By: Diane Benjamin
Taxpayers OWN Bloomington government, they work for you!
Why is it so difficult to get information? Instead of fixing the functionality of the City website, they just redesign it. They have many useless tabs that aren’t used, nobody is cleaning them up or making SEARCHING for information easier. It’s almost like hiding information is the real goal.
BCPA event reports continue to not be posted. Even the ones I have have FOIA’d never get posted. You own that building – you deserve to know how much of your money is being LOST on shows. So far EVERY show in the 2021-2022 has lost money. Looks like I need to file yet another FOIA.
At last night’s Council meeting the Fire Department presented their annual report. One would think that report would be available, this morning it isn’t:
All of the June 27th documents are MIA (as of 9:45 AM): https://www.cityblm.org/government/city-council/meetings-and-agendas
The City has a tab for documents:
https://www.cityblm.org/government/advanced-components/documents/-folder-1986
Last night the Fire Chief gave the department annual report. I can’t show it to you because the packet is missing, the video is fuzzy, and the Annual Fire Report hasn’t been posted to the appropriate documents tab since 2013: https://www.cityblm.org/government/advanced-components/documents/-folder-160
Why should you care?
Because Normal is underfunding their fire department because Bloomington covers for them. Nobody in Bloomington seems to care their taxpayers are forced to pay for numerous runs to Normal, especially when Normal is getting paid to cover Hudson and Towanda.
How many of the increased calls were to cover for Normal? From last night’s video, a screen that wasn’t horribly fuzzy:
The chief reported 401 out of district calls. Some were meeting an ambulance in the country to provide advance care before getting to a hospital, how many were just to Normal?
Bloomington taxpayers bought 2 ambulances last night, one wasn’t scheduled to be replaced but they wanted to beat increased costs. Taxpayers deserve to know if they are being used by Normal. Nobody asked.
Good luck trying to find previous Fire Department annual reports for comparison. They are a secret.
