Fifth Indy City-County Council Member Calls on Hogsett to Resign
INDIANAPOLIS — A fifth member of the City-County Council is calling on Mayor Joe Hogsett to resign from office.
Michael-Paul Hart, a southside Republican, said he felt compelled to ask the mayor to step down after reading a recent Mirror Indy/IndyStar investigation that detailed how Hogsett, a Democrat, ignored conflicts of interest involving millions of dollars in city incentives.
“This fails the basic test of ethical leadership,” Hart wrote in an Oct. 16 opinion column in IndyStar.
The joint investigation from the news outlets revealed that Thomas Cook, the mayor’s former top aide, was asked to resign at the end of 2020 because of a prohibited relationship with a subordinate, Scarlett Andrews.
Cook then became a partner at a downtown law firm where he signed up big-name developers seeking city incentives. Andrews, meanwhile, was promoted to lead the city agency charged with recommending those incentives.
All told, at least $80 million in public incentives were recommended or awarded to Cook’s clients during the roughly three-year period that Andrews was director of the Department of Metropolitan Development and deputy mayor of economic development.
When asked in an interview whether the relationship represented a conflict of interest, Hogsett refused to acknowledge it, saying he wouldn’t comment on “theoretical personnel matters.”
Earlier this week, three Democratic councilors, including Council President Vop Osili, told reporters they want to see additional reporting from the news outlets before deciding what to do next.
In an interview, Hart told Mirror Indy that he, too, is intrigued to see additional reporting on the Hogsett administration, but that he didn’t feel the need to wait for more information to call for the mayor’s resignation.
“I don’t need to see any more to make that resignation call,” Hart said. “As for Democrats, they should be in the same boat.”
Previous allegations
Hart said he would have called for Hogsett’s resignation last year after three women accused him of sexual misconduct, but the councilor held back because a majority of the six-member Republican caucus did not support doing so.
The allegations spurred a bipartisan effort by the council to hire an out-of-state law firm to investigate Hogsett’s handling of the women’s claims. The Fisher Phillips report raised ethical concerns but said the mayor’s actions were lawful and did not violate city-county policy.
Hart said he’s not inclined to support an additional probe, given that several councilors expressed disappointment in the outcome of the $450,000 investigation.
“I think the investigation was a waste of taxpayer money,” Hart said.
Three of the 19 Democrats on the council — Jesse Brown, Crista Carlino and Andy Nielsen — have previously called for Hogsett to step down. Josh Bain, a southside Republican, joined the chorus after Lauren Roberts was forcibly removed by sheriff’s deputies from a June council meeting after she tried to speak about her experience working on Hogsett’s first mayoral campaign.
Roberts contacted Hogsett and several other city officials in 2017 to report that Cook had abused his position of power over her when she worked on the mayor’s 2015 campaign. She now describes Cook’s conduct as sexual abuse.
Cook has not been charged with a crime and has previously characterized his relationships with subordinates as consensual.
In an Oct. 15 statement, the council’s 18-member Democratic caucus — Brown was expelled from the caucus in February — said that it was aware of recent news reports that “carry the potential to breach public trust” and will “continue to monitor the situation” before “taking any necessary steps to do what is right and hold those involved accountable.”
Next steps
Hart said he’s part of a six-member working group, led by Democratic Councilor Dan Boots, that is considering improvements to the city’s sexual harassment policies based on recommendations outlined in the Fisher Phillips report.
Among the potential changes: making the city’s human resources division independent of the mayor’s office and appointing an inspector general in cases where harassment allegations are filed against a high-ranking public official.
The working group also hopes to address any questions that weren’t answered in the law firm’s investigation, Boots told Mirror Indy.
The council’s Rules Committee plans to discuss the working group’s proposals in a special Oct. 28 meeting, Boots said.
That meeting is expected to include presentations from the city’s Human Resources Division, the National Women’s Defense League, a law scholar and the Society for Human Resource Management, a Virginia-based human resources consulting firm.
