All right, we are going to go ahead and call tonight's meeting to order. Today is Tuesday,
December 16 2025. It is the last.
council meeting of 2025. And for the record here, we have present in the net you Hill room. I'll start
to my left here. Um, we have counselors, vital, Wilts, Deckard and Iverson. Um, not joining us this
evening in person. Our council members, David Henry and Marty Hawk, and they should be virtual. And I see
Councilmember Hawke virtual. So we got a quorum in the NatU Hill room. So we will go ahead and get started.
So all those who are able to stand, please stand for the reciting of our Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge
allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands,
One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right, thank you. Next up
is the adoption of tonight's agenda. Does anybody wish to make any amendments to tonight's agenda?
Yes, Councilor. Madam President, I move to pull item 12 C per the department's request and move to add
item 10 J auditors request for an in-house transfer with regards to fund eight nine five zero dash zero
zero zero zero America Rescue Plan Act or ARPA. Second. OK, we got a motion and a second. And I also
wanted to do a quick
change of tonight's agenda. I know Mayor Morgan and team from heading home are here and a few of those
folks will not be able to stay for a lot of our meetings. So I would like to add and their item is 11A.
So I would like to bump that up after consent agenda items. So are there any other amendments to tonight's agenda?
All right so um all those that are well nope because we got council members present virtually so everything
tonight will be a roll call vote so may we please have a roll call vote on tonight's amended agenda.
Councilor Feidl? Yes. Councilor Wilts? Yes. Councilor Hawk is still not present is that correct?
I don't believe she's attending she just sorry to interrupt but she sent an email to me just a little
bit ago saying that she wasn't feeling well okay okay well we hope counselor hulk is feeling better
okay thank you counselor iverson yes counselor dekert yes counselor crossley yes and counselor henry
yes passes unanimous six zero okay thank you very much and next up
public comment. So if there is anybody that is here present in the NET Youth Hill Room or virtually,
you can make public comment on things that are not on tonight's agenda. You can do so via Teams by raising
your hand, or you can come into the NET Youth Hill Room to the lectern here. So do we have anybody here
present in the NET Youth Hill Room? I already saw a hand just pop up. So just checking here in person. Nope.
okay um and so i will go to teams so i think it was mr mg so mr mg you should be able to unmute yourself
state your name for the record and you'll have up to three minutes good evening uh president crossley
members of the county council sorry i'm not there do you uh be in person at the historic nath hill u room but
I did want to check in online. I want to take a moment to thank this body for the care and diligence
you bring into your work on behalf of the residents of Monroe County. I might have been critical in
the past a couple times where I don't think that was the case, but this is the case now. The time you
spend asking some good, thoughtful questions recently weighing some very difficult decisions and holding
yourselves accountable and government accountable affects a real commitment to good government.
Even when issues are complex and viewpoints differ, I think there's been a focus on transparency and
responsible stewardship that helps build the necessary trust that we have to have a local government
that ensures these decisions are made in our best interests or the community's best interest in mind.
Thank you for your service, continued dedication, serving Monroe County residents. I'll look forward
to the rest of the meeting. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. All right.
Last call for anybody that would like to make public comment on items on tonight's agenda. Again, raise
your hand via Teams, or you can come forward to the lectern here in the NatU Hill Room. And seeing none.
We will move on. Thank you for public comment. All right, next up is department updates. And so usually
department updates are for items that are not on the agenda. So those departments will have up to 10
minutes to make your update. Again, if you are present here and then at AU Hill Room, you can come to
the lectern here, or you can have a seat at the table. Or if you are virtually, you can raise your hand
via Teams.
Yes, Michelle. I just wanted to bring to your attention from the meeting from December the 9th, there
was a Scribner's error with regards to the probation's care grant. They used the wrong location number.
So the auditor went ahead and corrected it to the correct number for that grant year. So we just wanted
to bring that to your attention. Is that OK? Thank you very much for that update.
there any other department updates okay seeing none we will move on all right so next up is item six
for boards and commissions and we saw it in the news but we now have official got
a word of resignation for Mr. Jeff McKim as the council's appointment to the CIB. Are there any comments
from council regarding this resignation? Yes, Councilor Iverson. I just wanted to take a brief second
and thank Mr. McKim for his dedication to the CIB. We can see the fruits of his labors in the steel
structure that is now where the expanded convention center is going to be. So I think it's just
a moment where we can take time to thank Mr. McKim for all of his dedicated service. I also want to
thank him for his service to the county one additional year beyond his previous work but I also want
to congratulate the city that was a tremendous coup in bringing him to work for their organization and
if they do well we do well
and I think that it'll continue to benefit the community of no this is our second controller from the
county so somebody here is doing something right and let's just keep doing it and and hopefully we're
not sending the third anytime soon thank you anybody else have any questions or comments yes counselor
wilts uh just echoing my colleagues and congratulations all around and um
former counselor McKim will be missed on the CIB. What is the process then for replacing Mr. McKim?
and that gets into our next item. But for this particular one, anybody that is very much interested
in being a council appointment to the CIB, then you can go to our website and you can apply at the boards
and commissions page and submit an application. And we will review those and we will pick the best person to suit.
to fill some big shoes. Do we have a timeline or at least a goal? I don't think that we have a timeline.
However, I think given the nature of the position, I don't think we will have any problems
finding applicants. So again, maybe if all of us could just again pitch out to the community,
Um, for anybody that would like to apply to be the council appointment for the CIB again, um, contact
one of us come up after the meeting today. Um, and also just go to the county's website to apply via
the boards and commissions page. Okay. Councilor Henry, I want to make sure I didn't see your hand raised
and want to miss you for anything. I'll just say thanks, Jeff. There's no reason to.
keep that much praise. Jeff's a great guy. Thank you, Jeff. Yes. All right. And I would like to say
I get to see him in another capacity. So I'm kind of excited with that. So congratulations to the city
for getting one of the best people here in town. And I again look forward to seeing him around City
Hall next month. All right.
That being said, are there any objections to accepting Mr. McKim's resignation? All right. And seeing
none, his resignation is accepted.
All right. Next up, as Councilor Wilts was alluding to, we have not one, but two citizen vacancies.
And so, kind of also reminds me of my day job. So as we pitch for boards and commissions, anybody that
would like to, anybody that is on teams or anybody present here in the Nattie Hill Room that knows anybody
that would be a great fit for one of two of our vacancies, we have a vacancy
for the Sophia Travis Grant Committee. That one would be a two-year term.
Do we change? Yes, OK. Do your term. And then we, again, as we mentioned, go into the Capital Improvement
Board, also known as the CIB, as it is very much in the news recently. So if you are interested in applying
slash Monroe. And again, you can scroll down to you see on the left-hand side the board's
commissions click that and you should be able to apply for either one of those and if you have any questions
related to applying for any of those positions you can always contact our county office at eight one
two three four nine seven three one two for like a PSA all right so next up as we move from six to seven
six seven all right um sorry you know
Gotta have some fun. All right These last few days definitely deserve it. All right. Next up is consent
agenda items Council I move to approve the following consent agenda item for december the 16th the recorder's
office request and fund 1189-0000
Recorders, records, perpetuation for category transfer $54,435 from the supplies category to the services
category. Second. All right, is there any questions or comments on tonight consent agenda items for council?
and looking via Teams land and looking here at the day, so I don't see any. So we'll take public comment.
If we have public comment on consent agenda item as presented, you can come forward to the election
here in the Nattie Hill room or you can raise your hand via Teams. And seeing none, maybe please have
a roll call vote. Councilor Feidl? Yes. Councilor Henry? Yes. Councilor Crosley? Yes. Councilor Iverson?
Yes. Councilor Decker?
Yes. Councilor Wilts. Yes. Motion passes unanimous six zero. All right. Thank you. And now we go to
the amended portion, which is bumping 11 a all the way up to next. So I believe we have folks here from
heading home. I see them. So make your way to the table here and we will get started with our discussion.
Good evening, counselors. Good evening. I was not sure if I was going to have a remote to advance our
slides. We do have a slide presentation for you tonight. You just say advance. I just say the next slide
and they'll take care of it for you. OK, fantastic. Well, then in that case, I'm going to open my laptop
so I'll know where the heck I am in terms of my slides.
All right. Well, good evening. I'm Mary Morgan. I'm executive director of Heading Home of South Central
Indiana. And we really appreciate the opportunity to be able to talk with you tonight about not only
Heading Home, but some of our system work as well. I am delighted that I have two team members here.
And I would like them just quickly introduce themselves. Hi. Good evening. Tatiana Wheeler. I work alongside
Mary Morgan and Mary Hamburg at Heading Home. I'm the associate director.
I'm the strategic partnerships director. All right. Advance, please. We can advance. There we go. So
we're going to talk a little bit about the housing crisis. We're going to talk about the regional homeless
response system, our own origin story, and some of our initiatives and some communications and next
steps. Advance.
You are aware that housing is key. Homelessness is a housing problem. And just wanted to remind folks
of some of the challenges that we face, not only in our region, but also as a nation. There is a serious
lack of affordable housing, especially for low-income and extremely low-income individuals. There are
an insufficient number of landlords that accept vouchers, which is a subsidy that many people use so
that they can afford the high rents.
There is also a serious stigma, which is becoming more and more of a concern to me in our community,
especially against people who are unhoused. I think you've all heard about it, and we as a community
have a lot of work to do there. And then just insufficient supportive services for those people who
need them, including mental health services to keep people stably housed, advanced.
So how are we responding to the housing crisis? We are part of a six county region. This is a map of
the different counties that are part of this region. It's a state.
designation, and Heading Home's work mirrors the state region, which is region 10. Primarily at this
point, because we are still a young organization, our work focuses on Monroe, Morgan, and Lawrence County,
but we are also interested in working in some of these other counties, which have very, very few resources,
and so their lack of resources puts more of a burden on Monroe County in particular, so we need to address that.
These are some of the key partners in general in moving people from homelessness to housing. We rely
on emergency shelters and the staff there, as well as our street outreach staff in different organizations,
and then, of course, housing providers, including landlords. And this is just a quick overview of how
we connect with people who are unhoused. You can advance. Oh, sorry. Advance. And one more.
Thank you. There are access points which people enter the homeless response system that can be shelters,
can be a phone call to an agency or an individual, or that can be connected with street outreach staff
that encounter folks in encampments and on the street. Case managers and others do assessments to just
get a general idea of what the situation is and how to address someone's needs.
And then those assessments are turned into a scoring mechanism and that enables us to more equitably
understand what priorities people should have in terms of their access to housing because we do have
limited resources. Those scores will then cause referrals to happen in a coordinated entry system and
be connected to the appropriate housing. Next, please.
A little bit of background about Heading Home. Many of you know this because you were involved in our
origin story. Next, please. We began in 2020 and 21, and many of you were involved in the group that
put together the Heading Home plan, which is our North Star and guides a lot of our work. You'll see
some familiar faces. This was a collaboration of the city, the county,
United Way, the Community Foundation, and other stakeholders, including the South Central Housing Network.
Next, please. We just included a link to our Heading Home plan, which is on our website, and honestly,
I feel like it needs to be updated, so we're gonna be working on that in the future. Just FYI. Next, please.
We have been transitioning in this past year, and one of the things that was a transition for us was
to expand our board of directors. We now have, I think, a very formidable group, including Councilmember
Wilts, and these are the folks that helped direct our mission. Next, please. Just a quick overview of
our status from very germ of an idea in 21.
The fact that we were originally housed with the United Way We in 2022 and 23 as we expanded program
and our role in the community we moved to the mill on a co-working space in the trades district and
This year where we're thrilled to receive our 501 c3 status We are continue expanding our board and
programs we have
affiliated with the community foundation now they provide a lot of our back office support and added
a significant number of staff as you'll see next please our leadership team some of whom you see here
and then we are also onboarding and have onboarded a significant number of staff to bring our total
to 12 right now and soon to be 13 staff members
up from two really for the past four years until this fall. Next, please. So Heading Home was set up
to be a backbone organization to support the work of all of our partners and to really look at system
level changes in the region. There are some examples on this slide that we've been working on over the
past four years. And they are really efforts to bring
together community partners to tackle big system problems that one individual partner agency wouldn't
be able to do on their own. Some of those that we've worked on, including cross agency trainings where
we bring together different case managers from our various agencies and
provide training on issues that affect everyone, collaborating regionally, doing several system-level
changes that we will be talking about in a minute. Next, please. And again. So these are some examples
of the system changes that we've worked on. We created the Heading Home Guide, which is a website that
provides a range of information on a lot of different topics.
We wanted to put it all in one place so that not only our agency partners would have access to this
up to date information, but also people from the general public. Heading home had a commitment to build
the website, but also maintain it on a regular basis, which is not an insignificant amount of work.
Next, please.
We've also done a lot of work on landlord engagement. And we have now that we have a full time staff
person to do this work. We are really excited. We can really make some significant changes in this area.
I was going to brag on Mary for a minute. Within the first two weeks of her being in this position,
she uncovered one hundred and fifty different vacant units in among our landlord partners. Now, that
is amazing.
The next challenge is to work on the barriers that some of those complexes have that prevent people
from accessing those units, credit checks, felony checks, criminal background checks, the fact that
you might need three times your deposit or three times the income level of your deposit. Is that right?
Yeah, three times the rent in income each month.
challenging to say the least. So these are some of the things that we've done over the past four years
with landlords, but we are really looking forward to this next era where we're gonna make some huge
changes. Next, please.
Cross-agency training that I mentioned earlier, this is just some examples of the topics that we've
done in the past. We're also working with the National Alliance to End Homelessness and are bringing
in trainers for a two-day session open to all of our agency partners on housing problem solving. The
NAEH is a really terrific organization to work with and we're happy to be able to host this training.
session. Next, please. We also do a fair amount of community convenings, whether that's with the business
group, candidate learning sessions and forums, working with our faith partners. There are a lot of sessions
that we've had with student organizations in the past.
And it's just a role that we have to try to provide some education and information and problem solving
with other members outside of the homeless response system. And then one of our big partnerships is
with the national organization called Built for Zero. This is an entity that works with over 100 communities
nationwide and internationally.
to really tackle some of these seemingly intractable problems and really make a dent in our nation's
system to address homelessness. We are the first and only community so far in Indiana to be a part of
this network, and we are really grateful for the coaching that they provide and the resources that they provide.
They've guided us in a lot of work, which I'll talk about in a minute.
We just had a meeting earlier today with our coaches, and we're really excited that they are focusing
on our community to try to help us address some of the issues related to unsheltered homelessness. So
we haven't figured out what exactly that will look like. You might have heard of an entity called Clutch
Consulting that has done some encampment work, moving folks from encampments into housing and other
communities.
They are now contracted with Built for Zero to work with partner communities and they have also trained
Built for Zero staff who will be working with us. We met with one of those folks earlier today. So we
don't know exactly what that's going to look like. It might be they would come here for a community
convening, stakeholder partnerships, if we can get the county and the city together to address specifically
encampments or other issues that are barriers to housing.
We would love to be a part of that, and we would love to invite you all to be a part of that as well.
Next, please. Build for Zero was instrumental in helping us put together a data dashboard. Tatiana has
taken the lead on that. It is updated every month with information from the Collaborative Homeless Management
Information System, which is a database that are used by partners in this region.
It's very helpful in having a better sense of what is happening in our community, and so we're not going
in it blind. We've been working a lot on just ensuring quality data. We achieved that through Built
for Zero. Was that 2024? 2024? And have been working with our data coaches to make sure that we have
as accurate as possible information about what's happening in our homeless system. And again,
I think I said this last week that the data is important. Each of those data points represents an individual.
Each individual is unique. So while data gives us a great kind of aggregate view, when we're talking
about people who are struggling in this way, each story is different. And it's important to keep that
in mind. Next, please. And again.
So I just wanted to highlight a couple of things that are focused primarily on Monroe County.
As I've said, what I've talked about so far is regional, although much of the work is in Monroe, but
we have two specific projects that are focused on Monroe. One is a housing action plan.
We convened a group of service providers in 2024 to develop really a very targeted list of recommendations
for what needs to happen in our community to address unsheltered homelessness and what it will cost
to get there. Some of the things on the slide are part of the recommendations and I encourage you to
look at that plan. We can send you a link.
for a more granular level of detail and we do get quite granular. But this is one of the things that
helps guide us and as we're seeking funding opportunities we look for ways to address the need for case
managers, the need for diversion funds, the need for medical respite and other issues. Next, please.
And then some really exciting news. Earlier this year, actually in late 2024, the Community Foundation
of Bloomington and Monroe County received a significant grant from the Lilly Endowment. And we are one
of the main partners that is implementing that grant. That has allowed us to hire Mary Hamrick,
for example. We've also made a hire of Erin Reynolds Nyland, who was here at our last meeting and who,
oversees the significant number of case managers that we're introducing to this community. In total,
we'll have six street outreach case managers, hopefully by the end of the year or by early 2026. Three
diversion and prevention case managers who are already in place at our partner agencies.
and our strategic partnerships director, as I mentioned. This grant also includes basically a guaranteed
basic income pilot project that is administered by SCAP and that if we can show proof of concept, we
would hope to carry on after this grant expires in five years. Next, please.
And this just gives you a little bit of a chart to show the community foundation has funded Heading
Home. And then we're working with these various partners in street outreach. We have case managers embedded
at Centerstone Beacon and Health Net's Homeless Initiative Program. And our diversion and prevention
case managers are embedded at New Hope for Families, the library, the downtown branch, and Bloomington
and Perry Township trustee offices.
And quickly I just want to mention a little bit more of the targeted strategic work. We've been working
in Lawrence County. We set up a housing task force as a recommendation that came out of a housing study
that we commissioned a few years ago.
And we are doing something similar in Morgan County. Currently, Laura Little-Page, she's a professor
at IU you might know of. She and her graduate students are doing a housing study in Morgan County to
give us a better understanding of homelessness there. And Tatiana is board chair for Wellspring, which
is the only shelter in Morgan County. Next, please.
And just a reminder, you all should be on our email list. Hopefully doesn't go to spam for the newsletters
that we send out every month. We have information on our website. Obviously, we do have social media,
which we are going to be ramping up a little bit more in 2026. And we are always happy to come and address
any kind of gathering, large or small. I don't think we've ever turned anybody down who's asked us to
come and speak at their
organization.
One other thing as part of our outreach and communications, we did a series, and that is ongoing, called
People of Housing Security because we felt like it was important to put a face to the folks who are
doing frontline work in whatever way they may be. So that may be somebody at the Township Trustee's
office. It may be somebody who is working for the city as a downtown ambassador. Of course, it's case
managers and others who are
working in our partner agencies. But this is just a way to kind of humanize some of the folks who are
doing this really challenging work. And finally, I just would like to leave you with a thought. This
is one of my favorite quotes, choosing to have joy is not naively thinking everything will be easy.
It is courageously believing that there is still hope even when things get hard.
Thank you. And I'm happy to take any questions. All right. Thank you very much to you and your team.
Looks like we have somebody joining online from your team as well. So we appreciate that. I'm sure our
council members here have a question. I'll kick it off with a question. You have mentioned earlier that
you're working on training, and you're working with the National Alliance on Homelessness Training.
And that's upcoming, who exactly like would be able to attend, would we as elected to be able to do
that, or just wanted to ask, would you want to do that. I mean, I think we should. Yeah.
It was originally, we can certainly talk about that, it was originally intended for frontline workers
who will be working directly with people who are in-house to really give them a framework to, especially
in initial conversations, to be very housing-focused. So it is intended for all of the agencies that
are working
New Hope for Families, Wheeler Mission, Beacon, Centerstone, Health Net, et cetera, et cetera. So I
think we do have a cap on, and correct me if I'm wrong, Todd, do we have a cap on the number of people
that we can give the training to? For my recollection, I think we have a pretty decently large cap.
So that's a possibility then. We'll explore it. OK. I was just interested, because I know sometimes
we as electeds have lots of opinions on things. And so since we have opinions on those things, we might
not be experts. And you all are. And so sometimes it's easy for us to just kind of take a chill pill
and be quiet and maybe attend something like this. So if that's something that's definitely available,
I think I would really think
I'm speaking for myself here. I think I have council members that would probably take you up on that
offer and hopefully some other electeds would take you up on that offer. I appreciate that.
Thank you. And I should also add, I meant to add this at the very beginning of my presentation, you
all received a letter from our board of directors. So we are really eager, interested, happy to facilitate
any kind of discussion or give you any kind of support at the policy level or convening or really anything
that you think in this space you could use some help with. We're happy to do that.
Appreciate that. Thank you. Um, I'm gonna go to Councilmember Henry since I saw his hand raise and then
I'll kick it back to the room here. Thank you. And thank you, Mary Morgan and team for giving us presentation
today I guess I do want to say thank you for your work I know it's really hard work.
Yeah, and we're dealing with a, you know, another one of those wicked problems which seems to be a phrase
we've used this year and a lot of the stuff we're facing in the community. I guess my question, and
maybe something that triggered here in your presentation for me is that, you know, the normal, the day
to day work of.
housing in our community and the challenge for those that are unhoused in the community, your normal
everyday work and the work that our service providers do as a matter of routine is that outreach and
that scoring and that work to really help get people on a pathway into housing attainment, which I know
is not easy. And it doesn't happen overnight, but it strikes me that
what creates emergencies for our nonprofit community, your organization, other organizations you mentioned,
what creates an emergency or urgent situation is when external stakeholders or even key stakeholders
kind of disrupt your work through something like
trying to clear an encampment in a certain time period, like on a timeline that kind of disrupts the
flow or the normal of your work. And that sort of expedites your outreach and puts people into a scramble
to try to, I guess,
get people placed before the urgency comes from the choice we're making to work on the encampments.
I guess to the extent you're comfortable, I'm kind of curious how we might all get on the same page
with a shared objective because it seems like the objectives are slightly disaligned or misaligned between
some folks deciding on the urgency to clear things versus working with our partners that all the best
practices you're trying to put in. I mean, how might we
close the gap and get a shared objective here so that we don't blow up the normal work of the organizations
that are trying so hard with kind of self-induced emergencies through bureaucracy. Do you have any thoughts
on that tonight? I'm really glad you asked a simple question. Of course. It's exam season. That's what
it's exam season. That's how it goes. Go ahead.
I will say that it's been a rough couple of weeks. We really do not thrive in chaos, and I think that
there's been a fair amount of chaos. What I would say is I do think that it would help the whole system
if we could get the key players in a room and talk about those shared values, have better communication,
and really a clear plan for when there is a crisis or when there is something that comes up, we know
exactly who's involved in the decision making tree and how we can come together to basically make it
a situation that is in the best interest for not just people who are unhoused or in crisis, but also
for our entire community, right?
should have a stake in this. We should have a stake in making a community where people are, they have
stable housing, and if they don't, they can get it quickly. So I feel like this is a very politically
correct response to your question, but I do think that we have a lot of room to grow in terms of communication.
and planning and I would like to see that happen and be put in place at a time when we're not in the
middle of a crisis and when tempers are not heated. It's really been challenging right now and I know
that some of our service provider partners are feeling that pain and really what they want to do that
their mission is is to
meet people where they are, and ideally, make sure that they are in a place that's stable and secure.
OK. I'm going to kick it here. And I saw Councilor Decker's hand raised. I've got several. And as I
always say to a lot of folks, particularly on things that are hard, if you all need to get back with
me later, that's fine, too. And I also understand that you're managing a lot. And I kind of want to
start there.
You have a large selection of folks that you're dealing with just across the board that are doing portions
of housing and housing solutions in a variety of different ways. And I'm sure having been on the United
Way staff at one time, there's a variety of strong opinions about how that should be and who should
get what and when. You see, though, and help me if this is the case,
The whole purpose of what you all are doing in that plan was to try to get people around some common
understandings and not the service provider alphabet soup, which is a beautiful thing. It's a bunch
of people chasing after it. But to get us around a plan and get government officials around a plan and
try to get us all from stopping to do what we do on every issue and that start inventing solutions from
the opinion side of things. Ultimately, that was kind of the deal, right? Yes. Do you want me to elaborate?
Well, if you want to. I think one of the reasons why
Well, first of all, I think there are a lot of things in the plan that nobody would disagree with until
you start trying to implement them. And then people will have different opinions about how things should
be implemented. So that's just part of the process. But I also think that the plan is perhaps overly
broad. We have a lot in there. And you can really find almost any kind of housing solution
in that plan. So I think that it would help us to be a little more focused, perhaps, in the next go-around.
One of the things we did with the Monroe County Housing Action Plan was try to be extremely focused
in our recommendations, which is very different from the Heading Home Plan, which is quite broad. But
I think that it's always the devil in the details, right? So we work through it.
Well, I appreciate that. And I think one of the things I remember when we were in candidate forums,
and people would say, what are your thoughts on housing? And of course, we could be talking about multiple
levels of housing. One of the things I always try to focus on was that, well, we have a plan. And yeah,
things can change in that plan, but that's better than what we used to have, which was, again, all of
us kind of, let me throw the football that way. I think this is something I heard in an article.
One thing is I'm looking at your dashboard and I love the dashboard because numbers are numbers. And
I know that it's hard to get these numbers, but when I look at the dashboard, particularly when I filed
it down to single adults and the actively homeless in the community, I see a pattern. I even took it
down to this year, but I see a pattern from when you started this that numbers are going down. And so
the first part of my question would be,
Why do you think those numbers were heading down? What do you think was going on that may have helped
with that? Would you feel comfortable answering that? Sure. Thanks for the question. This is something
that I've been investigating personally. And I think it contributes to a couple of different things.
I think any data needs other data to build around those narratives. And I think it's really important
when looking
the active number of people experiencing homelessness on the dashboard to also look at the percentage
of people being housed month to month.
And we recently noticed that dip in our data. And I think it can be articulated that we also saw across
our system that there are a lot of people who had outdated assessments. Generally, it's best practice
to update assessments with clients every 90 days. Generally, across our region, our service providers
are really generous because they want to make sure they're doing their due diligence.
to keep that information updated. Though there are times that people disappear from the community, or
they self-resolve, or they return to other support systems in other communities. And so that's a reason
why we saw numbers decreasing as well, is because people were being moved to an active. And that's one
of the outflow categories, as well as housing. And so while we want to say, oh, there's less people
experiencing homelessness, there's a deeper story to tell there, is that, well, did we just lose touch
with them?
Did they self resolve, are they stably house now and so that's some of my priority work looking into
the deeper narratives within our dashboard coming in 2026. And I will add that the infusion of case
managers that are doing street outreach now will have more.
as an agency, more street outreach workers than any other agency in our county with the six street outreach
folks that are embedded in our partner agencies, that will help us tremendously in not losing touch
with people that are unsheltered. And then I guess the last thing is I was really intrigued by the notion
of connecting
people to, we've got a landlord, we've got a vacancy here, connecting someone in there, and obviously
the attention right now is on encampments, right? Because that's how this system seems to work where
we, you know, what is the visibility, what are everybody talking about, what's everybody fired up on?
And conceivably, those kinds of matchups with, there's no monolithic answer, but those kind of matchups may offer
solutions for some individuals that could go from here to here or have the option to go from here to
here and make a decision on that. I mean, am I overthinking that or under thinking it? Do you want to
take a stab at that? Yeah, sure. I think
Yes and no. I think on paper it seems very, very simple. If we have 150 open units and we have a similar
amount of people that are unsheltered in our community, why does homelessness exist? And I think one
of the key things that we're starting to realize, both just having done the work a long time, I previously
was at New Hope for Family, so I've been in the work a while, but just as a community what we're realizing is that
The barrier to having open units and vacancy is not necessarily the barrier to having people be housed.
As Mary talked about earlier, the barrier is getting into housing. It's not being able to continue to
pay your rent or to be able to not get into fights with your neighbor and get evicted or whatever.
stipulations in the criteria for residents or future tenants to be able to be accepted into an apartment
complex or a private landlord's house is too constringent for people. You have to make three times the
rent. You have to have a certain credit score. You have to have 650 or 700 credit score to rent a place,
not to buy, not to lease, not to have a mortgage, right? Just to have a 12-month lease. You have to
have no evictions, no criminal history. You have to be a perfect
upstanding person just to have a roof over your head. And that's the big barrier that we have is not,
you know, pouring money into into helping pay people's rents and deposits is helping and is doing a
large amount of preventing homelessness. But a huge bigger issue is the accessibility to stable housing.
Thank you very much. The last thing I'll just say is I appreciate just clarity around complexity, because again,
If you go on social media, you listen even to us. Sometimes we think that we understand every bit of
this. But literally in the last five years, I've heard very passionate, very what sounds like credible
articulations around who could be outside and how long they could be outside and what is reasonable
and what is not. I've heard people argue every side of that and multiple sides beyond that with such
seriousness and
that you would look at it and go, oh my heavens. And I think that the complexity of this is just, it's
beyond our minds. So thank you for letting me ask you a couple of questions. Thank you. Councilor Iverson.
Thank you all three for taking time out of your evening and joining us. As I've said before, the work
you do is so important to this community. And I'll echo what Council Member Crossley said, is that learning
for us is paramount. We get stuff thrown at us all the time, and your website, your newsletter is really
important. I pay attention to it, and I try to digest as much as I can. Obviously, as Council Member
Decker just stated, we're not perfect, but we're constantly learning. And so I appreciate that. Particularly,
I heard tonight two interesting
interesting tidbits, rent sometimes is three times income. I haven't heard that number before. That's
a really interesting number and I believe it. So actually, that's a stipulation for getting into housing
is that your income must be equal to three times the rent. Yeah. So not that rent is that people are
being asked to pay more than what they actually make. But still, that's a shocking
number or that there's this organization called Clutch Consulting, which is coming in and talking about
their specialty is encampments. I think that's all really interesting things to learn about. And I think
the previous conversation that, Mary, you just had with Council Member Deckard about housing and the
availability of housing leads me to my question I have for you tonight is we're all reading the news,
we're all listening to the news, and the availability of federal funding seems dire.
What are you hearing? I'm losing sleep over this. What should we know? I wish I could give you a clear
answer on that. I think that part of the anxiety that we all feel is because we don't have a clear level
from the federal government. And although the really I don't even know how to describe it. The federal
government is trying to pivot very quickly from a
philosophy of funding that has been in place for decades to a different philosophy, and it has just
sown chaos, uncertainty, fear, and will, if implemented, I believe, lead to an increase in
unhoused people. I just don't see how it, if we don't have those housing supports that we rely on, I
don't know any other way that could unfold. So the federal government now, because of a lawsuit, has
paused its decision, and HUD is not really giving any indication on what's going to happen next. So
the challenge is that some
of the funding cycles are coming up starting in January. I think that locally from the permanent supportive
housing side and you're on Beacon's board I believe so you've heard this directly from them. Their grant
cycle is a bit later in the year. I think September. Centerstone I think they said it was closer to
the summer.
time frame for some of their complexes. So, you know, people are waiting and seeing and trying to advocate
as much as possible with elected officials. So if you have any sway at the federal level, I would
I would encourage you to deploy it, because right now we're at a real turning point, I think. And if
this is a philosophical change that has to be made, then at the very least we need a longer lead time
to make accommodations for these changes. And the current proposal, or the proposal that was pulled,
was not allowing for that.
My heart goes out to folks who are living in encampments in this weather and the threat of evictions.
But the main reason why I personally want to take you up on your offer to facilitate a conversation
is for this reason. The future, I love your quote, it's important to be hopeful, but the future seems
like we really need to start talking. Definitely. Thank you. All right. I thought I saw some hands here.
So Councilor Vidal.
Yes, I'm interested in the income requirement for the rent. So I wondered how we might, as a county
or a community, compare to other communities who have situations like or not like this. And do you know
any data on that? Do we compare? Do landlords elsewhere have that same requirement, or is it just kind
of just here, or where is that all at? So that's a good question.
And I think many landlords have two, two and a half or three times the rent that you must make. I will
note that multiple studies year after year show that Monroe County, across the state, Monroe County
is the most unaffordable and hardest to obtain housing in the entire state. The only county that sometimes
beats us out is Tippecanoe County, which is where Purdue is, West Lafayette, and usually in third place is
Muncie, and I'm blanking on the county for Muncie, but where Ball State is. Thank you. Yeah. So these
big schools.
these counties where big schools are, are what are really increasing the unobtainability and unaffordability
of housing. And so I do know a lot of other properties are doing two times the rent and things like
that as well. But the reason that we're having that trouble is because HUD sets what's a fair market
rent or FMRs. And HUD, just in a conversation with a landlord I had a week or two ago, they said that
HUD set their FMRs
in a unit. It's actually the retreat at Switchyard, which is a brand new property here in town. And
HUD told her that the median salary in Bloomington is $52,000 a year. And so therefore, they set their
FMRs as such, which I think is surprising that that is the median salary. Because I think that if you've
lived here long enough, you know that that's not true. But because students are here and people affiliated
with the university are here,
which is a wonderful thing, and the university provides so much to our economy, but because those people
are kind of driving up that median salary, it then is impacting housing. And so then people who live
here and are townies and are from here, but aren't affiliated with the university and don't have that
kind of income, then are forced to come up to that standard as well. Thank you. Wow, okay.
Anybody else have any other final questions or comments from the heading for that? Yes, Councilor Wilts.
Thank you for coming. I appreciate it personally and on behalf of county government. Regarding your
letter and your presence here.
It went to not just county council, it went to the commissioners as well, I believe. That's right. Have
you heard back from anyone in county government, I know it just, it just went out this afternoon and
I actually
I've been sitting here. So not that I'm expecting that you have, but I also know that you've offered
to meet or present to the commissioners. Have you heard back from anybody in county government yet?
I haven't heard back from any of the commissioners yet, but nor have I reached out specifically directly
to them yet. I have talked with
I exchanged emails with Angie Purdy and I told her to expect the letter and I sent her the encampment
guidance from the South Central Housing Network and offered to meet with them, give a presentation to
the commissioners if they wanted to do that. So I will be following up more directly. Great. Yeah. Well,
I'm hopeful that we can work together to make things a little bit better, at least
from the county government perspective on how we do this. So appreciate it. Great, thank you. All right,
well, I definitely appreciate you all taking the opportunity, given the circumstances over the past
several weeks, to come in and educate us on things that you all do. And as it's been mentioned, I look
forward to continuing conversations, but not just conversations, but really having those
after having the conversations really kind of put an action to it. So I appreciate all the work that
you're doing and I definitely know on a level and former life I used to work in property management
for 10 years. So the fact that you have to the deposits were always things where it killed like the
application process for people because
Depending on your credit score, as you had mentioned before, if you had a decent credit score, you might
not have needed a huge deposit. But if you didn't, if you had bankruptcies, evictions, all of those
different things, then you had to have double or triple the amount. And usually, that was something
where people just gave up and just
went away from that. So but it all comes back to what we do here in Monroe County. So and Monroe County
government has a lot of work to do. We talk a lot and so now we need to start getting some work done.
So appreciate you taking the time to plant that seed to us and we hope folks across the hall here will
take you up on your offer and you get to present to them again. All right. So thank you so much. We
appreciate it. Thank you council members. Appreciate it. Thank you.
All right, next back up, we got item eight, and it looks like we're going to the hire and freeze conversations.
Council, as a reminder, this item was tabled from the December 9th meeting. I move to open for discussion
and possible approval of the auditor's request to be exempt from the hiring freeze and to be allowed
to hire and fund 1000-0002 County General Auditor, the internal auditor position. Second. All right,
we got a motion and a second and we see the auditor here. Ms. Gregory, hello.
Good evening council so um this is coming back before you today and I'm hoping will be an easy and brief
conversation this is a position that was part of the exempt list when this hiring freeze was implemented
unfortunately I was just unable to find a qualified candidate prior to my November 1 deadline so this
is just requesting your permission to continue what you've
kind of already improved initially. To proceed with finding a good candidate for this role, which is
it does take some time. This is a specialized position and it is very important for the county. This
is an added layer of control and
you know this person conducts like you know obviously internal audits for the county but assists with
the budgets it consists with assists with audits with report compilation and all kinds of other things
that assist the county to ensure you're on the right path so i'm happy to answer any questions or specifics
but i do want to note that we do have the support of fsg financial solutions group who the county contracts
with for financial guidance and they think this
position is very important as well. I forwarded that email to you. Okay, thank you very much.
Thank you. And look in the council to see if anybody has any questions. So, Councilor Henry's hand raised
first, so you go first sir. Yeah, thank you Madam President and thank you Auditor for
the explanation there. I'm supportive of getting this position filled. And it seems to me over the past
few weeks, it's all the more important to have the internal auditor role filled when we look at like,
for example, the way the commissioners attempted to use the cumulative capital fund during the encampment
discussion last week, or the work your office is doing to help the Board of Health sort through its
Well, I guess it's like nearly a million in grants that are kind of messy in that office over the past
year. The internal controls are important. So yeah, it's it's sort of a core function here. So we understand
what our bottom line is. So the only thing I'll say maybe is another comment too, is that I think as
we look at all of the
the variations on the freeze or the exemptions on the freeze that we really do need to work with department
heads to start thinking through. If we're hoping for attrition over the next calendar year to reduce
the budget in positions, we need to work with department heads on what that means rather than just kind
of hoping that positions go away through attrition. I know that's been raised a few times here, but
it kind of feels like
reaching under the hood of the car and just yanking out pieces indiscriminately rather than trying to
figure out over the next calendar year how we might be able to work with department heads on the savings
we're gonna need and subsequent fiscal years to help in our workforce here to keep everybody employed.
So I'm supportive of this one and I hope the others are as well, thanks. Thank you. All right, looking
here at the dais to see if anybody has any questions or comments.
Yes, Councilor Woods. Since Councilor Henry brought up kind of the bigger picture, I wanted to chime
in and say that I agree that we need to be more strategic about how we're doing this and what we're
thinking. I know we've put a lot of thought into it. I'm not trying to say that we haven't, but this
is part of what I envisioned that our long-term financial committee would be
talking about and thinking about and I think it might be worth as we move to the new year, new committees,
new whatever, thinking about redefining or expanding the role that that committee has in looking at
literally what is it over the next three to five years that we're trying to get to in terms of budgeting and
put in our revenues. And I know that's not, I'm not saying that that committee has not worked on that.
It's just, we need a little bit more, I think. And I think this falls under that. Also, we have two
resolutions that we are operating under right now. The KSA and the hiring freeze. Do both of those expire
at the end of this month? Okay.
and we do not have anything on our agenda to really talk about those. Is that correct? Okay. I was looking
at the discussion. All right. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. Any other questions or comments from
council? I know staff, we've been trying to schedule for a while now. And with FSD, a long term finance
committee,
meeting so hopefully we can do that and get in contact it's not like staff isn't trying not saying that
that's not what you were saying but it's a little difficult to find people this time of year yes um
you know i think people get on autopilot after thanksgiving so um you know staff we're definitely trying
to think about that yes um and to both of the counselor's points we definitely need to hit 2026 um
you know, pretty hit the ground running with a lot of things that we have mentioned that we'd like to
do with this past budget season, what we have to implement going forward. So I appreciate that comment.
All right. So seeing no other questions or comments from council, we will move to public comment. If
you have public comment on this item, you can raise your hand via Teams or come forward to the lectern
here the night you help around. All right. And
Seeing none, may we please have a roll call vote? Councilor Wilts? Yes. Councilor Henry? Yes. Councilor
Crosley? Yes. Councilor Iverson? Yes. Councilor Decker? Yes. Councilor Feidl? Yes. Motion passes unanimous
six zero. Okay, next up is item B. Council, as a reminder, this item.
was tabled from the December 9th meeting, and I move to open for discussion and possible approval of
the Parks Department's request to be exempt from the hiring freeze and be allowed to hire and fund 1000-0803
County General Parks, 11 part-time positions, and three part-time Karst Athletic Complex supervisors
for the 2026 year. Second. Okay. We have Ms. Whitman here joining us again. Welcome. Hello. Well,
thank you. Do you want me to go over what
We talked about last week, which is absolutely fine. I think if you want to hit some highlights, because
we had a very robust conversation. I will hit the highlights. The Karst Athletic Complex supervisors
will probably work March through November. It's one person for 25 acres. They do everything from calling
the ambulance, making sure everyone's playing well together. They operate our adult soccer league.
And obviously they can't be everywhere, but we usually try to prioritize the fields that they should
concentrate on the park maintenance technicians. They do everything for us. They allow our full time
staff who are highly skilled as our mechanics, our plumbers, our electricians, snow plow drivers.
Heavy equipment operators do their things to keep the park safe. So if we don't have part-time staff,
those eight staff members have to backfill the lower skilled things, which means we will be closing
the splash pad. We will be closing the restrooms on and off depending on what's going on that week.
We're a 35-hour department with eight staff, which means we are never fully staffed all week. They're on FMLA.
They're maybe sick. They may have an injury. They're on benefit time. So now we could be down to six
people to run the entire park system. We will obviously prioritize the athletic complex and toilets.
And that's where we're at. We have, which means the greenways. We can't do what we're doing now. This
golf course, the dog park, a lot of things
are going to shrink and the park board will want a list of everything so they can know what's going
on and the park board has instructed me to make sure I put a one page notice up so the public knows
what's closing and why they're closing and we can't do anything about it because we're not magicians
here. We can't make things happen without people.
and we can't do any construction at the Monroe County Nature Preserve, which has funding for us to be
the general contractor to save the county $1 million. So that's where we're at. Is that fast enough?
Okay. Yes. Appreciate that. Thank you. Nice recap. All right. Any questions or comments from council?
Yes. Councilor Wilks. I wanted to
wanted to just draw your attention to the email that Michelle forwarded today. I know it was late in
the game, but kind of went over some information about these positions and why we're in sort of that
rehire situation and kind of give some background. So if you haven't, I'm happy to go into it, but it's policy.
Maybe you should. Maybe. OK, I feel like I'm giving testimony on hearsay or something. You got this.
So at the park board meeting, we talked with we talked amongst ourselves about the nature of the positions
and the fact that it is HR policy
to in the county to take seasonal positions and basically terminate the employees who are filling those
positions in the off season and then go through the process of rehiring. And since no one at the meeting
really knew why our county legal department conversed with our employee services department and kind
of summarized
the reasonings, which I know we have employee services here, and I do want to just say if I get it wrong,
we might need some help. But the reasoning rests on a lot of things that can happen, I guess, in the
off season that we wouldn't necessarily know about and be able to account for if we kept people hired
but weren't interacting with them, like something that might show up on a background check, for instance.
So this enables us to check in, I guess, in that way on employees before they are re-installed in the
position. That's the one major one that I remember. There's also that kind of a tracking
So if somebody just doesn't come back, that would be harder to know that. And so this allows our employee
services folks to really better track who in the payroll list is actually being paid, being and working
and that kind of thing. Did I get that right? Do you need to add? I'm trying really hard here, sorry.
I think there were three things and I named two poorly. On the fly, you did good. Yeah. And so I think
that Justin was trying to give you the highlights, but there, I mean, I could list probably 50 reasons
why keeping accurate records are really important for us. And so that's the gist of that is that we are
It was mentioned by a department earlier in these conversations like why don't we just make them inactive
and then make them reactive because we can't do that state board of accounts requires us to have a form.
for every change that we make in payroll because they audit all of the entries that we make in payroll.
So part of that process is filling out a termination form. So then we make them inactive and then to
make them reactive, they fill out a new hire form. And those are the forms that we have because those
are the forms that we already use for those same purposes. So that's kind of, and we have to report
the things for lots of reasons. We have to report our payroll
our employee data for a variety of reasons and some of that is for employees benefit. We do public student
loan forgiveness verification of employment. We do loan verification of employment. There's just a lot
of things that we do that are based on keeping accurate records and that's why it's really important
for us to be able to pinpoint. If somebody didn't work for six months, we need to know that information
and that's how we document it. Also really important if
a department didn't bring if we kept them active and department didn't bring them back then our roster
of people just keeps growing and growing and it leaves more room for error both on the department when
they're processing payroll they might try and pay somebody who um isn't working and then on our side
when we're processing payroll to make sure that those inactive those people who aren't working aren't
showing up that we could
It's an internal control. We just talked about the importance of that. So that's the gist of why we
do this process. Does that help? And probably, and I don't know without looking at the numbers, we probably
rehire 80% of the same people. And they come back year after year. And we have to do this every November
and rehire them and do all the stuff. I wonder.
About the expense of associated. Are there, I mean, I'm assuming there's a cost to these processes and
I, I'm not trying to, I am throwing a wrench. I understand. I will tell you the cost of an error is
more costly than having departments consistently do the same thing.
that is where we're coming from. If a department turns in payroll to pay somebody who shouldn't have
been paid, the cost of us trying to get that money back is going to cost
us, the legal department, it just involves more people. So us having policies that we apply consistently
to all departments, making sure they're doing all of the same things, that's easier for us because we
are expecting the same things consistently than having to be like, this department does it this way
and this department, when you have turnover and then things that institutional knowledge doesn't really
get translated. So consistency for us is the cost
effective nest. I just had an inquiry point but for E if I understand it right we're in this freeze
discussion in this first parts just rhetorical we're in the freeze discussion because of the state cuts
on the flip side you're essentially saying there's a million reasons why
this has to be done as a rehire process. But bottom line, state board of accounts requires form to release,
form to do, right? That is correct. I mean, the auditor's office can tell you that when we have an audit,
I mean, they're asking for a million types of forms for us to document why we did a certain thing. Well,
so just to kind of cut to the chase, I mean, in that case, ladies and gentlemen, and in the audience,
Farrow has spoken.
there's no other everything else here is just debating whether or not you want to well do you want to
take a bathroom break or anything else that the state might permit this is literally
a requirement from them. It's a CYA kind of thing, right? That's why we have forms and that's why we
go through those processes, because eventually the auditors office is going to ask me, do you have these
things that match this thing over here? And then I will have to produce that information. OK, I have
other comments, but I don't have to now. Well, and, you know,
I wrangle with all this and Kate raises an interesting point. I'd love to have a giant tally like you
would if you, you know, we're talking to an attorney on hours spent trying to comply with state law.
I'd love to have that because then we could send that again to Farrow and then we could get that taken
care of. And that takes time to calculate too. Exactly. And that's ours. And I mean, literally, if you
look at the last two meetings we had,
We rock that bell till the midnight hour and there was a time I'd be in downtown I might hear that bell
but not inside this building and that has changed and that's all because of all this one thing I just
want to say bottom line on this I think we're kind of going around in this circle about whether or not
to do it and somebody said something to me one time that really hit home for me both experientially and just
I'm not sure if you've ever been to a park in your life and Kelly it may been you when I was out visiting
parts. With the parts of the great equalizer in this community. Because if you think about it to go
in a state park you have to pay a fee right. To go to an amusement park you definitely have to pay a
fee a lot of our families particularly right now they'll never be able to get an amusement park. To
go join a sports
we generally have a large set of lands that have been established by our four county people who set
those aside. Our duty is to take care of them with a little bit elbow grease, maintenance, and good
wisdom from that table right there. So that in 20 years, the next ones at this table have guaranteed
that for future. And I just worry that sometimes we start needling into cuts
and then suddenly we're not gonna have some of this stuff that somebody tupped it out. The cool thing
about the Parks Department that I always like is you don't get those shelter houses for free. Now some
people try to squat, right, and do that. Not often. But not often. And they're reasonably priced, so
everyone has a chance. Yes. And so we've got access for folks, but we also, they're trying to make sure
some revenue comes in so that
There's things maintained, but the bottom line is it's just like Lisa Ridge and Rhodes. If you don't
maintain it, then it becomes a disaster.
And the other thing is, and I've seen this before, and Kelly could write a book on it. If you don't
update the parks per the clientele, and guess what? We have a lot of people that want to make sure it's
got the latest grades. We can't ever afford always the latest grades, but they want that. If you don't
do that, they'll say, well, it's not safe. You're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. What are
you doing with my tax dollars? So I always worry when things like this start to
get up on the chopping block because this is the only chance somebody may not make the south football
team for a variety of reasons but they can go to cars park as many times as they want as long as that
gates open on a normal hour and i i think that that's if nothing else from county government young people
that may be what they get flatwoods out there that is the last stop
for a good park. There's tons of snakes, which I don't appreciate, but that's my business. But that's
your last stop. And then, you know, I know that the new park is the one that is controversial, but Peter
and the East Side kids, they don't always get lots of anything. And if we don't do something now, that
won't be a karst in 20 to 30 or 40 or 50 years, or Kate, for that matter, on the East Side. So, I mean,
there's, look, there's things and there's things, but it's just,
I worry that we're trying to, again, squeeze Pharaoh's money here out of something that's not going
to come. Oh, and I bet you that quote came from Jeff McKim. On Pharaoh? No. The equalizer. That sounds
like him. You know, it probably was. He's a pretty smart guy. Sidney knew that. All right. Any other
questions or comments or any group names to give today?
Nope. All right. Seeing none. Public comment time. If you have public comment on this particular item,
excuse me, you can come forward to the lectern here in the Net-E-Hill room or you can raise your hand
via Teams. And seeing none, may we please have a roll call vote? Councilor Henry? Yes. Councilor Crossley?
Yes. Councilor Iverson? Yes. Councilor Deckard? Yeah.
Councilor Feidl? Yes. Councilor Wilts? Yes. Motion passes unanimous six zero. Thank you and I forgot
this is Andy French. Thank you. Our park superintendent who works very hard. Appreciate it. And you
all may not know that we get called out the same time as the highway garage for snow plowing and we
take care of the jail and the youth services and all the things. And we may have to close the parks
in order to continue, you know, this is what we do.
And people don't appreciate because they don't know they're out there doing that at one in the morning,
too. Oh, you appreciate it. Thank you. Have a good night. All right. All right. Next up is item C, the
highway department.
Council, I move to open for discussion. Impossible approval. The highway department's request to be
exempt from the hiring freeze and be allowed to hire. In Fund 1197-0000, stormwater management, the
stormwater equipment operator position, and or a stormwater slash highway position vacancy that results
from a possible internal department hire for the 2026 year. Second. All right. And joining us tonight
in person is Ms. Lisa Ridge. Welcome.
Good evening. I was thinking I was a tabled item after those two tabled items and I was like oh you
don't need to hear this again but no it's first. So this position became vacant on 11-21-2025. The employee
seeked employment at a different location. This is not paid out of the county general fund. It's out
of the stormwater fund so it doesn't affect anything in the county general.
The reason why we need to keep moving forward and fill these positions. One of the current equipment
operators that we have on staff is out on FMLA, possibly leaving for a 90 day leave at the first of
the year. Another employee in Stormwater is gonna take the six week family leave in March.
The position is also used for snow removal. We use the whole stormwater crew. They're assigned a route.
So without those, the persons, the employees in those positions, those routes are not covered. It takes
other employees more time to get the roads cleared because there's not anybody in that position to take
that route. So we have to find different ways to cover those areas when we don't have that position filled.
It's already a small crew, so replacing the position is in the best interest of the department and the
public. With the award of the CCMG that was announced on December 1st, this crew does consistent work
for getting those roads prepped by ditching. They have a gradle. We use that crew to prep all these
roads before we pave. So we do utilize them. So that's kind of the reasons why we would like to fill
this position.
I anticipate that this is an equipment operator position. We are a collective bargaining unit, so we
are required to post that position if it's approved to be filled in-house for seven days. I anticipate
that there will be employees in-house to apply for that that are current truck drivers in the highway
out of the MVH fund. And we do a skills and test.
ability test for running equipment. I would foresee somebody moving up into that position, leaving open
an NVH position. So I don't know if it's approved. Do I have to come back and start this cycle again
when two weeks ago you approved me to fill the highway positions that I have filled? We have our last
employee starting tomorrow, but this
could start that cycle again. It's my understanding we might have a mechanic that will be possibly leaving
in January. I'll be right back for that MVH position also. Again, none of these positions are in the
general fund, county general. It does not affect your deficit that you're trying to fix. It's just,
I see this cycle.
We've gone through it for years that with this hiring freeze, it's possible I'm going to keep coming
back. So. Okay, if you have any questions. Thank you for that. And given the circumstances of early
snow season.
That's a very expensive week when I did payroll yesterday. I could only imagine. And we're not even
in winter yet. Well, yeah, winter officially starts Sunday. All right. That being said, do we have any
questions or comments for Ms. Ridge on this item?
So again, so your concern is because none of these positions are in the general fund because you'll
have some potential movement that will be happening because of people potentially that are already employed
filling those, which is a good thing, by the way. At least we're keeping people. This will kind of restart
the clock. So it almost sounds like from what I hear, maybe three, potentially.
So how I think this will play out is I believe that a truck driver will move into the stormwater equipment
operator position if it's filled. That would leave me of posting a truck driver position and still leaving
the one open that I said I would not fill. And then if the mechanic gives their notice, I would have
that one to post. So I ultimately see that we could have a truck driver and a mechanic position open
in January.
Okay. All right. Okay. Well, we appreciate that as there are no questions. Yes, Michelle. So the way
that the motion was typed up so that based on what she submitted is you would approve
her to fill that position. And if it is internal, she could go ahead and move forward with filling that
position that would become vacant due to that internal. So that would take care of one step that she's
asking about. So if you approve that for this, she could go ahead, make that internal move, and then
go ahead and post that truck driver position. So that's what the script
motion has stated okay you have to come back or if for that's perfectly fine mechanic did yeah later
but that will take care of I wrote it that way on purpose after reading what she had submitted so if
you want to do it different that would never come back no yeah okay and I think that helps well again
the mechanic is still not in general fine
Is that it's not and I have no problem of waiting for that. I know I have agenda items to come to you
on the January 27th meeting. So I haven't doing it with the truck driver and the equipment operator
that that would be perfect for me. Okay. Okay. All right. Just making sure we're trying to
I appreciate that. Thank you, Michelle, for clarifying that. Seeing no further questions or comments
on this item, we'll go to public comment. If you have public comment on this item, you can come forward
to the lectern here in the night yellow room or raise your hand via Teams. Seeing none, may we please
have a roll call vote? Councilor Crossley? Yes. Councilor Iverson? Yes. Councilor Decker? Yes.
Yes. Councilor Wills. Yes. Councilor Henry. Yes. Motion passes unanimous six zero. Okay. Thank you.
We appreciate it. All right. Next up on the agenda. I think we're in new business, correct? No ongoing
business. That is correct. All right. Council, I move to approve the commissioner's request and fund
four nine zero zero dash zero zero zero zero employee morale.
the creation of account line three zero one eight five employee promotion and simultaneously approve
an additional appropriation of four thousand nine hundred twenty two dollars and forty five cents in
the services category second okay we got a motion and a second and i don't i'm actually gonna cover
this oh okay okay your voice yeah okay um
So this is money that's from the vending machine, and the commissioners often use this money to do something
for employees for Christmas. And so they're asking for the appropriation to be eligible to do that this
year. All right, Councilor Feidl. So do all employees then benefit from this fund? Typically, what they've
done in the past is like donuts or fudge or cookies that get delivered to each individual office so
that all employees can benefit.
Thank you. All right. Any other questions or comments on this item? Seeing none, I see faces,
but I see none. All right. I'm going to go to public comment on this item. If you could come forward
to the lectern here in the Nattie Hill room, if you have public comment on this item, please do so or
raise your hand via Teams.
Seeing none, maybe please have a roll call vote. Councilor Iverson? Yes. Councilor Decker? Yes. Councilor
Feidl? Yes. Councilor Wilts? Yes. Councilor Henry? Yes. Councilor Crosley? Yes. Motion passes unanimous
6-0. Okay, thank you. Next up, item B. Council, I move to approve the Employee Service Department's
request and fund 4700-0000.
self-insurance an additional appropriation of three million three hundred thirty eight thousand eight
hundred ninety three dollars and 31 cents in the services category Okay, we have you joining us. Hello.
Hello. Uh, let me start by saying I don't need three million dollars. Um Yeah at the time that I made
this request due to all the
the timing of when that request is due, there were three anthem invoices that were going to be coming
our way. Since that time when I submitted this request, we received and paid two of those invoices.
So currently in that fund, so the way that
this works is when we receive an invoice, we pay a portion of that invoice from a line called Anthem
Contractual, and then we pay the rest of the invoice from what is a line that's called health insurance
claims. That's the bulk of where the invoice comes from. Typically, at this time of year, we're seeing
a credit in the contractual portion of things because we've met stop loss, and I saw your face. We met
stop loss and things like that, so we're getting credits back from that.
And so at this point in the health insurance claims line, thanks to the auditor's office for working
this week, they transferred every single dollar that I had available in other lines because we've paid
all of our invoices into this line. So we have remaining funds of $318,409. We have one invoice left
that will come in on Friday.
I am hopeful that that will cover what comes in. I am fearful that it will not. And so that's why I'm
here, because it is possible our invoice that we received two weeks ago was, for the claims part of
things, was around $400,000. The one we received two weeks before that was around $200,000.
I recognize we've talked about this all year long about wanting to understand and being able to predict
what's coming and at this point in the year I just can't do that for an invoice coming in.
basically in the last possible minute that the auditor's office can process it to ensure. And that invoice
is due before the end of the year. We have seven day terms for a turnaround, which due to the holidays,
it will still be before the end of the year. So this is purely an administrative task where I need some
more money from you to make sure that I can pay that invoice that comes in on Friday. It needs to be
paid no matter what. I would like to make that happen in this year so it's not a next year problem.
eating into the appropriations that we have for next year. All that to say the number, I don't know
what that number is. I think I would feel confident if in the highest claim that we paid in the health
insurance line this year was a million dollars. I guess I'm thinking that if we could have the health
insurance line balance be a million so that if that is what
comes through on Friday that I could pay it. I know that's not, I don't have concrete numbers to give
you. I've tried to get any information from Anthem, but I just can't. I don't have the information to
give you before this conversation. I don't know, I'll answer questions. And then maybe we can come to
an agreement on what I might need. All right, thank you for that.
hands raised. So I'm going to go Council Iverson and then I'll flip it to Councilor Feidl. My question
is directed at staff. Is there a number that I need to amend the motion or do you think we're okay with
what was read out in the motion? You'll need to amend her the request because her current balance in
that fund is not three million so
Yeah, I suppose that if that's the way you want it to go, and you just want to appropriate the cash
balance, I can give you that number too. OK. I have current cash balance. And Kim, if you could correct
me if I'm wrong, or somebody, try and find it on my paper. I passed it. $2,644,935.79? Yes. OK, cool.
I'll say that one more time. 2,644,935.79. Yeah, Council, I understand. Council, I move to amend my
motion to a new number, which is 2,644,935.79. Second. OK, we got a motion and a second on that amendment.
All right.
Councilor, I'll go to Councilor Feidl and then I'll go to Councilor Henry next. So am I understanding
it correctly that this will be the last payment for this year, whatever we appropriate now? Correct.
I just want to make sure. Thank you. Yes, sorry. That's my fault. Sorry. Any questions or comments on
the amendment to change that number?
Councilor, okay. I wasn't sure if that was why your hand was raised. Okay. Yes. Could we restate the
amount on the amendment, please? Mm-hmm. Okay. $2,644,935.79. 2644935.79. Okay. So there's no other
further questions on that amendment.
I'll go to public comment. Public comment. Raise your hand via Teams or come forward to the lectern
here in the Net Youth Overroom. All right. And seeing none, we'll need to have a roll call vote. See
Councilor Henry's hand out. I think it's on the overall. Oh, yeah. OK. Further amendment. Councilor
Wilts. Yes. Councilor Henry. Yes. Councilor Deckard. Yes. Councilor Crossley. Yes. Councilor Feidl. Yes.
and Councilor Iverson. Motion passes unanimous, six zero on the amendment. Okay, thank you. Now we'll
come back to overall. Now go back to Councilor Henry. Thank you. I guess my question is more forward
leaning into next year, because I know we've done a few of these settlement votes here in the last quarter
and they are seven figure votes. What's the forecast for next year on this? E, do you have a sense of,
What are your head looks like I know I previous commissioners meeting I called in to say that I really
do think council should be talking with a packs and commissioners administrator and you as you look
at contracts from year to year just so we understand the risk but.
Do you have a crystal ball for next year on what this cost looks like for us? I don't have a crystal
ball, but I have talked with both Apex and the clinic, and they do annual reports where they are evaluating
the health, Apex specifically, the health of the plan, the health of the employees, all the things that
we can factor into, things that will accrue costs for us. And I've thought about you all as part of
that reporting, and I'm asking them to put together extra information.
and to share with you so that we can make some decisions. And I think looking forward, we have a lot
of thoughts about some things we can implement that will create some cost savings. I think we've mentioned
some of those in various meetings that we've been in.
Looking forward, those conversations will need to happen early on in the year because by July, we're
starting to talk about those contracts for next year and renewal rates and all those types of things.
So I'm hopeful we can get you some information. Typically, the annual reports once they've compiled
them, like end of February, beginning of March is when that stuff's available. Does that help?
Any other questions or comments on this item from council? Okay, and seeing none, I'll go back to public
comment for the overall public comment. If you have public comment, come raise your hand via Teams or
you can come forward to the lectern here in the night you have room.
All right. And seeing none, may we please. Oh, I'm sorry. I just have a question for you. I want to
I want to make this what you need it to be. I don't want, you know, I'm coming. I recognize I'm coming
in the last minute asking you to do this thing. If if maybe you could in your conversations figure out
what's the process you would like this to be for me to to
provide some consistency. And this is the first year we've appropriated this fund. So we're kind of
figuring things out as we go. You tell me how you would like this when we're coming to year end and
having these conversations, what you want that to look like. I will do my best to work with that and
make it something that is beneficial for everybody. Does that help? Yeah. OK, cool. Appreciate that.
Thank you. All right. And may we please have a roll call vote?
Councilor Deckard? Yes. Councilor Feidl? Yes. Councilor Wills? Yes. Councilor Henry? Yes. Councilor
Crosley? Yes. Councilor Iverson? Yes. Motion passes unanimous 6-0. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate
it. And back up, well, item C, but we have Highway Department coming back again. That's right. Council,
I'll be combining Highway item C and D into one motion.
So I move to approve the highway department's request for a fund to fund transfer of cash of two hundred
twelve dollars and fifty cents from funds ninety one seventy four dash zero zero zero zero lake and
river enhancement or Larry to fund eleven ninety seven dash zero zero zero zero stormwater management
and simultaneously in fund nine one seven four dash zero zero zero zero lake and river enhancement or
Larry approve an additional appropriation of three thousand six hundred dollars in the services category.
second okay um miss ridge is back what do you have to tell us about larry or layer layer yeah it's okay
you can call it you can call it larry if you want that's the first time i've heard that so um so i'm
here to correct the layer larry grant um
A lot of the cards in this grant anyway, so that's it. It's kind of fitting. So we had a lot of players
in this with soil and water. We had property owners contributing their portion because part of it was
on private property. We had stormwater contributing their portion. So this the work has been completed.
We received the grant funds. This is just to finish out.
cleaning up the the last part of it moving that fund to fund because that was part of the local match
not part of the grant so it's basically so we want to get this done before the end of the year since
so it can be closed out all right thank you for that and already saw a hand raise and council votes
you're up could you give a brief description of the project just
So the public kind of knows. So they were two log jam cleanups. And basically when you get that within
these creek areas and such, then you can create a flooding in the areas. So the stormwater department
applied for the layer grant, received that. I think it was a max of 25,000. So we worked out with the
property owner soil and water. Then we hired a contractor, I believe at the time it was Bluestone. And
then when it was dry enough for them to get their equipment,
remove those log jams, so that way it keeps everything flowing. Thank you. All right. Any other questions
or comments from council? And seeing none, we'll go to public comment. Raise your hand via Teams or
come forward to the lectern here in the Natt U Hill room. All right. And seeing none, may we please
have a roll call vote? Councilor Pidl?
yes councillor wilts yes councillor hawke a big partner councillor henry yes councillor crossley yes
councillor iverson yes councillor dekert yes motion passes unanimous six zero thank you thank you all
right next up is item e from the sheriff's department
Council I'll be combining sheriff's items E and F into one motion. I move to approve the sheriff's fund
request and fund 1000 dash zero zero zero five county a general sheriff a deappropriation of five thousand
four hundred ninety eight dollars and fifty cents in the personnel category and simultaneously approve
and fund eight one zero three dash zero zero zero zero operation pullover an additional appropriation
of five thousand four hundred ninety eight dollars and fifty cents in the personnel category
second all right we have Jamie here welcome hello I'm just end of the year housekeeping that's all it
is really just moving the funds around thank you for that any questions or comments from council on
this item see none we'll go to public comment raise your hand via teams or come to the lectern here
in the night you'll roam for this item
And seeing none, maybe please have a roll call vote. Councillor Henry? Yes. Councillor Crosley? Yes.
Councillor Iverson? Yes. Councillor Decker? Yes. Councillor Feidl? Yes. Councillor Woods? Yes. Motion
passes unanimous 6-0. Okay, thank you. Next up is item G.
Council I move to approve the sheriff's request and fund four one zero seven dash zero zero zero zero
donation sheriff the creation of account line three zero zero one four other services and simultaneously
approve an additional appropriation of fifteen thousand dollars in the services category. Okay. Anything
to add here. This is just occasionally we have the public that comes in and donates money to the sheriff's office.
And sometimes they say it's at the sheriff's discretion. Sometimes they have something specific that
they want us to use the funds for. It's never been utilized before. And we would like to start using
that or have the ability to. Okay. Look at that. Okay. All right. Any questions or comments from council?
Yes, Councilor Feidl. So about how long has this amount been accumulating?
we know Brie how long this has been created i don't off the top of my head but we could definitely get
that information for you just curious sure okay any other questions or comments on this item from council
yes councillor wilkes i just feel the need since uh councillor hawke isn't here to state the obvious
that you can't spend what you don't have so we're appropriating 15 but you have 14 735 according to
or yeah so was there something guidance of the auditor's office it can be amended to what is actually
in there you want us to amend it okay could we amend it to yeah yes counselor okay council I move to
amend the motion to a new number which is fourteen thousand seven hundred thirty five dollars and ninety
two cents I concur okay we got the motion
And a second on that. Any other further question or comment from council? All right. Seeing none, can
we have a roll call vote on this friendly amendment? Councilor Iverson? Yes. Councilor Crosley? Yes.
Councilor Decker? Yes. Councilor Henry? Yes. Councilor Wilts? Yes. And Councilor Feidl? Yes. Motion
passes unanimous 6-0. All right. Thank you.
Oh wait, we gotta do the overall. All right, any other questions or comments? And thanks, Councilor
Wilts, for keeping the spirit of Councilor Hawk going. All right, and seeing none, we'll have public
comment. You can raise your hand via Teams or come forward to the lectern here in the Net Youth Hall
room. And seeing none, may we please have a roll call vote?
Councilor Iverson? Yes. Councilor Decker? Yes. Councilor Feidl? Yes. Councilor Wilts? Yes. Councilor
Crossley? Yes. Councilor Henry? Yes. Motion passes unanimous six zero. Thank you. You're welcome.
Thank you. Okay. Next up is item H for
Hava from the auditor's office. How'd you think I was going to say that? I don't know. All right, council,
I'll be combining the auditor's items H and I into one motion. I move to approve the auditor's request
in fund 8956-0000. The Hava grants a deappropriation of $35,873 in the capital category and simultaneously
in fund 8958-0000.
grant, approve the creation of account line 4001 equipment with an additional appropriation of $35,873
in the capital category. Second.
Okay and I'll look to the auditor for this. Hello what do you have for us on the HAVA grant? It's a
fun word right? Yes this is just a really simple housekeeping item. We're just asking for your assistance
with correcting a small error. Unfortunately this is the only way to correct. We clicked the wrong box
when setting up this fund and unfortunately it's not just a simple fix where we can unclick and click the
correct one, we have to totally add a new fund and kind of start from scratch, which is not a big deal,
but it's just coming here and presenting to you and explaining we need to de-appropriate then re-appropriate.
Understand. We did work with Lau, our financial software company, and confirmed this is the only way
to do it, unfortunately. OK. All right. Seems understandable, but does anybody have any questions or
comments from the auditor on this?
Seeing none, we'll go to public comment. Raise your hand via Teams or come forward to the lectern here
in the Night Eagle Room. And seeing none, may we please have a roll call vote? Councilor Crossley? Yes.
Councilor Henry? Yes. Councilor Feidl? Yes. Councilor Iverson? Yes. Councilor Deckard? Yes. And Councilor
Wilts? Yes. Motion passes unanimous 6-0.
All right, and because we combine those, we'll go to item J, then add it one. Council, I move to approve
the auditor's request and fund 8950-0000, American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, an in-house transfer of
$8,550 from account line 367100, ARPA septic assistance, to account line 36714, ARPA program support
in the services category. Second.
okay and yes yes thank you for accommodating us and adding this to the agenda we appreciate your support
this is just to transfer from one project line into another already established project line currently
the auditor's budget has
has supported an invoice of a little over $1,500 for our outside administrative support from Baker Tilly
and this will just move some excess funding from a project that's not going to be able to fully utilize
into that line so it's not coming out of the county's general fund so it is in the best interest of
the county if you're willing to approve. All right any questions or comments from council on this item?
And the only thing I would just add is a year from now, we will have to figure out a plan to make sure
that everything that we did through ARPA is spent down to the penny because this all has to be done
by December 31st of twenty twenty six. And so considering how fast this year went, it would be very
helpful. I know we kind of mentioned earlier this year
to try to have a follow-up joint meeting with the commissioners to do a plan to talk about some of that
or to have an update rather on some of that because I know I thought if my memory serves me well that
there were some things that we were thinking that we would switch and change and so I would really hope
that we wouldn't wait until next year's grand finale to scramble and try to figure out because
That's actually something we did last year where we kind of had to scramble this year for it. I think
I saw the auditor's hand raised again. Yeah, thank you for noting that we would like to address this.
very minimum by you know the midpoint of the year preferably before we like to be proactive rather than
reactive so having that plan in place something in our pocket just so we know how we're going to proceed
if and when projects do come in under budget and where we would hate to give back this this these resources
that we can certainly utilize rather than you know expending on a well-deserved already approved project
right yeah so maybe that's something that we can
I don't know if maybe we can pass on the message to commissioners. I know sometimes we need to make
sure that they get our information from our meetings. So I just wanted to, I guess, I think that maybe
that would be a good idea for us to do maybe first quarter is to have a meeting to kind of go over projects.
And then just as you were saying for that midpoint year to kind of figure out maybe right before budget,
That would be very helpful to figure out what we still have and to kind of finalize as we enter the
fourth quarter of next year to make sure everything is kind of put in play.
Yes, we did provide a very basic update of where we are now, but we would like to have a little bit
more of a formal presentation at the beginning of the year, just to kind of start us off along that
path and then we can reassess later in the first quarter, if that's okay. I think that will get us on
the right track and we have communicated with the commissioner's office and we hope that the plan update,
the ARPA plan update will be on their agenda for Thursday. I'm not certain if it is or not,
but I know that it is on the radar. Okay, okay. Yeah, since both of us, both bodies have to do all of
that, I definitely think that we need to make sure that we schedule that joint meeting with them. So,
all right, any other questions or comments related to this item? All right, seeing none. If there's
public comment on this item, you can come forward to the lectern here in the net, you can raise your
hand via Teams.
and seeing none, may we please have a roll call vote? Councilor Henry? Yes. Councilor Iverson? Yes.
Councilor Decker? Yes. Councilor Wilts? Yes. Councilor Crosley? Yes. Councilor Feidl? Yes. Motion passes
unanimous six zero. All right, thank you very much for that. Next up, since we moved item 11 and we're
done with that, we'll go to item 12.
which is the county council business. And we'll start with item A, which is a resolution approval. Council,
as a reminder, this item was tabled from the December 9th meeting. I move to approve resolution 2025-54,
a resolution pledging support to the BEDC or the Bloomington Economic Development Corporation.
I don't see it. Second. All right. I'm looking to our council attorney to see if you wanted to start
off anything first. Okay.
All right, and I see we have a BED representative, BEDC representative here. Clark, please go ahead.
Well, good evening, Council. My name is Clark Greiner. I'm the interim president for the BEDC, and it's
certainly a pleasure to be here this evening. I want to thank you for considering funding appropriations
to support economic development efforts in Monroe County. The BEDC has served as the primary community
organization for economic development on the business retention, attraction, and expansion for Monroe
County. And over the time that I've been with
BEDC over the last six years we've tried to function in that capacity as a sole economic development
organization for the county. As you know BEDC our membership has over 117 members we continue to try
to grow that and our members are made up of
most of the major trading sector employers such as Cook, Medical, Cook Group, Simtra, Phoenix Closure,
and then other community partners such as the IU Health, Indiana University, Monroe County, the city
of Bloomington, Ellitsville, and our board leadership consists of and includes organizations such as
Smithville, Forbes, IU Credit Union, Cook Group, Weddle Brothers, just to name a few.
And it is our goal to really help bring prosperity to the citizens of Monroe County, which I know that's
consistent with what you guys endeavor to do as well. I want to give you a little information about
some of the history of what the BEDC has done over the past five years. If you look at our budget and
added all those dollars up and then divided that by the amount of capital investment we had, for every
one dollar that you invested in the BEDC,
there was, it led to $289 in capital investment back into all of Monroe County. That resulted in more
than 900 plus new jobs and more than a billion dollars in that capital expenditure investment. And consistent
with that, we are still on target with our 2024 through 2026 business strategy, which is in place. And
that's one of our primary economic drivers for leading us forward on that. But as you know,
plans and economic development is dynamic. It's not static. And if you look at that, when we first drafted
that plan, there were things that have popped up since then. Some of them are tariffs.
which wasn't around when we were really talking about that. Some of the tech innovation, there's more
and more information being talked about that. Also one that we're dealing with that's top of mind right
now is the SCA-1. We're addressing that and some of the changes that it makes. We confront those things
and try to adjust and adapt to those as we go about our economic development initiatives. And of course,
then on the positive side here, Big Ten champions, you know, Go Hoosiers, you know, that's very exciting.
Heisman winner, again, very exciting.
And we have one of the coolest coaches in all of college football. So we have a lot to be proud about
our community. I want to just kind of review some of the things that have happened in 2025. Semper purchased
the former GE site in July of 2025. That was a major redevelopment. Many of you up there had an opportunity
to kind of look at that facility ahead of time. And as we drive there, buy it now, how exciting is that
to see? Those are efforts that the BEDC has been involved with, and that started way back
when we fostered those initial relationships with Syntra, their growth and expansion after they acquired
the Baxter operation. So we've been engaged for some time on that.
I also wanted to talk about some of the actions and things that we're doing right now. We have also
attracted a company called Omboy. They're a Canadian based company. They are right now leasing space
in the existing Phoenix Closure Facility. We hope that in the not too distant future that they'll be
constructing the building to house their employees and to continue to grow and expand. Another company
that we've also attracted here recently to the Monroe County Airport is a company called Swift Energetics
and Engineering.
And that's been a very exciting thing. They're still in their initial growth stage, so we're still working
with them on critical issues and stuff. One of the things I also wanted to point out really quick, and
this is very exciting, over the last six months, the airport has been, the BEDC, along with airport
leadership, has been engaged with multiple different
organizations that are looking at the airport as a potential home for their business growth and expansion.
It's super exciting. If you look at everything that's been involved in that, this could potentially
lead to hundreds and hundreds of new jobs
high paying jobs out there. So some of the technology, the innovation that's happening out at the airport
and that's in the aviation industry and aerospace industry is very dynamic. And the Monroe County airport
has positioned themselves well to be able to do that. I've been involved with them and attending a lot
of their board meetings so that we become very familiar with what goes on and what takes place out there.
So we want to use
the funds that you're considering appropriating us to continue to level up, to offer, again, prosperity
back to the community. So thank you for your time. Thank you very much for coming this evening and explaining
that to us. All right, anybody have any questions or comments? And Councilor Feidl's hand is up, go ahead.
So I remember last week when we had this on the agenda the first time that, as I remember it, we tabled
it because we wanted more information about some of the developments that had been occurring in BEDC.
And honestly, I don't feel like I know much. And I think that's disappointing as a partner in this endeavor,
if you want to call us that, that I don't know what's going on. So I'll just leave it at that.
Okay, all right. And Councilor Henry has his hand up. Please go ahead. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Clark,
for presenting a little bit about the year review there and what's going on at the airport. I agree
that there's a lot of excitement and opportunity with our Board of Aviation. I know a few of us have
been involved in those conversations. I guess for me, as someone who
suggested tabling last week and we tabled this item to get some of that feedback. I'm content with what
I've heard here today. It's a pretty good ROI to have a $30,000 a year donation yield. The work that
you all do for the county on economic development that otherwise we'd have to bring in house and have
an FTE with benefits doing that work. So I'm good with that moving forward, but I will say as I think about our
donations generally. I guess this has nothing to do with BEDC, but we conveyed through resolution our
desire to do a donation last week to the Board of Commissioners that somehow didn't happen. There was
not clarity on why that item was removed from their claims because we
did communicate our intent about another donation. I guess I'm just maybe as a point of information
for staff, how, if we do vote in favor of our resolution to make this donation, how does that get into
the commissioner's docket for Thursday so they understand that we have a resolution that is saying words
that shows our intent? Does it get in that packet or how is that presented in that meeting on Thursday?
I'd hate to see us,
I go through another round of our intent not being clear because we clearly wrote a resolution to that
effect. Can staff answer that? For resolutions, it's included as it would be processed through the claims.
And so the resolution that was passed is included in the claims docket and the claims are subject to
commissioner approval. So it's just really a matter of reading their packet, I presume. Okay. I'll just
leave it at that comment.
And again, thank you again for coming in tonight, Clark, and making the presentation there. I will say,
I think, too, in the future, as we think about our donation pattern and what we do to basically delegate
as a council activities like communications and economic development, that, yeah, there may be other
opportunities to invest in other organizations basically doing the work that the county could be doing.
So I'll just leave it there. But I'm happy to support this resolution this evening.
Thank you very much for that. Any other questions or comments? Councilor Wilts, and then I'll go to
Deckard. You mentioned that the BEDC had been tackling issues or impacts around SCA 1, and I was just
wondering if you could give me a little bit more information about that. You know, one of the things
that we want to look at, if you look at some of the primary drivers, it's our understanding right now
that SCA 1 is all about
income tax right to raise the revenue for that so what that means is as we approach the market we're
looking for good paying jobs trying to figure out how to get those jobs locate here to not only just
help with revenue but to also help potentially reverse some of the population decline that we've seen
over the decades so
our efforts are going to be much more assertive in reaching out to companies that we feel are a great
fit for our community. And it could be because we know when I've worked with you all in the past that
when we bring an opportunity here and it's the right opportunity, you guys have been very supportive.
So we're going to go outside of our community. We're going to identify companies that align with what
we're trying to accomplish here to increase wages, to increase the number of people that can come here
and live here. And those are things that we can do to influence
those folks. And so we'll do that. So the money that we are gifted, so to speak, we will use that to
develop outreach programs, talking with site selectors, specific companies that may be aligned with
our traded sectors or support our traded sectors. So we've got multiple tools in our toolbox. Those
aren't immediate things. Those things take time to evolve, but those are things we're going to be paying
close attention to.
So obviously, we can't tell people where to live. But it did come up with Cimtra that really the benefits
to county government from local income tax depend on those folks living within Monroe County. And so
when we attract businesses to the county and yet their employees choose
for whatever reason and quite justifiably in some cases I'm sure, to live outside the county, that's
not bringing income tax into our coffers, it's helping our neighboring counties and that's great for
them. So my question is, are there strategies that we could work together on or do you have ideas around how to
get those income tax dollars, those residents, those employees into Monroe County? Well, I think it's
starting with acknowledgement. So some of the first things that we've got to recognize that when we
talk with our traded sector companies, the larger employers, as I've mentioned, anywhere from 48 to
50, maybe slightly north of that of their folks live outside of Monroe County.
right? So the question is, is to meet and talk with these folks and say, why is that occurring? And
I think some of the things that we've got to be aware of is, what are these folks looking for? A lot
of it's going to be housing, particularly single-family housing. So we've got to look at our development
standards and see how they align with SEA 1 so that we can continue to incentivize that. And those aren't
necessarily easy things to do, but they're necessary to address some of those questions. And so those
would be things that we can sit down, talk with our traded sector companies, talk about
about some of the challenges they're seeing, maybe talk to some of their employees to say, hey, how
can we do this better? And those are some of the things. So I think it's kind of a community solution.
So it's a combination of traded sectors. It's about acknowledgment of some of the challenges that we
face, and then how we go about strategically addressing those to, A, help us, number one, identify how
we can increase revenue through the income tax of those people that live here. So that's going to be
one of the top things that we're paying attention to. And again, these things don't occur overnight,
but I think those are
things that I think are going to be important to address. And we all have a contribution to do and give
to that to make that work. Thank you very much. Thanks for being here, Clark. And thanks for taking
my call yesterday to get additional information. I do appreciate very much that the BDC has been a constant
presence, both through you and your predecessor
in some of these conversations with the county talking about jobs talking about what we got to do and
even convening people to it i mean i think we've all been to a few of us at least have been to the airport
numerous times for numerous things under various entities um one thing is i i do want to comment i think
the counselor henry was
I'm not sure that's the issue I think they get our point I think they're sending their own message.
And I think they'll send a message and this Clark this doesn't necessarily have to do with you. But
they they'll they'll send their message until.
you know, that word sends a different message or maybe they won't. I'm like Mary Morgan was saying earlier,
I have always joy and hope and optimism, but I don't know how it'll turn out. But we'll find out one
way or the other. And the show goes on. One thing I will say is this. I'm not sure, friends, given the
population numbers, I'm not sure that the community is in the position that it sometimes thinks it is
of convenience on jobs.
In fact, I don't think we are at all. We're in an age right now where the attacks on higher education
in a college town, and Clark, you don't have to comment on that, but I will, the attacks on that could
massively disrupt for a variety of different reasons. We got through a pandemic with our fingers crossed.
Now, some people didn't get through it, but we got through it.
you can only take so many hits and so many bad policies from Indy or DC or wherever, you can only do
that before you have a risk. The other thing is we have diversified our workforce, thank God, through
life sciences. Meanwhile, how we define science and healthcare is also rapidly taking some hits. In 2020,
on the the vaccine my gosh we were I I was in my classroom teaching in person one a few instructors
there on campus they said there's a they've got the vaccine my wife's texting me everybody's gonna I
said I'll gargle the thing every day if it if it takes care of this now and now ever ever I was down
with that until they weren't and now things are different so I sometimes think that the folks like the
BDC who are having those discussions about places
And things that we offer I think you got to be doing that as they're doing that under whatever form
it is because I remember vividly and Liz Fidel could write the book in the nineties when the plants
we had began to say.
this isn't working anymore. And everyone said, that'll never happen. That'll never happen. That turned
from never happened in regional traction, people driving daily from as far as Evansville and Illinois
to fill those jobs, including all the locals, by the way, McDowell Gardens and all their parking spots
and all those extra driveways were not because those people wanted extra driveways. They did it because
they sold parking lot spaces for the plant. That open field was vibrant. And then it changed. And someone said,
what are you going to do? Mayor, what are you going to do? County, what are you going to do? And what
they said is, we've got to attract new jobs. I think today, sometimes I listen to people and we speak
with the convenience of, well, we could do that, but I'm worried about growth and infringement on that.
Folks, I don't know that we're in the catbird seed that we think that we are. And so I think the BDC,
either this year, next year, many years, all years, I think Clark out there and others hustling on this
is our only hope
in case something gets more wild than it is. And those population numbers do not lie. The school recognized
that. I think other government entities have to recognize that too. There's something that is up and
we gotta own it. All right, thank you very much. Councilor Iverson. Mr. Greiner, thank you again for
being here and waiting till the end of the meeting. Really appreciate it and for your phone calls to
us. Appreciate, that's always helpful.
I'm not going to speak too much on this, but I do remember the BEDC was there front and center talking
about housing during the CDO debates. And that was a really healthy debate. We really got to talk a
lot about the pros and cons, the ways the sky was thinking about zoning. And BDC offered a lot of helpful
advice to that debate. And I I think the absolute key benefit for me, though, and the reason why I'm
going to be supporting this is
I've been able to get out there and tour, a lot of these factories, a lot of these sites, and I don't
need to have a tour, but it was meeting the people working there, the people who were coming in and
that is that is really the key indicator and talking to them about you know what do you need what are
you seeing and that's just.
great access to folks that I otherwise wouldn't have access to have a conversation with. So I'll be
supporting this. And I certainly hope that the commissioners see it that way as well as they came out
on a lot of these with us as well. So I think I'll leave it at that. Thank you. All right. Thank you.
Yeah. Nothing else to add.
to what my fellow council colleagues have said. I think, well, just one thing. The only thing that I
would like to see is just using public comment to come in and give any type of updates in the next coming
year, whether that's if you're seeing something that is proposed legislation from the General Assembly
that we should be mindful of, that we can work together with, definitely let us
know of course email but definitely like to see your face here and just explain that to us so that the
public could also know as well so definitely wanted to just express that and thank you very much for
that um i think councillor henry touched on this earlier but i'm going to look to miss turner king again
with this just to clarify because again what we heard last year or last week is they didn't know so
should this
I don't want to go through. Is there something as me as council president? Do I need to send a formal
email so nothing gets mixed and lost in the sauce? I don't. Yeah. I think an email would help, but I
will also add that this has been preemptively added to the commissioners meeting as an agenda item that
hopefully my voice allows me to present tomorrow. OK, OK. Well, maybe as a council president, actually
Thursday send an email just as a double and triple check.
We know for sure that this is coming. Yep. OK. All right. That being said, got to cross our T's and
dot our I's. All right. Public comment time. If you'd like to make public comment on this item, you
can come forward to the lectern here in the night. You have a raise your hand via teams. Thank you.
Thank you. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. It seems like a clerk. I might have one more thing.
I talked a little bit about my frustration about not what's going on, and I would like to ask that we
receive more communication about updates within the workings of the BEDC so that I, especially, I don't
know about others, but I can speak for myself. I want to know what's going on. I like to know what's
going on in an organization before I support it. And so I would like continued updates on what's happening
within the organization.
happy to do that thank you okay and look forward to it me too okay all right yeah one more and i think
if the board because i know this is not in your hands to add to counselor vital if the board could tell
us officially their window on the the leadership role
precisely and kind of how that's gonna work. I think that will help as a partner to know. I don't know
if the city wants that or Eltsville, because they're in those board meetings, but I think that's a helpful.
Those discussions are taking place now, so. All right, and last call for public comment. And seeing
none, may we please have a roll call vote.
Councillor Henry? Yes. Councillor Crossley? Yes. Councillor Iverson? Yes. Councillor Deckard? Yes. Councillor
Feidl? Yes, and I look forward to the partnership. Motion passes unanimous 6-0. All right, thank you.
Thank you, have a good night. All right, next up is item B.
Council, I move to approve resolution 2025-57, a resolution approving the Highway Collective Bargaining
Agreement. Second, please. All right, we got a motion in a second, Ms. Dernike. So for the last several
months, we've been meeting with the Collective Bargaining Unit for the Highway Department and Highway
Management regarding the Collective Bargaining Agreement that's set to expire at the end of this year.
What is before you today is the finalized version of this agreement. And I'm going to point out the
substantial changes. So the first one is that this is a two-year agreement instead of a three-year agreement
like we normally do. No, this is a three-year instead of a two-year because it seemed it might be problematic
to try to negotiate in the end of 2027. The agreement now allows for the highway department to sign
up twice a year for overtime.
previously you signed your name up one time and then if you missed too many times you were taken off
the list and so this allows them the opportunity to break the year in half. The major change is there's
some now limitations on when an employee can be called in on like a snow removal or an emergency call
out. We wanted to limit it so that if an employee calls in sick that day
They couldn't then be called out that evening for an emergency situation for liability purposes. It
now allows the highway employees to convert 40 hours of their sick time to personal time, and it allows
them to use it all at the beginning. So this is not them getting more time. They still get the same
amount of time. They're just allowed to convert more hours to personal time.
And this is because the union wanted to stay with the old scheme of benefit time. So most of the county
has transitioned to just having personal time and vacation time and not personal time, sick time, vacation
time. But they liked that old structure, so they kept it. And so we're allowing them to convert more
sick hours to personal time. And I think those are the major changes. All right.
And so counselor, I've ever since handed up and then I'll come back around. Am I reading this correctly?
This has been signed by both the commissioners and the union representatives. Mr. Cockrell did presented
to the commissioners last week. Yeah. OK. Councilor Fido. And you mentioned one or some of the changes
were union initiated. And so I just wanted to make sure that
that was okay what the employees wondered as well, right? I assume that's what that means, right? We
did a lot of back and forth, but we came to an agreement. Okay, thank you. Any other questions or comments
from Ms. Turner-King on this item? All right. Seeing none.
We'll go to public comment on this item. If we have public comment on this, you can come forward to
the lectern here, the Nattie Hill room or raise your hand via Teams. And seeing none, may we please
have a roll call vote. Councilor Crosley? Yes. Councilor Iverson? Yes. Councilor Deckard? Yes. Councilor
Feidl? Yes. Councilor Wilts? Yes. Councilor Henry? Yes. Motion passes unanimous six zero. Okay.
Next up, we will go to item D. Council, I move to open for discussion and possible approval to extend
the expiration date of resolution 2025-14, which temporarily suspends the personal administration committee
and job position requests. Second. Ms. Darnit King.
So I went ahead and prepared an amended resolution that I'll display on the screen. The only change
to the resolution is in paragraph three, which previously stated the resolution implemented a pack pause
that would expire in December of 2025 unless renewed by the council prior to that date. The resolution's
now gonna read, let me try to display it.
The resolution was set to automatically expire December of 2025. However, after further consideration
and review of the county's budget, the council believes it's fiscal fiscally responsible to extend this
pause until December 31st of 2026. And you can amend that date. I just put a placeholder in there for
now, unless renewed repelled or amended prior to that date by the council. Okay. Yes. Counselor Decker.
This is probably a really dumb question.
but this occurred to me as I was thinking about these last two items. This sitting council now, which
is the same sitting council theoretically in January that comes in here, we can set something for next
year, same as this year. It's just in this case, we set it to expire at the end of this year.
Is that right? It was set to expire at the end of this year. Yeah, yeah.
So there's nothing that would make this action not good for next year. It's okay. I think it's okay
because, um, as I'm displaying paragraph three, it says, unless for nude repeal to amend it prior to
the December 31st date, which allows any future council to change it. All right. And no dumb questions
to box said, even the genius has questions.
I'm full of quotes tonight. All right. Anybody else have any? Yes. Council Iverson. So this is going
to come up in both this one, this item and the next item. But I have not seen and maybe I missed it,
but I have not seen new economic data for Indiana that suggests that the next budget cycle is going
to be any easier than the last cycle.
I'm not seeing anybody that's indicating that they have seen anything like that. The next, I think,
thing on our calendar is an AIC legislative session in late January. We might get some more information,
maybe. But until I see anything contrary to the struggle that we had this last budget cycle, I am really
hesitant to make a change.
And then I'll go to Councilor Henry. So thank you. This is more of a legal term question. So is there,
it's, is, is repel being used for a specific reason or is it meant to be repeal? It's supposed to be
repeal. Okay. Well, I guess we need to change that. All right. That's it. I just want to make sure we
caught it. Cause I understand there's a legal, we can,
legally repel something too. I just don't know if we're trying to do that. Okay, thanks. Nice catch,
Councilor Henry. I think the only thing that I would add to this for council members is I think earlier
we heard about how we need to have a long-term finance discussion with this and I think considering
the forecast of a lot of things with SEA 1,
I don't feel very comfortable in allowing this to, I guess, to sunset at the end of this year. I think
we need to kind of pump the brakes on some things as we continue to navigate. And maybe again, this
is something that we could come to the long term finance and ask the question of, because again,
we can make amendments to the resolution. So if we chose a date after hearing, if we have a long-term
finance committee meeting and we speak to Greg Garantos about this and FSG about this, and they feel
comfortable with it, and we feel comfortable with it, we can always amend the resolution to change the
date. And so again, because the forecast is very frightful, I'm not very hopeful.
Yes, Councilor Wilts. Thank you. I just wanted to say that I agree that we're not quite ready to lift
this. However, as I've mentioned, I do think that there is business that the PAC could be doing. And
I didn't notice that it says that in the resolution. That's what it's called.
So I would, and maybe there are pieces of what long-term finance is looking at that come to PAC to process
and bring to council as well. I think we should utilize some of these committees strategically. And
so just wanted to point out that this doesn't mean that PAC cannot be meeting to do other things.
I agree. Well, I could, to your point, and I think you said this a while back when we were discussing
the higher end freeze, maybe Pat could come back to the table and discuss the higher end freeze in different
ways to figure that process out. Because I still think that people still have questions and concerns
about it. So maybe that's something that Pat could do and then bring back to council
for a larger discussion and our approval. Okay. Yes. If the intent is for PAC to still meet, then we
would have to make an amendment to the resolution because item one says the personal administration
committee will not meet. PAC may continue to meet to consider procedural matters. Does that
not mean what I think it means. I don't think that sentence is in the version that was passed. I'm just
looking in our packet. It's at the end of number one.
I didn't submit a resolution to the packet, so I'm not sure where the resolution that was in the packet
came from. I don't know. Everyone else has one in their packet, right? Am I looking at the wrong document?
Nope. Okay. Yep. Councilor Henry. Lord, this has been a crazy meeting. Yeah. Councilor Wilson's point,
I guess the question or the way I'm hearing it is if we allowed a little pack to happen,
um, that to make sure that it's, it's clear to departments that that doesn't open up PAC to do its regular
business, that it's limited to, I think the way you were going at it was in the right direction. This
idea that it's, it's really about the rules and procedure and not, um, the PAC process, right? So like,
like if it's, I mean, I mean, I, it's almost like a,
And I think I just, I'm careful about the word procedure because the procedure is for people to bring
things to PAC, right? So like, we don't want them doing that. But what we're talking about is opening
the committee up to deal with policy related to personnel. Like that would help us with department heads
and trying to figure out what a more severe budget cycle could look like if our revenue really drops,
right? Like it's not about opening the PAC process up. It's really about like a rules behavior. Does
that make sense?
Yeah, thanks. What it says, at least in the one I have. I checked S drive for approved resolutions and
there were two versions. And so I looked at the wrong version. And so that sentence is in what I would
consider the latter past version. So I have now added it to it. Cool. Thank you. Just to clarify, the
version in the packet that the public can see is the correct version? OK.
No amendment. Cool. OK. All right. Any other questions or comments from counsel? Who's on first? Yes,
counselor. And Ms. Mallory Turner King, may I ask you another question? The times that PAC has met this fall,
has been at the pleasure of the council. So the council has said you can meet on whenever and do whatever.
Section number one seems to indicate that PAC can schedule itself for meetings on procedural matters.
Am I reading that correctly or does council still need to provide guidance to say you can meet on January
14th as an example?
for the 2026 calendar resolution we did include a PAC meeting schedule. I remember that. And then in
that resolution it says if the PAC meeting schedule is that the PAC chair has the authority to address
any scheduling amendments necessary for PAC meetings so it allows the chair to amend that. We would
just need to ensure that if it is amended that it is noticed in accordance with open door. Got it.
So technically this is just a discussion. And so now we need to have a motion to extend. So council,
I guess with no objections, I would like to extend our pack pause to December 31st, 2026.
Am I second? I think you can simplify it and say I would like to move to approve amended resolution
2025 14 and then that has the new date. OK, so what you said. All right. Does that suffice? OK, second.
All right. And so that is what we are doing. All right. Any other further questions or?
comments from council on this. Yeah, I just have the point of order. Is the document that Molly,
that you, or that Mr. King amended, is that the same resolution we're talking about that's in the packet?
It wasn't clear to me. Yes. What was apparently in the packet was the version that was passed in March
and then the resolution
The amended version is the one that I displayed on the screen, and I'm happy to re-display it. Wait,
so we just said we were doing it as amended, though. So you're passing the amended one. The one in the
packet is not the amended one. The one in the packet is the original one. I don't know where the one
in the packet came from. I put it in there so that you guys would have a reference of what we passed to what
she was working on because at the time of the packet, the amendment was not ready to put in the packet.
My understanding was that the motion on the floor was amending section three of the packet, simply updating
the year to 2026. So the document in the packet would not change at all.
except for section three, updating the year to 2026. It is correct that the only change is to paragraph
three, other than it says amended at the top. It adds the language in section three changes to
What is displayed on the screen? It was set to expire December 25th. However, after further consideration
and review of the county's budget, the council believes it's fiscally responsible to extend the pause
until December 31st of 2026. Can you scroll up to number one just for my own peace of mind? Thank you.
Okay, thank you.
Yeah, this is my question that both documents are verbatim except for what we just changed, right? Because
I hate to have an amended over here and then something else that was a prior version that we somehow
merged together here. If it's clear to folks in the room that that amendment is on the most
recent resolution, then I'm good. It's not clear way out here. It's clear in the room. Okay, good, all right.
Ms. Turner-King, were you about to say something? I'm sorry. Okay. Because I think to Councilor Wilts's
point, it sounds like you wanted to ensure that we could still do procedural things for PAC, and that's
in what we see here that was in the PAC. Got it. Okay.
Okay, so we got a motion and a second on the floor. Any other further discussion from Council on this.
So is this for the amendment or the overall piece document now. This would be on the amendment.
We're voting on the amendment now. Thank you. It would be a motion to accept the resolution as amended.
As amended. So that's the whole thing. Because the only thing that we were doing is changing the date
in item three to extend to December 31st, 2026. Thank you. You're welcome. OK. So any other further
questions or comments? OK.
Um, seeing none from council, we'll go to public comment. If there's any public comment on this item,
come forward to the lectern here. The night you hope room or raise your hand via teams and seeing none,
maybe please have a roll call vote. Councillor Deckard. Yes. Councillor Fiddle. Yes. Councillor Woods.
Yes. Councillor Henry. Yes. Councillor Crossley. Yes. Councillor Iverson. Yes.
Motion passes unanimous six zero. Okay, thank you. Next up is item E. Council I move to open for discussion
and possible approval to extend the expiration date of resolution 2025-24, which temporarily suspends
the KSA or knowledge skills and abilities practice. Second. Okay, Ms. Turner King.
Similar to the previous motion, I prepared a resolution and the language changes to item three in it.
It previously stated that the KSA pause ends December 31st of 2025 and now reads as on the screen.
Okay, yes, Council Iverson. I support the possible amendment or the amendment being shown on the screen
for the same reasons that I talked about the previous point. I've seen no economic data that suggests
that the budget in the coming year is going to be any easier than the previous year. Councilor Decker.
Well, I appreciate that comment.
And the more I look at this resolution, it reminds me of my griping from when we adopted it originally.
And it seems to be more so the case that my griping that rescue not coming, change not coming is probably
imminent. I mean, just to kind of set the timeline, if I understand it correctly,
The general assembly is in technically right now and then they're out in February and that's shoot.
We won't even be done with snow trucks by then, let alone whatever. And so we're in this trouble. I
do appreciate the reassurance from a year ago that the council can, should something manifest, the council
can undo this resolution just like we could amend it all year and sometimes we do. So I appreciate that.
the ability we have to do that. All right, any other questions or comments from council on this item?
Yes, Councilor Iverson. Council I move to approve the adopted resolution 2025-24-25. Second. Hold on.
What I wanted to do with that motion, I'm gonna verbalize this, is adopt what was on the screen, but
then I got confused as to the naming of the resolution. No, we need to say the same, we're just adopting
that resolution. It would be a motion to adopt the amended resolution, which is 20, 25, 24. That's what
I wanted to do. I think that's what I said, but we've been here a while.
do I need to restate the motion I would say yes to clarify or you could say so moved all right okay
so we have that clarification there is there any other further discussion from council on this item
who seconded
Thank you. Yes, sounds like question is bigger than this item, but related. Nothing that we are doing
here or in the last one is addressing the hiring freeze right. And when does that expire. Next year. Wait.
I for some reason thought it expired at the end of this month too, but okay. The hiring freeze resolution
expires December 31st of 2026.
Look at that. Way to go. Okay. So again, the underlying thing is, yeah. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Okay.
All right. Any other further questions or comments on council related to the resolution as amended?
Seeing none. Public comment. You can raise your hand via teams or come forward to the lectern here in
the NatU Hill room. Okay.
And without further ado, may we please have a roll call vote on the final item of twenty twenty five.
House Iverson. Yes. Also, Decker. The counselor, Decker. Yes, counselor. Yes. Counselor Wilts. Yes.
Counselor Henry. Yes. Counselor Crosley. Yes. Motion passes unanimous six zero.
Okay. Okay. All right. So that brings us to, there was a little confusion here in the night, you know,
room. Um, everybody good on before we move. Yes, counselor. So I'll just bring it up. So we look at
the agenda. It's got 12 C, which is the meeting schedule, right? Right. And did we get rid of that or
it was removed? That's the one that we did earlier.
Where miss well Michelle can you or Molly? Explain that again Originally, we thought we were gonna have
to amend the meeting schedule to accommodate for a change in deadlines since the way Additional
appropriations is going to be advertised as changing but after all right after further review We don't
think we need to amend the deadlines What's gonna happen is?
additional appropriations will be advertised through Gateway, and there's a 14-day advertisement, but
I think our current advertising deadlines accounts for that. What we were afraid of was that we'd have
to advertise in Gateway and the newspaper, and our advertisement schedule wouldn't have accounted for
that, but after confirming with DLGF, we don't have to advertise in the paper anymore, we could remove
that item. I apologize for missing that if that was said some other time. Okay. I missed it. I was completely
confused as to what.
implementing all kinds of craziness over here on this end. All right, so if we're all good, we'll come
down to the last item, which is council comments and liaison updates. And it is the last one of the
year, so make it count. I'm going to start with Councilor Vidal. It's not color code, but I do have
a list. Okay.
So I just wanted to remind folks to shop local with this Bloomington gift card option. 50 vendors or
businesses are signed up to be part of that. So you can go on the City of Bloomington website and find
it there. It's called the Bloomington gift card. And you can find that at BloomingtonIN.gov. The 250th
anniversary events will be occurring, I've learned, between February and July of 2026.
I remind people that there's a copy of the Declaration of Independence at the Lilly Library and the
IU campus. In one meeting I was at recently, it was about from the people on Kirkwood Avenue. And they're
concerned about when emergency management notifications occur and information goes out,
were seeking a more collaborative approach into how that all gets disseminated. I think they were feeling
a little non-unification in messages they were receiving. And they didn't give me exact examples, but
there was some discussion about that. The taste of Bloomington next year will either be Saturday,
August 1st, or rain date of Sunday, August 2nd.
And they will be closing down Dunn and Grant this year. So that should help with people walking back
and forth on Kirkwood there. Visit Bloomington is working on a culinary passport trail. They'll have
it ready approximately in January next month. Freeze Fest is coming up on January 23rd and January 24th.
And that'll be at Switchyard this year. And then
We were alerted that the economic impact of each home football game is six to seven million dollars.
And then we talked a little bit about, I think, the ice arrest that happened recently. And as I understand,
the hearing for that will be tomorrow in Chicago. Yes. So that is still ongoing. There are there is
good legal counsel, as I understand.
and we're hoping for the best there. So that's, I'll leave it at that. Thank you, we appreciate that.
All right, Councilor Wilts. Yeah, cool. I have a couple of things that are just minor updates.
Let's see here. I am trying to find my minor updates
I'm messing everything up. There we go. The Waste Reduction District of Monroe County does a lot of
really cool things. And one of the things I learned as a member of their board is that we now have a
private entity offering curbside residential compost pickup
weekly to anyone residing within the city limits of Bloomington or in the northern half of Monroe County
for now. They are out of counties up north they've got a wide coverage area and the company's name is
Richland Farms so if that is something that interests you please go ahead and go to their website and
go to the compostery
section of the website. It is very reasonable in terms of the cost. I'll leave it at that and let you
all explore. It's Richland Farms. The other thing I wanted to say from the Waste Reduction District
is that we've lost a couple of members of the Citizens Advisory Committee to the Waste Reduction District
and it's a very, I would say it's a very impactful committee
of citizens and if you have any interest in waste reduction and recycling and composting and learning
more about how to reduce and reuse throughout the county, consider applying to the citizens advisory
committee and that application is super short
And it is on the wastereductiondistrict.com site is what it looks like. Monroe County Waste Reduction
District, wastereductiondistrict.com. And you can navigate to the CAC or Citizens Advisory Committee.
That I believe is all I had. Crazy. Let me see here.
Yeah, that's all I had. Thank you. Liza, my voice. I just want to start off and I want to thank our
highway workers who have been out clearing roads in a really early front end kind of winter before I
think we were prepared for it and some real
Arctic blasts. So thanks them. Thanks also to our friends in the city who do the same in the city and
over in the town of Elstville where I was cruising around in some of that. And you can see all these
folks out there doing that. They're away from their families, they're out.
questionably bad weather, as well as our law enforcement, who also stuff respond and other first responders.
And so thanks to all those heroes, they get the job done. I also will say this. I try to say this annually
to folks at home. I sometimes watch social media and I get a little nervous because sometimes we expect
miracles out of massive snow storms where temperatures are dropping. Please be patient.
be patient with those who work with you for you and where you have to go. And I know that's easy for
me to say now, but these things are what they are. And we've got a lot of folks trying to cover a lot
of ground quickly. I also want to point out that in this weather, as we've talked about for numerous
times in the last couple weeks, severe
winter hits a lot of different people, including those who find themselves unhoused and outside, which
we've talked about a great deal. I want to thank the churches who banded together for the Bloomington
Severe Winter Emergency Shelter.
that it's downtown, you've got First United, you've got First United Methodist, First Presbyterian,
kind of doing that rotation. I'm sure there's other entities that are also jumping in there as well
as our traditional, and I hate to use that word, traditional providers that make things happen. These
are volunteers that go overnight, that they get this done so that others will be okay. And so that we
try to make sense of how we do this. One thing is if you're out there
and you're thinking that you've got a little time and you want to help that effort, I'm sure they would
love either support in being a volunteer or supporting financially, because a lot of times these folks
are raising this money as they go and doing it with just volunteers and best wishes and good hopes.
To find out more about that, you could go to BSWERS, B-S-W-E-R-S dot wordpress dot com. And then the
last thing I'll just say in this season is the council is a
we are allegedly done for the year. I look at Councillor Crossley, no one's more excited than her. But
as we are allegedly done, this is the last time at this mic, and Councillor Feidl talked about a hearing
for a member of our community up in Chicago. And I, friends, I don't know what is precisely going on.
I cannot put my feet on it or hands on it, but the snatching of people,
the grabbing of people, the things that go bump in the night on public property and grab people. That's
creepy stuff. That reminds me of stuff I read in history books in Little Grandview Elementary, and it
wasn't in the United States. Now, we haven't been saints. And there's a lot of folks that know exactly
what I mean by that in a variety of ways. But is this who we want to be?
And so, in a season where some of our faiths talk about nativity scenes and people that wandered across
border to flee oppression and ruin and death, is this who we really want to be as a country? So, more
than any time, look out for your neighbor, but my gosh.
If you're not down with any of this, let's let our federal representatives know this because this is
the United States of America built by people from all over this world that make it stronger. And this
community is a place that literally was built stronger. There was no original townie other than our
first generations that were here. And so we only get stronger with more people. We only get stronger
by being kind.
And friends, we got to do better than this. And if you're mad about it like I am, then call somebody.
Erin Houchin is your congresswoman. Todd Young, Jim Banks, they're your U.S. senators. And you can find
any of their information online and otherwise. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that. Yes, Councilor
Iverson. I want to share four things today. First,
We've talked a lot about the cold. We've talked about being patient with folks plowing, where folks
can go and sleep. But I want to mention something fun. On January 1st, Pain Town will have its Polar
Plunge. I will be there yet again. Costumes are encouraged. It is a really, really fun time. You can
find more details on Facebook. Just look up Pain Town Polar Plunge.
Crack of Dawn on January 1st is a lot of fun. If Crack of Dawn on January 1st is not when you are at
your best. There is another opportunity, people of Monroe County. The Lemon Drop Polar Plunge will take
place on January the 10th at 10 a.m. on Lake Lemon. Again, costumes are encouraged. Or, you know, whatever
bathing suit you want to wear on January 10th at Lake Lemon.
Number two, SUDAC is going to meet tomorrow. We are really excited. The commission has approved a contract
for us to have the Opioid Summit next year. We're working hard on that as well as getting a treatment
list of recommendations put together for the county.
The health board will meet this week. And so I'll be attending that and see what they're up to. And
then in addition to the last thing I'll mention is thank you to President Crossley for her year of service
to this community.
It is a lot. And there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes. And so thank you for your dedication
and your courage. Thank you also to our staff. Thank you for everything all four of you have done this
year. This has not been an easy year. The packets just seem to get longer and longer. And people add
stuff at the very last minute that you have to add and all the minutes. So thank you. Thank you. Thank
you to each and every one of you. Happy holidays. And may you all have a joyous new year.
Thank you. All right. In virtual land, Councilor Henry. Thank you, Madam President. And I'd like to
thank my colleagues for a good first year here on council. There's been a lot and we've worked through
a lot. I appreciate when community leaders leave from their seats and they have agency and we all just
stay in our lanes, but we lead from the seats we have. And I think everyone's done that this year.
It's been a joy to work with all of you. I have one kind of update comment and then I'll finish on a
light note since I'm the last to talk. So the Convention and Visitors Center Board of which I've served
on as a liaison for the past year, we had our last meeting. The first thing we're gonna see on our docket
in January is a request to appropriate funds for the Visit Bloomington's relocation of that center to
downtown on 4th Street from our old 37 location. They're eager to get their architectural work going
to get the visitor center piece opened, which will complement the work on the convention center. There's
a lot of good news coming out of that board. One statistic that came out that really relates to Mary
Morgan's heading home presentation earlier is that we have over 880
Airbnb is in our community. By comparison to other counties in Indiana, only Indianapolis and South
Bend have more. Places like Fort Wayne have less because they regulate them there by a sample. And so
when we think about the housing choices in the community and the 880 units are set aside for short-term
or Airbnb rentals, especially in the city of Bloomington, there's another rock to look under into maybe
how we're creating some challenges for housing for what Mr. Greiner mentioned
with the BDC and attracting businesses here to house workers as opposed to those units being rentals.
And so while that is going on from an economic standpoint, those homes do generate in keepers tax revenue
too. So while we are also beneficiaries of it, but there's,
There are some challenges there with that many units in our community that are set aside for that Airbnb
use. I hope the city of Bloomington through their hand office really takes up some regulatory behavior
in the next year to really think through how much is too much on that. But on the last note, I am sorry
I'm not with you all. I'm in the state of Ohio next door where there's a really a lot of sad Buckeye
fans, especially as I'm wearing my IU hat all over the state. I will do so on my way back through Columbus tomorrow.
I'll just leave it on that. Go IU, et cetera. We'll see you on the flip side after the Rose Bowl. Thanks,
everybody. Thank you. And make sure you chant the O-H-N-O as you wear your hat. Appreciate it. All right.
Thank you. OK, so last but not least, again, as we are in the spirit
Hopefully we can continue to have the spirit of the holidays all year round. But because there's a lot of dark.
I don't know how many times right now. But I will choose to shift focus to light. And so I just want
to say to the auditor staff, I always call them the team, the table team. I appreciate that. Everybody
has gone through or is going through a whole lot of stuff this year. And you all continue to show up
as much as you have for us. And we definitely appreciate that.
see other teams around. And I think that we have a better team in the county. And I'm not just saying,
but I'm saying. So that being said, I just appreciate all of you all. I know sometimes we can kind of
irk each other and just kind of do all the things. But we still smile and we say thank you. To the two
newbies on council, y'all did a phenomenal job. Counselor Henry and Counselor Feidl for stepping in.
There was a lot this year and every month this year we can highlight at least
to at least one event where the next month was like, hold my beer, there's more to come. But we continue
to persevere and we'll continue to do so in 2026. To my colleagues here, all of you virtual and Councilor
Huck who aren't here, I continue to be very grateful for all of you. There have been moments where I
did not think that we would be banded together with certain votes and situations.
that we you're shocked me. And I really appreciated that. And I think that, you know, again, sometimes
some of us kind of maybe pushed us more than others into uncomfortable moments. But again, I think,
you know, we need that because I think that I don't think I've seen the level of scrutiny of county
council ever.
And I think that we are doing this all for the right reasons. It's not for vanity. It's not for fame.
It's not for any of that. But we really care about our community. And we appreciate that. And I just
appreciate my colleagues really coming together, especially last week after I think it was Kat said
it was a six hour and 27 minute meeting. So I appreciate that. I know our meetings are a little bit
longer. But at least we get through a lot of the business.
and don't let people sit through there and table them. So that being said, I just, again, appreciate
that. I appreciate everybody. Also, we got a very nice card from the Monroe County Humane Association.
I think that was one of our group's people that we funded through the Sophia Travis Grant Committee.
So we appreciate hearing or seeing that. Again,
The other thing that I wanted to say is there has been a lot of conversation and I want my colleagues
to pay attention to it close as we continue to go through the year with the CIB and the redevelopment
commission and the city and the conversations about there's been some talk from council members on the
city side about land swaps and I've been trying to pay close attention to that. I don't think any of us have
have been privy to the conversation. However, I think we should stay tuned and be very mindful of what
our council colleagues do on 401 North Morton Street. And maybe they'll talk about it tomorrow. They
have a meeting. Their last meeting tomorrow is at 630. So again, just appreciate everybody, all the things.
department head and council or, you know, employees of county government. We definitely appreciate that.
And without that being said, we are adjourned for 2025. See y'all in 2026. Thank you.