Mayor Hogsett set to make campaign announcement Wednesday
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) – Mayor Joe Hogsett may be ready to announce his re-election bid.
Hogsett’s campaign has set an event for 5:45 p.m. Wednesday for what it calls a “special campaign announcement.”
The Democrat in 2019 will enter the final year of his first four-year term as mayor.
No Republicans have formally announced candidacies for the 2019 mayor’s race.
When people who live in Indianapolis talk about what they call successes in Mayor Hogsett’s first term, they point to the balanced budget, the push for the criminal justice center, creating a program to help more than 1,000 Indy teens find summer jobs.
When people talk about some room for improvement, they mention the potholes, the homelessness downtown and the crime rate.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is a political reporter for WIBC, News 8’s sister station. He said the crime numbers could be problematic for the mayor since he campaigned on cracking down on crime.
“You live by the crime record you kind of die by the crime record and every year since the Hogsett folks have been mayor, we have seen a record in the number of murders and criminal homicides in this town,” he said.
WIBC had some polling on Mayor Hogsett from about six weeks ago. It showed Hogsett with a 65 percent job approval rating. It also showed 51 percent would support a bid of his for re-election. Yet 53 percent believe the city is heading in the wrong direction.
The poll had a 5.7 percent margin of error.
“it’s interesting it’s like a co-worker you like personally but you’re not quite sure maybe this person should keep their job,” said Shabazz on the poll numbers.
He added Republicans will need to find a viable, credible candidate to go up against Hogsett.
Kate Sweeney Bell, the Marion County Democratic Party Chair, released the following statement about Mayor Hogsett’s first term:
“Over the last three years, Mayor Hogsett has invested in programs to make Indianapolis safer, including more than three million dollars in grants targeting the root causes of violent crime, a team of Peacemakers working in high crime neighborhoods, and the creation of a Mobile Crisis Unit that is helping keep people with substance abuse and mental health issues out of jail and in to treatment programs. He has grown the police force and overseen the department’s return to community-based beat policing.
Last year, Mayor Hogsett launched Indy Achieves, an education program that will provide millions in scholarships and grants to low-income students attending Ivy Tech and IUPUI, helping to increase the number of Marion County residents qualified for the jobs of the 21st century. And he started Project Indy — a youth program that engages thousands of at-risk teenagers and teaches them soft-skills over the summer months.
Mayor Hogsett is also investing in our neighborhoods. With the help of the City-County Council he has laid out an infrastructure plan that will spend more than 500 million dollars on roads, streets, and sidewalks over the next four years — all without a local tax increase.
And he is working to build upon local momentum to ensure that Indianapolis continues to be a hub for innovation and business. Over the last three years, we have seen major investment from companies like Salesforce, FedEx, and most recently — Infosys, who announced plans to hire thousands of area residents and redevelop the city’s old airport site.
Mayor Hogsett has accomplished all this, not through divisiveness, but through collaboration. For the second year in a row, he worked with the city-county council to pass a balanced budget — this year, not just with bipartisan support but unanimous support, helping to cement the fiscal stability of our city. In fact, just this week Moody’s announced that they had upgraded the city’s credit outlook, citing the City’s conservative budget strategies and a strong local economy.”