Bloomington closes Rail Trail encampments, adds homelessness coordinator in 2025 budget
Another homeless encampment has been cleared in Bloomington, this time along the Rail Trail south of Country Club Drive and North of Gordon Pike.
At a news conference in the first week of August, Bloomington mayor Kerry Thomson said that the encampments along the Rail Trail, which had 30-day notices posted towards early July, were still on course for removal “in the next couple of weeks.”
Wednesday morning (Aug. 21) was when the city deployed workers from several departments to remove the belongings of those who were camping there and to make them leave.
On the same day, Thomson’s administration released the 2025 draft budget. In next year’s spending plan there are just five new positions, but one of them is a homelessness coordinator, working out of the mayor’s office.
When the B Square visited the area around 11 a.m. city workers from several departments had stacked people’s belongings along the road that runs along the Rail Trail, so they could move their personal property off the city-owned premises.
Mutual aid volunteers, among them Sidd, with a group called Help Ourselves were helping to move people’s belongings south, to the parking lot of the Unity of Bloomington spiritual center, at Gordon Pike and Rogers Street. From there, the idea was eventually to use a truck to help move people and their stuff to other locations.
Sidd told the B Square that there were four groups of people, totalling around 10 people, who had still been living in the encampments along the trail.
That was consistent with the report from city communications manager Desiree DeMolina, responding to an emailed B Square question. She wrote that when they arrived Wednesday morning, Bloomington police officers encountered 10 people still at the site. When The B Square was onsite, there was one squad car visible.
According to DeMolina, the city’s risk management team had two staff members onsite, while about 15 workers for city of Bloomington utilities (CBU) were present at any given time. The parks department had around 10 people at the sites at any given time, and the public works department had just a few, Demolina wrote.
Different police officers cycled through the site during the day. Two caseworkers from Centerstone were present and there was one SCCAP (South Central Community Action Program) volunteer who arrived, according to DeMolina.
Over the last several weeks, outreach workers came from HealthNet, Beacon, Inc., and Centerstone, Demolina wrote. It was the lack of adequate case workers from service providers like HealthHet and Centerstone that has been cited by the mayor’s office as one reason for the delay in clearing the encampments.
Wednesday’s Rail Trail clearance is at least the fourth significant encampment closure since the start of the year, when Bloomington mayor Kerry Thomson first took office. The first came in early January, at a city-owned property on the northwest corner of the intersection of Fairview Street and Patterson Drive. The second closure came at the end of January, on a wooded stretch of city-owned property behind Wheeler Mission.
The third encampment clearance came in early May on public and private property at the southwest edge of Switchyard Park.
On Wednesday morning, The B Square spoke with a 44-year old woman from Mississippi, whose belongings were mostly packed up, except for those inside her tent. She was accompanied by her dog, Chi (pronounced “Shy”). The woman said she’d been living in that general area, around the south end of Switchyard Park, since the end of January 2023.
She survived the late June windstorm camped out at the same spot where she was set up Wednesday morning.
The Mississippi woman said that over the last few weeks, Sidd, with Help Ourselves, had been bringing food for her, and the Monroe County Humane Association had been bringing food for Chi. On Wednesday, Sidd wheeled a collapsible wagon down the trail to her spot. It looked like it would take at least a half dozen trips with the wagon to move her belongings to the Unity of Bloomington parking lot.
The mayor’s draft budget proposal will be presented to the city council over the course of four days starting next week on Aug. 26 at 5:30 p.m.
Thomson’s draft budget cites the Heading Home Action Plan for Unsheltered Homelessness, which was revealed at the press conference a couple of weeks ago. But the narrative in the budget does not yet point to full funding of the Heading Home Action Plan.
From the draft 2025 budget: “As the Heading Home Action Plan for Unsheltered Homelessness has only just been released, work will be ongoing, beyond this budget, to identify specific funding sources and projects for the City. Departmental budgets contain elements of our response. Additional appropriations may be requested later.”
Reducing unsheltered homelessness (aka street homelessness) is a goal listed in the draft budget for the CFRD (Community and Family Resources Department) as well as the HAND (Housing and Neighborhood Development) Department.
In the draft budget, reducing unsheltered homelessness is laid out as a goal for the mayor’s office.
