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: Let’s kick off with Hopewell neighborhood - you started the last city council meeting asking to regroup and compromise during April. I’ll ask what I thought is a critical question from council member Matt Flaherty at the meeting - is there room for compromise, can this ordinance be changed and what’s that process?
Thomson: We're trying to get a Planned Unit Development in at Hopewell. This is just phase one - six and a half acres of a much larger site, but what we're trying to do there doesn't fit into the transportation and UDO succinctly. And so we needed to do a PUD that went through the plan commission back in January and February.
There's certainly room for a compromise. And we already agreed to four of the proposals, and thus far, the council appears to want to stick firmly with all of their remaining proposals. We'll see if there's wiggle room. But this week in the deliberation session, the RDC and the city council will be meeting, and our consultant, who drew these plans for us, has outlined the impact of each of the remaining reasonable conditions, and it will be up to the council and RDC to decide if they're willing to lose housing units in order to put in the rest of the conditions.
Hren: There was question about interpreting the legality if council can make changes, it was presented as pass or fail - but council member Isabel Piedmont-Smith felt that was used to pass something council wasn’t set on and felt deceiving. Can you address that?
Thomson: When a PUD comes through the plan commission, it is certified, and the map is not supposed to be changed at that point. And several of the reasonable conditions that have been proposed are actually amendments to the PUD, and so that's where the conflict started, and I think it's important that we stay out of the legal discussion. It really bogged down the entire first conversation that we had.
That's not to say it's not important to sort that out eventually, because it's going to be important for future developers. If the developer says, fine, we'll do it that way, then it can be amended. But the legal discussion is about whether or not the petitioner has to agree to it. So that's the legal discussion.
I think that in Bloomington, we certainly have the skills and the conflict resolution to be able to discuss what we want out of this neighborhood, ultimately, and try to find compromise and some middle ground.
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Hren: Council members Sydney Zulich and Courtney Daily are introducing a resolution to keep the criminal justice buildings within city limits. This comes after county commissioners want to include North Park further outside the city off I-69 as a location for the jail after county council dismissed that site. Meanwhile deadlines are approaching with the ACLU - is there a solution?
Thomson: The jail is a county decision, but I just want to say that I'm really supportive of moving this forward, and it does seem like we once again, are in a place where an executive branch and a legislative branch are not able to agree on something. We would love to keep it within city limits. And my understanding is that the proposal that came through to the city council for Fullerton Pike, the zoning was not approved by city council because they thought it was too far out and North Park, I believe, is even further out.
And so I do think it's important that the jail is somewhat centrally located, but ultimately, I think it's also important that we make some decisions, and they're decisions that we can afford economically, and that we get the jail where it needs to be, and I don't think that that necessarily has to be co located with the courts and the offices.
Hren: The Herald-Times had an article worth talking about stating the city is rethinking homelessness strategy focusing on metrics, results... is there a new initiative coming or being announced?
Thomson: I think the article's headline and some of what the article was getting to really relates to Senate Enrolled Act 285 which requires municipalities to arrest people who have been camping on public property for longer than 48 hours. I'm not sure that was ultimately clear in that article, and I just want to say that I'm really proud of how Heading Home has taken initiative to respond to this at the city.
We also are very busy responding in partnership with the county and Heading Home, but also on our own. And while it's really unfortunate that sleeping outside on public land has been illegalized and we have such a short timeline, we really are using this as sort of a burning platform to say, how many people can we get housed by July 1? So no, I wouldn't say there's a tremendous new initiative, but I think there's a lot of energy being put towards solutions and working together with urgency.
Hren: Bridgette emails in. Why does this city questionnaire seem like a means to avoid addressing the issues which were brought forward by the Council? The questions which are solicited are individual, qualitative issues, based solely on personal experience. Perhaps a more productive line of questioning might concern city planning which is considerate of existing infrastructure, topography, and residents. Why not form a study group, or better yet, open up a book club discussion, and get some informed input from residents?
Thomson: I think what Bridgette is referring to is our community survey that's been going on every other year for a number of years now. It actually is targeted to be individual responses and qualitative. We have a number of other ways that we have sort of more collaborative conversations going every other month, I have a town hall so that's open to the public.
I also have traveling office hours for people who'd rather have more of a one on one or small group conversation. Totally open to opening a book club or doing something else, but I really encourage involvement in what we have going on, and if there's a way that we can better serve we're happy to hear about it. But that particular survey wasn't meant to evade anything. All but to seek a different kind of input than what we are typically getting.
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Hren: Jim emails in, he's worried about tree replacement promises. He says you can't always trust promises to replace trees and nobody has the financial resources to challenge those whose jobs are dedicated toward finished a project. Karen also emails in wondering if it's too late to save the trees on High Street?
Thomson: There are a number of trees that will need to be removed in order to do the High Street path improvements. And not only are we going to replace all of those trees - so the full number of those, we also are going to plant an additional more than 70 trees within a pretty tight radius of where those trees were.
So we'll ultimately leave things better in number of trees than what we found them. I think that we all are sad when a beautiful, older tree goes and so I think that we all experience that loss and the city is going to do its best to replace those and over the long term, make things even better.
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