When I first moved to Fishers in May of 1991, this was a town of around 9,000 people.

If you had a craving for a Dairy Queen, you drove to Noblesville. If you wanted to browse the local library, you drove up the road — to Noblesville. We were in the middle of moving into the new Town Hall on 116th Street, and Hamilton Southeastern High School sat almost alone, with very little built up around it.

Oh, how things have changed.

The old Town Hall is gone. In its place stands a new City Hall and Arts Center complex. The development around Hamilton Southeastern High School is now massive, and somewhere along the way we added a second school, Fishers High School. The town I moved into is, since January 1, 2015, a city — one of the fastest-growing in Indiana. The 7,000-some residents counted in the 1990 census have multiplied many times over.

All of that was crossing my mind last Wednesday as I stood at a press conference announcing what’s coming next: a new corporate headquarters relocating to our city, a first-class fieldhouse that will include a home for the Indy Ignite professional volleyball team, and new residential development — all of it rising on what was a vacant field when my wife Jane and I first arrived. JD Finish Line is moving its North American headquarters here, and the Ignite, Indiana’s only women’s pro volleyball team, will practice and run their operation out of the new Fishers Fieldhouse, part of a major expansion of the Fishers District.

A vacant field. That’s what it was.

When you talk with the people who go back a long way in Fishers — and I mean the 1960s, at least — they’ll tell you the story started with two things: the arrival of I-69 and an upgraded sewer line. Those two pieces of infrastructure opened the door, and the development simply took off from there and never really stopped.

I came to this work by a roundabout path. When I retired in late 2011 from a 28-year career as a federal civil servant, I drew on my pre-government life as a journalist and did the simplest thing I could think of: I showed up at local meetings and wrote down what I saw and heard. I figured a few hundred people might care about local government. I was wrong.

In 2025, this website drew more than 100,000 unique visitors. I have already passed that number in 2026, and we are not yet halfway through the year. My podcasts logged more than 22,000 plays last year.

The bottom line is that there is far more appetite for local news than I ever imagined. People who live in Fishers want to know what’s happening in Fishers. I am not the only local news source in town, and I’m humbled, again and again, by how many people choose to spend their time on what I produce.

Until recently, the website and the podcasts were strictly a volunteer endeavor. In the past few months I’ve chosen to accept advertising. I use a national system to place ads on the site, and Citizens State Bank has been a great partner in sponsoring the podcasts. I make very little money after expenses. The sponsorships essentially cover the cost of producing all of this — costs that, until now, came out of my own pocket.

Some people have urged me to switch to a paid model: subscriptions, or a Substack account. I’ve considered it, and decided against it. My main goal is to offer this content free of charge, and that hasn’t changed.

I’ll turn 75 in a few months. My health is reasonably good, so as long as I’m able, I plan to keep going.

The main reason I plan to continue? You. All of you.

I’ve tried to quit this local news gig twice over the past 15 years. Both times, it was you — the readers of this website, the people listening to and watching the podcasts — who urged me to stay. So I stayed.

When Alison Gatz, publisher of Fishers Magazine, asked me to write a piece for new residents in her annual relocation guide, I wrote about the quality of this community. I ended it with a thought I’ll repeat here: Jane and I have chosen to stay in Fishers for 35 years largely because the people who live here are, by and large, good people.

That’s why LarryInFishers continues. The good people of Fishers have asked me to stay.

Here I am.