Bloomington city council District 5 is shaded orange in the southeastern periphery of the city.
Bloomington city council District 5 is shaded orange in the southeastern periphery of the city.
On Saturday in Monroe County Public Library’s downtown auditorium, three candidates who are vying to fill the vacant District 5 seat on Bloomington’s city council appeared in front of an audience of about three dozen people.
Courtney Daily, Jason Moore, and Jenny Stevens gave opening statements and answered questions delivered by Monroe County Democratic Party chair David Henry.
The annual event is held at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater on Kirkwood Avenue in downtown Bloomington.
Hagopian is an ethnic studies teacher at Seattle’s Garfield High School, who is an activist on issues of educational equity, the school-to-prison pipeline, standardized testing, the Black Lives Matter at School movement, and social justice unionism.
Not included on the map, because no locations have yet been identified, is a $50,000 allocation for resident-led traffic calming projects. The image links to a dynamic map.
Two sidewalk projects are supposed to get constructed and another two designed in 2023, based on the Bloomington city council’s approval of its sidewalk committee recommendations at Wednesday night’s meeting.
Scores for Bloomington project areas from Tree Equity map.
This Friday, the city of Bloomington is hosting the first of two information sessions about its plans to plant $800,000 worth of trees in the public right-of-way, according to a news release from the mayor’s office on Tuesday.
It was a little more than three years ago when Bloomington’s city council approved the issuance of a series of bonds worth $10.27 million for several different projects. That was in 2018, Bloomington’s bicentennial year, so they were branded by Bloomington mayor John Hamilton’s administration as “bicentennial bonds.”
Among the projects was an $800,000 plan to improve the city’s tree canopy by planting trees in the public right-of-way. Since 2018, Bloomington has contracted with Davey Resource Group (DRG) for a tree inventory and analysis of Bloomington’s tree canopy. (The layer of leaves, branches and trunks of trees that block the view of the ground from above is called the “canopy.”)
At noon on Jan. 6, the Bloomington city council’s transportation committee is scheduled to meet to continue its work on allocating money to add new sidewalks and traffic calming to the city’s street network.
Since 2007, a total of about $4 million has been allocated for new sidewalk projects, which reflects incremental increases each year starting in the low $200,000s in 2007.
For the 2022 budget year, the city council has $336,000 in available sidewalk funding to allocate.
At its Dec. 9 meeting, the committee voted unanimously to adopt a new approach to ranking potential projects.
It’s not just that the ranking criteria have been revised. The starting point is different.
Previously, the approach has started with a list of projects that have been requested through various channels. Those projects have been ranked, based on an objective metric. The metric has included factors like cost, safety, roadway class, pedestrian usage, destination points, and linkage to existing facilities.
At its meeting on Thursday (April 1), Bloomington’s plan commission voted 6–3 to forward an ordinance to the city council, with a positive recommendation, that will affect the status of duplexes in much of the city.
The yellow areas are the places in Bloomington where the plan commission is recommending that duplexes be allowed as a permitted (by-right) use.
The recommended ordinance would revise the unified development ordinance (UDO), so that duplexes are a permitted (by-right) use in four districts.
The areas where duplexes would be permitted are the R1 (Residential Large Lot), R2 (Residential Medium Lot), R3 (Residential Small Lot), and R4 (Residential Urban) districts.
The city council could take up the question before the end of April, depending on how long it takes the plan commission to finish its work on the 10-ordinance package it’s now considering.
The city’s plan staff had proposed an ordinance that would change duplexes in R1, R2 and R3 from disallowed use to conditional use. A conditional use requires approval by the board of zoning appeals (BZA).
The amendment approved on Monday also changed duplexes in R4 from conditional use to permitted (by-right) use, which is consistent with the city’s current UDO. The planning staff’s unamended proposed ordinance had made the use of duplexes in R4 conditional.
After about 2 hours and 45 minutes of deliberations on Wednesday night, Bloomington’s city council eliminated two of its 11 committees.
White dots with lines indicate projects recommended for funding by Bloomington city council’s sidewalk committee over the last 17 years. The darker the blue shading, the higher income the area is, based on US Census data. The image links to Bloomington resident Mark Stosberg’s “Sidewalk Equity Audit”
Not surviving the night was the council’s sidewalk committee.
The council started with a resolution could have eliminated as many as four of its committees. But the council unanimously agreed to preserve its housing committee and its climate action and resilience committee.
The council’s sanitation and utilities committee was merged with the community affairs committee.
The council’s sidewalk committee was not exactly eliminated.
But on a 5–4 vote, the sidewalk committee’s function was assigned to the transportation committee. That function is to make recommendations to the full council on the use of about $330,000 from the city’s alternative transportation fund, which purpose is to reduce the community’s dependence on automobiles.
The 5–4 vote by itself did not eliminate the sidewalk committee.
By the end of the meeting, it was not clear if the elimination of the sidewalk committee would come at a future meeting, in a housekeeping resolution, or if it would be eliminated through an authorization given to the council attorney, on a separate vote, to make revisions to the resolution.
Image is from the Pictometry module of Monroe County’s online property records system.
Image is from the Pictometry module of Monroe County’s online property records system.
Image is from the plan set that was available to bidders on the Moores Pike and Smith Road project.
This map shows projects recommended last year and approved by the city council for this year (2020).
Image is from Google Street View.
One of the outcomes of Thursday’s meeting held by the Bloomington city council’s sidewalk committee was the addition of an agenda item to the four-member group’s next meeting, on Dec. 15.
At the mid-December meeting, the committee will take up the question of its role in making recommendations for annual allocations of $330,000 from the city’s alternative transportation fund for new sidewalk construction projects.
That question comes in the context of a sidewalk equity audit that Bloomington resident Mark Stosberg released in early November.
Stosberg’s report concluded that the last 17 years of funding allocations recommended by the committee and approved by the city council, followed a “politically-biased process [that] resulted in skewing sidewalk projects towards neighborhoods that were wealthier, less dense and had lower pedestrian demand.”
The agenda suggestion came just before Thursday’s meeting adjourned, from committee member Kate Rosenbarger. She said, “I would like to talk about the broader question of the usefulness and the value of this committee in general.” She added, “… [I]t doesn’t look like sidewalks have been funded in the most equitable way across the existence of this committee.”
This year’s committee chair, Ron Smith, replied to Rosenbarger’s suggestion by saying, “Let’s do that. Sounds like a good idea.”
White dots with lines indicate projects recommended for funding by Bloomington city council’s sidewalk committee over the last 17 years. The darker the blue shading, the higher income the area is, based on US Census data. The image links to Bloomington resident Mark Stosberg’s “Sidewalk Equity Audit”
The report concludes that the process a four-member city council sidewalk committee has used to recommend funding has caused an inequitable distribution of limited resources.
From the executive summary of Stosberg’s report: “The audit found that the current politically-biased process resulted in skewing sidewalk projects towards neighborhoods that were wealthier, less dense and had lower pedestrian demand.”
To fund all the projects on last year’s potential project list would take around $17 million. Using just the roughly $330,000 a year that’s allocated to building new sidewalks with the city council’s program would mean a half-century wait until all those sidewalks are built.
City staff and councilmembers alike have over the last year talked about the need to find more money to pay for new sidewalk construction.
Based on Stosberg’s remarks at a July meeting of the city’s bicycle and pedestrian safety commission (BPSC), the audit helps make the point that if funding is limited, then it’s that much more important to make sure the resources are distributed equitably.
Stosberg is president of the BPSC. The commission got a preview of a draft version of the report at its October meeting. Other members gave Stosberg some feedback, but the authorship of the report is Stosberg’s.
The idea that the current approach could be a “politically biased process” is conceivable, based on the fact that it’s a four-member city council committee that works closely with staff from different city departments to select the projects for funding recommendations.
Stosberg’s audit uses US Census data on income to identify “a concentration of wealthier census blocks in the southeast part of town.”
About those wealthier census blocks, Stosberg’s report says, “That’s also where the about half of sidewalk committee funded projects landed and significantly overlaps with city council District 4, which has been continuously represented on the sidewalk committee for 17 years.”
Dave Rollo, who represents District 4, has served on the city council since 2003.
