"The Bloomington Alternative - 2015 Mayoral Edition Interviews" will play back-to-back-to back at the following times on The Library Channel (Comcast Channel 3). Each candidate for the Democratic nomination for Mayor in the May 5 Primary -- Darryl Neher, John Hamilton and John Linnemeir -- participated.

Linnemeier has dropped out of the race, throwing his support to City Councilman Darryl Neher. His name will still appear on the ballot.

The interviews feature each candidate's responses to the same questions about homelessness/housing, downtown development, police and deer. They run between 50 minutes and an hour, more or less.

Each candidate was also asked to define the term progressive.

The interviews will run in their entirety.

• Thursday, April 30: 7:35 p.m.  (Neher, Hamilton, Linnemeier)
• Friday, May 1: 7:30 p.m. (Hamilton, Neher, Linnemeier)
• Saturday, May 2: 12:30 p.m. (Neher, Hamilton, Linnemeier)
• Sunday, May 3: 6 p.m. (Linnemeier, Hamilton, Neher)

Post-production work was provided by Bloomington's Community Access Television Services.

The interviews will be posted to YouTube and The Bloomington Alternative website.

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Democratic mayoral candidates Darryl Neher and John Hamilton both have suggested reviving the “dormant” Housing Trust Fund to address the chronic lack of low-cost and affordable housing in Bloomington.

“I support creative financing of affordable housing, such as … activating our long-dormant Housing Trust Fund,” Hamilton wrote in response to a question from the League of Women Voters.

Dear friends and readers,

I have decided to briefly revive The Bloomington Alternative to take advantage of a second-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a lifelong political junkie – the chance to cover a contested election for Bloomington mayor. Since I moved off campus and into the Bryan Park neighborhood in 1971 (the first of three such moves), the only close race I recall was John Fernandez versus Charlotte Zietlow in the 1995 Democratic Primary.

My aging memory’s dependability aside, it is a fact that this may be the last race in which the outcome isn't a forgone conclusion for a decade or more, so I’m jumping back in, even though I really don’t have the time. The Bloomington Alternative – 2015 Mayoral Edition will be a work in progress, but here’s how I see it going.

The centerpiece will be on-camera interviews with the three Democratic candidates on the May 5 ballot: Darryl Neher, John Hamilton and John Linnemeier. The interviews are being scheduled between April 16 and 19. They will be taped and later rebroadcast on Community Access Television Services (CATS) as part of their lead up to the election. Linnemeier and Neher have scheduled theirs. I am waiting to hear from Hamilton.

Because I have been outside the inside political scene for many years, the interviews will focus on four issues I have come face to face with while walking, biking and driving through the slice of Bloomington I travel most, a triangular-shaped path between Bryan Park, Downtown and Ernie Pyle Hall:

• Homelessness/housing,
• Downtown development,
• Police/crime, and
• Urban deer.

There are dozens of other issues I'd like to explore, but we won’t have time to discuss them all. And I have multiple, competing deadlines between now and Primary Day anyway. I'll do what I can.

As I try to get up to speed, I will, at a minimum, be sharing what I learn on the Alternative and, for now, on my Facebook Page, where I reported that almost $900,000 sits untapped in a city fund that is supposed to be helping combat unaffordable housing.

Friend me on Facebook to follow this and other discussions.

Steve

Peace & Justice News is a collection of news items collected by Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene. Today's edition includes:

• Global education strike planned for the fall
• Surveillance of citizens with automatic license plate recognition cameras
• Drone use inside the United States
• Feminist punk band Pussy Riot on trial in Russia
• Pfizer bribing foreign physicians to hike sales
• Cutting funding for nuclear weapons
• Cuba lifts ban on anti-Castro musicians on the radio
• Women farm workers win sexual harassment case
• British workers in solidarity with trade unionists in Turkey
• Expulsion from school for pregnancy

While Mitt Romney trips over his tongue with hysterical predictability and Barack Obama persists in calling America's economic criminal class folks, the two leading progressive candidates for president are putting it on the line, in Dr. Jill Stein's case boldly crossing it.

Less than a month after securing the Green Party nomination, Stein emerged from a Philadelphia jail on Aug. 2 declaring that a night behind bars should be "a required experience for anyone in public office." Both she and running mate Cheri Honkala were arrested the day before for protesting foreclosure policies at a Fannie Mae office on the city's Banker's Row.

And in a lengthy Q&A with The Nation's Sasha Abramsky, Justice Party candidate Rocky Anderson called the Democratic Party "irredeemable" and Obama a "phony" on the issue of gay marriage.

"His position on equality was evolving?" the former Democratic mayor of Salt Lake City asked incredulously.
 

Downtown Bloomington, with its upscale restaurants, bustling bars and East Coast-style boutiques and nail salons – all brimming with the rich and their progeny – has always advanced a false image of the Southern Indiana town so many describe with utopian superlatives. The elite do indeed do well here. The state's richest man lived and died here. Indiana University professors, on average, knock down $128,400 a year, according to the American Association of University Professors. A handful of wealthy speculators, developers and their professional support networks have enriched themselves turning the city into a playground for the rich.

But for the rest, the latest 2012 Kids Count Data Book from the Annie E. Casey Foundation presents a more accurate image of IU's allegedly idyllic hometown. Nearly three in 10 Monroe County children in 2011 were poor enough to receive free lunches in the county's two school systems, according to the annual report. Another 7 percent qualified for reduced-price lunches.

Peace & Justice News is a collection of news items collected by Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene. Today's edition includes:

• Indiana’s Camp Atterbury one of 64 U.S. drone bases
• Vote for Hyatt as the country’s worst hotel employer
• Congressional opponents of women’s health attacking again
• Happy 50^th to Walmart
• Global elite evades taxes to the tune of $21 trillion
• Most minimum-wage workers at large, profitable companies
• New Israeli ship operates without people on board
• Petition demanding troop withdrawal from Afghanistan now
• Judge prevents closure of Mississippi’s last abortion clinic
• Activist arrested near White House for protesting hemp ban

Monroe County social service agencies are seeking alternative ways to raise revenues as private and public support for their missions decreases and the need for assistance increases. As bleak economic times cripple the impoverished community, agencies are turning to collaboration and merger to increase efficiency.

Local agencies receive public funding from two City of Bloomington sources – Jack Hopkins Social Service Program grants and Community Development Block Grants (CDBG).

“The Hopkins fund is named after a city council member named Jack Hopkins who had this vision that this fund, completely independent of any state or federal influences, would be started locally, from our local tax base,” City Council and Hopkins Committee Member Andy Ruff said in an interview in his office in Sycamore Hall on July 22.

Peace & Justice News is a collection of news items collected by Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene. Today's edition includes:

• 2012 likely to be journalists’ deadliest year so far
• Protestors charged with third-degree riot for defending house from foreclosure
• Aid for Haitian earthquake victims goes to build hotels
• Facts about inequality in the U.S.
• Community-labor alliance spurs unionization effort
• War Resister confined to sanctuary of Canadian church
• Military recruiting troops through motorsports marketing
• Texas Wal-Mart becomes nation’s largest single-story library
• Chinese Apple workers undergoing superexploitation
• Torture in CIA 'black site' secret prison in Poland

Peace & Justice News is a collection of news items collected by Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene. Today's edition includes:

• New national diners’ guide helps make wise restaurant choices
• Dell 20^th corporation to stop funding ALEC
• New Venezuelan laws give more power to communities
• TIAA-CREF divests from Caterpillar
• Increasing repression against Iranian labor rights activists
• Israeli 'refuser' on a hunger strike
• Philadelphia adopts resolution to redirect military spending to communities
• FDA helps companies exploit patients with Alzheimer’s
• Nonprofit organizations with ties to industry
• Congress poised to slash food stamps, program that helps minority family farmers