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: I saw a few online complaints last week. Everybody comes back into town at once and wants to know why is all the road construction happening during the busiest week of the year?
Thomson: According to people who are on our roads, there are so many busiest weeks of the year. So we don't like it to happen when there's any football happening. We don't like it to happen when Lotus is happening, et cetera, et cetera.
The asphalt plants are open only a certain number of months. We have now filled more than 8,200 potholes this year. So, we're sorry for the road construction, but also you're welcome. We are improving the grade of our streets little by little every single year in my administration, and there's no perfect way, no perfect time to do it.
We need the grant money in the door before we can do it, and so the timing actually ends up happening usually late summer, and we try to get everything done by moving week, but we don't always make it happen.
Read more: Two-week 3rd Street closure begins Tuesday
Hren: I'm curious to your reaction to the two proposals before the redevelopment commission of College Square that we've talked about so much. One utilizes Seminary Pointe for mixed-income apartments, but it wants to build a host hotel for the convention center. The other is Dora, who is building the host hotel south of the convention center. Their proposal includes luxury hotel shops and market rate apartments.
Thomson: This is an RDC decision, and so they are in deliberations about this, and there is a a fair practice that they go by to make their decisions. I will say that both of those submittals came in with different complexities, so neither one of them were clear yes because they both were dependent on other things, and so that'll be up to the RDC to decide, and we'll start some cleanup very soon on the property to get it even more marketable.
Read more: College Square proposals include hotels, housing units
Hren: The grassroots Save Seminary Pointe campaign is still pushing for action, despite the Capital Improvement Board setting demolition on November 4. What's your response to those people who are still trying to save Seminary Pointe?
Thomson: They are addressing the Capital Improvement Board at this point, so we don't have a response to them. We provided our clearest path forward a while ago. That is on a property that the city doesn't own. We do have a lot of affordable housing.
Anytime we lose any, we're concerned. We need it in Bloomington. We do have a lot of pretty creative affordable housing coming online. It's still not enough, but I am excited about, for instance, the Bloomington Housing Authority is getting ready to sell some bonds to purchase some existing apartments and then keep them low income and make them available to voucher holders, etc.
Hren: We have a question from Martha who emailed in a couple weeks ago. She asks, it seems like most developers prefer to contribute money to the city's affordable housing fund rather than directly build such housing. What is the city doing with these funds to increase affordable housing. She says, "I don't see it happening."
Thomson: We can use that funding to subsidize other projects that a nonprofit may be building or that the city is helping with in order to ensure that we do have affordable housing. Frequently, I know there's a debate about whether or not you should take the contribution or essentially force developers to provide some low-income housing.
Frankly, most families don't want to live in a high-rise that is targeted at undergrad students, and so providing an alternative that's off-site is actually more appealing to the people who actually need that housing.
Listen to more: How to address affordable housing in Bloomington
Hren: I'm going to follow up with her on her question: How can developers be incentivized to actually build such housing.
Thomson: We can't require them. So her question is a good one. Incentivizes are a different way of doing it, and so we do have various incentives in our Unified Development Ordinance that can, for instance, increase the density of your development, which means you can put more homes on a single tract of land, or sometimes you can get more height, so you can put an additional story on if you're doing affordable housing.
We have had a couple of deliberation sessions at City Council last year on housing, and some creative ideas came through that we are pursuing, but we're always open to hearing other ideas as well.
Hren: I know there was a summer groundbreaking plan for the Trades District Hotel, but don't see anything happening over there yet.
Thomson: There's a lot of I's to be dotted and T's to be crossed in between when you get approval and when you can actually break ground, and with construction prices and everything else changing as rapidly as they are in today's market, it's no wonder that it's taking a couple extra months to get that done.
Hren: Let's get into carving the 2027 budget. I know that's a huge deal happening with every city across the state, and I've been kind of out myself, so I'm trying to catch up. Where is that process?
Thomson: A full week, in our terms, means two evening nights of presentations to City Council. And last night we had our third. Tomorrow we will have our final presentation. Then we go back and make edits on that budget in September. It comes back to start being finalized before it goes to State Board of Accounts, and then October is final adoption.
I think we have done, frankly, something close to a miraculous job of putting together a great budget. We have continued to reduce the anticipated deficit. We're down to about $5 million now, so that's a third of what it was when I came into office. Of course, we budget somewhat of a deficit every year because we have to have the money in the bank to spend the money, and usually then we don't spend the full amount.
So, road projects are a great example. We need to have it approved so that we can do the road project, even if we don't get all of the projects done in a year.
We've had to say no to some things, and we're going to have to continue to say no to an increasingly larger number of things in the coming years. But we've tried to be really prudent about it. Stick with our clear priorities around housing, homelessness, and economic development. So we have not anticipated, for instance, no new anticipated FTEs added to the city this year. We have more work, but we will not be adding more people.
Hren: I see where Councilmember Sydney Zulich announced a run for Bloomington mayor. Have you made a decision on whether or not you're going to run next year?
Thomson: I fully intend to run. I'm really staying out of that conversation until after the midterms, we have other people running for really important seats, and I think it's really important that we support those folks. So I'm doing background work and nothing out in the public other than supporting other candidates.
