With the July 4th holiday, many may have missed an Indianapolis Star Op-Ed piece penned by our Fishers Mayor Scott Fadness in the July 5th edition.
“In the fickle sport of politics, the assignment of blame is the easy play called,” Fadness writes. “Anger and fear drive headlines and votes. Complex proposals, long-term thinking, candor, boldness and risk-taking are punished and not rewarded.”
Fadness describes a generally favorable government environment for business in the Hoosier state. However, there are factors that limit Indiana’s ability to attract and retain high-paying jobs.
He argues that our state lags the nation in per capita income, educational attainment, health outcomes and environmental conditions. The mayor points to the fact that Indiana faced much the same predicament twenty years ago, but state finances were in a woeful condition then. State government now has a budget surplus.
The state must find a way to create an environment with clean air and water, and a healthy ecosystem, not at the local economy’s expense, argues Fadness, but in way that is a benefit.
Can Indiana mine the gold rush of jobs to be created in the future?
“We must decide whether we will be a state that simply fulfills orders downstream or if we are a state that innovates, creates and generates real wealth,” according to Fadness. “If we harness the power of our higher education institutions and set forth an ambitious goal to lead innovation in the areas of carbon sequestration, battery power, pharmaceutical manufacturing, precision agriculture, environmental reclamation and data analytics, we can generate an innovation-driven economy that will propel our state into the next several decades and provide meaningful, quality of life-sustaining employment for generations to come.”
He ends the piece with a call to action to bring a “collective entrepreneurial spirit” to Indiana, upgrading our educational and medical systems to better serve everyone, as well as the state’s economy.
Mayor Fadness has had a front-row seat in dealing with these issues as his administration continues to develop Fishers economically and hears all about these issues from business leaders considering Fishers as a new home.
One thing this piece will do is fuel speculation that Fadness may be looking at a possible run for governor in 2024 by writing this missive in the state’s largest newspaper. Of course, he first must make a decision on whether to run for re-election as Fishers mayor next year. There has been no official announcement on that, but all the tea leaves point to a likely Scott Fadness run for another term as mayor.