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Mayor launches effort to land MLS team
The new year marked the start of Mayor Joe Hogsett’s third term, making him the city’s longest-serving mayor since the late Bill Hudnut, who led from 1976 to 1992.
In April, Hogsett made a surprise announcement that the city would pursue a Major League Soccer team and said he was talking with representatives of a yet-to-be-named ownership group about the possibility.
“Every great achievement in our city’s history has begun where opportunity was met with action,” Hogsett said then. “Today we enter our pursuit of the world’s game.”
Hogsett pledged to build a soccer stadium—if the MLS granted the city a team—that would be funded using a special taxing district the Indiana Legislature created in 2019.
The mayor said at the time that the city was considering two sites: the former Diamond Chain industrial site owned by Ersal Ozdemir, who planned to build an entertainment district and stadium there for his minor league Indy Eleven soccer team, and the property that is home to the Downtown Heliport, which the Indianapolis International Airport Authority plans to decommission.
But it became clear quickly that the city was focused on the heliport site and had stopped negotiating months before with Ozdemir and his Keystone Group on an incentive package for a development at the former Diamond Chain site.
At the mayor’s request, the City-County Council redrew the taxing district—which had been created to benefit the Diamond Chain site—to lay the groundwork for a stadium at the heliport. Now the city is waiting for the still-secret potential owners to come together to make a pitch to MLS.
Hogsett, meanwhile, has been dealing with the fallout over accusations in July that his former chief of staff sexually harassed women while working for the city and the mayor’s campaign. Critics say Hogsett allowed a culture of harassment to develop in his administration.
Hogsett’s administration ordered sexual harassment training for all city employees and launched an anonymous reporting system for employees. Since then, additional employee complaints made to Hogsett and the city’s Human Resource Department have led to seven more internal investigations, including one that resulted in an employee’s termination.•
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