Joe E. Kernan: the comptroller who became governor

1988 – 1997

The road in: Joe Kernan (1946–2020) came to the mayor's office from inside it: he had served as the city's comptroller under Mayor Parent from 1980 to 1984, gone into private business, and in 1987, with Parent retiring under the stadium cloud, won a bitter Democratic primary against county commissioner Richard Jasinski and then a close general election, 53 to 47 over the Republican Carl Baxmeyer — as of the present record the most recent truly competitive mayoral election the city has held. He took office on 3 January 1988. (His earlier life — Notre Dame, the Navy, six years a prisoner of war in Vietnam — belongs to his profile in the People record; what belongs here is the mayor.)

The administration: Kernan's nine years were the city's great age of deal-making government. His signature prize was the College Football Hall of Fame, which he was instrumental in winning for South Bend against 89 other cities; when corporate fundraising produced under $2 million of its cost, the city issued municipal bonds and built it, and the Hall opened downtown in 1995. His first year he refinanced the near-new Coveleski Stadium through the newly created South Bend Redevelopment Authority. He championed the Blackthorn development — golf course and office park on the northwest side — arguing in 1995 that it had added 3,000 jobs and $25 million in investment. He took credit, in the phrase of the time, for creating or retaining 4,000 manufacturing jobs, worked plant-by-plant to hold employers such as South Bend Stamping in the city, and testified before Congress in 1993 on the South Shore Line's move to the airport, opened in 1992, which he credited with a 73 percent jump in ridership. He began the "Mayor's Night Out" practice of taking the office into the neighborhoods, carried on by his successor. The Associated Press's summary, written as he left, was that he had "took a city that had lost thousands of factory jobs and helped diversify its economy." The long accounts also record the shortfalls plainly: the Hall of Fame never met its attendance projections, was criticized as a failure by the late nineties, and left for Atlanta in the 2010s — announced in 2009, closed at the end of 2012; Blackthorn's golf course fell short of its promise too, though Kernan defended the development to the end of his life.

The annexation plan: Kernan's boldest governmental act is told in the landmark series below: his 1989 Mayor's Housing Forum set in motion the annexation policy that the 1992 study he commissioned shaped into a plan to double the city's land — most of Clay Township, Knollwood, the unincorporated Notre Dame ground — a plan the suburbs and then the state legislature defeated.

Three elections and out: Kernan was re-elected in 1991 with 76.5 percent and in 1995 with 82 percent, a record vote share for the office — the first mayor since 1905 to win a third term, and at nine years the longest-serving mayor the city had had. In 1996 Frank O'Bannon chose him as his running mate; elected lieutenant governor that November, Kernan resigned the mayoralty on 3 January 1997. By law his successor was chosen by the city's 120 Democratic precinct committeemen and committeewomen, within thirty days; Kernan guided the interviewing, endorsed his former councilman Steve Luecke, and the vote was unanimous. Kernan served as lieutenant governor from 1997 to 2003 and then, on Governor O'Bannon's death in office, as the 48th Governor of Indiana from September 2003 to January 2005 — the only South Bend mayor ever to hold the state's highest office. He died on 29 July 2020, aged 74.

Sources:

1. The Mayoralty of Joe Kernan record (built from the South Bend Tribune, the Observer, the Howey Political Report and the Associated Press) — the 1987 primary and general elections, the comptroller years 1980–84, the Hall of Fame competition and bonds, the 1988 stadium refinancing, Blackthorn and the jobs claims, the 1992 South Shore station testimony, the re-elections of 1991 and 1995, and the succession.
2. Nancy Armour, Associated Press (10 November 1996) — the succession process: the 120 precinct committeemen, the thirty-day rule, Kernan's guidance and endorsement of Luecke.
3. Indiana Public Media (29 July 2020) — Kernan's death at 74; three terms as mayor, lieutenant governor 1997–2003, governor on O'Bannon's death.
4. Associated Press (23 September 2009) — the Hall of Fame's move to Atlanta announced; Al Lesar, South Bend Tribune (30 December 2012) — the Hall's South Bend end.