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Ask The Mayor: Bloomington's Hamilton On Overdose Map, Two-Way Streets

Bloomington Mayor John Hamilton in his office Tuesday. (Joe Hren, WFIU/WTIU News)

Hamilton admits mistakes were made regarding the drug overdose death map, Grimes Lane and Walnut Street construction is on schedule, Graduate Hotel construction update and we take your questions.

On this week's installment of Ask The Mayor, Bloomington's John Hamilton addresses these issues and more. 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.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Hren: A city website called ‘Bloomington Revealed’ gave the names and addresses of victims who died from a drug overdose. This information has been up since November or so, but recently discovered and brought to the city’s attention. The original response was it would stay up for transparency reasons, but over the weekend, it was taken down citing respect for families and friends of those who died. Why the change in stance?

Hamilton: Bloomington Revealed if part of the whole effort responding to public health challenges. A group of community leaders said, we need more information. If we're going to respond to the public health challenge, we need to know what's going on. There's all kinds of data sets we're putting out. Overdose deaths is public data, but it's never been mapped before. We learned some things, we learned that deaths are happening all over the community. They're not happening in a concentrated place and happening not in public.

We also learned just last week, the addresses of individual deaths is a very sensitive information and that seems obvious now.

But we also learned just last week, the addresses of individual deaths is a very sensitive information and that seems obvious now. So when that word came back after it was up for many months, word came back that said this is too much information. We agreed, so we removed the data.

Hren: But it took a few modifications to get to the point of removing all the date, what pushed the city to get to where we are today?

Hamilton: Yes, there were a couple different stages. The first response was let's get the group that put the data out that has been working together for months and review this. That group met first and said, it is public data - let's remove it from the website so it's not easy to find by just hovering over it. Let's take it a couple clicks away. And that wasn't enough. The community responded that it's just to painful.

So about three days after that the data was removed altogether, the map was just taken down.

Hren: This went as far though as a planned protest at your house, did that have any bearing on your decision?

Hamilton: It really didn't. The two things that mattered in this decision is we knew there was pain and difficulty in people going through things that they didn't want to revisit. And the second is this whole controversy was distracting us. The energy we need to bring is how to fix this problem. This energy on fighting about what's the right level of information was just distracting everybody.

Nathan from Email: There have been multiple instances where your office has announced something and faced intense backlash as a result. Have you considered consulting with the people of Bloomington, especially the populations who will be most impacted - before you make policy?

Hamilton: Absolutely, that's what we do. In government you have to get used to the fact if you're going to do things, we will navigate a path that has not a straight line. Most of the things we deal with can be complicated governmental responses and always we're working to listen to how we respond, take steps, rinse - repeat. What worked, what didn't work. From the first day I took this office, I said we're going to make mistakes, we do because we're trying things out. We definitely want to keep hearing from the public.

Stephen from Facebook: Why is the transportation plan recommending converting College/Walnut and 3rd/Atwater into 2-way streets when those changes do not address actual traffic problems, and might actually create traffic problems?

Hamilton: Well I'm glad he's added his viewpoint on this and I don't want to prejudge any of that. This is a process we're in the middle of where a consultant has come in to help make Bloomington plan and really looking at how do we move around. There are cities around the country that have shifted away from one-way back to two-way primarily because one-way intends to move vehicles quickly, but it tends to diminish the urban core feel for pedestrians and commerce. No decisions have been made, we welcome the input.

Stephen from Facebook: Lack of housing supply is a major driver of increasing housing costs, and Bloomington is already the most expensive city in the state for housing. What is the city doing to encourage/help builders to increase the housing supply in the city?

Hamilton: This is a key focus for our administration. It's from people who have no housing to people who can afford any housing to people who want better housing and can't buy a house. So it's a whole range of issues. There's really two things you can do, you can increase the supply of housing which we are in helping people create more units of different kinds of housing whether it's apartment buildings or cooperative homes or senior living. Two, try to identify ways to control affordability with federal subsidies with local subsidies, we put more than $1 million into local subsidies or when we let someone go more densely.

Anthony from Facebook: With all of the incredible expansion in the commercial airline industry that is occurring right now - for example at the Indianapolis airport and even including the Evansville Airport, are there any plans for the City to partner with the Monroe County Airport to take advantage of this?

Hamilton: I was just out at the airport yesterday. It's a fantastic terminal, but it's not used for commercial flights. When I-69 is done, we're probably going to be 45 minutes from the Indianapolis airport. The economics from a competitor operated from our airport, I don't know. I do think this airport we have is a big asset to the university, large entities and private aircraft.

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