Unknown Speaker
All right, I believe we are live on Facebook with Bloomington Mayor john Hamilton. This is the Ask the mayor show that we do once a month in Bloomington. We're in Terre Haute and Columbus and in Brown County with Nashville to once a week, every month. And again, Mr. Mayor, thank you very much for having us with for you being with us today. Appreciate it. Great to see you, Joe. Welcome back. Nice to be together again. You know, hard to believe third week of August and I think we can just start with what's on the minds of people fall semester at IU within a week.
Unknown Speaker
Is there any immediate data or news on this IU moving that's been happening the past couple weeks? I don't think we know everybody has to be tested. But we're also reading reports from other schools Notre Dame North Carolina, that the COVID outbreaks are happening what's happening right now in Bloomington
Unknown Speaker
Well, you're right, Joe. There's a lot of change going on in Bloomington right now, of course mccsc. Our local public school Corporation has begun classes in the last few days, though those are being done remotely. I us students are moving in on campus and off campus. It's the time for you halls and parents coming into town and 30,000 plus students. So there's a lot of testing a lot of but also a lot of anxiety, hoping that this will work. All right, our numbers in Monroe County continue to be quite good in terms of positivity rates. That is how many people who get tested show a positive result. And that's very low. It's around 3%, which is excellent, much lower than the state or the country. But as you indicate there, you know, there are certainly stories all around the country where the virus can just explode again, and we're watching for parties and big gatherings where they shouldn't be
Unknown Speaker
happening in the police departments, both IU and city are working together. I've spoke this morning to a group of 100 freshmen and just reminded them you know, what you do is going to matter how you behave as students with masks and distancing is going to make the make the difference on whether or not the school can keep operating this way. So I you will also have a dashboard with COVID data from the test that are coming back and will that be updated weekly and that will count for Monroe County totals so there could see a spike coming up here soon. We're going to see as IU is releasing those tests now to the state health department. We're going to see a big number of new tests and probably some new infections. IU has indicated that they're going to release publicly as you indicated weekly. The results of their tests are doing thousands of tests a day I think as as students are coming back
Unknown Speaker
That will be really important to monitor. You know, we're we're doing at the city of Bloomington utilities is doing wastewater testing to a few places around town to look if we can see virus blooms that are happening. So the more we can test and find where there are problems, the better chance we have of, of containing those infections. And that's going to be the key where, you know, look, Monroe County has been stricter than the state. It's hard to know cause and effect but we have a lower rate than the state we have mass quarter in place earlier. We had restrictions on bars and restaurants tighter and we're in a we're in a decent shape right now. It's just a question of can we maintain it? It's, it's, it's a 5050 proposition, frankly, from from my perspective, are are their calls coming in? Are you seeing these these buttons
Unknown Speaker
party's happening and are they being enforced?
Unknown Speaker
There are calls there's a county hotline that people are welcome to call or people can call 911 or my office to report things they see go online. I know I know the police departments of Indiana University and Bloomington police are kind of divided up the coverage of the city to respond to inappropriate gatherings and we are doing that right now. I you has pledged to use the university enforcement if you will, the student discipline that they can show and give to help protect against that and look, it's it's it's going to depend on behaviors and wearing masks, not doing stupid things and silly things and gathering in large numbers of people inside without without masks and distancing. And that's going to that's going to determine how we go. So I see if you look at the code the state COVID and Monroe County
Unknown Speaker
cases are going down. It's not like May and June. But also there's been news reports about people are not taking as many tests either. Some reports about being discouraged by the long wait times. I know the Bloomington center was closed for a while because of heat problems, although now they have an portable air conditioner. So that must be frustrating that you want all these tests, but people are not getting tested, you're getting frustrated. Well, we're six months after almost the real pandemic hit. And we still don't have a good national testing scheme. We don't have statewide testing. We don't have anything like the testing we should have. We're fortunate in Bloomington that we have Indiana University that has just taken it upon themselves to do many, many, many more tests than otherwise would be happening. They're testing all the on campus students before they go to their dorms. They're testing all the off campus students before classes open next week. those tests aren't perfect. But if if you do have already
Unknown Speaker
regime of testing your community regularly.
Unknown Speaker
Periodically, you can find problems now, you know this These aren't cures. But it's that is that is really important. I'll note, we have seen in hospitalizations, which you can't, hospitalizations don't really depend upon testing because if you're sick, you're sick, you go to the hospital you you know you're going to the hospital and we have seen a rise again, we had a big bump in the spring it went down in the summer, it's come up again, not as high as in the spring. It's kind of steady and flattened a little bit, which is good. We need to we need to make sure that that trailing indicator because that usually happens a week or two after infections grow, that we don't see a rise in that as well but so far, look the the indicators are decent is just we know we've got some dynamic factors that are threatening.
Unknown Speaker
You mentioned the COVID wastewater study. My colleague Brock Turner did a story on that and increment
Unknown Speaker
On Indiana, we can probably link to that story he did. He went there and talked to the people in charge and showed how that was being done. Can you maybe describe a little bit about First of all, how that process is coming to Bloomington, but then how that actually works? Well, we did, Carmel was earlier on this. And we, we we over the last few months, probably three months ago or so started to look at this and the utilities looked at it, I talked with them about it. And we were thinking about is this something we could do, the state has stepped up to help finance it. And what you basically do is, you know our bodies if we have bodies that are infected with the virus, we eliminated in our waste and in the waste stream, you can test for how much of the virus is detectable in the waste stream. So actually, for the last four or five weeks, we've been testing at the wastewater plants. So that's at the end of the pipe. All the collected waste from Wilmington in two different waste plants.
Unknown Speaker
We've got weekly weekly tests and those are getting tested now to give us the benchmark numbers and we'll keep keep testing those weekly, it takes a, it's a multi thousand dollar machine that has to draw these samples, you have to freeze them, you have to analyze them in a lab to look for the virus. The new thing we're doing this week is we're putting in about for three or four locations, some some grab sample machines that we can we can target toward areas of interest. And for example, if we have an area of town, the sewers all come out of a high student population area, you know, a 1010 square blocks, let's say we can put a machine to test three times a week and say what is the virus load overall on average from these 10 blocks, and it's experimental it but it what it does is every two or three days you get a number. And if you see a significant move in that number up or down, it gives you some indication that the virus is growing or shrinking, you
Unknown Speaker
That area of a few thousand people, let's say you could do it at a high school, you could do it at a particular location on campus. So CB is going to be doing that over the next few weeks. And we'll share what data we can. We're using caramels experience. There's a lab in Notre Dame, that's been helpful. And we're using a private lab to do the test. And is there a special funding for this that the city has to do this, that actually the state is helping us fund that utility bought a couple of these machines on their own, they're $4,000 or something. But the state is helping finance it's not incredibly expensive in the big scheme of things. And if it can give us some useful data that can help us target problem areas. It's just definitely worth it.
Unknown Speaker
I wanted to get into Of course, we're in the budget talks now, this week, but something that you've been talking about since even January 1 was a attacks a three phase initiative.
Unknown Speaker
And now it's kind of changed. Because right now you could see even around you right now on your screen you have recovered forward Bloomington that you've been really promoting as an initiative to fund a variety of programs. For now to climb out of this pandemic hole. Is this kind of the same initiative that you propose back during your State of the City address?
Unknown Speaker
Well, nothing's really the same as it was in January, given given what COVID has done and the economic collapse, recover forward, which which I've used to talk about a package of things is really meant to from the city of Bloomington perspective to try to articulate our role. Governments are really important local government, state government, federal government to help communities and cultures and our society respond to challenges. We have four really big challenges right in front of us. One is the health pandemic. Two is the economic collapse that accompanied the pandemic three is the ratio of
Unknown Speaker
injustice which is which has become a very active and millions of people marching and people trying to say, look, we need to make progress on this. And fourth is climate change which lurks in the background and in stands challenging all of us. So recover forward is trying to think about as a community as we claw our way out of the economic recession, as we recover from the pandemic, how do we move in the right direction? How do we recover forward into a community that has more economic justice, more racial justice, and more climate justice so that we, we can be the kind of community we want to be it's not about let's go back to what we were in 2019 and figure out how to get back there. It's like how do we move forward on these other issues and as you mentioned, it's kind of a multi phase approach. We the city council approved phase one last week, which is some basically emergency recovery money $2 million for this year.
Unknown Speaker
The budget in 2021 proposes some other kinds of investments to do the same. And then phase three is looking at Do we need more revenue to keep this progress going?
Unknown Speaker
That first chunk, it's close to 2.2 million. I was looking over all the different things, programs that it funds, the largest chunk or one of the biggest chunk $650,000 goes to sidewalks, path enhancements, transit improvements, I think transit stops
Unknown Speaker
it. Some may say why, why are we spending $650,000 for sidewalks during a pandemic? Yeah. So we really try to think about how do you help the economy recover, which means jobs and spending in some ways, right? If we have projects that we can do, how do we get those going quickly so more people can get back to work, and also that we that we're creating the information
Unknown Speaker
that we want. The bus system had previously identified a whole bunch of bus stops that had accessibility issues. For some people that's really really important getting to and from work or health care schools or other things. So doing a quick quick hits on bus stop improvements for $250,000 when it creates jobs because we're going to be hiring people to do that work, and to it creates a an infrastructure that will help our community climb out of this bad, this hit another.
Unknown Speaker
We are way behind in terms of physical infrastructure in sidewalks and more and more people are walking and using sidewalks and we want to be sure that we're doing all we can to improve them now. Admittedly, this is also what what can we do in the four months remaining in 2020 to help the economy and these are some quick projects that we can push money out the door that needs to be done and if we do them quickly, they'll help create jobs locally as well.
Unknown Speaker
But to take that maybe a little further should the city be spending maybe that money on you know, those we're facing evictions or maybe food banks, utility shut offs business grants? Well, we're doing a lot of that. The recover forward has a whole array of approaches which do include housing support. They do include support for social safety net and food, food providers and others like that housing support. We've been doing millions of dollars of support for local businesses, and we want to continue doing that. So recover forward is actually a big range of projects and approaches. eviction suit is incredibly important. Now I also think one of the things we want to do is each government entity kind of do what they can do best and the county has already stepped forward with eviction support, which I support and then applaud. They put $100,000 into the township trustees to help push that out.
Unknown Speaker
They have more that they can do if that's appropriate and needed. State governments doing eviction support federal government's doing eviction support. So we're, we tried to really identify where some places where our 2 million which is, look, it's it's not a lot of money in the big scheme of things. But where can we make the most impact in the short in the short run? Right. And from what I understand is about 18 million in reserves I think you want to use with about 8 million?
Unknown Speaker
Yes. So the overall recover forward really has two big pieces. We've been talking about the investments that will help the community climb out of this hole and move in the right direction and a half of it. Another half of it is really just focused on making sure we don't have to do layoffs, making sure we can continue the basic services because our revenues are down some. We want to we want to make sure we as a government are continuing to employ our people to pick up the trash to patrol our streets to respond to fires to clean
Unknown Speaker
up the parks to all those things that we need to do pick up, you know, animal animal welfare, all those activities, half of the money is going to make sure we can keep doing that in the face of some declining revenues.
Unknown Speaker
I also have to ask about the point is at point two 5%, local income tax increase in 2021. You mentioned this to fund these projects then for the next decade or so. So during an economic recession, pandemic, you know, how many cities are wanting to increase taxes? Is that kind of going the other direction? Well, it's, uh, I would put it this way. Anytime you raise taxes, it's not usually popular people sign and say, yeah, let's let's do that. I think the choice whether to increase revenue always should be based on what do we need it for? What is the revenue going to do for us if we have it? What does our community look like? If we don't have it? What does our community look like and we'll be talking
Unknown Speaker
About that, and the weeks and months ahead as we move forward. It's kind of one step at a time. We have the 2020. Investments beginning, the 2021. budget is being reviewed this week. And then after that, I think it'll be time to look at revenue. I did when I when I first proposed this in January, I proposed a point 5% to because I felt that was needed and appropriate to take the steps the city needs to create economic opportunity to protect racial justice to do our part on climate justice, improve our public transit system and our infrastructure and all that. We've cut it in half in light of some of the economic pressures. I do think it's interesting for people to know as well that the county of Monroe and these are countywide taxes, has the lowest tax rate of all the counties next to us of the seven counties in our region. Monroe County, which pretty clearly is the most progressive and liberal county of all those counties.
Unknown Speaker
has the lowest income tax rate. That means other counties have raised their taxes to do things that they think are important, and we have stayed low. Nobody's in favor of taxes for taxes sake, but it is instructive. Even if we raised our tax this much, we probably will still be the lowest because Oakland County's looking at raising their tax right now to for another purpose. So either way, we're a very low tax jurisdiction. And I think it's going to be a community conversation about is it worth doing now or not?
Unknown Speaker
You know, with budget sessions this week, I know you've talked about social justice initiatives, and there's a consulting group on assessing public safety. Is that are they out of Bloomington? No, that's a consulting group we hired. I think about three years ago, we did a big nationwide request for qualifications and identified a group. I believe they're out of Ohio. I'm sorry, I don't know exactly. They're not Bloomington I know. And we've used them over the last three years.
Unknown Speaker
To help us do kind of a third party, outsider, their national expert look at how how Bloomington city government is organized and how to improve it. We've, we've used it in a number of ways to improve our departments reorganize, restructure, align them differently. We're proposing a new engineering department this year because of that, we're proposing an assembly of the Parking Services because of that, and they did also starting last year review public safety and made some recommendations about the public safety divisions to
Unknown Speaker
how much has local organizations going I'm kind of trying to steer more towards the Social Justice Initiative part of this, how much have local organizations you know, Black Lives Matter, like that have been part of to able to be a consultant to the city in these types of initiatives? Well, we have give you another example where black lives matter has been very involved.
Unknown Speaker
And continues to be as a group, which was the farmers market. Last summer, of course, we had a lot of issues that the community cared a lot about. In connection with the farmers market. We brought in a group out of Ohio State, which is a, again, a national expertise. This one didn't cost us a dime, brought them in to help look at how does a community deal with racial issues like we're having in the farmers market, and they, this group led a process with some local involvement as well intensively involving Black Lives Matter and many, many voices to talk about what we do at the farmers market. And it's actually that process which is leading to a big step, I think in the next weeks or months to create a community wide
Unknown Speaker
taskforce that will dig into racial structural racism and racial issues. This is not going to be a city led group but it's a city supported group. Community led that will say what what do we want to talk about with public education with public
Unknown Speaker
Safety with criminal justice, with healthcare with housing with jobs. How does structural racism affect us now and that will be a very inclusive process with groups like Black Lives Matter, NAACP or
Unknown Speaker
campus groups and others that will be very involved in helping us look at that as a community.
Unknown Speaker
I know we're getting short on time. We have four questions I want to get to from people who have emailed in anything new on your plan to bring city wide broadband to Bloomington boy hasn't had been clear how important broadband capacity is over the last five or six months. We are continuing to explore we were not able and i i would think I think the national election in 2016 did not help us in moving toward a citywide infrastructure. We're continuing to explore that even even now. But what we did do when that when we couldn't get a full
Unknown Speaker
city wide build done. We continue to ask our providers at&t and Comcast and smithville to improve services. But we did do a digital survey, particularly a digital equity survey in the spring is actually before COVID hit, we didn't know it was coming. And that digital survey was just released a week or two ago showed us things like one out of eight low income households has reports zero connection to the Internet, never 50% of senior and low income households report. I don't have the skills I need to be comfortable and effective in engaging in digital commerce or digital activities. We had households report homework problems. So this is helping us identify where are where there are some challenges with with broadband access, and we've actually created in recover forward a small grant program to try to help with partners in the community, boys and girls club area. 10 on aging.
Unknown Speaker
Others like that to do, how can we chip away at these digital equity issues? So we're working on it, but it's still a big problem. Sure. Lee wants to know about the rules about masks on the Beeline trail.
Unknown Speaker
Well, Beeline trail is really treated like any park or any sidewalk, individuals under the state now and of course, we had that local order earlier required to wear a mask. Generally, unless you're at home with your household, or your outdoors and not within six feet of people. Or there. There are other special circumstances that can be relevant, but generally you are to have a mask if you're in any public place indoors, or if you're going to be closer than six feet to people. So question on the Beeline is generally if you're going to stay six feet apart from people other than your own household members. You're okay not with a mask but if you may be pausing and getting a cup of coffee or stopping and chatting with people
Unknown Speaker
You really should have a mess. So I would recommend and I try always to carry a mask, even if you're outdoors exercising or walking.
Unknown Speaker
And georgeanne wants to know if police officers are required to wear masks. Generally Yes, police officers are required to wear masks just like all of our city employees. There are some differences for public safety employees like firefighters and police officers in how they engage with the public in certain circumstances where it's deemed not appropriate to wear a mask. You know, police officers are often entering a situation where it's really important that they be identifiable and identify quickly. But generally, yes, now our police officers do single car patrols so they're when they're alone in their car, they need not wear a mask, but when they're interacting with the public in general within six feet, and and if they're indoors, they should be wearing masks. Alright, we're short on time is there any
Unknown Speaker
Any other announcements or things that you'd like to, to say before we go for next month? I think all I'd say is, I hope everybody will register and vote. It's really important this year. I'm urging people there. There are ways to do mail and voting. You can check with us on that. But please be sure to vote, it's really important that we move in the right directions and everybody participate in both this year plus get counted in the census. If you haven't been, that's really important, too.
Unknown Speaker
Is there a deadline for the census? I know that the I don't know that there's an exact deadline. But I know if you haven't answered by now You're late. And you should reach out to the census by phone or on the web and say you want to get yourself counted. They will contact you I hope if you haven't read if you haven't filled out the census form, but if you haven't done it yet, it's time you're late behind the curve. And if anyone has any other questions, not only for Mayor Hamilton but our other cities, please feel
Unknown Speaker
Feel free to email us news at Indiana public media.org or you can tweet us at ask the mayor. Mayor Hamilton, thank you for being with us today. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Joe, and thanks for everybody following the news. I will see you next time. Bye Bye. Take care.
All right, I believe we are live on Facebook with Bloomington Mayor john Hamilton. This is the Ask the mayor show that we do once a month in Bloomington. We're in Terre Haute and Columbus and in Brown County with Nashville to once a week, every month. And again, Mr. Mayor, thank you very much for having us with for you being with us today. Appreciate it. Great to see you, Joe. Welcome back. Nice to be together again. You know, hard to believe third week of August and I think we can just start with what's on the minds of people fall semester at IU within a week.
Unknown Speaker
Is there any immediate data or news on this IU moving that's been happening the past couple weeks? I don't think we know everybody has to be tested. But we're also reading reports from other schools Notre Dame North Carolina, that the COVID outbreaks are happening what's happening right now in Bloomington
Unknown Speaker
Well, you're right, Joe. There's a lot of change going on in Bloomington right now, of course mccsc. Our local public school Corporation has begun classes in the last few days, though those are being done remotely. I us students are moving in on campus and off campus. It's the time for you halls and parents coming into town and 30,000 plus students. So there's a lot of testing a lot of but also a lot of anxiety, hoping that this will work. All right, our numbers in Monroe County continue to be quite good in terms of positivity rates. That is how many people who get tested show a positive result. And that's very low. It's around 3%, which is excellent, much lower than the state or the country. But as you indicate there, you know, there are certainly stories all around the country where the virus can just explode again, and we're watching for parties and big gatherings where they shouldn't be
Unknown Speaker
happening in the police departments, both IU and city are working together. I've spoke this morning to a group of 100 freshmen and just reminded them you know, what you do is going to matter how you behave as students with masks and distancing is going to make the make the difference on whether or not the school can keep operating this way. So I you will also have a dashboard with COVID data from the test that are coming back and will that be updated weekly and that will count for Monroe County totals so there could see a spike coming up here soon. We're going to see as IU is releasing those tests now to the state health department. We're going to see a big number of new tests and probably some new infections. IU has indicated that they're going to release publicly as you indicated weekly. The results of their tests are doing thousands of tests a day I think as as students are coming back
Unknown Speaker
That will be really important to monitor. You know, we're we're doing at the city of Bloomington utilities is doing wastewater testing to a few places around town to look if we can see virus blooms that are happening. So the more we can test and find where there are problems, the better chance we have of, of containing those infections. And that's going to be the key where, you know, look, Monroe County has been stricter than the state. It's hard to know cause and effect but we have a lower rate than the state we have mass quarter in place earlier. We had restrictions on bars and restaurants tighter and we're in a we're in a decent shape right now. It's just a question of can we maintain it? It's, it's, it's a 5050 proposition, frankly, from from my perspective, are are their calls coming in? Are you seeing these these buttons
Unknown Speaker
party's happening and are they being enforced?
Unknown Speaker
There are calls there's a county hotline that people are welcome to call or people can call 911 or my office to report things they see go online. I know I know the police departments of Indiana University and Bloomington police are kind of divided up the coverage of the city to respond to inappropriate gatherings and we are doing that right now. I you has pledged to use the university enforcement if you will, the student discipline that they can show and give to help protect against that and look, it's it's it's going to depend on behaviors and wearing masks, not doing stupid things and silly things and gathering in large numbers of people inside without without masks and distancing. And that's going to that's going to determine how we go. So I see if you look at the code the state COVID and Monroe County
Unknown Speaker
cases are going down. It's not like May and June. But also there's been news reports about people are not taking as many tests either. Some reports about being discouraged by the long wait times. I know the Bloomington center was closed for a while because of heat problems, although now they have an portable air conditioner. So that must be frustrating that you want all these tests, but people are not getting tested, you're getting frustrated. Well, we're six months after almost the real pandemic hit. And we still don't have a good national testing scheme. We don't have statewide testing. We don't have anything like the testing we should have. We're fortunate in Bloomington that we have Indiana University that has just taken it upon themselves to do many, many, many more tests than otherwise would be happening. They're testing all the on campus students before they go to their dorms. They're testing all the off campus students before classes open next week. those tests aren't perfect. But if if you do have already
Unknown Speaker
regime of testing your community regularly.
Unknown Speaker
Periodically, you can find problems now, you know this These aren't cures. But it's that is that is really important. I'll note, we have seen in hospitalizations, which you can't, hospitalizations don't really depend upon testing because if you're sick, you're sick, you go to the hospital you you know you're going to the hospital and we have seen a rise again, we had a big bump in the spring it went down in the summer, it's come up again, not as high as in the spring. It's kind of steady and flattened a little bit, which is good. We need to we need to make sure that that trailing indicator because that usually happens a week or two after infections grow, that we don't see a rise in that as well but so far, look the the indicators are decent is just we know we've got some dynamic factors that are threatening.
Unknown Speaker
You mentioned the COVID wastewater study. My colleague Brock Turner did a story on that and increment
Unknown Speaker
On Indiana, we can probably link to that story he did. He went there and talked to the people in charge and showed how that was being done. Can you maybe describe a little bit about First of all, how that process is coming to Bloomington, but then how that actually works? Well, we did, Carmel was earlier on this. And we, we we over the last few months, probably three months ago or so started to look at this and the utilities looked at it, I talked with them about it. And we were thinking about is this something we could do, the state has stepped up to help finance it. And what you basically do is, you know our bodies if we have bodies that are infected with the virus, we eliminated in our waste and in the waste stream, you can test for how much of the virus is detectable in the waste stream. So actually, for the last four or five weeks, we've been testing at the wastewater plants. So that's at the end of the pipe. All the collected waste from Wilmington in two different waste plants.
Unknown Speaker
We've got weekly weekly tests and those are getting tested now to give us the benchmark numbers and we'll keep keep testing those weekly, it takes a, it's a multi thousand dollar machine that has to draw these samples, you have to freeze them, you have to analyze them in a lab to look for the virus. The new thing we're doing this week is we're putting in about for three or four locations, some some grab sample machines that we can we can target toward areas of interest. And for example, if we have an area of town, the sewers all come out of a high student population area, you know, a 1010 square blocks, let's say we can put a machine to test three times a week and say what is the virus load overall on average from these 10 blocks, and it's experimental it but it what it does is every two or three days you get a number. And if you see a significant move in that number up or down, it gives you some indication that the virus is growing or shrinking, you
Unknown Speaker
That area of a few thousand people, let's say you could do it at a high school, you could do it at a particular location on campus. So CB is going to be doing that over the next few weeks. And we'll share what data we can. We're using caramels experience. There's a lab in Notre Dame, that's been helpful. And we're using a private lab to do the test. And is there a special funding for this that the city has to do this, that actually the state is helping us fund that utility bought a couple of these machines on their own, they're $4,000 or something. But the state is helping finance it's not incredibly expensive in the big scheme of things. And if it can give us some useful data that can help us target problem areas. It's just definitely worth it.
Unknown Speaker
I wanted to get into Of course, we're in the budget talks now, this week, but something that you've been talking about since even January 1 was a attacks a three phase initiative.
Unknown Speaker
And now it's kind of changed. Because right now you could see even around you right now on your screen you have recovered forward Bloomington that you've been really promoting as an initiative to fund a variety of programs. For now to climb out of this pandemic hole. Is this kind of the same initiative that you propose back during your State of the City address?
Unknown Speaker
Well, nothing's really the same as it was in January, given given what COVID has done and the economic collapse, recover forward, which which I've used to talk about a package of things is really meant to from the city of Bloomington perspective to try to articulate our role. Governments are really important local government, state government, federal government to help communities and cultures and our society respond to challenges. We have four really big challenges right in front of us. One is the health pandemic. Two is the economic collapse that accompanied the pandemic three is the ratio of
Unknown Speaker
injustice which is which has become a very active and millions of people marching and people trying to say, look, we need to make progress on this. And fourth is climate change which lurks in the background and in stands challenging all of us. So recover forward is trying to think about as a community as we claw our way out of the economic recession, as we recover from the pandemic, how do we move in the right direction? How do we recover forward into a community that has more economic justice, more racial justice, and more climate justice so that we, we can be the kind of community we want to be it's not about let's go back to what we were in 2019 and figure out how to get back there. It's like how do we move forward on these other issues and as you mentioned, it's kind of a multi phase approach. We the city council approved phase one last week, which is some basically emergency recovery money $2 million for this year.
Unknown Speaker
The budget in 2021 proposes some other kinds of investments to do the same. And then phase three is looking at Do we need more revenue to keep this progress going?
Unknown Speaker
That first chunk, it's close to 2.2 million. I was looking over all the different things, programs that it funds, the largest chunk or one of the biggest chunk $650,000 goes to sidewalks, path enhancements, transit improvements, I think transit stops
Unknown Speaker
it. Some may say why, why are we spending $650,000 for sidewalks during a pandemic? Yeah. So we really try to think about how do you help the economy recover, which means jobs and spending in some ways, right? If we have projects that we can do, how do we get those going quickly so more people can get back to work, and also that we that we're creating the information
Unknown Speaker
that we want. The bus system had previously identified a whole bunch of bus stops that had accessibility issues. For some people that's really really important getting to and from work or health care schools or other things. So doing a quick quick hits on bus stop improvements for $250,000 when it creates jobs because we're going to be hiring people to do that work, and to it creates a an infrastructure that will help our community climb out of this bad, this hit another.
Unknown Speaker
We are way behind in terms of physical infrastructure in sidewalks and more and more people are walking and using sidewalks and we want to be sure that we're doing all we can to improve them now. Admittedly, this is also what what can we do in the four months remaining in 2020 to help the economy and these are some quick projects that we can push money out the door that needs to be done and if we do them quickly, they'll help create jobs locally as well.
Unknown Speaker
But to take that maybe a little further should the city be spending maybe that money on you know, those we're facing evictions or maybe food banks, utility shut offs business grants? Well, we're doing a lot of that. The recover forward has a whole array of approaches which do include housing support. They do include support for social safety net and food, food providers and others like that housing support. We've been doing millions of dollars of support for local businesses, and we want to continue doing that. So recover forward is actually a big range of projects and approaches. eviction suit is incredibly important. Now I also think one of the things we want to do is each government entity kind of do what they can do best and the county has already stepped forward with eviction support, which I support and then applaud. They put $100,000 into the township trustees to help push that out.
Unknown Speaker
They have more that they can do if that's appropriate and needed. State governments doing eviction support federal government's doing eviction support. So we're, we tried to really identify where some places where our 2 million which is, look, it's it's not a lot of money in the big scheme of things. But where can we make the most impact in the short in the short run? Right. And from what I understand is about 18 million in reserves I think you want to use with about 8 million?
Unknown Speaker
Yes. So the overall recover forward really has two big pieces. We've been talking about the investments that will help the community climb out of this hole and move in the right direction and a half of it. Another half of it is really just focused on making sure we don't have to do layoffs, making sure we can continue the basic services because our revenues are down some. We want to we want to make sure we as a government are continuing to employ our people to pick up the trash to patrol our streets to respond to fires to clean
Unknown Speaker
up the parks to all those things that we need to do pick up, you know, animal animal welfare, all those activities, half of the money is going to make sure we can keep doing that in the face of some declining revenues.
Unknown Speaker
I also have to ask about the point is at point two 5%, local income tax increase in 2021. You mentioned this to fund these projects then for the next decade or so. So during an economic recession, pandemic, you know, how many cities are wanting to increase taxes? Is that kind of going the other direction? Well, it's, uh, I would put it this way. Anytime you raise taxes, it's not usually popular people sign and say, yeah, let's let's do that. I think the choice whether to increase revenue always should be based on what do we need it for? What is the revenue going to do for us if we have it? What does our community look like? If we don't have it? What does our community look like and we'll be talking
Unknown Speaker
About that, and the weeks and months ahead as we move forward. It's kind of one step at a time. We have the 2020. Investments beginning, the 2021. budget is being reviewed this week. And then after that, I think it'll be time to look at revenue. I did when I when I first proposed this in January, I proposed a point 5% to because I felt that was needed and appropriate to take the steps the city needs to create economic opportunity to protect racial justice to do our part on climate justice, improve our public transit system and our infrastructure and all that. We've cut it in half in light of some of the economic pressures. I do think it's interesting for people to know as well that the county of Monroe and these are countywide taxes, has the lowest tax rate of all the counties next to us of the seven counties in our region. Monroe County, which pretty clearly is the most progressive and liberal county of all those counties.
Unknown Speaker
has the lowest income tax rate. That means other counties have raised their taxes to do things that they think are important, and we have stayed low. Nobody's in favor of taxes for taxes sake, but it is instructive. Even if we raised our tax this much, we probably will still be the lowest because Oakland County's looking at raising their tax right now to for another purpose. So either way, we're a very low tax jurisdiction. And I think it's going to be a community conversation about is it worth doing now or not?
Unknown Speaker
You know, with budget sessions this week, I know you've talked about social justice initiatives, and there's a consulting group on assessing public safety. Is that are they out of Bloomington? No, that's a consulting group we hired. I think about three years ago, we did a big nationwide request for qualifications and identified a group. I believe they're out of Ohio. I'm sorry, I don't know exactly. They're not Bloomington I know. And we've used them over the last three years.
Unknown Speaker
To help us do kind of a third party, outsider, their national expert look at how how Bloomington city government is organized and how to improve it. We've, we've used it in a number of ways to improve our departments reorganize, restructure, align them differently. We're proposing a new engineering department this year because of that, we're proposing an assembly of the Parking Services because of that, and they did also starting last year review public safety and made some recommendations about the public safety divisions to
Unknown Speaker
how much has local organizations going I'm kind of trying to steer more towards the Social Justice Initiative part of this, how much have local organizations you know, Black Lives Matter, like that have been part of to able to be a consultant to the city in these types of initiatives? Well, we have give you another example where black lives matter has been very involved.
Unknown Speaker
And continues to be as a group, which was the farmers market. Last summer, of course, we had a lot of issues that the community cared a lot about. In connection with the farmers market. We brought in a group out of Ohio State, which is a, again, a national expertise. This one didn't cost us a dime, brought them in to help look at how does a community deal with racial issues like we're having in the farmers market, and they, this group led a process with some local involvement as well intensively involving Black Lives Matter and many, many voices to talk about what we do at the farmers market. And it's actually that process which is leading to a big step, I think in the next weeks or months to create a community wide
Unknown Speaker
taskforce that will dig into racial structural racism and racial issues. This is not going to be a city led group but it's a city supported group. Community led that will say what what do we want to talk about with public education with public
Unknown Speaker
Safety with criminal justice, with healthcare with housing with jobs. How does structural racism affect us now and that will be a very inclusive process with groups like Black Lives Matter, NAACP or
Unknown Speaker
campus groups and others that will be very involved in helping us look at that as a community.
Unknown Speaker
I know we're getting short on time. We have four questions I want to get to from people who have emailed in anything new on your plan to bring city wide broadband to Bloomington boy hasn't had been clear how important broadband capacity is over the last five or six months. We are continuing to explore we were not able and i i would think I think the national election in 2016 did not help us in moving toward a citywide infrastructure. We're continuing to explore that even even now. But what we did do when that when we couldn't get a full
Unknown Speaker
city wide build done. We continue to ask our providers at&t and Comcast and smithville to improve services. But we did do a digital survey, particularly a digital equity survey in the spring is actually before COVID hit, we didn't know it was coming. And that digital survey was just released a week or two ago showed us things like one out of eight low income households has reports zero connection to the Internet, never 50% of senior and low income households report. I don't have the skills I need to be comfortable and effective in engaging in digital commerce or digital activities. We had households report homework problems. So this is helping us identify where are where there are some challenges with with broadband access, and we've actually created in recover forward a small grant program to try to help with partners in the community, boys and girls club area. 10 on aging.
Unknown Speaker
Others like that to do, how can we chip away at these digital equity issues? So we're working on it, but it's still a big problem. Sure. Lee wants to know about the rules about masks on the Beeline trail.
Unknown Speaker
Well, Beeline trail is really treated like any park or any sidewalk, individuals under the state now and of course, we had that local order earlier required to wear a mask. Generally, unless you're at home with your household, or your outdoors and not within six feet of people. Or there. There are other special circumstances that can be relevant, but generally you are to have a mask if you're in any public place indoors, or if you're going to be closer than six feet to people. So question on the Beeline is generally if you're going to stay six feet apart from people other than your own household members. You're okay not with a mask but if you may be pausing and getting a cup of coffee or stopping and chatting with people
Unknown Speaker
You really should have a mess. So I would recommend and I try always to carry a mask, even if you're outdoors exercising or walking.
Unknown Speaker
And georgeanne wants to know if police officers are required to wear masks. Generally Yes, police officers are required to wear masks just like all of our city employees. There are some differences for public safety employees like firefighters and police officers in how they engage with the public in certain circumstances where it's deemed not appropriate to wear a mask. You know, police officers are often entering a situation where it's really important that they be identifiable and identify quickly. But generally, yes, now our police officers do single car patrols so they're when they're alone in their car, they need not wear a mask, but when they're interacting with the public in general within six feet, and and if they're indoors, they should be wearing masks. Alright, we're short on time is there any
Unknown Speaker
Any other announcements or things that you'd like to, to say before we go for next month? I think all I'd say is, I hope everybody will register and vote. It's really important this year. I'm urging people there. There are ways to do mail and voting. You can check with us on that. But please be sure to vote, it's really important that we move in the right directions and everybody participate in both this year plus get counted in the census. If you haven't been, that's really important, too.
Unknown Speaker
Is there a deadline for the census? I know that the I don't know that there's an exact deadline. But I know if you haven't answered by now You're late. And you should reach out to the census by phone or on the web and say you want to get yourself counted. They will contact you I hope if you haven't read if you haven't filled out the census form, but if you haven't done it yet, it's time you're late behind the curve. And if anyone has any other questions, not only for Mayor Hamilton but our other cities, please feel
Unknown Speaker
Feel free to email us news at Indiana public media.org or you can tweet us at ask the mayor. Mayor Hamilton, thank you for being with us today. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Joe, and thanks for everybody following the news. I will see you next time. Bye Bye. Take care.
