The newest Greenwood City Council member wants to clean up his hometown and redevelop the east side, making Greenwood a safer community for residents and more attractive for businesses.
Andrew Foster, a deputy prosecutor and long-time Greenwood resident, was sworn in as the newest member of the council on Tuesday night during the Johnson County Republican Party’s caucus to fill the seat of former council member Brent Corey, who resigned last month.
“I’ve decided to stay here and not move away because this is where I grew up and I want to be home,” Foster told voters.
“We are the city of pride and progress. As my dad would say, upward and onward. We cannot be stagnant. We have to be moving forward. To do that, the city council and the mayor need every tool at their disposal in order to attract new businesses, new event venues and new activities in the city.”
Nine residents applied for the vacant seat, the second in a matter of weeks: Linda Meier, an attorney; Larry Atkinson, a retired teacher; Don Russell, a pharmacy manager; Britton Shoellhorn, a veteran and volunteer minister; Lenore Terek, who works in advertising and marketing; John Lindstrom, a regional sales manager; Ron Deer, a former council member for 24 years; Paul Reed, a former Johnson County council member; and Foster.
Former police chief Bob Dine won former council member Chuck Landon’s seat in another caucus earlier this month.
Thirty-seven precinct committee members who were tasked with selecting the next city council member cast just two rounds of votes. Foster was selected by a simple majority of 20 votes. Meier received 11 votes in the second round, and eight votes in the first round. Four of the candidates received no votes.
Fifty-one people were eligible to vote during the caucus, county Republican Party chairwoman Beth Boyce said. Precinct committee members cast secret ballots.
Foster ran in the last caucus, too, and narrowly lost to Dine after five rounds of votes.
Foster began his legal career at the Greenwood City Court working parking tickets and traffic violations, he said. Last year, he won a local murder trial as a deputy prosecutor with the Johnson County Circuit Court. His father was a local prosecutor and judge too, so keeping the community safe is in his blood, he said.
For the past few years, Foster has been the on-call prosecutor. He knows firsthand what is happening on the city’s streets, he said. He hopes to encourage some changes in areas he says feed criminal activity, such as several motels near the Main Street exit of Interstate 65.
“There is no bigger hive of scum and villainy than those places in this town,” Foster said. “I have a lot of friends on the police department, and I’ve been there on search warrants. Those are nuisance places. They attract people with drug problems and criminal problems, and that spreads out into our community.”
He wants to draft an ordinance that declares places with a high volume of police runs “nuisance areas.”
“If you’re deemed a nuisance, you can fix the problems and get it straight; be a productive business and productive member of society. If not, your land gets condemned. That area is prime for development. There are already roads out there; there are already utilities out there. So we’ll bulldoze it and build a profitable business,” he said.
He also wants to bring in more businesses to the city, but not just warehouses that offer low- and middle-wage jobs.
“I think it’s great that we’ve got Amazon (possibly) coming in. That’s good jobs with good benefits. But I don’t want all of the east side to just be industrial areas and trucking stuff. I want to see us bring in other types of high-end technology jobs,” he said.
“If you’ve got 1,200 people working there, they’re going to be eating down here and shopping down here while they’re at work, and that brings money into the community and tax base.”
Foster graduated from Greenwood Community High School before attending Franklin College, then law school in Indianapolis.
He will serve on the council until the term expires at the end of 2019.
