Renovation-plus-Curry plan edges out Thomson site for jail panel’s recommendation

Renovation of the Monroe County jail and justice center, with expansion into the Curry and Fiscus buildings just to the west, emerged Monday (July 13) as the preferred location of a new jail for a group of city and county officials tasked with the job of choosing a site inside the city limits of Bloomington.

The Collaborative Justice Project Working Subcommittee voted 3–2 at its final meeting on Monday to recommend as its top choice the renovation of the current facility at 7th Street and College Avenue and expansion west to the neighboring buildings, which are both county-owned.

The five-member subcommittee is made up of: Kerry Thomson (mayor, city of Bloomington); Karen Wrenbeck (deputy public defender); April Wilson (deputy prosecutor); Sydney Zulich (Bloomington city councilmember); Liz Feitl (Monroe County councilor).

The three voting in favor of the renovation-plus-Curry option as the top recommendation were Kerry Thomson, Zulich, and Feitl. The three had also put renovation-plus-Curry as their top choice in their rankings of five different sites. The subcommittee members came to the meeting having each ranked the five sites, with the top site getting five points, next-highest four points, and so on, down to one point for the worst-ranked site.

The pure arithmetic of total points gave renovation-plus-Curry 22 points, or just one point better than the next-best location, which was the Thomson site off S. Rogers Street. (There is no connection between the site and Bloomington mayor Kerry Thomson.) A bar chart of the scoring is included at the end of this article.

The group’s second choice, on a unanimous vote, was for the Thomson site.

The subcommittee’s recommendation now is expected to be considered by a bigger group made up of the county council, the city council, the county commissioners and the mayor, but that meeting has not yet been scheduled.

The assignment to the subcommittee came on June 12, which was a couple weeks after the May 29 expiration date for a settlement agreement between the county and the ACLU for a lawsuit that was originally filed in 2008 over conditions at the jail. From around late 2024, the board of county commissioners, as well as the county council, seemed poised to move forward with the construction of a new jail at North Park.

But on Oct. 28, 2025 and again on May 26 this year the county council voted against the action needed to move ahead with North Park. With the 2008 lawsuit dismissed, that made the county government vulnerable to fresh litigation. The subcommittee was given the task of moving the needle on the selection of a new jail site, by recommending a location for the new jail inside Bloomington city limits. The anticipated fresh litigation was filed in federal court last Friday (June 10). [Monroe County Jail Timeline]

Monday’s subcommittee vote came after five meetings held between June 24 and July 9 where the group, aided by county and city staff, came up with evaluation metrics, looked at more than a dozen properties across the city, and reviewed previous work done by county commissioners. Setting the stage for the subcommittee’s deliberations on Monday was the ranking of a smaller set of five properties by each committee member.

According to the combined rankings, the highest rated option for the subcommittee members was renovation of the current facility at 301 N. College Ave with the expansion to the adjoining Curry and Fiscus buildings. Coming in a close second was the Thomson property at S. Rogers St. The property south of Tapp Road was third, the property on Fullerton Pike fourth, and the property north of Tapp Road last.

The mayor, Feitl and Zulich ranked the renovation-plus-Curry option as their top choice. Getting Wilson’s top rank was Tapp Road South, while Wrenbeck’s top ranking was the Thomson property. The Thomson property was ranked second by all subcommittee members except Wrenbeck, who had renovation-plus-Curry ranked second.

Bloomington mayor Kerry Thomson encouraged focusing the discussion on the top two properties in the combined ranking—renovation-plus-Curry and the Thomson property.

Deputy prosecutor Wilson, who ranked renovation-plus-Curry as third, presented a slide deck with the rationale for her rankings.

“I think one of the concerns I have is if we pick a site like Curry, we are pinning in the design options,” she said. In her presentation, Wilson went over the fact that building on the Curry site would likely require a multi-story design which would increase floor space requirements. She cited a 2024 study by architecture firm RQAW that said renovating the existing jail would require relocation of the courts for two years during construction, as well as relocating and transporting existing inmates to other county jails.

“I think this will be very expensive, and I think it’s more expensive than maybe we’ve previously talked about,” Wilson added. She also explained her support of Thomson as her second pick, citing the fact that it’s close to downtown and transportation services. “I like the fact that you can collocate in the future. I think it checks a lot of really important priority boxes for me,” she said.

But Wilson landed on Tapp Road South as her top choice, based on the fact that it most clearly provided enough space to accommodate an eventually co-located justice center, and enough space to fit a one-story jail design, which county commissioners see as a requirement, not just a strong preference.

Bloomington mayor Thomson picked the renovation-plus-Curry option as her top choice, putting the Thomson property second. About those two locations, she said, “I think if for some reason there is a foregone conclusion, which it is not my understanding, that it is a must to have everything on one floor, Thomson would be my top choice. That’s obviously not possible at Curry, which was my top choice,” she said.

“I have a vision of this combined property as being able to construct part of the building without disrupting the current jail. Get that inhabitable, and then begin renovations of the existing justice center,” she said about the Curry site, saying that expert opinion is needed to judge the feasibility of that vision.

“It just appears to me to be the best case scenario and most efficient to move forward is this site, especially given the challenges at Thomson in terms of timing. So when it came down to a vote for me, that is why this got my top vote. I’m not sold on the justice building needing to be downtown. That’s not part of why I voted that way.”

Responding to a question from The B Square Bulletin after the meeting about the possibility of relocating temporary offices to the Showers West, the mayor said that the city doesn’t know if legally it can do that, but there may be some square footage available for that purpose.

At the meeting, Bloomington city councilmember Zulich pointed out that the existing jail is 0.2 miles away from the center of downtown, which she defined as the historic courthouse, while the Thomson property is 2.9 miles away, and the rest of the considered options even farther out.

“As the downtown representative, I just want to put that out there, because something can be in city limits without close access to anything,” Zulich said. “Additionally, according to our metrics, Thomson and the Curry plus renovations are the only two properties that currently have access to public transportation.”

Deputy public defender Karen Wrenbeck put the Thomson property at the top of her list and renovation-plus-Curry second. Wrenbeck alluded to the possibility that a renovation scenario would require transporting all prisoners out of the county.

“From the public defender’s office perspective, I don’t think I can really support any plan that would require clients to be moved out of the county that eliminates their access to attorneys, access to courts, and I think that creates a lot of challenges transportation-wise,” she said, explaining her choice.

Before the final vote was taken, Wilson took a moment to highlight the damage being done by the delay that has plagued the jail site selection process.

“I just believe people deserve a basic standard of care and being treated with dignity,” she said. “I’m going to vote for Thomson with the caveat, with full honesty, that I would ask the [county] council to reconsider North Park in a phased way that would still allow access to some services downtown, would start to get people outside of the jail into a healthier and constitutional environment.”

Zulich expressed disappointment that it has taken this long to resolve this issue.“The settlement agreement has been in place since 2008,” she said. “Somebody could have had a child in 2008, that child would be eligible to vote this year. The county has failed to build a new jail. There are fabricated false choices that we are currently experiencing because elected officials failed to do their due diligence.”

The subcommittee took separate votes to establish its first- and second-choice recommendations. On the motion to make renovation-plus-Curry option the subcommittee’s top recommendation, the vote was 3-2, with Feitl, Thomson, and Zulich in favor of it, and Wilson and Wrenbeck opposed.

The vote to recommend the Thomson property as a second choice was unanimous. The subcommittee’s recommendations could now be considered at a joint meeting of the county council, the city council, the county commissioners and the mayor. That meeting has not yet been scheduled.