Mayor Ballard’s Land Bank Scandal
Required reading:
11-03-2012 IBJ-Cory Schouten: City bans bulk land-bank sales after lopsided deal with not-for-profit
05-21-2013 IBJ-Cory Schouten: FBI searches City-County Building, makes multiple arrests in Land Bank probe
05-21-2013 IBJ-Cory Schouten: Feds used wire tap, undercover agent in Land Bank probe
05-21-2013 Indy Star-Dan Carpenter: Indy Land Bank indictments may be too late for neighborhoods
05-21-2013 Indy Star-Matthew Tully: Your scandal is here, Mayor Greg Ballard – but you’re not
05-23-2013 Sheila Kennedy: Ship to Shore
Apologies to Sheila for quoting such a large chunk of her article (please read the whole thing):
The only thing worse than a chief executive who knows very little is a chief executive who knows very little but thinks he knows a lot.
We had a chance last year to replace Ballard with someone who actually knew what a city was, but for a variety of reasons (including but not limited to gender) we re-instated Mr. Clueless.
So we have a Mayor who is absent from the legislature when that body is debating issues of great importance to Indianapolis. We have a Mayor who sees no reason to communicate with the City-County Counsel (conveniently, his cronies in the General Assembly have now relieved him of that obligation).
We have a Mayor who relishes traveling with an outsized entourage but who can’t be bothered to supervise—or even understand—what city departments are doing.
We have a Mayor who hires people who are too young and inexperienced to know what they’re doing, or to recognize what their boss doesn’t understand.
We have a Mayor who insisted on controlling all public safety personnel, but then lost interest in the hard work of actually providing for the public’s safety–a child Mayor who has ignored a soaring crime rate while focusing on fanciful (and costly) projects like Cricket fields. (China Town didn’t pan out.)
We have a Mayor who is selling significant pieces of the City–making complicated deals with implications he clearly doesn’t understand—deals that benefit clients of cronies at the expense of taxpayers.
We have a Mayor who is not being held accountable for any of this, because local media is effectively AWOL.
So while Ballard sells the city off, unsupervised city employees are selling the city out.