City-County Council to consider forest preservation
Why it matters: Marion County was once covered almost entirely by forest, but less than 15% remains today. Only a small fraction of that is protected as park and preserve space.
Several environmentally sensitive properties — including the last flatwood forest — are at risk for development if not soon purchased by someone willing to protect them.
Between the lines: This aligns environmental advocates and pro-economy conservatives.
What they're saying:"Indianapolis' forests aren't just green spaces — they're economic assets that enhance our quality of life and support the local economy," said Minority Leader Michael-Paul Hart.
Hart told Axios that nature amenities attract more residents, in turn attracting more business development.
What they're proposing: Council Republicans have three amendments to the majority's plan for spending $27 million in supplemental income tax revenue.
They're suggesting an additional $6.5 million to the Department of Public Works for strip patching to repair potholes.
They also want to add $1.5 million to the $1 million allocated for stormwater management, which would be used to purchase and preserve urban forest land.
Republicans have called for a pause on money going to the Office of Public Health and Safety for grants until it presents more details on their projects.
Flashback: Last year, the Indiana Forest Alliance asked the city to allocate $6 million to buy urban forest land.
The city budget included $1 million.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Axios
2 minutes ago
- Axios
Violent crime in border cities fell below national rate in 2024
Several U.S. border communities saw violent crime drop below the national average in 2024, as nationwide rates fell to 20-year lows, according to new FBI data analyzed by Axios. Why it matters: The findings from last year run counter to claims by President Trump and GOP leaders, who painted border towns as crime hotspots because of newly arrived immigrants. The big picture: Eleven border cities examined annually by Axios — Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, Eagle Pass, Del Rio and El Paso in Texas; Sunland Park in New Mexico; Nogales and Yuma in Arizona; and Calexico and San Diego in California — had an average violent crime rate of 356.5 per 100,000 residents. That was a sizable drop from 2023 and was slightly below the national average of 359.1 violent crimes per 100,000 residents last year, FBI numbers show. Between the lines: The 11 border communities, all of them majority-Latino, had a homicide rate of 2.5 per 100,000 residents — half of the national average of 5 per 100,000. Four of the border cities — Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Sunland Park and Nogales — reported no homicides in 2024, the data show. El Paso and Yuma had the highest homicide rate among the border communities with 2.9 per 100,000, still well below the national average. The intrigue: McAllen — located across the Rio Grande from Reynosa, Mexico, one of the most dangerous places in the Americas — had one of the lowest violent crime rates on the border. Zoom out: The border communities had low crime rates before Trump took office, boosted border security and canceled millions of dollars in federal money for crime prevention programs. Early numbers for 2025 indicate that overall violent crime in the border cities is continuing to drop, as Trump's lockdown of the border has greatly reduced illegal crossings. Yes, but: Local officials fear that could change if the administration pulls back on anti-crime grants amid fights over immigration enforcement. The Trump administration is threatening to withhold millions of dollars in law enforcement grants unless cities agree to work with federal immigration officials on mass deportations. El Paso has been an exception this year, experiencing a 42% jump in homicides in the first half of 2025, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA). The intrigue: Some border cities, such as Laredo and Sunland Park, are dispatching AI-enhanced drones to help fight crime amid officer shortages. Flashback: Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeated false claims that migrants from Latin America, Africa and the Middle East were responsible for jumps in violent crime, despite studies showing violent crime was dropping.
Axios
2 minutes ago
- Axios
AI in education's potential privacy nightmare
AI is now firmly entrenched in classrooms, but student privacy rules haven't caught up. Why it matters: Chatbots can expose troves of personal data in ways few parents, students or teachers fully understand. The big picture: The 2025-26 school year is shaping up to be one where educators feel that they must embrace AI to keep students competitive. Here are three top concerns with classroom AI, according to privacy advocates and AI companies Axios spoke to. 1. Student work could be used to train AI models AI firms are constantly seeking data to train their models. They're not required to say exactly where they get it, but they do have to say how they're using customer data, especially when they're dealing with students. Guidelines like The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) don't guarantee meaningful protections for students. FERPA was signed into law under President Ford in 1974 and has not been significantly updated since. "Penalty for violating FERPA is that your federal funding is withheld," Elizabeth Laird, director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Axios. "And that has been enforced exactly zero times. Literally never." Most educational AI firms say they're not training models on classroom work. Content submitted by teachers and students is not used to train the foundational AI models that underlie Khan Academy's AI tutor, Khanmigo, the company's chief learning officer, Kristen DiCerbo, told Axios. But training on a diverse set of student data would make the models less biased, DiCerbo said: "There's no easy answer to these things, and it's all trade-offs between different priorities." Institutions technically could allow student work to be used for AI training, though they're unlikely to do so, several educators told Axios. Yes, but: Data that's "publicly available" on the web is a different story. Business Insider recently reported on what it described as a list of sites that Anthropic contractors were allowed to scrape — including domains from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Northwestern and other universities. Funding mandates often require universities to post student research online, meaning more of it is considered freely available data for training AI. An Anthropic spokesperson told Axios that it could not validate the list of sites found by Business Insider because it was created by a third-party vendor without Anthropic's involvement. 2. Off-the-shelf AI tools could expose student data Many teachers are experimenting with free chatbot tools. Some are from well-known players like OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Anthropic. Others are from lesser-known startups with questionable privacy policies. In many cases, educators use these apps without district approval or formal guidance. Accelerating pushes from both big tech and President Trump for school and student adoption of AI have changed the vibe around AI heading into the new academic year, ed tech experts told Axios. "Where in the 2024-2025 school year most schools had the LLM on lockdown through their filter, this year all flowers will bloom," Tammy Wincup, CEO of Securly, a software company that builds safety tools for K-12 schools, told Axios. Products designed for educational use, like ChatGPT Edu, do not train on student data, but some of the consumer-facing free and paid versions of ChatGPT and other chatbotshave different policies. "That's where things get tricky," says Melissa Loble, chief academic officer at Instructure, the company behind the learning management system known as Canvas. "If AI tools are used outside our system, the data may not be protected under the school's policies." Yes but: Teachers are often the best judges of AI tools for their students. Ed tech is "a bottom-up adoption industry. It grows and thrives on teachers finding tools they like for teaching and learning and then getting districts to adopt," Wincup says. 3. Hacks are an increasing threat Earlier this year, a breach at PowerSchool — a widely used student information system — exposed sensitive personal data of tens of thousands of students and parents. "When you introduce any new tool, when you collect any new piece of information, you are necessarily introducing increased risk," Laird says. That makes thoughtful planning critical, she added. If AI tools store or process student data, a breach could expose not just grades and attendance records but also behavioral data, writing samples, and private communications. One way to prevent leaks is to delete data periodically. DiCerbo says Khan Academy deletes chats after 365 days. Yes, but: The advantage of using chatbots is that they can remember and learn from previous conversations, so some users want to store more information than might be safe. Between the lines: AI is steamrolling into classrooms and colleges and privacy is just one on a long list of concerns these institutions must manage. Khan Academy's DiCerbo says AI adoption is moving faster than anything she's seen in her 20 years working in ed tech. Khan Academy expects to reach a million students with its AI-powered tutor Khanmigo that launched in 2023. Earlier this year the California State University system introduced ChatGPT Edu to more than 460,000 students and over 63,000 staff and faculty across its 23 campuses. Google just started offering its AI Pro plan for free to students over 18 for a year. What we're watching: Some ed tech providers are looking beyond OpenAI, Anthropic and Google and using services like AWS and Microsoft's Azure to keep student data separate from the model providers. Brisk Teaching, a classroom AI assistant, uses this approach to mitigate concerns that student data might be used to train new models — even though OpenAI and Google say that their education-focused models don't train on user data. Brisk Teaching founder Arman Jaffer told Axios that there's a lot of "lost trust" between schools and the big AI providers. "It's just easier for us to say Google is not touching your data because they could potentially use it to train the next version of their model," he said.
Axios
2 minutes ago
- Axios
Focus groups: Trump redistricting push could backfire with swing voters
The reaction of Georgia swing voters in our latest Engagious / Sago focus groups shows how President Trump's sudden push for redistricting could backfire on the GOP in the midterms — if Democrats can hold voters' attention. The big picture: Just four of the 11 Biden-to-Trump swing voters in Tuesday night's sessions said they could explain why more than 50 Democratic Texas legislators have left that state. But when provided with neutral facts describing the situation, none of the 11 said they support the GOP redistricting effort. All 11 oppose an effort from the state attorney general to remove some of the Democrats from office. 10 of the 11 said Texas Democrats did the right thing by leaving the state. "Once Georgia swing voters understand what Texas Republicans are attempting, they reject it," said Rich Thau, president of Engagious, who moderated the focus groups. "That said, Democrats have done a lousy job of educating swing voters about mid-decade redistricting." Zoom in: Of the 11 focus group participants, all of whom backed President Trump in November, just three now say they approve of the administration's overall actions. All 11 said they're more anxious about the economy now than when Trump took office. Seven said they disapprove of the tariffs. How it works: Axios observed two online focus groups Tuesday night that included 11 Georgia residents who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Donald Trump in 2024. Five are Democrats, four are independents and two are Republicans. While a focus group is not a statistically significant sample like a poll, the responses show how some voters are thinking and talking about current events. What they're saying: " The cost of living is ridiculous and it's not slowing down; it shows no signs of getting better," said Todd L., 42, of Atlanta. "It seems like every other day there's a new tariff or he's pissed off some other country, and just every single day there's more news about inflation and job losses," said Gavin E., 52, of Decatur. "It just keeps getting worse and worse. We're hemorrhaging. It's crazy." When it comes to the Texas redistricting dispute, Kevin J., 57, of Woodstock, said: "Doing this now and redrawing their districts, that's just they want to please Donald Trump." Said Chris Z., 36, of Norcross: "He wants it now. He wants it his way. There's a proper way to do things and he doesn't follow. ... There's no balance of power. That's just not how things operate, and it'll be a domino effect with other states doing the same thing." "Once it's done every five years, then some state will push it to two years and some state will push it to a year," said Sherrecia J., 34, of Atlanta. "It's going to become more and more ridiculous. It has to have a boundary." "What's the purpose of having laws and constitutions and protocols if they're not going to be followed?" said Olanrewaju A., 44, of Decatur. Meanwhile, Thau also spent a portion of the sessions asking these swing voters how they are using and thinking about AI. The panels followed the launch of OpenAI's GPT-5. Some communities, including in Georgia, are raising concerns about the growth of data centers and their potential strains on the power grid and the environment. 10 of the 11 said they've used some form of AI; five use ChatGPT at least weekly; eight consider themselves supporters of AI. Nine worried AI will weaken privacy protections, especially related to financial data; nine also feared AI will be used to undermine America's political system; and eight said they fear AI will figure out how to launch weapons on its own, without human commands.
