Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to ask the mayor on WFIU. I'm Joe Hren, it's the third week of the month already. So here we are at city hall in Bloomington with Mayor Kerry Thomson, Hello and welcome.
Speaker 2
Hi, Joe. Thanks for having me again. Beautiful day.
Speaker 1
Graduation just ended a couple weeks ago. Bloomington goes into summer mode. But just talking to Brandon Sackbun in Terre Haute Mayor, and was talking about his strategies, or maybe even the state strategies, of trying to keep, you know, brain drain from happening. You know, how do you keep graduates staying in Indiana. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2
Well, I think it's one of the most important things that Bloomington can do. We know nationally that 62% of college grads want to stay where they graduated from college, and so that means we're not we're not keeping our share here in Bloomington, and so you will see in the coming months. First of all, I hope that folks that are concerned about this are going online and taking our branding survey. How we tell Bloomington story. How we tell that story is also a lot about what we need to attract the people that we want to really stay here and ultimately, doing that is what's going to close our wage gap, because cluster development all depends on getting the right population here, so employing the people that are already here with better wages and attracting enough new business of the right kind in order to really do some sector development. So that branding survey is really important, so that we can address this very important population of graduates who are leaving, or even the ones that we get to stay frequently, they leave after they turn about 25 so we're on a path to try to keep more of those folks. Yeah.
Speaker 1
So you mentioned this branding initiative, I think, just announced a couple days ago with civic brand. It's an agency that collaborates with cities, districts, organizations to develop, implement branding public public engagement strategies. So I assume there's many branches, though of this that you're hoping to get from this? Oh,
Speaker 2
absolutely. You know when I think, if you're in Bloomington, I hope you love Bloomington. But what we know is that it takes many of us 10 minutes to tell somebody else What's so special about Bloomington. So we're hoping to equip our city with exactly how to talk about that in a concise way, but importantly, we're we're hoping to tell the world why they should be visiting Bloomington and why they might want to consider living here at some point. And so it's not just the young professionals. You know, we're very popular community for retiring, and it's really everything in between. And with the new convention center going in, now is the time to start planning your conventions and planning to come visit Bloomington. Yeah,
Speaker 1
groundbreaking, and just That's right, a few weeks. Super exciting. Yeah, you mentioned the well, we just talked about a survey. There's another survey. Bloomington parking systems are doing a review of parking around downtown. Because, I mean, of course, you have meter there's surface lots, there are parking garages. And I took the survey, and it was, it was interesting, because it asked you questions, questions like, did you know that the garages are less expensive than street parking? I know that many people know that. So what are you hoping to get from that survey? Garages
Speaker 2
are half price, half price, right? I was just in a meeting, and they were noting the importance of hosting a meeting where there's parking, and I had to tell people, you know, both of these locations are right next to city garages, and garages are for parking, and they're underutilized sometimes in Bloomington, at other times they're full. But what we really want to know is, what are we what are our residents and visitors hoping to get out of parking in Bloomington? Why they're not using garages sometimes? What? What they need to be incentivized to use those. And you know, sort of how close do you need to be to your ultimate destination? So that's the parking survey. I also will put a plug in that Bloomington transit is starting a new door to door downtown circulator, really, but it's a car that'll pick just you up, and it's on demand. But if it's not being used on demand, it'll be circulating through the garages and downtown just to pick people up and take them closer to where they're going.
Speaker 1
Is that app based? Yeah, it's part of our
Unknown Speaker
blink be link system. Nice. Nice
Speaker 1
last time we talked about Senate Bill one, there's some relief in property taxes, but now local governments are starting to see the tax code, maybe starting to understand it more, and hearing maybe how hard some cities, especially small towns, will get hit with revenue. But Brandon sackbund last week said, except for the business community, they're getting the bigger handouts is, was this a fair budget?
Speaker 2
I'm not in favor of SB one. So to answer your question, no, I don't think it was fair. What this does is direct more money to the state and put the onus on taxes to individuals rather than to the larger businesses. So there's a there's a more significant low end of business, personal property tax used to be just 10s of 1000s of dollars. Now it's 2 million. The property owners, homeowners are going to get small tax deduction, but what they'll probably end up doing in many communities is paying a lot more local income tax than what they're used to. This is really important to me, because we have a clear bimodal distribution of wealth in Bloomington. And, you know, we just talked about trying to increase wages. The goal of that is to really close the wage gap as well. And if we're, if we are taxing more these individuals, especially at the low end there, they will eventually come to a point where they can't afford their basic services, and many of them already are. We're getting more calls about just needing basic food and shelter, and so I take it very seriously our tax rate, and we will be carefully considering whether or not we're going to make up the loss with local income tax
Speaker 1
Yeah. And there seems to be another wrinkle with that too, that local income tax increases wouldn't be allowed to 2027 That's right, that kind of adds to what you're trying to do, and hoping that maybe next year, legislators will come back to session to add some amendments to what we're seeing now. That's
Speaker 2
right, yeah. So there, there are some gaps to fill. The other important thing to know is that our bonding capacity and our bonding ability has been tremendously impacted. And so last year in our budget, we did some capital projects with geo bonds now, and we did a two year geo bond, just to be conservative. Now, you can only have one live and and it has to have a one year break in between, which means that we will have, we have no ability to fund future capital projects for three more years. So that's that's very serious for the city of Bloomington. So
Speaker 1
I wanted to dig deeper on your statements that you issued about federal immigration enforcement a few weeks ago, and of course, that states limited authority the city has with this, which is true, offering immigration legal help through organizations, a recent op ed in the HT states that the mayor could do more in protecting rights. Do you want to dig deeper into into your statements?
Speaker 2
Well, I think my statements stand on their own. We are doing what we can and and, you know, we have some great organizations in town, and, frankly, great individuals as well, that are doing legal work and doing advocacy work. And you know, the role of our police department is to is to do civil safety. The ICE agents are federal.
Speaker 1
Former Mayor John Fernandez appointed CEO of the mill. Sounds like the hotel is getting closer to fruition as alleyways are being vacated for the proposed building. Are there any more announcements on other economic development in the trades district?
Speaker 2
Really first? Just want to say congratulations and thank you to John Fernandez for stepping into that role. The community is really lucky to have him. He, you know, was former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for the United States, right? So he's done this on large scale. He, through his leadership, we have been really actively developing trades. The Forge is signing leases rapidly, so I think they're going to be full before too long here. And of course, we have our first tenant now in the trades district parking garage. So so things are really looking up there. And that's exactly what a city needs when, when we want to turn around. Our economic development, we need a very focused geographic area, but we also need leadership that really works well together, and with the university's 2030 plan, the CCC grant, John leading the mill and my focus on economic development from the mayor's seat, we really have the trifecta of leadership that we need to advance things in some tangible ways for our community.
Speaker 1
So moving a little bit further down the B-Line we just did a article about a chemical contamination cleanup underway at Hopewell neighborhood site. This was news to me when I heard it was it to you,
Speaker 2
no so anytime you're using HUD funding on a property, you have to do an environmental review, and if it comes back with anything suspicious, any past uses that could be contaminants, et cetera, then you have to do soil samples and continue. So this process can take quite a long time. When I was developing with Habitat, I got very used to this process. We knew there was a filling station there, so it's very clear that this property probably was going to have some issues, and we actually planned a lot of the development around that so people wouldn't be living even, even after cleanup. People won't be living in the the cleaned up places. But it's, it's actually, you know, I have come to know it's actually quite a gift to have these environmental reviews, because we end up selling properties where people know a lot more, and we can guarantee the the safety of the soil there in ways that homeowners that don't buy with with HUD funds probably never know. We had a habitat site that I had to do a complete cleanup on because a house had burned a block away, and there were remnants of those chemicals in the soil. So we never would have known that if somebody else had, you know, just a run of the mill homeowner had purchased that lot. So that's just an example of of things that can happen. And so we weren't surprised. It was expected. We're just trying to be transparent with what's going
Speaker 1
on. Yeah. And so last time we were here, there was a grand opening of a park in that area. Yes, what? So that kind of kicks off that whole area as well. What should we see next? Because that's been under construction, of course, the hospital, the former hospital site, coming down there are now roads and sidewalks and infrastructure, that's
Speaker 2
right. So the next thing you're going to see are residences, and so we have a team really actively working on designing the final plats there and laying out lots that'll make it easier for developers to take on the project, and we'll give them a very clear vision. And I think we've, you know, we've asked developers to give us proposals on this. Our part in this is the city hasn't been really clear about what we're looking for, and so we need to do that for the development community, because otherwise they're just really drawing blind, and so we we will put out some more clear paths, and we're also looking to really de risk this participation for builders and developers. So we'll be having some conversations with builders about what can make this easier for them and and then we should be off to the races with building some residences.
Speaker 1
So it's summertime in Bloomington. I know this is usually a time to the city tries to get a lot of things done. We do what? What's in store? What should the people that live here gonna have to go through this summer? Not go through you can look forward to some improvements. So the streets look great from last all that paving last year. Yeah,
Speaker 2
the paving last year was a real gift. I you know, during the process, people, people didn't love it. And you know, I apologize. We know we'll be in the way we try to do it at times when our population has gone down a bit. So our pothole crews have filled more than 1100 potholes. I think I was part of about 10 of those yesterday. And so
Speaker 1
I'm going to embed that into the Facebook post. Okay, for this, so people can see that you were out there. Yeah. What was it like? It was
Speaker 2
hot. It's hot, yeah, but there's a lot more to filling a pothole than I ever knew. And I had always been sort of curious about the, you know, the structure of that, and so there's a lot of clean out that has to be done before you fill the pothole, etc. So I. You know we're we'll be working on some, some roads, again, planned projects. So those are all on our GIS system, on the city's website, and you can look at those in real time to see what's happening in your area. You can also expect that in dot will be doing its share of projects as well. So we have been hearing plenty about the new stop sign at 10th and Park Ridge is that? Is that the name of that road? I think so, yeah, the other side of it's called Park Ridge Smith. Maybe there. That's an indot project. That was an indot decision. People either love it or hate it, but we don't take credit or blame for that. Wasn't temporary to I don't think so.
Speaker 1
No, oh no. Okay, yeah, something different, yeah. Okay, so
Speaker 2
you can, you can expect many things, and I've gotten just in the past, you know, three days since the students started to leave, I've gotten lots of comments like, hey, Mayor, is this like, Is this the time that everything slows down for you? No, this is the time that we, you know, push the accelerator. So we did lots of planning for what we do during the summer, and the administration has lots of work to carry out throughout the summer. One
Speaker 1
minute left. Is there any other special announcements or anything you'd like to say,
Speaker 2
just really look for the amazing programs happening in the parks. Our pools open on Memorial Day weekend. There's a lot of fun to be had concerts in the park, all of the best of Bloomington and I want to give a shout out to our hospitality industry. They did a great job with graduation. And to all of you who sort of got out of practice going out to eat this past weekend and maybe around little five, go back out and support our hospitality industry.
Speaker 1
Thank you so much. Hope to see you next month. Thanks, Joe.
Hello and welcome to ask the mayor on WFIU. I'm Joe Hren, it's the third week of the month already. So here we are at city hall in Bloomington with Mayor Kerry Thomson, Hello and welcome.
Speaker 2
Hi, Joe. Thanks for having me again. Beautiful day.
Speaker 1
Graduation just ended a couple weeks ago. Bloomington goes into summer mode. But just talking to Brandon Sackbun in Terre Haute Mayor, and was talking about his strategies, or maybe even the state strategies, of trying to keep, you know, brain drain from happening. You know, how do you keep graduates staying in Indiana. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2
Well, I think it's one of the most important things that Bloomington can do. We know nationally that 62% of college grads want to stay where they graduated from college, and so that means we're not we're not keeping our share here in Bloomington, and so you will see in the coming months. First of all, I hope that folks that are concerned about this are going online and taking our branding survey. How we tell Bloomington story. How we tell that story is also a lot about what we need to attract the people that we want to really stay here and ultimately, doing that is what's going to close our wage gap, because cluster development all depends on getting the right population here, so employing the people that are already here with better wages and attracting enough new business of the right kind in order to really do some sector development. So that branding survey is really important, so that we can address this very important population of graduates who are leaving, or even the ones that we get to stay frequently, they leave after they turn about 25 so we're on a path to try to keep more of those folks. Yeah.
Speaker 1
So you mentioned this branding initiative, I think, just announced a couple days ago with civic brand. It's an agency that collaborates with cities, districts, organizations to develop, implement branding public public engagement strategies. So I assume there's many branches, though of this that you're hoping to get from this? Oh,
Speaker 2
absolutely. You know when I think, if you're in Bloomington, I hope you love Bloomington. But what we know is that it takes many of us 10 minutes to tell somebody else What's so special about Bloomington. So we're hoping to equip our city with exactly how to talk about that in a concise way, but importantly, we're we're hoping to tell the world why they should be visiting Bloomington and why they might want to consider living here at some point. And so it's not just the young professionals. You know, we're very popular community for retiring, and it's really everything in between. And with the new convention center going in, now is the time to start planning your conventions and planning to come visit Bloomington. Yeah,
Speaker 1
groundbreaking, and just That's right, a few weeks. Super exciting. Yeah, you mentioned the well, we just talked about a survey. There's another survey. Bloomington parking systems are doing a review of parking around downtown. Because, I mean, of course, you have meter there's surface lots, there are parking garages. And I took the survey, and it was, it was interesting, because it asked you questions, questions like, did you know that the garages are less expensive than street parking? I know that many people know that. So what are you hoping to get from that survey? Garages
Speaker 2
are half price, half price, right? I was just in a meeting, and they were noting the importance of hosting a meeting where there's parking, and I had to tell people, you know, both of these locations are right next to city garages, and garages are for parking, and they're underutilized sometimes in Bloomington, at other times they're full. But what we really want to know is, what are we what are our residents and visitors hoping to get out of parking in Bloomington? Why they're not using garages sometimes? What? What they need to be incentivized to use those. And you know, sort of how close do you need to be to your ultimate destination? So that's the parking survey. I also will put a plug in that Bloomington transit is starting a new door to door downtown circulator, really, but it's a car that'll pick just you up, and it's on demand. But if it's not being used on demand, it'll be circulating through the garages and downtown just to pick people up and take them closer to where they're going.
Speaker 1
Is that app based? Yeah, it's part of our
Unknown Speaker
blink be link system. Nice. Nice
Speaker 1
last time we talked about Senate Bill one, there's some relief in property taxes, but now local governments are starting to see the tax code, maybe starting to understand it more, and hearing maybe how hard some cities, especially small towns, will get hit with revenue. But Brandon sackbund last week said, except for the business community, they're getting the bigger handouts is, was this a fair budget?
Speaker 2
I'm not in favor of SB one. So to answer your question, no, I don't think it was fair. What this does is direct more money to the state and put the onus on taxes to individuals rather than to the larger businesses. So there's a there's a more significant low end of business, personal property tax used to be just 10s of 1000s of dollars. Now it's 2 million. The property owners, homeowners are going to get small tax deduction, but what they'll probably end up doing in many communities is paying a lot more local income tax than what they're used to. This is really important to me, because we have a clear bimodal distribution of wealth in Bloomington. And, you know, we just talked about trying to increase wages. The goal of that is to really close the wage gap as well. And if we're, if we are taxing more these individuals, especially at the low end there, they will eventually come to a point where they can't afford their basic services, and many of them already are. We're getting more calls about just needing basic food and shelter, and so I take it very seriously our tax rate, and we will be carefully considering whether or not we're going to make up the loss with local income tax
Speaker 1
Yeah. And there seems to be another wrinkle with that too, that local income tax increases wouldn't be allowed to 2027 That's right, that kind of adds to what you're trying to do, and hoping that maybe next year, legislators will come back to session to add some amendments to what we're seeing now. That's
Speaker 2
right, yeah. So there, there are some gaps to fill. The other important thing to know is that our bonding capacity and our bonding ability has been tremendously impacted. And so last year in our budget, we did some capital projects with geo bonds now, and we did a two year geo bond, just to be conservative. Now, you can only have one live and and it has to have a one year break in between, which means that we will have, we have no ability to fund future capital projects for three more years. So that's that's very serious for the city of Bloomington. So
Speaker 1
I wanted to dig deeper on your statements that you issued about federal immigration enforcement a few weeks ago, and of course, that states limited authority the city has with this, which is true, offering immigration legal help through organizations, a recent op ed in the HT states that the mayor could do more in protecting rights. Do you want to dig deeper into into your statements?
Speaker 2
Well, I think my statements stand on their own. We are doing what we can and and, you know, we have some great organizations in town, and, frankly, great individuals as well, that are doing legal work and doing advocacy work. And you know, the role of our police department is to is to do civil safety. The ICE agents are federal.
Speaker 1
Former Mayor John Fernandez appointed CEO of the mill. Sounds like the hotel is getting closer to fruition as alleyways are being vacated for the proposed building. Are there any more announcements on other economic development in the trades district?
Speaker 2
Really first? Just want to say congratulations and thank you to John Fernandez for stepping into that role. The community is really lucky to have him. He, you know, was former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for the United States, right? So he's done this on large scale. He, through his leadership, we have been really actively developing trades. The Forge is signing leases rapidly, so I think they're going to be full before too long here. And of course, we have our first tenant now in the trades district parking garage. So so things are really looking up there. And that's exactly what a city needs when, when we want to turn around. Our economic development, we need a very focused geographic area, but we also need leadership that really works well together, and with the university's 2030 plan, the CCC grant, John leading the mill and my focus on economic development from the mayor's seat, we really have the trifecta of leadership that we need to advance things in some tangible ways for our community.
Speaker 1
So moving a little bit further down the B-Line we just did a article about a chemical contamination cleanup underway at Hopewell neighborhood site. This was news to me when I heard it was it to you,
Speaker 2
no so anytime you're using HUD funding on a property, you have to do an environmental review, and if it comes back with anything suspicious, any past uses that could be contaminants, et cetera, then you have to do soil samples and continue. So this process can take quite a long time. When I was developing with Habitat, I got very used to this process. We knew there was a filling station there, so it's very clear that this property probably was going to have some issues, and we actually planned a lot of the development around that so people wouldn't be living even, even after cleanup. People won't be living in the the cleaned up places. But it's, it's actually, you know, I have come to know it's actually quite a gift to have these environmental reviews, because we end up selling properties where people know a lot more, and we can guarantee the the safety of the soil there in ways that homeowners that don't buy with with HUD funds probably never know. We had a habitat site that I had to do a complete cleanup on because a house had burned a block away, and there were remnants of those chemicals in the soil. So we never would have known that if somebody else had, you know, just a run of the mill homeowner had purchased that lot. So that's just an example of of things that can happen. And so we weren't surprised. It was expected. We're just trying to be transparent with what's going
Speaker 1
on. Yeah. And so last time we were here, there was a grand opening of a park in that area. Yes, what? So that kind of kicks off that whole area as well. What should we see next? Because that's been under construction, of course, the hospital, the former hospital site, coming down there are now roads and sidewalks and infrastructure, that's
Speaker 2
right. So the next thing you're going to see are residences, and so we have a team really actively working on designing the final plats there and laying out lots that'll make it easier for developers to take on the project, and we'll give them a very clear vision. And I think we've, you know, we've asked developers to give us proposals on this. Our part in this is the city hasn't been really clear about what we're looking for, and so we need to do that for the development community, because otherwise they're just really drawing blind, and so we we will put out some more clear paths, and we're also looking to really de risk this participation for builders and developers. So we'll be having some conversations with builders about what can make this easier for them and and then we should be off to the races with building some residences.
Speaker 1
So it's summertime in Bloomington. I know this is usually a time to the city tries to get a lot of things done. We do what? What's in store? What should the people that live here gonna have to go through this summer? Not go through you can look forward to some improvements. So the streets look great from last all that paving last year. Yeah,
Speaker 2
the paving last year was a real gift. I you know, during the process, people, people didn't love it. And you know, I apologize. We know we'll be in the way we try to do it at times when our population has gone down a bit. So our pothole crews have filled more than 1100 potholes. I think I was part of about 10 of those yesterday. And so
Speaker 1
I'm going to embed that into the Facebook post. Okay, for this, so people can see that you were out there. Yeah. What was it like? It was
Speaker 2
hot. It's hot, yeah, but there's a lot more to filling a pothole than I ever knew. And I had always been sort of curious about the, you know, the structure of that, and so there's a lot of clean out that has to be done before you fill the pothole, etc. So I. You know we're we'll be working on some, some roads, again, planned projects. So those are all on our GIS system, on the city's website, and you can look at those in real time to see what's happening in your area. You can also expect that in dot will be doing its share of projects as well. So we have been hearing plenty about the new stop sign at 10th and Park Ridge is that? Is that the name of that road? I think so, yeah, the other side of it's called Park Ridge Smith. Maybe there. That's an indot project. That was an indot decision. People either love it or hate it, but we don't take credit or blame for that. Wasn't temporary to I don't think so.
Speaker 1
No, oh no. Okay, yeah, something different, yeah. Okay, so
Speaker 2
you can, you can expect many things, and I've gotten just in the past, you know, three days since the students started to leave, I've gotten lots of comments like, hey, Mayor, is this like, Is this the time that everything slows down for you? No, this is the time that we, you know, push the accelerator. So we did lots of planning for what we do during the summer, and the administration has lots of work to carry out throughout the summer. One
Speaker 1
minute left. Is there any other special announcements or anything you'd like to say,
Speaker 2
just really look for the amazing programs happening in the parks. Our pools open on Memorial Day weekend. There's a lot of fun to be had concerts in the park, all of the best of Bloomington and I want to give a shout out to our hospitality industry. They did a great job with graduation. And to all of you who sort of got out of practice going out to eat this past weekend and maybe around little five, go back out and support our hospitality industry.
Speaker 1
Thank you so much. Hope to see you next month. Thanks, Joe.
