‘Back on track’: Bloomington mayor commits downtown land for convention host hotel

At its Wednesday (Feb. 18) meeting, the Monroe County capital improvement board (CIB) took a step toward resetting its approach to siting a new convention center host hotel, as CIB president John Whikehart relayed a land-commitment message from Bloomington mayor Kerry Thomson’s administration.

That comes after the host hotel effort seemed completely stalled, when the CIB’s effort to reach a deal with Dora Hospitality ended in early February. The stall-out came after the response to the CIB’s request for transfer of city parcels south of the existing convention center was met with a statement from Bloomington corporation counsel Margie Rice indicating that the city wanted compensation for the property.

From Rice’s message (emphasis in caps in the original) “[N]egotiations must first occur, then we can follow the required processes IF we are able to reach agreement on what real property will be transferred and the price or consideration to be received by the City from the CIB.”

Rice’s indication that price and consideration would first need to be negotiated was at odds with a March 6, 2024 letter she sent to the CIB, which described the south properties as among those that were available for the project, but identified only the Bunger & Robertson property at 4th Street and College Avenue as land that would not be donated, and for which the city wanted to see roughly $7 million in compensation.

Thomson, in an interview with WTIU on Wednesday, walked back Rice’s more recent written statement about negotiations for price and consideration on the south parcels. Journalist Joe Hren echoed Rice’s statement, when he said to Thomson during the interview: “But the city is asking for negotiations and pricing.”

Responding to Hren, Thomson said, “Well, we actually haven’t asked for negotiations, but we have two different public entities that own those parcels of land.”

Whikehart told CIB members on Wednesday that Thomson has pledged to provide key parcels—city-owned land immediately south of the existing convention center—at no cost to the CIB.

A joint letter from Thomson and Whikehart, that was slated to run as a column in the Herald-Times, confirms that pledge. The letter states that the Thomson administration “fully supports advancing the necessary public processes that would allow the south properties to be considered for transfer to the CIB at no cost for project development, subject to approval by the appropriate boards and commissions.”

Whikehart also said at Wednesday’s meeting that based on an initial inquiry, the Monroe County commissioners are also looking favorably at transferring some county-owned real estate to the CIB. That includes the county-owned land, now a parking lot, immediately to the west of the existing convention center, as well as some developed parcels even farther south than the city-owned land.

On Wednesday, Whikehart alluded to a land swap deal that was floated by city councilmember Kate Rosenbarger at an early December joint work session of the council and the Bloomington redevelopment commission. Rosenbarger did not lay out a precise sequencing of the exact parcels to be swapped.

But one possibility is for the county government to donate land to the CIB that includes the southernmost parcels on 2nd Street, which the CIB could then trade to the city in exchange for the former Bunger & Robertson property. The host hotel would then be built on the former Bunger & Robertson property, which had been the subject of the year-long negotiations between Dora Hospitality and Bloomington’s RDC.

Whikehart put it like this at Wednesday’s meeting: “Once we’ve been advised of all the properties transferred to us, we can look at a comprehensive land use plan to include a hotel and parking needs, any opportunity for land exchanges—as has been suggested by the city council—and the best benefit of a comprehensive scope of the project… then we can consider a new RFP for a hotel…”

Speaking from the remote public mic, CIB member Jay Baer addressed what he acknowledged might feel like a reset. Baer said some observers might be frustrated that the hotel process appears to be “back to square one.” In retrospect, he said, it likely would have been better to resolve land control before issuing the original hotel RFP. “But we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” Baer said.

Baer praised the current trajectory, calling the project “back on track” and stressed the need to think of it holistically. Baer was not able to participate in the CIB’s actual business meeting through a remote connection, and resorted to the public mic—because Indiana’s Open Door Law prohibits participating in more than two consecutive meetings by a remote connection.

City councilmember Isabel Piedmont-Smith, speaking after Baer in the same public comment segment, described the hotel as “an integral part of this project,” while focusing most of her remarks on accessibility considerations inside the convention center expansion.