As Sullivan Mayor Clint Lamb spoke by phone from City Hall, he glanced at old black-and-white photographs on the wall.
The pictures didn’t show factories or power plants. “I see people around the downtown core,” Lamb said Tuesday afternoon. Those situations tend to be remembered.
Quality of life, and the struggle to enhance it, dominate the thoughts of most of Indiana’s 120 mayors. That quest also serves as the focus of Lamb’s tenure as president of the Indiana Conference of Mayors. The organization chose Lamb for that job in May, five months after the city of Sullivan re-elected him to a second term. He vowed to stand as an advocate for the state’s cities, where 21st-century economic development depends on giving Hoosiers a chance “to live, work, play and retire in communities with ‘things to do.’”
Cities, especially those outside the affluent Indianapolis suburban counties, feel the weight of that challenge. In the same 2015 survey by business network CNBC, Indiana simultaneously ranked strong for low-cost-of-doing business (first in the nation) and low-cost-of-living (fourth), and weak in quality-of-life (46th) and skilled workforce (42nd).
Hoosier mayors trying to improve their cities’ amenities, which appeal to highly skilled people looking for a place to live, face a predicament. Property tax revenue dwindled after the state capped those taxes in 2008. The caps saved Hoosier taxpayers $727 million in 2014, according to the Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute, but also squeezed local governments’ ability to provide basic services, let alone quality-of-life investments.
Some of the alternatives for cities — local option income taxes, user fees and annexation — can prove difficult to enact.
In his one-year term as leader of the mayors coalition, Lamb hopes to “bring awareness to average citizens” of the demands and needs of the cities. Meanwhile, he wants the state Legislature to establish long-term funding for local roads, bridges and infrastructure desired by prospective employers and employees, as well as current residents. A riverfront development project requires solid roads, trails and sewers, for example.
The Regional Cities Initiative, created by Gov. Mike Pence and approved (somewhat hesitantly) by the Legislature, sent $42-million grants to three regions — around South Bend, Fort Wayne and Evansville. That trio of metro areas competed with others for funds to build or expand distinctive elements to grow the local population, attract private investment and lure new businesses.
The one-time initiative helps, Lamb said, “but all communities, not just the three that won, need some long-term funding solution.”
Lamb played a central role in the west-central Indiana region’s bid for one of the Regional Cities grants. Though its bid wasn’t chosen, the Wabash River Region (the official name), did result in the establishment of a regional development authority board involving Vigo, Knox and Sullivan counties, and a network among the cities of Terre Haute, Sullivan and Vincennes. It also gave local participants a look at the proposals from other regions.
Lamb saw some good ideas. The Fort Wayne region, which included 11 counties, called its multi-faceted proposal the “Road to One Million.” It involves 38 interconnected projects with $400 million of public-private investments over the next two years and $1.5 billion long term, aimed at “attracting a younger, more educated workforce.” As a result, the Fort Wayne team projected the population would increase to 1 million from the present 789,015 by 2031.
Often, when young families move to a place, the grandparents of the young children move to that region, too, Lamb said.
“They understand that if you get people to live in a place, they’ll bring their incomes,” said the mayor, a 36-year-old father of three. “If you get those millennials [people who reached adulthood around the year 2000] to move to your city, they’ll bring the grandparents and their disposable incomes with them.”
Those workers favor walkable towns, where a residence is a short stroll from a pharmacy, grocery, church, restaurants, brew pubs and wineries, coffeehouses, trails and eye doctors, Lamb said. He cited a statistic that 64 percent of young people today choose the place they’ll live after college before they’ve found a job, and they’re looking for those amenities.
“I think you have to have a combination of those things,” he said. “And I think you’re going to find the successful cities of the future are the ones who focus on their downtown cores.”
Lamb is mayor of the town where he grew up. Since taking office in 2011, some of his ideas have been enacted, others haven’t. An effort to annex 1,100 acres into the city failed, but the city has also seen an infusion of $3.5 million in grants and federal funds, the conversion of a former school into a civic center and plaza, and plans for apartments, rehabilitated buildings and paving (for the first time since the 1980s) on Sullivan’s town square.
Cities all across Indiana — with populations from 5,000 to 500,000 — need to pursue growth to survive, Lamb said. They don’t need a state handout, he added, just sustainable funding. Waiting on the arrival of a giant manufacturing plant isn’t realistic, either.
“We can control our own destiny, instead of waiting on that white horse to ride into town,” Lamb said. “If you don’t attempt to grow and invest in yourself, you aren’t going to stay in the game.”