Standing up for historic preservation

When the interim study committee created by the Indiana General Assembly to

Bill Brooks, editor of Urban Times

“improve” the Indianapolis Historic Preservation Commission finally gets around to meeting, presumably later this fall, it will hear from a number of people with stakeholder interests in the system.

Include among that list a task force created by the Indianapolis-Marion County City-County Council. The task force was adopted, according to the resolution written by Councilor Ben Hunter, because “recent questions and concerns have been raised by some Indianapolis residents living within designated IHPC neighborhoods over the process of review and procedures as related to the issues of Certificates of Appropriateness.” Hunter added, because “it is important to educate and ensure due process for residents within designated IHPC districts.”

The resolution calls for the task force to include five members – two councilors, one of each party; a representative from the Historic Urban Neighborhoods of Indianapolis; a representative from the Metropolitan Indianapolis Board of Realtors; and a representative of the Marion County Alliance of Neighborhoods (but who does not live in an IHPC neighborhood).

As of this writing, the City-County Council has been able to fill only three of those slots – Hunter himself; Councilor Brian Mahern, who resides in Woodruff Place; and Mike Arnold, past president of the Lockerbie Square People’s Club.

Tentative dates for the four mandated meetings, along with their subject matter, are 5:30 p.m. Thursday, June 10, education of IHPC process; 6:30 p.m. Thursday, June 17, economic impact; 5:30 p.m. Thursday, June 24, resident concerns; and 5:30 p.m. Thursday, July 8, review and recommendations. At press time, those dates had not been confirmed, nor any location announced.

The group’s final recommendations would go to the General Assembly’s interim study committee, created after Sen. Pat Miller’s 2010 proposed legislation that would have dramatically altered – some say neutered – the historic preservation process. (For more background, see “Babblin’ Brooks” at www.urbantimesonline.com.)

Diverting the debate to study committees has given people in the historic preservation districts time to educate legislators about the process and its many merits. A group of neighbors vitally interested in safeguarding the historic preservation process has continued to work educating legislators. That group is currently led by Garry Chilluffo of St. Joseph, who can be reached at garry@chilluffo.com.

The challenge now is to continue that educational effort through the City-County Council’s task force, and then in front of the General Assembly study committee.

Such work will have a significant impact on the future of the Indianapolis Historic Preservation Commission, as well as the flourishing neighborhoods under its auspices. The current system, being one formed and manned by people, is not perfect. None is. But it works, and should not be fixed into non-existence.

– One of the more well attended monthly meetings of the Downtown District Task Force took place on May 13, when neighbors and business representatives had a chance to meet Karen Arnett, the new commander of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Dept.’s Downtown District. The personable new commander is no stranger to Downtown, having served here earlier in her career. In addition to dealing with crime and public safety, she has one other worry: Where the police station will be after December, when IMPD’s lease at 25 W. 9th St. expires. Police are looking for a larger facility.

– In the Pouring Salt Into An Open Wound Dept., the East End merchants will be looking on in wistful silence this month as they watch the celebration of a one-mile leg of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail.

Wistful, because it’s not their particular leg, the one which has kept the East End of Mass Ave in cone-zone hell for two summers now, while a different construction company working on the leg of the trail running west from the English Foundation Building has substantially completed that section, known as the North Corridor. Work on that leg, by the way, started a few weeks after work on the Northeast Corridor, now not expected for completion until November.

There’s only one reasonable explanation for the inequity: Gov. Mitch Daniels hates the East End merchants. Absurd? Follow my logic: Work on the two corridors (unlike work on the first completed section, along Alabama Street) involved federal money, and therefore the Indiana Dept. of Transportation. It was INDOT, not the Cultural Trail advocates, that awarded the bid to Sunesis, an Ohio-based company (and, by the way, not the company working on the North Corridor).

Who is in charge of INDOT? Certainly not anyone who has to answer to votes. But everyone at INDOT is responsible to, who else, Gov. Daniels. So, we know who to blame for the fact that traffic cones went up at Mass Ave and College Avenue in April 2009, even though no substantive work on that road was done at all last year. Merchants suffered, and no one seemed to care.

Gov. Daniels, of course, does not hate the East End merchants. He might not even know who any of them are. He might not even know what the Cultural Trail is, or why it remains a brilliant idea which, one day, will be a magnificent asset for the city of Indianapolis.

But, if work on the mile-long stretch ends in November as planned, the East End of Mass Ave would have endured one-lane traffic and unwieldy customer detours for 20 months. Count ’em, 20. As President Harry Truman once sort of said, the buck has to stop somewhere. In this case, wherever it stops someone will immediately cover it up with an orange cone.