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: Areas 1A and 1B litigation appeals will not be taken up by the state Supreme Court. Those are those large southwest portions that are outside city limits. Obviously, not the decision you wanted. So what's next?
Thomson: What we know is that our work is to make sure that we have a thriving city, and that is tough to do in a city that doesn't have any elasticity in its boundaries, but we have gotten to work and will be announcing a strategic sites development plan for economic development sites that are outside of city limits, that may need some city services.
We believe it will have a rubric that will demand higher wage jobs, etc. and so that will take care of some of the business attraction pieces that we need to make sure that we still are able to do.
And then, my administration has been very housing forward. And so we'll continue to push on housing.
Hren: When we talk to some of the people in those areas, there's just some hard feelings about the way things unfolded. How do you move forward?
Thomson: We had some open meetings while annexation was still going on. While it was well attended, I think people really didn't want to speak openly at that point. We, of course, inherited an annexation case from the previous administration. I think it wasn't done well, and it was too large of a grab and not very inclusive of the people who were living in those areas.
I have continued to say and continue to extend the olive branch that I am open and ready to listen to people's concerns. We have several landowners that are very disappointed that they're not able to be annexed into the city, and if they meet criteria for voluntary or super voluntary annexation, we are working to expedite those.
Hren: We received a letter from city council member Isabel Piedmont-Smith that was sent to you regarding Flock safety. It's a company that operates license plate reading cameras, and the concern is not trusting the company in safe camera use. We did talk to the police chief in a previous story; he says it's been used to solve crimes. What's your take?
Thomson: Both things are true. We have used it to solve some pretty critical crimes here in the city and we also have the most locked down version of a contract.
That being said, there's data, and the data is in the cloud, and so we are thoroughly investigating our relationship with flock and working to make a determination that both addresses my and others safety concerns about civil liberties and the sharing of information, intentional and unintentional, and our ability to really tell the public that we're keeping you as safe as possible. And so it's a careful balance, and we're still in the middle of that investigation.
Hren: The Capital Improvement Board is having to start over to find an upscale hotelier for the convention center expansion. It's under the impression the areas around the center were owned by the county or the city and were fair game donation to use. But the city is asking for negotiations and pricing.
Thomson: Well, we actually haven't asked for negotiations, but we have two different public entities that own those parcels of land. There're three parcels of parcels of land, some owned by the redevelopment commission and another owned by the Board of Public Works.
It's not a simple administrative decision to do a quit claim deed, or something simple like that, to deed it over to the CIB. I think the community knows, and it is certainly my understanding that those parcels have always been intended to be part of the convention center project. These are the ones south of the convention center.
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Transferring them requires a decision both from the Board of Public Works and the redevelopment commission, and so that's where we are right now, and we're working on getting them in front of those boards.
I think it's always been my understanding that those would be transferred without cost, that they're part of the convention center project.
Hren: The Hopewell Neighborhood is on the city council agenda for tomorrow night. Is this process is starting to pick up some speed?
Thomson: Anybody who's lived here for the past six years knows that we've been talking about Hopewell for that long. And so finally, we are moving towards actually getting housing in Hopewell. We have building season coming up, and we have done our due diligence.
Every week we delay housing is more cost to housing. And so when we say we're serious about getting housing built, it means we have to move it through the process.
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Hren: I notice a lot of single occupancy homes, which I don't see much.
The American household is now trending predominantly to be either one or two people. So 76% of the households in America are either one or two people. However, our home sizes are still averaging three or four, which is part of the problem for why people cannot find housing that they can get into for their income level.
Hren: What happens next?
Thomson: We'll have a plat process, and we simultaneously will be doing a developer boot camp, so training builders. We're really targeting local builders to be able to build here, and so we'll train them in this model. We will finalize house plans.
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It's important to understand the Unified Development Ordinance as a land use document. It doesn't approve the final house plans. We'll be approving those final house plans. Ultimately, the goal is to get those into a pattern book that is authorized for fast track permitting throughout the city, and then we will begin building homes in Hopewell by the end of the summer.
Hren: What's going to happen with Kirkwood Avenue? There was a presentation at a city council meeting that the city did not want to close the street for the outdoor dining program this year because 7% less people were coming despite more activities and it seemed to ruffle a lot of feathers. What's your response?
Thomson: It is amazing how many feathers can be ruffled over a tremendous asset, and so Kirkwood is just a great asset to our community. Our responsibility is to try to serve all of Bloomington and to create a thriving downtown as well.
There's lots of different folks who go to Kirkwood and their safety concerns, parking concerns, but in the end, we did survey all of the businesses impacted by a closure of on Kirkwood, and only five of them said that they supported a closure.
We also have for accessibility purposes and other things, people who who really say, I can't access Kirkwood when it's closed the way it's been closed. So Kirkwood will be open this year. We will be moving forward with a parklet model, where we'll continue to have outdoor dining.
This also allows us to sort of expand some of the festivals that do happen there that have really been limited because of the dining in the streets.
Hren: So what's next, does this go to city council?
Thomson: The engineer has has issued his ruling that it is going to be open. The ordinance leaves it in the city engineers court, and so he issued that last Friday.
