Not Happy with Mayor Kerry Thomson
On Bloomington Mayor Kerry Thomson’s fourth day in office, she showed up as boots-on-the-ground for the clearance of a homeless camp, to talk to the residents and help them pack up. The act itself said everything. No extra layer of messaging was needed.
But now a communications strategy of sorts has emerged. And it resembles a collection of new-age inspirational slogans.
Thomson’s four-point list of aspirations from the proposed 2026 budget book starts off with “Co-Creators With Our Community.” But basic City operations, like ensuring the addition of fluoride to the City’s drinking water, are not collaborative art projects.
Next comes “Accountable Servant Leadership,” which would look great printed in flowing script on a scented candle. But when the Thomson administration treats mistakes by individual humans as systems failures, that seems to avoid accountability. One example is the City’s failure to collect around $48,000 in trash cart fees from the start of the year. Whose job was it to implement the rate increase?
Landing in the third spot is some unintended humor: “Demystified Government.” Among the mysteries that Thomson herself helped to create is the myth that Bloomington has for years been deficit spending.
Thomson told the City Council: “The definition of a deficit budget is spending more than what you’re bringing in, and it’s important that the public understands … that we can’t keep spending the way we have been spending.” In fact, the City of Bloomington has not spent more than its revenues for any year in at least a decade. The general fund balance at the end of 2024 was $55 million.
But the chef ’s kiss for Bloomington City government’s new age branding is “Architects of Joy.” What an ambitious idea to consider—that City government could design the most positive of all human emotions.
I wonder what architectural renderings of joy look like? Is there a schematic for joy that uses as building blocks a series of black boxes from redacted email messages?
When her administration got caught trying to bury the City’s lack of drinking water fluoride in a statistical table, Thomson didn’t say: “We should have done better—we’re sorry.”
Instead, her communications director doubled down on the idea that it was perfectly fine to leave it to a resident, who happens to be a chemist, to read a table footnote and alert the press. The Thomson administration’s official position was that the statistical table in the annual drinking water report “was the most appropriate place to share fluoride levels, as it is a comprehensive tool for communicating water quality information to residents.”
No one complained that a table of numbers included the fluoride data. In Thomson’s own terms, the complaint was this: Nobody co-created a message that held servant leaders accountable. Or maybe: Nobody architected any joy.
Thomson’s fourth day in office was a good lesson in memory. We can all remember the basic facts of who showed up and did a thing, without any help from the mantras of municipal marketing.
Note: The opinions expressed here are not necessarily the opinions of the editors of Bloom Magazine.
