The 812

Any roads outside Bloomington, Ellettsville or Stinesville are the jurisdiction of Monroe County. Today, we talk to the County Highway Department about how they manage the condition of more than 700 miles of roads.Our guests today are Lisa Ridge, the Highway Dept. director, and her deputy, Toby Turner, the Highway Superintendent. They talk about what it takes to maintain a roadway properly (hint: it's not just about paving), h...

The 812 is back after an extended summer break with a new season!

Our premiere guest of season 4 is a fellow traveler. He too started a local government reporting series...and he just finished high school. 

Rafiul Shefar graduated at the beginning of this month from Harmony School, an independent K-12 school in Bloomington. Harmony students have to do a senior project. He wanted to better understand US government, which led him to th...

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 sch...

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 ...

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"...

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 Bl...

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 ...

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 know...

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...

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 r...

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 cit...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 D...

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 ...

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 ce...