INDIANAPOLIS-Four members of the City-County Council are all members of the LGBTQ+ community. They met with around 40 people Tuesday evening to answer questions and talk about their plans for the city.
Ali Brown, Keith Potts, Ethan Evans, and Zach Adamson hope to make Indianapolis a better place for everyone.
"Having a council that's full of LGBTQ people, people of color, women, all these diverse voices," Brown said. "There's a lot of compassion for people who are left off the table."
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Although the meeting was geared towards the LGBTQ+ community, she wants people to know she represents everyone.
"I have 40-ish thousand people who live in my district who rely on me to make sure their roads are taken care of, that they feel safe in their home," Brown said.
Keith Potts, District 2, says he thinks people who previously served as city-county councilors didn't have their unique perspectives. That’s why some of the ordinances and policies the City-County Council put in place specifically benefit certain groups of people.
"Intentional policy decisions created some of the inequities that we see, so it's going to take intentional policy decisions to rectify them," Potts said.
Brown and Potts say meetings like the one on Tuesday give them an opportunity to interact with the people who voted for them. However, during the question and answer portion of the event, many people asked questions that went above what they can do. Those questions were on issues the legislators at the Statehouse control. All of the councilors say they wish legislators would take a hands-off approach when it comes to city issues.
“What we need is a state legislature who not only wants to empower everyone, those who are different than them, but we also need a state legislature who wants to empower our cities to advocate for themselves,” Potts said
