Mayor Thomson stands behind her comments about federal immigration enforcement, chemical clean-up at Hopewell, and the city is looking for public input on parking and branding.
In this week’s installment of Ask The Mayor, Bloomington Mayor Kerry Thomson addresses this issue and more at City Hall. Listen to the full conversation with Indiana Newsdesk anchor Joe Hren by clicking on the play button above, or read some of the questions and answers below. A portion of this segment airs 6:45 and 8:45 a.m. Wednesday on WFIU. Here are some highlights.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Hren: IU graduation just wrapped up, how do local and state officials keep graduates in Indiana and not contribute to the state's brain drain?
Thomson: We know nationally that 62% of college grads want to stay where they graduated from college, and so that means we're not keeping our share here in Bloomington. First of all, I hope that folks that are concerned about this are going online and taking our branding survey. How we tell Bloomington's story.
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How we tell that story is also a lot about what we need to attract the people that we want to really stay here and ultimately, doing that is what's going to close our wage gap, because cluster development all depends on getting the right population here, so employing the people that are already here with better wages and attracting enough new business of the right kind in order to really do some sector development.
Hren: Bloomington parking systems are doing a review of parking around downtown. What are you hoping to get from that survey?
Thomson: I was just in a meeting, and they were noting the importance of hosting a meeting where there's parking, and I had to tell people, you know, both of these locations are right next to city garages, and garages are for parking, and they're underutilized sometimes in Bloomington, at other times they're full. But what we really want to know is, what are we what are our residents and visitors hoping to get out of parking in Bloomington? Why they're not using garages sometimes? What? What they need to be incentivized to use those. And you know, sort of how close do you need to be to your ultimate destination? So that's the parking survey. I also will put a plug in that Bloomington transit is starting a new door to door downtown circulator, really, but it's a car that'll pick just you up, and it's on demand. But if it's not being used on demand, it'll be circulating through the garages and downtown just to pick people up and take them closer to where they're going.
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Hren: Last time we talked about Senate Bill One, there's some relief in property taxes, but now local governments are starting to see the tax code and understanding how hard some cities, especially small towns, will get hit with revenue. Was this a fair budget?
Thomson: No, I don't think it was fair. What this does is direct more money to the state and put the onus on taxes to individuals rather than to the larger businesses. The property owners, homeowners are going to get small tax deduction, but what they'll probably end up doing in many communities is paying a lot more local income tax than what they're used to.
This is really important to me, because we have a clear bimodal distribution of wealth in Bloomington. And, you know, we just talked about trying to increase wages. The goal of that is to really close the wage gap as well. And if we're taxing more, these individuals, especially at the low end, they will eventually come to a point where they can't afford their basic services, and many of them already are. We're getting more calls about just needing basic food and shelter.
The other important thing to know is that our bonding capacity and our bonding ability has been tremendously impacted. Last year in our budget, we did some capital projects with geo bonds, and we did a two year geo bond, just to be conservative. Now, you can only have one live and and it has to have a one year break in between, which means that we will have no ability to fund future capital projects for three more years. So that's that's very serious.
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Hren: I wanted to dig deeper on your statement about federal immigration enforcement a few weeks ago, of course, it states the limited authority the city has, but a recent op-ed in the H-T states that the mayor could do more in protecting rights.
Thomson: Well, I think my statements stand on their own. We are doing what we can and, you know, we have some great organizations in town, and, frankly, great individuals as well, that are doing legal work and doing advocacy work. And you know, the role of our police department is to do civil safety. The ICE agents are federal.
Hren: We just did a story about a chemical contamination cleanup underway at the Hopewell neighborhood site. This was news to me when I heard it was it to you?
Thomson: No, so anytime you're using HUD funding on a property, you have to do an environmental review, and if it comes back with anything suspicious, any past uses that could be contaminants, et cetera, then you have to do soil samples and continue. So this process can take quite a long time.
When I was developing with Habitat, I got very used to this process. We knew there was a filling station there, so it's very clear that this property probably was going to have some issues, and we actually planned a lot of the development around that so people wouldn't be living there even after cleanup. We weren't surprised. It was expected. We're just trying to be transparent with what's going on.
Hren: So it's summertime in Bloomington. I know this is usually a time to the city tries to get a lot of things done. What's in store?
Thomson: So our pothole crews have filled more than 1100 potholes. I think I was part of about 10 of those. It's hot, but there's a lot more to filling a pothole than I ever knew. We'll be working on some roads, again, planned projects. So those are all on our GIS system, on the city's website, and you can look at those in real time to see what's happening in your area.
You can also expect that INDOT will be doing its share of projects as well. So we have been hearing plenty about the new stop sign at 10th and Park Ridge is that the name of that road? I think so, the other side of it's called Park Ridge Smith. That's an INDOT project. People either love it or hate it, but we don't take credit or blame for that.
