Read more about local beautification efforts in the June/July 2025 feature story.
With a population just north of 103,000, Carmel, Indiana’s profile is on the rise. Enhancing that is its visibly clean, colorful aesthetic.
“We set the expectation level of how clean we keep the city, not only for constituents but also visitors,” says Jeremy Kashman, Chief Infrastructure Officer for the City of Carmel. “If they see a clean environment, they’re more apt to leave a clean environment.”
The city administration leads by example, setting out trash cans, deploying street sweepers daily, and installing landscaping around Carmel’s 155 constructed roundabouts. A Tree City USA for three decades, officials keep tree canopies in mind when reviewing new developments and commit to preservation efforts by planting more than 500 new trees each year.
Kashman says civic pride plays a big part in bolstering the city’s beautification efforts, citing the flowers that the street department installs on light poles in the urban core area.
“If we took that away today … people would think we took away part of their identity,” he says. “Main Street is home to a lot of public events throughout the summer. These efforts create a lot of community pride in their built environment, and they want more.” One of those events — called Rain on Main — is similar to an Evansville stormwater management program in which artists paint rain barrels that later are auctioned off.
In areas recently annexed by Carmel, Kashman says residents have wanted to preserve their neighborhood’s identity but craved Carmel’s civic pride — and the authority behind it. “Some residents wanted us to annex them because of Carmel’s level of code enforcement,” Kashman says. “If there’s any area not kept up to standards, we work with property owners to get it to those standards.”
To get government officials and the public to buy into and work together on beautification efforts, the message has to be clear.
“At the base level, the biggest thing to do as a city is to decide what it wants to be and to be intentional and deliberate about making those changes,” Kashman says.
