140-acre rezone to be taken up by Bloomington’s city council again on May 15
A rezone request for about 140 acres in the southwest part of Bloomington got a second round of scrutiny from the city council last Wednesday.
The first council deliberations took place on April 17.
A postponement until the council’s May 15 meeting got unanimous support.
It sounds like some councilmembers could be ready to take a vote in mid-May. But there’s still another month before a 90-day window closes, on June 26. After that, the new zoning would be automatically enacted, if the council did not act to deny it.
The 90-day clock started ticking after the 7–0 positive recommendation was certified to the city’s plan commission, on March 28.
The Summit District planned unit development (PUD) could allow construction of an estimated 4,250 units of housing in five new neighborhoods, to be built out over the course of the next 10 years.
A PUD (planned unit development) zoning district is a kind of customized zoning that uses an existing zoning district as a baseline, but diverges from it, in order to deal with challenges that are unique to the district.
There still does not seem to be any strong overt opposition to the rezone expressed by councilmembers, through two meetings worth of deliberation.
Wednesday’s discussion included some “reasonable conditions,” which the council can place on the rezone, in order to ensure specific outcomes. The council typically votes on each reasonable condition separately, ahead of the final vote on the whole PUD. The final vote on the PUD will include all the conditions that had majority support.
Councilmember Andy Ruff did express some reservations about the sheer size of the rezone. And towards the end of Wednesday’s meeting, Ruff’s commentary raised a question about what counts as an actual public benefit, when it comes to a PUD.
Under the city’s unified development ordinance (UDO), a PUD is supposed to provide a “substantial additional benefit to the City that would not otherwise be required…” by the ordinary standards of the UDO.
One of the benefits that the Summit District PUD offers is that in some of its areas, a project has to include 20 percent of the units at or below 120-percent of area median income (AMI), in order to qualify for certain incentives, like increased height. The rest of the PUD requires 15 percent just like in the UDO.
Some councilmembers have pointed to the AMI for Bloomington, as calculated by HUD, as inconsistent with the idea of a commonsense understanding of incomes that correspond to “affordable” housing. In 2024, the HUD calculation for Bloomington’s AMI is $106,100.
Based on that figure, HUD calculates income limits for different percentages of the AMI, based on family size. For example, for a family of one, the 80-percent AMI level translates to $55,650. For a family of five, the 80-percent AMI level translates to $79,450.
Instead of a 120-percent AMI requirement for the Summit District’s incentives, some councilmembers are mulling the idea of a reasonable condition that would require a lower percent of the AMI. For example, a reasonable condition that has been floated, but not yet put to a vote, would require Summit District’s incentives to start with 15 percent of units at or below 90 percent of AMI.
Travis Vencel, with Sullivan Development, asked the council not to put Summit District at an “unfair disadvantage” compared to other areas that are being developed in the city. Vencel asked: Why would a developer choose to build in Summit District, where 90-percent AMI units have to be constructed, when elsewhere in the city the same incentives could be achieved with 120-percent AMI units?
Vencel pointed out that a requirement of lower-percentage AMI units puts pressure on the other units—besides those required to hit the AMI standard—to be even more expensive. The way the “affordable units” are funded is by building more expensive units and transferring the value from one to the other, Vencel said.
Councilmember Matt Flaherty picked up on the point, saying that he wanted to see an analysis of the impact of requiring 90-percent AMI units on the affordability of the other units, that are not subject to the AMI standard.
In his remarks towards the end of the meeting, Ruff picked up on Vencel’s point that by requiring lower-percentage AMI units, the impact is that the other units will necessarily be accessible only to a higher income bracket than they otherwise would be. So he questioned how that translates into an actual public benefit—when a developer is not actually making a sacrifice, but rather shifting the cost to other units.
Ruff asked if the public is actually getting a benefit from the “windfall” the council would be creating through a rezone.
The potential reasonable condition on the percentage of AMI that should be used for the Summit District PUD includes a thread that got independent discussion in the context of other issues, like electrical charging stations. That thread is the idea that if a requirement on some topic is baked into the Summit District PUD, then even if the city’s UDO is at some point revised—to make a requirement on the same topic more strict—then the Summit District PUD would escape that UDO revision.
To address that issue, the idea is to write reasonable conditions that say if the UDO is revised, then the PUD has to match the UDO requirement.
For example, the possible reasonable condition on affordable housing includes this statement: “If the City of Bloomington’s UDO is amended to require that PUDs meet an affordability threshold below 90 percent of the HUD area median income for Monroe County, Indiana, then that lower threshold shall apply to this PUD district ordinance.”
And a reasonable condition on electrical charging stations, which the council voted on Wednesday to adopt, includes the phrase: “Electric Vehicle Charging standards in Bloomington Municipal Code Title 20 (as those standards may be amended in the future)…” Title 20 is the city’s UDO.
Councilmember Dave Rollo raised a question about whether the Monroe County Community School Corporation (MCCSC) would need to build another school, due to the increase in population in the district.
Travis Vencel, with Sullivan Development, responded by saying that when he talked to representatives from MCCSC, their concern was that a school would be included in the PUD as an allowed use of land. Vencel said that schools are in the use table for the proposed PUD.
The council’s May 15 meeting starts at the customary time of 6:30 p.m. Details for meeting access will be available on the council’s meeting documents page.
