Who OWNS Indianapolis?
Friends,
It feels like a month since I last wrote to you. In fact, it’s been only eight days. In that amount of time, broad spectrums of the public and media have agreed with me that Mayor Hogsett’s administration has failed unacceptably at snow removal and trash pickup this month. (For example: IBJ, James Briggs at the IndyStar (twice), WIBC)
Several constituents reported to me that their trash was not picked up between New Year’s Day and January 21st due to the Solid Waste crews’ inability to get their jobs done while fighting against the rampant snow and ice. I’ve received dozens more emails from people confused and angered that their city provided no help to them.
Democratic and Republican Councilors alike are moving forward with proposed ordinances to change the city’s policy on snow removal. I will of course support and vote for these changes, but I want to reiterate that the problem here was not policy, it was leadership and their choices.
Since then, multiple sources within the administration have leaked to me that a variety of agencies and departments are being prohibited from communicating directly with me and other Councilors, either as punishment for speaking out against the administration’s failures or as a way of protecting the Mayor from Councilors finding out more details about how many constituents are complaining and how poorly departments are being run.
This is not the behavior of a person who has any business running our city.
At the request of two different constituents, I’m asking to track how many residents who contact the Mayor’s Action Center or use the RequestIndy app have insisted in their comments and notes that the mayor must resign. The notes of these cases are public record, and I’m very curious to see if the data about these requests will be provided to me (I asked for this data on January 17th and my email has received no response at all so far, eight days later).
Joe Hogsett is not answering questions from elected officials. Joe Hogsett is not responding to concerns from constituents. However, the mayor is absolutely responding quickly to one group of people: his big donors.
Indiana has incredibly weak campaign finance laws. Locally, an individual can give as much as they’d like with no limits to elected officials. (Compare that to Presidential campaigns, where individual contributions maxed out at $3,300 for an individual last year).
To know exactly who gave Joe Hogsett money last year, one would need to navigate to the government website where this data is hosted, search by name (his exact legal name - the site is old-fashioned enough that “Joe Hogsett” does not return any results), and pull up a PDF image file. The image file is not searchable, so one must scroll through the entire 88 page document eyeballing to see if names pop out.
Many of these names list “unknown” as their occupation. Just to pick on the first name I noticed, Dustin Koesters gave $1,000 to Hogsett on July 16th, 2024. Hogsett’s campaign finance report lists Dustin’s occupation as “Unknown.”
In a two second Google search, I was able to make known the unknown:
Dustin is a Senior Property Manager at The Residences at Cityway! He says that very openly on his public LinkedIn page:
I wonder why Hogsett and Koesters might not want this information to be so easily seen?
Regardless, I find it unacceptable that this theoretically public data is so difficult to access for constituents. And unlike the mayor who raised and hoarded nearly a million dollars for himself in a year when Democrats were fighting hard against well-financed opponents, I’m willing to do something about it.
Next Saturday, February 1st, Central Indiana DSA and I are buying lunch and providing childcare for volunteers to start poring through local campaign finance reports from all elected officials in Marion County. We are going to do what our taxpayer-funded elections division and Clerk have not: put all of this data in an easy-to-digest format in a spreadsheet, and then start analyzing trends about donors. (And yes - that includes me and my donors, though I’m providing a spreadsheet of my fundraising information, so volunteers should only need to double check my math on the PDFs!)
You don’t need to be a socialist to see the value in a transparent and accountable government. We would love to have your help if you’re at all interested in the brute-force data entry work, researching to correct any missing employers, or any fun data science work to analyze and visualize the data afterwards.
Join us!
Elected officials must serve the people, not the other way around. Democracy dies in darkness - help us shine some light.
And if you’re curious about DSA or socialism, join me at our information session tomorrow afternoon! We will briefly go over our local organization and explain what we believe and how we make decisions. You’re welcome to attend even if you’re not sure you align with us.
In love and solidarity,
Jesse