Ballard Blasts Peterson For Lobbying Handouts To Political Cronies

GOP mayoral hopeful Greg Ballard blasted Mayor Bart Peterson (D) for blowing $324,000 in taxpayers dollars to reward political cronies at two major lobbying firms. Ballard said, “Mayor Peterson demonstrated, yet again, his poor judgment and failure to make crime his top priority when he chose to spend over $300,000 on outside lobbyists last year, instead of hiring police officers," said Ballard. Ballard pointed to lobbying reports filed by the City of Indianapolis with the the state lobby commission, which shows the City spent $324,400.39 in the past twelve months to compensate lobbyists. "The lion’s share of that money went to the law firms that currently employ the Mayor’s campaign manager and his former top city attorney."

Bose Public Affairs Group employs former Peterson deputy, Mike O'Connor. The city also paid Baker & Daniels and Ice Miller to lobby for the City this past session. Baker & Daniels employs former Peterson deputy, Melina Kennedy, and the city's former chief legal counsel, Scott Chinn. Ice Miller formerly employed Mayor Peterson. Peterson political crony Lacy Johnson, an Ice Miller attorney, is a lobbyist and partner at Ice Miller. According to a Star report on Sunday, the expenditures on lobbying by the City made it the third biggest spender at the General Assembly this past session among all lobbyists. This comes at the same time Mayor Peterson is seeking yet another $85 million tax increase from the city-county council.

Ballard thinks that money would be better spent on more police officers on the street. "A recent report showed that the new Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD) is well over 100 officers short at best,” said Ballard. “Violent crime is growing throughout the city. And how does the mayor spend our hard earned tax dollars? On political cronies who are now highly paid lobbyists.” "This offends me,” Ballard added. “While the City needs a strong presence at the General Assembly, I don’t think the Mayor went about it the right way at this time. With more than $2 million dollars worth of staff on his office’s payroll, couldn’t he, through good personnel management, have found competent City employees for this part-time task?”

Ballard called on Peterson "to place public safety ahead of all other city priorities and political considerations.” “We need to hire more police officers and we need to reopen some of the important community police posts like the North District substation." Commenting on the City's waste of taxpayer money to reward Peterson's political cronies, Ballard said, "We didn’t get lower property taxes." "We didn’t get more efficient government." "We didn’t get more police on our streets." "We did get his pledge to raise our income taxes by $85 million when we can least afford it.”