So, when someone submits a proposal to the city, with a clear scoring system, you expect those doing the scoring to be fair, right? Well, two alders can make a big swing in the scoring if they want to. Check out what happened with the one of the James Madison Park Houses.
BACKGROUND
A little background first. The City of Madison has three houses in James Madison Park. They finally made a deal to sell one of the houses, but did not have good enough proposals for the other two, so they put out another RFP. There were several new submittals for the other two homes and now they have scored those proposals and will be meeting on Thursday to consider the other proposals.
NEW PROPOSAL SCORING
You can see the new proposals above. Here’s what I found odd about the scoring for the Collins House (previously the bed and breakfast and the largest of the houses) at 704 Gorham St. (646 Scores & 704 Scores
For 704 E Gorham the top two proposals would have tied with most non-alder committee members giving the two proposals scores within 6 points out of 100. Without the alders, the scores on the first house ranged from 79 – 95 for the first proposal and 80 – 95 for the second proposal. That is, except Alders Clausius and Maniaci. They both scored one proposal perfectly, the full 100 points, they were the only ones to do so. Then, the pair gave the second proposal the two lowest scores, not by a few points, but by 25 to 38 points. Their low scores were 75 (Clausius) and 62 (Maniaci). A HUGE swing compared to the other committee members that had scores within 6 points between the projects. Those scores immediately leaped off the page at me and made me wonder what was going on. Without the scores of the alders, the proposals would have tied at 443. With the alders wide ranging scores the one proposal got 643 and 580.
I think it smells. I can pretend to know what the alders were thinking, but I think they were being more political than engaging in a scoring process designed to be fair.
Looking more closely at Alder Maniaci’s scores, there are a few oddities:
The proposed use is a permitted or conditional use under the current zoning code 5 5 5 0 2 5 3 4
Maniaci’s score is the 0 when half the committee gave the proposal the full 5 points
Proposed use is compatible with the neighborhood 10 10 10 5 9 10 10 10
Maniaci’s score is the 5, half of what 6 of 7 committee members scores
Development schedule that is mindful of the City processes that will be required (referendum) 10 10 10 5 10 10 10 9
Again, Maniaci’s score is half of most of the rest of the committee
To add to the strange scoring, she gave two propsals at 646 the full hundred points as well.
Is she living in some alternate reality? Perhaps we now know why she prefers to work in secrecy. Are there more cynical explanations about why should would score so wildly different than the rest of the committee for her own constituents? I have lots of guesses, none of them very flattering and I don’t know what is inside that head and don’t want to go there. I just think it stinks. And I can’t wait to hear her explanation for her behavior . . .
