The Monroe County Community School Corporation (MCCSC) may want to build a new school if the Bloomington City Council approves a proposal to build 4,250 homes on the city’s southwest side.
(Courtesy, Bloomington Plan Commission)
Correction: The council has not yet voted on a condition requiring 15 percent of units be restricted to households earning less than 90 percent of the local area median income.
The Monroe County Community School Corporation (MCCSC) may want to build a new school if the Bloomington City Council approves a proposal to build 4,250 homes on the city’s southwest side.
That’s a new piece of information from a Wednesday city council meeting.
Travis Vencel, who is co-developing the Summit District Planned Urban Development, said MCCSC asked him and partner Tyler Ridge to dedicate space for a potential new school in the project.
“We had a couple of conversations with MCCSC early on in the process,” Vencel told the council. “MCCSC says that there might be a need for an additional school or combination school in this area in the future. They asked that we make sure that the use of schools — be it a primary, secondary, or even advanced education — be included in our land use tables.”
The school could be needed because of the expected population growth this project is expected to bring. While the developers have not cited this figure, council members have said they think 10,000 or more people could move to the area if approved.
Vencel said if MCCSC approached developers about building a new school, they could do so without needing to request a rezone — though they would still have to purchase the land.
But council member Hopi Stosberg said discussing a new school at this point is speculative and not in the council’s purview. She added that MCCSC can responsibly make its own decisions.
“They can manage their own population, and they know best where their population is coming from and how their population is distributed,” Stosberg said.
She continued, “It’s not like, all of a sudden, 10,000 people are going to drop overnight into this district; it will be a slow roll-in of population. That would give, I think, the schools plenty of time to adjust and manage within the population constraints that they have. I want to assure everybody that our school system has that under control.”
The five-neighborhood project would be constructed over 10 years on 138.51 acres of undeveloped land north of RCA Community Park.
It would include single- and multi-family homes, condos, apartments and townhomes — as well as space for businesses, hotels, and a fire station and trailhead. Buildings up to 12 stories high are possible.
Vencel previously told the council it is impossible to mandate a certain number of the housing units be owner-occupied as opposed to rentals.
On Wednesday, the council also approved “reasonable conditions” for the project, one of which requires each neighborhood to include a minimum of 10 percent of units that meet the city's permanent affordability standard.
Another condition requires that the electric vehicle charging standards in the city's Unified Development Ordinance apply to parking areas for all multi-family residential, commercial and mixed-use buildings in the development.
The council is considering but has not yet voted on a condition requiring 15 percent of constructed units to be income-restricted to households earning less than 90 percent of the local area median income.
If that condition were approved, and the city were to amend its Unified Development Ordinance to require that planned urban developments meet an affordability threshold below 90 percent of the area median income, then that lower threshold would apply to this project.
The council could have voted on the proposal on Wednesday but decided to move the item to a third hearing on May 15.
