For the first time in eight years, West Lafayette’s mayoral race has two candidates. Zachary Baiel is running as an independent on a platform focused on transparency in local government. Does West Lafayette need more transparency? How will having a challenger change the campaign landscape in the city?

WBAA News has spent a fair amount of time in Crawfordsville during the past couple months, with an increasing amount of that focused on the debate in the city about subsidized housing. Recently, Mayor Todd Barton got inspectors from the department of Housing and Urban Development to come look at some rental units that had been okayed by the Crawfordsville Housing Authority. The federal official found some to be substandard, which could them to be removed from the rolls of those eligible for

If Frankfort Mayor Chris McBarnes wants to have his city seen as more progressive, when it comes to attracting investment, a recent move by the county commissioners may not help. They’ve instituted a $30 per day fee for anyone found guilty of a crime who sits in the county jail for more than three days. That’s despite much criminal justice research showing that legal fees and fines do little more than encourage recidivism.

It’s not often that cities turn down all the bids they receive for a project, but that’s just what Lafayette’s Board of Works did this week on a road paving and sidewalk improvement job. And to hear Mayor Tony Roswarski tell it, this story might be more common in the coming years, because it’s a seller’s market in the construction trades. A lack of qualified workers means companies don’t have the manpower to do all the available jobs at once, and they can pick and choose only the most lucrative

This week on WBAA’s Ask The Mayor, listeners weigh in on the recent closure of West Lafayette’s recycling drop-off site. With less than favorable reviews rolling in for Lafayette’s Ninth Street drop-off location, what new recycling options should these West Lafayette recyclers expect from the city—and when?

In the past month, residents of Crawfordsville and Montgomery County have had several opportunities to examine what it means to be an engaged citizen. The city held a meeting last week to try to explain more about a raid that arrested several people at a downtown restaurant to process them for deportation. The county continues to struggle with its planning and zoning documents, in part because neither the citizens nor some county leaders seem to have done their homework. And in the midst of all

Frankfort Mayor Chris McBarnes easily won his primary election earlier this month, collecting nearly three-quarters of the vote. So, barring a last-minute challenge, he’ll head into a third term in January that he once wrote off as an impossibility. And he’ll do so in a city that he thinks is on a precipice – an estimation that might be right in several ways. This week on WBAA’s Ask The Mayor, we talk about what the next four years might hold and whether McBarnes feels he now has a mandate to

The city of West Lafayette has spent significant time in recent months pondering new rules for different types of transportation. First it was electric scooters. This month on WBAA’s Ask The Mayor, we discuss the push to regulate the pedal-powered beer wagons that could soon be navigating the city’s streets and the addition of a term to city law that strikes fear in the hearts of cyclists: dooring.

As two new water slides go in and as the City of Lafayette prepares to rebuild Loeb Stadium, redevelopment is moving down Main Street toward the Five Points intersection. Mayor Tony Roswarski has said it’ll likely be several more years until a proposed plan for a Five Points overhaul begins in earnest – and it’s a spot that needs some TLC, to be sure. This week on WBAA’s Ask The Mayor, we take a look at the surrounding homes, and whether gentrification might be a necessity if the city truly

Though the discussion about wind farms in Montgomery County doesn’t affect Crawfordsville directly, it’s connected to the ongoing talks about a comprehensive plan and zoning rules county leaders are considering. And those have been nothing if not contentious. This week on WBAA’s Ask The Mayor, we have Crawfordsville Mayor Todd Barton weigh in on a loud, and sometimes unruly, last month of talks, and see if he can separate fact from fiction.