Final Four updates: Basketball writers get their due; Visit Indy exec highlights Final Four impact

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1. Indianapolis and the NCAA deserve congratulations for yet another successful Final Four in our city. It was a polished, well-executed, high-profile event that once again demonstrated Indianapolis’s competence in hosting major national athletic events. The crowds came, the games were played, the television images were good, and the city showed itself to be organized, experienced, and welcoming.
   Yes indeed, the city can coordinate intensely when it wants to. It can summon extraordinary levels of time, money, attention, manpower, logistical focus, political bandwidth, and labor. Streets are managed. Police are visible. The city is cleaned up, branded, staffed, and presented at a high level for the benefit of a major event and the visitors it brings.
   The question is why, when, and for whom? And what would happen if effort of that magnitude were devoted consistently to permanent, lasting downtown improvement for the everyday people who pay taxes here and whose repeated presence matters most. What if we focus more on the daily experience of the locals, office workers, shoppers, diners, residents, and regular visitors, instead of concentrating only on temporary, short-term one-offs.
   For the good of the city, that is the question city leaders must confront. We should not be content merely to use local people as extras in a tourism pitch to visiting organizers. If we can ask local residents and workers to perform civic enthusiasm in order to help keep NCAA events coming back, then surely we can summon equal seriousness to attract our own region’s people back downtown to live, work, dine, shop, stroll, and sightsee by making downtown feel safer and more welcoming every day, not just on game days. The same will also help us keep our brightest young college graduates in the state that educates them instead of shipping them off to to boost other economies like those of Nashville, Denver and Austin.
   This is a matter of priorities. We settle for short-term activations alone instead of lasting repairs and restorations. We celebrate the pop-up event, the branded signage, the and the big crowd, while many of the underlying conditions that shape everyday downtown life go unaddressed. A city center is not made prosperous by occasional surges of excitement. It is made prosperous when people delight in returning again and again, not just for an event, but just because.
   Downtown depends on local regulars making ordinary decisions: whether to come back to the office, where to meet friends for dinner, whether to linger after work, whether to bring the family downtown on a Saturday, where to lease an apartment, and whether to invest more time and money in the heart of the city. Many people stopped coming a few years ago when, they felt downtown was no longer as safe or welcoming as it used to be.
   High levels of visible care, order, and public attention must not be reserved only for the special weekends aimed largely at outsiders and broadcast TV. They must also be directed consistently toward the everyday downtown experience. That means visible police foot patrols and bike patrols. It means officers interacting with people, including potential troublemakers, before there is disorder. It means cleaner streets, , stronger everyday retail, and a larger sense that someone cares and is in charge not only on big game days, but everyday. It means better roads, sidewalks, lighting, and street trees. It means good repair and maintenance, including zebra-striped crosswalks that too often are nearly invisible because of years of neglect, to the detriment of pedestrians and public safety overall.
   Civic brand matters, but not only for visitors on big game days. It matters for all of us, everyday. It matters to the office worker deciding whether downtown feels worth returning to, and to business owners deciding where to locate their operations and add jobs. It matters to the suburban couple deciding whether to make an evening of it in the city. It matters to the family deciding whether downtown feels like a great place for a day out. It matters to potential residents deciding whether the center city feels like a great place to build their lives.
   If Indianapolis can make downtown work for occasional big events catering largely to out-of-towners, then it can do more to make downtown work for its own people everyday. We assume that broadcast networks such as TBS and TNT, along with out-of-town hotel owners, restaurant groups, sponsors, and others tied to the event machine, deserve to profit from it all—and, let’s face it, they rake in millions of the profit. What do our everyday residents get from it?
   My direct appeal to city leaders, including Mayor Hogsett, and to all candidates in the upcoming mayoral race is this: Your boosterism is great. But Downtown is nowhere near achieving its potential. You can and you must change that for the better; that is job #1 – Upon it all else depends as to quality of live, the vibrancy and the success or your city. Please, please, please recognize that if business as usual were going to save downtown, it would already have done so. Your job is not to sit back, shake hands, and let everyone keep doing what they have been doing. Your job is to lead.
   Be at least as serious about ensuring that the city providing the big stage for events, the public services, the policing, the street management, and the civic energy derives more than a fleeting burst of excitement and a few mentions in a television broadcast. Insist on greater and more lasting benefit for Indianapolis itself and for the people who live here, work here, pay taxes here, and whose repeated presence downtown matters far more to the city’s future than one more weekend of spectacle.
   As goes downtown, so goes the city. As goes the city, so goes the region. As goes the region, so goes the state.
   Now is the time. Please lead.

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