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PODCAST

The 812

Steve Volan / Plateia Media

The 812 is a daily show about the basic workings of city government in Bloomington, Indiana. Hosted by Steve Volan, a recently-retired five-term member of Bloomington"s City Council, The 812"s primary feature is a half-hour interview with elected and appointed officials in city government, as well as with members of boards, commissions and not-for-profits providing services to the city. Produced by Plateia Media.

government

All Episodes

39:32

197 [S3E44]: Comparing "College Metro" Notes with...

The 812 ·

2025/05/14

We talk shop with our counterpart in the state’s other major college-dominated metropolitan area. The city of West Lafayette, the home of Purdue University, only became a second-class city like Lafayette and Bloomington in 2013, with a mayor and a nine-member council. Now a city of 45,000, it's experienced 50% growth in a decade, thanks to pressure from a growing Purdue student body attracted by a tuition rate frozen since cityhood. David Sanders is a councilmember at large in West Lafayette....

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35:44

196 [S3E43]: County Assessor Judy Sharp Talks Senate...

The 812 ·

2025/05/12

Judy Sharp, the Monroe County Assessor, has seen it all in her decades in office, and is back with an update on property taxes. We talk with her about the debate between whether assessors should be elected or appointed, and in the second half, all about Senate Bill 1, which passed the statehouse in April, and had a number of surprises, mostly unpleasant, for municipal and county governments. [Note: We had problems with the quality of the audio in this episode's interview, which we're wo...

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33:08

195 [S3E42] Liz Feitl, Monroe County Councilmember...

The 812 ·

2025/05/09

Liz Feitl served as a union organizer and leader at IU and then with United Way of Monroe County for decades. Seven years ago she won the Toby Strout Lifetime Achievement Award from the City of Bloomington Commission on the Status of Women. Since winning the local Democratic Party caucus on January 19, Feitl is the newest member of the Monroe County Council, replacing the late Cheryl Munson. We get into her background, the breadth of her new portfolio, and her take on the job. Support the sho...

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36:50

194 [S3E41]: Rethinking "Public Safety" in...

The 812 ·

2025/05/07

The murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020 exploded into the national consciousness and raised many questions. One of the most important was: knowing that our society has plenty of biases, knowing that perception is reality for a great number of people, should we count on sworn officers alone to improve public safety? In Bloomington, the city council approved a new commission to address that question. The Community Advisory on Public Safety (CAPS) Commission, approv...

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34:53

193 [S3E40]: Miah Michaelsen, Executive Director of...

The 812 ·

2025/05/05

To the present. Miah Michaelsen is an old hand at the intersection of government and the arts. She's been at the Indiana Arts Commission since 2015, where she's now Executive Director. Before that, she served eight years in the Kruzan Administration, serving as Bloomington's first Assistant Economic Development Director for the Arts. As if that weren't enough, before that she served four years as the Executive Director of the Bloomington Area Arts Council. We talk about the current fiscal aus...

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35:46

192 [S3E39]: Amy Oelsner, Founder and DIrector of...

The 812 ·

2025/05/02

We speak with Amy Oelsner, the founder and director of Girls Rock Bloomington, which teaches girls from ages 8 to 14 all the elements of a rock and roll band. Girls Rock has been the beneficiary of grants from the city Arts Commission as well as from the Monroe County Council's Sophia Travis Fund. Oelsner is also a musical artist in her own right, with nine albums under her belt under the stage name "Amy O". For her work with Girls Rock, she was given the Emerging Leader Award by the Blooming...

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36:14

191 [S3E38]: Mia Beach and Hannah Airriess of Redbud...

The 812 ·

2025/04/30

We've been highlighting some of the programs of the Center for Sustainable Living, an organization that acts as an umbrella for nonprofit ideas that might be too small to be their own 501(c)(3). One of the constituent organizations in the CSL incubator is Redbud Books, which opened just over a year ago at 408 W. Kirkwood. A one-room bookstore entirely run by volunteers and open seven days a week, it also acts as a community center. Redbud screens movies, hosts meetings and stages events throu...

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35:29

190 [S3E37]: The 50-Year Tradition of Public Access...

The 812 ·

2025/04/28

Community Access Television Services is the television station in the Monroe County Public Library. For 50 years, CATS (formerly known as Bloomington Community Access Television, or BCAT) has provided access to channels over cable and the Internet for public meetings and then some, and has provided access to equipment and studio space for the public to make television programming. It's one of the first organizations in the country to provide live and recorded coverage of local government meet...

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36:03

189 [S3E36]: About the Bloomington Fire Department,...

The 812 ·

2025/04/25

It's The 812's first look at one of the most basic local services, the fire department. Our guest, Tom Figolah, is the Department's Fire Prevention Officer, and his title reflects a trend that may not be self-evident to people who are used to fire departments being just about putting out fires. That's reactive; better is to anticipate potential fires so that they don't start in the first place. Our conversation gets into what they call "community risk reduction", as well as the city's fire in...

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35:56

188 [S3E35]: MDWST FABLE and the Power of a Grant...

The 812 ·

2025/04/23

Today's show is a case study in Bloomington's arts economy. Our guests are the founders of MDWST FABLE, a series of performing-arts shows that involve other artists in the Bloomington area, largely centered around storytelling. Tristra Newyear and Matt Rice, both of whom work for local creative media companies and who are creatives in their own rights, began collaborating on events just last year. In today's innings, they talk about their ideas and their work, and how key to their ability to ...

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36:14

187 [S3E34]: GIS Coordinator John Baeten, on the...

The 812 ·

2025/04/21

John Baeten came to town as a visiting assistant professor in IU's geography department, where he spent time doing, among other things, a reconstruction of maps of Bloomington from the past. That led to his current post as the GIS Coordinator for Monroe County. GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems, of which there are many at the county. In fact, it's hard for any local government to do their jobs these days without some kind of GIS capacity. Baeten talks with us about all sorts of in...

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37:53

186 [S3E33] Getting to Know Bloomington's Sibling...

The 812 ·

2025/04/11

So you may know that Bloomington has been a sister city to Posoltega, Nicaragua since 1988, and to Santa Clara, Cuba since 1999. Sister Cities International has been pairing cities across national borders for many years now. But Vicki Veenker asked herself: why can't two American cities be sibs? And that's how Bloomington, Indiana became the sibling city of Palo Alto, California, where Veenker is the Vice Mayor, as well as the founder of the Sibling Cities USA program. We learn about how the ...

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36:39

185 ]S3E31]: Understanding Ellettsville with Its Town...

The 812 ·

2025/04/09

In the incorporated place that is Bloomington's primary official suburb, there's no mayor. The part-time town council in Ellettsville is the legislative and executive body -- sort of like the board of commissioners that runs the county -- but they're also the fiscal body. They're everything; in Indiana, only counties and cities have separation of powers. Scott Oldham is in his nineteenth year on the five-member council for the town of more than 8000, and currently serves as president. H...

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39:01

184 [S3E31]: "Big Mike" Glab Makes Big Talk about...

The 812 ·

2025/04/07

Today is a Work Session, an interview with a member of local media where we talk about the city and local issues of the day. Michael "Big Mike" Glab is a former reporter for the Chicago Reader who's covered every kind of news, hard and soft. After 50 years in the Windy City, he eventually found himself in Limestone Country, where he became the host of Big Talk, a half-hour interview show not unlike this one. Where this show's theme is local government, Big Talk focus more on creative Blooming...

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39:57

183 [S3E30]: Tackling Problemas with the City...

The 812 ·

2025/04/04

The 812 converts to "El Ocho Doce" for the day, to welcome representatives from the Commission on Hispanic and Latino Affairs, which "works to identify and research the issues which impact those populations in Bloomington, especially in the areas of health, education, public safety and cultural competency." They help break the language barrier that prevents many residents from accessing services like medical care or housing, through forums on mental health or orienting newcomers to the commun...

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36:37

182 [S3E29] All About the Trashion Refashion Runway...

The 812 ·

2025/04/02

One person's trash is another's treasure...or so the Trashion Refashion Runway Show tries to demonstrate. The 16th annual event will be presented by Plato's Closet at the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre April 13. The virtually all-volunteer event presents and models clothes designed almost entirely from waste, recycled, or upcycled materials. We talk about promoting sustainability through haute couture, the history of Trashion, and all about how the event works with Devta Kidd, producer of this year'...

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37:28

181 [S3E28]: The Taste of Bloomington Returns, Says...

The 812 ·

2025/03/31

Even before they make the formal announcement later this morning, we have details on the official revival of the Taste of Bloomington, the summer celebration of this city's bustling local restaurant scene that happened for 35 years before the pandemic said we couldn't have nice things. Anyway, the Taste is back -- for at least one year, anyway -- courtesy of the Chocolate Moose. It's moving from its longtime home in the parking lot at City Hall to all five blocks of East Kirkwood Avenue, and ...

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34:43

180 [S3E27]: Andrea "De" de la Rosa on Managing the...

The 812 ·

2025/03/28

We talk about the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association. It's run by a city board of directors appointed by mayor and council. The BUEA oversees the city's Urban Enterprise Zone. Businesses and residents of the Zone can benefit tax-wise from the Enterprise Zone's Investment Deduction; revenue from the EZID generates a pot of money in the mid-six-figures annually. Someone has to figure out how to distribute each year -- which is harder than it sounds. Andrea "De" de la Rosa is our guest tod...

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37:46

179 [S3E26]: How Court-Appointed Special Advocates Go...

The 812 ·

2025/03/26

A person who advocates in court for those who can't for themselves is known as a guardian ad litem. But there's an even greater need for children who have suffered abuse and/or neglect and find themselves lost in the justice system. Every state except North Dakota has court-appointed special advocates, or "CASAs" for short. Despite being an integral part of the local justice system, Monroe County's CASA system [is not funded by] gets only partial funding from county government; it became a no...

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39:54

178 [S3E25]: The Lake Monroe Water Fund: Raising...

The 812 ·

2025/03/24

Today we're talking specifically about a topic that could take several episodes to discuss: the primary source of drinking water in metropolitan Bloomington. The reservoir commonly known as Lake Monroe is the largest body of water inside the state of Indiana. It was the state's idea to put a university in the middle of nowhere in 1818, and the city that grew up around it was always in danger of losing the university to Indianapolis because of the lack of water. We outgrew Lake Griffy, then La...

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218 results

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