Congratulations, Debra / Deb / Debbie Cook!
While some citizens have referred to you as "too good to be truthful", we visionaries and developers know that you are simply too good to be true. Your commitment to the Vision was apparent with your very first development presented to the Town - the 150-ft tall freezer facility called "Project Aisle" right next to single-family homes. We suspect that you must have learned from your failure that speeding things along and suppressing public participation would lead to your success as a visionary today. Here are just a few of the changes that have occurred under your leadership:
- You basically rezoned the entire Town all at once by leading the charge with changes to the Unified Development Ordinances. This 3-year project is still underway, but at least you could speed track the deletion of appropriate adjacent districts and industrial definitions to show that Brownsburg welcomes all warehouses.
- Public Hearings are no longer hosted for Development Plan Reviews during Advisory Plan Commission Meetings. In fact, your department even tried to remove these reviews from the APC responsibilities completely so that hired Town Staff that don't even live here could approve them on their own for extra speediness. Good luck with that goal in the future!
- First, second and third readings are grouped together with the Public Hearing to fast-track developments before those unvisionary citizens slow us down.
- Ex parte must be all Latin to you! During many government meetings for industrial topics that you were presenting, Brownsburg elected Town Council members, appointed committee members and hired town staff all testify in the Public Hearings designed for Town citizens and impacted residents.
- During industrial approvals from 2021-2023, all citizens who participated in Public Hearings signed in before meetings began to indicate whether they are for or against the development project they haven't even heard about yet. Public participation is limited to 20 minutes per stance for a maximum of 3 minutes per impacted citizen. Participation is no longer an option by email or letter. Thank you for sparing us visionaries from their repetitive pleas for help and increased buffering!
- Recorded minutes for all government meetings no longer contain summaries of the content of citizen participation. Only the names. We understand... listening is hard.
- On the very day that you adopted the new 2021 Land Use Map on the Town's Comprehensive Plan, you were already in breach of it with industrial approvals that already existed in land that was coded for regional commercial. You need to hire people who can color maps as fast as you can change them!
- You recently gave a very professional presentation to support raising future water & sewer service rates during times of record inflation. Since your Vision doesn't really spell out how you will use all that 3% tax revenue, why waste it on things that directly benefit citizens? We Visionaries support building a bougie aquatic center to compete with the many other aquatic centers in Hendricks County. That's way more fun and flashy. We hope that you will not outsource it to third parties. The Town government deserves all of the credit for the results of this project.
You have been moving so fast from your decades of experience with economic development into your Town Manager position with no experience that you may have forgotten to protect certain hospitality and tourism assets for the Town. And when you launched the "Discover Brownsburg" website and magazine, you did it again by forgetting to protect that brand identity from others. Don't worry, Debbie! We at VISIT BROWNSBURG LLC and DISCOVER BROWNSBURG LLC got your back!