Um so just calling this meet into order.

This is an interview for interview committee A.

We are interviewing for the um uh board of directors for B for Bloomington Transit.

Um I am Isak Sari.

I am a council member at large.

Joined by Hope East Osberg uh District Three.

And also joined online by Kate Rosenbarger District 2.

Fantastic.

And there are some members of the public here as well.

Uh we won't be doing public comment, but if you feel free to type um in notes and we will keep those on the record.

Um okay, so we have a handful um of questions, um, um, Hank, and there's sort of like a standard set of questions, um, if you will, and we might have some clarifying and follow-up questions thereafter.

Um, but would love to just hear from you first why you want to be a part of this board, like what attracts you uh to the work that it does.

Um, et cetera.

Great question.

So I have been wanting and I I've had this desire to work in the public sector and better my community for years now.

So after I graduated from IU, I got accepted into the Peace Corps and was planning on going out to the country, Georgia for three years and doing work out there.

Unfortunately, COVID happened a month before I was supposed to go, so I never got that opportunity, which is big bummer.

But throughout that process, I realized this is what I want to do.

And so after biding my time for a little while, I came back to Bloomington.

I was the Little 500 race director.

So I advised about 700 different IU undergrad uh IU undergraduates.

And that is, you know, one leading this race, but two, teaching these people professional skills how to make it in the real world and also making their IU experience as great as possible.

And that is, you know, getting around campus.

That's showing them resources that the city has to offer.

And so it's all about giving back to the community that I live in.

And then eventually, as you all know, I came to the city of Bloomington in planning and transportation as the bicycle and pedestrian coordinator.

So working on smaller scale bike ped projects, and eventually um made my way into the safe streets program manager position.

And now I am a public face for listening to the community in terms of what they want in their streets, what's working, what's not working, and also selling them ideas about how we can work together to make our community a safer, more convenient, more efficient place to travel to travel from point A to point B.

And so that leads me to right now where one, I have the professional expertise to work with Bloomington Transit and make it a better organization.

Two, the local expertise, because I've been in Bloomington off and on for about nine or ten years now, and I've been serving different corners of the community, but then three, I have the time and the willingness to put effort into this position.

And so it's rare that you have all of those dots connecting and the ability and expertise to do it, but I'm in this position right now.

I want to continue giving back to my community in a way that I know how, and that way is through transportation and public transit.

Thank you so much.

Um, as a follow-up with that, like what experience do you have right now with this board, like at all in terms of what's been going on and their meetings and their responsibilities and that kind of thing.

Sure.

So I really started thinking about applying for this position late last year.

And since then I've been listening and watching all of their board meetings to understand how exactly it works.

Again, through my day job, I work with the Transportation Commission, sometimes the Plan Commission, the bike ped safety commission, when that still existed.

So I'm very aware of how boards and commissions in general work and function in the city, but every board is a little bit different.

They each have their own quirks, and so I've been watching in, reading the agendas of these board meetings, and then obviously in the past month or two, there have been some bigger changes, and that has only pushed me farther into that desire to be on this board to make positive change for this community.

Yep.

Um I'm just okay.

Do you about the board too?

Do you think the board is missing representation?

Um and if so, what do you bring skills and experience to fill in those gaps?

Like what would that what would that look like?

Yeah, great question.

That was actually something that I wanted to talk about in this interview is representation as a whole.

Um I talked about my professional expertise in Bloomington, representing a lot of IU students and now with the city representing the community as a whole.

Again, these people that I try to represent through my day job are the people that need safe, efficient transportation the most.

And I talk to thousands of people each year throughout the city.

A lot of those people, I can use their comments in the projects I work on with the city.

Most of those I can't, though.

A lot of the comments I get are about the accessibility of the transit stops, the route frequency to get to the west side of the city.

For example, there was a recent project I was working on on Roger Street, and it goes right along the four west line.

And that goes out to the Walmart Sam's Club area of town.

And there are these people who need to get out there, but because the route only functions every hour, it's hard.

It's very, very hard.

And so that's just one example of I am not saying that I represent all of the community, but my job is to serve the community.

And by doing that, I feel like I have a at least a better knowledge base of what the community as a whole needs.