Friends,
Last month a couple hundred folks gathered online and at the beautifully restored Waldron Arts Center for my 8th and final State of the City. You can check out the full evening event or transcripts here. But in case that dose is too much, let me share a summary.
Our theme -- “Your Future is Here” – meant not only we hope everyone here today sees a vibrant future here, but also is a message to the world at large, and future residents. Two families who joined us, one from Ukraine and one from Congo, reminded us how important that open door is.
We thanked 16 extraordinary department heads and our Mayor’s Office team for so many accomplishments together over the past 7 years. I’m very proud of the work we’ve done, together with our community, to advance Bloomington in many ways. You can get details here. And watch for “Your City at Work” in coming weeks too. The state of the city is very strong, and we are very well positioned for the future.
As a final such message, it also felt important to look to that future with some cautions and some calls to action.
Our future is not automatic – like thousands of cities around the globe, we have choices to make to be the best community we can be. Change is hard, and essential. We can be limited by nostalgia or lethargy. We need to be self-reliant. The state often is at cross purposes with our goals, and even with great federal partnerships in the short run, we cannot count on that consistently.
I called us to imagine four big areas of improvement by 2030, and related specific goals:
For the climate emergency, continue to invest annually in our Climate Action Plan, and build America’s very best small-city public transit system
For better jobs and quality of life, enhance collaborations with IU and others, and establish and fund universal, free pre-K for our residents
For more affordable housing, continue our momentum, and accept more density and height to avoid more sprawl and unsustainable patterns, and plan for a 30% growth in our metropolitan area population, to 250,000.
For public health and criminal justice reform, immediately invest new local dollars in public health and commit that for every new dollar invested in incarceration, we’ll invest at least a dollar in new services like mental health and substance use disorder programs.
Achieving success in those four areas would be a recipe for our future, to help us be the welcoming, inclusive, thriving community we imagine and value.
Two more ingredients are needed in that recipe. We need financial capacity, which we have plenty of, with still the second lowest income tax rate among our seven contiguous counties and a very strong local fiscal condition. And we need political will. That takes political leaders willing to challenge us, and mobilize us, and focus on results not process. I strongly believe our public sentiment supports these advances, and I hope and trust that our politics can deliver them.
That was the gist of the State of the City message: your future is here, so long as we claim it. Thanks for all that you do to help claim that future.
Democratically yours,
John Hamilton
p.s. The outdoor farmers market season begins on Saturday, April 1st outside City Hall. As in past years, Mayor's Office staff and Department Heads will take turns participating in "Mayor at the Market" every week, beginning with Deputy Mayor Mary Catherine Carmichael on the 1st--we hope to see you there!