OPENPUBLICA · PUBLIC MEETING RECORD
Record of Proceedings

Public Safety Committee Budget Hearing, August 19, 2026

City-County Council — Wednesday, August 19, 2026
BodyIndianapolis, Indiana
SessionCity-County Council
DateWednesday, August 19, 2026
StatusNEW · FILED
Video Record
0:00 / 2:33:01
Transcript — Verbatim
0:01

I should remember that.

0:03

Good evening, members of the committee.

0:06

My name is Scott Hull, Executive Director of Marion County Community Corrections.

0:10

Happy to be here tonight and go vote over our 2027 budget.

0:16

Our request and a couple other budget that we have presented, and then a couple of other additional items that I think are of particular importance for our agency, for our community, and for your consideration.

0:32

So starting off, we we just want to kind of give you an overview of the agency and some things that we have accomplished in the past year.

0:42

I'm not going to read every slide here for everyone's sake.

0:46

But we we are an agency of a staff of about 200 people, supervising 3300 people on a daily basis.

0:56

We serve nearly 7,000 individuals in 2025.

1:01

That encompasses pretrial programs, executed sentences of home detention, electronic monitoring, and work release.

1:12

If we break those uh that that 7,000 number down a little bit just to give you a little bit more awareness of of who it is we serve.

1:23

4600 of those individuals were post conviction, 2200 were pretrial, 400 in work release.

1:32

The most common level of offense on our program is F6, and that's at just under 2300, and nearly 2,000 at F5.

1:42

So we are serving lower level felonies, predominantly nonviolent, and most of our individuals are dealing with either a substance abuse issue, mental health issue, or co-occurring issues.

1:55

Again, I mentioned staffing wise, we are nearly 200.

2:00

Um fully staffed, we would be at 205.

2:03

We have our administrative administration and accreditation division, which oversees programming and training, pretrial services, our executed community supervision, operations, which is really intake release, and our 24-7 call center and residential supervision out at Deval.

2:23

Some other numbers just to kind of hopefully fully give a picture of how much volume we we work with in a year.

2:31

We processed over 6,000 individuals in taking them in in 2025 and released over 2,600 in 2025.

2:41

Our call center, which again operates 24-735, handled over 200,000 calls in 2025.

2:50

And then in addition to those calls, they also manage the high-level alerts for our agency, and they address 22,000 alerts in 2025 as well.

3:02

We also have a field team that focuses on our higher risk clients or individuals that we have uh some concern with maybe their living situation or maybe their place of employment.

3:16

And our field team handled over nearly 6,000 home visits in 2025.

3:23

We also have a law enforcement liaison who is embedded within IMPD, and we work very closely with them on individuals who who both of our agencies are uh having some issues with the number of home visits that they conducted together resulted in 67 arrests in 2025, over 79 guns were seized and over 18,000 grams of drugs collected.

3:52

Beyond just the the working with our clients, we also engage quite a bit in the community as this is something we have been trying to do more of over the last several years.

4:04

So uh we have contributed over 400 volunteer hours to local organizations such as Second Helpings and Keep Indianapolis beautiful.

4:13

We worked very hard in 2026, early in the year to uh begin translating our documents into other languages beyond just uh Spanish, so several in particular several Burmese dialects.

4:27

Um we partner with a number of organizations, specifically Second Helpings and Northview Church to contribute to the food pantry that we operate, and I've talked about that in the past.

4:40

And we continue to try to build our social media presence mainly from the standpoint now we're expanding it to try to help be a platform that our clients can go to and get information about uh if they have questions about how to charge their device properly or different things like that, having that emission that information available uh through social media.

5:04

Besides the partners I mentioned, more in a volunteer basis, we have also worked very hard to expand a number of partners throughout the community that we work with in conjunction with our clients.

5:17

So PACE, the public advocates for community re-entry, Brookside Community Reentry Group, Health Department, Fathers and Families, Second Chance Indy, Growing Indy, the Urban League, UESU, a number of others, and we continue to grow that because we know that we as an agency cannot solely address every need that our clients have, and we need our community partners to be able to help us do that.

5:42

The other thing I would say is we have uh we work quite a bit on the programming side with our clients.

5:48

Uh, over 250 uh clients went through our in-house programming, and I'll talk a little bit more about that.

5:56

We have put an awful lot of effort into staff development, and um I want to really focus on that because as we get into the numbers, you're going to see uh some things that are going to impact that staff development.

6:13

We have put our our staff through thousands of hours of training uh every year.

6:21

We have uh been able to send a number of staff to large statewide and and national conferences.

6:28

And I know there is uh I I believe some people have a conception that these national conferences are are more fun and and uh it's just a kind of a vacation type of thing, but I don't believe in coincidences, and since we have been investing and sending our staff to these conferences statewide and nationally, our success rate has gone up nearly 20 percent from the mid-60s to this past year uh over 80 percent.

6:57

And I don't think that those two things just happened in a vacuum.

7:01

I think they'll go tidy, they are tied hand to hand, and as we have invested in our staff and they have uh continued to grow and develop, our our results are that our clients are being served better.

7:16

Again, we we did over 2400 hours of coaching internally with our teams.

7:21

They completed 12,000 hours of training uh as an agency.

7:25

We finished our second internal leadership development class, which is something that we developed internally to help our frontline staff when they move into those supervisory positions, which you know historically, particularly in our field and and in many places, uh you get promoted because you're really good at the job, but then they it stops right there, and you don't get the training to develop you as a leader and as a supervisor, and we are working to do that internally.

7:52

We completed caseload audits on every case manager in the in the course of 2025, and that average score was over 80 percent.

8:03

We continue to have a number of individuals uh within our agency recognized both statewide and nationally for the work that we are doing.

8:13

Alyssa Smith was uh the 2025 IACAC, which is the Indiana Association for Community Corrections case manager of the year.

8:23

She did that in addition to just the tremendous work she does on a daily basis.

8:28

She initiated our uh internal crisis response team, similar to the CIT teams that both sheriff and IMPD have.

8:36

We decided to uh work on doing that internally because with all due respect to our sheriff and and IMPD partners.

8:46

Sometimes when our individual clients are escalated, the mere presence of a uniform and a badge and a gun continues to escalate that situation.

8:56

And by being able to uh handle that internally, one, we avoid that issue, and but more importantly, we're just not even having to bother the sheriff or IMPD and be a drain on their limited resources.

9:08

So we've been able to handle that internally because of her initiative.

9:13

Delaney Kent, another one of our team leaders who focuses on uh domestic violence cases, uh, was able to add strangulation as a charge to the individuals that get victim zones uh put in place because by state statute, they are not uh automatically put on place unless it's uh an upgradable charge.

9:32

So we were able to get that done.

9:34

Jeffrey Sudd, a captain at our work release facility, uh graduated from the emerging emerging leaders program with the Department of Corrections.

9:45

Jasmine Morris, a supervisor in case management, completed the leadership education accelerated development program here with the city.

9:53

We've had a number of staff that have been selected to do presentations both state and nationally regarding the work they do, like Kreska, James Alby, Jacob Mason, Ryan Gilman, and Mackenzie Knox.

10:06

Kyle Mitchler, one of our managers just graduated from the American Probation Parole Association's Leadership Institute, uh, which are our national association.

10:17

Ryan Gilman is not here tonight because he is currently in that program.

10:23

He is the fourth individual from our agency to be part of that leadership program since they instituted it, and they've only had a little over 200 people participate in that in the last 11 years.

10:36

And we are one of the very few agencies nationally that have more than one graduate of that program.

Discussion Breakdown — Share of Meeting
Public Safety█████████████████████████████████████████████47%
Budget█████████████████████████26%
Correctional Facilities███████████11%
Community Engagement█████5%
Public Works███3%
Public Health███3%
Mental Health Awareness█1%
Training And Development█1%
Personnel Matters█1%
Summary of Proceedings

Public Safety and Criminal Justice Committee Budget Hearing – August 19, 2026

The Public Safety and Criminal Justice Committee of the Indianapolis City-County Council met on Wednesday, August 19, 2026, at 5:30 p.m. in the Public Assembly Room of the City-County Building to hear budget presentations from Marion County Community Corrections, the Marion County Prosecutor and Child Support Division, and the Marion County Public Defender Agency. The committee also received public comments. No formal votes were taken; the session was informational.

Public Comments & Testimony

  • Devante Gilbert Bay (Grand Major Temple Number One, Validus Movement / Lou Free Indiana) expressed gratitude to councilors who support waiving ankle monitor fees. He argued that investing in the incarcerated population could change narratives and reduce crime, as fees create barriers to re-entry (e.g., transportation, job interviews, clothing).
  • Josh Ruddick (Lou Free Indiana) noted that a June 28 action with 200 leaders discussed the “cost of the cage.” He stated that reinvestment in the community saves taxpayer dollars, and that the budget presented to the council contained 25 million dollars in cuts not explicitly stated, including the 1.5 million for fee elimination. He urged the committee to lean into these conversations.

Discussion Items

Marion County Community Corrections – Scott Hohl (Executive Director) and Justin Garcia (CFO)

  • Presented the 2027 budget request of $23.3 million, with funding from County General, Public Safety Income Tax, State Grant, and program-specific fees.
  • The agency supervises 3,300 individuals daily, served 7,000 in 2025 (4,600 post-conviction, 2,200 pretrial, 400 work release). The most common offense levels are F6 (2,300) and F5 (2,000). Staff of 200 (205 fully staffed).
  • Success rate: 80%+ in 2025; 14% rearrested or revoked (8% rearrested). 3,800 clients successfully completed the program.
  • User fees: Billed $3.4 million in 2025, collected only $523,000 (15% of billed; 3% from active users, 81% from tax intercept). Hohl proposed a $1.5 million annual increase to eliminate all user fees for clients, arguing it would reduce jail costs ($80+/day) and improve outcomes.
  • DeValt Residential Center: Multiple major repairs needed (roof $1.5M, HVAC, generator) – past 18 months spent over $1M on repairs. A new work release facility is estimated at $50 million.
  • Character one increased by $577,000 (COLA, step/grades, health insurance). Character three increased $243,000 (contracts, ISA). However, $300,000 was cut from original request, impacting staff development and training.
  • Councilor Perkins supported the user fee elimination and asked why it wasn’t in the initial budget (Hohl: told to keep budgets flat).
  • Councilor Hart opposed the fee elimination, stating his constituents prioritize sidewalks, lighting, bike lanes, green space, and third spaces over subsidizing ankle monitors. He also questioned the fairness of fees to those who pay versus those who don’t; Hohl noted most collected fees come from tax intercept, not direct payments.
  • Councilor Wales asked about the cost of freezing four positions ($300k) and the need for a new facility, noting that $3.5M in repairs plus $1.5M in fees totals $5.3M. She urged thinking of DeValt as a home, not just a building.
  • Councilor Booth asked about state/federal aid for a new facility; Hohl replied that federal grants are decreasing and the state DOC cut $250,000 from Marion County’s grant.
  • Councilor Graves asked about court involvement in waiving fees; Hohl explained that fees are set by the agency, tied to federal poverty level, and can be reduced further. The 3.4 million billed does not include indigent clients. Graves also asked about other client challenges (housing, transportation, treatment).
  • Councilor McCormick noted a rounding error in the budget slide and asked about ISA chargeback increases (15% without change in IT usage). She supported exploring enterprise-wide building prioritization.

Marion County Prosecutor and Child Support Division – Ryan Mears (Prosecutor), Salita Scott (Chief Counsel), Mike McGuire (Child Support)

  • Mears highlighted that the budget seeks parity with the Public Defender Agency. The office is unionizing; 69% of staff are women. Conviction rate on homicides is 87%; on child molest cases 91%.
  • 66% of individuals charged with murder in 2025 had no criminal history or only nonviolent priors; 51% had no prior arrests. 26 teenagers were charged with murder in 2025. Disputes (often online) are the leading cause of homicides, replacing drug-related motives.
  • Problem-solving courts: Re-entry court and drug treatment court will stop accepting new clients after September 2026 due to state DOC grant cuts. Veterans court was cobbled together for 2027. Mears warned these cuts will impact public safety.
  • Child Support Division: 35,500 open cases; 2027 proposed budget $8.1 million ($2.5 million net after federal/state reimbursements). Programs include mediation, Parent at Work (employment assistance), and family resource days.
  • Councilor Wales expressed strong disappointment, noting that re-entry court was a critical support for people leaving DOC. She asked for the full list of cuts; Mears confirmed drug treatment and re-entry courts end in September.
  • Councilor Delaney clarified that the funding was state DOC grants, not county. She asked about parity; Mears said the 2027 budget includes parity, and a fall cleanup will address the current year.
  • Councilor Perkins asked about staffing: Mears reported a class of 18 legal interns graduating, which would bring the office to full staffing. He emphasized retention through parity and collective bargaining. Perkins also asked about engagement with Burmese and Chin communities; Mears cited partnerships at the YMCA and soccer games.
  • Councilor Paris asked about the 66% statistic; Mears explained that many homicides arise from trivial disputes, often involving guns. 48% of 2025 homicides were dispute-related.
  • Councilor Boots asked for the list of problem-solving courts affected (drug treatment, re-entry; VA court saved through 2027). He also inquired about the Parents at Work program: it helps non-custodial parents find employment, modify orders, and keeps child support payments flowing.

Marion County Public Defender Agency – Ray Casanova (Chief Public Defender) and Rebecca Matziger (CFO)

  • Presented 2027 budget increase of $4.9 million, largely due to the IBEW contract ratification (salary and benefits). The agency receives 40% reimbursement from the state for non-capital cases, 50% for capital cases.
  • Staffing: 23 vacancies, but 17 expected to be filled by certified grad interns. Attrition rate reduced from 14.5% to 8.5%. Residency requirement lifted via state legislation (House Enrolled Act 1249), which applied to public defenders, prosecutors, and emergency personnel.
  • A death penalty case is scheduled for trial in February 2027, with estimated expenses of $200,000.
  • Community engagement includes partnerships with law schools, participation in Pride Parade, Gleaners Food Bank, and Christian Legal Clinic expungements.
  • Need for a case management system ($350,000) to handle digital discovery (body cameras, cell phone data). Current system inadequate; ISA may develop a shared solution, but that would take years.
  • Problem-solving courts: drug treatment and re-entry courts funded by DOC grants cut; veterans court funded through 2027 by Indiana Office of Court Services. Casanova and Matziger noted that the cuts were learned late (June 2026) and that the drug treatment court is the “grandfather” of problem-solving courts.
  • Councilor Wales asked about using opioid settlement funds for drug treatment court; Casanova said the current fund is only $60,000 and not robust enough to replace the court’s wraparound services.
  • Councilor Graves expressed condolences for the passing of Ann Sutton, long-time chief counsel. Casanova acknowledged her role.
  • Councilor Hart congratulated Casanova on the residency requirement and asked about the authority making the cuts to problem-solving courts; Casanova explained the DOC grant ended, and the courts’ future may depend on the courts’ own budget or restored state funding.
  • Councilor Delaney asked about the cost of a case management system ($350,000) and whether a shared system with prosecutors and IMPD could be built; Casanova said ISA has expressed interest, but it would be a multi-year project.
  • Councilor Boots asked about the DOC grant amount ($400,000) that funded the three problem-solving courts.

Key Outcomes

  • No formal votes were taken; the committee received the three budget presentations for informational purposes.
  • Several councilors (Perkins, Graves, McCormick, Wales, and the Chair) expressed support for eliminating user fees for Community Corrections clients, but further discussion is needed to identify funding sources.
  • Councilor Hart opposed the fee elimination, citing competing constituent priorities.
  • The committee expressed concern about the loss of problem-solving courts (drug treatment, re-entry) due to state DOC grant cuts. Councilor Wales suggested exploring opioid settlement funds, and Councilor Boots noted the $400,000 amount is relatively small.
  • The Public Defender Agency’s successful effort to lift the residency requirement was praised; Councilor Hart offered to revisit the issue for other agencies if needed.
  • The committee will continue budget deliberations in upcoming meetings; the fall cleanup budget may address parity for the prosecutor’s office and other adjustments.

Meeting Transcript

I should remember that. Good evening, members of the committee. My name is Scott Hull, Executive Director of Marion County Community Corrections. Happy to be here tonight and go vote over our 2027 budget. Our request and a couple other budget that we have presented, and then a couple of other additional items that I think are of particular importance for our agency, for our community, and for your consideration. So starting off, we we just want to kind of give you an overview of the agency and some things that we have accomplished in the past year. I'm not going to read every slide here for everyone's sake. But we we are an agency of a staff of about 200 people, supervising 3300 people on a daily basis. We serve nearly 7,000 individuals in 2025. That encompasses pretrial programs, executed sentences of home detention, electronic monitoring, and work release. If we break those uh that that 7,000 number down a little bit just to give you a little bit more awareness of of who it is we serve. 4600 of those individuals were post conviction, 2200 were pretrial, 400 in work release. The most common level of offense on our program is F6, and that's at just under 2300, and nearly 2,000 at F5. So we are serving lower level felonies, predominantly nonviolent, and most of our individuals are dealing with either a substance abuse issue, mental health issue, or co-occurring issues. Again, I mentioned staffing wise, we are nearly 200. Um fully staffed, we would be at 205. We have our administrative administration and accreditation division, which oversees programming and training, pretrial services, our executed community supervision, operations, which is really intake release, and our 24-7 call center and residential supervision out at Deval. Some other numbers just to kind of hopefully fully give a picture of how much volume we we work with in a year. We processed over 6,000 individuals in taking them in in 2025 and released over 2,600 in 2025. Our call center, which again operates 24-735, handled over 200,000 calls in 2025. And then in addition to those calls, they also manage the high-level alerts for our agency, and they address 22,000 alerts in 2025 as well. We also have a field team that focuses on our higher risk clients or individuals that we have uh some concern with maybe their living situation or maybe their place of employment. And our field team handled over nearly 6,000 home visits in 2025. We also have a law enforcement liaison who is embedded within IMPD, and we work very closely with them on individuals who who both of our agencies are uh having some issues with the number of home visits that they conducted together resulted in 67 arrests in 2025, over 79 guns were seized and over 18,000 grams of drugs collected. Beyond just the the working with our clients, we also engage quite a bit in the community as this is something we have been trying to do more of over the last several years. So uh we have contributed over 400 volunteer hours to local organizations such as Second Helpings and Keep Indianapolis beautiful. We worked very hard in 2026, early in the year to uh begin translating our documents into other languages beyond just uh Spanish, so several in particular several Burmese dialects. Um we partner with a number of organizations, specifically Second Helpings and Northview Church to contribute to the food pantry that we operate, and I've talked about that in the past. And we continue to try to build our social media presence mainly from the standpoint now we're expanding it to try to help be a platform that our clients can go to and get information about uh if they have questions about how to charge their device properly or different things like that, having that emission that information available uh through social media. Besides the partners I mentioned, more in a volunteer basis, we have also worked very hard to expand a number of partners throughout the community that we work with in conjunction with our clients. So PACE, the public advocates for community re-entry, Brookside Community Reentry Group, Health Department, Fathers and Families, Second Chance Indy, Growing Indy, the Urban League, UESU, a number of others, and we continue to grow that because we know that we as an agency cannot solely address every need that our clients have, and we need our community partners to be able to help us do that. The other thing I would say is we have uh we work quite a bit on the programming side with our clients. Uh, over 250 uh clients went through our in-house programming, and I'll talk a little bit more about that. We have put an awful lot of effort into staff development, and um I want to really focus on that because as we get into the numbers, you're going to see uh some things that are going to impact that staff development. We have put our our staff through thousands of hours of training uh every year. We have uh been able to send a number of staff to large statewide and and national conferences. And I know there is uh I I believe some people have a conception that these national conferences are are more fun and and uh it's just a kind of a vacation type of thing, but I don't believe in coincidences, and since we have been investing and sending our staff to these conferences statewide and nationally, our success rate has gone up nearly 20 percent from the mid-60s to this past year uh over 80 percent. And I don't think that those two things just happened in a vacuum. I think they'll go tidy, they are tied hand to hand, and as we have invested in our staff and they have uh continued to grow and develop, our our results are that our clients are being served better. Again, we we did over 2400 hours of coaching internally with our teams. They completed 12,000 hours of training uh as an agency. We finished our second internal leadership development class, which is something that we developed internally to help our frontline staff when they move into those supervisory positions, which you know historically, particularly in our field and and in many places, uh you get promoted because you're really good at the job, but then they it stops right there, and you don't get the training to develop you as a leader and as a supervisor, and we are working to do that internally. We completed caseload audits on every case manager in the in the course of 2025, and that average score was over 80 percent. We continue to have a number of individuals uh within our agency recognized both statewide and nationally for the work that we are doing. Alyssa Smith was uh the 2025 IACAC, which is the Indiana Association for Community Corrections case manager of the year. She did that in addition to just the tremendous work she does on a daily basis. She initiated our uh internal crisis response team, similar to the CIT teams that both sheriff and IMPD have. We decided to uh work on doing that internally because with all due respect to our sheriff and and IMPD partners. Sometimes when our individual clients are escalated, the mere presence of a uniform and a badge and a gun continues to escalate that situation. And by being able to uh handle that internally, one, we avoid that issue, and but more importantly, we're just not even having to bother the sheriff or IMPD and be a drain on their limited resources.

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