The 812

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.