If you've just stumbled across The 812 Show, welcome! It's a snapshot of the establishment in Bloomington and Monroe County, Indiana. In our more than 200 episodes, we've tackled issues like housing, transportation, animal welfare, economic development, and tax assessment. We've interviewed elected officials -- everyone from the mayor to the coroner -- we've talked with, appointed officials, members of boards and commissions, members of nonprofits, and then some. Throughout 2024 and 2025, we learned an awful lot from an awful lot of people.We're going on an extended hiatus; more on that in this last mini-episode of Season 4. But we remain proud of our work. Subscriptions have been turned off, but episodes continue to be available on our website at the812show.org, as well as wherever you get podcasts. Thank you for trying our show, and for wanting to learn what makes your community tick -- to hear about the officers, public bodies, processes and organizations that make Bloomington and Monroe County the decent places to live that they are.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We're still trying to wrap our heads around CDFIs -- community development financial institutions -- and this time we think we've cracked the code.We welcome back John Zody, the executive director of CDFI-Friendly Bloomington. He was last on the show in May 2024; for his followup he's brought along their program coordinator Emma Yoder, to further break down the concept of mission-based lending.CDFIs are not like regular banks; they don't hold people's money. They only loan money to individuals and entities whose projects fulfill their often non-profit missions. Our guests at CDFI-Friendly Bloomington, are a non-profit-lender-wrangling organization, a kind of coordinator for financing for that community project you're so eager to get off the ground.And there's a lot of money out there being offered by mission-based lenders, who are often far from Bloomington -- but our guests also have money direct FROM the city of Bloomington to loan out. All that money wants to be applied to good works to be done here in town. We talk about why banks can be a bottleneck to the physical development of a city despite the wishes it may have expressed in its comprehensive plan. And we talk about borrowers that CDFI-Friendly Bloomington is working with: housing providers like Bloomington Cooperative Living, small businesses, and providers of childcare.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Bloomington has won two Gold Medals for its Parks Department. It's not just because of nice facilities like Switchyard Park or the B-Line Trail. Sure, a city needs to set aside physical places for greenery et al. But land doesn't program itself. Hence the phrase "Parks...AND Recreation." Today we speak with Leslie Brinson, the director of the Recreation Division of the city Parks and Recreation Department. She tells us about the several venues that the division programs, and its many types of programs, including community gardens, concerts, movies, the Fourth of July parade, kids' programs, and the long-running Farmers' Market.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our Extra Innings segments feature bonus interview material that didn't make it into our regular episodes. We haven't shared these Extra Innings with you yet, and it's about time we did. John Connell, the General Manager of Bloomington Transit, and Shelley Strimaitis, their Planning & Special Projects Manager, were on the show in May 2025 (to talk about new bus service to Ivy Tech and Cook and their new raft of all-electric buses). They stuck around to discuss the several new apps people can use to book rides, track buses and pay fares, as well as their talks with IU Campus Bus and a comparison with Lafayette and Purdue.We also have more of our interview with Elisa Pokral, the community outreach coordinator of the Waste Reduction District of Monroe County, who stuck around after her January interview to discuss WRD services like the Green Business Network, which helps businesses recycle more easily and cost-efficiently; how they help businesses with waste audits; where exactly plastic goes now; how you can get rid of bulky items too big to fit into a trash bag; and the Adopt-A-Road program.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Since 2015, the online magazine The Limestone Post has held a kind of middle ground among Bloomington publications, combining the arts, the outdoors and other lifestyle features with longform investigative journalism. We talk with Dason Anderson, the executive editor, about how the Post works and the challenges it faces in an era of local journalism all but consumed by social media. Their response in 2019 was to switch from a for-profit to a non-profit publication model, which has helped them survive and thrive.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Today is another feast of Extra Innings -- extensions of interviews with past guests that we've never made available before. Two guests who have been involved in art as a public matter also had more to say than we could fit into our regular half-hour interview format. In September 2024, (hear the original interview here), Holly Warren, the city's assistant director for the arts, talked in Extras about her back history in the arts; her interest in the city going beyond having a public arts plan to developing a cultural plan, and explaining what that is; and the importance of facilities like the John Waldron Arts Center and the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre.Those buildings were also the topic of our conversation in Extra Innings in May 2025 with a predecessor of Warren in the city arts director role, Miah Michaelsen, (hear the original interview here) who now is the director of the Indiana Arts Commission. Michaelsen talked about those buildings that were rededicated to the arts, and the history of the organization that rehabbed them, the Bloomington Area Arts Council, which she directed in the 2000s. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Lately we've been diving into our hoard of Extra Innings interviews with prior guests. Today, two new never-before-heard clips with guests from nonprofit entities between Kirkwood and Sixth Streets whose names begin with "Monroe County."The first two-thirds are devoted to our Extra Inning with Sara Laughlin, who visited in September 2024 to talk about her volunteer work with Teachers' Warehouse. In her Extra Inning she talks about her former job, as director of the Monroe County Public Library system, and the now-open Southwest branch library, which was in the planning stages before her retirement in 2015. She also talks about how the Library gets and manages its funding. The final third of this episode with Megan MacDonald, librarian and Daniel Schlegel, director of the Monroe County History Center. After the main episode they recorded in October 2024, they stuck around to talk about the effect of the pandemic on the History Center, and how some people think the old Carnegie Library building that they occupy is haunted. Not to mention their run-ins with cryptids (or at least, their overzealous fans).Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

[Charlotte Zietlow passed away Wednesday at the age of 91. She was a pillar of the community who will be greatly missed. This is an encore presentation of our interview with her, recorded in January 2024.]Charlotte Zietlow is well-known in Bloomington and Monroe County for many reasons. This episode focuses her time on the Bloomington City Council in the early 1970s -- the subject of her second book, "1971: How We Won". She talks about how the previous council was unresponsive to public input and concerns, motivating her to run for office. She campaigned on issues like zoning changes and lack of transparency. By 1972, she was one of ten newly elected city officials who had swept all but one incumbent out of office.As the new council president, she led reforms to open up government and increase public participation. The new council addressed a long backlog of issues through committees and initiatives focused on social services, infrastructure, and the environment. After one term, Charlotte decided not to run for reelection when she disagreed with the mayor on an issue, instead running for mayor herself.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

This week we're exploring our archive of extra interview segments that we didn't have room for in the original episodes, segments that we call "Extra Innings". It's new material, never-before aired, that gives further insight into the way decision-makers think. In these Extra Innings segments:David Hittle, the director of the Planning & Transportation Department for the city of Bloomington (originally interviewed in Episode 123), focuses on the Transportation portion of his unusual title, the car-centric mentality of the state department of transportation, and the types of thoroughfares that dominated planning and development in the last century that the city is striving to correct.Megan Betz, the CEO and executive director of Mother Hubbard's Cupboard (originally interviewed in Episode 110), talks about her background in agriculture that led to her current role trying to reduce food insecurity. She reminisces about, before she was at the Hub, the Bloomington Community Orchard and her experiences there — including the day the Orchard discovered it was the victim of peach thieves — and how it all shifted her focus from individuals to the systems that determine who gets to grow things in our community. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Switchyard Park opened in 2019, during the administration of Mayor John Hamilton. It's a stop on the B-Line Trail, another beloved amenity, which opened in 2009, during the administration of Mayor Mark Kruzan. But those places didn't happen by magic or overnight. They were only made possible by decisions made all the way back in 1998, during the administration of Mayor John Fernandez.Our guest today is Randy Lloyd, who was the city's first director of economic development from 1996 to 2001. He was getting the feel of the city's new position when on his watch occurred the greatest negative event in the history of Bloomington's economy: the cessation of all manufacturing at the 58-year-old RCA television plant in 1998, which at its peak employed 8000 workers. We get into the situation at the time, how the Fernandez administration reacted to the news of the plant closure, how the railroad land right-of-way that had been serving the RCA plant could easily have just disappeared, and how it was preserved for use as a park.[Note: this is a longer episode than usual. We'll resume our normal 30-35 minute shows next week.]Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We've been focusing on the tenant side of the local housing equation lately. We hosted Student Legal Services a few episodes back; today, we meet their cousins at Indiana Legal Services. Nick Minaudo is a lawyer for the Bloomington branch of ILS, a statewide nonprofit. They handle a wide variety of civil cases, like family law and reentry work. But they handle a lot of cases involving tenants, and their services are not just for IU students. We talk about how they're funded, how to apply for their services, and how they're like public defenders for civil cases.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

There's been a precedent for table-turning on this show, in which the guest interviews the host. (As a former city councilmember, Steve has been interviewed on this very program by the rizz-tastic current at-large councilmember Isak Asare.) Last year the Bloomington city administration and council saw fit to merge the Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety, Traffic, and Parking Commissions into a single Transportation Commission, which started meeting this past June. Your host was named to the new Commission; by July, they had elected him chair (mostly because he was the only fool willing to do it).To interview Steve, we asked our recent guest, Shefar Rafiul, host of the government.exe podcast on WFHB's Youth Radio, to be our guest host. He agreed, and we're all enthusiastic about the result. The conversation gets into city transportation policies: everything from sidewalks to the Safe Streets for All Action Plan, with the city's Vision Zero goal of zero traffic fatalities by 2039. And, of course, parking. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

[This is an encore presentation recorded in April. We'll be back with a new episode Thursday.]John Baeten came to town as a visiting assistant professor in IU’s geography department, where he spent time doing, among other things, a reconstruction of maps of Bloomington from the past. That led to his current post as the GIS Coordinator for Monroe County. GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems, of which there are many at the county. In fact, it’s hard for any local government to do their jobs these days without some kind of GIS capacity.Baeten talks with us about all sorts of interesting projects on the county’s state-award-winning GIS website, like stitching together aerial images of the county taken in the middle of the 20th century, a project mapping racial covenants in real estate deeds across the county. mapping the prevalence of radon, even mapping ticks for the health department.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Melanie Vehslage works for the Youth Services Bureau, which serves to "reduce negative childhood conditions" in Monroe County. A department of county government, the Bureau also strives to promote what they call "safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments" for local youth, which is part of Vehslage's job as their Prevention Coordinator. She came to the Bureau from the county Health Department, where she worked for 8 years in harm reduction and population health. From her we'll learn about the county's youth shelter, the Safe Place program and how it works, the many counseling programs they run to help teens, parents and organizations alike, the Monroe County Youth Council, and the upcoming Childhood Conditions Summit addressing similar issues on November 13 at the Convention Center.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The local university enrolls 43,000 students in person but only houses 13,000 of them. The other 30,000, almost all of them tenants, live in the city of Bloomington, a city that is only 80,000, students included. That's where our guest comes in. Stacee Williams is the director of Student Legal Services at IUB. They're a full-service civil law firm that happens to be ensconced within IU, and offers free legal representation and advice to IU students who have to pay the fee for it each semester. In addition to representing students in accident cases and reviewing employment contracts, SLS has seen and litigated it all when it comes to issues between tenants and landlords. It's an eye-opening chat for any tenant in a town dominated by rentals.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Lake Week at The 812 continues with Maggie Sullivan, the Watershed Coordinator for the Friends of Lake Monroe. It's a non-profit organization whose goal is to bring together the many entities that have some responsibility for the reservoir: the Army Corps of Engineers, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Monroe County, and the City of Bloomington Utilities among others -- because none of them are directly related or responsible to each other, and no one is specifically responsible for the quality of the water in the lake. We talk with her about what causes the water to sometimes taste funky; the problems of sediment, agricultural nutrient runoff, and the thousands of septic tanks in the area; and how she works with everyone to collectively protect the watershed.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

It's Lake Week on The 812: we're talking about one of the Bloomington metropolitan area's great glories: its freshwater lakes. Reservoirs, actually. Our subject is not the smallest, Lake Griffy, nor the largest, Lake Monroe, but the one in between, Lake Lemon. Named after former mayor Tom Lemon, it was Bloomington's primary water source for more than a decade. Today we find out all about the Lake Lemon Conservancy District with its manager, Adam Casey, including the history of water in Monroe County, the separate nature of the Conservancy District and how it funds itself, and how it cares for the beloved now-recreational site. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The Community Kitchen of Monroe County is part of the local safety net for people experiencing food insecurity. While it targets those in need, there are no eligibility requirements to receive a meal there. Vicki Pierce, their executive director for more than 20 years, and Kyla Cox Deckard, their treasurer who's been on their board of directors since 2009, talk about how they differ from other organizations dealing with food insecurity like Mother Hubbard's Cupboard or the Hoosier Hills Food Bank, the scope of the hunger problem in Monroe County, and the logistics of an operation that serves more than 300,000 meals a year.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

There have been cries lately for "viewpoint diversity" in academia, but for years in this college town there's been a student organization actively soliciting viewpoint diversity. Our guest today, Elizabeth Conley, is the president of the IU chapter of BridgeUSA, since 2017 a national organization of students devoted to constructive dialogue on political issues. Their vision is of "a thriving US democracy where leaders and citizens engage in respectful, productive dialogue." We talk about the events BridgeUSA sponsors, including roundtable discussions of current topics at their weekly meetings on campus, how the organization is growing here and nationwide, and the local chapter's reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

When it comes to the housing market, we've had city departments, and we're working on guests who can talk about the demand side of the equation such as advisers for tenants' rights. This week, we're talking with people from the supply side of the housing equation. Mark Figg is a developer who built hundreds of units in Bloomington, in projects large and small. He's been a landlord, and an appraiser. And for a decade he was president of the Monroe County Apartment Association, and a former member of their board. We brought him back to the show to talk about the latest data on number of units in the city, occupancy rates and how both are affecting rents; how hard it is to determine because of the foggy data environment around such numbers; and how the Apartment Association works.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The affordability of housing in Bloomington, or rather, its increasing unaffordability, has been an issue for more than a decade. Indiana University has grown its enrollment without growing even its first-year-student housing stock, per a recent story in the Herald-Times. Interest rates have been relatively high, and only now are starting to come down; supply has been low; in this area, new housing that's not student-oriented apartment complexes have been difficult to build. But so much of that type of housing has opened as of this school year that the market may be cooling off. On all this we get the perspective of a long-time professional in the local real-estate market. Tracee Lutes is a Broker Owner at Remax/Acclaimed Properties of Bloomington and Bedford. We get into the state of the market, as well as the challenges of developing single-family housing locally. And we discuss the Bloomington Housing Authority and the Summit Hill Community Land Trust, both of whose boards she serves on.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Although we hope to have a representative from the City Commission on the Status of Women, we're talking today about the separate, seven-member Monroe County Women's Commission. Where the city commission has a budget to throw events like the annual Women's History Month luncheon, the county's focuses more on policy. Our guest today is the chair of the county women's commission, Susan Hingle. We talk with her about the research they do, their outreach efforts, and their advocacy in the design of the new county justice complex.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

It's another round of questions for Anna Killion-Hanson about the city Housing & Neighborhood Development, which she directs. She tackles questions like what's happening now in the Hopewell development where the hospital used to be, good advice for tenants new to town, like how a tenant with a complaint about a habitability issue should proceed, and how the Redevelopment Commission (which HAND oversees) works.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our topic today is emergency winter sheltering, the last resort for Bloomingtonians with no place to call home when it is most dangerous outside. For years there was a coordinated effort among local churches called the Interfaith Winter Shelter, but...well, it ended. We talk about why, and what's required to replace it, with the leadership team of the organization that has picked up the baton. Caleb Hoagland and Dan Caldwell run the Bloomington Severe Winter Emergency Shelter, called B-SWERS for short. The shelter provides beds in extreme cold weather at downtown churches, on a shoestring budget with virtually all volunteers. But it's already being recognized for its effort: last month, the city/county human rights commission awarded B-SWERS the 2025 Human Rights Award. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is a Nurse Practitioner who specializes in OBGYN, and works for IU Health as the Regional Director for Advance Practice Providers. But Danielle Benedek is also a co-founder of the Riley Physician's Medical Child Abuse Clinic, hosted at the Bloomington branch of the nonprofit child advocacy center known as Susie's Place. We talk with her about the clinic, which is a safe, unified and effective place for child victims of abuse to be cared for while their cases work their way through the justice system. For her work, the city Commission on the Status of Women named Benedek the 2025 Woman of the Year. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

There are almost a thousand agencies around the country called "community action programs", whose mandates are to reduce the extent and impact of poverty in a given area, and date to the 1960s War on Poverty launched by the administration of LBJ. Our guest today, Eddy Riou, is the executive director of SCCAP ("skap"), the South Central Community Action Program, which is based in Bloomington. He lays out all the programs that they manage, involving Head Start, weatherization, housing choice vouchers, energy assistance, and many others. SCCAP is the local operator of state and federal programs designed to meet the specific needs of low-income individuals and families. It also advocates for and represents the interests of people with low incomes, helps them to represent themselves, and coordinates with other agencies in the same sector.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Any roads outside Bloomington, Ellettsville or Stinesville are the jurisdiction of Monroe County. Today, we talk to the County Highway Department about how they manage the condition of more than 700 miles of roads.Our guests today are Lisa Ridge, the Highway Dept. director, and her deputy, Toby Turner, the Highway Superintendent. They talk about what it takes to maintain a roadway properly (hint: it's not just about paving), how they deal with water, and how it all gets funded. It's a crash course on roads -- no wait, that's probably the wrong metaphor -- call it a quick start guide to your county roads network. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The 812 is back after an extended summer break with a new season!Our premiere guest of season 4 is a fellow traveler. He too started a local government reporting series...and he just finished high school. Rafiul Shefar graduated at the beginning of this month from Harmony School, an independent K-12 school in Bloomington. Harmony students have to do a senior project. He wanted to better understand US government, which led him to the Youth Radio program at community radio station WFHB. Over the summer, he produced an eight-part series taking a deep dive into the state legislature, interviewing experts on issues taken up by the Indiana statehouse, and called it "government.exe". But if you're expecting an amateur production full of stumbles and hesitation, you're in for a big surprise. Rafiul (his "last" name) books knowledgeable guests, asks incisive questions and is a good listener. And Rafiul's non-American identity -- he came to the US for high school from his native Bangladesh, where autocracy is the rule -- gives American listeners a fresh perspective on our democracy. The show aired between June and August on WFHB, and is available on their website.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Shelli Yoder returns to The 812, now as the Indiana Senate minority leader (a title she got unexpectedly the day after she was last here in December). Whatever plans she mentioned then for this legislative session were upended by the behemoth changes wrought by Senate Bill 1. Localities around the state are still reeling from the impact of the tax cuts in SB1; we talk about how it will affect Bloomington, Monroe County, and the school corporations. Sen. Yoder also talks about the state's new work requirements in Medicaid, and the looming threat of universal choice vouchers to public school systems in the state.This is our last episode for Season 3 which began in January. The 812's schedule roughly follows that of the Bloomington City Council, which just had its last meeting Wednesday, June 4, before its summer recess. The show will resume with Season 4 in mid-July, after Council resumes its regular sessions.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

On June 27, the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre will host a screening of the original, uncut, 1954 Toho Studios film Gojira, in Japanese with English subtitles. There will be a special presentation before the film, and a Q&A panel discussion afterwards. That'll be followed by original Japanese cuts of two more Godzilla films the next two nights, rarely if ever seen by American audiences -- and the differences are dramatic.The mad genius behind Godzilla Weekend is Beth Bredlau, a graduate student in the Art History Department at IU, who specializes in "Godzilla Studies." We talk with her about the cultural significance of the famed movie beast in the 21st century, and the proclamation from Mayor Thomson declaring June 27 Godzilla Day in Bloomington. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Steve Bonchek, whom everyone just calls "Roc", is founder and principal of Harmony School, the independent, non-religious school not funded by the state, which is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary, 40 of which have been in Bloomington's old Elm Heights School, which itself is turning 100 next year. Bonchek talks about how the school came to be, how it works, and why he doesn't call it a "private" school even though it's neither a public nor a charter school. He also talks about the founding of the youth organization called Rhino's, which, with the cooperation and sponsorship of the city and county, served an important role as an all-ages center and night club in downtown Bloomington for more than 25 years.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the episode scheduled for today has been delayed until tomorrow, Tuesday, June 3. Look for it in your podcast feed then!Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

When last here in December, Nathan Ferreira was the director of real estate development for the Bloomington Housing Authority. He's now executive director of the BHA, and at a trying time for government-assisted housing, with cuts facing the Housing and Urban Development grants that fund so many housing authorities around the country. We'll get a sense from him of what's facing affordable and supportive housing in Bloomington, as well as find out how projects like the Kohr Building remodel or the Summit Hill Community Development Corporation are going.A Last Pitch today, in response to the conflict brewing at the Monroe County Board of Health, which is courting the Streisand Effect.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

People and Animal Learning Services, or PALS, is a nonprofit center, dedicated to providing meaningful, therapeutic hands-on experiences with horses for individuals with disabilities, veterans, senior citizens, and underserved youth through partnerships with entities like the Monroe County Youth Services Bureau. We talk with Christine Herring, the Executive Director, about the normal work PALS does, and the harrowing impact of the tornado that destroyed their horse barn on May 16, days after they celebrated their 25th anniversary.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

NOTE: The 812 will take Memorial Day off; new episodes resume Wed., May 28.Stormwater needs to be channeled somewhere -- lakes, rivers, retention ponds -- or it becomes floodwater. If there aren't ditches or box culverts near where you live or work, you may have been wading around last weekend. Communities do their best to manage stormwater, to not mix it with their wastewater. Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems, also known as MS4, exist throughout Monroe County: they reduce pollution and the costs of cleaning water for human reuse at the water treatment plant.Erica Penna is Monroe County's stormwater program manager. We talk with her about MS4 and other kinds of concerns she deals with, like illicit discharges into storm drains; the challenges of preventing problems created by construction; and the county's current decade-long plan for stormwater, which is about to be updated next year. She can even tell you the difference between the local drainage board and the local stormwater management board. There's a new Last Pitch today, too: in light of the recent decision by the Election Board, it's about the prospect of changing from precinct voting to vote-center voting.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Children have very real-world needs, and sometimes face problems that adults would have trouble dealing with. That's why the city's Commission on the Status of Children and Youth exists. The commission advocates for local youth, collects data on their needs, and debates how to solve persistent problems that those under 18 are having in our community. Erin Reynolds is the chair of the commission; Katie Hopkins is the fomer chair and the current secretary of the commission. They talk about how they try to help all the other organizations, including the city itself, coordinate to better serve children, and to define and address issues like literacy rates, chronic absenteeism in school, digital equity, and, yes, the mental health needs of children. They also promote the SWAGGER Awards, recognizing children in the community who go above and beyond.After only 17 months, The 812 is celebrating its 200th episode! We hope you'll support us to do at least 200 more. Visit our Patreon or our website for how you can help.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

City councilmember Sydney Zulich (D-6) returns to the show to talk about:downtown beautification, including planters and the new art going up at last on traffic control boxes; some of the logic behind this year's Kirkwood closures; Bloomington Transit's summer experiment with a new downtown shuttle; and the breaking of ground on the convention center expansion.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

There's bus service to Ivy Tech and Cook at long last. A dozen new fully-electric buses in the fleet. And, this summer at long last, the first experiments with a free downtown circulator. John Connell, General Manager, returns for a 2025 update with Shelley Strimaitis, BT's Planning & Special Projects Manager, to discuss many improvements coming or already implemented: the new #13 route, the new downtown shuttle-bus route, an update on the Green Line (the name of BT's "bus rapid transit" initiative), and more.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We talk shop with our counterpart in the state’s other major college-dominated metropolitan area. The city of West Lafayette, the home of Purdue University, only became a second-class city like Lafayette and Bloomington in 2013, with a mayor and a nine-member council. Now a city of 45,000, it's experienced 50% growth in a decade, thanks to pressure from a growing Purdue student body attracted by a tuition rate frozen since cityhood. David Sanders is a councilmember at large in West Lafayette. We talk with him about housing, relations with Purdue, and the state water grab that almost drained the Wabash river.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Judy Sharp, the Monroe County Assessor, has seen it all in her decades in office, and is back with an update on property taxes. We talk with her about the debate between whether assessors should be elected or appointed, and in the second half, all about Senate Bill 1, which passed the statehouse in April, and had a number of surprises, mostly unpleasant, for municipal and county governments. [Note: We had problems with the quality of the audio in this episode's interview, which we're working on. We hope the audio doesn't detract too much from your enjoyment of the episode.]Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Liz Feitl served as a union organizer and leader at IU and then with United Way of Monroe County for decades. Seven years ago she won the Toby Strout Lifetime Achievement Award from the City of Bloomington Commission on the Status of Women. Since winning the local Democratic Party caucus on January 19, Feitl is the newest member of the Monroe County Council, replacing the late Cheryl Munson. We get into her background, the breadth of her new portfolio, and her take on the job.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020 exploded into the national consciousness and raised many questions. One of the most important was: knowing that our society has plenty of biases, knowing that perception is reality for a great number of people, should we count on sworn officers alone to improve public safety?In Bloomington, the city council approved a new commission to address that question. The Community Advisory on Public Safety (CAPS) Commission, approved in November 2020 and established in May 2021, was created to research and recommend evidence-based alternatives to traditional policing, including best practices anywhere in the world, for implementation in Bloomington. Their goal: to increase the safety of everyone in the community, especially those often marginalized due to race, disability, gender, sexual identity, or sexual orientation. Our guests today are Kamala Brown Sparks, a member of the CAPS Commission since its founding, and Councilmember Isabel Piedmont-Smith, a co-author of the ordinance creating the commission. We get into how the CAPS Commission differs from the long-standing Board of Public Safety, what initial conclusions the new commission came to, and how their work is going.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

To the present. Miah Michaelsen is an old hand at the intersection of government and the arts. She's been at the Indiana Arts Commission since 2015, where she's now Executive Director. Before that, she served eight years in the Kruzan Administration, serving as Bloomington's first Assistant Economic Development Director for the Arts. As if that weren't enough, before that she served four years as the Executive Director of the Bloomington Area Arts Council. We talk about the current fiscal austerity for the arts, the variety of projects happening around the state nevertheless, and how her time at the city influenced her work in Indianapolis. When it comes to the arts, she's seen it all, and she tells us about what she's learned.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We speak with Amy Oelsner, the founder and director of Girls Rock Bloomington, which teaches girls from ages 8 to 14 all the elements of a rock and roll band. Girls Rock has been the beneficiary of grants from the city Arts Commission as well as from the Monroe County Council's Sophia Travis Fund. Oelsner is also a musical artist in her own right, with nine albums under her belt under the stage name "Amy O". For her work with Girls Rock, she was given the Emerging Leader Award by the Bloomington Commission on the Status of Women at their annual Women's History Luncheon in March. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We've been highlighting some of the programs of the Center for Sustainable Living, an organization that acts as an umbrella for nonprofit ideas that might be too small to be their own 501(c)(3). One of the constituent organizations in the CSL incubator is Redbud Books, which opened just over a year ago at 408 W. Kirkwood. A one-room bookstore entirely run by volunteers and open seven days a week, it also acts as a community center. Redbud screens movies, hosts meetings and stages events through arts and youth programming grants from the city, county and IU. We speak with two founding members of the collective that runs Redbud Books, Mia Beach and Hannah Airriess, about their effort to build community in a time when that goal seems to be receding.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Community Access Television Services is the television station in the Monroe County Public Library. For 50 years, CATS (formerly known as Bloomington Community Access Television, or BCAT) has provided access to channels over cable and the Internet for public meetings and then some, and has provided access to equipment and studio space for the public to make television programming. It's one of the first organizations in the country to provide live and recorded coverage of local government meetings. Our guest today is Martin O'Neill, the general manager of CATS, who'll tell us about the other services it provides, and the not-so-trivial challenge of maintaining 50 years of video archives.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

It's The 812's first look at one of the most basic local services, the fire department. Our guest, Tom Figolah, is the Department's Fire Prevention Officer, and his title reflects a trend that may not be self-evident to people who are used to fire departments being just about putting out fires. That's reactive; better is to anticipate potential fires so that they don't start in the first place. Our conversation gets into what they call "community risk reduction", as well as the city's fire insurance rating, the effect of the new union contract on retaining firefighters, and their new initiative to making medical runs more effective through their innovative Mobile Integrated Health initiative.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Today's show is a case study in Bloomington's arts economy. Our guests are the founders of MDWST FABLE, a series of performing-arts shows that involve other artists in the Bloomington area, largely centered around storytelling. Tristra Newyear and Matt Rice, both of whom work for local creative media companies and who are creatives in their own rights, began collaborating on events just last year. In today's innings, they talk about their ideas and their work, and how key to their ability to create was a small but significant grant from the angel investors known as the Bloomington Arts Commission. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

John Baeten came to town as a visiting assistant professor in IU's geography department, where he spent time doing, among other things, a reconstruction of maps of Bloomington from the past. That led to his current post as the GIS Coordinator for Monroe County. GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems, of which there are many at the county. In fact, it's hard for any local government to do their jobs these days without some kind of GIS capacity.Baeten talks with us about all sorts of interesting projects on the county's state-award-winning GIS website, like stitching together aerial images of the county taken in the middle of the 20th century, a project mapping racial covenants in real estate deeds across the county. mapping the prevalence of radon, even mapping ticks for the health department.We're back from a week's hiatus, and we're starting a mailing list! Visit the812show.org to add your email.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

So you may know that Bloomington has been a sister city to Posoltega, Nicaragua since 1988, and to Santa Clara, Cuba since 1999. Sister Cities International has been pairing cities across national borders for many years now.But Vicki Veenker asked herself: why can't two American cities be sibs? And that's how Bloomington, Indiana became the sibling city of Palo Alto, California, where Veenker is the Vice Mayor, as well as the founder of the Sibling Cities USA program. We learn about how the program came to be, how they chose Bloomington (hint: Veenker's a Hoosier), and we learn about our sib: how Palo Alto is governed, what their big issues are, and how they compare to Bloomington's. The 812 is taking a week off from new programs to retool. New episodes resume April 21. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

In the incorporated place that is Bloomington's primary official suburb, there's no mayor. The part-time town council in Ellettsville is the legislative and executive body -- sort of like the board of commissioners that runs the county -- but they're also the fiscal body. They're everything; in Indiana, only counties and cities have separation of powers. Scott Oldham is in his nineteenth year on the five-member council for the town of more than 8000, and currently serves as president. He talks about what he's seen since he started in 2006, and current and future issues concerning Ellettsville. It's the first time The 812 has gotten the perspective of Monroe County's second-largest community.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Today is a Work Session, an interview with a member of local media where we talk about the city and local issues of the day. Michael "Big Mike" Glab is a former reporter for the Chicago Reader who's covered every kind of news, hard and soft. After 50 years in the Windy City, he eventually found himself in Limestone Country, where he became the host of Big Talk, a half-hour interview show not unlike this one. Where this show's theme is local government, Big Talk focus more on creative Bloomington. Glab is a creative himself, who continues writing on his long-standing blog The Electron Pencil.At any rate, Big Mike invited The 812 host Steve Volan to Big Talk last year; now it's time to return the favor. We talked about differences between here and Chicagoland, about Bloomigton's ambitions as a city, and about books — Glab also is a bookseller who works at the local institution known as the Book Corner and its late, lamented long-time owner, Margaret Taylor.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The 812 converts to "El Ocho Doce" for the day, to welcome representatives from the Commission on Hispanic and Latino Affairs, which "works to identify and research the issues which impact those populations in Bloomington, especially in the areas of health, education, public safety and cultural competency." They help break the language barrier that prevents many residents from accessing services like medical care or housing, through forums on mental health or orienting newcomers to the community. Our guests are Marlo Libel (LEE-bell) — he's chair of the commission — and Ximena (hee-MEN-a) Martinez — she's the commission's liaison as well as the Latino Outreach Coordinator in the city's department of Community and Family Resources. We also get a brief update on the Vote Center Study Committee (VCSC), the special body appointed by the Monroe County Election Board, which has completed its report on whether the county should move from precinct-based to center-based voting, in which a voter can cast their vote on Election Day at any polling place in the county. (Last November we had an episode about the topic featuring Ralf Shaw and Ami Gandhi from the VCSC.) The report is now open for public scrutiny. VCSC chair Ilana Stonebraker outlines the final steps before the Election Board's decision in May.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

One person's trash is another's treasure...or so the Trashion Refashion Runway Show tries to demonstrate. The 16th annual event will be presented by Plato's Closet at the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre April 13. The virtually all-volunteer event presents and models clothes designed almost entirely from waste, recycled, or upcycled materials.We talk about promoting sustainability through haute couture, the history of Trashion, and all about how the event works with Devta Kidd, producer of this year's event (and also about her former role as Director of Innovation for the City of Bloomington), and Stephen Hale, immediate past producer of the show for the past several years, and a member of the board of the Center for Sustainable Living which the event benefits.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Even before they make the formal announcement later this morning, we have details on the official revival of the Taste of Bloomington, the summer celebration of this city's bustling local restaurant scene that happened for 35 years before the pandemic said we couldn't have nice things.Anyway, the Taste is back -- for at least one year, anyway -- courtesy of the Chocolate Moose. It's moving from its longtime home in the parking lot at City Hall to all five blocks of East Kirkwood Avenue, and it's moving from June to August. And: for the first time, admission will be free.How do we know all this? Jordan Davis, who last appeared on this show a year ago to talk about his very popular No Dishes podcast, happens to be the director of operations for the Moose, and he's leading the charge to reestablish Taste by reinventing it. And the plans are intriguing to say the least.(The previously scheduled interview with Devta Kidd and Stephen Hale about the coming Trashion Refashion Runway Show will air Wednesday.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We talk about the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association. It's run by a city board of directors appointed by mayor and council. The BUEA oversees the city's Urban Enterprise Zone. Businesses and residents of the Zone can benefit tax-wise from the Enterprise Zone's Investment Deduction; revenue from the EZID generates a pot of money in the mid-six-figures annually. Someone has to figure out how to distribute each year -- which is harder than it sounds.Andrea "De" de la Rosa is our guest today. We learn some of the finer points about the BUEA, and talk about her role working with small businesses, as she's both the executive director of the BUEA and the Assistant Director for Small Business Relations and Development in the city's department of Economic and Sustainable Development. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

A person who advocates in court for those who can't for themselves is known as a guardian ad litem. But there's an even greater need for children who have suffered abuse and/or neglect and find themselves lost in the justice system. Every state except North Dakota has court-appointed special advocates, or "CASAs" for short. Despite being an integral part of the local justice system, Monroe County's CASA system [is not funded by] gets only partial funding from county government; it became a nonprofit more than 40 years ago. Our guest today, Tia Arthur, is the executive director of Monroe County CASA. She and a dozen employees and a hundred volunteers provide advocacy for more than 75 cases serving more than 200 children in the justice system through no fault of their own. But another [50] 60 are on the waitlist for a CASA. Arthur talks about the need for CASAs, what the intensive training requirements and challenges are like...and what it's like for a CASA to have to name an infant! But they also  the local nonprofit manages related programs, like their Child Visit Monitor program, for people with less time to volunteer but still want to help.UPDATE March 28: Monroe County CASA reached out with corrections to the figures they gave us in this episode. It's more than 200 children being served by CASA through 75 cases, and almost 60 children who are on their waiting list for an advocate. Also, while the nonprofit organization is indeed not a county agency, they do receive some county funds, which they're grateful for. [Corrections made above via boldface and brackets. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Today we're talking specifically about a topic that could take several episodes to discuss: the primary source of drinking water in metropolitan Bloomington. The reservoir commonly known as Lake Monroe is the largest body of water inside the state of Indiana. It was the state's idea to put a university in the middle of nowhere in 1818, and the city that grew up around it was always in danger of losing the university to Indianapolis because of the lack of water. We outgrew Lake Griffy, then Lake Lemon. When the Army Corps of Engineers built Lake Monroe 60 years ago, it solved once and for all what had been Bloomington's existential problem since its founding in a place without a ready water supply. Our guests today are from the Lake Monroe Water Fund: Michelle Cohen is the executive director; Jane Martin is president of its board. Formed less than five years ago, their primary mission is to raise money for shovel-ready projects that help the lake: related to protecting the forests around it, helping farms run less fertiilizer off into it, and even helping homeowners with septic systems to prevent runoff. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We continue our series of Work Sessions — interviews with members of the local media discussing issues involving local government — today with Jill Bond, News Director and Editor of the Bloomington Herald-Times newspaper. We ask about her editing philosophy (which she just gave a TEDxIU talk about). Then we dive into some of the big issues the city's paper of record has been tackling lately, including ambulance service in Monroe County, the Monroe County Community School Corporation's need to downsize, and the current state of the city annexation lawsuit. Today's Last Pitch is about the Mayor's recent decision to appeal the decision on that annexation lawsuit to the Indiana Supreme Court.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Forty years ago, Bloomington's downtown was all but over. Half of the land had been cleared for parking lots to compete with auto-centric development at College Mall and other places on the outskirts of the city. A coalition of downtown businesses assembled to try to reverse the trend. As a result, Bloomington is one of the few cities in the state that saved its downtown, through the rehabilitation of many historic buildings. And, to give the community civic meeting space, an old car dealership was converted to a convention center. Our guests today are from Downtown Bloomington Inc, a sort of chamber of commerce devoted to revitalizing the city's core. DBI also has a contract with the county to run the Monroe Convention Center. We talk with Talisha Coppock, DBI's executive director since 1987 and director of the Monroe Convention Center, and Jim Doering, president of the DBI board of directors. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

When friend of the show Geoff McKim was on the show last May, he was in the final year of his four-term, 16-year career as a member of the Monroe County Council. Now in retirement, he rejoins us to discuss issues of the new term, like the development of the new justice complex, and the impact of the recently discovered $3.8 million shortfall in the county budget. He also looks back on his county council career, and talks about his new role as one of the seven members of the joint city/county Capital Improvement Board, which just got approval from the Bloomington City Council to issue a bond to build the expansion of the Monroe Convention Center. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our topic today is the Center for Sustainable Living, a peculiarly Bloomington institution. Since the 1990s, it has been a kind of not-for-profit co-op, foster projects that help the environment or allow people to live more sustainably. Their projects include Discardia which puts on the annual Trashion/Refashion show at the Buskirk Chumley; the Southern Indiana Renewable Energy Network which advises homeowners on how to solarize their homes; and the Bloomington Community Bike Project.The Center manages the overhead for a typical nonprofit -- insurance, taxes, governance, and the start-up costs associated with organizing a business however modest. Each project it sponsors pays a small part of its proceeds to sustain the Center. Some projects complete their missions or fade out; others grow big enough to graduate and become their own separate nonprofits. The Center has applied for and received many a grant, including from the city of Bloomington, on behalf of its many constituent projects. Our guest is Sura Gail Tala. She's been associated on and off with the CSL for decades, and is a member of their board of directors. We get from her the scope of their work, how they manage all those projects, and we dig into her own history as an environmental activist -- which includes her story about attending the first Earth Day in 1970.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guests today are from Tandem, the perinatal and reproductive resource center. Through Jack Hopkins grants, the city of Bloomington helped Tandem launch in Bloomington five years ago, with a certified nurse midwife, who's considered an APRN, an advanced practice registered nurse, in the state of Indiana. They now also offer a postpartum house with overnight rooms and are building a birth center, all at their location on East Third Street near the Bypass. Julie Duhon, the center's executive director, and Erin Loughery, their office manager, join us to talk about their programs, and the challenges of providing modern-day midwifery services.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

In 1991 the city of Bloomington sold the rights to its 1915 City Hall building to nonprofit groups. One group made most of it what you know today as the John Waldron Arts Center. Another group acquired the attached old Fire Station No. 1: with the money it raised they made it the home of Bloomington's community radio station, WFHB, which got its call letters because they stand for Fire House Broadcasting. That conveyance of a city building has been a key reason for WFHB's successful operation for more than 30 years. Money for operations can be scarce, and rent has been the undoing of more than one worthy community radio station around the country.A community radio station is like a public radio station in that it's non-commercial and supported by underwriting and listener contributions; unlike a public station, most of the programming is also done by volunteers. Our guests are Jar Turner,  the general manager of WFHB, and Brooke Turpin, its development director. They talk about what a community radio station does, how it helps make community, how you can benefit from it, and how you can support it.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

It's not just a new era nationally, it's a new one locally. We have the other elected county newbie on our show (besides County Council Member David Henry, who appeared late last year), and that's County Commissioner Jody Madeira. She's taking a swing at all the big local issues of the day -- the new jail, the county health department, the county's new development ordinance -- and some of the niceties of how the commissioners collectively do business day to day. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our topic today is Kirkwood Avenue, specifically the five blocks of East Kirkwood between the Courthouse Square and the Sample Gates, which many people consider to be the heart of Bloomington.Since 2020, the city has closed public rights-of-way to benefit local restaurants. Some establishments, mostly around the Square, have rented adjacent metered parking spaces as outdoor dining space. On Kirkwood, the city closed whole blocks to allow restaurants to host diners while social distancing. It also made those blocks de facto pedestrian streets. The idea proved so popular that it has continued each year since. Last month, the city council approved an ordinance permanently delegating the decision to close any and all of the five blocks of East Kirkwood as the administration sees fit, at least between the months of April and November. Jane Kupersmith was last on almost a year ago to talk about the  city department she leads, Economic and Sustainable Development. We invited her back to discuss the prospects of a seasonal pedestrian mall, and what ideas they're hoping to explore in addition to the now-usual outdoor dining and low-speed thoroughfare -- festivals, pushcarts, food trucks, and other new kinds of programs.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Cicada Cinema is a volunteer-run organization which calls itself a "pop-up movie theatre". Since 2016 they've been showing around Bloomington underrepresented and what they call "underseen" films, pretty much just for the sake of cinema. The city Arts Commission strategically funded their organization with a grant to show movies in local parks, which was co-sponsored by the city Parks and Rec Dept. and promoted in their annual Program Guide, which this show recently featured. Cicada Cinema's Josh Brewer, a co-founder and the organization's lead volunteer, along with Cicada's senior volunteer Derek Navardauskas, are our guests today. We visit with them to find out how an arts organization is born and grown, just as they're on the cusp of establishing nonprofit status.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

In September we interviewed the director of the Sycamore Land Trust, John Lawrence, about the idea of a land trust -- a nonprofit that preserves land from development and maintains landscape in its natural state. It also runs an environmental program that connects people to that nature. But somebody has to manage those 144 properties, their more than 11,500 acres. That's another story, for which we turn to Sycamore's Lead Stewardship Director, Chris Fox. He talks about how he and his team deal with boundary issues, monitors unauthorized tree harvesting and the health of ecosystems under Sycamore management, and maintains the condition of Sycamore's 30 miles of trails.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

One of the most high-profile developers in the area is Habitat for Humanity of Monroe County, famously builders of affordable housing (and formerly headed by current Mayor Kerry Thomson, who was a guest on this show back in August). We talk with Wendi Goodlett, current President and CEO, and Lindsey Boswell, Development Director, about their process for finding potential residents and training them to qualify for Habitat homes; how many houses are currently have under construction at Osage Place, a whole neighborhood of Habitat-built houses on the southwest side of Bloomington; and common misconceptions people have about what Habitat does and how it works -- like that their organization or their nonprofit model is going to solve the local housing crisis.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Today's local-media guest is visual journalist Jeremy Hogan, the co-owner and editor of The Bloomingtonian, the local independent hard-news website which he founded five years ago after being laid off from The Herald-Times, where he was a staff photographer for more than 20 years. We talk with him about how he chooses stories, and some of the biggest topics he's covered lately, like the unhoused and the Gaza protests in Dunn Meadow. He also talks about how the business of journalism has changed -- and how he's gone back to shooting 35mm film in the digital age, and why.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Bloomington is rightly proud of its namesake greenery and its long-standing status as a Tree City. But the growth of the city's built environment over the past several decades has cut its tree population by more than half. This was the impetus for the creation in 2021 of Canopy Bloomington, a nonprofit devoted to getting citizens to understand the importance of trees, to getting them to plant new trees, and to getting them to care for the city's tree canopy. Unlike most tree-planting efforts that focus primarily on public land, Canopy Bloomington tries to plant trees on private land. We talk all about their goals with Executive Director Ava Hartman and Community Engagement Specialist Jon Vickers (who we also briefly ask about his time as the director of the IU Cinema).Later, a Last Pitch about what to name the soon to be dramatically expanded convention center.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

There's a reason that the city's Parks & Recreation Department is a two-time winner of the National Recreation and Park Association's prestigious Gold Medal. Their Program Guide is proof of it: 40 pages listing all the programs, special events, sports, fitness, outdoor, garden, and other opportunities open to little kids, seniors and everyone in between.We go through the Guide with Community Relations Manager Julie Ramey, who highlights coming events like classes, seminars, the 50+ and Kids Expos, Adult Winter Recess, how Parks is handling the invasive species that is pickleball, and the new park facilities at Hopewell Commons.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guests today are from the Arts Alliance of Greater Bloomington. It serves as sort of an arts chamber of commerce, representing six types of arts genres --  visual, literary, music, dance, theatre/film, and galleries/venues/festivals. Artists or organizations in each genre have very different needs, but all genres are represented on the Arts Alliance's Board of Directors. The organization owns the Arts Alliance Center in College Mall, and has just taken over management of the By Hand Gallery, a 45-year old co-op art gallery on the Courthouse Square.We talked with Alliance executive director Charles Pearce and board president Henry Leck on First Friday about their services, and the organization's formation, in the wake of the 2011 management crisis involving the Waldron Arts Center that led to the demise of the Bloomington Area Arts Council. (This episode was recorded on February 7, also known as First Friday or Gallery Walk Bloomington, the date each month when 14 downtown galleries nearby each other coordinate to stay open until 8 pm to encourage evening visitors.) We also talk about next month's First Friday, when the Alliance will throw an event at Fountain Square Ballroom called "Gala Round the Table", at which they'll celebrate the founders of By Hand,...and announce the Alliance's new name, brand and logo.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Hopi Stosberg returns to The 812 a year later, as the new president of the council in only her sophomore year. We talk about some of her priorities for her leadership year, including changes to the Unified Development Ordinance initiated by Council late last year, including making affordability incentives more practical, and returning Single Room Occupancy dwellings to legal status in the city. She also talks about the budget process and steps the Council is considering to make it better. (And...we may have talked a little about certain boards and commissions.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

If you mix together your grade school math class, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and life skills into a blender, add lemon, and press "liquefy"...you get Lemonade Day, which encourages kids across the community to set up lemonade stands on a Saturday in June. It's a fun way to learn the basics of business, which can be useful even if a kid doesn't ever start one and becomes just another consumer. Laura Blaker, Events Director at the Boys and Girls Club of Bloomington, is our guest today and, as she also holds the title of Lemonade Day City Director for Monroe County, tells us all about how it works. (Fair warning: She likes to make puns...with zest.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Are you fighting with someone -- a spouse, the city, a landlord, a tenant, even a family member -- and you just can't reconcile with them? At least here in Bloomington, there's a nonprofit devoted exclusively to mediating disputes. It's a nonprofit called the Community Justice and Mediation Center, or CJAM for short. CJAM has helped negotiate restorative justice between victims and offenders; separations and divorces; landlord-tenant disputes; even the custody of pets. And they get results. And...their services are free. We hear all about what they do from Liz Grenat, the outgoing executive director, and Wyatt Lawson, the incoming executive director.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Instead of a guest from a city or county board or commission, which we do frequently, today's show is about ALL the city's boards and commissions, and how they get managed. Which, until now, has been haphazardly, by the individual departments that act as their liaisons. The city has created a new position in the Clerk's office just to centrally administer the city's dozens of boards and commissions. Our guest is friend of the show Jennifer Crossley. She was our guest in June, in her capacity as a member of the Monroe County Council. We talk with her about her day job as a Deputy City Clerk, whose new portfolio is the administration of boards and commissions. If you've ever thought about public service, listen to this episode and consider being on a local board or commission -- institution building is the antidote to the selfish chaos of national politics.Today also: a Last Pitch about how best to benefit from the City Council's recent decision to make permanent the seasonal closure of East Kirkwood Avenue.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

This week we're inviting back some of our favorite guests with updates from their corners. Today we welcome back Holly McLauchlin to talk about the latest at City of Bloomington Utilities, where she's the Communications Manager. This time we ask about the new wastewater rate and how CBU handles rate increases in general; the health of Lake Monroe, the primary water source for the Bloomington metro area; and the installation of fiber across the city and how the digging sometimes affecting water service. We also pay tribute to the late, great John Langley, who served the city through CBU for 41 years.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We welcome back to the show one of our favorite raconteurs, Christopher Emge from the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce, who appeared a year ago when the show was first starting. We discuss current issues on the Chamber's agenda, including Bloomington's convention center expansion, public transit going outside the city for the first time, and the question of whether and how to dedicate certain streets downtown for exclusive bus or pedestrian use. (He also tells us about his new title, which Steve just can't get quite right.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Diverting waste from the environment is a value held dear by most Monroe Countians. There's a local government agency independent of Monroe County or its settlements that oversees the management of solid waste (not to be confused with human waste, which is managed by City of Bloomington Utilities). It's the Waste Reduction District of Monroe County, and it's a taxing district like the library or the school corporations: with a separate line item from Bloomington or Ellettsville on a property tax bill. Our guest today is Elisa Pokral, the Community Outreach Coordinator for the District. She conducts tours, seminars and K-12 classroom presentations, and generally spends her time advocating for the environment. She tells us about the District, its services, and how she approaches her job. Basically, for her, every day is Earth Day.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We've had a number of guests who represent city commissions on this show. Today, our subject is the Commission on the Status of Black Males, a very busy board that hosts events at least six times a year, including their Outstanding Leaders of Tomorrow awards, their "Barbershop" health initiative, and the Million Father March at the beginning of each school year. Our guest is its chair, James Sanders. He's an award winner himself: for his involvement with the Commission, he won the 2024 Be More Phenomenal Award, presented to outstanding leadership through board, commission, or committee involvement by the City of Bloomington's Volunteer Network.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our first guest of the new year and the third season of The 812 is Carrie Albright, chair of the Bloomington Environmental Commission, one of the city's oldest. She talks about the work they do advocating for the city to balance urban growth with environmental preservation. They address everything from water quality and biodiversity to newer challenges like light pollution. And we talk about the popular annual Eco-Heroes art contest that they oversee.Our website is new and improving! It's undergone a slight revamp -- our Contact Us form finally works now! -- and we've started a new series of pages on our website called Collections, in which we put together a bunch of previous episodes that have a common theme. Our first collection brings together the interviews we did in 2024 with all nine Bloomington city councilmembers. There's no better introduction to the current city council than through our website. All that's fodder for our new weekly newsletter, along with previews of upcoming shows and whatever else we can manage to get in there. If you're a fan of the show, drop us your email and we'll keep you up to date.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The 812 is back with a new season of interviews with the people that make your community go 'round! New episodes drop beginning Monday, January 20. We're looking forward to an interesting crop of new episodes, and other innovations to be announced soon. See you next Monday!Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Shelli Yoder is the dynamic state senator from District 40, representing Bloomington. She explains the statehouse for us, then talks about 2025 and what treats the statehouse might have in store: the $1 billion budget miscalculation; birth control, IVF, and abortion; a farm bill she's sponsoring; and, for localities like Bloomington, topics like annexation and universal school vouchers.This is our last episode of Season 2, and of 2024. We'll be back with another season of shows beginning in mid-January.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

It's our penultimate show of our season 2, which began in August, and of the year 2024. Today we meet Lilliana Young, a member of the Bloomington/Monroe County Human Rights Commission, to talk about Bloomington's performance on the Municipal Equality Index. That's the Human Rights Campaign's annual report on how cities across the nation are doing by the LGBTQ+ population. This is the tenth consecutive year that Bloomington has achieved a perfect score on that Index, and we dig into why. We also talk with her about the Sisterhood of Bloomington, an alliance of trans women that she helped found and leads; she's styled herself the "matriarch" of the social and activist group. We talk about how they get by and the ceremony they conducted on November 20, the Transgender Day of Remembrance, on the steps of City Hall.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Director of Animal Care and Control for the City of Bloomington, Virgil Sauder tells us all about how the city, Monroe County and town of Ellettsville collaborate to manage domesticated pets in the area. He clears up some myths about how the city animal shelter works, and talks about what he's seen come through their doors in his almost 20 years of service.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Today we're remembering Monroe County Councilmember Cheryl Munson. A professor emerita in the IU Dept of Anthropology, she volunteered throughout the community, and also served in local politics, first on the township level, then as an at large member of the County Council. In the interview we recorded with her in June, she describes herself and the Council, and we talk about the issues of the day: the question of the county jail, county employee salaries, and how she was looking forward to a fourth term to address issues like these. And we get a look into her life as an archaeologist. There was plenty more to explore, and we were looking forward to having her back. We send our condolences to Pat, her husband of 57 years, and their family. Since it's all we can do, today we pay tribute to Cheryl Munson by remembering her in her prime. Please enjoy this encore presentation of The 812.Photo of Cheryl Munson having a bright idea ©2013 Steve Volan. All rights reserved.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is the director of the Bloomington affiliate of I Support the Girls. It's a nonprofit organization that started in the District of Columbia to get donations of old bras and unused feminine hygiene products to women in the local homeless shelter. It's now a global organization aimed at "supporting girls, women and folx in need with products to support and maintain their dignity."Marsha Lovejoy founded the local affiliate, and for her work in March was named Woman of the Year by the Bloomington Commission on the Status of Women. We ask how she got started supporting I Support the Girls, how the organization works, and how it's going. She also tells us what it's like to win that prestigious award and attend the Women's History Luncheon that fills the local convention center every year.We also note and lament the passing of Monroe County Councilmember Cheryl Munson, who died yesterday at 80. We'll devote our Friday episode to a remembrance of her, and revisit the interview she gave us in June.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

David Henry was first on in February, in his role as chair of the Monroe County Democratic Party, to explain the complicated caucus process that elevated Courtney Daily to the District 5 Bloomington City Council seat. Now he appears as an elected official in his own right, having won an at-large seat on the Monroe County Council. On January 1, when he takes the seat of friend-of-the-show Geoff McKim, a four-term councilmember who's retiring, Henry will be the only rookie on the council. We ask him about a wide range of topics, including county employee salaries, emergency management, and public health administration. And he gives us his general take on the difference between city and county councils, and the fiscal task that's the primary work of a county council.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Adam Nahas of Cyclops Studios, a sculptor, was also the founder and executive director of the former Artisan Alley, an artist's cooperative and nonprofit incubator  from its founding in 2011 until 2023. It folded earlier this year. During its existence, Artisan Alley provided a community for artists, offering affordable studio space, and evolved to meet the needs of local artists through various programs and initiatives. The city arts director helped them rent space at what would become Switchyard Park, which allowed them to expand and offer more resources like gallery space, a tool share, and classroom space. It even incubated other nonprofits, art-related and not. The life cycle of an arts collective on today's episode.Later in the show, a Last Pitch on the city council's controversial proposal to double its own salaries.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Today, Part II of our interview with April Hennessey and Erin Cooperman, the president and vice president respectively of the Board of Trustees of the Monroe County Community School Corporation. We talk about the challenges school boards have managing superintendents, and about issues that impact public school enrollment and funding from the state, like:the decline in K-12 enrollment that began even before COVID, due to lower birth rates and families being priced out of new homes throughout Monroe County;charter schools, private school vouchers, and the impact they have on public school finances;the potential impacts of the incoming Braun administration, and other policies coming from the stateand how all these factors weigh on a community that strongly supports its public schools.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our next two episodes are devoted to a new topic for this show about local government: the school board. There are two school districts in Monroe County: by far the larger of the two is the Monroe County Community School Corporation, which serves more than 10,000 students in more than 20 different school buildings. Neither city nor county government has any direct involvement in the oversight and operation of MCCSC. Our guests are April Hennessey and Erin Cooperman, the president and vice-president of MCCSC's Board of Trustees -- the completely separate unit of government which oversees the school system. We take a deep dive into what it's like to manage an Indiana school system, including a discussion of a controversial issue: the potential merger of Childs and Templeton Elementary Schools. (Part II will be released Wednesday, December 4.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

People on campuses across the country are wondering what the fate of equity efforts will be in these charged political times, and IU's is no exception. One organization asking existential questions is Students for Equity in Public Affairs (SEPA), an organization founded and run by students in the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. We talk with two of its representatives, Zsofia Leary and David Orth, about IU SEPA's effort to address the cultural climate at O'Neill through advocacy and action, in the context of the coming disdain for equity at the national level.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Until not too long ago, Danny Weddle was a builder of bespoke tiny homes. That got him interested in building affordable homes more cost-effectively. Now the co-founder and chief design officer of Terran Robotics, his company is building walls out of earth from the construction site... using 3-D printers, as though subsoil were just so much 3-D filament... which are run by robots run by AI — which Terran is  also inventing. He explains the process and the technology, which aims to reduce labor costs and make housing construction faster and more affordable. The first house built using this method is nearing completion right here in Bloomington; they have plans to build more houses starting in March. Weddle talks about the challenges of building such homes within existing local building codes, and the potential for scaling up the technology to build thousands of homes annually. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Middle Way House is the nonprofit that supports survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault through shelter, protection, counseling, permanent housing, and more. It is still a big agency to be sure, and addressing a distressingly great need. Executive Director Carrie Stillions gives us the virtual tour of Middle Way and all it does, and talks frankly about their budget plans with sources of funding drying up, and times growing more uncertain.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Monroe County still has precinct voting. On Election Day, you go to a particular polling place based on what precinct you live in. But there's a new idea out there: voting centers, which allow you to vote at any polling place regardless of where you live.In mid-2023, Monroe County's Election Board created a nine-member committee to study whether it would be a good idea for its residents to vote at vote centers, rather than at assigned precinct polling places. The committee began meeting at the beginning of this year and will wrap up its work in January.Two members of the Vote Center Study Committee join us: Debora (Ralf) Shaw is a representative from the League of Women Voters, and Ami Gandhi remotely leads the Midwest Voting Rights Program, a function of Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. They'll tell us all about vote centers, the Committee's work and some of the conclusions it's come to. (Note: Host Steve Volan is also a member of the Vote Center Study Committee.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

On the B-Line Trail downtown, there's a bust of Kathryn Janeway, captain of the USS Voyager, from the Star Trek series of the same name. How it got there is our subject today.  Our guests are Peter Kaczmarczyk and Lee Lawmaster, former presidents and members still of the Janeway Collective, the organization that fundraised for, designed and installed a statue dedicated to the fictional captain on Star Trek: Voyager in 2020. The Collective then brought the actor who played her, Kate Mulgrew, to town for a post-pandemic ceremony two years later. Kaczmarczyk and Lawmaster talk about the challenges of such a project on today's episode, the journey of a one-off public arts project from concept to execution, and a case study on working with your local government.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The city's efforts to cultivate entrepreneurship is embodied in the buildings that were auxiliary to the Showers Brothers Furniture Factory, a third of which famously became Bloomington's city hall in the mid-90s, and another third of which was acquired from IU by the county and is now the Monroe County Government Center. Several smaller brick buildings have been preserved and remade into workplaces for 21st-century new businesses, which more often than not are information technology-related. That area, dubbed The Trades District by the city, lies between 10th and 11th, Rogers and Morton Streets. The Dimension Mill,  with the same sawtooth roofline, is now a cowork space and the state's biggest tech incubator. We talk today with Pat East, executive director of The Mill, as well as senior vice president John Fernandez, who also happens to be a former two-term mayor of Bloomington. (We'll invite him back sometime to talk about his administration, which was the first to occupy the new Showers Building City Hall in 1996.) The Mill was the first of several buildings to be renovated or built in the Trades District, now runs the District on behalf of the city. We'll talk about the Kiln, the Showers Administration Building, the Forge, which is being built right now across from the Mill, and what's planned for the rest of the Trades District.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The last time Courtney Daily was on the show, in February, she was a candidate for city council. She won the District 5 seat in a Democratic party caucus; after 9 months, we're asking the most junior member of council what it's been like. We talk about the drama of that caucus, what's surprised her about being an elected official, and some of the issues that have recently been brought before the Council. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We're going into the belly of the development beast on today's show, with someone who's been involved in every aspect of the life cycle of a building: Mark Figg, a developer who's also done property management and appraisal. A local resident born and raised in Monroe County, he's built several multi-family apartment projects here, starting with the building many non-student residents of Bloomington love to hate: the Avenue on College, known initially as Smallwood Plaza when he developed it in 2004. Whether you love to see apartment buildings or you loathe them, it's important to understand how such buildings get built; today's guest gives us plenty to think about.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

It's a downtown transportation infrastructure update with Hank Duncan, the city's bicycle and pedestrian coordinator. We get the skinny on all the bumpouts being installed on downtown street corners, the future of Indiana Avenue, where the city is with studying updates to College and Walnut Streets, and more.Also...don't forget to vote before 6pm tomorrow, Tuesday, November 5th!Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The county's elected prosecuting attorney now in her second term, Erika Oliphant explains to The 812 the role of her office and the different programs it manages. We talk about the multiyear study her office is conducting into racial and ethnic disparities in the county justice system as a result of her office's actions, and what they're doing about it. We also discuss the county jail, particularly its population and the effect of programs like pretrial release on it.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We don't usually delve into arts and culture on this show unless it has a direct relationship to local elected government, but today's guest offers us an unusual opportunity. Abigail Knipstine tells us about the brand-new yet newly-renovated museum made out of two old ones, the IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (IUMAA), where she's the business manager. She talks about how museums like it are responding to the new rules about the questionable provenance of cultural artefacts in their collections, and how they're dealing with new rules on repatriating some of those items.Her immediate past job was as a legal researcher for the Bloomington City Council. In the second half of today's show, she walks us through the process of helping councilmembers develop legislation, and talks about some of the legislation she worked on, like a resolution about Artificial Intelligence or an ordinance about short-term rentals. It's like a double-half episode of The 812!Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

To the thousands of residents of Monroe County who were ever active-duty, Steven Miller is  likely to be a familiar name. He's the Veteran Service Officer, who runs Monroe County's Veterans Affairs Department. He tells us about the services he administers to vets, including pensions, education and burial benefits. He also talks about the harder side of the VA. Many vets have seen more than they bargained for. He talks about disability benefits, veterans case conferencing and treatment court for those struggling with substance abuse, as well as other services targeted to serving those who served. Note: In the second half of this episode, as part of her work, the conversation turns to veterans who have considered suicide. It may not be suitable for younger or more sensitive listeners. (If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide and seeking emotional support, there are crisis lines available via phone, chat, or text. The number to call, message or Google nationwide is 9-8-8; press 1 to be connected to a veteran who can help.) Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

A new installment in our occasional series, The 812 Work Session, in which we meet members of the local media and compare notes about local news. Today's guests are Marissa Meador and Jacob Spudich, the co-editors-in-chief of the Indiana Daily Student. We talk about issues they're covering on campus, including Dunn Meadow and the unwitting deficit spending of student organizations. One issue is the IDS itself: the IU administration has ordered the cutting of its print-run, potentially ending a 150-year tradition.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Today we're releasing portions of never-before-aired overtime interviews with recent guests. Anything we've recorded after the main interview for that episode we've been setting aside as "Extra Innings" segments, which can run anywhere from 7 minutes to as long as half an hour. Here now are a few samples.Extra Innings with Haskell Smith and George Hegeman of the Tree Commission (original episode), talking about the emerald ash borer in BloomingtonA portion of the Extra Innings with Lesley Davis, chair of the city's Council for Community Accessibility (original episode), about her new job as the VP for North American Partnerships at Access Able, a British companySara Laughlin, a volunteer and board member at Teachers' Warehouse (original episode), on her former role as director of the Monroe County Public Library, and her oversight of the process that led to the new Southwest branchIsak Asare, city councilmember, commandeering the helm (original episodes here and here) to grill The812 host and former city councilmember Steve Volan on his 20-year careerFull-length Extra Innings segments will soon be available to patrons of the show on our website.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Van Buren Township, to the city's west-southwest, is the fourth most populous township in Monroe County (about 12,000 people as of the last census). In the first half of our interview, Township Trustee Rita Barrow (pronounced "borrow") lays out how she handles the role of trustee in Van Buren, including building new headquarters and dealing with disputes over weeds and fence lines.In the second half, the episode really gets into the weeds: host Steve Volan asks her about fire department mergers, the still-cooking county development ordinance, and, the elephant in the room, Bloomington's notorious attempt at annexation of significant parts of the unincorporated areas nearest to it, including significant areas of Van Buren. (Full disclosure: when Steve was on city council, he voted in 2021 for the city's annexation proposal, while Rita has been leading the opposition to annexation since 2017.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The Monroe County History Center on 6th and Washington is a museum, a library, an event space, and then some. Not every community has such a thing -- it's not part of the Public Library, so it relies entirely on donations and grants, yet it has several full-time staff. We talk with Daniel Schlegel, the Center's Director, and Megan MacDonald, the Center's Librarian. They tell us all about the place, including its holdings regarding limestone and the old RCA factory, people doing genealogy research, cemeteries in the county, the history of the building itself, and some of the amusing stories they've collected over time.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Ellen Jacquart is the president of Monroe County Identify and Reduce Invasive Species, or MC-IRIS for short. She leads a surprisingly large group of volunteers who have made it their mission to help pull plants that shouldn't be here because they're not native to the area, and in many cases, crowd out plants that are. Whether it's the Callery pear, the asian bush honeysuckle, or the so-called tree of heaven -- don't cut that one, friend, it could give you a heart attack -- they've got to go, but they're hard to get rid once they've literally taken root in our community. Jacquart talks with Steve Volan about MC-IRIS' philosophical approach to wrestling with Mother Nature, and how you can help.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Living-learning centers at IU allow students to take classes in a specialty of their choice in the dorm where they live on-campus. The Civic Leaders Living-Learning Center takes up three floors in one tower of Briscoe Quad. Former Bloomington city councilmember Steve Volan was invited out for an exchange of ideas with former Fort Wayne mayor Paul Helmke, now the faculty director of the CLLLC, and Colby Wicker, the center's Cox Scholar. This episode was recorded live at Briscoe Quad in front of 80 students participating in the LLC. We talk about how politics works at the local level and how the modern media landscape has changed local politics.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is the Monroe County Coroner, Joani Stalcup. She tells us all about the job: how it works, what the difference is between a coroner and a medical examiner, and why coroners were ever elected in the first place. She also introduces us to the term "medical legal death investigator", talks about the surprising requirements of the job, and how the people who do it manage. It's a sobering but fascinating look into a necessary corner of local government.Note: by definition, we're talking about death in this episode. It may not be the best idea for children, or for the faint of heart. In the second half of the show, as part of her work, the Coroner has to talk about suicide. (If you, or someone you know, is thinking about suicide and seeking emotional support, there are crisis lines available via phone, chat, or text. The number to call, message or Google nationwide is 9-8-8.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

On today's show, we're talk to the biggest distributor of usable food in South Central Indiana, the Hoosier Hills Food Bank. They move more than 5 million pounds of food, half from places that can no longer use or sell it, to people in need. Julio Alonso, the Food Bank's executive director, and Jake Bruner, the associate director, talk about how they support local food pantries in six counties, the impact the pandemic had on them, and some of the ways they raise funds. We'll also talk about two of the biggest fundraising events they throw: the annual Soup Bowl Benefit in February and their big event coming up, their annual Book Fair at the Monroe County Fairgrounds.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

NOTE: There will be no episode Mon., Oct. 7. The next episode is Wed., Oct. 9.Our guest today is Lesley Davis. Until recently the assistant dean of international programs at the IU Maurer School of Law, she now is the VP for North American Partnerships at Access Able, a British company that creates detailed accessibility guides to buildings so that their users can navigate as many environments as possible with dignity and independence.More importantly for the purpose of this show, Davis is the chair of the Council for Community Accessibility, a city commission that, unusually, any resident can join without being appointed by the mayor or city council. She's been a member of the CCA since 2010, and has been in a wheelchair since 2006. We talk about some of the CCA's initiatives, her experience with disability, and the challenges that the disabled face despite the advent of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. We also talk about how accessibility actually helps the non-disabled, too, and how accommodating people of all abilities can be good for everyone.EXTRA INNINGS! Listen to Extra Innings with Lesley Davis here.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

David Hittle, the city's new director of the Planning and Transportation Department, talks with Steve Volan about the documents that rule the planning process in this city: the Comprehensive Plan and the Unified Development Ordinance. We discuss how the department he runs works in practice, and the boards and commissions that collectively oversee the city's entire built environment. This episode is the first for which we're also publishing an Extra Innings segment, where we talk about "car sewers", complete streets, and building new urban cores in the city. You can find it only from the webpage for this episode at our website, the812show.org.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Holly Warren is the assistant director for the arts in Bloomington's department of Economic and Sustainable Development. She's enthusiastic at boosting the visual and performing arts, helping artists get grants, coordinating artwork on major projects through the city's 1% for the Arts program, and promoting the city's Public Arts Master Plan. She also acts as liaison to the Bloomington Arts Commission. In this episode, we talk all about the city's efforts to support arts and working artists.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We've talked a lot on The 812 about the development of land. Today we talk about land that's undeveloped, undevelopable, or will never be developed. Our guest is the executive director of the Sycamore Land Trust, John Lawrence. He oversees the preservation of thousands of acres of land throughout southern Indiana, from Sycamore's headquarters in the house on the edge of Bloomington that was the home of a principal architect of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act. It's a fascinating conversation about the setting aside of land as nature. Instead of a Last Pitch today, we have a First Pitch...about how the "honor" of serving as an elected official isn't enough to justify low or no pay.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Today we talk housing with the new director of the city's Housing and Neighborhood Development department, Anna Killion-Hansen. The breadth of what her department does is kind of mind-boggling: it's not just inspecting rentals or working with neighborhood associations; it's also handling federal dollars, historic preservation, housing quality appeals, the Redevelopment Commission, and more. She does a good job of laying out her dizzying array of duties, and giving us a sense of the state of housing in Bloomington and the future directions she wants to take it.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The812 looks into a type of local government separate from city and county that it has yet to talk about: local schools as a separate branch of government. We get our first look through a nonprofit that tries to help the schools -- Teachers' Warehouse, the local nonprofit which raises money and donations to provide school supplies to teachers in public schools in six counties.  Sara Laughlin is a board member and regular volunteer there (and also the retired director of the Monroe County Public Library system). She talks about how the Warehouse works, how it was formed as a project of one of the local Rotary Clubs where she's a member, and its role in the context of school poverty and the recent MCCSC tax referendum. Our Last Pitch today is a fastball about...skywalking. (Our promised interview with Anna Killion-Hansen of HAND has been postponed to Wednesday.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

One of the three seats on the Monroe County Board of Commissioners is contested this fall. Today, our guest is the Republican candidate, Joe Van Deventer. He's the director of street operations for the city of Bloomington's Public Works Department. We get his perspective on all the local issues, including housing, the jail, zoning, the unhoused. He also advocates for taking advantage of the newly-complete I-69's presence as an incentive to bring blue-collar jobs into the county. (The Democratic candidate for the District 3 seat, Jody Madeira, was our guest on Monday.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

It's 40 years since Bloomington became a so-called Tree City. We talk about what that means with our guests: Haskell Smith, the city's Urban Forester, and George Hegeman, an inaugural member of the Bloomington Tree Commission, which has been in existence since 1992. We talk about the importance of trees and shade, invasive species and how they're dealt with, how utilities and the city interact when it comes to trees in the right of way, and, if you're lucky enough to own a house, how to get the city to give you a tree.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Today, we talk with the first of the two candidates vying for the marquee local race this cycle: Jody Madeira, the Democratic nominee. She's an IU law professor in her first political run, up against Joe Van Deventer, the director of the city of Bloomington's street division. (We've invited him and he's agreed to appear on the show; we look forward to publishing that show soon.)We talk with Jody Madeira about her reasons for running, what she brings to the table, and how she would govern the county, particularly with respect to how land should be used...or not.The Last Pitch we throw out today is about a teeny tiny little pet peeve for this former elected official: a misunderstanding of procedure embodied in a single word that unnecessarily makes local government more opaque.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

This is the second of two episodes released today (note: we strongly recommend listening to the previous episode first), part of our conversation with NPR's Eric Deggans, an alum of the IU School of Journalism, back in Bloomington to speak at its successor, the Media School. Among other topics, Eric Deggans talks about the reasons he went from music to television criticism; Bloomington's neighborhoods -- and its vibrant music scene -- in the eighties; and the racial dynamics of being a mostly-Black band while playing throughout Indiana back then. (Host Steve Volan even asks for pointers on interviewing from a top-notch interviewer and instructor, and gets the advice he hoped for.)PS: Our second big news today: our homepage now has a working button called "Donate"! If you like the work we're doing at The812, we hope you'll consider becoming a financial supporter. See more today at the812show.org.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Eric Deggans is the TV critic for National Public Radio, as well as a media analyst, and guest host. Before NPR, he was by turns a TV/media critic, music critic and reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, the Asbury Park Press, the Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He's the author of the book, "Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation," published by St. Martin's Press.A 2024 inductee into Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame, he's also an adjunct instructor at both Duke and Indiana, where he got his degree in journalism in 1990. During his recent visit to teach a seminar at IU's Media School, we spoke about the modern media landscape, as well as his multifaceted career -- undeniably rooted in his seven years in Bloomington, where he lived on campus and off. Along with his journalism studies, he worked at the Indiana Daily Student while being a drummer in a band that got signed to Motown Records. This is the first of two episodes released today; the second one is Part 2 of this wide-ranging conversation.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The Reverend Bill Breeden is perhaps most famous for a protest in 1987, when he stole a street sign in his nearby hometown of Odon, Indiana. It was named for John Poindexter, the admiral convicted of multiple felonies in the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan administration. But that affair was the tip of the iceberg for this minister emeritus of the Bloomington Unitarian Church, who's had a long career as a peace activist. We talk about how anti-war protests, and the policing of them, have changed in Bloomington since the 1980s, and catch up with his more recent work as an opponent of the federal death penalty. In our Last Pitch today, we ask: consider the ostrich and its plumage. How would the city work if we applied...strategic ostrich thinking? Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is Trohn Enright-Randolph, Monroe County Surveyor. He explains how his work is crucial to everything regarding the use and ownership of land in Monroe County -- if you don't know where the property lines are, well, it's pretty much chaos. Besides measuring those, though, he's involved in drainage and stormwater management, and is an integral part of county planning. He also talks about his advocacy for trails and connecting them to regional and statewide trail networks. Why is this an elected job? Ask the Indiana Constitution -- it's been called for in that document for 175 years. He'll tell us more about that too.In today's Last Pitch: the definitive argument for why Bloomington needs to keep building more housing -- just look at IU's enrollment numbers. The latest ones are out, and they show a clear pattern.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Originally started in 2013 to rescue hamsters, The Pipsqueakery has expanded to become an animal rescue (which adopts out domesticated creatures) and sanctuary (which cares for wild creatures). Along and in consultation with Wildcare, which focuses on wildlife, and the city of Bloomington's Animal Control division, which focuses primarily on dogs and cats, the Pipsqueakery is part of the notable local public-private spectrum of animal care. We talk with veterinary assistant Amy Clark and director of wildlife rehabilitation Katie Lo about their work...which includes a couple of animals they brought into our studio. (Yes, it's our cutest show ever.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest is Megan Betz, the CEO and President of Mother Hubbard's Cupboard, the Bloomington community resource center that's one element of the local emergency food sector. She lays out how, acting from the belief that food pantries won't end hunger, the Hub strives to be more than a food pantry; they try to tackle the root causes of hunger by building relationships and community through initiatives like their community garden and their farm-to-family program.Later on in the program, the Last Pitch looks at local Gaza protests and sees another border: the one between town and gown.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Duncan Campbell is an advisory member of the city's Historic Preservation Commission, and before that was a voting member for its first 16 years. He's also a former professor of architecture, planning and preservation at Ball State University, where he directed the graduate program in historic preservation. We talk with him about the background and history of preserving buildings, the definition of historic districts, how the preservation of buildings has played out in Bloomington over the past several decades, and the story of how he came to his profession. Also in this show: a Last Pitch about the Council's annual high-stakes choice in the game that is the annual city budget.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Clerk Browne's duties include providing the clerical services needed for the county court system to function, as well as administering elections in the county, whether local, state or federal. We talk about the logistics of voting in Indiana, clear up confusion about similarly titled offices like that of the Bloomington City Clerk, and talk about the biggest things that people don't get about her job.Later in the show, for those new to town, we give our list of the five most significant news topics of local concern. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guests today are Dawn Adams and Juliet Roberts, who are part of the committee that puts on the Fourth Street Festival of the Arts, the community's biggest annual arts event, where tens of thousands of pedestrians view the wares of more than 100 painters, sculptors, jewelers and other visual artists, not to mention the performing arts stages the Festival hosts. It's taken place ever Labor Day weekend since 1977, and this year's festival promises to be as big as ever. We talk with Adams and Roberts about what to look forward to this weekend, how the festival comes together, and even how volunteers can pitch in.Later in the show, we present our orientation to the city for all those people wjo just got oriented to the IU campus. (Hint: find it at our website under the Articles tab.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Deborah Myerson is a professional urban planner who specializes in housing policy. She talks about working for cities all over the country, including Bloomington where she lives. She's currently helping the city's Housing and Neighborhood Development (HAND) Department develop the update of the city's Consolidated Plan, a document required of every place that gets funds from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This week as part of her job, she began hosting a number of public meetings that run through September 3 to gather input from Bloomington residents about housing policies of every kind. She also serves on the city's Redevelopment Commission (RDC) and its Council for Community Accessibility, where she chairs the Transportation and Mobility Committee.In the Last Pitch, a strategy for when you just have more that needs to be said in front of a public body.NOTESAll about the Bloomington Consolidated Plan, including virtual and in-person meetings you can attend to give input through September 3 at this link.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest is Amy Swain, the county Recorder. If you're lucky enough to own land in Monroe County, her office is the place that helps you prove it. It's a bigger, and older, and more complicated job than you might guess. Besides telling us about the lengths she has to go to preserve records in perpetuity, there's also other matters, like scammers and what her staff does to guard against them, and how she serves veterans.On the Last Pitch: a bit of advice for how to most effectively say your peace in a public meeting.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

As we collect interviews with elected officials in the county, we occasionally come across the word "resiliency" -- is the community resilient enough? Our guest today is asking that question, among many others. Peter Iversen talks about the job of the council to manage the county budget, some of the boards he's on like the Justice Financial Advisory Committee and the county Environmental Commission, where the watchword is "resiliency"...and what it's like to represent all the lakes in Monroe County, Lemon, Griffy and Monroe.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The world of public housing has moved past the negative reputation it's had from decades of national neglect. Thanks to legal changes at the federal level, our guest today, Nathan Ferreira, is having success making more public housing available, as the Director of Real Estate Development at the Bloomington Housing Authority. He talks with us about whatever happened to the term "Section 8", about the power of Low Income Housing Tax Credits, and about the reestablishment in the city of a housing land trust -- an idea that was tried by a standalone nonprofit for about 20 years but gave up the ghost in 2010.And Today's Last Pitch pays compliments to the chef who cooked up the median at Third and Grant.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The Stride Center is a program started a few years ago in Bloomington that serves people who are experiencing mental health or substance abuse crises, both at their headquarters and where those people live, even if they're unhoused. Our guests today are Tia Magee, the Center's Program Manager, and Jennifer Scott, who leads its Mobile Crisis Response Team. The Stride Center serves as a crisis stabilization receiving center, providing resources to people experiencing mental health or substance abuse crisis, both at its headquarters and in the field. It's Indiana's version of Oregon's Cahoots program, which diverts police calls that are more effectively addressed by social services. Also today: the Last Pitch ruminates, at the outset of another school year, on ways you can orient yourself to your community, no matter how long you've been there.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The second of our 2-part interview with Mayor Kerry Thomson, in which she talks about her current initiatives. It should be no wonder that, as befitting her former role as the longtime director of the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity, her number one priorities are street homelessness, followed by housing construction. But she also discusses transportation, economic development, and the 2025 budget process.On today's Last Pitch: what's the right way to respond to the assertion, "Bloomington without IU would be Bedford, or Martinsville"? Answer: by turning the tables on it.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The 812 marks its 100th episode with Bloomington Mayor Kerry Thomson, who graciously sat for a double interview earlier this week. In this first part, we ask about her Bloomington origin story -- it's not typical -- and her life before taking office, including about her long tenure running the local Habitat for Humanity chapter, and how she decided to run for mayor. Part II, on her administration's status and plans, will be available Monday. In the Last Pitch: a philosophical treatise about the dilemma that many podcasters have -- namely, should we offer more episodes with shorter lengths, or fewer episodes with longer ones? -- and reframing it as a question for the notoriously late-night City Council.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

In their respective offices since the beginning of 2023, Monroe County Sheriff Ruben Marté and his deputy, Monroe County Jail Commander Kyle Gibbons, argue that no matter what else happens, any new jail needs to be larger than the old one. Meanwhile, in today's Last Pitch segment, host Steve Volan exhorts you to sign up for a Residents Academy course.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The 812 returns for its second season! We have new music, new segments, and a new program schedule to lead us off.Our first show back from break features a conversation with Angela Van Rooy, director of the city's neighborhood services program. She tells us about grants that people can apply for to improve their neighborhoods, and the city's Residents Academy, which starts in a couple of weeks. It's where people can sign up to get a guided tour of how every department in the city works. Today we also introduce a segment called the Last Pitch, a 60-second editorial about current local issues....and the beginnings of our new website! We're excited to be back, Bloomington!Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is Katarina Koch. She's the fourth-ever director of the Lotus Education and Arts Foundation, the organization whose primary production is the annual Lotus World Music and Arts Festival. Since 1994 the Lotus Festival has presented musical artists from all over the world in multiple venues in downtown Bloomington, and on the streets between those venues. We learn about the Festival, how it works, and other initiatives its foundation conducts. While there's much for it to celebrate in its thirtieth year, the after-effects of the pandemic have finally caught up with Lotus. We talk with Katarina Koch about how the organization is maintaining the level of quality that's made it a mainstay of the annual Bloomington event calendar, while acknowledging the tougher times for arts organizations post-Covid.This is the final episode of Season 1! We're looking forward to bringing you more about your community and its various layers of governance in Season Two, along with improvements to the show's format. The new season begins Monday, July 29 and will run until December 18. Thank you so much for listening, Bloomington!Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Many local homeowners have...thoughts, about the assessed value of their homes. Some of those thoughts are ...less than charitable, especially when assessments go up dramatically. Today, we talk to the person doing the assessing...she has thoughts, too. Welcome...to The 812.Our guest today is Judy Sharp. She's been the Monroe County Assessor since 1991, one of the, if not the longest-serving assessor in the state of Indiana. Her job is to assess the value of every property in Monroe County, so that they can be appropriately taxed. She talks all about the job, how her office works, how's she's stayed in it for so long, and how over time she's helped innovate the task of assessing in Indiana.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

(This is an encore presentation.) The city has dozens of boards and commissions, to contemplate big local issues and recommend or take action on them. What's it like to be on one...what's it like to chair one? Our guest is Dr. Gloria Howell. We learn about what the Dr. Martin Luthe King Jr. Birthday Celebration Commission does -- and it's more than just hosting the annual event in its name -- and what a city commission chair does. amd deals with.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

If your human rights have been violated in Bloomington or Monroe County, you have recourse. Our guest today is Ryne Shadday, chair of the city/county Human Rights Commission. (He's also chair of the Traffic Commission, but we'll leave that for another day.) He’ll talk about one of the oldest commissions in Bloomington, one with a proud history of standing up for those unfairly discriminated against, and how they go about adjudicating complaints.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our first two excerpts are from interviews with members of the Monroe County Council. We get thoughts about the problems with the county jail and developing a new so-called justice system in the county from at-large member Cheryl Munson and District 4 member Jennifer Crossley. In the second half, we welcomed back at-large  Bloomington city councilmember Matt Flaherty to discuss the need for a version 2.0 of the city's Climate Action Plan. Then at-large member Isak Asare, who agreed to come back on to the show only if he could usurp the host's role and put him in the guest chair. His wish was granted, and he to ask Steve Volan about issues from his time on city council.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is Jennifer Crossley. She's been the 4th District representative to the Monroe County Council since December 2021, when she was elected in a Democratic Party caucus to replace Eric Spoonmore, who resigned to become president of the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce. When she took office, she resigned her position as chair of the Monroe County Democratic Party. She won election to her seat in 2022. She also serves as a Deputy City Clerk in Bloomington, so her knowledge of the community is broad and multifaceted. She talks about the Council's primary task of budgeting, the learning curve she had when she was caucused into the job in late 2021, and we get into the question of the jail and the future of the county justice system, among other topics.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Steve Volan passes the gavel and his hosting duties to at large councilmember Isak Asare, who was not satisfied with his first appearance on this show, and insisted -- insisted! -- on grilling your humble interlocutor about his time on city council. If you heard that  original interview, or you've met the man in person, the force of his charm and irrepressible wit rendered Steve helpless to object. And so, we're trying a new segment called Pass the Gavel, where the guest becomes the host and gets to ask the questions. So be it! (Hint: there's talk of history, parking, and chess.) Decide for yourself how it turned out.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Matt Flaherty is an at-large member of the Bloomington City Council in his second term. One of his strongest concerns as a candidate and officeholder is climate change. He's been an avid participant in the discussions about local responses to climate change, and a close reader of the city's Climate Action Plan. We invited him back to discuss and review the Plan -- has it has the desired impact? Is it going to? We talk climate action in Bloomington in today's interview.Some helpful links to documents mentioned in today's show:Bloomington's Climate Action DashboardCity of Bloomington Climate Action Plan (2021)2018 Bloomington Sustainability Action PlanSupport the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Today's show features county councilmember Cheryl Munson, who's running for her fourth term. She is also an archaeologist (emerita) from IU Bloomington, who has done research here in the state of Indiana. We dig up her opinions on salaries, public safety, the convention center, and more.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

On today’s digest, a current-events discussion, the county judicial system, and more about the campus in our city’s midst:Lucas Gonzalez, on the big issues he’s been covering for WFIU News; Judge Catherine Stafford on how the county’s circuit court works;Judge Stafford from another episode,  on how the Eviction Protection Project has improved outcomes in the county; and another excerpt from Steve Volan's Doppelganger Cities, the public talk from last fall, on campuses and their relationship to so-called "third places.”Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Today we explore why evictions are the whole community’s problem (hint: guess how many people currently experiencing homelessness lost their rented apartments?). We talk about it with Judge Catherine Stafford, one of two judges who handle evictions cases locally, and who  was on the show yesterday to talk about the county judicial system in general. She talks with Steve Volan about the degree to which those evicted are students in a college town, how the eviction moratorium affected the county during the pandemic, and the local Eviction Prevention Project. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

This show started by exploring Bloomington city government. But you're swimming in layers of local government. Recently we've expanded our scope to the other layers of government, like townships and the county council. This episode is our first crack at understanding the local judicial system. Our guest today is Catherine Stafford. She's one of Monroe County's nine circuit court judges. She explains what local judges do and how they go about it. (Hint: a lot of what you see in those TV dramas are not really a thing...but you might be surprised at what things ARE a thing.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Interviews on this show are typically with decision and policy makers in Bloomington and Monroe County. But some people know a lot about the city and can explain the issues well, who may never have been elected or appointed officials. This is the latest entry in our occasional series that we call The 812 Work Session.Today's Work Session guest is Lucas Gonzalez, the city government reporter for WFIU News. He talks with host Steve Volan about many current local issues, including the convention center, the Dunn Meadow protests and the city's Gaza ceasefire resolution, the Summit District decision, and more. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

This episode is the second excerpt from a public talk Steve Volan gave last fall at the Collins Living-Learning Center in Bloomington, called "Doppelgänger Cities: A History of Campuses." The first excerpt was Episode 29 of The 812, posted February 23.As you may know, Steve was a member of the city council here for the last 20 years, in a district that was almost entirely students at IU. After redistricting, more students than ever were drawn into District 6, and the district is now represented by a recent IU graduate of typical undergraduate age. (We recommend you go back and listen to our interview with Sydney Zulich in Episode 14, on February 2.)While in that role, and to better come to terms with the state jurisdiction that had such great impact on his local jurisdiction, Steve authored a master's thesis looking into the origin of campuses. In Part 2, he weaves together the work of sociologist Ray Oldenberg and philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben to illustrate the problems created by the substitition of "campus" for a regular urban environment, and analyzes the problematic everyday vocabulary of the campus that infantilizes the people it's supposed to serve.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from recent interviews include county council at-large member and president Trent Deckard talks about leadership; county councilmember (D-2) Kate Wiltz talks about budgeting and the depth of county services; and Drew Bratton and Steve Versaw, board president and executive director (respectively) of BCT Management, Inc., the non-profit that runs the Buskirk-Chumley, the city's premier theatre.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Is a leader born or made? Is it nature... or nurture? This show won't answer that question definitively...but if anyone can answer that question, it's our guest today. Trent Deckard is the second of the three at-large members of the Monroe County Council to appear on the show, and this year is the council's president. He talks about running for office, current issues facing it, and leading the council. But he's not just a study in leadership -- he also studies leadership, which he's pursuing a PhD in. And we'll talk about that slogan on his yard signs -- Our Friend Trent Deckard -- and how people react to it. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We're plowing through a new landscape on the show: the wonderful world of county governance. Today we meet Kate Wiltz, the District 2 representative on the Monroe County Council. She talks about her district, explains the county budget process, some of her governing priorities, and how she decided to become a councilmember in the first place.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Shakespeare needed his Globe Theatre; Bloomington needs its Buskirk-Chumley. The former Indiana Theatre is more than a century old, has been a publicly-owned 600-seat venue since the 1990s, and is still an eye-catching downtown landmark. How it got to be that way -- and how it survives -- are our topics today. Our guests are Steve Versaw and Drew Bratton, the executive director and the president of the board of directors, respectively, of BCT Management, Inc., the umbrella organization which runs the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

New to town, maybe? You deserve a gentle intro to the breadth of local governments. Note that we use the plural: this show is beginning to dig deeper into offices other than just within the city of Bloomington. Today's episode is a good cross-section of what different local governments do. Along with a long-sought-after interview with city councilmember Dave Rollo, we venture beyond city limits to interview county councilmember Geoff McKim; the county's chief public defender, Michael Hunt; and Perry Township trustee Dan Combs.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Townships are subdivisions of counties. Townships aren't much of a deal in most of the rest of the country, but it turns out that, in Indiana, they're still kind of a big deal. Monroe County is divided into 11 townships. Except for a couple of thousand people in Van Buren Township, and a couple of dozen in Richland Township, the 80,000-plus residents of the city of Bloomington are split almost evenly between Bloomington and Perry Townships. Our guest today is Dan Combs, who's been the trustee of Perry Township since 1986. He explains what townships were for originally, what they're for now, and what he does on a daily basis as trustee. It's a crash course on the least-understood form of government you're subject to.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The 812 has finally landed its interview with the elusive Dave Rollo, the senior member of the Bloomington city council. In this wide-ranging interview we discuss the carrying capacity of the city in light of the approval of the enormous new Summit District, as well as greenways, urban deer, and more.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We're starting to invite guests beyond the humble municipality of Bloomington; we're expanding to the humble county of Monroe, to meet some of the people who make the county tick. The Sixth and 14th Amendments to the Constitution guarantee the fundamental right of the accused to counsel regardless of their ability to pay. Today we meet the embodiment of that right in Monroe County. Our guest, Michael Hunt, has been for the past 50 years the county's first and only chief public defender. We learn all about how the Public Defender's Office came to exist, how it works now, and how Monroe County has changed in the past half-century since he began in his role. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The 812 is slowly expanding its horizons to include governments beyond the city of Bloomington. There are many people whom we’ve interviewed on this program for their knowledge and experience, yet no one is in a better situation to explain Monroe County than our guest today, Geoff McKim, who’s been a member of the county council since 2009 and is in his last year as a councilmember before retiring. (You may also recognize Geoff as one of the co-hosts of Plateia Media’s first experimental podcast, What’s the 311, a show about local government across America generally. ) He explains and demystifies the unusual form of local government that Indiana practices in its counties, and compares it with townships and cities like Bloomington. It's a useful explainer you won't want to miss.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We look back at recent interviews, whose unifying theme seems to be money and how it flows throughout government. Excerpts from last week include:The mechanics of how the legislative process in the Statehouse works, with Indiana’s Own Dana Black, host of the Turn Left podcastthe advent of a new organization that tries to pair up worthy projects with mission-based lenders, with the leader of that organization, John Zody, executive director of CDFI-Friendly Bloomington;new City Controller Jessica McClellan on the city budget process and how radically different it is from the county budget process; and Senior Transportation Planner Pat Martin, on how local road projects come into existence through the financial review filter known as the Metropolitan Planning Organization.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

How do city road projects get funded? Oftentimes, they're a mix of local, state and (a lot of) federal dollars/ If you've ever wondered why road projects take a long time to come to fruition, today we explore the filter through which those federal dollars flow. Bloomington is the center of a metropolitan area. Metropolitan areas, especially ones that cross state lines, get special consideration from the federal government for highway, road, public transit and other federal transportation money. A Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) is an interjurisdictional body created by federal mandate to oversee the spending of federal dollars on local transportation projects. Our guest today is Pat Martin. He's the Senior Transportation Planner for the City of Bloomington, but really, his main job is to lead, guide and direct the local MPO. He guides us through this motley entity -- an unelected body made up entirely of people elected or appointed by others -- and helps us understand the vagaries of transportation planning.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

On this show about local government, we're thinking today about the state, and how it affects local government. Dana Black is host of the Turn Left podcast and an inveterate watcher of the Indiana General Assembly. We discuss topics like home rule, annexation, the regulation of rentals, and other legislation that has impacted cities like Bloomington. Dissecting bills and engaging directly with representatives and their aides, particularly during the summer sessions when legislators are more available, is more easily done when people group together. Black also tells us about the mechanisms by which local citizens can influence state policy -- strategies for lobbying and working with legislators, and the importance of organizing locally to address state-level decisions. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Jessica McClellan recently left her job as the elected Monroe County Treasurer to join the new Thomson administration as the City of Bloomington's new Controller. In short, no one has followed more money than her. She explains the byzantine process of municipal budgeting and compares it with her previous experience.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

[EPISODE CORRECTED. Enjoy this episode as it was meant to sound!]Our guest today is John Zody. He's the executive director of CDFI-Friendly Bloomington. Community deveopment financial institutions, or CDFIs, are lenders with missions. CFB connects the dots between mission-based lenders and projects that need special kinds of non-standard funding, that may not be able to get funding through regular commercial banks. We also talk with him about his role as the most recent director of the City of Bloomington's HAND department, where he oversaw the city's rental-inspection program, its relationships with neighborhoods, and its historic preservation program.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The812 is back from its hiatus! To get you reacclimated, it's a Monday-digest addition of the week of interviews from before our mid-April hiatus. We'll hear excerpts from interviews with:Noah Sandweiss, the city's Historic Preservation Program ManagerShatoyia Moss, the city's Safe and Civil City Director and Mat Alano-Martin, stand-up comedian and co-founder of the Limestone Comedy Festival, about how it started and how the city helpedImprovements coming to the show, starting tomorrow...be sure to subscribe wherever you get podcasts!Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

How does a building get declared "historic"? Who decides what should be saved or not? We find out  some of the answers today, from the guy who sets up the questions. Noah Sandweiss is the new program manager for historic preservation for the city. In our interview, he unpacks the portfolio he's charged with, which includes working with federal and stage agencies, reviewing and preparing for presentation cases to be considered by the local Historic Preservation Commission, and his background that led him to the job.With this episode, the show goes on hiatus. We return with new shows May 13.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

How does a community deal with issues that aren't obviously the business of a city government? Cultural issues can overwhelm even the most well-intentioned administration. What does it take to keep a city peaceful beyond law or code enforcement?Our guest is Shatoyia Moss, the Safe and Civil City Director for the City of Bloomington, who works in the Community and Family Resources Department. She talks today about her job helping the city and its residents navigate issues that don't have ready solutions available, that can't be solved bt patching a pothole, issues that can result in protests. She also talks a little about child care...while her infant son tries to horn in on the conversation. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Mat Alano-Martin is a professional stand-up comedian who got his start at the city's first comedy club, the Comedy Attic. In 2013, he and the owner of the club, Jared Thompson, created the Limestone Comedy Festival, which is now entering its eleventh year. We learn from Mat what it takes to launch a comedy festival, and how Bloomington helped nurture it through advice from the city and the convention and visitors' bureau. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our planned guest fell through for today (it wasn't Dave Rollo...but it could've been you, Dave). We're presenting the Lineup of public meetings happening in City Hall today on its own. Full episodes coming the rest of this week.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

After the eclipse hubbub died down, we interviewed several interesting people. On today's highlights from last week's interviews, clips from:Emily Pike, director of New Hope, the only shelter in the county for families experiencing homelessness; lex Crowley, the city's former director of ESD; and Hank Duncan, the city's bike and ped coordinator.(Dave Rollo Watch: 64 Days and Counting)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Today's episode is not just one, but two doses of The 812 Overtime, extra segments recorded for us by recent guests who just had too many interesting insights for us to fit into our regular half-hour interviews. It's a couple of good, deep dives into local government.Our first Overtime interview we made back in March with John Connell about Bloomington Transit, where he's the general manager. In this segment, he tells us about the Bus Rapid Transit line coming to Bloomington and how it'll be different from a similar service in Indianapolis. He also talks about the difference between BT and Rural Transit, and the key metric the federal government uses to define who can serve where: the so-called "urbanized area" around Bloomington.In the second Overtime segment, made last week, we had Alex Crowley on to talk mostly about his time as director of ESD at the city of Bloomington. In this segment, we learn more about how the Indiana Energy Independence Fund, where he's been the Executive Director since last August, will get itself off the ground. He also compares "green banks" like his new organization to community development financial institutions, or CDFIs, which are regulated like banks, and compares their public-oriented missions. First, he goes into more detail about direct pay, a new benefit to not-for-profit organizations that compares favorably to tax credits.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Hank Duncan, who works in the city's Planning and Transportation Department, is the city's Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator. He explains his role in how pedestrians, cyclists, scooter users, wheelchair users, stroller-pushers and more get around town. We discuss protected bike lanes, sidepaths, sidewalks, greenways, curb cuts and more.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

From 2016 to 2023, Alex Crowley served in the Hamilton administration as Bloomington's director of Economic and Sustainable Development. Since last summer, his new role is as executive director of the new Indiana Energy Independence Fund. In the second half of the show, he'll explain what a "green bank" is and his new job running one. In the first half, though, he talks about his time with the city.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

How much do you really know about the typical homeless person? Are you sure, or are you just making assumptions? Homelessness among children, for example, is a significant thing. Our guest today is Emily Pike, the executive director of New Hope for Families, the only shelter in Monroe County dedicated to helping children under the age of 18 experiencing homelessness, and the parents or guardians who come with them. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

To everyone visiting Bloomington, and about to make Monday the largest tourism event in the city's history, this episode is for you. The 812 podcast is all about explaining how the city of Bloomington works. In the first half of today's episode, we talk with Michael Large from the Public Works DepartmentJohn Connell, general manager of Bloomington Transit, and Tim Street, the city's new Parks and Recreation Director. Each of them shares what they and their departments are doing about, or for, the eclipse. In the second half, we highlight excerpts from our interview with Prof. Catie Pilachowski, chair of the IU Astronomy Department, to put the eclipse into celestial and personal perspective. She also talks about many of the programs happening this weekend on campus and in town, from Science Fest this Saturday in IU's Old Crescent to the many activities on Monday, April 8.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

When you hear the words "public" and "works"... what do you think of first? Potholes, maybe? Street paving? Yeah, that's not uncommon. But it definitely depends on the city you're in. In Bloomington, Public Works does everything from animal control to sanitation. Michael Large, the Operations Manager for the city's Public Works department, lays it all out for us, and surprises host Steve Volan more than once along the way.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Professor Pilachowski, Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, and the Daniel Kirkwood Chair of the Astronomy Department at Indiana University, has been planning for Bloomington's April 8 eclipse for many years. She talks about its significance astronomically, its impact on people locally, her career in astronomy, and shares the plethora of activities her department and IU generally have in store from Saturday through Monday. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is new director of Bloomington Parks & Recreation, Tim Street -- and not once...not ONCE was the word "pickleball" mentioned. But he talks with host Steve Volan about the breadth of city parks issues, including the remediation of invasive trees, the state of the Farmers' Market, programs they're sponsoring for the coming eclipse, and how he feels about the Amy Poehler sitcom "Parks & Rec".Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

A look back at interviews The 812 has conducted with:Communications Director Holly McLauchlin of City of Bloomington Utilities, about how the local water works works:General Manager John Connell of Bloomington Transit, about how the local system  of busses is so bussin'and Jordan Davis, host of the No Dishes podcast about the local restaurant scene, and Operations Manager for the Chocolate Moose local ice cream shops chain.(PS: No, this is not Radiolab. But Jad Abumrad is in town this week!)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

BT General Manager John Connell gives The 812 an overview of the state's busiest bus system per capita, its scope, how it works, and what's next for public transit in Bloomington, including an update on the Green Line, soon to be the city's first bus rapid transit line. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

After the Lineup for Thursday, March 28, we revisit our interview with At-Large Councilmember Matt Flaherty, recorded in January. He discusses how the city can take significant climate action and decarbonization by rethinking policies on development, utilities and parking.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is Jordan Davis, director of operations at the Chocolate Moose. He's also host of the No Dishes podcast which is all about the local restaurant scene, and a board member for Visit Bloomington, the local convention and visitors' bureau. Among other things, we talk about his career in food service, the Chocolate Moose's history, the growth of food trucks in Bloomington, and the logistics of putting on the popular local event known as Food Truck Friday. (As part of the cultural exchange, The 812 will come to No Dishes in May.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Water, water everywhere, but every drop you drink, dear city dweller, is cleaned somehow. Who delivers -- and takes away -- your water? We talk with Holly McLauchlin, the communications director for City of Bloomington Utilities. She'll explain the ginormous operation that provides us drinking water, carries off and cleans our wastewater, and disperses our stormwater. Topics include the prospect of a new headquarters facility at Winston-Thomas, what "MS4" is, and the downtown "Hidden River" project.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

On this Digest episode we look back at people whom we've interviewed to explore how they became candidates. We'll hear segments from former fire chief Jason Moore and now-city councilmember Courtney Daily about their origin stories, and a longer look at how Jonas Schrodt, who ran last year for an at-large seat and whom we interviewed last week, found his hat thrown into the ring.In the second half, we'll hear an excerpt from our interview with Mike Leonard, the city's last preeminent opinion columnist, and his assessment of the decline of his former employer, the Herald-Times daily newspaper. Finally, I'll share a personal reminiscence of Peter LoPilato, the late publisher of The Ryder Magazine and purveyor of The Ryder Film Series, which showed well-curated arthouse movies at venues all over the city. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Sorry, Bloomington! No public meetings to promote and all our guest prospects fell through. We'll be back with a full schedule next week.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

What it's like to run for local political office for the first time? What motivates people to run, and how does a campaign make affect a candidate's self-esteem? Our guest today is Jonas Schrodt, the local stand-up comedian and winemaker who ran among six other candidates for one of three at-large seats on the city council last year. We do a post-mortem on his candidacy, exploring his experience as someone running for office for the first time, as a voice for a new generation of local voters, and the highest vote-getter of any openly gay candidate to date in city election history.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

So far on this show, our interviews have been with decision and policy makers in the city of Bloomington. But there are some people who know a lot about the city, and can explain the issues well, who may never have been elected or appointed officials. Today we debut a new occasional feature: The 812 Work Session.Mike Leonard was the primary columnist at the Herald-Times newspaper from 1985-2013, when he retired; before that, he was a beat reporter for the paper starting in 1979. He's also a 20-year board member and former president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.  Host Steve Volan talks with Mike about his career at the Herald-Times; they then turn to the state of local news, the growth of the city in his time here, and the passing of the publisher of The Ryder magazine and film series, Peter LoPilato.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The 812 is still re-tooling post-spring break. Today's Lineup of public meetings is fresh for March 19, but please enjoy this encore presentation of our interview with City Clerk Nicole Bolden, originally recorded in January.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

On this digest episode, we hear excerpts from interviews all about the local economy, including:Jane Kupersmith, director of the city's  Economic and Sustainable Development department;Jennifer Pearl, president of the Bloomington Economic Development Corporation;Mike McAfee, director of Visit Bloomington, the Monroe County Convention and Visitors' Bureau; andIsak Asare, the newest at-large city councilmember.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

This bonus mini-episode is our first extended interview, in a week when we otherwise have no programming planned. In this inaugural version of The 812 Overtime, Isak Asare, the raconteur city councilmember who stole the show last week, stuck with us for another round of conversation. In this surprisingly serious segment, we talk about the rules of order for meetings, how they came to be, how they can and have been used as tools of exclusion, and how the city might rethink its processes. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We're mostly off this week for Bloomington's spring break. Public meetings, however, are not off, so we're still filling out the Lineup to keep you up to date. Also: Happy Pi Day! Celebrate with a local pizza (preferably a round one).Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We're mostly off this week for Bloomington's spring break. Public meetings, however, are not off, so we're still filling out the Lineup to keep you up to date. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We're mostly off this week for Bloomington's spring break. Public meetings, however, are not off, so we're still filling out the Lineup to keep you up to date. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We're mostly off this week for Bloomington's spring break. Public meetings, however, are not off, so we're still filling out the Lineup to keep you up to date. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is Mike McAfee, the director of VisitBloomington, otherwise known as the Monroe County Convention and Visitors Bureau. He'll talk about the CVB, how it's organized and funded, and how it promotes tourism and helps organize events.He talks with Steve Volan about the importance of the Convention Center as a greeting card for the community and the potential economic benefits of attracting more visitors and events to the area on at off-peak weekday times if it were expanded to accommodate larger groups and events. They also talk about the April 8 eclipse, which will bring hundreds of thousands of people to the area, and preparations including safety measures, traffic management, and events to keep visitors entertained.---After today's episode, The 812 will go into a kind of sleep mode during spring break to retool, as all schools in Bloomington, including IU, are off for the week. There will be Lineups each day, but full shows resume March 18.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

This one's a doozy. In our game of Pokemon Go City COuncilmember edition, we've landed one of the two most elusive creatures in the Bloomington legislature. But one of his powers is to turn the tables. Today, the newest at-large member of the city council, Isak Asare, all but takes over the show, and the putative interviewer finds himself as often as not the interviewee. The conversation went so long The 812 has recorded its first Overtime segment. It'll be uploaded as a separate bonus episode.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Economic development seems to be an emerging theme on this week's shows. Yesterday was about small business; today we'll talk about, well, bigger business. Our guest is Jennifer Pearl, the president of the Bloomington Economic Development Corporation. She'll explain what that is and how it fits into the overall landscape of local economic development, especially in the era of climate change and action to mitigate it.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

"Economic development." What does that phrase mean, anyway? Is that, like, bringing factories to town? Don't we already have enough of an economy here? Today, you'll learn the spin that our fair city puts on this generic, if not clichéd, phrase. Our guest is Jane Kupersmith, the director of the city's Economic and Sustainable Development department. She'll walk us through the goals ESD has, how her department is structured, and a thing or two about the initiatives they're working on. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

In the first half of today's show, we look back at recent conversations we had with former corporation counsel Beth Cate and former director of planning & transportation Scott Robinson, both of whose tenures ended with Mayor Hamilton's administration on January 1, but whose perspectives are fresh enough for early 2024. In the second half, Gloria Howell, talks about being chair of the Dr. MLK Jr. Birthday Celebration Commission, and re-elected councilmember Kate Rosenbarger of the newly-redrawn district 2, covering roughly the northwest quadrant of the city, talks about her plans for the new term.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

How did the place where you are right now get built? Who built your home? When was it built, and why was it built in the size and shape that it is? Every place in Bloomington was developed...even that park you may be standing in the middle of, if that's where you happen to be listening to this. People can't just build willy-nilly any more...they have to follow certain rules the community has set up. Our guest today is Scott Robinson. Today he begins a new job as the Community Development Director for the town of Timnith, CO. But he's our guest because he was the Director of Planning & Transportation for COB through most of the last term of the Hamilton administration which ended January 1. Before that, he worked in the Planning & Transportation Department as a planner or deputy director for more than 20 years. We talk with him about why there is a land-use planning office, about how planning works, to reflect on the work he did here, and what's on the horizon for the city's built environment. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest is Kate Rosenbarger, the reelected member now serving the newly-redrawn District 2, which represents the northwest portion of the city including much of the downtown. She talks about her priorities for the term, her biggest focus being on transportation. Happy Leap Day! The Lineup today (in the absence of meetings scheduled for City Hall) is a preview of Eclipse Day, April 8, and the facts reported about the many preparations being made for it by the Thomson administration. A synopsis of a report given at last night's Council meeting by Deputy Mayor Gretchen Knapp and Public Works Director Adam Wason.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The city has dozens of boards and commissions, to contemplate big local issues and recommend or take action on them. What's it like to be on one...what's it like to chair one? Our guest is Dr. Gloria Howell. We learn about what the Dr. Martin Luthe King Jr. Birthday Celebration Commission does -- and it's more than just hosting the annual event in its name -- and what a city commission chair does. amd deals with.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is Beth Cate. She was the Corporation Counsel for the City of Bloomington for the last two years of the Hamilton administration. She'll describe the nature of the job as the city's lead lawyer and, yes, counselor to the administration, and anticipate some issues that might face cities like ours in the near future. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

In this week's digest episode, we look back at  talks with Andy Ruff, the at large CM starting his sixth term on Council, amd Doug Bruce of the newly-formed CIB about the Convention Center. To start, though, we'll hear back from our interview with Matt Austin of the Bloomington Commission on Sustainability, about what the word "sustainability" means in theory and in practice.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The show's host becomes the guest today. This episode is an excerpt from a public talk Steve Volan gave last October at the Collins Living-Learning Center in Bloomington. It was based on his Geography master's thesis called Gownsburg: The Campus as a Municipal Phenomenon. His theory in Gownsburg is that university campuses have all the traits of towns, yet are more like spooky replicas of towns. Hence the talk's title: "Doppelgänger Cities: A History of Campuses."For a podcast all about city government policy, it was a matter of time before we had to address the separate jurisdiction within our jurisdiction, the Vatican inside our Rome. You're going to hear quite a bit about IU's campus, but really, today's show is more about where campuses in general came from. It's one episode you don't have to be a Bloomingtonian to appreciate, so tell your non-local friends to download this one.(Also: we have an email address now! Send us your opinions to letters@the812show.org.)Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is Doug Bruce. He's the owner of Tabor/Bruce Architects. He's also a member of the newly-formed Capital Improvements Board, the joint city-county entity created to take responsibility for the County Convention Center and its management. The CIB's first meeting was Oct. 4. Steve Volan asks Bruce to comment on the present and speculate on the future of the Convention Center.Bruce has a history of serving on local boards. He also discuss being the former vice-chair of the Historic Preservation Commission, where he was a member for 20 years. He also is a former member of Downtown Bloomington, Inc., a former president of Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors. and a current member of the city's Parks Foundation board.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest is Matt Austin, a member of the Bloomington Commission on Sustainability ("BCOS", pronounced "bee-koss"). We talk about BCOS, compare it to the Environmental Commission, and talk about what BCOS is working on, including a composting program in the wake of the closing of EarthKeepers' composting program, and rethinking the chicken ordinance to allow people to keep even more hens. He also talks about urban and vertical farming, and his role as chair of the Citizens' Advisory Committee of the newly-renamed Waste Reduction District of Monroe County. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

On today's show, we catch up with Andy Ruff, one of three at-large members of the city council and, even though he was off last term, is the Council's most senior member, first elected in 1999. In our interview he looks both forward to his return to Council and the goals he has for it, as well as backward to his first term, and to life as a townie. Ruff is also a country musician in the tradition of the Bakersfield Sound and artists like Buck Owens. He's played for years with the local honky-tonk band the Dew Daddies. His son is touring up-and-comer Hank Ruff. He's also our first musical guest: he brought his guitar into our studio to play a little for us. Stay tuned at the end of this episode for a special bonus.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

On this edition of The 812 Digest, we revisit conversations with:Andrew Krebbs and Martha Whitmill of the Monroe County Humane Association, about it and other nonprofits help care for the local animal population;Brad Wisler, president of the city Plan Commission, talking about the Commission's work and the advent of the Summit District project, the largest proposal in the city's history; andDavid Henry, chair of the county Democratic Party, on the statutory process of replacing elected officials who leave office early through partisan caucuses.We're now on Instagram! Follow us: @the812showSupport the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

What happens when an elected official leaves office early? In many states, they hold a special election a few months later. Not in Indiana, though. In Indiana, the party whose candidate won the seat in an election holds a partisan caucus to elect someone new.  Our guest, David Henry, the chair of the Monroe County Democratic Party, has had to call for no fewer than four caucuses in the past year to replace elected officials or ballot candidates. Most recently, he had the responsibility to fix the date for the caucus that will elect the replacement for City District 5 Councilmember Shruti Rana, who resigned on February 7; that caucus will be held March 2. On today's show, we get into the statutory weeds about the conduct of these very unusual elections.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Brad Wisler is the president of the Bloomington Plan Commission, now in his tenth year serving on that body. He also served as a member of the City Council for then-district 2, from 2005 through 2011. In today's show, Steve Volan (his former City Council colleague) asks him to unpack the complex process that anyone who wants to build a building in Bloomington must navigate. They also spell out the alphabet soup of planning-related acronyms like ADUs (accessory dwelling units), PUDs (planned unit developments, and the city code that rules it all, the UDO (a.k.a., the Unified Development Ordinance). Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The 812 Primer is designed to give you the background you need to fully enjoy the show. In Primer Lesson 1, we described Bloomington's "second-class" city status. In today's Lesson 2, we enumerate the various departments of the city overseen by its chief executive, the Mayor, and briefly describe what they do. The Lineup segment is pretty substantive today, because on this Valentine's Day, dear listener, we want you to know that you are loved.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We talk with Andrew Krebbs, the executive director, and Martha Whitmill, the development director, of the Monroe County Humane Association. We'll learn a little about MCHA's  long history, and more about what they, the city of Bloomington, and other organizations do and don't do for the sake of animal welfare in the Bloomington area. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

In this episode of The 812 Digest, we'll hear:new councilmember Hopi Stosberg address an issue in her newly-drawn District 3: the ongoing assessment of the design College Avenue and Walnut Street called for in the city's Comprehensive Plan;Gabe Gloden talk about forming a super-organization to save not only the missions of three performing-arts organizations, but the city-owned venue they all rely on that has proven difficult to maintain over the decades;Beverly Calender-Anderson talk about the city department she runs, Community and Family Resources, and some of the many initiatives it oversees;and Courtney Daily, a first-time candidate for public office and one of three candidates running in the upcoming Democratic Party caucus election to replace the recently retired Shruti Rana, talk about some of her ideas for city council.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Courtney Daily is the state co-lead for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, and chaired the Bloomington chapter for 3 years before that. She's also the second of three candidates for the District 5 seat who we've interviewed, along with Jason Moore. We've also invited Jenny Stevens to interview. Daily talks about her work with Moms Demand Action, her motives for running for City Council, and her thoughts on governing.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is Gabe Gloden, the managing director of Constellation Stage and Screen, the performing-arts superpower formed in 2022 out of three well-regarded organizations: Cardinal Stage, the Bloomington Playwrights' Project, and the Pigasus Institute which hosted the Bloomington Academy of Film and Theatre. A major reason for their Wonder-Triplet-power team-up was to take over ownership of the 1915 building that was the former City Hall, but since 1991 has been the John Waldron Arts Center, one of the primary performance venues in the city. The building was given back to the city twice in ten years by two different organizations who couldn't find a way to keep it afloat financially; we explore how Constellation is managing to do it. We hope you'll join us.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is Hopi Stosberg, the latest in our series of interviews with members of the new city council. She represents the newly-drawn District 3, the northeast quadrant of the city. She talks about her priorities for the coming term, and explains why in her campaign last year she emphasized her experience with and the importance of local schools, even though they're overseen by a different elected body. She also talks about her new roles as council parliamentarian and as their representative to the City Plan Commission..Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Kindness in the public realm, as it turns out, takes a lot of work to nurture. Today, we interview what you could call the city's chief kindness officer: Beverly Calender-Anderson, director of the city of Bloomington's Community and Family Resources Department. She's held the job for nine years and was the city's Safe and Civil City Director for nine years before that. She'll explain some of the myriad programs she oversees that help people get by, whether it's appealing to the city's human rights code when there's a violation, helping people in need downtown, or offering opportunities for people to volunteer in the community. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We revisit interviews with the Rev. Forrest Gilmore, executive director of Beacon, Inc., about the challenge of fighting misconceptions and bias against people in extreme poverty; Laurence "Buff" Brown, who influenced changes in city transportation policy by bringing in the experts; and the new District 6 city councilmember Sydney Zulich, who talks about what her newly-drawn constituency, the vast majority of whom are students, want from the city.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest is Sydney Zulich. She got her bachelor's degree after only three years at IU. At 21, she became the youngest-ever member of the Bloomington City Council last month, and (at least through next week when Councilmember Shruti Rana steps down after a very short tenure to take a job in another state) is a member of the first majority-female council in city history. Zulich replaced Steve Volan, who interviews her today, in the District 6 seat on City Council. She shares her thoughts about how she handles being young in politics -- and  people who have trouble with her youth. She also talks about issues she's begun working on, including increasing late-night public ride services to discourage drunk driving, and better access to housing data for the two-thirds of the city who rent. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We're taking a break today to retool. Instead of our usual full-length interview, we're starting an occasional segment called The Primer. We don't want to assume that you have all the background you need to fully enjoy the show. The Primer is designed to give you that background.In Primer lesson one, you'll get background on what exactly it means for Bloomington to be a "second-class" city in the state of Indiana, including how its executive and legislative branches work. We also explore the city's population figure and the role its biggest neighborhood plays in that figure.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest, Lawrence "Buff" Brown, has been a transportation planner for 20 years, working with INDOT, IDEM, the Columbus, Indiana, MPO, and cities on the west coast.  Buff's childhood experiences in Bloomington included being able to bike freely around town, which instilled in him a profound appreciation for accessible urban spaces. In the nineties this led him to involvement in transportation policy starting with the Citizens Advisory Committee of the Bloomington MPO, and then the Traffic Commission. In 2004, he founded Bloomington Transportation Options for People, or B-TOP, to champion sustainable transportation solutions for pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users, including by inviting academic experts to town to give public talks on transportation policy.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Rev. Forest Gilmore, an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, is the Executive Director of Beacon Inc. He discusses the evolution of the organization from its origins as the Shalom Center, established in 1999 as a response to the lack of daytime resources for people experiencing homelessness, as it gradually expanded its services over the years, including hunger relief, case management support, an overnight shelter, permanent housing, and street outreach. Gilmore dispels common misconceptions about homelessness, emphasizing that it primarily stems from housing issues rather than personal choice or lack of employment, and that housing is the fundamental solution to homelessness. Furthermore, he addresses the challenges of substance use disorders and mental health within the homeless population, while also discussing Beacon Inc.'s future plans, including a new facility aimed at centralizing and expanding their services to better serve the community.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Selected clips of last week's conversations with: City Councilmember Matt Flaherty, City Human Rights Director Michael Shermis, former Fire Chief and now candidate for the open District 5 Council seat Jason Moore, and Charlotte Zietlow, who was the city's first-ever female council president in 1972.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Charlotte Zietlow is well-known in Bloomington and Monroe County for many reasons. This episode focuses her time on the Bloomington City Council in the early 1970s -- the subject of her second book, "1971: How We Won". She talks about how the previous council was unresponsive to public input and concerns, motivating her to run for office. She campaigned on issues like zoning changes and lack of transparency. By 1972, she was one of ten newly elected city officials who had swept all but one incumbent out of office.As the new council president, she led reforms to open up government and increase public participation. The new council addressed a long backlog of issues through committees and initiatives focused on social services, infrastructure, and the environment. After one term, Charlotte decided not to run for reelection when she disagreed with the mayor on an issue, instead running for mayor herself.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Shruti Rana recently resigned as the District 5 representative on the Bloomington City Council. barely two weeks after being sworn in, to take a job out of state. This episode is the first of three to meet the candidates running to replace her: Courtney Daily, Jason Moore, and Jenny Stevens. (Invitations have been extended to Daily, Stevens and Rana; we hope to have them on the show as soon as possible.)Citing his background as Bloomington's most recent fire chief,  Jason Moore discusses his motivation for running, his experience with city budgets and public safety issues and weighs in on key issues like economic development, homelessness, and quality of life concerns.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

This episode features an interview with Michael Shermis, the city's Human Rights Director. It's probably good that he likes wearing hats: he's also the the Special Projects Coordinator for the city's Community and Family Resources Department, which earned him titles like the city's ADA Coordinator and liaison to the Council for Community Accessibility, the South Central Community Action Project, and the Nonprofit Alliance. He investigates claims of discrimination, ensures compliance with accessibility laws, and acts as a liaison to various groups focused on issues like disability rights, transportation, economic stability, and digital accessibility. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Councilmember Flaherty discusses climate action for the city through such projects as  decarbonization through reduction of gas infrastructire, strategic use of the Redevelopment Commission, and encouragement of all-electric and sustainable construction of the city's built environment. He also takes on topics like planned unit developments, the Unified Development Ordinance, the Hopewell development project and his new roles on the Utilities Service Board and the Parking Commission this term.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

This episode provides an overview of The812, and its mission of explaining local government in Bloomington. We hear highlights of interviews with city council president Isabel Piedmont-Smith, city clerk Nicole Bolden, and council attorney/administrator Stephen Lucas; we also hear from Christopher Emge, from the  Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest is Stephen Lucas, the attorney for and administrator of the Bloomington City Council. He'll talk about what it takes to organize and advise the city's primary legislative body, what it's like to have nine bosses, the life cycle of an ordinance, and how he herds the cats. Plus...it's time for FreezeFest!Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

Our guest today is Christopher Emge. He works for the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce as its director of advocacy and public policy. He'll talk about what it's like to advocate for local businesses in a blue town in a red state. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

We'll talk with Nicole Bolden about the Clerk's duties -- from tracking the legislative work of the city council, to adjudicating parking tickets, to marrying people. And we'll talk about the number of firsts she set, like being the city's first elected woman of color. Also on the show: a preview of the city council's first regular session tonight.Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.

The inaugural episode introduces your humble host and lays out the case for The 812. Our first interview is with Isabel Piedmont-Smith, the newly-elected president of the Bloomington City Council. Support the showA production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.