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Dear Editor:
Backward-looking Carmel demonstrated its lack of foresight and confused purpose in announcing a $2.5 million roundabout sculpture extravagance on 96th Street.
Four artworks bought with borrowed money will “pay homage” to the very gas-guzzling, climate-threatening, parking-lot-filling machines the mayor so often and so smugly criticizes. “When was the last time you had a romantic stroll through a Walmart parking lot?” he arrogantly asks time and again.
Prior to the automotive eyesores’ announcement, the city had spent $2.3 million on all other sculptures combined. The $2.5 million came from borrowing the mayor’s henchmen on the city council approved earlier in the year. It’s part of a $13.5 million slush fund for the Carmel Redevelopment Commission (CRC). The fund carries a $9.2 million interest price tag and is to be repaid by Carmel business taxpayers, the majority of whom don’t sell cars.
Apart from the hypocrisy and expense, the four metallic monuments to motoring apparently will boost car sales.
The CRC director responsible for this aesthetic crime said the mayor “wants to ensure the dealerships remain in Carmel rather than move north, as many Indianapolis-based dealerships did with new development.” The director continues:
“We want to lock (the dealerships) in place. We want this to be the premiere place to buy a vehicle in the state. The mayor’s thinking always has an economic development component behind it, and that’s a huge one for this location.”
Two questions:
- Wouldn’t a $2.5 million tax cut for car dealers be a better lock-in strategy?
- How many new dealerships will “develop” because the confused, sophomoric aesthetes in city hall added $2.5 million more to the city’s $1.5 billion debt?
As an appointee to the Biden Administration’s advisory committee on climate change pipe dreams, the mayor could have expanded the backward looking monuments to include the first electric car in the United States – WIlliam Morrison’s 1890, six-passenger wagon that zipped along at 14 m.p.h.
Alas, the final question remains: When will the State of Indiana rein in the runaway Carmel debt-and-spend merry-go-round?
Bill Shaffer
Carmel
Rob Kendall of WIBC called these sculptures “Crap”. Wasteful spending continues by Mayor Brainard but him and his cronies on City Council like Jeff Worrell and Woody Rider keep getting re-elected. So apparently the majority of people in Carmel approve of this “Crap”.
The writer seems to confuse city and state governments. It’s for the Carmel voters to decide if the Mayor and others are doing the right thing, not the state. I’m curious if the writer welcomes other state-level interference with local administrations?