financial analysis – The B Square

On Friday at noon, Bloomington’s city council held a work session on the topic of the Monroe Convention Center expansion project.

The B Square will report separately on the substance of the meeting.

The focus of this notebook entry is a request during Friday’s meeting from a city councilmember to city controller Jessica McClellan—for a historical breakdown of expenditures from the city’s food and beverage tax fund.

The food and beverage tax fund is key to discussion of the convention center project, because it is supposed to be the source of the funding for the project.

McClellan will be using the city’s own internal system to provide the requested information to councilmembers. But the city’s publicly accessible online financial information makes it possible for anyone to get the information that was requested from the controller. Continue reading “Financial data notebook: Digesting Bloomington food and beverage tax spending” →

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At the Aug. 1 meeting of Bloomington’s utilities service board (USB), utilities director Vic Kelson told USB members that the current Miller Drive service center is “bursting at the seams.”

That was not new information to the board—because city of Bloomington utilities already has a master plan for an alternate site where the service center could be moved. That’s the former Winston Thomas wastewater treatment plant property, which is located on Walnut Street, on the edge of the current city limits. It’s north of the Bloomington animal shelter.

It’s also a former EPA Superfund site. The master plan refers to that history: “Of course, the legacy of the site is not all roses. Environmental damage was done here.”

Kelson’s remarks served to brief the whole USB on a meeting of its property and planning committee, which had met earlier that day to review the master plan.

Kelson said he would like to move on a plan to relocate the service center to the Winston Thomas “as quickly as we can,” noting that it’s a complicated project. Kelson added, “Certainly the administration downtown would like us to move as quickly as it’s possible for us to make decisions about it.”

Deputy mayor Don Griffin attended the committee meeting, telling members “We support this project, or at least going forward with this project—100 percent.”

The Winston Thomas site is currently used for material storage—like manholes, culvert sections, and concrete pipe. It is also where construction debris taken from various Bloomington public works projects. Continue reading “Bloomington utilities could be “coming home” to old site, as Miller Drive center is “bursting at the seams”” →