Indianapolis: beyond the bricks and mortar: civic leaders say human issues will be the focus of the '90s.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve

Indianapolis: Beyond the Bricks and Mortar

Civic leaders say human issues will be the focus of the '90s.

Indianapolis has been a story of phenomenal growth in the past couple of decades.

The city has gone from being the sleepy butt of out-of-towners' jokes to a major destination point. Can Indianapolis top its accomplishments in the coming decade? Probably not. But civic leaders have plenty of challenges ahead as they move beyond the bricks and mortar of the 1970s and '80s and down the new roads of the '90s.

"I think the community is in the process of trying to assess what those roads are going to be," says Thomas A. King, president of the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce. That assessment isn't a simple task, and it is bound to be affected by the wild card of a new mayor next year. Longtime Mayor William H. Hudnut III has announced he won't run again, leaving the biggest political question mark the city has seen in years.

Question marks aside, civic leaders have some ideas about where Indianapolis should focus its attention in the coming years, and many of their ideas are less glamorous and glitzy than the building projects of days gone by. "I think human revitalization must be given a high priority," says Hudnut. "We need to deal with issues concerning human needs." The problems of drugs and gangs must be solved, he says, and affordable housing must be made available to low-and middle-income families. And health-care problems must be addressed, he says, with projects like the Campaign for Healthy Babies that is tackling the city's infant mortality predicament.

"I think education first and foremost will get a lot of the community's attention," says King. "Our schools and students have not kept pace with the world competitively."

"It's not a very bright scenario if your school systems are producing people that cannot be employed," says David Frick, managing partner of the Indianapolis law firm of Baker & Daniels and a former deputy mayor. "We've simply got to make our school systems work better and address how to develop the kinds of people that make the community work."

In terms of promoting economic development, reforming education could become as important as good infrastructure, central location and low taxes. Demographers say workers of the future will need more and more skills, and already the labor pool is lagging behind the needs of industry. "We have business and industry that can't hire the people they need to get the job done,"...