In this week’s installment of Ask The Mayor, Bloomington Mayor Kerry Thomson addresses these 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: Let's start with the UDO meeting last night, that's the Unified Development Ordinance. Some of us may remember the UDO under the Hamilton administration, but one thing I remember about all those meetings, Mayor Hamilton, at the time, said it's a three-ring binder. It's meant to be updated. What's your take on it, what are you hoping to see.
Thomson: That three ring binder, if that's what we want to still call it, used to be a 20-page pamphlet, and that wasn't that many years ago. It is now more than 600 pages, and when we talk to builders and developers about why they can't provide more affordable housing, part of the challenge is that the zoning code is so complex that it takes a long time to get through the planning process. So my goal as we're updating the UDO, and this is not an overhaul of the UDO, these are just tweaks.
My goal is, listen to the public, remove the barriers to getting great things built. So we do want great housing, and we want it to look good. We want it to be great to live around. We are the most housing cost burdened city in the state of Indiana, and we have to drive that cost down.
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Hren: Some of the items talked about last night would allow buildings with up to five bedrooms per residents to be developed in residential areas for more affordable housing. Some of the people spoke against the proposal, asking how is the city going to enforce quality guidelines?
Thomson: Compliance is something that we always have to look at whenever any of these UDO changes go through, because the compliance all happens out of HAND, and we need to be able to staff that. So we need to be serious about ensuring that whatever housing is provided is decent housing.
It's already legal to build a five-bedroom house if you wanted to build one for your family, you could, these are single room occupancy homes, and so they come into play so that you can rent the bedrooms to different people who aren't related. And what we need to mitigate for is that these are really targeted at creating affordability and not creating mass housing, where landlords can pack students in there and just charge by the bed instead of just the bedroom now, and the various contributing health and safety issues that happen when you do that.
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Hren: Some of this sounds familiar with the Hopewell neighborhood, where the city rejected bids on housing developments to streamline the process with Flintlock Lab. We don't know much about them. Can you tell us a little bit about this company and how they were chosen?
Thomson: So Flintlock is a team of experts. They have folks who have done development on their team, architects, landscape architects, housing experts. We met the team during our Harvard experience, and they have helped several different municipalities look at their zoning code to try to reduce the friction to housing attainability. And they also have worked with several municipalities. So we fully vetted these. They fit into what we envision for residential building and most notably, they did South Bends' plan book.
Those will be preapproved plans for Hopewell and they also will be looking at just Hopewell south, so just two blocks of Hopewell, and looking at how to really maximize housing attainability with local builders. So entry level housing that is close to services where they want to live and really a community that calls to them and magnetizes them.
Hren: We're reading how this affects communities all over the state, the county as well. So the county council and commissioners are trying to come up with a letter to send to the state legislators, especially since they're trying to build a jail. Is the city thinking about doing something like that?
Thomson: Yeah, we have been very involved in talking to our legislators before SB One came into play, and we're committed to continuing to talk to them and advocate for our ability to really be able to spend the finances that were originally intended for the municipalities and the ability to bond.
Hren: I hear city council presented a plan or a letter to the mayor in terms of what they're looking at for next year's budget. What's in that letter and your response?
Thomson: During last year's budget process, we decided together with council, we really need an ongoing group that's looking at this, especially if we want to move towards a priority-based budget, and we're not going to arrive at a full priority-based budget this year.
Part of that is because of SB One going through that has been a real wrench in our fiscal planning, and it means that we still don't know exactly how much we're going to have to spend this year.
When my administration took over, we inherited a budget with a $16 million deficit, and I've been committed to reducing that deficit. That has become even more difficult in the face of SB One. So last year, even though we were able to implement our salary study and really move forward with some HR things that had to be done, we got from $16 million to $12 million in deficit this year. Our target is to get to $10 million, and the public should understand that's just in the operating budget, and we were able to really do our capital projects with a geo bond. So that was additional $5 million that we had to spend on capital projects.
