Taxpayers Lose Regardless Of Who Becomes Indianapolis' Next Mayor

Joe Hogsett may be running TV commercial where he claims he's going to put a stop to the downtown insiders cheating the system and stealing our tax dollars as he touts his credentials as a former federal prosecutor, but it's all just a bunch of baloney. He's more beholden to their interests than his Republican opponent, who only moved to the city a few short years ago and knows nothing about city-county government other than he thinks everything Ballard has done during his two terms in office is all hunky-dory and wouldn't change a thing.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that both candidates are delivering the middle finger to Indianapolis residents who've been cheated and robbed to benefit a French company and the monopoly electric car sharing business which Mayor Ballard broke numerous state and local laws to award to the company. Of course, I already shared with you Hogsett's "I could care less how many laws were broken or how much taxpayers are being defrauded" attitude about the deal. Here's what Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum had to say to WTHR's Mary Milz about Blue Indy:

Brewer: "I think you're going to see BlueIndy take off. We've got some time before the numbers really start coming in, but it's exciting that a billion-dollar company wants to make that kind of investment in Indianapolis. There could have been some...it could have been handled better from, you know, a communications standpoint, you know, inside local city government, but at the end of the day, I think we all agree that initiatives like this make our city better." 

Hogsett: "How this contract was reached and who said what to whom and who got to check this or that, I'm not the mayor and I'm not on the council and I'm not really qualified to opine, but certainly, the BlueIndy's technology of making our environment cleaner and greener, along with the other initiatives Mayor Ballard has engaged in, 'Rails to Trails' included, I think he should be commended for."

I believe I've related this story before but it bares repeating. After Hogsett served as campaign manager for Evan Bayh's first gubernatorial campaign, Bayh rewarded him by appointing him Secretary of State. There was a big securities fraud case involving Ski World, the infamous failed ski resort in Brown County that was supported by a bunch of political types and which had been represented by Ed Lewis, a politically-connected attorney with close ties to the Bayh family. Lewis had allegedly facilitated the payment of a bribe to win a liquor license for Ski World, in addition to signing off on a prospectus filled with glaring misrepresentations. The securities division under Bayh had shelved the complaint against Ski World and when the defrauded investor's attorney met with Hogsett soon after he took office and asked him what he planned to do with the case, according to former Indianapolis Star political reporter Dick Cady, Hogsett supposedly replied, "We're not going to do a goddamn thing."

Hogsett will not put a stop to the corrupt manner in which Indianapolis' municipal government business is conducted regardless of what he says while he's out campaigning. He had a chance as federal prosecutor to do something about it, and he was more interested in leveraging the power of the office to forge a deal with the downtown power brokers to push Ballard out of office and allow himself to become Indianapolis' next mayor. That's the only rational explanation one can attribute to the massive public corruption evidence presented to the federal prosecutor's office during his tenure that got swept under the rug the same way it's been done for decades under the political hacks who occupied that office in the past. Look at his campaign contributors and try to tell me he's not already beholden to the same corrupt masters who've been pulling Ballard's strings since the day he took office. It's very depressing for Indianapolis voters, who have virtually no choice in candidates for mayor or council in this year's municipal election. If you choose not to participate in this year's election, I won't fault you. It won't make a damn bit of difference in how this city is governed.

At a neighborhood meeting last night, both Council Zach Adamson, the incumbent Democrtic council member for my district, and his Republican opponent, Sally Spiers, expressed their disappointment and opposition to the manner in which the Ballard administration carried out the Blue Indy deal. Adamson told our neighborhood meeting that he had spoken to Marion Co. Prosecutor Terry Curry about the possibility of a criminal investigation. To his disappointment, Curry claims there is no criminal matter to investigate. Curry obviously wouldn't know public corruption if it jumped up and bit him in the ass. Who would have thought we would be getting a prosecutor as useless as Carl Brizzi was when it came to prosecuting public corruption? Remember how Curry promised to open up a hotline for whistle blowers to aid in prosecuting public corruption when he was running for prosecutor? Why is that people who report public corruption to his hotline become the targets of retaliatory acts while nothing is done to prosecute the public corruption they report?