Ransacking the Public Treasury

Friends and Constituents,

I woke up on Monday morning to see the explosive IndyStar and Mirror Indy collaboration, “Mr. Clean” - the first of a multi-part expose into shady dealings within the Joe Hogsett administration. If you haven’t read it, stop here, read the whole thing, and come back. This story has it all: illicit relationships, political cronyism, corruption, and Hogsett’s typical allergy to the public.

Tony Cook, one of the journalists who broke this story, followed up with me and with all of the other Councilors to ask a few questions. Among them:
”Do you think any ethics laws were broken? Do you think the city’s ethics laws are strong enough?”

Tony included a few sentences from me in his follow-up article, but I had much more to say - and as usual, I wanted to say it directly to you, the public.

I immediately started writing this email upon reading the story on Monday. But it quickly became clear that there’s more problems here than can fit in a single email.

“Ethics” is a broad term that covers a lot of political ground. In many ways, it’s the lack of ethics in our laws and government that led me to run for office to begin with.

Is it ethical to hide a six hundred million dollar revenue bond investment into the Signia Hotel until after the primary election in 2023?

Is it ethical to hide the potential ownership group involved in a professional soccer deal from the public?

Is it ethical to hire an outside attorney to push back against the Council’s investigative committee - thereby making the investigation a contested process and increasing the cost to taxpayers?

I know from conversations with all of you in the district that by supermajority levels, you would give a resounding “NO” to all of the above.

But today, I wanted to focus on self-enrichment, and the ways in which Joe Hogsett’s corrupted government allows private individuals and businesses to ransack and plunder the public treasury.

Thomas Cook and Scarlett Andrews: The Revolving Door for “Public Servants”

Thomas Cook told me the very first time that I met him that as a partner at the law firm of Bose, McKinney, and Evans, he didn’t work as an attorney, but as a “bag man for developers.” Cook told me that he was still working for the Mayor, but now got his (larger) paycheck from Bose instead. Reporting this week makes it clear that Cook was in conversations about taking on this role as early as 2020.

Cook was simply taking the same path that so many hangers-on in the Hogsett administration have tread before and after him: do a few years of “public service”, getting in good with rich developers, and eventually taking the revolving door to a high-paying job working for one of them. Cook’s romantic partner Scarlett Andrews did the exact same thing, receiving her reward for making developers rich during her time at the city by getting a great new job making developers rich directly.

In my short time in city government, I’ve seen far too many examples of this pattern.

And why would Mayor Hogsett want to put a stop to it? These same developers, fattened at the taxpayers’ trough, nearly always saw fit to give massive donations to Hogsett, even after he’s claimed not to be running for office again.

Everyone benefits! Everyone, that is, but the public these crooks are supposed to be working for.

City-County Councilors Wet Their Beaks

Last week as we came to vote on the city’s budget, we split the vote into nine separate pieces because so many Councilors had perceived or real conflicts of interest. City ethics rules require Councilors to abstain from any vote that may appear to offer a conflict of interest based on their, or their spouse’s, employment or ownership stake in businesses. Before the meeting, I asked my peers to consider the public interest that lays behind these abstentions. I pointed out that the public would be served by Councilors identifying the specific conflict at play and the amount of money involved in that conflict.
I will give credit where credit is due: the Republicans on the Council took my words to heart, and identified their specific roles at specific organizations, and the amount that those organizations stood to gain from the City budget.

For the most part, Democrats on the Council all ignored my request and simply abstained from the relevant votes without sharing the nature of their conflict, their employer, or how much was to be gained from the vote.

Perhaps Councilors aren’t standing to personally enrich themselves based on the City budget. If so, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t simply share the details about the perceived conflicts. Without sharing these details, how is the public to know whether Councilors are appropriately recusing themselves from debate on the issues at hand? They have made mistakes in the past, after all: IndyStar reported in 2024 that at least a few of the Councilors previously failed to properly disclose their conflicts of interest.

Note that these nine votes were on the main City-County budget, which doesn’t include the abstentions required on votes regarding municipal corporations. Council President Vop Osili is reputed to be the lead architect for the new Westin hotel being constructed in partnership with the Indianapolis Airport Authority, but that information is extremely difficult for the public to find.

It doesn’t make you a bad person to work for a business that deals with the City. But can we truly not find 25 residents of Marion County who don’t stand to personally benefit from the city budget?

Charter Fraudsters Gorge Themselves on Public Resources

In a political environment categorized by this much self-dealing and personal enrichment, it’s predictable that bad actors would go after any public funds they could sniff out.

In almost any other Democrat-led city in the country, public dollars for public education would be firewalled off from self-enrichment. But not in Joe Hogsett’s Indianapolis.

Hogsett has facilitated the sale of taxpayer-purchased buildings from Indianapolis Public Schools to scam artists for $1, even though IPS already shared resources with charter schools. The end result? IPS cuts services to children, while charter operators sell off the buildings for far more than they paid.

Not content with the breakneck pace of privatization and self-enrichment in Indianapolis, Hogsett is now paying an old ally of his $40,000 a month to help project manage for the “Indianapolis Local Education Alliance”, a Republican-created organization intended to force bankruptcy on IPS by demanding they further give away public resources to private companies.

We’ve known that our Mayor ignored sexual assault, harassment, and other improprieties at the highest level of his administration.

We’ve known that our Mayor held court over a ‘toxic’ culture, yelled at subordinates, and created a ‘culture of fear’.

We now know that our Mayor’s government and leadership is plagued with self-enrichment and corruption.

Mayor Hogsett’s legacy is destroyed. It’s only getting worse from here. My fellow Councilors can only choose whether their own legacies will follow suit. Joe Hogsett must resign - and every city leader needs to make that clear.

In love and solidarity,

Jesse