Opinion: Who will mourn for Bart Peterson?

Across the nation, Peterson was lauded by education reform wonks for breaking with the Democratic Party — and its support for the public education establishment — and becoming the only mayor in America to authorize charter schools. Harvard University’s Kennedy School also recognized his efforts last year by awarding him its Innovations in American Government Award. He also took his campaign against gory videogames to the national level this year after he became president of the National League of Cities. At a conference he organized on the issue last April, Peterson declared that ‘a lot of us ... continue to be concerned about our violent culture.’ Those matters, however, aren’t paramount on the minds of residents in urban communities, who want crime-free streets, neighborhoods free of vandalism, pothole-free streets, family-friendly parks and low taxes. Rudolph Giuliani’s success in attending to those desires while serving as mayor of New York is one reason why he is now the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Peterson’s failure to do so cost him his job. It has also kept Indianapolis, once a shining Rust Belt metropolis, mired in the same blight, mayhem and malaise that have long made Detroit an unlivable slum. A near-record 153 reported homicides last year — including such headline-grabbing incidents as the savage mass murder of Emma Valdez and six of her relatives — shows that Indianapolis is in some ways less safe than either New York or Detroit. It was the only one of eight mid-sized cities (along with the Big Apple) to experience increases in incidents and crime rates per 100,000 people in every category — including a 44-percent increase in the burglary rate — between 2000 and 2005. Rampant, flagrant vandalism has become an increasingly common feature of the city’s landscape, as even downtown office buildings are ‘tagged’ in graffiti. So has abandoned housing, with both poor and otherwise middle-class neighborhoods such as Fountain Square blighted by ramshackles that attract drug dealing, vagrancy and arson. City government, once-known for embracing privatization and merging local government operations under such legendary mayors as Stephen Goldsmith and Richard Lugar, has become addicted to tax increases. Peterson burnished this reputation — and likely sealed his fate — this past July when he convinced the Democrat-controlled city-county council to approve a 65-percent increase in the county-option income tax, just as homeowners were livid over a new round of double-digit property tax increases. Now Indianapolis, whose population and labor force has barely budged since 2000, is struggling to combat the kind of suburban flight it had expertly avoided in the last century — and which crippled most other American cities.