Amid continued opposition from members of the public, the Community Justice Response Committee for Monroe County met again on Monday to move forward with plans for a new county jail. The committee was initially formed in May 2021 to review reports that described poor conditions in the jail and currently meets two times per month.  

Built in 1986, the jail was described as having “far exceeded its structural and functional life cycle” in one of the consultant reports. Since then, there has been little movement on the push for a new jail, with the previous plan of building a jail in the southwest corner of the city failing to receive approval from the Bloomington City Council.  

A key player in the opposition movement is local advocacy group Care Not Cages, which hosted a block party in front of the courthouse in advance of the meeting. The event recognized this week as the Week Against Mass Incarceration and hosted Jauston Huerta, the director of Forever On Course United in Solidarity Initiatives, as a speaker. FOCUS Initiatives is an Indiana-based organization that aims to help people transition out of prison life and re-enter society.  

NOTE: This "The More I Know" podcast episode featuring Chamber CEO Eric Spoonmore was published on February 6th, 2023.

Dr. Trudy Weddle was brought into the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors effective January 25, 2023.

Dr. Trudy Weddle is the Vice Chancellor of Enrollment Services and Student Success for the Bloomington campus and has been with the College for 15 years. In her current role, she provides leadership that enhances the overall student experiences, from enrollment planning and management to student support and development.

Additionally, she assists with strengthening relationships with K-12 educational institutions and community organizations, improving cross-functional teamwork in support of retention and educational achievement, and establishing progressive strategies for advancing continuous quality improvement efforts in an environment that promotes and values diversity and recognizes the various needs and services required for a diverse student body.

​Weddle earned an associate degree from Ivy Tech Community College Terre Haute, a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Saint-Mary-of-the-Woods College, and PhD in educational administration with a higher education leadership concentration from Indiana State University.

​On Wednesday, January 18, Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce President Eric Spoonmore addressed the Bloomington Common Council to express deep concern about numerous violent crimes that have occurred in the community over the past several weeks and months including rape, stabbings, shootings, attempted murders, and murders among other egregious acts.
 
The Chamber fully supports the law enforcement agencies that make many sacrifices each day to protect and serve our city, working tirelessly around the clock to keep residents and businesses safe. The Chamber also recognizes that the Bloomington Police Department (BPD) is experiencing a significant shortage of police officers, which only exacerbates current public safety challenges for both BPD and the community.
 
Given the rash of troubling incidents, the Chamber encourages elected leaders to act with the highest level of urgency to address the current police officer shortage and ensure that our highly skilled police department has all the personnel and resources needed to meet its critical mission to the community.
 
“Safety always comes first, and the optimum levels of public safety can only be achieved for our community when we have a fully staffed police department,” said Spoonmore. “We have excellent police officers, but we need about 25 more of them. It’s our highly skilled team of officers that so often make the difference.”
 
Spoonmore also noted that elevating police staffing to the necessary levels should be the community’s top public safety priority. “City leaders have demonstrated they can ambitiously pursue innovative initiatives city-wide, including the new gigabit fiber infrastructure project and dramatic decreases to carbon emissions. I am confident that we can also aggressively solve the police shortage with that same spirit of innovation and ambition,” Spoonmore said.

The Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce continues to support the expansion of the Monroe Convention Center. The expansion will be paid for by revenue from the 1% food and beverage tax that was passed in 2017 by the Monroe County Council. Disappointingly, there has been no tangible progress on the expansion despite nearly $15 million in food and beverage tax revenue collected over the past five years.    

​However, a glimmer of hope came in November when meaningful steps were taken by county government to move forward with expansion plans. All three county commissioners unanimously agreed to create a Capital Improvement Board (CIB) that would give the city of Bloomington equal representation on the CIB. In the following weeks, all seven county council representatives unanimously supported the county commissioners’ CIB plan. Two weeks later, a supermajority of city council members voted 8-1 to support the plan for a CIB. For the first time in six years, strong momentum was building for the long-awaited convention center expansion project. Elected officials across the city and county were working together to achieve progress on this shared community goal.