Carmel City Council Finally Stands Up To Big Spending Mayor

The Indianapolis Star reports:

Carmel City Council members effectively fired the executive director of the Carmel Redevelopment Commission on Monday night – denying a $60,000 contract extension that would have paid him for the rest of the year.

Carmel Mayor Jim Brainard

Les Olds, an architect by trade who has been the mastermind behind much of what the CRC has done to redevelop downtown Carmel, has been the executive director for more than a decade.

But by a 4-3 vote, the council expressed disappointment in the way the way Olds has run the CRC – particularly with apparent haphazard record-keeping revealed after the CRC was swallowed into city government after last year’s refinancing of CRC debt.

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An angry Mayor Jim Brainard said the vote effectively puts a stop to everything the CRC is currently doing – a list that includes selling the Shapiro’s building on Rangeline Road; redeveloping the Party Tree building, also on Rangeline; and a number of other small projects.“This vote today effectively shuts down the CRC,” said Brainard, addressing the council, “which is what you promised over and over would not happen.”

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Councilwoman Luci Snyder led the charge against Olds, saying she would not vote for the contract because of the many problems seen with contracts that were to be given to city’s clerk-treasurer.

Many of the contracts, that were supposed to be original documents to be kept by the city and scanned into the city’s website, were turned over haphazardly – some were missing pages, others were missing signatures.

CRC has been an out-of-control organization for quite some time, helping to take Carmel into deeper debt as the city eventually had to assume the CRC's liabilities.  If bad record-keeping is the excuse the council needs for finally act to put a stop to the CRC's reckless financing of private business ventures, so be it.