If you've just stumbled across The 812 Show, welcome! It's a snapshot of the establishment in Bloomington and Monroe County, Indiana. In our more than 200 episodes, we've tackled issues like housing, transportation, animal welfare, economic development, and tax assessment. We've interviewed elected officials -- everyone from the mayor to the coroner -- we've talked with, appointed officials, members of boards and commissions, members of nonprofits, and then some. Throughout 2024 and 2025, we ...
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If you've just stumbled across The 812 Show, welcome! It's a snapshot of the establishment in Bloomington and Monroe County, Indiana. In our more than 200 episodes, we've tackled issues like housing, transportation, animal welfare, economic development, and tax assessment. We've interviewed elected officials -- everyone from the mayor to the coroner -- we've talked with, appointed officials, members of boards and commissions, members of nonprofits, and then some. Throughout 2024 and 2025, we ...
If you've just stumbled across The 812 Show, welcome! It's a snapshot of the establishment in Bloomington and Monroe County, Indiana. In our more than 200 episodes, we've tackled issues like housing, transportation, animal welfare, economic development, and tax assessment. We've interviewed elected officials -- everyone from the mayor to the coroner -- we've talked with, appointed officials, members of boards and commissions, members of nonprofits, and then some. Throughout 2024 and 2025, we ...
We're still trying to wrap our heads around CDFIs -- community development financial institutions -- and this time we think we've cracked the code. We welcome back John Zody, the executive director of CDFI-Friendly Bloomington. He was last on the show in May 2024; for his followup he's brought along their program coordinator Emma Yoder, to further break down the concept of mission-based lending. CDFIs are not like regular banks; they don't hold people's money. They only loan money to individu...
Bloomington has won two Gold Medals for its Parks Department. It's not just because of nice facilities like Switchyard Park or the B-Line Trail. Sure, a city needs to set aside physical places for greenery et al. But land doesn't program itself. Hence the phrase "Parks...AND Recreation." Today we speak with Leslie Brinson, the director of the Recreation Division of the city Parks and Recreation Department. She tells us about the several venues that the division programs, and its many ty...
Our Extra Innings segments feature bonus interview material that didn't make it into our regular episodes. We haven't shared these Extra Innings with you yet, and it's about time we did. John Connell, the General Manager of Bloomington Transit, and Shelley Strimaitis, their Planning & Special Projects Manager, were on the show in May 2025 (to talk about new bus service to Ivy Tech and Cook and their new raft of all-electric buses). They stuck around to discuss the several new apps p...
Since 2015, the online magazine The Limestone Post has held a kind of middle ground among Bloomington publications, combining the arts, the outdoors and other lifestyle features with longform investigative journalism. We talk with Dason Anderson, the executive editor, about how the Post works and the challenges it faces in an era of local journalism all but consumed by social media. Their response in 2019 was to switch from a for-profit to a non-profit publication model, which has helped them...
Today is another feast of Extra Innings -- extensions of interviews with past guests that we've never made available before. Two guests who have been involved in art as a public matter also had more to say than we could fit into our regular half-hour interview format. In September 2024, (hear the original interview here), Holly Warren, the city's assistant director for the arts, talked in Extras about her back history in the arts; her interest in the city going beyond having a public arts pla...
Lately we've been diving into our hoard of Extra Innings interviews with prior guests. Today, two new never-before-heard clips with guests from nonprofit entities between Kirkwood and Sixth Streets whose names begin with "Monroe County." The first two-thirds are devoted to our Extra Inning with Sara Laughlin, who visited in September 2024 to talk about her volunteer work with Teachers' Warehouse. In her Extra Inning she talks about her former job, as director of the Monroe County Public Libra...
[Charlotte Zietlow passed away Wednesday at the age of 91. She was a pillar of the community who will be greatly missed. This is an encore presentation of our interview with her, recorded in January 2024.] Charlotte Zietlow is well-known in Bloomington and Monroe County for many reasons. This episode focuses her time on the Bloomington City Council in the early 1970s -- the subject of her second book, "1971: How We Won". She talks about how the previous council was unresponsive to public inpu...
This week we're exploring our archive of extra interview segments that we didn't have room for in the original episodes, segments that we call "Extra Innings". It's new material, never-before aired, that gives further insight into the way decision-makers think. In these Extra Innings segments: David Hittle, the director of the Planning & Transportation Department for the city of Bloomington (originally interviewed in Episode 123), focuses on the Transportation portion of his unusual title...
Switchyard Park opened in 2019, during the administration of Mayor John Hamilton. It's a stop on the B-Line Trail, another beloved amenity, which opened in 2009, during the administration of Mayor Mark Kruzan. But those places didn't happen by magic or overnight. They were only made possible by decisions made all the way back in 1998, during the administration of Mayor John Fernandez. Our guest today is Randy Lloyd, who was the city's first director of economic development from 1996 to 2001. ...
We've been focusing on the tenant side of the local housing equation lately. We hosted Student Legal Services a few episodes back; today, we meet their cousins at Indiana Legal Services. Nick Minaudo is a lawyer for the Bloomington branch of ILS, a statewide nonprofit. They handle a wide variety of civil cases, like family law and reentry work. But they handle a lot of cases involving tenants, and their services are not just for IU students. We talk about how they're funded, how to apply for ...
There's been a precedent for table-turning on this show, in which the guest interviews the host. (As a former city councilmember, Steve has been interviewed on this very program by the rizz-tastic current at-large councilmember Isak Asare.) Last year the Bloomington city administration and council saw fit to merge the Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety, Traffic, and Parking Commissions into a single Transportation Commission, which started meeting this past June. Your host was named to the new Com...
[This is an encore presentation recorded in April. We'll be back with a new episode Thursday.] John Baeten came to town as a visiting assistant professor in IU’s geography department, where he spent time doing, among other things, a reconstruction of maps of Bloomington from the past. That led to his current post as the GIS Coordinator for Monroe County. GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems, of which there are many at the county. In fact, it’s hard for any local government to do thei...
Melanie Vehslage works for the Youth Services Bureau, which serves to "reduce negative childhood conditions" in Monroe County. A department of county government, the Bureau also strives to promote what they call "safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments" for local youth, which is part of Vehslage's job as their Prevention Coordinator. She came to the Bureau from the county Health Department, where she worked for 8 years in harm reduction and population health. From her we'll lea...
The local university enrolls 43,000 students in person but only houses 13,000 of them. The other 30,000, almost all of them tenants, live in the city of Bloomington, a city that is only 80,000, students included. That's where our guest comes in. Stacee Williams is the director of Student Legal Services at IUB. They're a full-service civil law firm that happens to be ensconced within IU, and offers free legal representation and advice to IU students who have to pay the fee for it each semester...
Lake Week at The 812 continues with Maggie Sullivan, the Watershed Coordinator for the Friends of Lake Monroe. It's a non-profit organization whose goal is to bring together the many entities that have some responsibility for the reservoir: the Army Corps of Engineers, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Monroe County, and the City of Bloomington Utilities among others -- because none of them are directly related or responsible to each other, and no one is specifically responsible fo...
It's Lake Week on The 812: we're talking about one of the Bloomington metropolitan area's great glories: its freshwater lakes. Reservoirs, actually. Our subject is not the smallest, Lake Griffy, nor the largest, Lake Monroe, but the one in between, Lake Lemon. Named after former mayor Tom Lemon, it was Bloomington's primary water source for more than a decade. Today we find out all about the Lake Lemon Conservancy District with its manager, Adam Casey, including the history of water in Monroe...
The Community Kitchen of Monroe County is part of the local safety net for people experiencing food insecurity. While it targets those in need, there are no eligibility requirements to receive a meal there. Vicki Pierce, their executive director for more than 20 years, and Kyla Cox Deckard, their treasurer who's been on their board of directors since 2009, talk about how they differ from other organizations dealing with food insecurity like Mother Hubbard's Cupboard or the Hoosier Hills Food ...
There have been cries lately for "viewpoint diversity" in academia, but for years in this college town there's been a student organization actively soliciting viewpoint diversity. Our guest today, Elizabeth Conley, is the president of the IU chapter of BridgeUSA, since 2017 a national organization of students devoted to constructive dialogue on political issues. Their vision is of "a thriving US democracy where leaders and citizens engage in respectful, productive dialogue." We talk about the...
When it comes to the housing market, we've had city departments, and we're working on guests who can talk about the demand side of the equation such as advisers for tenants' rights. This week, we're talking with people from the supply side of the housing equation. Mark Figg is a developer who built hundreds of units in Bloomington, in projects large and small. He's been a landlord, and an appraiser. And for a decade he was president of the Monroe County Apartment Association, and a form...
If you've just stumbled across The 812 Show, welcome! It's a snapshot of the establishment in Bloomington and Monroe County, Indiana. In our more than 200 episodes, we've tackled issues like housing, transportation, animal welfare, economic development, and tax assessment. We've interviewed elected officials -- everyone from the mayor to the coroner -- we've talked with, appointed officials, members of boards and commissions, members of nonprofits, and then some. Throughout 2024 and 2025, we ...
