State Rep. Victoria Garcia Wilburn, who represents a portion of Fishers in the Indiana House, is in Washington, D.C., this week as part of a bipartisan group of young state lawmakers attending Future Summit 2026.

Garcia Wilburn, a Democrat and co-chair of the Indiana Future Caucus, is joined by fellow co-chair Rep. Beau Baird, a Republican, and Rep. Alex Burton, a Democrat. The Indiana lawmakers are among nearly 100 Gen Z and millennial state legislators from 34 states taking part in the annual gathering hosted by Future Caucus.

The summit runs July 8-11 and is being held as the nation marks its 250th anniversary. This year’s theme is “Next 250 — The Courage to Build,” with a focus on strengthening democracy, improving governing institutions and encouraging bipartisan approaches to public policy.

Garcia Wilburn and Baird are scheduled to serve as featured speakers during the four-day event.

According to Future Caucus, the summit is designed to bring together younger elected officials from across the political spectrum to discuss ways to work across party lines and better serve constituents.

Program sessions include hands-on labs with TikTok and OpenAI, where lawmakers are expected to discuss the use of artificial intelligence and social media for constituent outreach, policy research and the challenges of operating with limited legislative staff.

Another session, titled “The Exit Interview,” will examine why some young Americans are reconsidering public service and what might encourage them to remain involved in government.

The summit will also feature a discussion on building a safer internet for children, including state-level policy options related to online safety, algorithms and the impact of congressional inaction on families.

Future Caucus describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works with young elected officials in Congress and state legislatures to bridge partisan divides and promote collaborative governance.

Volunteers for the Advance HSE Political Action Committee gathered at Hub & Spoke in Fishers Tuesday night to begin organizing the campaign to pass Hamilton Southeastern Schools’ operating referendum on the November 3 general election ballot.

HSE is far from alone. Nearly a third of Indiana’s roughly 290 school districts are asking voters to weigh in on a referendum this fall — a wave driven by Senate Enrolled Act 1, the sweeping 2025 property-tax law. Beyond increasing homestead deductions that shrink the assessed value schools can tax, the law also limited school referendum questions to the November ballot in even-numbered years, giving districts just one shot every two years and pushing many of them onto this single election.

Advance Chair Laura Cole told the group the district has already cut roughly $7 million from its budget and will still need a new referendum to close the gap.

HSE Superintendent Dr. Matt Kegley explained that action by the Indiana General Assembly changed the rules underneath the district. By increasing property-tax deductions, the state reduced the net assessed value used to calculate what schools collect — meaning that even keeping the referendum rate voters recently approved would now generate less money than before. That shortfall is what’s driving the district to seek a new, replacement rate. The measure on the November ballot would replace the operating referendum HSE voters passed in 2023, with revenue earmarked for teacher recruitment and retention, school safety, student behavioral health, and classroom programs.

Guiding the effort is outside consultant Robin Winston, who recently advised the successful Avon Community School Corporation campaign that passed with roughly 65% of the vote. Winston laid out the timeline for volunteers: the election is 118 days away, but early voting begins in just 88 days — the real deadline the campaign has to plan around.

The math, Winston said, is straightforward. There are about 83,000 registered voters inside the HSE district. If turnout reaches 30%, that’s 25,000 to 26,000 votes cast — and the campaign’s job is to make sure enough of them are “yes.”

Winston pointed to the ground game that carried Avon. There, volunteers knocked on some 13,000 doors. When no one answered, the volunteer simply held a campaign sign up to the home’s security camera — turning a missed conversation into one more impression.

With the clock already running, Cole closed the kickoff by recruiting volunteers to chair the campaign’s key committees, putting the first pieces of the organization in place as Advance HSE turns toward the 88 days until ballots start being cast.

Two Hamilton County school districts are moving in opposite directions, and a new IndyStar opinion piece, written by Sadia Khatri, argues the main reason is real estate — specifically, whether existing homes are turning over to young families.

The Hamilton Southeastern story. HSE has lost more than 1,500 students since 2020. That decline has real consequences: the district recently announced it will eliminate nearly 60 positions, including contracts for 18 teachers. Because Indiana funding follows the student, fewer students means less money.

Superintendent Matt Kegley points to several causes — families having fewer children and having them later, and some students transferring out for religious schools or smaller settings. But the trend he emphasizes most is housing. Fishers grew fastest in the mid-2000s, and many of those residents have since become empty-nesters who stayed put. Because they aren’t selling to younger families with school-age kids, the pipeline of new elementary students has thinned. The losses are steepest in the early grades.

How HSE is responding. Rather than wait for the housing market to shift, HSE launched an open-enrollment (non-resident transfer) program. Families outside the district can enroll their children but must provide their own transportation. Participation grew from 99 students last year to about 120 approved for 2026-27. Many of those transfers are in the lower grades, which Kegley called encouraging — families who join early are more likely to stay. The district has room for more and hopes awareness across Central Indiana keeps growing.

Why Westfield is booming. To the west, Westfield Washington Schools has grown 43% over the past decade. Its high school has gone from about 650 students in the 1990s to more than 3,000 today, and the district is restructuring — phasing out its intermediate school by moving fifth grade into elementary and sixth grade into middle school. Superintendent John Atha attributes the growth to demographics and, above all, new housing: unlike “built-out” Fishers and Carmel, Westfield still has homes ready for families to move into.

The housing throughline. Over the past decade Westfield issued more residential building permits than Carmel and Fishers combined, according to the Indiana Association of Realtors, and it has the most listings priced at or below $350,000 — the inventory that attracts young families. Fishers isn’t alone: Carmel Clay Schools has also lost more than 750 students since 2020, and Carmel is likewise largely built out.

The long view. Hamilton County is projected to add roughly 180,000 residents by 2050. Westfield is the current top draw for families with school-age children, but early signs of the same enrollment slowdown are already appearing in its numbers. As columnist Khatri  puts it, no suburb stays young forever.

You can read Sadia Khatri’s opinion piece at this link, but you will likely need an IndyStar online subscription to access the article.

When the Indianapolis City-County Council voted 14-10 Monday night to raise vehicle registration taxes across Marion County, it stepped into a fight that Fishers settled almost ten years ago — with a lot less drama.

The Indianapolis measure, Proposal 192, would impose a $240 wheel tax on buses, RVs, semitrailers, tractors, trailers and trucks, and a $100 excise surtax on passenger cars, trucks, motorcycles and other vehicles under 11,000 pounds. Today most Marion County drivers pay somewhere between $10 and $50 a year. The plan runs from 2027 through 2031 and is projected to raise about $855 million, money the council says it needs to unlock a $50 million annual state “match” for road and infrastructure work beginning in 2027.

Mayor Joe Hogsett opposes it and has 10 days to decide whether to veto. Overriding him would take 17 of the council’s 25 votes. The council’s Republican caucus, writing in the IndyStar days before the vote, said it supports more road money but questioned “the timing and hastiness” of what it called an $80 million tax increase. The politics are loud, the stakes are high, and the outcome is still uncertain.

Fishers has been down a version of this road already — just far more quietly.

Fishers acted first, in 2016

On the night of September 19, 2016, the Fishers City Council voted 7-0 to impose a $25-per-vehicle wheel tax to help pay for road maintenance. (Council members John Weingardt and Selina Stoller were absent.) Mayor Scott Fadness had proposed it earlier that month, and the tax took effect in 2018. It applies to both personal and commercial vehicles and was estimated to bring in roughly $2.16 million a year.

Fadness framed it at the time as a “unique opportunity” rather than a burden. His case was straightforward math: a typical road needs to be repaved every 15 to 20 years, and Fishers wasn’t keeping pace. In 2013, the city spent about $1 million on paving when it could have used $2.7 million. In 2016, it budgeted $1.95 million but needed $3.8 million. The wheel tax was meant to help close that gap, augmenting — not replacing — money the city already received from state and local sources. Fadness told the council that even if state road funding grew in the future, he believed the tax would still be needed.

Even reluctant council members came around. “I’m not usually in favor of any kind of tax increase, but this is what I consider to be vital to the safety of our community,” council member Todd Zimmerman said that night.

It’s worth remembering how new that authority was. For years, only Indiana counties could levy a wheel tax, and Hamilton County never adopted one. A 2016 state road-funding law opened the door for cities with populations over 10,000 to impose their own. Fishers was among the earliest to walk through it, alongside Valparaiso, Portage, Crown Point, Munster and LaPorte. The tax generated headlines locally mostly because the council, on the same evening, also gave itself a 58 percent pay raise — from $12,000 to $19,000 a year, its first increase since the early 1990s.

Why the wheel tax matters more now than in 2016

What looked in 2016 like a forward-leaning local choice has since become something closer to a statewide requirement — and that’s the thread connecting Fishers then to Indianapolis now.

In 2025, the General Assembly passed House Enrolled Act 1461, a sweeping transportation-funding law. Its most consequential provision for local governments ties eligibility for the state’s popular Community Crossings matching-grant program to whether a community has adopted both a wheel tax and a vehicle excise surtax. In plain terms: no local wheel tax, no access to one of the most dependable pots of road money the state offers.

The pressure didn’t stop there. SEA 1-2025, the property-tax overhaul passed the same session, capped key local revenue sources, forcing cities and counties to look harder for their own money. State leaders made the message explicit. House Speaker Todd Huston, a Republican from Fishers, warned local officials in December 2024 that they needed to help themselves before asking the Statehouse for more, saying local leaders “have to take some tough votes, too.” With an estimated $2.4 billion road-funding shortfall statewide, lawmakers argued they’d given communities the tools to raise revenue locally.

The result has been a wave of reluctant votes across Indiana over the past year. As of late 2025, 56 counties and 15 municipalities had wheel taxes on the books, with more cities and towns — from Plymouth to Evansville to Goshen — grudgingly adopting them to stay eligible for state dollars. Many councils made their frustration clear, pointing fingers at the Statehouse even as they voted yes.

Indianapolis is the biggest domino. The same funding framework that is pushing small towns to act is what stands to send Marion County a $50 million annual state match — if it raises the local revenue to qualify. That’s the machinery behind Proposal 192, and the reason the vote carried such weight Monday night.

The Fishers contrast

Seen against that backdrop, Fishers’ 2016 decision looks less like an outlier and more like a head start. The city adopted a modest, flat $25 wheel tax on its own terms, years before the state effectively linked such taxes to grant eligibility — and did it with a unanimous, low-drama council vote rather than a veto standoff.

That timing has practical consequences. Because Fishers already levies a wheel tax, it is positioned to meet the HEA 1461 eligibility test that many Indiana communities scrambled to satisfy in 2025. Indianapolis, by contrast, is only now confronting that choice, and it’s doing so with far larger dollar figures, a divided council and a mayor threatening a veto.

For Fishers residents, the wheel tax has been a quiet fixture for years — $25 a vehicle, folded into registration, funding the repaving schedule Fadness argued the city couldn’t otherwise afford. It’s the kind of decision that draws attention only when a neighbor like Indianapolis wrestles with the same question and finds it a good deal harder to answer.

Whether Indianapolis follows through now rests with Mayor Hogsett’s veto pen — and, quite possibly, with whether the council can muster 17 votes to override him.

Fishers-area drivers heading to or from the Indianapolis area overnight this week should be aware of planned lane and ramp restrictions on I-465 and I-69 in northeast Indianapolis.

The Indiana Department of Transportation says crews are scheduled to install pavement markings and complete bridge work on I-465.

From Monday, July 6, through Friday, July 10, eastbound I-465 will be reduced to one lane overnight from Keystone Avenue to Binford Boulevard. Those lane closures are scheduled from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. each night.

Additional restrictions are scheduled Tuesday, July 7, beginning at 9 p.m. and lasting until 6 a.m. Wednesday.

During that period, drivers will not have access to northbound I-69 from northbound Binford Boulevard at 75th Street. The ramp from southbound I-69 to southbound Binford Boulevard will also be closed. In addition, one lane will be closed on the ramp from southbound I-69 to southbound I-465.

The work is just south of Fishers but could affect residents who use I-69, Binford Boulevard or I-465 for trips to and from downtown Indianapolis, especially late at night or early in the morning.

INDOT says the schedule could change if weather or other unforeseen circumstances interfere with the work.

The Fishers Health Department is reporting unsatisfactory E. coli test results at three local water locations following recent testing.

The locations are:

White River at the 116th Street Bridge
Fall Creek at Geist Park
Fall Creek at Canal Place

Health officials say elevated E. coli levels often occur after periods of heavy rainfall. Rain can wash sediment, agricultural runoff, urban runoff, wildlife waste, and other contaminants into creeks, rivers, ponds, and other open-water areas.

The Fishers Health Department and its water quality programs test 40 creek and open-water locations throughout the city. Nine area test results are published monthly during the spring, summer, and fall.

E. coli is a naturally occurring bacteria found in warm-blooded animals and is commonly used as an indicator of possible contamination from fecal matter. While E. coli itself does not always cause illness, its presence can signal that other harmful bacteria or viruses may be in the water.

Health officials say waterborne illnesses can include dysentery, Hepatitis A, and bacterial or viral gastroenteritis. Monitoring for E. coli is considered an important public health measure, particularly in areas where people may come into contact with creeks, rivers, or other open water.

The department also tracks water temperature and dissolved oxygen levels. Warmer water can allow bacteria to grow more quickly, especially when combined with sediment and runoff after rain events. Dissolved oxygen is important for fish and other aquatic life, with lower levels potentially harming organisms that live in or near the sediment.

Fishers officials note that the city’s watershed is affected by both urban and agricultural runoff.

Two games remain in the Fishers Freight’s season, spread across the schedule’s final three weeks, and the math is simple to state and hard to pull off: win, and keep winning.

At 7-7, the Freight sit fifth in a seven-team Eastern Conference where the top four advance. Green Bay (12-2) and Jacksonville (9-4) have already clinched. That leaves two playoff spots and four teams still chasing them — Tulsa (8-5), Orlando (8-6), Fishers (7-7) and long-shot Quad City (5-8).

Here’s the good news for Freight fans: Fishers control their own fate. They play at Quad City on July 11, sit out a bye during Week 19, then host Orlando on July 26 in what amounts to a play-in game. Beat both, and the Freight finish 9-7. Beat Orlando head-to-head, and the Pirates can climb no higher than a tie with them.

So the obvious question: does winning out guarantee a playoff berth? Almost — but not quite.

At 9-7, the only team that can finish with a better record is Tulsa, which has three games left (Jacksonville, then Quad City twice). Orlando, having just lost to Fishers in that scenario, could only tie the Freight at 9-7. Quad City, if it loses to Fishers on July 11, tops out at 8-8 and falls away. In the large majority of outcomes, 9-7 is comfortably good enough for third or fourth.

The lone escape hatch: a tiebreaker logjam. If Orlando beats San Antonio on July 11 to reach 9-7, and Tulsa wins at least two of its final three to pass the Freight, Fishers could be squeezed into a tiebreaker for the final seed despite winning out. It’s a narrow path — and one Fishers can’t fully control — but it’s why “win and you’re in” comes with an asterisk.

Everything else is worse. Split the two games and the Freight land at 8-8, needing significant help and likely on the outside. Lose to Quad City on July 11 and even a season-ending win over Orlando gets them only to 8-8 — probably not enough. Lose both and they’re done.

The cleanest path is also the most demanding: two wins. Step one is the trap game at Quad City, a team Fishers already beat 45-27 in the March opener. Step two is the home finale against the Pirates, who edged the Freight 60-57 back in May and will arrive with a playoff spot of their own on the line.

Freight fans should also scoreboard-watch Tulsa. Every Oilers loss — starting with their July 11 home date against Jacksonville — widens Fishers’ margin for error.

Two games. One realistic route. The Freight don’t need a miracle, a calculator or a lucky bounce elsewhere in the conference. They need to take care of business twice, starting in Moline. Win both, and they’ll almost certainly be playing in August for the first time in franchise history.

Recently, tens of thousands of us crowded downtown Fishers for our pre-Fourth of July event — the parade down the Nickel Plate District, the drone show (delayed by weather to July 31), the fireworks that closed out Spark Fishers and, this year, the nation’s Semiquincentennial. For one summer day, the city looked like the answer to a worry that has been building across the country for two decades: that Americans have stopped gathering.

The worry is not imaginary. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its 2025 American Time Use Survey last month, and the trend line is hard to miss. The average American now spends about 35 minutes a day socializing and communicating in person, down from 41 minutes in 2015 and roughly 45 minutes in 2003. On any given day in 2025, only 30 percent of us did any in-person socializing at all — down from 38 percent a decade earlier.

Young people have pulled back the furthest. Fifteen-to-24-year-olds who once spent close to an hour a day hanging out with others now spend a little over half that. Writer Derek Thompson has called it “the anti-social century,” and the health data explains why anyone in public life is paying attention. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory declared loneliness a public-health epidemic, estimating that about half of American adults report feeling lonely and that chronic isolation raises the risk of early death by roughly 29 percent — comparable, the report noted, to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Gallup found about one in five adults feeling lonely on a given day, and AARP reported last year that four in ten adults 45 and older now describe themselves as lonely, up from about a third in 2010.

Some causes are structural, not personal. A 2025 University of Colorado Boulder study documented the steady loss of “third places” — the libraries, coffee shops, museums and houses of worship where neighbors used to run into one another. Bigger homes, bigger TVs, food-delivery apps and phones that hold a whole social world have made staying in easier than ever. Teens now average close to five hours a day on social apps, Gallup reports.

But the full picture is more complicated than a straight line down — and that is where a week like last week matters. Recent time-use data showed Americans watching less television than at any point in a decade and, notably, spending less time alone than during the pandemic years. Adults have clawed back some of the in-person time they lost after 2020, even if teenagers have not. And we are still willing to show up for things we care about: Live Nation reported about 159 million people attended its events in 2025, up 5 percent, and a Deloitte survey found 61 percent of Americans had gone to a live event in the previous six months.

Fishers looks a lot like that second story. The Saturday Farmers Market, now in its 2026 season at the Nickel Plate Amphitheater, draws more than 80 vendors and ranks sixth in the state. Spark Fishers fills days each June. The Fourth of July still empties living rooms and fills streets.

The national data is a real warning: connection is not automatic anymore, and for our kids especially, it is slipping. But warnings are not verdicts. The 35-minute average describes ordinary days — and last week reminded us we still know how to make extraordinary ones. The question for our 251st year is whether Fishers can carry a little of the Spark Fishers and Fourth-of-July habits into the quiet Tuesdays in between.

On a day when Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc stole the headlines with an emotional British Grand Prix win, the Fishers Cadillac Formula 1 team quietly delivered one of its more encouraging afternoons of a demanding rookie season, bringing both cars home and gaining track position at one of the sport’s most storied venues.

Sergio Perez crossed the line 15th and Valtteri Bottas 17th in a race that finished behind the safety car after a dramatic late sequence of events. It was not the points-scoring breakthrough the team is chasing, but for an outfit that spent the winter openly warning it would run at the back of the grid in year one, a clean race with forward progress counts as a step in the right direction.

Perez, the six-time grand prix winner, made the most of the afternoon. He started 20th and but picked his way up to 15th over the course of the race, benefiting from a chaotic finish but also from the steady, mistake-free running that has become Cadillac’s calling card in its debut campaign. Bottas, who out-qualified his teammate in 18th on Saturday, brought the sister car home 17th, keeping the team’s strong reliability record intact.

The result came on a weekend that showcased both how far Cadillac has come and how far it still has to go. The team, which is constructing its permanent headquarters in Fishers, entered Formula 1 this season as the grid’s 11th team, pairing veteran drivers Perez and Bottas with customer Ferrari power. Team leadership, including racing boss Graeme Lowdon, tempered expectations from the outset, telling stakeholders that points would be a bonus rather than a target in 2026 as the organization builds toward the future.

That candor has been borne out by results. Cadillac has yet to score a championship point through the opening stretch of the season, and Silverstone extended that wait. The closest the team has come was in Monaco, where Perez ran inside the top 10 on the road before a penalty erased a hard-won point. Still, the operation has impressed with its dependability — Perez has reached the checkered flag in nearly every race he has started, a rarity for a brand-new team facing the steep learning curve of top-flight motorsport.

Sunday’s race itself was a spectacle. Leclerc claimed his first win in more than a year after championship leader Kimi Antonelli suffered a mechanical failure while closing in on the lead, and a late crash for Max Verstappen brought out the safety car that ultimately decided the finish. Mercedes’ George Russell took second and Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton third in front of a roaring home crowd. Amid the drama, Cadillac’s two cars ran their own race near the tail of the field, gaining ground and gathering data.

For fans in Fishers watching a hometown-connected team compete on the world stage, the takeaway is one of patience and gradual momentum. The points haven’t come yet, and the team has been honest that they may be slow to arrive. But finishing races, climbing the order, and learning with every lap is exactly the foundation Cadillac said it would build in 2026 — and at Silverstone, that foundation looked a little more solid than it did a few months ago.

FYI, the fireworks over Geist could not be safely done Saturday night, so the display is now set for Sunday, July 5, 10pm