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Ethics filings. City contracts. Campaign finance reports.
Each of those records can help citizens keep a watchful eye on their government, but right now they are spread across the city website. They’re difficult to search. And in some cases, they aren’t online at all.
Mayor Joe Hogsett recognized this problem. He campaigned on fixing it.
“To substantially enhance transparency of public information, I will create a citizen information portal called ‘Disclose Indy,’” he said in 2015. “This portal will be a digital one-stop shop for all existing information critical to public and media oversight of government.”
The following year, once in office, he signed into law an ordinance requiring the city’s legal office to create “an online citizen information portal.” The law required city contracts, ethics filings, campaign finance reports and other records to be located “in a single identifiable location” online.
But 10 years later, no such portal exists.
Resource
Hogsett hasn’t delivered a ‘Disclose Indy’ ethics portal. So we built one.
We also obtained records not previously made public as promised.
The omission is just one example of what Hogsett’s critics — including some within his own party — see as failures to follow through on his promises of government integrity. An ongoing IndyStar/Mirror Indy investigation has found:
- Hogsett pledged on the campaign trail to crack down on public employees who use their position for personal gain, but allowed his former chief of staff, Thomas Cook, to cut deals involving millions of dollars of city incentives with a top city official with whom Cook had a secret romantic relationship.
- Hogsett also promised to stop awarding no-bid contracts whenever feasible, but his administration routinely awards such contracts, including at least $6.5 million to the mayor’s former staffers and top campaign contributors.
While there is a city website that claims to contain “all data required by Disclose Indy, a plan to promote honesty, integrity, and cost savings in local government,” it is limited.
The “Disclose Indy” part of the website has only 22 records, including annual budget information for the years 2020 to 2022, outdated IMPD crime reporting data for 2007 to 2017, and several audit reports.
There are no ethics filings. No campaign finance data. No city contracts.
There are, however, a few seemingly random reports: a 2016 zoning guide, general election results from 2004, a “Freight Plan Airport Study” from 2002, and an “Adult Bookstore Property Values Summary” from 1984.
Some of the information required under Disclose Indy is available elsewhere on the city’s website. For example, you can find campaign finance reports. Hogsett in 2015 promised a “searchable database for campaign finance reports.” And while you can search for individual reports by candidate, office or party, it’s impossible to analyze campaign finance data by donor or other parameter.
Other records are limited. You can find financial disclosure forms for Hogsett and other county-wide elected officials. But not for Hogsett’s cabinet members and appointees.
The city’s ethics laws also allow employees to request waivers to ethics rules, including revolving door restrictions on what kind of work they can do after leaving city employment.
Those waivers are not found anywhere on the city’s website. And even when reporters requested them under the state’s public records law, the city failed to provide all of them.
In response to questions from reporters, a spokesperson for Hogsett said the requirements for the portal were effectively met by revamping the city’s website in 2019.
“The Disclose Indy proposal was made prior to the rollout of the City’s new website,” said the spokesperson. “The old website was cumbersome and difficult to navigate. The new website features a prominent search function that makes it possible to easily find ethics filings from a ‘single identifiable location’ — the main Indy.gov landing page — without the need to navigate to a specific page, section, or ‘portal’ on the site.”
But requiring people to search the city’s massive website for such information is exactly what Disclose Indy was supposed to address. That’s what Hogsett’s top city attorney told City-County Council members during a 2016 hearing on the mayor’s proposal.
“Currently, these all are available on the city-county website,” said Andy Mallon, then the city’s corporation counsel. “It’s just they’re not all in the same place, and it can be difficult to find. And we shouldn’t be requiring people who want this very valuable public information to know the ins and outs of the city and county website structure to be able to find this.”
In a recent phone interview, Mallon said he thought the city may have published such a website, but he acknowledged that it doesn’t exist now and that the city may be out of compliance.
“If the ordinance requires the corporation counsel to have a website and all of this is located on the corporation counsel website, then we’re violating the ordinance because the corporation counsel doesn’t have a website,” Mallon said.
He said he recalled discussions around the launch of the new website that indicated residents would have an easier time locating all types of city information.
State Rep. Blake Johnson, D-Indianapolis, sponsored the mayor’s ethics proposal — including the portal requirement — as a city-county council member in 2016. He said the new city website does not fulfill the intent of the law.
“I am disappointed and frustrated that the intent of that portal has not been executed effectively,” he said. “You can find some things, but it is not what is in plain text in that ordinance.”
“I’m a pretty firm believer that transparency only works if regular people can actually find the information,” he added. “It just doesn’t meet the expectation.”
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Emily Hopkins is a Mirror Indy reporter focused on data and accountability. You can reach them on phone or Signal at 317-790-5268 or by email at emily.hopkins@mirrorindy.org. Follow them on most social media @indyemapolis or on Bluesky @emilyhopkins.bsky.social.
Contact IndyStar reporter Tony Cook at 317-444-6081 or tony.cook@indystar.com. Follow him on X @IndyStarTony.