Carmel Pumps More Public Dollars Into Parking Garages As Indianapolis Taxpayers Are Asked To Pay Higher Taxes For Mass Transit

Indianapolis taxpayers are told they must suck it up and pay higher income taxes to fund a metropolitan bus rapid transit system that ultimately could cost upwards of $1 billion to provide connectivity to suburban communities like Carmel, Fishers and Greenwood. While suburban communities spend nothing on mass transit, they do make large public investments in roundabouts and ample public parking spaces to make commuting by automobile as convenient as possible.

Carmel council members recently gave Mayor Jim Brainard more borrowing authority to spend tens of millions of dollars on constructing more roundabouts at traffic intersections. Last night, those same Carmel council members approved $20 million in new bonding authority to construct two new parking garages. A private developer, Old Town Design Group, will get a 580-space parking garage to house the employees of Allied Solutions and a 308-space parking garage for office buildings and apartments also being developed as part of the Midtown development.

Again, the Indianapolis Star, which rams down our throats the necessity of funding mass transit, never makes the connection between all of the public money being spent by these suburban communities to promote and ease commuting by automobile at the same time it insists that higher taxes be paid to provide mass transit connectivity to these suburban communities. News stories by the Gannett newspaper are always written approvingly of all of these massive public expenditures by suburban leaders to support private developers while already overtaxed residents in Indianapolis are expected to absorb major tax increases to provide public transportation to transport low-paid workers in the urban core to those same suburban communities who want us to deliver them to their door but not make affordable housing available for them to reside there.