Bloomington mayoral candidates focus on COVID-19, economic growth during debate

Candidates running for Bloomington mayor took part in a one-hour debate hosted by WGLT Tuesday night, and were faced with questions from community members.

The three candidates Mike Straza, Jackie Gunderson and Mboka Mwilambwe were presented with various questions surrounding the development and changes they seek to make if appointed as the new mayoral representation.

The topics discussed were wide-ranging, as the community’s economic growth is one issue all three brought focus onto when working through the relief of COVID-19.

Mwilambwe opened the conversation for the debate, saying how hard Bloomington has worked to help people during the pandemic. 

“The City of Bloomington has worked pretty hard to try to help people in the midst of this pandemic, and what I would do goes back to my platform for one is to focus on fixing our infrastructure but also growing our local economy,” Mwilambwe said. 

“I do know that people have lost a lot of jobs, and I do think that we need to focus on providing more jobs. [This includes] investing in not only our infrastructure, which will also bring jobs locally, but also working to bring new businesses to Bloomington.”

Gunderson responded to the pandemic issue, saying city relief plans are to help the community recover from the long-term effects of all the unmet needs.

“There’s an important focus on supporting our locally owned small businesses as they struggle to keep their doors open and employees struggle to get back to work,” Gunderson said. “I believe the city should be advocating for aid from the federal and state government to help businesses weather the storm without compromising the health and safety of the residents.” 

Straza discussed the need to do better than the state. The current fall of the unemployment rate is currently at 5.2% in the community, not far from the 2008 rate during the Great Recession.

“We need to find and develop more skilled labor. We are at a shortage. We need to train more. We need to have workforce development be a key thing to increasing our workforce,” Straza said. 

“We need to bring more jobs to this community, and we need to continue to work with the agencies in local state and federal to bring the funding that’s needed to help the people of this community.”

Economic development played an essential role as candidates were asked what plans they intend to make for recovering from COVID-19 and how businesses in the community will continue to function in the upcoming months.

Mwilambwe expressed the actions the city council has taken in developing elements of change, which he has taken part in over the past 10 years. 

“We have folks at the Economic Development Council who have a strategic plan that I believe is meant to address the next 18 months and in order to be able to attract different businesses here in town,” Mwilambwe said. 

“Given the pandemic and the fact that we might have a lot of businesses looking to move in different directions will remote workers. I think there are opportunities there for us to do to try to attract remote workers to the area, but also for us to tweak a little bit of our focus on economic development to try to bring in companies who are likely to stay here that require a physical presence in Bloomington.”

Straza also expressed the idea of bringing new businesses into the area to improve community development. As his main focus in the campaign is community development, Straza wants to create Bloomington into the entrepreneurial capital of the Midwest.  

“We need to also draw new businesses to the city for jobs. We need to continue to invite people from outside of our community into our community in a way that is in the best interest for our community economically,” Straza said.

“We also need to continue to work with our local businesses that we currently have. One of the biggest complaints they’ve had is that once you’re here, they don’t feel like they’re being listened to or taken care of. We need to start taking care of business here so we can start seeing more growth from them and we need to be able to support them in any way possible.”

Gunderson stayed committed to her campaign cause to strive towards development changes in Bloomington.

“I believe that economic development should benefit the people and the businesses that are already here in our community, so especially our small business owners. They felt the weight of the COVID pandemic, and I think they should be the primary focus of economic development tools going forward,” Gunderson said. “Bloomington needs to find solutions that benefit the city in a variety of measurements without harming our schools or other public entities.”

Gunderson went on to express her direct actions to help the members of the community in crisis by discussing the focus of her campaign to put people first, addressing the housing affordability challenge. 

“One idea is to spread out public housing around the city and focus on semi-distressed housing places and conduct some repairs to make lower-cost improvements to improve the quality of our housing stock,” Gunderson said.

Gunderson creating mixed-income housing is one of the first steps to lessen inequality with systemic changes.

All three candidates have expressed a commitment to diversity inclusion and inclusion during the debate, defining the actions and policies.

“As we continue to navigate the pandemic we see the effects of systemic racism across a lot of different social issues. We talked about housing and we talked about police reform. All of those places that we talked about the social issues there are systemic things in place,” Gunderson said. 

“I want to make sure that our recovery plans for COVID-19 are comprehensive and that we make sure that the pieces that we put in place for the years to come to undo those systems or racism that we all benefit from that we may not even know.”

Mwilambwe expressed the consistency of staffing and how the need should reflect the diversity within the community.

“I think ultimately what we need to do is to build our own bench and starting to you know by working with younger people and bring them into government not only positions with boards and commissions,” Mwilambwe said.

“We’ve done just that with the public safety community relations board by bringing in a couple of youth members, but we also need to reach out to the local professionals.”

As mentioned before, forming mentoring opportunities, internships for people in a position of disadvantaged and provide opportunities, Mwilambwe said he wanted to “try to give them a leg up and an opportunity at the American dream.”

Straza responded to the topic of institutional racism in relation to his fellow candidates by explaining his actions to be more knowledgeable.

“I do care for people. I do sit and listen. I have sat with people and listened to hear what they have felt and what the realization of what they have gone through,” Straza said.

“I have even actually reached out to people. I’ve reached out to diversity coaches so I can understand better what people are going through that I would not possibly have gone through or had those experiences. But what I do look at is how do we make those changes? Because those things are real, we need to do that.”