Bart Lies On Gray Ethics Investigation

It was one of those moments of total disbelief. Mayor Bart Peterson (D) during tonight's debate with Greg Ballard (R) claimed nothing had been done about Monroe Gray's ethical violations because no complaints had been filed. He knows damn good and well that an ethics complaint was before his appointed ethics board at Gray's own request after the Star first raised questions about work his concrete company performed on publicly-financed projects, which Gray failed to disclose. The rubber stamp board dismissed the complaint against Gray after he agreed to amend his statement of economic interest. As Councilor Phil Borst would later complain at a city-county council meeting, the ethics board didn't fully investigate the charges against Gray. That failure prompted Republican councilors to seek an independent investigation of Gray. Democratic council members, including Gray himself, voted to block that investigation.

The spineless Peterson refused to level any criticism at the thoroughly discredited Gray tonight. Instead, he simply said it was up to the voters of Gray's district to decide his fate. Gray is elected from one of the most Democratic of the 25 council districts and, unless lightning strikes, he will likely be re-elected. Peterson knows this. This tells us Peterson is perfectly comfortable with Gray continuing to preside over the CCC if Democrats retain control of the council regardless of how damning the evidence of his corruption is. Peterson also completely sidestepped a response to Norm Cox' question about Gray's alleged ghost employment at the fire department. Greg Ballard was more direct. He says Gray's ghost employment at the fire department is the worst kept secret in the fire department. He sees one more police officer who isn't on the street because Gray is being paid $83,000 to do nothing but steer the Peterson administration's legislative initiatives through the council.

Peterson's opening statement provided a good laugh. As if someone were poking him from behind as he falsely claimed his consolidation efforts to date had saved taxpayers more than $20 million, Peterson was overcome by a brief coughing spell. Ballard provided a solid opening statement about the direction he wanted to take the city, but he didn't leave listeners with any memorable one-liners tonight. Mayor Peterson provided many openings for him to go on the attack, but Ballard was too reticent to fire any shots at Peterson. When Ballard responded to a question on immigration, I was kicking myself that he didn't mention the fact that his own wife is an immigrant. Alas, it occurred to him later and he followed it up in rebuttal. The story could have been much more poignant, however, if someone had just taken the time to condense the story of his immigrant wife down to a folksy level.

Hats off to Norm Cox for questioning Peterson about the city's lackluster effort at closing down the city's pea shake houses--the illegal gambling operations in primarily African-American neigbhorhoods which are also associated with drugs, guns and prostitution. Unbelievably, Mayor Peterson claimed he had nothing to do with recent efforts to close the pea shakes. He stated flat out he never called up the police chief and asked him to raid pea shake houses. They have operated uninterrupted throughout the eight years he has been mayor of the city. It wasn't until the blogs and local news media started making waves this past year about the pea shakes that city police started raiding them. As Cox pointed out, the illegal businesses often reopened within days of a police raid. Peterson denied this was happening, but I don't know how he would know since he claimed he never spoke to the police chief about them. Ballard agreed the pea shakes needed to be closed down, but he failed to capitalize on the point by criticizing Peterson for failing to do anything to shut them down for the past eight years to the detriment of these troubled neighborhoods. It demonstrated once again Peterson's failure to lead. Sadly, Ballard didn't take advantage of the big opening the mayor provided him.

As an aside, I assume other people experienced problems with WRTV's signal during the storm. I assume they were using a satellite upload to broadcast tonight's debate. I doubt this would have been a problem if they had simply broadcast from the station instead of the empty theater at the Indiana Historical Society.