Ask The Mayor

For the third time in two years, a Frankfort police officer has left his post due to bad behavior off the clock. That’s an amount equal to an entire shift of patrolmen under the current scheme. So is it time for stronger words and actions from department leadership?

In recent years, several Indiana cities have made sports-related investments as a way of trying to lure athletic tourism dollars.

Now that Lafayette is building a softball park and a new Loeb Stadium, is it the latest municipality to try that tactic?

That’s one of the questions we pose this week to Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski on WBAA’s Ask The Mayor.

West Lafayette’s State Street partially reopened, on time, last month, and drivers have begun getting used to the new traffic patterns.

They’ve had a lot of time to do that because the new architecture leaves them idling in the road for much longer than the old setup did.

Frankfort’s Mayor is on the mend this week after an accident in his home a few days ago. On this episode of WBAA’s Ask The Mayor, we get Chris McBarnes’ take on what happened.

Also: Does the mayor agree with his police chief’s assessment that the city’s police station is stuck in the 1970s? The county has levied a new tax to try to fix that – a tax the fiscal conservative mayor says he’s in favor of.

Despite months of objections from Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski, Tippecanoe County gets its needle exchange this week – at a fixed location in a neighborhood that Roswarski said he wanted specifically to avoid.

This week on WBAA's Ask The Mayor, we pose this question to the mayor: did all that opposition force the county’s hand into deciding to use the health department’s site as the home of the controversial program?

It doesn’t take much driving around Greater Lafayette to learn the summer’s buzzword: construction.

West Lafayette has less than two weeks before college students begin returning in droves and there are still questions about whether State Street will be open to accommodate that, particularly after last month’s rains and two gas main strikes earlier this week.

Crawfordsville Mayor Todd Barton is focusing a lot these days on fostering cooperation.

He’s hosted the first of what he hopes will be a series of meetings with business leaders, he’s brought together multiple parties to complete a long-stalled road project and he’s working with the state on Stellar Communities projects.

This week on WBAA’s Ask The Mayor, we’re talking about expansion. The Indiana Department of Transportation has released its Next Level Roads Plan, hoping to draw in international industry and Clinton County has welcomed two businesses into a key intersection. But, where will a city like Frankfort go – or grow – now, with others crowding the road?

If it seems to you that Tippecanoe County leaders have been talking forever about starting a needle exchange program, that’s just an illusion – it’s only been about eight months since the first approvals began.

But if it has seemed to you that in recent months support for such a program from some local leaders has waned, that may be true.

Crawfordsville Mayor Todd Barton has made visits this month to businesses granted tax abatements by the city.

It’s normal – required, in many cases – for some sort of check-in to happen, but on this week’s Ask The Mayor, we find out whether Mayor Barton thinks changes that could be afoot in the coming years thanks to Stellar Cities money may change the way the city looks at abatements.

Also on this week’s show, we check back in on the progress of the reconstituted Crawfordsville Human Rights Commission.