For the first time in his mayoralty, Greg Ballard faced angry African-Americans.
Black southsiders confronted the Mayor over his plans to close their Bethel Park swimming pool for up to two years because the pool, constructed during Steve Goldsmith’s reign, leaks like a sieve.
In WTHR/Channel 13’s coverage of the heated meeting, Mayor Ballard is shown jumping to his feet in anger when neighborhood resident and community gadfly Larry Vaughn criticized Ballard saying, “you’re discriminating because of race.”
A livid mayor responded, “We’re not going to take that. We’re losing 100,000 gallons of water a day. Frankly you’ve been neglected for the last 10 years at this place and you didn’t say anything (emphasis added). We‘re trying to fix it.”
And the Mayor concluded, “We’re not gonna take that racial discrimination taunt!”
Residents of the Bethel Park neighborhood and the other neighborhoods losing their swimming pools this summer have reason to be angry.
Residents had no clue 11 Indy Parks pools leaked millions of gallons of water each summer. For Ballard to accuse angry southsiders of not saying anything about a problem they knew nothing about is absurd.
Our Black community knows they’re bearing the brunt of pool closings.
Our Black community knows the mayor’s promises to find cash to fix them is a hollow promise. With the city/county budget in technical deficit, basic services will continue to be cut. There’s no way the mayor will find $7 million this year or next to fix the pools.
Mayor Ballard will probably find the cash to fix the Capital Improvement Board, but not leaky pools in Black neighborhoods.
Then Sunday’s Indianapolis Star provided more ammunition towards feelings in the Black community about the Ballard Administration’s agenda.
The front page story documented that poor, working class neighborhoods, including Black neighborhoods, get less than prompt response to complaints called into the Mayor’s Action Center.
Lack of responsiveness from the Mayor’s Action Center has been around since former Mayors Hudnut, Goldsmith and Peterson. But those Mayors regularly talked unfiltered to our Black community. They directly heard complaints about the slothfulness of the city bureaucracy and responded to the lack of responsiveness. Mayor Ballard’s bragged about building a better Mayor’s Action Center, but the Starstory shows another story.
Mayor Ballard likes to say he’s very visible in the neighborhoods. But his repeated refusal to hear community questions and concerns, in prime time, on Black radio, while regularly appearing in prime time on white stations, is catching up with him.
And he caught it at the heated Bethel Park meeting.
Mayor, when you’ve been standoffish and cool towards our community these past 15 months; when you’ve cut yourself off from regular feedback from our community; when you only talk with “acceptable” Black leaders while ignoring scores of other leaders, including Black elected officials; when your departments contain a scarcity of Black senior management; when your senior staff is tone deaf on the impact of their decisions on our neighborhoods; then the anger you experienced Saturday will be repeated until you begin to truly reach out and communicate with Indianapolis’ African-American community!
What I’m Hearing
in the Streets
In the wake of anger over pool closings, it doesn’t help Indy Parks’ credibility when new Director Stuart Lowery can’t answer a simple question.
On “Afternoons with Amos,” a listener asked Lowery “how many Blacks hold senior management positions?” Lowery danced around the question. I asked him, if “you put all your senior managers in a conference room, how many would be Black?”
Lowery again danced and dodged, promising answers later that day.
As of this column’s deadline, no answer. So I assume Indy Parks has no Black senior managers.
Oh, the number of Black senior managers at the Recorder? Three out of four. The number of Black senior managers at my radio stations day job? Six.
I can answer quickly, can’t Lowery? And you wonder why our community’s angry about pool closings…
See ‘ya next week!
Amos Brown’s opinions are not necessarily those of the Indianapolis Recorder
