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Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett has put forth a spiffy new plan to fix the disasterous roads in Marion County: MORE TAXES! 

*Article Intermission: We now pause for 20 seconds to allow you to applaud and sing praises to the good Mayor’s name… No one? Really? Alright, I guess we move on.

In comments delivered during his thrilling, nail-biter of a state of the city address, Mayor Hogsett stated that one of the challenges with fixing Marion County’s roads is that not everyone who uses them is contributing to their upkeep. Specifically, there are 161,000 workers who commute into the city from outside Indianapolis every day. Thus, in strict accordance with the democrat party’s most beloved principle, it’s time for those freeloading outsiders to pay their fair share!

“Marion County taxpayers bear the brunt of the financial burden for infrastructure which serves the entire region,” Hogsett said in his address. “After decades of under-funding it is abundantly clear that any solution for Marion County’s infrastructure problems must include help from all who use it.”

Hogsett is proposing a “Regional Infrastructure Fund,” which is a more eloquent and politically sensitive way to say “new tax.” The fund would take a percentage of income taxes from the nine surrounding counties of Indianapolis and put that money into a collective fund. 

As expected, residents from surrounding counties are less than enthusiastic about Mayor Hogsett’s proposal, and they unleashed their frustration to WIBC host Tony Katz Thursday. 

“I’m furious!” a caller told Katz. “I live in Hamilton county and the only time I come to Indianapolis is to visit my parents.”

“I look at it this way,” the caller continued. “If they’ve got enough money to build their Red Line, their Blue Line, their Yellow Line and all their other Lines, why don’t they try using that to fix the roads?”

Hogsett’s Republican challenger for Mayor in 2019, State Sen. Jim Merritt, criticized Hogsett’s proposal for Indy’s roads.

“If this sounds familiar, it’s because we have been working in the state legislature on this very topic over the past several years,” Merritt said of the Regional Infrastructure Fund. “The Mayor says that this now is a priority and yet he hasn’t engaged with legislators once to help push this concept forward.”

Merritt said Hogsett has had three-and-a-half years to “start talking about plans and improvements,” adding that his plans are “only skimming the surface – at a time when Indianapolis needs deeper insight into the serious problems plaguing our city.”

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