I began covering Scott Fadness in 2012 when starting this blog and covering the Fishers Town Council. Fadness was the town manager at the time, working for a 7-member town council.
His job was to listen during the meetings and respond to what the council wanted the staff to handle. After a long town council discussion on a given issue, Town Manager Fadness would often respond, “You’ve given us some work to do.”
When residents of Fishers voted in a November 2012 referendum to become a second class city, the assumption was Scott Fadness would likely leave for another position somewhere as a town manager or similar job. When that didn’t happen, I suspected there were people in high places encouraging him to become a candidate for Mayor of the new City of Fishers.
He did run and assumed office in 2015. He has been there ever since, and faces no opposition in the upcoming city election, meaning his mayoral term lasts four more years.
When Town Manager Fadness became Mayor Fadness, his priorities and style of governing became clear. His first initiative was mental health, one he continues to advocate to this day. That may seem fairly uncontroversial and I would agree, but there have been residents and families in this city that have benefited.
However, when the COVID pandemic hit, he decided the only way to get a handle on testing in the early stages of COVID was to begin his own testing program by creating a city health department. Fishers is only one of a handful of cities with its own health department, but Mayor Fadness felt strongly an aggressive approach was needed to deal with the health emergency.
Mayor Fadness took a lot of political heat for creating the Health Department, particularly from people at the county level of government, but he felt strongly it was needed and moved forward anyway. The Fishers Health Department is still in business under the leadership of Public Health Director Monica Heltz, and by all measures, the department appears to be doing well.
I go over all this because of a podcast I recorded with Mayor Fadness recently, where we spent the first minutes talking about the controversies surrounding the Hamilton East Library, serving Noblesville and Fishers. I found many of the words he used in that interview words I have heard from him since 2015.
The debate is over a new Library Board policy to review all the books in the teen (or Young Adult) collection of books and move books meeting a specific criteria set out by the board to the adult book collection. It has created lots of publicity state-wide, nation-wide and to a certain extent, the international media has picked up this story.
The mayor says in situations like this, he tries to practice “discipline and humility over cultural matters.” When dealing with emotionally-charged issues, he preaches being “intentional, thoughtful and inclusive.”
I have heard the mayor use the word “thoughtful” often in the many years I have covered him and held podcast discussions with him. He has always shied away from what he sees as issues coming from the far left or the far right. He believes most people living in Fishers are not on the far left or right, but rather in the middle. He would like to see less ideology and more civic-minded people coming together to fashion policy recommendations and solve problems.
Fadness also indicated in the recent podcast interview that he is asked multiple times nearly every week to make a statement about this or that issue. He made it clear to me he has decided not to issue constant statements about most of the issues when pitched to him by someone or some group of people locally.
However, he has chosen to speak on the library board issue because it has generated publicity about Fishers and it is not generally positive. As always, Mayor Scott Fadness is measured in his language and continues to believe in reaching some solution that the community can generally support on an issue such as the local library.
This is the Scott Fadness I have covered nearly 12 years.