Five mayors, including Peru’s Jim Walker, gathered together at the First Christian Church Thursday morning for the monthly meeting of the North Central Indiana Mayors Roundtable.
Others included Marion Mayor Wayne Seybold, Kokomo Mayor Greg Goodnight, Winchester Mayor Steve Croyle and Columbia City Mayor Ryan Daniel.
Walker said they had a roughly two hour meeting behind closed doors that covered “a lot of different issues.”
“Property tax caps, business personal property tax and its elimination that is still being proposed and what we can do to give input as to how it’s going to have a negative impact on communities,” he said. “We talked about education – what do we have to do to get our workforce in our communities up to where it will be attractive to jobs?”
He said other topics included how 2014’s assessed values were looking in each mayor’s respective towns and how each community could use its roads and construction better “so the whole region (can be) served by that.”
“It was very good,” Walker said of the talk. “As a matter of fact, it probably could have gone on another two hours.”
Croyle, who called Peru a “lovely city,” said that any meeting where the region’s mayor can “together and commiserate and share ideas and talk about issues it’s a success.”
“We don’t have a wide wealth of people that we can turn to that have similar circumstances that we have and share,” he said. “We always look forward to our monthly gatherings in different parts of the state where we’re able to sit down and talk about issues and common problems.”
He said they “borrow a lot of good ideas of one another,” things that Peru could be doing that could be incorporated in Winchester or vice versa.
“Nobody has all the answers, nobody even understands all the problems,” Croyle said. “Anytime you can talk to somebody else who’s already been there and done that and take and work off their knowledge and implement that in a local capacity, it’s only a plus.”
Goodnight said the meeting was “a good way for us to hear what’s going on in other communities and a chance to stay on top of issues that are may be impacting us that are more of a statewide problem.”
“None of us operate within a vacuum,” Goodnight said. “We rely on others and it’s just nice to have other mayors that you can call on as resources for information.”