Bloomington Common Council Deliberation Session on Outcome-Based Budgeting and 2027 Priorities - December 11, 2025
Bloomington Common Council Deliberation Session on Outcome-Based Budgeting and 2027 Priorities - December 11, 2025
The Bloomington Common Council held a deliberation session on December 11, 2025 (transcript indicates December 10th start time) to discuss outcome-based budgeting and begin prioritizing outcomes for the 2027 budget. Councilmember Piedmont Smith organized the session, which focused on reviewing outcomes from existing city plans, adding new outcomes, and identifying priorities. The council debated adding an environment category, discussed structural challenges in using existing plans, and began adding outcomes for housing and homelessness, high performing government, and economic development. Public comments were heard, and a prioritization exercise was initiated but not fully completed due to time.
Public Comments & Testimony
- Chris Ri from the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce expressed support for incremental improvements and emphasized the importance of maintaining city assets. He also discussed economic development, noting the need for growth that brings working-age residents and warned against growth for growth's sake.
- Kevin Keogh, a lifelong Bloomington resident and accountant, stressed the need for a clear understanding of fixed versus flexible costs and the use of meaningful, limited key performance indicators (KPIs) tied to outcomes. He encouraged the council to pair every prioritized outcome with measurable indicators before funding decisions.
Discussion Items
- Adding Environment as a Category: Councilmembers voiced support for adding environment as a seventh outcome bucket, citing resident priorities and the existence of relevant plans. Several council members noted the cross-cutting nature of many outcomes and questioned the utility of broad buckets, but the consensus was to add environment.
- Structural Challenges: Councilmember Flaherty challenged the usefulness of broad categories, expressing concern about transparency and the risk of arbitrary groupings. Deputy Mayor Gretchen Knapp explained that the accounting software requires top-level categories and that more granular program data would come later. The discussion also highlighted unevenness in formal city plans (e.g., no comprehensive plan for public safety or economic development) and differing frameworks among existing plans.
- Housing and Homelessness Outcomes: The council added outcomes such as increasing the speed/ease of permitting and development approval (with caveats about design quality), making homelessness rare, brief, and non-repeating, coordinated wraparound services, temporary shelter options, transit-oriented development, and follow-through on already planned projects (e.g., Hopewell and Summit).
- High Performing Government Outcomes: Additions included creating city plans for areas lacking them, increasing capacity to implement existing plans, maintaining city assets, improving council-clerk functioning and accessibility, engaging in outreach rather than expecting public to come to meetings, and improving communication between council and administration.
- Economic Development Outcomes: The council considered renaming the category to "economic health" and added outcomes such as attracting employers offering living wage jobs, activating vacant commercial spaces, creating vibrant third places/neighborhood hubs, and focusing on per capita economic growth and quality of life (arts, etc.). Councilmember Rallo suggested including urban village centers from the comprehensive plan.
- Prioritization Exercise: Councilmembers placed post-it notes with their top three priorities on boards for each of the three categories discussed, but due to time, the results were not fully reported out.
Key Outcomes
- The council agreed to add "environment" as a seventh category in the outcome-based budgeting framework.
- The fiscal committee will record the council's prioritized outcomes from the exercise and use them as a basis for future discussions.
- The council plans to hold additional deliberation sessions to cover remaining categories (public safety, transportation, etc.).
- Public comments emphasized the need for measurable KPIs and clear costing, which will inform the process.
- Announcements: A special council session on the Hopewell development is scheduled for Monday, December 15th at 4:00 p.m. in the Allison Conference Room. The last regular session of 2025 is Wednesday, December 17th at 6:30 p.m. A committee on council processes meeting is scheduled for December 12th (tomorrow evening) at 6:00 p.m. (Note: transcript references December 10th start date; meeting date per metadata is December 11, 2025.)
Meeting Transcript
The time gonna go ahead and call this uh deliberation session of the Bloomington Common Council to order here on December 10th at 6:31. Will the clerk please call the roll okay? I'm not doing this in the usual order, so bear with me. Um Councilmember Rosenberger. These are not working here on the minute. Hello. Just one more here. Okay, President Barnes. Here, here. I got here. Daily. Here, Stasberg. Here. Piedmont Smith. Here. Roller. Sorry, Clarity. Here. Okay, thank you. Thank you so much. As I said, tonight we are having a deliberation session. We're going to be discussing outcome-based budgeting, and believe it or not, 2027 priorities because municipal budgeting starts early. So I want to thank uh in advance, Councilmember Piedmont Smith who organized the discussion this evening. We will uh discuss um outcome-based budgeting and the progress so far, um, various outcomes that we already have in city plans, and really kind of the the main goal I think tonight is to try to, as a council prioritize outcomes, which uh didn't really happen last year because you know this this is a process. Um we will have public comment in there and then next steps, and then we will adjourn. So I think at this point I'm turning over to Councilmember Piedmont Smith. Thank you. Um I do want to mention I'm chair of the um fiscal committee, special committee of council, and we did review this uh agenda or the the general ideas uh that uh went into this agenda tonight, so it wasn't totally flying solo here. Um so I just wanted to remind everybody about the context um that uh both the mayor's administration and the council agreed to move towards an outcome-based budgeting process. Um the council passed a resolution in June of 2024 regarding this, and of course, during the budget process for the 2026 budget, um the administration did move towards um outcome-based budgeting, sort of an in-between step, which they call priority-based budgeting. And um really the big difference is that uh compared with what the city budget, how the city budget was created previously, um, is that previously we would basically take um the budget from the the current year and uh just tweak uh things, you know, we need more for this, we need less for that, this costs more now, we need another staff person, etc. Um, with outcome-based budgeting, uh, we look at what outcomes we want to achieve. Then we back up and look at programs that will get us towards those outcomes, and then we back up further and look at what um how the the what those programs cost. Uh and I know that um our deputy mayor Gretchen Knapp, who's here, uh, and our controller Jessica McClellan have been working on um evaluating all the programs and putting them in categories so that we can better track what exactly they cost. But I think one of the the big um questions at this point is uh which programs do we prioritize and to to look at what we prioritize, we really need to go back to look at the outcomes that our city plans have said we are all working towards. And since we can't do everything, we also have need to prioritize those outcomes and kind of decide. Um, given our limited funding, what uh outcomes are most important for the community. So hopefully um my colleagues all got a chance to take a look at um the packet that came with this uh for this meeting. Um are there any questions before we kind of dive into the outcomes? And if yes. I have um I really appreciate that we're doing this. Uh I also had a lot of like structural questions about I'll just like surface a small one without getting into like a lot of detail. A lot of things that need to change to accomplish our outcomes are not in fact expenditures, their policy change, their legislation and policy change. Um how do how should so that's just an example of like a number of structural issues that inform how we might engage in this exercise? And um, I'm just getting into the agenda and getting it pulled up for my file, so apologies if there's like adequate space on the agenda for discussing that. So apologies if there's like adequate space on the agenda for discussing that. But I was curious for the suitability of a topic like that uh at a session like this, um, and just wanted to get your input as um the person running the meeting. Um I think that's a really good point. Um I think that we could probably talk about that through the course of the meeting as we look at the outcomes that I've collated from our city plans, and we can say, okay, you know, if a majority of council members say this outcome is the most important, well, is that do we influence that uh just by budget or by policy as well? And kind of we can we can definitely should consider that once we um prioritize our outcomes.
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