Monroe County council faces yet another high-stakes North Park jail vote on Tuesday (May 26)

A project that could cost a few hundred million dollars, a community passionately engaged in the discussion, and a deadline looming under the threat of a federal lawsuit mean the stage is set for Tuesday’s (May 26) 5 p.m. Monroe County council meeting.

On the agenda for the second time in two weeks is a purchase agreement for North Park, which is just northwest of Bloomington, off SR 46.

The proposed North Park location for a new county jail has become the political equivalent of a prizefighter who gets dropped to the canvas over and over, but refuses to stay on the mat.

A purchase agreement was first approved in November 2024, by both the county commissioners and the council, but the funding was knocked flat in October 2025 by a unanimous council vote. In February this year, another apparent knockout punch was delivered to the North Park proposal when the county council adopted a resolution declaring it no longer wished to consider the property.

But a month later, the board of commissioners got North Park back to its feet with a resolution of their own that stated: “The Commissioners will continue to consider the North Park Site.”

The backdrop to all of this debate on North Park has been a 2008 ACLU lawsuit that alleged unconstitutional and unlawful conditions at the Monroe County jail. Following the lawsuit, the jail has been operating under a 2009 settlement agreement with the ACLU which has been extended several times since.

In late 2025, Ken Falk, Legal Director for ACLU of Indiana, wrote to the county legal department expressing skepticism that the situation underlying the 2008 lawsuit is anywhere close to getting resolved, and so the settlement was extended until only April 15 this year.

The February and March resolutions followed, the public expressed its opinion at council meetings, and then county commissioners, the sheriff and the ACLU filed an eleventh-hour request to extend the settlement to May 29, three days after this Tuesday’s county council meeting. It’s the county commissioners and the sheriff who are the named parties in the decade-and-a-half old lawsuit.

If the settlement agreement expires with no approval of a North Park purchase agreement by the county council, the 2008 ACLU lawsuit will get dismissed. But that exposes the county to fresh lawsuits by the ACLU, or inmates represented by other attorneys, or both.

The board of commissioners approved an updated purchase agreement on April 30. Now it’s up to the county council to say yes or no to a purchase agreement it had refused to fund six months ago. The council’s vote on approval during its May 12 meeting failed 1–5 after overwhelming public comment against it. This Tuesday, three days before the current ACLU deadline, the council will vote on it again.

The central question now is whether the council will approve the purchase agreement for North Park. But after a string of recent votes rejecting the proposal, there’s a bigger question without a clear answer: What happens if the council says no again?

Perspective from commissioners

The B Square spoke with commissioner Julie Thomas after last week’s Thursday meeting. She said there is no contingency.

“We don’t have any property, there’s no way to do anything by July, and there’s definitely no way to do anything by Thursday the 29th, which is the ACLU deadline,” she said. The July deadline is important because the process to initiate a bond to build the jail has to be started by then. And issuing a bond requires identifying a site.

Last Thursday, county attorney Jeff Cockerill pointed out the problem with considering other properties that have been brought up as options at various times. “I think any other property—we’re starting to invest more dollars, we’re doing more studies, we’re doing more testing. I don’t know whether we can do that without having some kind of information about what’s appropriate. Without any kind of thought on whether this property is acceptable or not, how do you justify using public funds to investigate that?” he said.

Commissioners don’t see the Thomson property as viable on the current short timeline.

Going into Tuesday’s meeting, commissioner Jody Madeira said last Thursday she would be listening for signs that the council understands the situation the county finds itself in. “The fact that people know we’re in a lawsuit, and that our backs are up against a wall, and that we’ve tried every way to get out of the lawsuit, that we’ve gotten an extension, that we’ve explained our position multiple times in multiple different ways,” she said.

Perspective from business community

County councilors almost certainly think they fully understand the county government’s current bind, given the amount of time they’ve spent discussing the proposal and the consequences of not letting the ACLU settlement agreement expire. Councilors will also be considering public sentiment, and for the last six months, public commentary has been uniformly against the North Park site.

That sentiment has come from grassroots groups like Care not Cages and the non-profit New Leaf New Life, as well as the business community.

During the most recent council meeting on May 12, public commentary saw an overwhelming majority of speakers pressing on the council not to approve the purchase. Some residents of neighborhoods adjacent to the North Park site made pleas to not go through with the approval. All but one commenter made arguments against the proposal.

One of the people speaking from the public mic during the May 12 meeting was Eric Spoonmore, president of the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce. Spoonmore is also a former member of the Monroe County Council.

Speaking to The B Square late last week at the chamber’s downtown office, Spoonmore reiterated that he doesn’t think a jail is the best use of the North Park property. “Budgets are tight, and I just hope that the council will take all the fiscal considerations into mind when they’re making their decision, and also what the community thinks is going to be best for the long-term use of that property,” he said.

Spoonmore also explained why he thinks the business community is an important stakeholder in the discussion and what their position is. “The physical proximity of having our legal system downtown in Bloomington is important to us. We think that that generates a lot of economic activity and adds to the vitality of our downtown,” he said.

”It’s just been that way for the last 200 years since we’ve been in existence, our courts and legal system have always been maintained in downtown Bloomington, and so a lot of our businesses and members have made intentional decisions and deliberate decisions to be in close proximity to have their businesses there because of all the activity that happens around the court system,” Spoonmore said.

Spoonmore’s concerns are driven largely by the fact that a jail at North Park would almost certainly be co-located with a justice center that hosts other legal support services.

The sheer financial size of the proposal is also a point of concern, according to Spoonmore. “If we’re going to spend $250 million on a new jail and court system at North Park, what are we going to get in exchange for that? We haven’t had any of those conversations, and I think that leads to a lot of uneasiness from the business community about what is to come after this,” he said.

Perspective from county councilors

Council members are all for having conversations. Councilor Peter Iversen, who was the sole vote for the North Park purchase agreement two weeks ago when it failed 1 to 5, told The B Square late last week his vote was a strategic one meant to prolong the conversation. “[For Tuesday’s meeting], what I’m looking forward to the most is hearing from the public on this very important topic,” he said.

Iversen said that he was looking at the issue as a choice between two viable paths. “One path is that articulated by the county commissioners and the sheriff, where we know that the conditions inside the jail are suboptimal, and they’re asking for us to make a definitive decision to move forward by going to North Park. The second position that’s been articulated … by certain individuals has been that we need to allow a federal judge to intervene and make the decisions for us,” he said.

Councilor David Henry had, for a brief moment during the last meeting, moved to deny the ordinance to fund the North Park jail site. If that motion had passed, the proposal would have been dead outright and not been up for vote again this Tuesday at all. He eventually went back on this motion and moved to vote for approval.

Henry’s position on the issue seems firm. Speaking to The B Square late last week, Henry said, “I don’t know what more can be said, because I’ve honestly thought about: How long do I want the meeting to go? I don’t have any more speeches to give,” Henry said. “It’s the third time I get to vote no.”

Council president Jennifer Crossley seems like she’s in same camp, and for her, there are too many unanswered questions about the North Park site. She told The B Square, “I don’t think anything would make me think that North Park is a viable option, simply because we have no current infrastructure,” she said.

“The amount that we keep being told of how much this is continues to rise. A few weeks ago we heard it was like $135 million, and then last week we heard with soft cost that’s $157 million. It keeps being that cost continues to change, and I don’t understand how that can be.”

Crossley, however, does not believe that voting in down on Tuesday would spell the end of the conversation. “I think the contingency plan, despite … a looming lawsuit, is we continue to still keep working, and we’re not just going to shut down,” she said.

“I know that there’s this thing where people are saying that time is up. Time wouldn’t be up, because I don’t think that, for a second, on the 29th of May, if we don’t pass North Park, then as of June 1st, we’ll be in court, our fate will be decided at that time. That’s not true. I tend to think that we still have time where we could still show the courts that we have options available,” Crossley said.

While the two clear rejections of North Park by the county council in recent months might make next Tuesday’s meeting seem like a foregone conclusion, Iversen’s vote offers a glimmer of hope in favor of the proposal.

Councilor Trent Deckard, who was not present during the most recent vote, but voted against the appropriation last October, believes the council can’t keep voting down proposals endlessly. “I keep reminding people that if you say no to this, you’ve got to say yes to something somewhere, because we got to move on this. I keep saying that for a reason—because it’s got to get done,” he told The B Square late last week.

Deckard pointed to the council’s vote to enact the jail tax in fall 2024, which has been collected for going on a couple of years, as a decision just as big as the one on the jail site.

To win approval this Tuesday the North Park purchase agreement requires just a simple four-vote majority on the seven-member council.

Crossley seems almost certain not to be one of the needed yes votes. “I know that this is a hard decision for a lot of us. We don’t take it lightly, but this is a time for us to really pause, because what we are doing with this project will affect generations to come, and I don’t want my name to be a part of anything that will screw people over like that,” she told The B Square.