In this week's installment of Ask The Mayor, Indiana Newsdesk's Joe Hren visits Bloomington's Mark Kruzan at City Hall. The mayor takes your questions and gives us an update on downtown construction, city budget hearings and student move-in week.
Listen to their full conversation above. Here are some highlights from e-mails we received:
Stephen: For years, there have been significant traffic issues during morning and especially evening commutes to and from the west side (especially along Tapp Rd and 2nd St.) The issues have been obvious for years but with seemingly little action to relieve it. Improvements have been recommended for years in various traffic and infrastructure plans. What is the city currently doing to relieve these traffic issues?
Kruzan: It's going to get worse. And that's when I-69 is built through. There will be more demand on fewer roads. That's why years in advance we were building out improvements on Third Street, done improvements on Second Street, that's why we were on 17th Street making those improvements. The county is looking at Fullerton Pike expansion. So no easy answers to long term solutions when the problem is going to be compounded.
Bob: We have had explosive building downtown as part of infill and reuse which is good but please tell Bloomington you won't leave office with a legacy of a critical need to repair roads that get damaged and the contractors not fixing the road areas they damage during construction. There is a general feeling that you have not taken a stronger stand on the need to maintain our roads within the city while we grow.
Kruzan: There is certainly damage being done to roads referring to contractors working on private projects downtown. There are times we will let a road bed go a year longer than we might have knowing that there's going to be so much wear and tear based on construction projects that we know are coming. One thing the state of Indiana outlaws are impact fees. You can't assess impact fees to a contractor to say as part of your project you must pay this much for increased use on utilities or roads.
Marc: I cycle to work as often as the weather permits and I'm grateful for the number of bike paths, lanes and roads but there seem to be a few maintenance issues. On the multi-use paths there are a few overgrown areas with trees and weeds. Many of the bike lanes have potholes or very rough areas that often force me to ride outside of the bike lane. I'm concerned the city is not dedicating the proper budget and staff to maintain what already exists.
Kruzan: I tend to agree with him in some fashion. We've added many many miles of bike lane, percentage-wise our miles of bike lanes versus those of Portland, Oregon which many people point to as a model, we have a higher ratio, we have more bike-ped paths. We try to keep up with it. It's something we're working on. That's why we shifted the maintenance of bike-ped ways to our to our Planning and Transportation Department not just our Public Works Department. The other way Marc and others can directly help is go to your smart phone and download the free City of Bloomington app and use 'uReport.'
Sue: Mr. Mayor. I parked in front of the Justice Building Saturday morning. The sidewalk is a mess of black chewing gum. Can anything be done?
Kruzan: If that was the worse of our problem, I would be somewhat happy, but we do have a few more pet owners I'll put it delicately living in the downtown area, that's created some challenges too. I was just talking to our downtown resource officer and specialist, both of whom are walking that street all the time and the challenges never go away. We've increased the number of people who are working on those issues, but the number of people living downtown has by far exponentially grown compared to our staffing levels. So it's a game of catch up.
