Mayor Thomson: Tell us your new-found secrets

By Peter Dorfman

New Mayor Kerry Thomson made transparency a major theme of her Democratic primary campaign last spring. It was smart politics. She had two primary opponents, one of whom was the former Deputy Mayor in the then-current administration, which had made enemies by stridently promising but abjectly failing to embrace transparency as a governing value.

So it got our attention when Thomson, interviewed by reporter Joe Hren for WTIU/WFIU’s “Ask the Mayor” feature in late February, said this:

“…[U]nless you’ve been the mayor before, you’re going to be surprised by what you find when you are the mayor. So, there have been things that that we didn’t know about. And we’re still sort of processing where we are with things and how to how to really put things in place so that we can move forward, really with a plan that is best for our city in several different instances.”

This came in response to a question about the city review of internal finances and litigation, which Thomson initiated shortly after taking office. Hren noted, in posing the question, that most of the discussion sparked by that review has been about annexation. But, as has been the pattern in these “Ask the Mayor” features throughout the years of the Hamilton Administration, Hren tossed the mayor a softball and then never even tried to field the slow roller that Thomson smacked straight at him.

So I’ll ask.

Mayor Thomson: What, exactly, did you find now that you’re the mayor? What are these things that you didn’t know about until you put your feet up on the desk recently vacated by John Hamilton?

Don’t you think the rest of us — your staff, your constituents, the local media, the business community, your counterparts in county government, and yeah, even those people out in the county you have now committed your administration to annexing into Bloomington if the court lets you — wouldn’t we all be better off if we knew and understood those things too?

Because, having laid out an intriguing platform and promising a significant change of direction from that of the last administration, so far most of what we’re seeing is the very continuity with the Hamilton program that we’d worried about during the primary — full speed ahead on annexation, top-down imposition of traffic engineering and bicycle infrastructure on neighborhoods that mostly don’t want it, and that pointless expansion of the Monroe County Convention Center, to the tune of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars that could be better spent elsewhere.

A continuing undercurrent of Bloomington and Monroe County politics has been backroom dealmaking among Democrats, who then publicly rationalize their decisions with gauzy progressive slogans. It’s all neatly summarized in the phrase “Too Many Secrets.”

Whatever it was that you found in a locked desk drawer when you moved into the mayor’s office…please share it with the rest of us so we can figure out what we’ve all been missing.