On Wednesday, Bloomington’s city council is set to approve an appropriation ordinance for around $6 million of food and beverage tax money. It’s for an architect to design the expansion of the convention center at College Avenue and 3rd Street. Continue reading “Opinion: Convention center expansion should be designed from ground up as Net Zero facility”
On Friday, Dec. 6, 2019, a coalition of several groups staged a sit-in at Bloomington’s city hall. The Beacon captured some of the activity there, before heading over the county courthouse to cover a city-county meeting about the convention center expansion.
In this audio clip, the city hall foyer reverberates with voices of climate strikers singing “Little Bird”: [mp3 file of Little Bird]
A key stat from a new tree inventory for the city of Bloomington, released on Tuesday, found its way into a list of climate activist demands presented to Mayor John Hamilton on Friday.
The demands were presented to the mayor a little after 3 p.m. by around 400 people who marched from Dunn Meadow, where Bloomington’s Climate Strike activities had started, to city hall. The third point on the list was:
Get the City of Bloomington to 60% Tree Coverage.
Based on a report delivered on Tuesday to Bloomington’s board of park commissioners by Aren Flint, an urban forester with Davey Resource Group (DRG), the maximum tree canopy that Bloomington could achieve is 61 percent of its 15,000 acres. So the demand is essentially to max out Bloomington’s potential canopy. (The layer of leaves, branches and trunks of trees that block the view of the ground from above is called the “canopy.”)
The climate strikers’ demand noted that Bloomington’s tree canopy now covers just 38 percent of Bloomington’s area. That’s the figure from Tuesday’s new report, which is a 2018 analysis. Continue reading “New tree study for Bloomington measures canopy at 38 percent, climate strikers demand 60 percent”
Bloomington, Indiana’s Climate Strike activities started at Dunn Meadow and wound their way around campus, then over to the west side of downtown to visit with the city’s mayor, John Hamilton. There, a list of demands was presented.
A few hundred people piled into Dunn Meadow on the campus of Indiana University on Friday just before noon to join in a global action that’s been organized under the banner of “climate strike.” NBC News put the number of people worldwide who joined demonstrations in the “millions.” Here’s some photos from Dunn Meadow today.