Meet the new Indianapolis City-County Council candidates who can't lose

Ko Lyn Cheang, Indianapolis Star
Updated ·4 min read

Corrections & Clarifications: A previous version of this story misstated the location of Pike Township. It is in the northwest.

Indianapolis' City-County Council will see at least two new councilors come 2024, because the candidates who won their primaries are uncontested in the Nov. 7 general election.

Meanwhile, eight incumbents, two Republicans and six Democrats will also remain in their seats as they, too, are unopposed.

IndyStar sat down with the two candidates not currently on the council— Democrats Ron Gibson and Rev. Dr. Carlos Perkins — to learn more about their priorities for the next four years.

Ron Gibson

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Gibson won the Democratic nomination for District 8 encompassing Fairgrounds and Martindale-Brightwood in May. Gibson will serve in an area part of which was formerly represented by a 20-year veteran of the council, William "Duke" Oliver, who announced in February that he was withdrawing from the race and would retire at the end of this year.

Gibson previously served on the City-County Council for two terms from 2000 to 2007, losing his reelection bid in 2007, the same year former Democratic Mayor Bart Peterson was ousted by former Republican Mayor Greg Ballard.

"I have experience being a council member," he said. "I really wanted to take a new perspective as a neighborhood leader and bring that new approach to the council and be more attuned to the neighborhood needs."

In 2006, he was accused of shoving an off-duty Marion County Sheriff's Deputy. A special prosecutor later dropped charges. Gibson told IndyStar the allegations were unfair, had no truth to them and partially attributed his 2007 electoral loss to the incident.

"That was pretty painful, hard to go through that, but the truth prevailed," Gibson said.

Now, he said he is excited to serve as a City-County councilor once again.

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Gibson has been the president of the Devington Communities Association since 2009. Having built his career in insurance, he works as a program manager for Elevance Health, Anthem Division.

His top priority is improving infrastructure, including sidewalks and side streets, which he said are in bad shape in his district, and revitalizing neighborhoods, he told Indystar. He said he wants to figure out how District 8 will be served by Mayor Hogsett's $1.2 billion five-year infrastructure plan passed in this year's budget.

Ron Gibson won the Democratic nomination for Indianapolis City-County Council District 8 during the May 2, 2023 primary and is uncontested in the November election.
Ron Gibson won the Democratic nomination for Indianapolis City-County Council District 8 during the May 2, 2023 primary and is uncontested in the November election.

"A lot of residents will argue a lot of our side streets have been left behind for so long and when you go into more affluent areas, they don’t have that problem," Gibson said.

Gibson said he also wants to work to reduce crime by addressing the needs of youth.

"With crime, we can't police our way out of it," he said.

Rev. Dr. Carlos Perkins

Perkins won the Democratic nomination for District 6 on the northwest side in Pike Township.

A veteran educator and pastor, Perkins is the associate director of engagement in the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and serves as the senior pastor of Bethel Cathedral AME Church, the oldest black congregation in the city of Indianapolis. He moved to Indianapolis in 2018 when he was appointed to the position.

"I made a commitment at that moment that my appointment was not to the church but rather the community," he told IndyStar. "My assignment required me to lead within the community."

This is the first time he is running for elected office.

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"Our work and our decision to run for the Council this year was really rooted in our community activism and community work," Perkins said.

Upon arriving, he said, he worked with the Pike Township trustee to establish a food pantry. During the pandemic, he said, he worked on vaccine education and offered a vaccine clinic at his church.

The Reverend Dr. Carlos Perkins, Senior Pastor at Bethel Cathedral AME Church, speaks at the Indiana Remembrance Coalition and the Indiana Historical Bureau unveiling an official state marker remembering John Tucker, a Black man beaten to death on July 4th, 1845, at the intersection of Illinois St. and Washington St. in Indianapolis on on Saturday, Sept. 30, 2023. Tucker, a freedman from Kentucky and father of two was attacked after leaving a Fourth of July celebration at Military park while peacefully walking along Washington St., and beaten to death by three white men while a crowed looked on. One attacker served three years while the other two served no time.

After Herman Whitfield III died after being tased by police amid mental health crisis last year, Perkins was a prominent advocate for police accountability and fully funding mental health crisis response systems, something for which he's long lobbied.

He said his priorities when he takes office will be addressing mental health, affordable housing, homelessness, gun violence, and potholes.

The general election is Nov. 7.

Contact IndyStar reporter Ko Lyn Cheang at kcheang@indystar.com or 317-903-7071. Follow her on Twitter: @kolyn_cheang.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indianapolis City-County Council election: Ron Gibson, Carlos Perkins