A New Year, A New Focus: Bloomington vs. Its Neighborhoods

It’s official: Kerry Thomson will be Bloomington’s Mayor in January 2024. We get a new cast of characters in the serio-comic spectacle that is our City Council. John Hamilton will leave City Hall without having consummated his hostile takeover of the suburbs, closed the road through Lower Cascades Park or erected his aluminum cutta at the north end of Miller-Showers Park.

We’re adopting a cautious optimism about Mayor-Elect Thomson. Bloomington Dissident Democrats didn’t back her. We had issues with the way she ran her Democratic primary campaign, and our caution stems mainly from the vast amounts of campaign cash lavished on her by donors with stakes in land transactions and real estate development.

But while we felt Bloomingtonians had a better choice, we always stipulated that Thomson was smart, articulate, and with us on most of the issues that motivated us.

Thomson did oppose the upzoning of Bloomington’s core neighborhoods, and expressed that opposition eloquently. Like all Indiana cities, Bloomington has a strong mayor system. She will largely control the political agenda and the budget process for the next four years. If she meant what she said as a citizen and a candidate, she can choke off any new move to further densify the neighborhoods. It’s our hope that she’ll do just that.

Thomson flattered us by taking us seriously enough to respond to a survey we sent to all the candidates for Mayor and Council in the May primary. Her answers were thoughtful, articulate and respectful. She:

• Expressed concern about the proliferation of giant student housing developments that have engulfed the available land that could instead have been designated for workforce or affordable development;
• Disavowed a development strategy prioritizing “growth for growth’s sake”;
• Voiced a healthy skepticism about the numbers used by her predecessor to rationalize its development decisions;
• Recognized wealth inequality as a strategic problem for Bloomington;
• Recognized the indifference among previous Bloomington administrations toward dialog with Indiana University about the impact of IU’s growth and its failure to house the vast majority of its students, and suggested she would open that dialog;
• Acknowledged the tiny minority of Bloomington’s electorate who actually vote, and the arrogance of suggesting that election to office confers a mandate on the officeholder to act unilaterally; and
• Recognized the futility of trying to bring down housing costs merely by adding units to our housing stock.

Thomson offered a usefully specific plan to improve transparency in Bloomington’s city government, addressing a major source of cynicism and mistrust in the city’s government — indeed, in many Bloomington institutions. While we threw our support to a different mayoral hopeful in the spring primary, we look forward to the fresh start the new Thomson Administration will provide.

The City Council

While it was a foregone conclusion in this one-party town, the only contested City Council seat, in District 3, went to Hopi Stosberg. So now we know the composition of the new Council.

We foresee another four years of ideological division, procedural sumo wrestling and general unpleasantness. But we are delighted to have Andy Ruff back on the dais, alongside friend and ally Dave Rollo. And we welcome Isak Nti Asare to the Council, where his formidable intellect and open mind are sorely needed.

We had argued, before the primary, that Council members representing geographic districts should put their local constituents’ interests before their own citywide, ideological agendas. We endorsed candidates who pledged to do exactly that; unfortunately, incumbents who had shown us the opposite tendency — Kate Rosenbarger (District 1, now D-2 after redistricting) and Isabel Piedmont-Smith (former District 5, now D1) — were re-elected. With self-anointed “true progressives” Matt Flaherty, Rosenbarger and Piedmont-Smith returning and newcomers Stosberg, Shruti Rana and Sydney Zulich (District 6) getting their feet wet in their first elected positions, the Council could be hard to watch, at least for a while.

The City vs. Its Neighborhoods

A crucial theme of the next administration/Council term will be neighborhood autonomy — the tendency of the administration to impose infrastructure and land use initiatives on neighborhoods opposed to them, and the ability of neighborhood residents to resist those changes.

Something like five percent of Bloomingtonians eschew car travel when they can, choosing instead to get around town on bicycles. There’s nothing wrong with this; it’s admirable for those able-bodied for it. But the city has spent millions of dollars on new bicycle infrastructure during the Hamilton years, and the allure of that investment has begun to engender increasing cynicism and pushback from residents.

A lot of that cynicism has come from direct experience watching the development of the Seven Line protected bike path — engineering, construction, re-engineering (e.g., when it was discovered that the constricted Seventh Street didn’t allow for buses to make required turns), re-construction, removal and then re-installation of stop signs and on and on…along an important artery widely observed to be little-used by cyclists and where drivers, pedestrians and even cyclists have complained that they didn’t feel safe.

Infrastructure projects like these used to require oversight by the City Council, but in 2020 the Council ceded that responsibility to mayoral appointees on the Bicycle & Pedestrian Safety Commission. This set up an atmosphere of confrontation between the city government and individual neighborhoods on whom new bike paths and greenways have been imposed over neighbors’ sometimes strong objections.

We expect conflict between aggressive citywide development interests and the interests of neighborhoods seeking to preserve their livability, diversity, (relative) affordability, home ownership opportunity and unique character to continue as one of Bloomington’s most salient issues.

The Dissident Democrat has been described in local media several times as an “Anti-Hamilton Blog.” With John Hamilton leaving the scene — and with many of his administration’s objectives unrealized — the blog, its brain trust and the Bloomington Dissident Democrats PAC will focus on new priorities, starting with the defense of neighborhood autonomy. The Hamilton Administration and its allies on the City Council have aggressively pursued top-down transformations of Bloomington’s core for the last eight years. We hope for a different sort of approach, at least from this town’s new Mayor, but we’re not going away.