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.

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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.

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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.

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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.]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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