoking ordinance or a new City Council will do so in early 2012.

HONORABLE MENTION

Vectren Rate Increase: Would have been top ten if it were something that local government could do something about. Paying 188% extra for a commodity on this side of the river defies reason. It is up to our state legislators and the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to level this playing field.

The First Street Dilemma: Will the McCurdy and the Riverhouse continue to just sit there? This dilemma is interesting but not worthy of making the top ten. If we can live for 42 months with only words we can live for 12 more. Eventually the developer will either perform or the Evansville Redevelopment Commission will have to find another one.

Roberts Stadium: 2012 is the year to deal with Roberts.

Evansville Arena: Part of the entertainment complex referenced above. The Arena is not a stand-alone project as hopefully was learned in 2010 in what became the Executive Inn fiasco.

Evansville Housing Authority: Expect some fireworks there. Some think that the EHA in 2011 will join the ECVB of 2010, and GAGE of 2009 as non-profits that were plagued by political decisions from outside of the entity.

Kicking off the Arts District TIF: Still formative. Not yet a top 10 issue.

Front Door Pride: If the banks ever start acting like banks again we will find out if this is a viable program. Financially, it is certainly not viable to buy for $200,000 and sell for $100,000.

Downtown Parking: The spaces as have been asserted are within walking distance of the Arena. The test for convenience, clarity, and tolerance of the public begins when the Arena opens.

Gateways to Evansville: All of the gateways to the city are considered to be ugly by many readers. This did not make the top 10 list because it does not seem to be a problem that the City of Evansville has the vision or the financial capacity to repair.