LAWRENCE, Ind. (WISH) — An Indiana Gulf War veteran on Thursday said a special American Legion challenge shows there is nothing Americans can’t do as a team.

Ron Patterson served in the 82nd Airborne Division during Operation Desert Storm and is now the commander of the Indiana Department of the American Legion. For the past few months, he has been marching toward a total of 250 miles while wearing the infantry backpack he carried in the Army, adding weight each time. He said it’s his contribution to the American Legion’s national USA 250 Challenge.

“The thing I dreaded the most (when I was in the military) was the ruck march,” he said. “There’s a lot of pain when you do a ruck march. It made me think about the pain that our veterans with children in the household, if they’re struggling financially, what kind of pain are they going through? So this ruck, the pain that I feel in my shoulders, kind of reminds me of the service of people before me and the service of the people who are going to come after me.”

Launched last July, the USA 250 Challenge involves activities centered around physical fitness, mental wellness and community service. Donations support the Legion’s Veterans & Children Foundation, which provides one-time financial help to veterans who have children and are facing difficulty meeting basic needs. Patterson said he has already exceeded his personal goal of raising $20,000 for the foundation.

On Thursday afternoon, News 8 accompanied Patterson as he completed the final mile of his ruck march challenge, with an additional 22 pounds of weight added to represent the 22 veterans who die by suicide every day. Patterson’s route took him from the Legion’s Indiana Department headquarters into a neighborhood that was once home to officers’ housing when Fort Benjamin Harrison was still active.

Besides the monetary donations, Patterson said he has recruited new members for the Legion, the American Legion Auxiliary and Sons of the American Legion.

“Some of the great things I learned on the USA 250 Challenge, people are interested in what you’re doing,” he said. “When you’re engaging people like that, they’re genuinely interested in what you do and what the American Legion does.”

As America’s semiquincentennial nears and participants complete challenges, he said he wants Americans to understand just how truly exceptional this country is.

“America is a strong, amazing country. And there’s nothing we can’t do if we work together as a team,” he said. “So I feel that this Legion USA 250 really brought the Legion back together to work as a team to accomplish great goals.”

Patterson said the challenge runs through Independence Day, so you still have time to donate or to complete your own USA 250 Challenge.

Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett’s former top deputy in city government is now working at an engineering firm run by major Hogsett donors that has received contracts worth up to $62 million since the mayor took office.

The top Hogsett official, former chief of staff Dan Parker, signed many of those contracts himself while he led the Department of Public Works from 2017 to 2022.

Parker’s move to American Structurepoint, about a month after leaving his job as Hogsett’s No. 2 at the end of 2025, comes as one of the company’s contracts with the city is facing scrutiny for being too expensive.

An analysis by IndyStar and Mirror Indy found the Indianapolis-based firm’s tens of millions of dollars worth of deals make it one of the largest city contractors over the past decade.

Meanwhile, the company’s political action committee and two of its executives, President Cash Canfield and Senior Executive Vice President Greg Henneke, are major donors to Hogsett. Collectively since 2014, about $368,000 in campaign donations have come from those executives, one of their spouses and a political action committee run by Structurepoint.

Multiple ethics experts said Parker’s move to Structurepoint raises questions about potential conflicts of interest.

Jeff Hauser, founder of the national ethics watchdog group the Revolving Door Project, said it’s “definitely concerning” that Parker began working for a top city contractor and major donors to the mayor shortly after leaving his high-profile role as a public servant.

“There is a concern about how he might have been behaving in anticipation of leaving government service,” Hauser said. He compared it to dating: “If you are planning to ask somebody out in the future, that could impact your behavior before you actually ask them out.”

It’s unclear whether Parker is working on city-related matters for Structurepoint. Neither the company, nor Parker, responded to repeated emails, calls and questions sent by IndyStar/Mirror Indy. Parker said “no comment” twice when approached by a reporter at an Indy Chamber event on June 23 before walking away.

A new IndyStar/Mirror Indy investigation has also raised ethical questions surrounding Parker’s role in how city contracts were awarded. The reporting found Hogsett’s campaign fundraiser arranged for donors’ project wish lists to be hand-delivered to Parker when he led DPW. Within months, some of the firms received contracts included on the wish lists. The deals, approved by the city’s Board of Public Works, were signed by Parker.

If Parker’s working on city contracts at Structurepoint, his public-sector experience could give the company an unfair advantage, said Danielle Caputo, senior legal counsel for ethics at the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center.

Because Parker — a longtime Hogsett ally and former Indiana Democratic Party chairman — understands the inner workings of the Hogsett administration, he could know how to appeal to decision-makers with whom he recently had close professional relationships, Caputo said. In at least one major city, San Francisco, even communication between the city and Parker at this juncture would be forbidden to prevent favoritism.

“You don’t want a contract to be accepted just because the deputy mayor … is best friends or was close work confidants with the person who’s now choosing where the contract goes,” Caputo said. “That’s not how the government works and that’s not what’s in the best interest of the public.”

City lacks some revolving door guardrails

It’s not uncommon for elected officials and past government employees to accept lucrative roles in the private sector, experts noted. But many experts recommend cooling-off periods that prohibit former public officials and employees from quickly cashing in on their experience in private-sector roles with government contractors.

The city’s ethics code doesn’t require employees to wait to take a job with companies they oversaw or awarded contracts to while in their government role, despite Hogsett campaigning on such an idea in 2015 during his first mayoral bid.

The city’s rules do, however, prevent former employees from working on “particular matters” such as public works projects, economic development deals and other transactions in which they were “personally and substantially” involved.

But city attorneys can waive these ethics restrictions for past employees if their involvement is found not to be “adverse” to the city.

Hogsett spokesperson Aliya Wishner said Parker has not received a waiver, but she didn’t answer several questions about the situation, including when Parker informed the mayor he was applying for a job at Structurepoint and whether he was then shielded from decisions involving the firm. She also did not say whether he’d sought a waiver.

“The city does not control where city employees go after they leave the enterprise and cannot prohibit people from working where they want,” Wishner said in a written statement. “Nothing in the ethics ordinance prohibits former employees generally from earning a living in the private sector following their employment with the city-county, with the exception of activities to lobby the city-county for a period of one year.”

State law is more restrictive than the city’s ordinance. It requires a one-year cooling-off period before state employees can work for or lobby a company if they negotiated or held an administrative role over a contract involving that company while the employee worked for the state. That restriction applies to former state employees, officers and special state appointees, who may seek a waiver from the state ethics commission.

Hauser said the goal of such ethics rules isn’t to stop people from making a living in the private sector. It’s about protecting taxpayers.

“There are many construction and engineering jobs in the world that are not connected to government service,” Hauser said. “The question is whether this person should be involved in a firm that is so focused on public contracting.”

It’s not the first time former Hogsett administration workers have quickly gone on to work for city contractors.

IndyStar and Mirror Indy previously reported that Hogsett’s first chief of staff, Thomas Cook, did not seek a waiver after leaving the city in 2020. He went to work for a Hogsett-connected law firm, Bose McKinney & Evans, where he helped the firm’s developer clients secure millions of dollars worth of city incentives.

Past reporting from the news outlets also showed attorneys for Hogsett went on to work for law firms that do business with the city, where they then performed similar work under contract. The city previously said, in those cases, that the attorneys were either granted waivers or that the legal work they did after they left city employment was different enough as to not trigger the ethics ordinance.

‘Astronomical’

Parker’s move to the company comes as one of the city’s contracts with Structurepoint has drawn scrutiny.

The broad contract for stormwater consulting services will pay American Structurepoint up to $14.1 million over nearly four years, with most contractors earning hourly wages in the $100 to $300 range.

The latest amendment to the Structurepoint contract was signed in late 2025 when Parker was Hogsett’s chief of staff, roughly a month before he started working for Structurepoint. It’s unclear what, if any, role he played in its negotiation.

For consulting services, DPW puts out a “request for qualifications” to firms in the industry, according to the agency. Department leaders choose a company based on a variety of factors. Then those contracts must be approved by the Board of Public Works, an entity made up of City-County Council and mayoral appointees, and signed by the DPW director.

The contract’s price tag caught the attention of Susie Cordi, a Board of Public Works member who has previously campaigned for Hogsett.

Cordi called the cost “astronomical” in a November 2025 meeting where she urged DPW leaders to fill vacant positions. She lamented that the city was paying higher hourly rates to private contractors instead of more cost-effective wages to DPW employees.

The city defended the contract. Current DPW Director Todd Wilson, who worked for American Structurepoint from 2007 to 2013, told IndyStar/Mirror Indy that the city lacks staffers to perform all the needed work.

Specialized employees like engineers can earn higher salaries in the private sector. He said DPW is working to boost recruiting and increase city salaries to better compete and rely less on contractors going forward.

“But I don’t see in any world where we would completely eliminate staff augmentation from our program,” Wilson said.

DPW spokesperson Kyle Bloyd said the agency’s extensive contracts with Structurepoint and other companies are crucial to the timely execution of DPW’s five-year infrastructure improvement plan worth about $1 billion.

Still, Cordi called the contracts “money in Structurepoint’s pocket” in an IndyStar/Mirror Indy interview.

“We’re understaffed,” she said, “and now Structurepoint is reaping all these benefits from us not being able to keep our engineers.”

Mirror Indy reporter Peter Blanchard and IndyStar reporter Hayleigh Colombo contributed reporting.

Mirror Indy, a nonprofit newsroom, is funded through grants and donations from individuals, foundations and organizations. Sign up for our free newsletters.

Contact IndyStar Indianapolis City Hall Reporter Jordan Smith at jtsmith@indystar.com. Follow him on X @jordantsmith09.

Emily Hopkins is a senior reporter at Mirror Indy. You can reach them by phone or Signal at 317-790-5268 or email at emily.hopkins@mirrorindy.org. Follow them on most social media @indyemapolis or on Bluesky @emilyhopkins.bsky.social.

Related

Karen Rutledge was walking her dogs along the shore of the White River just before 3 p.m. on June 24 when she saw a man standing in the bed of a pickup stranded in the middle of the river.

She had received word of a potential drowning on the river from a public safety app and went to check it out, she said.

“I saw a guy standing on the truck, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s weird,’” she said. “And then I saw all the fire engines and everything.”

The Indianapolis Fire Department was called to the river when a man swam out to the pickup, prompting an emergency water rescue. Divers went out to the vehicle in a rescue boat, IFD Battalion Chief Candace Ashby said, and brought the man back to shore.

IFD Special Operations Command Capt. Chris Van Roo said the man told Department of Natural Resources officers he swam out to check whether anyone was in the vehicle. He is not believed to be the pickup’s owner and left the scene shortly after being brought safely to shore, both IFD and Rutledge said.

The pickup, a dark-colored Chevrolet, has been sitting in the river near West 16th Street and Waterway Boulevard — just off the bank of Belmont Beach — since Monday evening or Tuesday morning, first responders told IndyStar.

With potential incoming rain sweeping through Indianapolis this week, Ashby said, the DNR may not be able to remove the pickup from the river for several days.

“We just hope that no other [people go] to that truck,” she said.

Low-head dams along river pose dangers to those in the water

The pickup is stuck near the Emrichsville Dam on the White River at Belmont Beach. More than two years ago, the city received a $750,000 federal grant to remove the low-head dam as part of a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service effort to improve fish passage and safe recreational use of the river.

The Department of Public Works did not immediately respond to IndyStar’s inquiry about the status of the project.

Low-head dams can be extremely unsafe to those out on the water. In April 2024, two kayakers – Marcus Robinson, 30, and Solomon Shirley, 22 – drowned after their boats went over the Emrichsville Dam and were found capsized. In 2021, 17-year-old Kevin Rodriguez drowned near the same dam.

“Any low-head dam is dangerous,” Van Roo said, encouraging those on the river to be aware of their surroundings.

Mia Thurow is the breaking news and criminal justice reporting intern for the Indianapolis Star. She can be reached at mthurow@gannett.com. Reporter Ryan Murphy contributed to this article.