How many people are experiencing homelessness in our community?

At the September 9 business meeting with Mayor Kerry Thomson, Heading Home and more than 60 business representatives, businesses heard an estimate of roughly 150. Other publicly available measures have put the number above 500.

One count may track people sleeping outside. Another may include people in shelters or everyone actively experiencing homelessness during a particular period. Geography, time periods, and definitions can shift the number further.

But if people participating in the same community conversation don't understand why one number says roughly 150 and another says more than 500, that's a problem.  

Should government own apartments? That sounds like a simple question. It isn't.

Should government run a grocery store? Probably not — thin margins, constant decisions about pricing and inventory, no reason to think City Hall would be good at it. Should a community own its water utility? Usually yes — nobody's building a second set of pipes to your house if you don't like the rates, so public accountability matters there in a way it doesn't for groceries.
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Neither example tells you much about apartments. That's the point. The question isn't whether government ownership is good or bad in general. It's whether it's the right tool for this problem, at this price, with this plan to execute it.

Good intentions don't answer that question. Most people making public decisions in our community want good things — more attainable housing, safer neighborhoods, help for people who need it. We should take those intentions at face value. But intentions are where you start evaluating a decision, not where you stop.

​I have been thinking lately about how easy it has become not to leave the house.

We have access to more movies, television, music, and information than at any point in our lives. I can watch almost any movie I want tonight without going anywhere. That's pretty remarkable. But having nearly everything available on demand makes me appreciate the things that are better when other people are there.

Years ago, Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone, looking at bowling leagues, civic clubs, and the organizations that put people in a room together. I have been thinking about that book again because a good portion of my job at the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce involves doing exactly that.

At our recent Business After Hours at First Financial Bank, more than 200 people showed up. Some came to make a business connection. Others were catching up with people they knew. Even more wanted to bask in the glow of IU Henke Hall and Indiana Football. Let's focus on the few who came because somebody invited them and figured they should get out of the office — and once they did, they had a pretty good time.

There's good news in Indiana's latest population estimates.

Indiana added nearly 38,600 residents in 2025, pushing the state close to 7 million people. Sixty-six of Indiana's 92 counties grew last year, and Indiana's 0.56% growth rate outpaced every neighboring state. For the fourth straight year, international migration was the largest driver of that growth.

Monroe County grew, too. Our population reached an estimated 143,345 in 2025, an increase of 513 residents, or about 0.4%, from the year before. That's a meaningful turn: Monroe County's population had declined in both 2023 and 2024, driven largely by domestic out-migration. Last year's growth reverses that trend. 

Nothing is alarming about the size of that rebound...
Bloomington and Monroe County anchor southern Indiana in higher education, health care, employment, and arts and culture. Indiana University draws tens of thousands of young people here every year. We have major employers, a nationally recognized research university, a strong entrepreneurial community, and amenities most communities our size would envy. A regional center like ours should reasonably aim for steady growth closer to 1% a year — not a boom, just consistent, sustainable growth that shows people are coming here.

Competitive businesses require competitive communities—and communities need the capacity to invest in themselves.

Indiana's fiscal discipline deserves real credit.

The state closed fiscal year 2026 with $3.99 billion in reserves, including a $1.86 billion surplus, according to the state comptroller's office. Reserves grew substantially over the previous year and now equal roughly 63 days of state expenditures—not an accident, but the result of cautious forecasting, spending controls and stronger-than-expected economic and revenue performance.

We should celebrate that. But we should also ask "what it's for?"

A strong reserve protects Indiana during a recession, a natural disaster or a sudden loss of federal support. It lets the state meet its obligations without immediately raising taxes or making damaging cuts. Maintaining that cushion is responsible government.

But fiscal discipline isn't just the accumulation of money. It should also give Indiana the capacity to confront the weaknesses holding back our economy and our communities.

Parking is one of the few public systems that people judge one trip at a time. Find a space near your destination, and the system barely registers. Circle the block twice, get a ticket or fight with a payment app, and suddenly Bloomington has a parking crisis.

I spent four years on the now-defunct City of Bloomington Parking Commission. My experience is that downtown parking is generally available and reasonably priced. Someone who has spent 15 minutes searching for a space may reasonably see things differently. Individual experiences quickly become conclusions about the entire system.

The City’s new parking study offers another chance to compare those perceptions with actual usage—and to consider parking as public infrastructure supporting workers, businesses and development.

A parking problem, or a convenience problem?
More than 1,500 people responded to the study’s survey. 55 percent said they usually find an on-street space within five minutes. 44 percent said Bloomington’s rates are comparable to other communities, while another 32 percent said they are lower. Those responses present a calmer picture than the public debate often suggests (Walker Consultants, 2026).

​The listening sessions were less reassuring. Participants associated parking with fines, hassle, and confusion. Downtown businesses said some customers assume parking will be difficult and choose another destination. Broken equipment, enforcement and limited awareness of cheaper garage spaces also came up repeatedly.

Both experiences can exist within the same system. Garage spaces may be available while every curb space beside a restaurant is occupied. Bloomington can have enough parking overall while particular blocks reach capacity at certain hours.

Perception also carries an economic cost. A customer who expects downtown parking to be difficult may never make the trip. An occupancy report produced afterward does not recover the visit.

Better signage, visible garage entrances and clearer information may improve the experience as much as another rate adjustment.

Communities do not compete simply with tax rates or incentives anymore. They compete on whether people believe they can get things done.

Government exists to protect the public. We agree with that old saying. But protecting the public should not mean making it unnecessarily difficult to invest in our community.

Government at its best creates confidence. It sets clear expectations, applies standards consistently, and helps people find a path to compliance. It opens doors instead of putting up barriers.

That is why the Bloomington Chamber welcomes the City's response to the independent audit of its development review and permitting process. The report confirms what applicants—large and small—have experienced for years: inconsistent reviews, conflicting direction between departments, long timelines, and a process that often felt unpredictable. More importantly, it offers practical ways to improve it.

These conversations have found their way to the Chamber for years.

We have collaborated with a local entrepreneur trying to open an emergency veterinary hospital, where months of delay meant the community waited longer for the service it needed. We have also seen a homeowner's accessory dwelling unit become caught in an extended review despite supporting the City's own housing goals. We have heard from business owners renovating existing buildings who went through round after round of comments without a clear understanding of what was required to move forward.

None of this was ever about avoiding regulations.

It was about understanding them.

​Bloomington does not lack imagination for Kirkwood Avenue.

Most people can picture the better version: outdoor dining, steady foot traffic, music, better lighting, easier movement between campus and downtown, and a street that feels less like a pass-through and more like a place.

The vision is easy to understand. What has been missing is the harder conversation about cost, management, and tradeoffs.

The ordinance before the Mayor would close five blocks of Kirkwood Avenue to vehicles from April 1 through November 15 every year. This is not a weekend closure or a seasonal experiment. It is a seven-and-a-half-month operating model for one of Bloomington's most visible corridors.

Last year's closure did not prove that the model works.

Kirkwood has already shown it can be an excellent event street. Taste of Bloomington's return and Pride both brought the kind of energy people want to see downtown. But those events worked because they had a clear purpose, built-in crowds, programming, and management. That success does not answer whether five blocks should function as a seven-and-a-half-month pedestrian district without the same level of planning.

Too often, the closure looked unfinished: pavement, barricades, scattered seating, uneven activity, and long stretches where the street did not feel like a destination. The problem was never that people oppose downtown vibrancy. A closed street is not automatically a public space, and that is what the city ran into.

Most people skip Monroe County Plan Commission committee agendas. I don't blame them, but these meetings matter.

A recent Ordinance Review Committee session nominally focused on a narrow technical question: whether to revisit the 25 percent open-space requirement for Planned Unit Developments (PUDs). But the conversation quickly moved into broader territory — dormant development approvals, urban-fringe density, and whether Monroe County's role is to manage growth or resist it.

When the phrase "hyper-urbanization" surfaced to describe what the city was doing at the county's edges, it was a tell. That's not ordinance language. That's a position on growth — and it was sitting quietly inside a technical committee discussion.

Monroe County should clarify what counts as "open space" in a PUD — backyards? detention ponds? utility corridors? Those aren't the same thing, and the difference matters. The same 25 percent requirement could produce a genuine neighborhood amenity or shrink the number of homes on a site plan without anyone noticing. But ordinance review shouldn't become downzoning by another name.

The urban fringe is where many of our most consequential housing decisions will be made — areas already close to roads, utilities, jobs, schools, and public services. Making density harder there doesn’t preserve anything rural. It redirects housing pressure somewhere else, or eliminates it  — which isn’t protection, it’s scarcity.

That has real consequences. Of Monroe County's 65,975 jobs, more than half are held by people who live elsewhere. As John Fernandez recently noted, Senate Enrolled Act 1 turns that long-tolerated inefficiency into a direct fiscal problem — income tax revenue follows workers home, not to where they work. If land-use policy at the urban fringe keeps making it harder to build attainable housing, we're effectively sending tax revenue to Lawrence County and calling it growth management.

The dormant PUD question deserves the same scrutiny. Retiring old approvals may sound like housekeeping, but a stalled project isn't self-evidently bad policy — it might be evidence of an infrastructure gap, a financing problem, or a City-County coordination failure that nobody fixed. Before the County reduces development capacity, it should understand why that capacity went unused.

The open-space language needs work, and older approvals may need clearer expectations around phasing and public benefit. But there’s a difference between raising the bar and moving the goalposts. The urban fringe isn’t the place to quietly restrict housing under the cover of technical cleanup.

The decisions that shape a community don't always happen in front of a full room. Sometimes they happen in a committee discussion about how to define open space.

The collapse of the North Park proposal was not just a fight over one piece of land. It was the clearest sign yet of a larger Monroe County problem: local government is struggling to deliver major public projects.

The proposed Justice Center has moved through years of studies, committees, site reviews, consultant reports, litigation deadlines, public meetings, political reversals, and failed votes. Yet Monroe County still lacks a site, a final scope, a clear cost model, and a durable coalition to move the project forward.

The concern is bigger than one site. It is whether local government can execute, collaborate, explain the costs, weigh the tradeoffs, and maintain public trust.
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North Park may be dead as a site. The governing problems that led to its collapse are not.

The Present: The Commissioners Kept Returning with the Same Failed Proposal
The commissioners’ North Park strategy failed on both political and practical grounds: they kept returning with the same proposal after it was clear the votes were not there.

The County Council rejected North Park in October and again in May. On May 26, it voted 1–6 against approval and then 6–0 to deny the ordinance outright. That second vote was not hesitation. It was institutional rejection.