Bloomington Wins the First Round of 2024 Strongest Towns Contest!

In celebration of winning the preliminary round for the 9th annual Strongest Towns Contest, please read our application! Make sure to vote for us in the following rounds!

How Bloomington is working to decrease the negative impacts of parking on their community.

As our city completes our new Downtown streetscape plan, the Bloomington Revivalists have been making every effort to establish themselves as both stakeholders and an influential force for re-examination and change. We attend any public meetings and engage any and all fellow citizens, designers, architects, and civic officials in order to share our perspectives, resources, and ideas, deeply influenced by Strong Towns. Currently, the plan is slated to cut on street parking in order to put in place bike lanes and expanded pedestrian space.

How Bloomington is building streets that are dominated by people and accommodate automobiles—not the other way around.

Bloomington is attempting to re-allocate the space currently devoted to automobile traffic and redesign the streetscape, reducing the number of lanes, increasing public recreation space, adding bike lanes, and minimizing parking. Especially with the state highway controlled by the Illinois Department of Transportation that surrounds downtown, their redesign plan is slated to remove one of the four lanes and add cycle lanes. We are working to reduce that number down to two lanes. Recently, the city built a pedestrian island on Front Street to narrow the lanes and have reclaimed the parking lanes for dining on other streets.

How Bloomington is making progress toward greater transparency in budgeting and accounting.

At any and all city council meetings, the budget must be adopted and approved, at which time what is being proposed to be spent is publicized and public comment is encouraged. In addition, the city government publishes videos on their YouTube channel explaining the ins and outs of the city budget, and the information is available on their website with full budgets and a budget in brief. The city has commissioned a master plan called Bring It On Bloomington that accounts taxes and liabilities for all parcels in the city. However, we can do more as a community to show our infrastructure liabilities. The Strong Towns Local Conversation has also done a rudimentary tax revenue per acre analysis using public data.

How Bloomington is promoting the incremental development of more housing options and greater housing flexibility.

Our city has a major housing crisis as a new electric truck factory opened. In part due to the work of our Local Conversation group, city officials rewrote the zoning code to allow for accessory dwelling units in the core neighborhoods. Other grassroots groups in the area, such as the Bloomington-Normal Community Land Trust (started in part by Bloomington’s Local Conversation group), have championed a new model of homeownership. Recently, this has manifested in the McLean County Regional Planning Commission’s Forum for Housing Needs. The combined attendance at that forum was over 100 people, both in person and virtually, which shows that the general populace was supportive of upzoning, removing parking, and adding overall more density. Our Local Conversation is working with the regional planning commission for recommendations regarding upzoning and loosening zoning requirements like lot sizes and setbacks.

How Bloomington is shifting focus toward maintaining their existing infrastructure instead of just building more roads.

There have been serious efforts to engage state officials to negotiate changes to the plans for the state-controlled portion of our cityscape. There has even been consideration for whether the city could manage to take ownership and responsibility for the roads in order to exert a more defining and transforming impact on these roads. At public comment, local citizens come to express their dissatisfaction with the state of the roadways and new proposed stroads. We as an organization are looking to promote more collective action and ownership to fix and repair what the city has not been able to do.

How Bloomington leaders engage with the public and listen to them.

In addition to public meetings and other forums, four of the nine members of the city council are active in our Revivalists organization, and are very willing to listen and advocate on our behalf in their capacities as civic officials. The city council member for Downtown and Westside has been a champion for Strong Town ideas and has held several open house issues held by businesses downtown. Another city council member, who is also a member of our Local Conversation, has taken it upon herself to get involved directly with the housing efforts by joining the board of the new land trust. The regional planning commission has made an effort to engage the community regarding their housing action plan, with several forums with over 100 attendees each.

What inspires Bloomington to keep working to make the town stronger and sets it apart as truly special?

The city boasts a diverse and vibrant cultural scene: two universities, a wide variety of independent businesses, a strong working class manufacturing sector, a unique past of historical significance, a beautiful downtown with weekly farmers’ markets and other public events, as well a small, but passionately active citizenry. Localized efforts to revitalize impoverished areas of the community, such as the West Bloomington Revitalization Project, use Strong Towns methods to improve the community. Neighbors share veggies with each other, people can volunteer at the bike cooperative in exchange for a bike, and everyone can rent tools from the tool library. We also have the Constitution Trail network, a car-free backbone of our infrastructure. This trail is connected to the local Amtrak service with direct routes to Chicago and St. Louis.