Editorial: It’s time for Mayor Hogsett to let someone else lead Indianapolis

It has been nearly a year since The Indianapolis Star first reported that multiple women had made sexual harassment allegations against Thomas Cook while he was serving as Mayor Joe Hogsett’s chief of staff or when he was running Hogsett’s campaign. Since then, there has been an internal investigation, an external investigation and policy changes, all against a backdrop of accusations that Hogsett and his team didn’t do enough to protect employees from harassment. (Cook denies that he acted inappropriately.)

And yet, more than 11 months later, the controversy is such a distraction for the Mayor’s Office that it canceled a press conference Tuesday related to homelessness, one of the biggest issues facing the city.

That’s when we decided it was time to join three city-county councilors—each from a different party—in calling for Hogsett to step down.

We don’t make that recommendation lightly. But the city needs a leader who doesn’t have to cancel events “in order to keep the focus” on important public policy—those were the words his office used in its notification canceling the event.

Indianapolis needs a mayor who is putting all of his or her focus on the serious challenges and opportunities that come with running the state’s biggest city and one of the Midwest’s economic drivers.

The Hogsett administration has never been able to articulate a clear strategy for the city, a message or a plan through which business and community leaders could rally. That’s despite billions of dollars in development projects underway downtown and opportunities presented by expansions of Indiana and Purdue universities downtown and the rising prominence of Indianapolis sports teams.

It doesn’t feel that Hogsett is leading those changes. In fact, his administration is distracting from them.

The cancelation of the Streets to Home press conference came the day after an embarrassing City-County Council meeting in which the council’s president, Democrat Vop Osili, had police officers forcibly remove one of Cook’s accusers as she tried to tell the council why its $450,000 investigation was flawed.

And why was it flawed? Well, in part, according to reporting by IndyStar, because the law firm doing the investigation didn’t include after-hours text messages that Hogsett had sent two of the women who accused Cook. Both women said the messages—one of which involved a discussion of poetry—made them uncomfortable.

The meeting and the new accusations were so unsettling that Rabbi Aaron Spiegel, Pastor David Greene and the Rev. Gray Lesesne—who were involved in the initiative that was announced this week—said they asked the mayor not to speak at the press conference. The Mayor’s Office “opted instead to cancel,” the clergymen said in a joint statement.

The mayor spent much of the day doing 10-minute, one-on-one media interviews about the Cook debacle, interviews that did nothing to instill confidence that he is ready to move forward from what investigators said was a culture that resembled “more of a fraternity or sorority … than emblematic of a business setting.”

So we’re ready for him to turn the job over to someone who will provide the leadership this city needs.•

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