Mayor Mueller speaks proudly of South Bend’s accomplishments in State of the City address

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (WNDU) - South Bend Mayor James Mueller delivered his 2024 State of the City address on Thursday night at Riley High School.

The mayor spoke proudly of his administration’s recent accomplishments in South Bend and allowed time to discuss the small stuff that gets a mayor re-elected or ousted.

He pointed out the city has recently installed 91 speed humps, patched over 52,000 potholes, and graded 542 allies. He also spoke about the important partnerships the city has made with the federal and state government to get big projects moving forward, leading to a discussion of politics, saying elections have consequences.

“Governor Holcomb, who has been good to us, is term-limited and won’t be our governor next year. Some of our state legislators on both sides of the aisle are facing challengers who take a burn-it-all approach. We need more bridge builders, not bridge burners,” he said.

Mueller also spoke about the U.S. Congress, saying the Congress in place before the most recent midterm elections was one of the most effective in history, calling the current Congress one of the least productive in history.

You can rewatch Mayor Mueller’s address in its entirety and read the full remarks below:

Members of the Common Council, distinguished guests, city employees, neighbors, and all who call South Bend home: thank you for being here tonight as I share the latest chapter of our city’s story.

I am pleased to report that the state of our city has never been stronger. South Bend has not had this much growth at any point in my lifetime and the lifetimes of all but our longest living residents. We thank our predecessors for their work over the decades. The vision and hope, the difficult decisions and detailed plans, the perseverance and hard work. They’re finally paying off in full. With all the pieces coming together, our comeback story continues with South Bend squarely back on the map. And we’re well on our way to world fame once again, as a leading city of opportunity where everyone can thrive.

I am thrilled to share that our population growth continues. The latest estimates for South Bend project that in the first two years of this decade, we have exceeded the total population gains from the last decade – a decade when we grew at the fastest rate since the 1950′s, before Studebaker closed. And this progress is shared across South Bend with most of our neighborhoods experiencing growth.

Our economy continues to be resilient. We have weathered the economic storms from the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, high inflation, and most recently historic, aggressive economic tightening by the Federal Reserve. Supply chains have healed. Prices and interest rates have stabilized. Through all of this, unemployment has stayed at or near a level economists consider to be sustainable full employment.

And we are attracting record investment. Last year we saw more than $393 million of investment into our buildings and homes. That’s a staggering figure. We recently announced over $300 million of new investment into the Madison Lifestyle District – the largest redevelopment in downtown history that will transform and connect Memorial hospital to the heart of our downtown. More than 200 million into modernizing the Ethanol plant to produce biofuel and biogas, the expansion of Pure Green Farms, and there’s much more on the horizon. Not only in South Bend but across the greater South Bend region. We are a proud partner and supporter of the record, multibillion-dollar investments happening to our west that will be game changers for our regional economy.

Partnerships are the key to our success – partnerships with governments at the federal, state, and local levels, nonprofits, and private enterprises. Our partnerships are fueling South Bend’s resurgence in a big way. And we need to continue fostering them to keep moving forward.

Safe Community for Everyone

The City of South Bend is committed to delivering a safe community for everyone and fully funding our critical public safety systems.

Our fire service remains a leading department – top one percent nationally – and our firefighters continue to deliver high quality services to our residents.

Earlier this year, we were reminded how critical our fire service is to the safety of our community, when a tragic fire – a nightmare seemingly from the distant past – took the lives of six children. Our heroes responded swiftly and bravely, working to extinguish the flames and save the kids trapped inside. Unfortunately, there was nothing they could do. I’m proud of our firefighters and proud of our community for rallying around the Smith children and working to honor their legacy.

Last year our fire prevention team installed 375 smoke detectors and 100 carbon monoxide detectors to alert residents of danger in their homes. And between our Fire and EMS teams, our fire department responded to nearly 24,000 incidents and logged nearly 59,000 hours of training. Our EMS team arrives in a hurry, responding to calls much faster than the national average: 11 minutes 5 seconds is the average time for a chest pain call to have a 12-lead EKG in place, and 87% of the time it’s just a hair over 7 minutes.

Our new Station 8 is moving along and when completed, will provide better living quarters for our male and female firefighters and expand our service capacity to keep our growing city safe into the future.

As a leading department nationally, SBPD is building on its strong foundation.

Our officers fielded nearly 102,000 calls for service, completed 33,774 total police reports and logged over 16,000 training hours. Last year we saw an average of less than two uses of force per week, and only eight complaints for uses of force were filed during 2023.

With strong training and accountability systems already in place, the civilian review board and office will add another layer to help our officers and our community work toward making South Bend a safe community for everyone. I thank the Common Council for seating the board members and their partnership in this endeavor.

Responding to over 1,500 crisis calls for service in 2023, our community has made great progress in how we respond to residents in crisis. Thanks to the state, the 9-8-8 crisis lifeline operates 24/7. Oaklawn’s mobile crisis response teams operate from 8 am to 8 pm and continue to move toward 24/7 coverage. Several weeks ago, Oaklawn opened the behavioral crisis resource center – a partnership among Beacon, Oaklawn, former health officer Dr. Bob Einterz, Sheriff Redman, faith leaders, the American Rescue Plan, the city, and the county. This is a critical, better alternative to the county jail or emergency room for crisis calls.

Over the past year, we wrapped up remaining 21st Century Policy recommendations outlined four years ago. Going forward we will continue to work with community leaders, advocates, sworn officers of all ranks, and civilian members of our department to build upon our community policing efforts and chart how the community and our officers can work together to solve local challenges.

Last year Part I crimes were down by 9% compared to 2022, and down roughly 19% from the most recent pre-pandemic peak in 2019. Despite more progress, these numbers are still too high. And we must work together as a community to reduce crime, while also continuing to address its root causes.

Shooting victims were down 33% last year, though fatal shooting victims were not down as much – a 20% decrease. This is a promising trend, especially considering the state’s permitless carry policy is still in effect. I may sound like a broken record, but we need to move forward, not backward, on commonsense gun measures to keep guns out of the wrong hands and our community safe. I will continue to advocate for these commonsense measures and ask residents to keep pushing our state and federal lawmakers to act with urgency.

Between SBPD and SAVE, our Group Violence Intervention team delivered hundreds of custom notifications and referrals to our residents involved in violence, providing them with an offer of a better path of opportunity and hope.

Like most cities, a small number of individuals are driving much of the violence. If they stay on a path of violence, we must stop them. We must send a strong, united message that violence has no place in our community. Last year our Strategic Focus Unit recovered 730 illegal guns and seized over 76,000 grams of meth, cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl.

Our Expanded Violent Crimes unit continues to outperform cities across the country, with a homicide solve rate near 82% in 2023 – well above the national average homicide solve rate of 52%. Crimestoppers had a record year in rewards for tips, and our community embraced the Victory over Violence campaign.

Our ballistics lab received national recognition from the ATF for a less than 24-hour turnaround processing time and joining the top 5 in the nation for producing 705 potential leads for detectives.

SBPD also is staying at the cutting edge of technology with investments in infrastructure to support real-time analysis: gunshot detectors, license plate readers, and a cloud-based real time crime center with 756 integrated cameras across the city. In 2023 our officers completed over 25,000 connect missions designed to deploy our officers to places where they’ll be most effective at deterring crime. We appreciate the 40+ businesses that have taken advantage of our business security grants to improve their technology and integrate with the City’s Real Time Crime Center.

Following the largest and most diverse group of new officers in over three decades, we added 28 more officers last year. I thank the training and recruitment team for all their efforts. I thank the Common Council for supporting the resources necessary to make this happen.

With these new officers, our units focused on gun violence are fully staffed, and we’ve been able to focus on more proactive strategies for community concerns like drug houses, investigations of lesser crimes, community-based policing, and reckless driving. In 2023, SBPD made an average of 34 traffic stops per day. Now, nobody likes being pulled over, but we saw firsthand the dangers of being short-staffed, of being unable to enforce traffic laws at all.

We must continue to work with neighbors to address the issues most important to them and build the needed staffing capacity in SBPD.

A safe community for everyone also means a clean, safe environment.

We made great progress last year tackling one of the most visible eyesores in South Bend. In partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency, we cleaned up Drewry’s, hauling away 14,000 tons of debris, including asbestos contamination. With the environmental cleanup completed, the next phase of work this year will remove the remaining unstable, unsafe structures and debris – all with the goal of getting the site ready for redevelopment opportunities in the near future. We’ve also been working with the Environmental Protection Agency, the County, and neighbors of West Washington to address the Oil Express, SB Range and other sites in the neighborhood.

A safe community for everyone also means safe, affordable housing for our residents.

With our population growing at the fastest rate in decades, demand for housing is higher than ever. To keep prices down, we need to increase supply across the board, from affordable to workforce to market rate. This is why we have adopted an all-of-the-above housing policy, which recognizes the simple fact – and confirmed by multiple studies – that the more housing we build the more housing prices will stay down for everyone. This is simply supply and demand pricing dynamics. More housing of all types is good for the city and good for everyone.

Over the past year, I’m pleased to report that nearly 1,000 housing units have been financed with construction underway or soon to be underway.

Two years ago we launched our New Neighborhood Homes Initiative that makes it easier to finance and build infill homes across the city by making connections to city utilities easier, creating pre-approved plans, and closing the financing gap. Last year’s housing financing awards will unlock over $4 million of private investment into infill housing. In addition to our many local partners, Advantix Development Corporation out of Evansville will begin building 50 affordable units on 37 currently vacant, city-owned lots.

We have made strides in verifying that our rental homes are safe, performing 726 RSVP inspections and certifying 193 units. I thank the Common Council for making important updates and clarifications to the underlying ordinance last year. I thank the lead affinity group and our neighborhood health and housing team for their work to raise awareness and to mitigate lead exposure in our homes. I also thank our state legislators, particularly Representative Maureen Bauer and Senator David Niezgodski, for pushing important policy changes that would empower renters and help to keep them safe.

We have also awarded work at 90 homes through the South Bend Home Repair Program, with a total investment of $1.24 million.

Our Housing Authority is continuing their turnaround, now under the leadership of Marsha Parham-Green. We are making real progress together and thankful for our partnership.

Our housing first strategy is moving forward. While treatment first works for some, too many are left behind. And the evidence is clear, which is why housing first was adopted by the federal government under President George W. Bush and also by the state of Indiana. The pillars of our approach are (1) to add permanent supportive housing units that provide affordable homes with the needed supportive services and (2) establish a permanent low-barrier center in partnership with Our Lady of the Road. We have already secured over 100 permanent supportive housing units and are working to add more in the coming years.

Our low-barrier shelter service, Motels4Now, needs a permanent home. Though we have secured one potential site, the search for a better alternative continues. Let me make one thing clear. We must keep pushing forward. We cannot go back to large tent encampments in South Bend. We need to finalize a site soon. Failure to act is not an option.

We partnered with The Center for the Homeless, helping to renovate their existing facility and provide weather amnesty services during colder months.

On the East side, we’re excited about the new Youth Service Bureau campus taking shape on its former vacant lot.

Cradle to Career Education

We must also do more to support our kids from cradle to career. The path to opportunity begins in the early years.

We are working to expand Talk with Your Baby with the Robinson Center and a $500,000 grant from the Lilly Endowment’s Early Years Initiative. This work will help close the word gap for children ages zero to three in South Bend and provide a stronger foundation that will continue to pay off later in life.

The Southeast Neighborhood Center welcomed El Campito earlier this year. We look to expand our partnerships with United Way, South Bend Schools, and the State to increase access to high quality early childhood education. An important next step of that effort will be getting the Far Northwest Neighborhood Center off the ground.

Our Innovation and Technology team supported a successful pilot PLTE network for students with South Bend Schools to help bridge the digital divide. South Bend is recognized as a “Visionary” Digital Equity Trailblazer City for all our efforts. Last year we were awarded the most money of any city to increase uptake of the federal Affordable Connectivity Program. While the future of this program is tied up in Congress, our team engaged 7,000 people to get as many homes enrolled before the deadline. In total, over 12,000 South Bend residents received affordable connectivity from this program. Thank you to everyone in our South Bend Connectivity Coalition, including Choicelight, the St. Joseph County Library, enFocus, the South Bend Schools, La Casa de Amistad, and the Notre Dame Wireless Institute.

My team and I will continue to look for more opportunities to partner with South Bend schools. The reality we must face is that we still have more school spaces than kids and teachers to fill them. Simple math tells us something must be done to balance this space with people. As we sit here in Riley tonight, I thank the School Board for finding a way to keep Riley, Washington and Adams open. There are those who claim today that the 2020 referendum promised to avoid all school closures. Nothing could be further from the truth. While the referendum saved South Bend Schools from massive losses, right sizing the district was always a core part of the referendum plan and message to voters.

Right sizing is the reason why School administrators will move into Brown this summer. After their move, work will begin to prepare our new city hall that will include a one-stop shop in the lobby where residents will be able to access most city services.

The Career Center, a centralized career and technical education hub to expand career pathways, was another referendum focus. It’s now moving forward in the former Studebaker 84 building, fittingly part of the Renaissance District. In the former assembly plant of one of South Bend’s largest employers, this new center will help build the workforce that our companies need and prepare our students for the jobs of the future.

South Bend Schools are moving many important things forward: expanding Pre-K, rebalancing space with students, forming strategic neighborhood feeder patterns, and building a career center. Their hard work is paying off. They now have the highest graduation and literacy rates in nearly a decade.

Shared Growth and Opportunity

We are building an economy that works for everyone. One way we’re doing that is to ensure the city is open for business to all. Last year the City’s spend with minority and women owned business enterprises, both certified and noncertified, was $10 million. Our Diversity and Inclusion team more than doubled the number of certified minority and women-owned enterprises doing business with the city, and in partnership with IMPower, assisted 118 entrepreneurs through our Business Assistance Suite program.

In 2023, our revolving loan programs financed 12 businesses with nearly $5.2 million of capital – 66% are minority owned, 33% are women owned. And there’s more financing help for our entrepreneurs and small business owners on the way. Our Opportunity Fund will offer low-interest microloans to support local, growing small businesses that cannot access traditional financing. We will select an administrator of this program and have the fund up and running this summer.

We’ve also supported our workers, supporting residents as they transition into new fields and grow in their careers. Between our Pathways and Upskill SB programs we assisted over 200 South Bend residents as they learn new skills and complete certifications to advance in their careers.

Transportation is a critical part of our shared growth and opportunity strategy. Commuter’s Trust worked with local employers and nonprofits to help over 750 employees and clients, providing over 143,000 discounted rides on Uber, Lyft, and TRANSPO. We are also working with TRANSPO on strategic investments to improve service and ridership and strengthen our public transit system – a critical service that empowers our residents with access to opportunities and enables them to meet their essential needs. We also continue to explore how passenger rail service can be brought back to our downtown.

Even though our new long-term control plan for sewer overflows into the St. Joseph River will save ratepayers $437 million and reduce E. Coli discharges by an additional 12% over the original plan, we still have a lot of work left to do on this plan. And that will require new capital dollars from ratepayers.

We believe everyone should pitch in and pay their fair share, but no family should have to choose among basic needs. About 2,900 utility customers signed up for our Utility Assistance Program, helping to prevent their families from falling behind.

Our city’s growth is visible all around us: Pure Green Farms, Potawatomi Zoo, the new grocery store coming to Olive and Western, and the South Bend Chocolate Factory and Indiana Dinosaur Museum, bringing new life to the west side of the city. And just this week, the Common Council approved financing to remake Coveleski Stadium and add the Encore Center to the Morris. Funded by a competitive federal RAISE grant, infrastructure design for our Market District is currently underway and will propel further revitalization.

And earlier today, the South Bend-Elkhart region received news of another $45 million, the highest READI 2.0 grant that the state awarded to any region. With another opportunity for transformation, we will look to build another vibrant, urban neighborhood on the northside of Monroe Park/Edgewater neighborhood, as envisioned in the plan recently completed and adopted. I thank the redevelopment commission for their recent purchase of the River Glen properties that will help bring this vision to reality.

New neighborhood plans for LaSalle Park and River Park and Potawatomi Park are well underway with bold visions for these neighborhoods.

All these large projects transform our neighborhoods and serve as catalysts to future investment.

But we are still all in with our incremental developers. Ten active developments connected with our Build South Bend initiative will total $25 million of investments when completed. It will take all of us to rebuild our city and neighborhoods block-by-block.

Vibrant, Welcoming Neighborhoods

Making our neighborhoods welcoming and vibrant is another top priority.

Our vibrant places/neighborhood main streets grant has provided 38 awards for $1.2 million of total private-public investment.

Our NEAT crew partnered in 20 neighborhood cleanups and removed 1.9 million pounds of waste from our neighborhoods.

Our partnership with our neighborhood associations continues to grow. We are pleased to see more neighborhoods take part in our Neighborhood Consortium, develop great projects for our IGNITE grant program, and strengthen their organizations. We welcomed three new neighborhood associations in 2023: Council Oak, Edgewater, and Twyckenham Hills. South Bend now has 25 active associations.

Upgrades to our public places and spaces continue. We’re building the dream together with construction of the new $25 million Dr. Martin Luther King center well underway. We will mark this progress and celebrate together with an upcoming steel signing ceremony. When it opens, it will also be home to a new financial empowerment center, a key part of the blueprint for financial empowerment and equity in South Bend that our Engagement and Economic Empowerment team built with the community. This new center – the first in Indiana – will implement proven strategies that help our families build wealth and focus on racial equity.

We opened the next phase of the Stephen J. Luecke Coal Line trail and look forward to the future phase from Lincolnway west to the new MLK Dream Center. We recently received good news – a $7.5 million matching grant to make major improvements to Kennedy Park. Improvements to LaSalle Park, Walker Field and Rum Village, Coquillard, and Southeast parks are also underway. With all this work, Venues Parks and Arts will be ready to defend our gold medal status when we’re eligible to reapply again in a few years.

Other projects from last year’s neighborhood financing package are moving forward too, including the multiuse trail between downtown and Notre Dame and streetscape improvements to Mishawaka Avenue and Elwood. Thank you to the Redevelopment Commission and the Common Council for making funds available for these important neighborhood projects.

After nearly 20 years, we brought back South Bend’s Ethnic Festival, a celebration of all our cultures and ancestries, and we reimagined it as Fusion Fest. We had a successful first year back with an estimated 35,000 visitors over two days.

We are also investing to clear the backlog of neighborhood infrastructure needs and committed to equity in these investments. We are rebuilding our streets, including those in neighborhoods that haven’t been touched in decades. And by the end of the year, we will have paved or reconstructed more than 218 miles after completing four years of our plan. This summer we will work to outline our rebuilding our streets plan for the next several years. We’ve answered resident concerns installing 91 speed humps on residential streets across the city, patching over 52,000 potholes, grading 542 alleys, and working with AEP to install 234 new LED streetlights on existing utility poles to address lighting gaps across the city.

As we look to the future, we’ve already hosted over 50 community workshops in preparation for our 2045 plan. I encourage everyone in our community to get involved in this opportunity to help set the vision for our city for the next 20 years. This year we will have additional planning processes that will inform this plan, including education, climate and our downtown. With $1 billion dollars of investment into our downtown expected over the next few years, the downtown plan will aim to have the impacts exceed the sum of these individual projects.

Climate action will be an important piece of our 2045 plan too, and we’re working to update and strengthen our Climate Action Plan this year. I’m proud of our Sustainability Office’s work to leverage limited public funds to deliver $438,000 of private investment in energy efficiency and over 300 kilowatts of solar.

Before I close, I would like to thank our internal service departments – Administration and Finance, Innovation and Technology, and Legal. They help make all the progress I mentioned tonight possible. I’m proud to maintain our AA bond rating, which reflects our continued strong financial position and responsible fiscal stewardship. I’m also proud that we earned the What Works Cities Gold, a recognition for excellence in data driven local government. We are the only City in Indiana to achieve this distinction and are one of the smallest nationally to reach gold level.

Call to Action

I am amazed by our city’s resilience and many accomplishments. As I mentioned at the top, partnerships are fueling South Bend’s resurgence in a big way. It’s important to highlight some of the governmental partnerships that made these accomplishments possible: at the federal level, the American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act; at the state the level, READI, PSCDA, the Innkeepers Tax; at the local level, our partnerships with South Bend Schools and the County.

This is a big election year that will determine the future of our partnerships and how much more we can get done going forward. Elections have consequences. Look no further than just the past two years to see how elections impact partnerships and our progress. At the federal level, the previous Congress was the most productive in decades. After the midterm elections, this current Congress is one of the least productive in our entire nation’s history, struggling to settle on a Speaker of the House or pass annual appropriations. At the local level, we had built many partnerships with the County on the behavioral crisis center, low-barrier shelter services, public health, and more. Following the last election, the County withdrew from most of them seemingly at once.

Governor Holcomb, who has been good to us, is term-limited and won’t be our governor next year. Some of our state legislators on both sides of the aisle are facing challengers who take a burn-it-all approach. We need more bridge builders, not bridge burners. Our partnerships depend on them.

We have worked across the political spectrum. We have shown that we can work together with conservatives, progressives and moderates, as long as we bring mutual respect, compassion, and pragmatism.

I’ve said it many times before, but it bears repeating: for as long as I’m your Mayor, I will look to build bridges within our community and outside of it, and South Bend will be a willing and open partner in progress.

Let’s continue down this path together and transform South Bend into a home of opportunity where everyone can thrive.

Thank you once again to all of our community partners for the work you do with and for us.

To the greater South Bend community, together we can make every neighborhood safe, welcoming and vibrant. Together we can make South Bend a fairer and more just city. Together we can expand opportunities and continue our breakout growth.

May God bless our sworn firefighters and officers. May God continue to bless the City of South Bend.

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