Bloomington Dissident Democrats published candidate endorsements for the 2023 Democratic primary. (You win some; you lose some.) People are asking, now that early voting is underway, where we stand on this year’s county races.
Turnout is likely to be inflated somewhat, because it’s a presidential election year. There’s simply no sane reason not to support Joe Biden’s re-nomination for President, but we do so solely for our own satisfaction. Indiana, being essentially North Alabama, is unquestionably going to award its electoral votes in November to a demented insult comedian and bible salesman who may by then have been convicted of at least 34 felonies, whose proudest brag is that he put the nation’s Judiciary in the position to revoke the rights of American women to make their own decisions about their health and well-being. So there’s that.
Democrats are utterly disenfranchised statewide, but they have an absolute lock on Monroe County. County politics has been dismal to watch. There are issues to talk about, but what has our attention is the determination of Millennial Democrats to denigrate and remove the county’s elder incumbents (abetted by their age peers in Bloomington’s city politics).
The rallying cry in this generational conflict is that the county’s incumbents have too often stood in the way of dense housing development in Monroe County, and that therefore they need to be cast out in the name of affordability. That contention appears to us to be the central case that Peter Iversen, Steve Volan, Jody Madeira and (reading between the lines) Matt Caldie are making in their pitches for County Commissioner and Council seats.
To be concise, we differ with this contention.
Collectively, we’ve been arguing for more than five years that the need, and the demand, for market rate housing in Bloomington and Monroe County has been radically exaggerated by development interests and the public policymakers who cater to them. Local population growth estimates have been inflated, even as census figures have shown the area’s population to be flat or shrinking and getting older, and with the Enrollment Cliff looming over university on-campus occupancy.
More importantly, in our view, the contention that all housing is good housing, and that massive construction of luxury student and other market rate rental housing will ultimately bring down rents (through the fairy dust of supply and demand) is nonsense and has been thoroughly debunked over the last half-decade.
But this bit of libertarian dogma refuses to die, and has in fact become a core philosophical tenet of the Monroe County Democratic Party, or at least of its younger leadership.
Bloomington Dissident Democrats came into existence principally to push back against this idea, because we saw it as the basic rationalization for the upzoning of Bloomington’s core. We view deliberate densification as destructive to the historic cultural resources and the vitality of Bloomington’s distinctive neighborhoods that make this city a place where people actually want to live.
(We’d have been willing to listen to a credible argument that densification would actually make life easier, cheaper or better for anyone except real estate investors and developers, but no one has ever made such a believable case.)
We believe conditions vary across different areas of the county. But the arguments against the expectation that “the market” can be relied on to build us out of our housing affordability problems are just as valid outside the city limits as they are within it. Where incumbent County Commissioners and Council members have opposed new developments, we believe they have generally done so because they saw flaws in the developers’ proposals, either because of traffic, environmental or geologic impacts. Rather than beat them up for standing in the way of “progress,” we applaud their conscientiousness.
And in fact, a lot of new housing has been built or green-lighted under the current Monroe County Commissioners and Council. The 330-apartment Westgate development has been approved. Wininger Construction applied to build the Southern Meadows Development on South Rogers; although it was not approved for the 190 housing units the developer sought (on a property with 21 complex sinkholes, floodplain issues, and HOA responsibility for drainage), the site is currently being developed with approximately 95 single family homes.
Verona Park was approved by the Commissioners and the 248-unit site is almost completely developed. The Highlands was approved by the Commissioners and the site is in various stages of completion. It includes around 219 units. Another 24 units have been approved in Clear Creek. This is not a complete list.
There are other issues, of course. There’s the stalemate over the siting of the new jail, for instance. It’s not that we don’t care about the continuing failure to resolve this issue. It’s just that we don’t see any meaningful differentiation between Democrats with respect to the jail. The challengers suggesting the Old Guard need to face consequences for the impasse have yet to show that they have better ideas about where to put the new facility.
And then there’s that lunkheaded project to expand the Monroe County Convention Center. The incumbents in the county have shown an admirable capacity to stand up to Bloomington’s administration when mayors have tried to seize control of that process. We believe the price tag for this boondoggle, currently estimated at $50 million, is probably understated by a lot. But the convention center project has taken on a dismaying kind of inevitability. It’s probably unstoppable. So it’s not very useful as a differentiator between Democrats either.
So, to cut to the chase:
For County Council and Commissioner seats, Bloomington Dissident Democrats urges primary voters to resist the challengers’ entreaties to replace the incumbents with new commissioners who will promote dense housing development.
More specifically, we support the re-election of the county’s responsible and courageous stewards:
- Julie Thomas, in County Commissioner District 2;
- Penny Githens, in County Commissioner District 3;
- Trent Deckard and Cheryl Munson for County Council At Large.
They’ve made wise, pragmatic choices in the face of strident, misguided criticism from dogmatic pro-development advocates, including some of the people who are running to oust them. (We’re particularly taken with Julie Thomas’s commitment to “prevent anything-goes real estate development,” and wish we’d been the ones to come up with that neat turn of phrase.)
We’re neutral on David Henry’s bid for an At Large County Council seat. We’re not sure where the Monroe County Democratic Party Chairman stands on dense development and its supposed influence on affordability, but he has shown a disquieting tendency to choose the path of least resistance out of tough decisions, as in the recent, nauseating resolution of the City Council District 5 Caucus stalemate. He’d still be preferable to Caldie.
We recommend county voters resist the short-sighted appeals from the “Build, Baby, Build” faction of the MCDP. Unfortunately, given the number of commission and council seats on the ballot, some of these challengers are likely to be nominated. We encourage voters to remember that just because there are three seats to fill in a given ballot line, that doesn’t mean they are required to check three boxes. Withholding your vote will convey the sentiment that election to office does not imply a mandate to pursue irresponsible development.
The Dissident Democrat 