One Day More

Friends and Constituents,

Tomorrow is a big day!

Mayor Joe Hogsett will give a speech and reveal his proposed city budget for 2027.

The City County Council will vote on a data center moratorium proposal.

The Council will vote on my proposal to remove the MDC commissioners who have ignored the Council and constituents by continuing to support data centers.

The Council will also vote on whether to overturn Hogsett’s veto and institute the wheel tax.

Get ready to cringe at my singing while you watch the video , then keep reading.

For the first 8 years of Joe Hogsett’s mayorship, the budgets he proposed passed virtually unanimously. This was not because he worked carefully to make sure all 25 Councilors’ concerns and desires were incorporated into the budget. Rather, it was because he successfully bullied and intimidated the Council into serving as his rubber stamp.

I’ve served on the City-County Council since 2024. In that amount of time, I am proud that the Council has started to find its spine. More and more Councilors have joined me in voting against the immoral budgets that underfund all public safety other than the police and fire departments, create more poverty, and force our streets to become worse and worse.

When big developers need money, there’s always a solution. When billionaires need City support, they get free land in the heart of downtown. When the Mayor wants new Flock cameras, money does not seem to be a barrier. Data center developers are offered massive tax breaks. And there’s always plenty of money to dole out to contractors and consultants who happen to donate to Hogsett’s campaign fund.

But last year, Hogsett’s Parks Director told us on the mic that the budget was so tight, we had to take crayons away from children by lowering the Parks Department budget even further. We are told we can’t afford to investigate and prosecute illegal dumpers, slumlords, Airbnb party houses, or utility subcontractors that do shoddy work.

There is a word used around the world for this type of priorities and political decisions: austerity.

Austerity is cutting spending on public services and/or raising taxes on working people in order to put the government in a better financial position.

Austerity usually results in worse quality of life for regular people - since the public services we all rely on are degraded and worse, but the rich can always find another option. If the public pool is closed, but you have a friend with a private pool, the rich can simply hang out at a friend’s house. If the library doesn’t have a book or video they want, they can just buy that book or video. If the police aren’t providing sufficient public safety, they can hire a private security guard for their home or business.

Austerity can also cause ripple effects that slow economic growth, increase unemployment and evictions, and actually increase public spending by forcing more people to rely on expensive emergency services rather than relatively frugal preventative ones.

At the end of the day, the reason we don’t have all the money we need for a great city in the budget is because of federal and state policy. In Indiana, our laws have created a tax system that taxes the poor a much higher share of their income than it taxes the rich. Across the United States, large and profitable companies pay far lower amounts of tax than do small businesses. The rich have continued to control a larger and larger share of wealth in the country, and income inequality has continued to grow.

In short: the rich are making more money than ever before, but they aren’t paying their fair share.

Rather than taxing the rich in order to stop our public services from falling apart, Joe Hogsett wines and dines them in order to get their money into his campaign bank account.

So I’m going into tomorrow expecting to be very frustrated and disappointed by the proposed budget. But I’m going in ready as always to fight for District 13.

I hope to see many of you at the Council meeting tomorrow evening. I will be at the Citizens Action Coalition rally against data centers at 6:00 pm - so join me there for our People’s Caucus time. The full meeting starts at 7:00 pm, and the Mayor will make a rare public appearance, so if you have anything to say to him, you’ll be able to do so.

Here is where the annotated meeting agenda will be, and here is where the full Councilor packet of background info will be, as soon as both are prepared.

And here is where you can donate to help me keep providing this much information to the public.

In love and solidarity,

Jesse