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Overdose Map Controversy Raises Questions About Transparency

Bloomington Revealed is a city-run website that was the result of recommendations from the Safety, Civility and Justice initiative.

Bloomington’s mayor regularly says his administration is built on transparency, but some residents say a number of recent controversies show that’s not really the case.

The latest incident involves data published on a city website called Bloomington Revealed. It included the exact addresses of fatal overdoses.

When April Adkins logged onto Facebook last week, she was shocked to learn of the overdose map. Her in-laws' address was included in the information because her brother-in-law died of an overdose in 2015.  Adkins says her husband also struggled with addiction before dying of pancreatitis in 2011.

"The feeling of seeing their address on that website was like this is very unfair," she says. "At first I really thought about my family. That was my main concern. But then I started thinking, well, there’s a lot of families on this website that are represented by these dots that look like the sex offender registry."

The city says the map was intended to educate the community and show that overdoses aren’t confined to one area of town.

"But we also learned last week after this data was up for many months that the addresses of individual deaths was very sensitive information," says Mayor John Hamilton. "And that seems obvious now. It is, of course."

The city responded to critics initially by saying the information was public record and it wouldn’t be taken down. It instead planned to show locations for the overdoses, but make the exact addresses available elsewhere on the site.

After the situation reached a boiling point, the Hamilton administration decided to remove the location data from the website, but in the process, mistakenly posted the names and ages of the deceased.

That information has also now been scrubbed from Bloomington Revealed.

The mayor says balancing public health data and privacy concerns is complicated.

"We will continue to work on this," Hamilton says. "From the beginning of my administration we’ve been focused on transparency."

But some of the people on the front lines of addressing the opioid crisis say that’s no longer how they feel.

"We hope that in the future there’s a real involvement of people most affected," says Chris Abert, director of the Indiana Recovery Alliance. "Not as a response to policies that are enacted, but before those policies are enacted and that that’s documented."

Abert says the Bloomington Revealed controversy is one of several instances of the administration not having an open conversation with the community before making a decision. He points to backlash over the city’s purchase of an armored vehicle and a proposed moratorium on new addiction treatment centers.

Abert says when city leaders are drafting policy or sharing data, they need to include those directly affected in the conversation.

"What would be best practice is that when they have these meetings, 51 percent of the people attending those meetings have direct, immediate experience with whatever the policy is," he says.

Adkins says she felt the city brushed off her concerns about the overdose map until she helped plan a protest outside the mayor’s house. She’s glad the administration changed its mind and removed the information from the website.

"Am I satisfied that things like this will not occur in the future? No," she says. "I’m pretty confident that the mayor’s administration will go on without public input on several different issues."

During Noon Edition Friday, Beverly Calender-Anderson, the city's director of community and family resources department, said the city will work as partners with the Monroe County Health Department and organizations  like the Indiana Recovery Alliance. She says, based on task force recommendations, the city will provide a basic mental health and substance abuse training program for 160 residents.

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