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.

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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.

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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. 

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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).

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[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.

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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. 

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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.]

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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.

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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. 

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[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.

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