The 812 - Steve Volan / Plateia Media

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223 [S4E17]: Attorney Nick Minaudo with Indiana Legal Services Oct 28, 2025

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We've been focusing on the tenant side of the local housing equation lately. We hosted Student Legal Services a few episodes back; today, we meet their cousins at Indiana Legal Services. Nick Minaudo is a lawyer for the Bloomington branch of ILS, a statewide nonprofit. They handle a wide variety of civil cases, like family law and reentry work. But they handle a lot of cases involving tenants, and their services are not just for IU students. We talk about how they're funded, how to apply for their services, and how they're like public defenders for civil cases.

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222 [S4E16]: About the New City Transportation Commission: Shefar Rafiul Turns the Tables on Steve Volan Oct 23, 2025

Show notes

There's been a precedent for table-turning on this show, in which the guest interviews the host. (As a former city councilmember, Steve has been interviewed on this very program by the rizz-tastic current at-large councilmember Isak Asare.) Last year the Bloomington city administration and council saw fit to merge the Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety, Traffic, and Parking Commissions into a single Transportation Commission, which started meeting this past June. Your host was named to the new Commission; by July, they had elected him chair (mostly because he was the only fool willing to do it).

To interview Steve, we asked our recent guest, Shefar Rafiul, host of the government.exe podcast on WFHB's Youth Radio, to be our guest host. He agreed, and we're all enthusiastic about the result. The conversation gets into city transportation policies: everything from sidewalks to the Safe Streets for All Action Plan, with the city's Vision Zero goal of zero traffic fatalities by 2039. And, of course, parking.

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187 [S3E34]: GIS Coordinator John Baeten, on the Mapping of Monroe County [ENCORE] Oct 21, 2025

Show notes

[This is an encore presentation recorded in April. We'll be back with a new episode Thursday.]

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 interesting projects on the county’s state-award-winning GIS website, like stitching together aerial images of the county taken in the middle of the 20th century, a project mapping racial covenants in real estate deeds across the county. mapping the prevalence of radon, even mapping ticks for the health department.

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221 [S4E15]: Melanie Vehslage and the Youth Services Bureau Oct 16, 2025

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Melanie Vehslage works for the Youth Services Bureau, which serves to "reduce negative childhood conditions" in Monroe County. A department of county government, the Bureau also strives to promote what they call "safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments" for local youth, which is part of Vehslage's job as their Prevention Coordinator. She came to the Bureau from the county Health Department, where she worked for 8 years in harm reduction and population health. From her we'll learn about the county's youth shelter, the Safe Place program and how it works, the many counseling programs they run to help teens, parents and organizations alike, the Monroe County Youth Council, and the upcoming Childhood Conditions Summit addressing similar issues on November 13 at the Convention Center.

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220 [S4E14]: Defending Tenants with Stacee Williams of Student Legal Services at IU Oct 14, 2025

Show notes

The local university enrolls 43,000 students in person but only houses 13,000 of them. The other 30,000, almost all of them tenants, live in the city of Bloomington, a city that is only 80,000, students included. That's where our guest comes in. Stacee Williams is the director of Student Legal Services at IUB. They're a full-service civil law firm that happens to be ensconced within IU, and offers free legal representation and advice to IU students who have to pay the fee for it each semester. In addition to representing students in accident cases and reviewing employment contracts, SLS has seen and litigated it all when it comes to issues between tenants and landlords. It's an eye-opening chat for any tenant in a town dominated by rentals.

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219 [S4E13]: Protecting Local Waters: Maggie Sullivan of the Friends of Lake Monroe Oct 09, 2025

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Lake Week at The 812 continues with Maggie Sullivan, the Watershed Coordinator for the Friends of Lake Monroe. It's a non-profit organization whose goal is to bring together the many entities that have some responsibility for the reservoir: the Army Corps of Engineers, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Monroe County, and the City of Bloomington Utilities among others -- because none of them are directly related or responsible to each other, and no one is specifically responsible for the quality of the water in the lake. We talk with her about what causes the water to sometimes taste funky; the problems of sediment, agricultural nutrient runoff, and the thousands of septic tanks in the area; and how she works with everyone to collectively protect the watershed.

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218 [S4E12]: Lake Lemon Conservancy District Manager Adam Casey Oct 07, 2025

Show notes

It's Lake Week on The 812: we're talking about one of the Bloomington metropolitan area's great glories: its freshwater lakes. Reservoirs, actually. Our subject is not the smallest, Lake Griffy, nor the largest, Lake Monroe, but the one in between, Lake Lemon. Named after former mayor Tom Lemon, it was Bloomington's primary water source for more than a decade. Today we find out all about the Lake Lemon Conservancy District with its manager, Adam Casey, including the history of water in Monroe County, the separate nature of the Conservancy District and how it funds itself, and how it cares for the beloved now-recreational site.

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217 [S4E11]: The Community Kitchen Tackles Food Insecurity: Vicki Pierce and Kyla Cox Deckard Oct 02, 2025

Show notes

The Community Kitchen of Monroe County is part of the local safety net for people experiencing food insecurity. While it targets those in need, there are no eligibility requirements to receive a meal there. Vicki Pierce, their executive director for more than 20 years, and Kyla Cox Deckard, their treasurer who's been on their board of directors since 2009, talk about how they differ from other organizations dealing with food insecurity like Mother Hubbard's Cupboard or the Hoosier Hills Food Bank, the scope of the hunger problem in Monroe County, and the logistics of an operation that serves more than 300,000 meals a year.

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216 [S4E10]: Elizabeth Conley of BridgeUSA at IU, on Constructive Political Dialogue Sep 30, 2025

Show notes

There have been cries lately for "viewpoint diversity" in academia, but for years in this college town there's been a student organization actively soliciting viewpoint diversity. Our guest today, Elizabeth Conley, is the president of the IU chapter of BridgeUSA, since 2017 a national organization of students devoted to constructive dialogue on political issues. Their vision is of "a thriving US democracy where leaders and citizens engage in respectful, productive dialogue." We talk about the events BridgeUSA sponsors, including roundtable discussions of current topics at their weekly meetings on campus, how the organization is growing here and nationwide, and the local chapter's reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

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215 [S4E09]: Mark Figg on the Cooling Bloomington Rental Market Sep 25, 2025

Show notes

When it comes to the housing market, we've had city departments, and we're working on guests who can talk about the demand side of the equation such as advisers for tenants' rights. This week, we're talking with people from the supply side of the housing equation.

Mark Figg is a developer who built hundreds of units in Bloomington, in projects large and small. He's been a landlord, and an appraiser. And for a decade he was president of the Monroe County Apartment Association, and a former member of their board. We brought him back to the show to talk about the latest data on number of units in the city, occupancy rates and how both are affecting rents; how hard it is to determine because of the foggy data environment around such numbers; and how the Apartment Association works.

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