Shelli Yoder returns to The 812, now as the Indiana Senate minority leader (a title she got unexpectedly the day after she was last here in December). Whatever plans she mentioned then for this legislative session were upended by the behemoth changes wrought by Senate Bill 1. Localities around the state are still reeling from the impact of the tax cuts in SB1; we talk about how it will affect Bloomington, Monroe County, and the school corporations. Sen. Yoder also talks about the state's new wor...
Jun 06, 2025•35 min•Season 3Ep. 206
On June 27, the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre will host a screening of the original, uncut, 1954 Toho Studios film Gojira , in Japanese with English subtitles. There will be a special presentation before the film, and a Q&A panel discussion afterwards. That'll be followed by original Japanese cuts of two more Godzilla films the next two nights, rarely if ever seen by American audiences -- and the differences are dramatic. The mad genius behind Godzilla Weekend is Beth Bredlau, a graduate student i...
Jun 04, 2025•36 min•Season 3Ep. 205
Steve Bonchek, whom everyone just calls "Roc", is founder and principal of Harmony School, the independent, non-religious school not funded by the state, which is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary, 40 of which have been in Bloomington's old Elm Heights School, which itself is turning 100 next year. Bonchek talks about how the school came to be, how it works, and why he doesn't call it a "private" school even though it's neither a public nor a charter school. He also talks about the foundin...
Jun 03, 2025•39 min•Season 3Ep. 204
Due to unforeseen circumstances, the episode scheduled for today has been delayed until tomorrow, Tuesday, June 3. Look for it in your podcast feed then! Support the show A production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved.
Jun 02, 2025•12 sec
When last here in December, Nathan Ferreira was the director of real estate development for the Bloomington Housing Authority. He's now executive director of the BHA, and at a trying time for government-assisted housing, with cuts facing the Housing and Urban Development grants that fund so many housing authorities around the country. We'll get a sense from him of what's facing affordable and supportive housing in Bloomington, as well as find out how projects like the Kohr Building remodel or th...
May 30, 2025•38 min•Season 3Ep. 203
People and Animal Learning Services, or PALS, is a nonprofit center, dedicated to providing meaningful, therapeutic hands-on experiences with horses for individuals with disabilities, veterans, senior citizens, and underserved youth through partnerships with entities like the Monroe County Youth Services Bureau. We talk with Christine Herring, the Executive Director, about the normal work PALS does, and the harrowing impact of the tornado that destroyed their horse barn on May 16, days after the...
May 28, 2025•37 min•Season 3Ep. 202
NOTE: The 812 will take Memorial Day off; new episodes resume Wed., May 28. Stormwater needs to be channeled somewhere -- lakes, rivers, retention ponds -- or it becomes floodwater. If there aren't ditches or box culverts near where you live or work, you may have been wading around last weekend. Communities do their best to manage stormwater, to not mix it with their wastewater. Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems, also known as MS4, exist throughout Monroe County: they reduce pollution and t...
May 23, 2025•40 min•Season 3Ep. 201
Children have very real-world needs, and sometimes face problems that adults would have trouble dealing with. That's why the city's Commission on the Status of Children and Youth exists. The commission advocates for local youth, collects data on their needs, and debates how to solve persistent problems that those under 18 are having in our community. Erin Reynolds is the chair of the commission; Katie Hopkins is the fomer chair and the current secretary of the commission. They talk about how the...
May 21, 2025•39 min•Season 3Ep. 200
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. Support the show A production of Plateia Media ©2024-5. All rights reserved....
May 19, 2025•39 min•Season 3Ep. 199
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" ini...
May 16, 2025•34 min•Season 3Ep. 198
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...
May 14, 2025•40 min•Season 3Ep. 197
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....
May 12, 2025•36 min•Season 3Ep. 196
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. Support the show A...
May 09, 2025•33 min•Season 3Ep. 195
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 ...
May 07, 2025•37 min•Season 3Ep. 194
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 auster...
May 05, 2025•35 min•Season 3Ep. 193
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...
May 02, 2025•36 min•Season 3Ep. 192
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 ...
Apr 30, 2025•36 min•Season 3Ep. 191
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 meeting...
Apr 28, 2025•35 min•Season 3Ep. 190
It's The 812's first look at one of the most basic local services, the fire department. Our guest, Tom Figolah, is the Department's Fire Prevention Officer, and his title reflects a trend that may not be self-evident to people who are used to fire departments being just about putting out fires. That's reactive; better is to anticipate potential fires so that they don't start in the first place. Our conversation gets into what they call "community risk reduction", as well as the city's fire insur...
Apr 25, 2025•36 min•Season 3Ep. 189
Today's show is a case study in Bloomington's arts economy. Our guests are the founders of MDWST FABLE, a series of performing-arts shows that involve other artists in the Bloomington area, largely centered around storytelling. Tristra Newyear and Matt Rice, both of whom work for local creative media companies and who are creatives in their own rights, began collaborating on events just last year. In today's innings, they talk about their ideas and their work, and how key to their ability to cre...
Apr 23, 2025•36 min•Season 3Ep. 188
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 inter...
Apr 21, 2025•36 min•Season 3Ep. 187
So you may know that Bloomington has been a sister city to Posoltega, Nicaragua since 1988, and to Santa Clara, Cuba since 1999. Sister Cities International has been pairing cities across national borders for many years now. But Vicki Veenker asked herself: why can't two American cities be sibs? And that's how Bloomington, Indiana became the sibling city of Palo Alto, California, where Veenker is the Vice Mayor, as well as the founder of the Sibling Cities USA program. We learn about how the pro...
Apr 11, 2025•38 min•Season 3Ep. 186
In the incorporated place that is Bloomington's primary official suburb, there's no mayor. The part-time town council in Ellettsville is the legislative and executive body -- sort of like the board of commissioners that runs the county -- but they're also the fiscal body. They're everything; in Indiana, only counties and cities have separation of powers. Scott Oldham is in his nineteenth year on the five-member council for the town of more than 8000, and currently serves as president. He talks a...
Apr 09, 2025•37 min•Season 3Ep. 185
Today is a Work Session, an interview with a member of local media where we talk about the city and local issues of the day. Michael "Big Mike" Glab is a former reporter for the Chicago Reader who's covered every kind of news, hard and soft. After 50 years in the Windy City, he eventually found himself in Limestone Country, where he became the host of Big Talk, a half-hour interview show not unlike this one. Where this show's theme is local government, Big Talk focus more on creative Bloomington...
Apr 07, 2025•39 min•Season 3Ep. 184
The 812 converts to "El Ocho Doce" for the day, to welcome representatives from the Commission on Hispanic and Latino Affairs, which "works to identify and research the issues which impact those populations in Bloomington, especially in the areas of health, education, public safety and cultural competency." They help break the language barrier that prevents many residents from accessing services like medical care or housing, through forums on mental health or orienting newcomers to the community...
Apr 04, 2025•40 min
One person's trash is another's treasure...or so the Trashion Refashion Runway Show tries to demonstrate. The 16th annual event will be presented by Plato's Closet at the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre April 13. The virtually all-volunteer event presents and models clothes designed almost entirely from waste, recycled, or upcycled materials. We talk about promoting sustainability through haute couture, the history of Trashion, and all about how the event works with Devta Kidd, producer of this year's e...
Apr 02, 2025•37 min•Season 3Ep. 182
Even before they make the formal announcement later this morning, we have details on the official revival of the Taste of Bloomington, the summer celebration of this city's bustling local restaurant scene that happened for 35 years before the pandemic said we couldn't have nice things. Anyway, the Taste is back -- for at least one year, anyway -- courtesy of the Chocolate Moose. It's moving from its longtime home in the parking lot at City Hall to all five blocks of East Kirkwood Avenue, and it'...
Mar 31, 2025•37 min•Season 3Ep. 181
We talk about the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association. It's run by a city board of directors appointed by mayor and council. The BUEA oversees the city's Urban Enterprise Zone. Businesses and residents of the Zone can benefit tax-wise from the Enterprise Zone's Investment Deduction; revenue from the EZID generates a pot of money in the mid-six-figures annually. Someone has to figure out how to distribute each year -- which is harder than it sounds. Andrea "De" de la Rosa is our guest today....
Mar 28, 2025•35 min•Season 3Ep. 180
A person who advocates in court for those who can't for themselves is known as a guardian ad litem. But there's an even greater need for children who have suffered abuse and/or neglect and find themselves lost in the justice system. Every state except North Dakota has court-appointed special advocates, or "CASAs" for short. Despite being an integral part of the local justice system, Monroe County's CASA system [is not funded by] gets only partial funding from county government; it became a nonpr...
Mar 26, 2025•38 min•Season 3Ep. 179
Today we're talking specifically about a topic that could take several episodes to discuss: the primary source of drinking water in metropolitan Bloomington. The reservoir commonly known as Lake Monroe is the largest body of water inside the state of Indiana. It was the state's idea to put a university in the middle of nowhere in 1818, and the city that grew up around it was always in danger of losing the university to Indianapolis because of the lack of water. We outgrew Lake Griffy, then Lake ...
Mar 24, 2025•40 min•Season 3Ep. 178
