First Mayor of Fishers is ready to begin work
By Ann Craig-Cinnamon
With no Democrats on the ballot running for Mayor, the first Mayor of Fishers was determined in the May Primary. Town Manager Scott Fadness, who has worked for the Town of Fishers for more than seven years, came out the primary winner and is unopposed in the General Election on Nov. 4. We sat down with him to discuss politics in Fishers, changes to the community as it becomes a city and his answers to his critics about Fishers’ growth.
Q: The fact that we can talk to the new Mayor before the General Election says a lot about the two party system in Fishers. Do you have a comment on that?
A: Obviously we’re pretty well dominated by the Republican Party in Hamilton County and I think the Primary certainly was a vigorous campaign and a lot of ideas were thrown out there. For whatever reason the Democrats decided not to have someone go up against me this fall and that’s fine. I think we still had a really good debate in the Primary about different ideas for Fishers. So I do think residents were given an opportunity to choose among different philosophies and different ideas.
Q: There are only 4 Democrats running for City Council and even if they won, they would be in the minority. Does that mean you can pretty much do whatever you want?
A: No, I don’t think so. Whether we’re talking about Republican or Democrat I think everyone running today had their own ideas about what’s best for Fishers. Honestly, some of the partisan stuff at the local level should deteriorate into the background and we should just be talking about whether or not this is the right idea to move Fishers forward or not. So, whether it’s Democrat or Republican, I anticipate having a lot of healthy discussion and dialogue with the council about what’s best for the future of Fishers whether it’s a Republican sitting in that seat or a Democrat.
I’ve always contended that I’m not sure there’s a Republican or Democrat way to plow your street or run a police department or do economic development. And so I think it’s more about everyone’s general belief of what Fishers should be 10, 15, 20 years from now. So there’s going to be a lot of healthy dialogue even among Republicans about what that should look like.
Q: Is this a new era for Fishers?
A: Yeah, I think so. I don’t say that because of me. I say that because of a new form of government and a crossroads. There’s been so many things in the last year and a half to two years that have led to a kind of fork in the road and clearly this is a departure from the past.
Q: What will the average Fishers resident notice that will be different as we change to a city?
A: That’s a great question because I get that a lot. My hope is that in the delivery of services, absolutely nothing. We do a great job of delivering core services today and my goal and my target is to make sure they don’t see any hiccup in services. What I think the most prominent difference will be is there will be a singular face and voice to Fishers and where we’re headed that represents the community and I think that’s something that we probably haven’t had in the past. Whether it was the town manager talking, the town council president talking a council member talking; I’m not sure from of all those people who really spoke for the community, I think now we’re going to have that with the mayor.
Q: The form of government itself, how will it change in terms of how much input will the council and the mayor have?
A: You can break things down into buckets of authority or scope of authority. In reality, the city council has, in my estimation, two major roles: financial; they pass the budget. The second is land use. Everytime someone wants to do a rezone or they want to redevelop or develop a piece of land that has to go before the council. Everything else falls primarily to the mayor to run. So the day-to-day operations of the city, you can expect that would come from the mayor’s office. And setting the agenda and policy for the community and the vocabulary that the community will rally around that will come from the mayor. So that to me is the primary difference.
Q: How will that change for you?
A: For me, I take a more public role than I probably have in the past; a more prominent role. And on the operational side, there is far less interaction with the council when I decide to do something. Under state law now becoming a mayor, if I want to go do something because I think it’s right for the community I don’t have to go ask seven council members if they think the same thing, I can go ahead and move forward.
When we’re buying things, when we’re entering into contracts, when I decide to move staff around, none of those things will go before the council moving forward.
Q: You have to run again next year. How will that affect how you govern? How much do you think you will get done if you have to keep your eye on the ball of running again?
A: When I decided to run for office, I made a commitment and I remember talking to my wife about this, I’m 100% okay with losing. It’s not part of my identity to be mayor. So, if I think whatever policy decision is the right decision for the community, then I’ll pursue it regardless of the political timing of an election. We’re going to work hard on economic development and we’ve got some other initiatives that we’re going to be moving forward with and it’s going to be a really active year next year regardless of whether I have an opponent or not because I don’t think a community can take a time-out for a year so that I can ensure my election.
Q: What are top three projects that you will be working on in the next year or so?
A: Economic development; creating new job opportunities in Fishers which is kind of cliché because everyone says economic development. But if you look at our 106th Street corridor, the new interchange coming in, Crosspoint where Sun King is going in, that area is really an economic engine for us. So, identifying companies and attracting them to that is going to be important.
Developing a comprehensive plan; Fishers has not operated off a comprehensive plan in at least the last ten years that I know of. So, working with the community to identify what do we want to look like thirty years from now and then backing into how we’re going to get there. And getting input from the residents is going to be really important. And that could be a year-long initiative trying to do that. But we’ve never taken the time to do the work ahead of time so that when we come to decisions, everyone is operating through the same lens.
And then there are things that I am worried about for our community. It’s things like mental health issues in our population. Making sure that our youth are being taken care of from a mental health perspective and even the adults out there, following up with mental health victims. That is something that nobody likes to talk about. It’s uncomfortable. But we’re too good of a community not to attack those issues head-on and become a model of how a community when rallying its resources together can actually make a fundamental difference when it comes to people who are suffering from mental health issues. That is something I look to pursue in the coming year and use this mayor’s title to rally people around, bringing people together to talk about this issue. You’d be surprised. I see the police and ambulance reports and I see what’s going on in our community behind closed doors. It’s not alarmist it’s just that we can be better at dealing with those issues than what we are today. It starts with awareness and talking about it.
Q: Your critics hate tifs and all the building going on downtown. How do you respond?
A: Here’s the questions I would pose to people who are harsh critics of the downtown: lots of people talk about what if it doesn’t work out and what if it falls apart? We’ve put in a number of different ways to mitigate that risk to the taxpayer. And I feel confident that we’ve protected the taxpayer. But what we haven’t done a good job of doing, and this is my fault more than anybody’s, is we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about what if we didn’t do anything? What if Fishers just continued on its course? That is the why question that we didn’t answer prior to starting a lot of economic development issues that we did. At the end of the day, with tax caps the way they are, a quiet bedroom community like Fishers where we’re just mainly residential homes, will not be financially sustainable in the long-term. I spent six months looking at the financials projecting out twenty or thirty years and it just doesn’t add up. We can all debate and dialogue whether you like it being here or whether it should be somewhere else, we can have that conversation. But the question to me and the one that I fundamentally believe in is that the threat of doing nothing was significant. And it could have put this community, not tomorrow but 10, 15, 20 years out which is where someone in my position should be looking: not tomorrow but 20 years out, would have put this community in financial jeopardy to do nothing. That’s my belief. People can argue that. We can look at the merits. We can look at the numbers. But that’s what I think. So we went about trying to create an economic engine that would develop more commercial tax base for the long-term. I think what else is important is that my vision of downtown is not grandiose and we get compared to Carmel a lot. We’re not the same as Carmel, we’re Fishers. We’re uniquely Fishers. We’re trying to build a downtown and a sense of place that resonates with Fishers residents. The Amphitheater is a million dollar facility we paid for out of cash reserves. We had 81,000 residents come last year. It was completely free to the public. That is what Fishers is about. It’s family-oriented.
My response to those that are hypercritical is that I haven’t heard a proposal of what else they would do. We spent a year talking about doing this. I think, in the end, the risk of doing nothing was far greater than the risk of what is happening here. And we have put plenty of hooks in the developers to make sure that we have mitigated our risk. As for the budget, I would challenge anyone to go find another community in the state of Indiana that is financially as sound as we are today. No tax increases to residents. We’re adding police officers. We’re investing in our community and we have a $5 million surplus in cash above what we need for our reserves. So this “let’s get everyone wound up and worried” and the kind of rhetoric that comes with the political season is not grounded in any kind of fact about our actual financials. We have tried to be as transparent as humanly possible. The internal fiscal plan which I make all decisions off of, is posted on the website. I have no more complex numbers than that. That’s what I sit down with all department heads and go over. I welcome them to take a look at that and discern where we are in financial trouble.
Q: There are those that say that you have award contracts to campaign donors with no bidding process. Is this true?
A: Absolutely not. It’s ridiculous. I’m excited about the fact that if you look at downtown, every single development that we have done has a different developer. That provides competition and different ideas to come to the table. And I think that’s exciting.
I have not voted on any one of these deals. I propose them to a council, a redevelopment commission and a town hall building corporation and they all vote on it. To say that I’ve approved projects based on campaign contributions, I haven’t approved any projects. They are subject to everyone else.
Q: How will Fishers look in 5 years?
A: The number one quality of life issue for our residents is not having enough job opportunities right here in our own community. I think everyone having to drive downtown or drive to Carmel every single to go to work is a huge quality of life issue. You’re on the road for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. That’s time you could have spent with your family, frustration of traffic. My goal is to create a vibrant, entrepreneurial culture here in our community where there are job opportunities five minutes away instead of 50 minutes away. So I hope the 106th and I-69 corridor sees significant commercial development over the next five years. I think you’re gonna see a lot more in the entrepreneurial culture. Launch Fishers continues to grow. It’s very successful and we’re getting a lot of recognition for that. So I hope you see a whole new class of entrepreneurs that are attracted to Fishers and come here and start creating interesting things.
And my hope is that the core things are still alive and well. We have a great school system and we will hopefully continue to have a great school system; the connectivity in terms of trails and transportation will be a big push. And then the more abstract, if you will, is that I would really like to see in the next five years this community become engaged. It’s a suburban community. People live in the cul de sacs and it’s hard to draw them out of their. So the goal of our parks department, the goal of our communications department, and part of my goal is to get our residents out of their homes, get them engaged in their community in a way that they haven’t seen before. And we start building new traditions.
All this brick and mortar that everybody argues about, whether they like the architecture or whether transportation is a nightmare, all that stuff pales in comparison to your ability to make some visceral connection with a resident about why they love their community. And that is an art not a science. We’re going to swing and we’re gonna miss occasionally and then other times we’re gonna have homeruns and it’s going to be an ongoing knock-down drag-out fight every single day to find residents and get them engaged in this community. But that is the goal that we have.
New positions in Fishers Government:
Mayor vs. Town Manager
City Clerk
9 vs. 7 Council members
