The 812 - Steve Volan / Plateia Media

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195 [S3E42] Liz Feitl, Monroe County Councilmember (At Large) May 09, 2025

Show notes

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.

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194 [S3E41]: Rethinking "Public Safety" in Bloomington with the CAPS Commission May 07, 2025

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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 in November 2020 and established in May 2021, was created to research and recommend evidence-based alternatives to traditional policing, including best practices anywhere in the world, for implementation in Bloomington. Their goal: to increase the safety of everyone in the community, especially those often marginalized due to race, disability, gender, sexual identity, or sexual orientation.

Our guests today are Kamala Brown Sparks, a member of the CAPS Commission since its founding, and Councilmember Isabel Piedmont-Smith, a co-author of the ordinance creating the commission. We get into how the CAPS Commission differs from the long-standing Board of Public Safety, what initial conclusions the new commission came to, and how their work is going.

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193 [S3E40]: Miah Michaelsen, Executive Director of the Indiana Arts Commission May 05, 2025

Show notes

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 austerity for the arts, the variety of projects happening around the state nevertheless, and how her time at the city influenced her work in Indianapolis. When it comes to the arts, she's seen it all, and she tells us about what she's learned.

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192 [S3E39]: Amy Oelsner, Founder and DIrector of Girls Rock Bloomington May 02, 2025

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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 Commission on the Status of Women at their annual Women's History Luncheon in March.

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191 [S3E38]: Mia Beach and Hannah Airriess of Redbud Books, A New Third Place in Bloomington Apr 30, 2025

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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 arts and youth programming grants from the city, county and IU. We speak with two founding members of the collective that runs Redbud Books, Mia Beach and Hannah Airriess, about their effort to build community in a time when that goal seems to be receding.

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190 [S3E37]: The 50-Year Tradition of Public Access TV in Bloomington, with CATS GM Martin O'Neill Apr 28, 2025

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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 meetings. Our guest today is Martin O'Neill, the general manager of CATS, who'll tell us about the other services it provides, and the not-so-trivial challenge of maintaining 50 years of video archives.

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189 [S3E36]: About the Bloomington Fire Department, with Prevention Officer Tom Figolah Apr 25, 2025

Show notes

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 insurance rating, the effect of the new union contract on retaining firefighters, and their new initiative to making medical runs more effective through their innovative Mobile Integrated Health initiative.

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188 [S3E35]: MDWST FABLE and the Power of a Grant from the Arts Commission Apr 23, 2025

Show notes

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 create was a small but significant grant from the angel investors known as the Bloomington Arts Commission.

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

Show notes

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.

We're back from a week's hiatus, and we're starting a mailing list! Visit the812show.org to add your email.

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186 [S3E33] Getting to Know Bloomington's Sibling City with Vicki Veenker, Vice Mayor of Palo Alto Apr 11, 2025

Show notes

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 program came to be, how they chose Bloomington (hint: Veenker's a Hoosier), and we learn about our sib: how Palo Alto is governed, what their big issues are, and how they compare to Bloomington's.

The 812 is taking a week off from new programs to retool. New episodes resume April 21.

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