Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and call this meeting to order.

This is the Marion County Commissioners meeting.

We are in room 260 of the city county building.

It is May 19th, 2026, approximately 2 p.m.

My name is Joseph O'Connor.

I am the president of this commission.

And we will go ahead and start off with introductions to my right.

I am Barbara's Marion County Treasurer and a member of this fine body.

Thank you.

We are missing the county auditor, but we do have a quorum with the treasurer and I, so we will go ahead and continue with the business we have today.

It looks like the first thing will be to approve the meeting minutes from the March 17th, 2026 meeting.

Do we have any additions or corrections?

Mr.

President, hearing or saying no additions or modifications.

I move approval of the minutes.

Okay, I'll second that.

All in favor, please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Pose, same sign.

Minutes are approved.

And it looks like we have an update of the Noble of Indiana Project project.

It's like we have Mr.

Wade Wingler here, the CEO.

Good afternoon.

And joined by Aaron Carmichael, our new advancement director.

Can you come up with me?

Oh sure.

Please.

And you're the only one on the agenda, so you have the floor.

Song and dance and little thing, right?

Well, commissioners, thank you so much for having us back for a little bit of an update.

I know we've got a slideshow here that we're going to walk through.

But I just wanted to let you know how things are going with this with the Tibbs location and what some things that are happening in Noble that I think are exciting.

We're on track and doing well in general.

So if you wouldn't mind going to the next slide here, when we were last meeting, we were talking about the facility that was our former shelter workshop on the Tibbs location.

And we talked about the people who were being served there.

There were about 40 folks with individual or individuals with disabilities who were spending their days in that warehouse.

In the last year, we have been able to relocate that group into a new location on 16th Street in Speedway that we affectionately call Noble Art.

And the reason we call it Noble Art is because it's part of who we are and what we do, but it has an art focus.

So there are folks there with disabilities.

We have a partnership with the University of Indianapolis.

They have an art therapy program and they send students out.

And we now have people who, frankly, for many generations had been doing subminimum wage work who now call themselves artists, and some of them are commissioned artists.

And I was real excited as we were moving through the budget process for Noble this year.

There's a very small line for art revenue that goes to the folks that create art out there and are now selling it and making a little bit of money in doing that.

So that was a big part of our strategy was to relocate folks in the community so that they can learn to make art, make friends.

We had uh a gentleman who in his very first week was super excited to go to lunch at Charlie Brown's Pancake House because he heard that Elvis had been there, and um so there's just a lot of heartwarming stuff that has happened as the people who are at the Tibbs location previously have been relocated into Speedway.

We have a waiting list for services there, and it's going really well.

They recently visited the track, it's within walking distance.

Um, and so one of their first outings when Greetwind practice started was to head down and sit and watch some of that.

So those are some photographs of the people that we serve who set down their paintbrushes for the day and went down to the track to enjoy that.

This um this is really good.

I asked our artists to come up with an art piece this year that represents their new experience at the 500.

And so this is a collaborative art piece where every individual, regardless of their ability, had some contribution.

Um we have some artists who are very talented and painted parts of the pagoda.

And if you will look above the top of the 500 um uh posts there, all the way to the left.

There's a little slip of white paper that has two thumb prints on it.

That shows you that that particular artist that was her contribution to the art piece.

She put two thumbs in ink or paint, put them on that, and now her part of the art, which blends in so beautifully, um, is her contribution.

And that's the way that piece works.

It's a collaborative of our artists who have put together this piece, everybody with a with a contribution.

So they're doing some great stuff.

Uh, we're gonna sell those two.

Uh, we've got some postcards printed up, and we're gonna make some prints, and we've already talked to some of our board members and community members about buying um this piece, and they want to make another one next year, so this may turn into an annual art piece that Noble Art does there as part of the May festivities.

The Tibbs location still is there.

And over the last winter, we were contacted by the city for that to be used as a winter contingency location, and we were able to partner with the city to do that.

So as we are gearing up for a capital campaign to build out the sports complex, the building was going to sit empty over the winter, and I know that the city needed a location for overflow for women and kids.

So we partnered with the city.

We partnered with Aspire, who operated the thing, and we were able to utilize that location this winter for the next slide will tell us how many families.

So a total of 419 residents stayed warm there this winter, 126 families, 231 kids, and averaged a length of stay there for 27 days.

And so I was excited when we had this location that was temporarily not being used, was able to be put to good use to house our neighbors this winter.

We are talking to the mayor's office about doing that for one more winter.

We aren't quite ready to break ground and start tearing down buildings down there to start with our sports park, and so we're in negotiation right now on what that looks like for them to use it for one more winter as we're gearing up for our capital campaign.

Next slide, please.

Do we have another one?

There we go.

So our long-term purpose is for Noble Sports.

So you've probably caught a little bit of our branding.

We've been noble for a long time.

Now we are taking our service lines and rebranding them things like Noble Art, Noble Sports.

Our employment programs are becoming noble works.

Our children's services are becoming noble kids.

And the idea is we've been around for 73 years.

A lot of folks know us, but they don't always understand the little things that we are doing within our service lines.

And so this is part of the slowly rolling out branding campaign.

And Noble Sports doesn't exist physically yet, but as we launch into a capital campaign, that'll become more well known.

And just as a reminder, our friends over at Special Olympics, Jeff Moeller, the CEO and I have a great relationship.

And as we were talking, he said, you know, Wade, I have plenty of Special Olympics athletes.

I actually have a lot of coaches, a lot of volunteers, college students, for example, who want to come coach Special Olympics.

What we don't have our facilities, we need more facilities for practice.

And in fact, this has been anonymized, but it's actually about me.

I sit next to a gal uh at church, and we were talking one day about what you're gonna do this afternoon, and she's a special Olympics athlete, and she says, Well, I was gonna go to basketball practice for Special Olympics, but the regular kids made it to the tournament, so they get to practice, and we got booted out.

And it it not only broke my heart, right, um, but it just drove home the need for practice facilities and facilities for special Olympians to have a place.

And again, that's one of our long-term purposes for this location is to build out in partnership with Special Olympics that sports park that'll be unique to Indianapolis.

There's not anything specifically targeted for folks with intellectual disabilities in an integrated environment.

The closest thing we have is in Fort Wayne.

Turnstone center up there has a sports facility that's smaller for people who have physical disabilities.

It's a Paralympics program.

So while they focus on amputation, spinal cord injury-related disabilities, we focus more on those intellectual disabilities, the kind of things that folks are born with autism and cerebral palsy and down syndrome and the like.

So that's um as we think about our social vectors for inclusion, the things that people use to get to know each other and learn about their community and become connected.

Um art and sport and work are some of those are some of those social vectors of sport is the next one.

So we have engaged um a an architect.

Um we're working here on a master plan, and this is a general overview of what we dream the property to look like, and this is much more sophisticated than the earlier drawings that we brought in.

And we're looking at a five-phase approach.

The first one is um the relocation of a firehouse.

So we're talking to IFD about what it would look like for a Firehouse 30 to um to move on that property, and there's some conversations happening about that now.

Um phase two would be for us to build a field house, so a three-court basketball court that can be used year-round for basketball and volleyball and pickleball and all those hardcore sports that are out there.

Phase three is an indoor and an outdoor turf.

So think soccer or uh rugby or football inside and outside.

And then phases four and five are as a two-story building.

One story is a health and fitness club identified for folks with disabilities and folks without disabilities to work out together and learn about health and fitness.

And then the top story of that long term is to be a new headquarters for Noble at some point.

The blue box, the blue building there with the X on it, that is affordable housing.

We don't have that phased in yet in terms of a particular partner or particular time frame related to that.

But as the um as the property is developed and we raise funds, then we have a couple of different uh affordable housing, light tech tax credit housing developers that are interested in partnering with us on that.

So they're in tow whenever we're ready.

Um so if you'll go to the next slide, please.

That is just one of the um renderings of what it might look like.

That's what an architect thinks.

So this would be from the northwest corner with Tibbs running along the top left side of the slide there.

Um you'll see out near Tibbs the L-shaped two-story building that would be the health club and the headquarters.

Um the long building with the slanted roofs and the little circle skylights there would be both the basketball field house and the indoor turf.

The soccer field is both soccer and football and striped for baseball or softball, so the idea is we could run a lot of different sports on that on that court or on that field.

And then the building with the green roof would be the housing piece at some point.

So I I didn't argue with the architect about putting grass on the roof, but they thought it looked cool, so that's why that's why that's there.

So, how does the low income low-income tax credit housing fit into the project overall in terms of is it are they are they able to use that stuff?

That kind of yeah, I mean, the idea is among folks with disabilities, affordable housing is a critical issue.

And there are LITEC tax credits specifically for folks with intellectual developmental disabilities.

Okay, I didn't know that.

So for folks who get that tax credit, their income, I think the amount is they're capped at 30% of their income.

So if you have an intellectual disability and you can receive that tax credit, then your housing costs rent and utilities and everything are capped at 30% of your income.

So that just creates more housing for the people we serve.

Okay, yeah.

So I didn't realize so a lot of the people you serve will utilize those facilities and you would utilize them anyway without the housing component, but the housing component gives them that option to possibly live in that housing.

It's just we have the space and we know that's a need, and so um that's that's on the um on the drawing board for what we're trying to do here.

Great.

You know, approximately how many housing units.

The last time that we did numbers on that, it was around a hundred or a little more.

Okay.

Yeah.

Good questions.

Other questions?

No, right now.

Okay.

I think I got a couple more slides there.

Oh, yeah, there's Aaron.

Um, so I brought Aaron with me today.

Aaron Carmichael has been hired as our director of advancement.

Obviously, we're talking about a capital investment here that's a complex multi-year project, um, and we wanted to make sure that we brought somebody in who had that kind of experience.

So Aaron comes to us with about 30 years of fundraising experience, and he for good reason is much more of a sports guy than I am, so he can talk to potential donors about baseball and basketball and things that I only have a little bit of of knowledge about.

Um, and he is now working on laying the groundwork for the capital campaign, which is scheduled to start this fall.

So we are doing some fundraising feasibility studies, we're doing some things with our donor database, and um we will start that capital campaign later this year to start to raise the funds to build this out.

Aaron, do you want to say anything about yourself or what you plan to do here?

Putting you on the spot.

Um life uh can't say lifelong hoosier, but born and raised in Indiana and moved around some and and came back to Indiana in 1999.

Um, most of my life has been spent uh here in in Indiana and and a lot for um the people we serve.

Uh love for the the the sports as well as as Wade said, uh I was a collegiate athlete and and have continued to be engaged in in sports in one manner or another um for for many years as as well as coaching and and uh uh just involved in in that and and as as Wade said it's it's it's it's a wonderful partnership with Special Olympians.

About sixty percent of those that we serve are also Special Olympians.

So their people are our people, our people are their people.

And if if you go talk to the the artist that um that Wade was talking about uh who wanted to go to Charlie Brown's, if you talk to him in the context of of noble art, he's an artist.

If you cock talk to him in in the context of sports, he's an athlete.

And so those those are his social vectors and and the the places that he feels um feels a lot of alive and and feels at home and we want to be able to create that.

And I think the the really cool thing about the facilities that um Wade has has Wade has dreamed up and and the architect has put to pencil um is the the long term sponsorship opportunities, naming right opportunities, and then also the short-term annual sponsorship opportunities for ongoing uh funding that will help fund the the pro the the programs that go on there.

So we we we have some great opportunities uh to to get some naming rights, like you think Game Bridge, think Lucas Oil, think RCA Dome if if if you're old like me, right?

You know, you remember remember back when uh the Hoosier Dome became the RCA dome and and having those kind of relationships with uh uh important partners here in here in the city, but also annual sponsorships, naming rights on in particular rooms, banners hung in field house, um, little league, you know how little leagues will have the the signage all around the fence, those kind of things as well that will help uh support this on on an ongoing basis and and provide not just the basic level of services that that we are expected to do, but that extra level of what Noble does, which is just go the extra mile and and make sure that the people that we serve uh get the facilities and the services that they they not that just that they're entitled to, but the ones that they deserve as well.

That's a bad picture, so we're excited and grateful for your continued partnership and things are moving along with the project and we're excited, so we happen to answer any other questions you might have.

You mentioned groundbreaking.

Has there been any type of groundbreaking or not yet?

We um vacated the building in October when we moved folks to Speed Wave to in the new art location, and then in November, middle of November is when we started using the property there for the shelter.

Okay.

So any idea when there might be a groundbreaking.

Well, so we have to raise funds, so we start the capital campaign, we start the raise the money, and then that phased approach as we hit certain milestones um with the fundraising is when we'll start breaking down.

Logical sequential sequential.

Yes.

Yep.

Is the uh the LITEC uh application process the same for this type of project?

It is.

It is.

So it's like a July deadline and used to be pretty extensive or I guess I want to say hard to get, maybe.

Yeah, yeah, it's very competitive.

Um and so in the last two years I have spent some time getting to know who the leaders are in that industry.

Um and the ones that we are talking to right now are folks that you would recognize who have a very strong track record with that.

Good.

Yeah.

I don't have any more questions.

Well, uh it's just very exciting and I appreciate the update.

Um please come back any type anytime you like.

This is, I mean as as a commission, and we don't see many of these types of projects coming in.

So when we do, we're especially interested.

Yeah.

So if you can make wave a magic wand with funds, what what would be your ideal opening timeline for all phases?

Oh, well, it's more than a magic wand.

So we have a capital budget, and we right now are refining our operational budget, right?

Because we don't want to build it unless we can afford to keep it running.

Right.

And because it's so new, we're sharpening pencils and really spending a little extra time on that piece.

But not including anything with IFD and not including the housing piece.

Um we're looking at a little over 50 million dollars to build it out.

Is it new everywhere?

So this concept has not been tested anywhere in.

I mean, as far as you know, this type of project extensively with the with the sports and the and the low-income housing.

That's right.

There are some other uh Paralympics and Special Olympics facilities that are on a smaller scale than this, um, but not this combining the whole campus concept that I'm aware of.

Great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I am proud to let you know that I actually own a piece of art from Noble from years ago when I was involved with Noble.

Um when I was city controller, I went to one of their events.

And it's a little frog.

Clay frog with its tongue sticking out.

If you're if you have her on the tenth floor, stop by and see it.

Stop by and see the frog.

Excellent.

Well, they sit on another committee, the space allocation committee, and one of the members who's a judge, uh, was just commenting that the uh community justice center where she works, you know that is lacking a lot of art.

So uh I mean her her thing was it's just kind of barren wall.

So she actually was trying to engage with the city controller to try and obtain some art.

So I don't know, that may be a feel free to connect them to us.

Um we have some inventory.

We have artists who they just love to make art, and so they're constantly doing that, but then we're also having some commissioned pieces, right?

Where somebody says, Oh, I wish I had a barn or uh whatever, and we have artists they like to think about it, and and then they they create some pretty beautiful stuff.

Yeah, we will actually be uh with the artist have an artist tent at Penrod uh this September, yeah.

Um and looking at future other art festivals and such to get our artist engaged.

Um but if you ever want to come by the the gallery or the uh the studio, um, we are open during the day.

We'd love to show you around and and you can buy art while you're there if you prefer.

Um or or if this judge would like to come by and and fill the fill the courtroom, that'd be fine with us.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you all so much.

We certainly appreciate your partnership and um we're excited.

This is fun stuff, it really is meaningful.

Great.

All right, all right, yes.

Thank you.

It looks like that's the only item of business we had on our agenda today.

So our next meeting is June 17, 2026 at 2 p.m.

in this room, which is 260 of the city county building.

Seeing or hearing no other business come before this board today.

I'll enter entertain a motion to adjourn.

So move.

We are adjourned.

Thank you.