Two forums have taken place in the past three weeks for Brown County Commissioner candidates.
Incumbent Republican Diana Biddle did not attend either of them due to a prior engagement and needing to help her husband who was recovering from surgery; Democrat challenger Kyle Birkemeier attended both.
The League of Women Voters’ “empty seat” policy prohibits candidates from answering questions if their opponent is unable to appear, so Birkemeier made a prepared statement at their Oct. 4 forum and Ted Adams read one from Biddle. Biddle’s statement ran in last week’s letters to the editor; Birkemeier’s is in this week’s letters.
Biddle was unable to attend an Oct. 16 forum which Birkemeier organized at the Brown County Public Library, as she was at a bridge conference in Lafayette.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]The Brown County Democrat recorded the questions asked at the library forum, then posed them to Biddle in person the following day.
The three-member board of commissioners is the county’s executive branch, helping to direct policy for the way the county is run. One seat is up for election this year.
Q: What is your timeline for completing the Salt Creek Trail?
Kyle Birkemeier: I couldn’t give a full timeline to complete it. … That’s something I really want to do. I talked to the Snyders who are very worried about eminent domain being used to take their farm. … The Snyders told me that they are willing to do another route that takes it on the other side of Salt Creek and back, or take it along State Road 46 up on the hill above. … They’re willing to work with the county to complete that trail. … If we want to get these projects done, we need to be willing to work with the people who actually own the land instead of trying to come in there, strong-hand and force it to get done. That’s what I would do to get the trail done. I would start there, try to start on that section instead of starting at the park. It doesn’t make sense to me to start a park trail that goes to the RedBarn, but one that would connect the current trail. Ultimately, I would love to get one to Deer Run. I think that has a much bigger community benefit to take a trail out to Deer Run where kids come from the school and go out every day. … I also think if we get new leadership and get a new trail committee, the Tiltons (property owners between the edge of town and Deer Run Park) might even work with us. There is hope if you engage in the right, proper ways. …
Diana Biddle: … All of the property acquisition with INDOT has been completed on what we’ll call the “school section” over by the school (athletic fields at Eagle Park). The Watson property, the Oliver property and those things were negotiated to administrative settlement. … Now that we have those (deeds) … it’s time to the circle the wagon, I think. … One property owner (in the middle section) has already laid out his own path, so that will be easy. … The final piece of the puzzle will be if we go Plan A or Plan B around Snyders’ property to get to the trail at the Y. It could include maybe going through or around Maple Leaf. I don’t know. We’ll have to come up with an actual design plan. I think (Brown County Highway Superintendent) Mike (Magner) was trying to get some survey work done in that area. The timeline will be dependent on when the bridges come from Clay County. … I think we’re really close. I would like to be able to work with Snyders to come to some kind of an optimum solution, but we’ve got options to go in front of or behind. … Across the creek there’s just a lovely area, if we could go that direction it would be beautiful. There is going to have to be another bridge, but it won’t have to be a big bridge. … It can be like a pedestrian bridge. … We’ll see. I’d like to work with the schools, work with (Superintendent) Laura (Hammack) to see if they can acquire that piece of property down by the sheriff’s department (where the skate park was first going to go). They want to build a trail up to the football field so the kids can access the trail without crossing the highway.
Q: They (local leaders) are not listening to us. … What can you do to solve this problem?
Birkemeier: I truly believe that transparency is key to any successful democracy. … I pledge as commissioner to make sure everything I do is done in public. If people try to pull me into a closed-door meeting, I will tell you about it. … I don’t know why complaints haven’t been answered. … I know they’ve been written. But as commissioner I will call it out. … I am going to need the public support to do that. It’s going to need you guys out there helping to change elected people’s minds. That’s the only real power we have as a voting public. … In my time out in Arizona, we worked on the comprehensive plan. … They spelled out in the plan how they codified in the law to make it so all departments, all boards had to follow this plan before they actually make a decision. If someone comes to you with a development for an entertainment center, you need to make sure it fits within the guidelines set forth and it’s not going to take away money from other things the county is going to need. … I would be just one of three commissioners if I get elected. Getting something done is going to be really hard; that’s why I am going to get up there and fight for it. That’s why if we want to get this kind of change in the county, we all need to get involved. … Hold the people you elect accountable for what you elected them to do.
Biddle: No business is transacted outside of the public view. State statute says we have to vote on contracts in meetings, but services and those sorts of things are just day-to-day administrative decisions. The thing that (commissioner) Dave (Anderson) referenced tonight (a social media complaint about Brown County Solid Waste requesting a property tax increase for a new truck), we have … solid waste board meetings and they are advertised in the paper. I think in the four years I have been on the solid waste board, we’ve had six people come to a meeting, not all at once. We’re lucky to have one person in the audience. … If people don’t come to the meetings and they don’t attend, it doesn’t mean there’s been no public input. … But the perception is they don’t hear about it. That I don’t know how to fix. … There were changes to the Open Door Law this year which allowed for administrative meetings. … If you want your commissioner meetings to be six hours long, we can discuss everything: choose paint colors, carpet colors, decide how to fix the toilet in the jail … but state statute says we really only have to discuss things that we actually vote on and contracts. Anybody is welcome to come to the commissioners’ office any time. I actually had two people last week that job shadowed me. One guy couldn’t keep up and it was a slow day, actually. He came with me from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. I had 24 interactions with different people. He was trying to make a list of everybody I talked to and what about. Transparency is a two-way street. If you want to know what’s going on, then you have to be at the meetings or come to the commissioners’ office and we’ll have coffee.
Q: What is your plan to bring families to the community to help boost … the good schools we have?
Birkemeier: That’s a tough problem. … Some of the things that have happened since we were kids here causes that. One of the big ones, in my opinion, we got on this tax levy freeze system where … we have to get our taxes from somewhere, so we’re taking them from income tax. Income tax has gone up. We’re now fifth in the state and we’re going to have to go up again with the way the system is currently to fund this county. … We need to get out of that system and get to a fairer, more equitable system. The average Brown County worker … is getting taxed at 2 percent of their income for anything they make; it goes to Brown County. That’s a big hurdle for families. … I know some people who saw that, wanted to move here and said, “Well, I could buy a house right across the border in Monroe County and don’t have that problem.” … We’re attracting people to come in and buy these houses as retirement houses, vacation homes, a second, third or fourth home because the property taxes here are so low. That’s inflated property values. We need to come up with a way to offer more affordable housing … but also a better tax system that would support a working family. … That’s not necessarily going to fix all of that problem. … We’re getting fiber internet through most of this county, so why don’t we get out there and market to other families to try to bring professionals to come to the Brown County lifestyle and work for whatever company it is where you can go, work remotely from home … the kind of jobs, the kind of people who could actually afford to come here. I think that would be the quickest solution. SPEA (School of Public Environmental Affairs) at IU did a study (on our tax system). … They gave a number of suggestions of things we can do to turn it around and solve these kinds of problems. … The League of Women Voters did a financial study, which also had some good suggestions on what we can do. Again, no one really has taken those and done anything with it. We need to do that. We need cut some of the waste, too. … A lot of those ad hoc committees are doing things, creating problems and have added to our debt. … We need to step back for a second and say, “Hey, wait. We’re a small county and we can’t afford to live like we live.” We need to start cutting some costs, to allow taxes to drop down and hopefully we can then go out and market this county, not just to people who want to come and retire here, but to people who want to come and live here, be a part of the community. …
Biddle: That’s one of those two-edged swords. You have a certain group of individuals in the county who don’t want anything to change, ever. Unfortunately, things have to change. History is the record of change, so if you have no change, you have no history. Affordable housing, and I don’t mean low-income housing, but the real key in the problem we’re having is trying to be able to build moderate priced homes … the $150,000 range and you don’t have to do $100,000 of work to move into it. The issue with doing that is everybody has to buy 3 to 5 acres. We have very few subdivision-type properties. I don’t mean quarter-acre lots. … We developed a subdivision up on Carmel Ridge Road years ago, my mom did, several of them, but those “subdivisions” are 5-acre lots. … I would love to bring a builder in here and be able to point him to a piece of property that is 30 to 40 acres and say, “Build 20 homes,” but we don’t have 30 or 40 acres with the topography that is conducive to building them. Then we have to have septic systems because we don’t have sewers. … Something has to change in terms of our housing. Tiny homes might be an answer to that. … Younger generations … want minimalist living. … The downside of tiny living is you still have the same cost of infrastructure. … You still have to have a septic system. You still have to run water. You still have to run electric. You still have to have a driveway permit. You still have to buy the land. But now instead of having to buy 5 acres, you only have to buy 3. Instead of building 20 houses that are 1,500-square-foot ranch, three-bedroom, two-bath homes, then maybe we’re looking at a smaller footprint. I think we have to look at the change in the lifestyle of the generation we want to attract because it’s not the same type of lifestyle that is common for my generation. Smaller homes might be an answer to that (bringing families here), jobs; it’s all a package. It’s like chicken or the egg. You need jobs or you need houses. We’ve got houses, we’ve got no jobs. We’ve got lots of jobs, we have no houses.
Q: I do a lot of research on tiny homes. … What can we do to get these?
Birkemeier: I was involved with lobbying and speaking in front of the commission and council on the tiny home issue. We did succeed in getting the ordinance changed for house sizes. There are some major issues that would still hold up the true tiny home movement. One of them is … we don’t allow septics to be pumped. A lot of tiny homes could have a very small tank that they could hire out to be pumped and that could keep costs down very significantly. That is allowed under the state standards, and modern systems have alarms built into the tanks that could notify the health department. … I don’t really believe it’s the government’s job to go ahead and say, “We can’t trust our people to do things.” It’s more their job to say, “Oh, you’re not doing something …” A lot of the tiny house movement is a modular style, not built into a foundation. That is currently not allowed in Brown County. I think that’s one where I would like to hear from the public if we would really want to change that. … There’s a lot of scientific research done right that you can compost your toilet. It’s not for everybody. I would never do it, but we have a major city (Tucson, Arizona) with over 9 million people who changed that ordinance and it has not caused a massive pollution problem. … Realistically, young families who move here are not going to move here for city life. … They are going to be moving here to homestead, they’re going to be moving here to live a rural, country life and there’s going to be a lot of those types of people that do want to do things, like live in a tiny house, compost your toilets and stuff like that. … I want to go back, start at the state level (with septic requirements). … We need to stop doing things that inflate prices and keep people out of the county. …
Biddle: We’ve already kind of moved that way. Planning and zoning, within the last six months, we reduced the size of the parcel that you need to build on. It used to be 5 acres and now it’s 3. We reduced the required minimum square footage. … They still have to get the infrastructure and buy the land. I don’t know what more we can do. I’m sure there are other things we can do, but we’ve made a lot of progress to kind of move in that direction to make it more conducive to live here.
Q: Are you willing to work with Brown County (Nashville) Volunteer Fire Department to create a fire territory?
Birkemeier: I do believe there needs to be some kind of central coordination. … If we had that central fire emergency response coordination for the county, we can then bring in our other big needs of serving the (state) park, serving state lands. I really want to try to get more money from the state park, and if we had a centralized response team, it would be easier for us to lobby and have a centralized idea of how much money we’re even spending to go on these emergency runs. It would help when we go to lobby the state to get money back. … I would need to understand the issue a little bit better, but at the same point it makes sense. … It makes sense to I think, again, have a countywide centralized fire authority. It’s hard because we have such a great amount of volunteers out there and I don’t want to sound like I’ll be stepping on anyone’s toes, but at the same point I see there is a need to help coordinate between the different departments.
Biddle: We talked about a year ago. A fire territory is different than a fire district, so the short answer is we already have a taxing unit in place that we are not using, so why are we trying to reinvent the wheel? There are some very technical differences between a district and a territory. Cold turkey, I can’t tell you what those are. My answer to that is we already have a funding vehicle in place; let’s use it. If that’s what they want to do then we don’t have to create a new territory. We don’t have to go through all of the legal things we have to do to create something. We have something. If they wanted to do something to create paid firemen, it’s a two-edged sword because we’re losing our volunteers. It’s very hard to get volunteers like we used to have, but the idea of funding paid firemen, that’s an expensive issue. I don’t know that the burden to the taxpayers, I don’t know if we can bear that out. … I’m always willing to look at solutions.
