The 812

It's a downtown transportation infrastructure update with Hank Duncan, the city's bicycle and pedestrian coordinator. We get the skinny on all the bumpouts being installed on downtown street corners, the future of Indiana Avenue, where the city is with studying updates to College and Walnut Streets, and more. Also...don't forget to vote before 6pm tomorrow, Tuesday, November 5th! Su...

The county's elected prosecuting attorney now in her second term, Erika Oliphant explains to The 812 the role of her office and the different programs it manages. We talk about the multiyear study her office is conducting into racial and ethnic disparities in the county justice system as a result of her office's actions, and what they're doing about it. We also discuss the county ja...

We don't usually delve into arts and culture on this show unless it has a direct relationship to local elected government, but today's guest offers us an unusual opportunity. Abigail Knipstine tells us about the brand-new yet newly-renovated museum made out of two old ones, the IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (IUMAA), where she's the business manager. She talks about how m...

To the thousands of residents of Monroe County who were ever active-duty, Steven Miller is  likely to be a familiar name. He's the Veteran Service Officer, who runs Monroe County's Veterans Affairs Department. He tells us about the services he administers to vets, including pensions, education and burial benefits. He also talks about the harder side of the VA. Many vets have seen more th...

A new installment in our occasional series, The 812 Work Session, in which we meet members of the local media and compare notes about local news. Today's guests are Marissa Meador and Jacob Spudich, the co-editors-in-chief of the Indiana Daily Student. We talk about issues they're covering on campus, including Dunn Meadow and the unwitting deficit spending of student organizations. One i...

Today we're releasing portions of never-before-aired overtime interviews with recent guests. Anything we've recorded after the main interview for that episode we've been setting aside as "Extra Innings" segments, which can run anywhere from 7 minutes to as long as half an hour. Here now are a few samples. Extra Innings with Haskell Smith and George Hegeman of the Tree Comm...

Van Buren Township, to the city's west-southwest, is the fourth most populous township in Monroe County (about 12,000 people as of the last census). In the first half of our interview, Township Trustee Rita Barrow (pronounced "borrow") lays out how she handles the role of trustee in Van Buren, including building new headquarters and dealing with disputes over weeds and fence lines....

The Monroe County History Center on 6th and Washington is a museum, a library, an event space, and then some. Not every community has such a thing -- it's not part of the Public Library, so it relies entirely on donations and grants, yet it has several full-time staff. We talk with Daniel Schlegel, the Center's Director, and Megan MacDonald, the Center's Librarian. They tell us all...

Ellen Jacquart is the president of Monroe County Identify and Reduce Invasive Species, or MC-IRIS for short. She leads a surprisingly large group of volunteers who have made it their mission to help pull plants that shouldn't be here because they're not native to the area, and in many cases, crowd out plants that are. Whether it's the Callery pear, the asian bush honeysuckle, or the...

Living-learning centers at IU allow students to take classes in a specialty of their choice in the dorm where they live on-campus. The Civic Leaders Living-Learning Center takes up three floors in one tower of Briscoe Quad.  Former Bloomington city councilmember Steve Volan was invited out for an exchange of ideas with former Fort Wayne mayor Paul Helmke, now the faculty director of the CLLLC, and...

Our guest today is the Monroe County Coroner, Joani Stalcup. She tells us all about the job: how it works, what the difference is between a coroner and a medical examiner, and why coroners were ever elected in the first place. She also introduces us to the term "medical legal death investigator", talks about the surprising requirements of the job, and how the people who do it manage. It&...

On today's show, we're talk to the biggest distributor of usable food in South Central Indiana, the Hoosier Hills Food Bank. They move more than 5 million pounds of food, half from places that can no longer use or sell it, to people in need. Julio Alonso, the Food Bank's executive director, and Jake Bruner, the associate director, talk about how they support local food pantries in s...

NOTE: There will be no episode Mon., Oct. 7. The next episode is Wed., Oct. 9. Our guest today is Lesley Davis. Until recently the assistant dean of international programs at the IU Maurer School of Law, she now is the VP for North American Partnerships at Access Able, a British company that creates detailed accessibility guides to buildings so that their users can navigate as many environments as...

David Hittle, the city's new director of the Planning and Transportation Department, talks with Steve Volan about the documents that rule the planning process in this city: the Comprehensive Plan and the Unified Development Ordinance. We discuss how the department he runs works in practice, and the boards and commissions that collectively oversee the city's entire built environment. This...

Holly Warren is the assistant director for the arts in Bloomington's department of Economic and Sustainable Development. She's enthusiastic at boosting the visual and performing arts, helping artists get grants, coordinating artwork on major projects through the city's 1% for the Arts program, and promoting the city's Public Arts Master Plan. She also acts as liaison to the Blo...

We've talked a lot on The 812 about the development of land. Today we talk about land that's undeveloped, undevelopable, or will never be developed. Our guest is the executive director of the Sycamore Land Trust, John Lawrence. He oversees the preservation of thousands of acres of land throughout southern Indiana, from Sycamore's headquarters in the house on the edge of Bloomington...

Today we talk housing with the new director of the city's Housing and Neighborhood Development department, Anna Killion-Hansen. The breadth of what her department does is kind of mind-boggling: it's not just inspecting rentals or working with neighborhood associations; it's also handling federal dollars, historic preservation, housing quality appeals, the Redevelopment Commission, a...

The812 looks into a type of local government separate from city and county that it has yet to talk about: local schools as a separate branch of government. We get our first look through a nonprofit that tries to help the schools -- Teachers' Warehouse, the local nonprofit which raises money and donations to provide school supplies to teachers in public schools in six counties.  Sara Laughlin...

One of the three seats on the Monroe County Board of Commissioners is contested this fall. Today, our guest is the Republican candidate, Joe Van Deventer. He's the director of street operations for the city of Bloomington's Public Works Department. We get his perspective on all the local issues, including housing, the jail, zoning, the unhoused. He also advocates for taking advantage of...

It's 40 years since Bloomington became a so-called Tree City. We talk about what that means with our guests: Haskell Smith, the city's Urban Forester, and George Hegeman, an inaugural member of the Bloomington Tree Commission, which has been in existence since 1992. We talk about the importance of trees and shade, invasive species and how they're dealt with, how utilities and the ci...

Today, we talk with the first of the two candidates vying for the marquee local race this cycle: Jody Madeira, the Democratic nominee. She's an IU law professor in her first political run, up against Joe Van Deventer, the director of the city of Bloomington's street division. (We've invited him and he's agreed to appear on the show; we look forward to publishing that show soon....

This is the second of two episodes released today (note: we strongly recommend listening to the previous episode first), part of our conversation with NPR's Eric Deggans, an alum of the IU School of Journalism, back in Bloomington to speak at its successor, the Media School.  Among other topics, Eric Deggans talks about the reasons he went from music to television criticism; Bloomington'...

Eric Deggans is the TV critic for National Public Radio, as well as a media analyst, and guest host. Before NPR, he was by turns a TV/media critic, music critic and reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, the Asbury Park Press, the Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He's the author of the book, "Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation," publishe...

The Reverend Bill Breeden is perhaps most famous for a protest in 1987, when he stole a street sign in his nearby hometown of Odon, Indiana. It was named for John Poindexter, the admiral convicted of multiple felonies in the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan administration. But that affair was the tip of the iceberg for this minister emeritus of the Bloomington Unitarian Church, who's had...

Our guest today is Trohn Enright-Randolph, Monroe County Surveyor. He explains how his work is crucial to everything regarding the use and ownership of land in Monroe County -- if you don't know where the property lines are, well, it's pretty much chaos. Besides measuring those, though, he's involved in drainage and stormwater management, and is an integral part of county planning....