Latest news with #IndianapolisDepartmentofPublicWorks
Indianapolis Star
06-05-2025
- Business
- Indianapolis Star
Archaeology firm finds more graves than expected at historic Greenlawn Cemetery site
The archaeology firm excavating the Henry Street right-of-way for a major redevelopment project has found more grave shafts than expected at the site that includes a 200-year-old former cemetery. Indianapolis-based Stantec had identified 674 grave shafts in the original section of the former Greenlawn Cemetery called the "Old Burying Ground," as of May 2. City officials initially estimated that 650 grave shafts would be found at the city's first cemetery, a roughly 25-acre site just southwest of downtown where Indianapolis' earliest settlers were buried. Stantec archaeologists began digging within the Henry Street right-of-way on the east side of the White River in November 2024, after the Indianapolis Department of Public Works announced crews had found human remains and 15 grave shafts in late October. Before the cemetery's closure nearly 140 years ago, many people removed the loved ones' bodies and reburied them in newer, less crowded grounds. Union and Confederate soldiers who died in Indianapolis were among those removed. But a number of unmarked graves remained at the site, many belonging to Indianapolis' early Black residents. Development continued above ground in the following decades. A slaughterhouse, a baseball stadium and eventually the Diamond Chain Co. manufacturing complex, which operated there for much of the 20th century before its recent demolition, sat on the site. New projects underway near the site include the Henry Street Bridge, which will connect South Street with a 15-acre White River State Park expansion and the new headquarters of animal health giant Elanco. Elanco is expected to open this spring while construction on the Henry Street Bridge will finish by the end of 2026. Initially, real estate developer Keystone Group had planned to build a residential, hotel, entertainment and retail complex called Eleven Park, which was to include a soccer stadium for Indy Eleven. Those $1 billion plans are in limbo after the developer accused Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett of walking away from them to court a Major League Soccer team for downtown. As archaeologists continue their work, it's unclear how many more grave shafts exist at the former Greenlawn site. The number of grave shafts does not necessarily equal the number of bodies buried there, Stantec says. Further analysis will reveal that number. "Our approach and commitment to the respectful excavation and reinterment of individuals remains unchanged,' Stantec lead archaeologist Ryan Peterson said in a statement. 'While more grave shafts have been identified than initially estimated for the right-of-way, this does not necessarily mean we will unearth a similar number of grave shafts in the areas still awaiting excavation." The state Historic Preservation Office approved the plan to excavate, document, and remove human remains and artifacts in the area. Once all the human remains are exposed, photographs and data will be collected before the remains are exhumed and sent to Indiana University Indianapolis for analysis. In the meantime, city leaders and the Henry Street Community Advisory Group invite residents to submit any personal historical research that may shed light on the cemetery and its inhabitants to the DPW webpage
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Sinkhole off Southeastern Avenue & South Keystone Avenue blocked by DPW
A video on Facebook showed a huge hole in the ground at Southeastern Avenue and South Keystone Avenue as men examined it with flashlights. It was time-stamped for Monday just after midnight. Nearly 12 hours later, the area is marked off by Indianapolis Department of Public Works signs and no one can turn on the street near the hole. Indy Department of Public Works could not be reached for comment by the time of this article's publication. Potholes are created when water seeps beneath the pavement through cracks, according to Indianapolis' website. As the temperature drops, the water freezes and expands, causing the pavement to rise. As the ice melts, it creates an empty cavity beneath the pavement, so when a vehicle passes over one, it collapses and creates a pothole. Sinkholes are depressions on the surface of the land caused by water moving downward into cracks and passages in the limestone. Open sinkholes are sensitive to disturbance and can be difficult to remedy once they begin to grow and become unstable. Sinkholes in street asphalt are depressions or holes that appear in the pavement, often due to erosion or callapse of the underlying soil, rather than just wear and tear like potholes. Report a pothole through the Mayor's Action Center online through RequestIndy or by calling 317-327-4622. The Mayor's Action Center is open daily for calls Monday to Friday. The call center hours are Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., however, on Thursday they are closed from 2 to 3 p.m. RequestIndy is accessible on the city's website and via the mobile app 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Be sure to be specific in your report about how many are in the reported area, where they are located and what size they are (the options are small, medium or larger than a basketball). It will also ask if they caused any property damage. You can also call the non-emergency line at (317) 327-3811. That all depends on the weather and how they decide to repair them. There are only two ways to repair them: With hot mix or cold asphalt patches. Hot mix is the preferred method of repair, however, it's only used during warm months because asphalt factories are closed during the colder months. Cold asphalt patches are the alternative method when the weather is too cold for hot mix, but they are not as permanent of a fix as hot mix. It may take up to a week and a half before potholes are filled. Crews are often unable to repair potholes when it is raining, snowing or during cold weather. On busier roads with multiple potholes and weather damage, they might even decide to just resurface the road. The Department of Public Works is in charge of assessing what roads need to be repaved, but they do accept public input and that can also be submitted via the Mayor's Action Center. Jade Jackson is a Public Safety Reporter for the Indianapolis Star. You can email her at and follow her on X, formerly Twitter @IAMJADEJACKSON. IndyStar Trending News Report and Midwest Connect reporter, Katie Wiseman contributed to this article. This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indianapolis DPW blocks area of apparent sinkhole on city street
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
How does Indy's snow fleet compare to other cities? Here's what we found.
A woman couldn't take her mother to chemotherapy. A man missed three days of work. School buses slid as children stood nearby. The complaints piled up as quickly as snow during Winter Storm Blair in early January. The Indianapolis Department of Public Works deployed 70 plow drivers around the clock for nearly two weeks, logging more than 13,000 hours of overtime and dropping nearly a dozen tons of salt. It wasn't enough. Complaints continued to pour into the Mayor's Action Center — 784 of them — during January as snow hardened to ice on Indianapolis sidewalks and residential roads. An IndyStar investigation found that a constrained budget, stretched-thin snowplow fleet and past policy decisions combined to strand residents in their homes, leading members of the City-County Council to interrogate the public works department over a snow response that Councilor Jared Evans called the "worst that [he's] seen." One month after the public outcry, Mayor Joe Hogsett and City-County Council President Vop Osili took action to get the city through the rest of the winter. IndyStar examined data from six cities, including the number of plows owned, the maximum deployed at once, the miles a city is committed to plowing and the city's total road surface to get a better understanding of how other cities deploy their snow fleets. The analysis found that Indianapolis has significantly fewer snowplows per mile compared to its midwest neighbors. This result was found by dividing the distance of miles plowed by the maximum number of trucks on the road at once. When rounded to the nearest mile, that breaks down to: Chicago (38.4 inches average annual snowfall): 32 miles/truck + contractors Cincinnati, OH (23.3 inches average annual snowfall): 52 miles/truck Columbus, OH (22.4 inches average annual snowfall): 66 miles/truck Detroit, MI (45 inches average annual snowfall): 49 miles/truck + contractors Indianapolis (25.5 inches average annual snowfall): 100 miles/truck Louisville, KY (13.4 inches average annual snowfall): 45 miles/truck Nashville, TN (8.1 inches average annual snowfall): 75 miles/truck St. Louis, MO (18.9 inches average annual snowfall): 47 miles/truck Even cities with more snowplows took heated criticism over Winter Storm Blair. Columbus saw hundreds of complaints filed to its reporting system, and the response in St. Louis had residents so riled that snow removal became a "hot topic" on the mayor's campaign trail. Indianapolis' snowplow inventory is just one piece of a complicated system. Clues to how the city got to this point can be found in a December 2020 meeting of the Public Works Committee. At that meeting, then-director Dan Parker announced that the department was doing away with a rule that hired paid contractors on residential side streets to augment its fleet following 6 inches or more of snow. Instead, denser residential streets — "connectors" — would be added to the city's plowing routes. Administrators presented the change as a way for more local streets to be plowed faster and create more neighborhood accessibility. Contractors could be called in for residential side streets before the 6-inch threshold was met at the city's discretion. 'We eliminated the old 6-inch arbitrary rule, and we've added 300 additional centerline miles of residential streets,' Parker said on Dec. 10, 2020. In practice, however, the city hasn't called out contractors since February 2021, despite notable snow events in 2022 and 2024. And roads that might have previously been taken care of were left uncleared following two back-to-back January snowstorms. Interim DPW director Sam Beres defended the department's actions at a contentious Public Works Committee meeting on Jan. 16, 2025, saying that contractors could make streets more slippery by reducing streets' cover to a thin layer of ice. 'Now all of those neighborhoods are a sheet of ice anyway,' Councilor Brian Mowery shot back. More: 'The worst that I've seen:' City officials push DPW on unplowed residential roads To DPW's credit, more than 80% of the city's 8,400 miles are covered by snow routes. But narrow neighborhood streets weren't part of that plan, leaving residents struggling to get basic services like mail delivery and trash removal. In the absence of help from the city, people paid out of their own pockets for plowing so that they and their neighbors could receive in-home health care, buy groceries and get to work. On Feb. 13, the Public Works Committee was set to discuss a proposal from Councilor Jared Evans requiring contractors to clear streets following 4 inches of snow as a matter of policy. Two hours before the meeting began, Mayor Hogsett and Council President Osili announced a nearly identical strategy, but only for the remainder of this winter. Snow fell in Indianapolis days after the announcement, but it wasn't enough to trigger contractors. Discussion and voting of Evans' proposal were tabled until March. The news was a welcome change for Jack Stocks, a civil engineer who volunteers to arrange private plowing in his northeast Indianapolis neighborhood. "The city needs to make people feel safe, and people don't feel safe if their streets aren't cleared off," Stocks said. "It's clear that they responded to the concerns, which is good. That's what they're supposed to do." Even if the policy gets permanently adopted, Evans says it's a stopgap to a broader infrastructure issue. 'We're doing all of these projects, and we need more and more engineers and people,' Evans said. 'It's like, why do we keep contracting this out? Why don't you at some point just bring it in-house?' When do cities plow residential roads?Indianapolis: The city doesn't salt or plow residential roads unless the city calls in private contractors, which is done on a case-by-case basis. There aren't specific guidelines about how those case-by-case decisions are made, but Department of Public Works spokesperson Kyle Bloyd said the city considers how fast snow falls, how soon it will melt, and whether more snow is OH: Residential streets are plowed by "trained auxiliary city staff" after four or more inches of snow fall, according to the city's snow control plan. These roads aren't salted, citing environmental concerns, and they're plowed last after major thoroughfares and their OH: Cincinnati refers to its smallest streets as "pickup routes" because they can only be plowed by pickup trucks. They're prioritized last, behind primary thoroughfares and connectors (known in Cincinnati as "residential routes"). The city bans street parking during a snow emergency, which helps plows navigate down narrow local MI: Private contractors are deployed to residential streets if the Motor City sees more than six inches of snow. The city can ban parking to help plows move through narrow KY: Neighborhood streets aren't plowed, but on Jan. 16, Mayor Craig Greenberg announced crew members would salt 70 neighborhood streets surrounding city schools. The city prioritizes major thoroughfares, connector roads and roads near major employers and hospitals, according to its Louis, MO: Residential streets are not plowed according to a map provided by the TN: Some residential roads are not Residential roads are plowed after major streets are cleared. Each plow maintains between 14 and 17 miles of side streets, a city representative said. 'If folks want to know why [contractors are] not called out all the time, every time they're called out, it does cost us quite a bit of money,' then-director Dan Parker told the Public Works Committee after the city spent $600,000 during a February 2021 snow fight. For the 2024 fiscal year, Indianapolis allocated $62.6 million to the Department of Public Works for its operations budget, which covers snow removal. The money also covers the city's never-ending fight against potholes, a scourge compounded by the state's road funding formula, which doles out maintenance money based only on road length, not traffic volume or number of lanes. That means a rural road traveled a few times a day gets just as much state maintenance money as a heavily trafficked Indianapolis thoroughfare. More on the public works funding gap: Indianapolis should spend 5 times what it currently does on infrastructure, study says The cost of maintaining a staggering 8,400 miles of road depletes Indianapolis' ability to pay for other public goods – including snow removal. Councilor Evans told IndyStar the city's administration should calculate how much contractors cost and put that money aside each winter in case of an emergency. 'We're having a snow event like this every six [expletive] years,' Evans said after the snow had melted. The city needs to adopt a policy with "a little bit of common sense to it," he continued. After the February 2021 snowstorm, DPW asked to set aside $460,000 to pay for snow removal contractors the following year. They haven't been called out since, and that money was instead used to hire contractors for some of the city's many other infrastructure needs, according to the department. During an August 2024 budget hearing, then-DPW director Brandon Herget said some changes to next year's operations budget would reflect patterns based on previous years' spending. 'This is a 'live within our means' budget. That does mean that hard choices have to be made,' Herget said. More: Indy council passes budget despite 'no' votes over police, roads concerns The same residential streets that go unplowed by the city have also been passed over for critical repairs for years. Prospects of Marion County getting any more road funding seem nil. The statehouse has not looked favorably upon increasing taxes, leaving Indianapolis only with the option to make do with its undersized budget or pass a tax referendum. Rep. Justin Moed, a Democrat representing Indianapolis, has authored bills looking to overhaul the state's road funding formula every year for the past five legislative sessions. This year's bill, HB 1278, stalled in committee. Without some form of lasting change, odds are high that Indianapolis will again risk what was described in January complaints — missed doctors' appointments, a vehicle crashed into a home and broken bones from slip-and-falls. On Feb. 10, Director Todd Wilson took the reins of the Department of Public Works. He wasn't available for an interview at the time of this article's publication. "I look forward to working with you all in the future and to find a best way for our city to move forward," Wilson, the department's third director in 5 years, told the Public Works Committee on Feb. 13. Ryan Murphy is the communities reporter for IndyStar. She can be reached at (317) 800-2956 or rhmurphy@ This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indianapolis has fewer snowplows per mile than other midwestern cities
