Dear Editor:
Joshua Carr’s rambling defense of Carmel mayor Jim Brainard not only openly questions a challenger’s integrity, it attacks the reader’s intelligence.
Carmel’s residential property taxes have increased 82 percent since 2005, its total debt is $2.3 billion and most of its debt reported to the Indiana Department of Local Government disappeared from its Annual Financial Report for 2018 – presumably hidden behind shell corporations set up as legal walls.
Carmel’s 24-year-long tolerance for the incumbent administration has put the city on thin financial ice. It ignores a bond rating agency’s warning about over-borrowing in November 2017, builds roundabouts with no safety improvement, attracts fewer than 500 patrons to its $175 million Center for the Performing Arts and designs congestion into Main Street and Range Line Road.
Mr. Carr ought to get real.
Bill Shaffer
Carmel “Non-Mayor”