The City of Bloomington’s Board of Public Works has approved a resolution seeking to prevent camping and other obstructions in streets, sidewalks and roads.

The board’s three members unanimously passed the resolution Tuesday, paving the way for the city council to modify the city code to include such language.

Adam Wason, the city’s public works director, said there have been instances of people blocking the sidewalks with their belongings.
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“There was no way that the public right-of-way at that point in time was ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant,” Wason said. “There was no way it was passable by somebody simply walking by.”

At a forum for mayoral candidates hosted on Monday night by the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce, not a lot of new, additional daylight emerged between the three candidates as far as their known policy positions.

But a sharp difference in perspective emerged in response to a couple of the questions—one involving public safety and another involving the working relationship between city and county governments.
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Moderating the forum was Paul Helmke, who was a three-term mayor of Fort Wayne, and is a professor of practice at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

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.  

The Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce hopes the board of Bloomington Transit will vote to expand Route 3 by 1.3 miles in the west direction to serve those in Park 48 and Ivy Tech facilities, according to a Herald-Times guest column. In his column, Eric Spoonmore, the president and CEO of Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce, said City Council also supported this idea when they passed Resolution 22-16, a document sponsored by Councilmember Steven Volan.  
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Spoonmore said the resolution favored extending the transit services outside city boundaries, something the municipal code didn’t allow previously. While the resolution signifies council members want to expand transit lines, it doesn’t formally approve an infrastructural change or construction. Spoonmore said the expansion has been an ongoing conversation in both the business and residential community and by extending services, the city will be able to serve those accordingly.  

Choosing a career isn’t always on the radar of middle school students. But the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce is trying to kick-start them into thinking about the possibilities with its Tour of Opportunity program.

“It’s a way to plant the seed and start the conversation about what they might want to do in the future,” says Katie Sensabaugh, director of Success School, which operates the program giving students real-world experiences at local workplaces.

​“We have done virtual tours for the last two years, but this is the first time we are doing in-person tours,” Sensabaugh says. Groups of about 50 seventh- and eighth-graders visit two or three businesses in one day to talk with professionals and learn about careers.