Bloomington City Council often votes 5-4. Does it reveal something deeper?

The Bloomington City Council chose new leaders in 5-4 votes that can be read as an entrenchment of two council camps that split on some major issues last year, including homelessness, housing and annexation.

However, council members from both wings disagree — of course — about whether the votes reveal a disagreement merely on process — or a deeper divergence on philosophy.

Newly elected council President Susan Sandberg, whom members chose earlier this month over council member Matt Flaherty, said she believes council members’ demeanor after the votes — more so than their actual yeas or nays — sometimes causes a public perception of a 5-4 deadlock.

“I think it’s much more nuanced than that,” she told The Herald-Times.

More: City council's Volan blasts colleagues as uncivil, uncaring opportunists

However, council member Isabel Piedmont-Smith, one of the four who voted for Matt Flaherty as council president, said the votes for council leadership corroborated the notion of a split.

She said the 5-4 vote for Sandberg over Flaherty as president and the 5-4 vote for Sue Sgambelluri over Flaherty as vice president were “just one way in which the split on the council has been evident.”

The council also voted 5-4 to designate council member Ron Smith to serve on the Bloomington Plan Commission. Piedmont-Smith had vied for that assignment. The cores of both council camps clashed on housing matters last year, including in a series of long and contentious meetings on a proposal to allow for more duplexes in the city.

But Piedmont-Smith said she believes the council split first became clear last March, in a record-breaking nine-hour session in which the council rejected a proposed law that aimed to decriminalize sleeping on public property and to create a public space for homeless people.

“I think that kind of was a watershed moment for showing the divide on the council,” she said.

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Sandberg, Piedmont-Smith and council members Dave Rollo and Stephen Volan told The Herald-Times that complex dynamics affect their positions, disagreements and alliances.

Age and length of service certainly play a role, some acknowledged: Flaherty and council member Kate Rosenbarger are serving their first terms on the council and graduated from college this millennium, or about 30 years after Sandberg, who is serving as council president for the fourth time.

But age and council experience don’t explain everything: Piedmont-Smith and Volan, who often side with Flaherty and Rosenbarger, are “not young,” as Piedmont-Smith put it, and have served multiple terms on the council. And while council member Ron Smith, a reliable part of the five-member majority, got his first college degree in the dying days of disco, he, like reliable minority quad members Flaherty and Rosenbarger, is serving his first term on the council.

To some extent, council members also are guided by their different campaign promises and constituencies: For example, Smith represents the more suburban District 3 on the city’s east side, while Volan represents District 6, the more urban core around Kirkwood.

“It’s kind of a reflection of the community,” Sandberg said. “We do represent various constituencies.”

But district boundaries, too, reveal some interesting patterns: Sandberg and council member Jim Sims, reliable members of the five, as well as Flaherty, a reliable part of the quad, are at-large members, which means they represent all of Bloomington.

Philosophical divide

Piedmont-Smith contends the council split reveals philosophical differences.

Piedmont-Smith said she believes the four-member minority shows a greater willingness to question the status quo. Incidents such as the 2020 murder of George Floyd while he was being restrained by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she said, must prompt governments to analyze their systems. The four-member minority responded, in part, by leading the charge for the creation of the Community Advisory on Public Safety Commission, which aims to look at public safety more broadly and to bring in people who often are not consulted on policing matters.

“I think the four of us … recognize that we need to acknowledge the power dynamics that exist that favor white middle-to-upper-class people and actively counteract that by, you know, being anti-racist,” Piedmont-Smith said.

“It appears to me that the other side is more reticent to bring changes to the way business is done in the city,” she said.

Rollo agreed that the camps are split on ideological lines, but he rejected the notion that he or the majority were trying to retain the status quo. Different members simply have different ideas about how the challenges should be addressed, he said.

“I see everyone on the council as progressive in their own way,” Rollo said.

To some extent, he said, he is simply pushing back against proposals that believes go too far.

Some council members last year essentially wanted to eliminate single-family zoning in the city, Rollo said. And some also raised concerns about increasing police salaries, which, given rising salaries for police officers in other communities, amounted, in Rollo’s eyes, to defunding the local police force.

“I see myself on the council in a sense reacting to some very radical … proposals,” he said.

In general, Rollo said he believes all of his colleagues are trying to do their best to improve Bloomington and sometimes simply disagree on how to achieve that goal. And whatever ideological differences exist, he said, they allow for shifting alliances and agreements.

Case in point: Volan and Rollo now acknowledge that they made procedural errors during the nine-hour meeting in March, which could have been shorter if they had taken different steps. Volan said that when it became clear that Rollo, Sandberg, Sgambelluri and Smith were unwilling to delay discussion on the homelessness ordinance, he should have urged his other colleagues to leave the meeting, which would have ended for a lack of quorum.

Rollo said that when the homelessness ordinance was introduced that evening in March, none of the members thought the meeting would last as long as it did. Looking back, he said, he would not have voted to give the proposal a second reading.

“Lesson learned, I suppose,” he said.

Volan also said that while some votes may reveal differences in members’ positions, others show unity, near unity or alliances from members of both camps. Clear majorities voted in favor of annexation, he said. And many members initially raised concerns — though for different reasons — about the mayor’s budget proposal.

Sandberg said that council members have to accept that sometimes they’re going to be in the minority and that they should disagree without being disagreeable.

Having members with different viewpoints, she said, in many ways points to a healthy council.

“Vive la difference,” she said.

Power struggle

Piedmont-Smith said she worries the new leadership composition will force both groups to dig in their heels.

She said that rather than giving each camp a leadership role, either the presidency or vice presidency, the majority has chosen to give both offices to itself. That concerns her, she said, because prior council presidents have used their leadership role to delay legislation they did not support.

Sandberg said that during her term as council president, she wants to work as a facilitator and to set a tone that prompts members to deliberate “in a more collegial or respective fashion than has been demonstrated.”

Her calls for collegiality, at least in the interim, appear to not have had their desired effect: The council on Wednesday split along the same 5-4 fissure in a meeting that lasted nearly five hours and was filled with acrimony.

Coming Saturday: From interruptions to eye rolling and derision, council members on Wednesday clashed again along the 5-4 fault line.

Boris Ladwig is the city government reporter for The Herald-Times. Contact him at bladwig@heraldt.com.

Council divide

The nine-member Bloomington City Council has frequently found itself voting along a 5-4 fault line.

The five-member majority:

• President Susan Sandberg, at-large

• Vice President Sue Sgambelluri, District II

• Parliamentarian Dave Rollo, District IV

• Jim Sims, at-large

• Ron Smith, District III

The four-member minority:

• Matt Flaherty, at-large

• Isabel Piedmont-Smith, District V

• Kate Rosenbarger, District I

• Stephen Volan, District VI

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Bloomington council divided on whether 5-4 votes reveal split