Gulp. This article in the Wisconsin State Journal is a pretty fair assessment of the situation with Allied Drive. The thumbnail sketch of what has happened to this point is as follows:
1. We bought the properties in May 2006. 16 months ago.
2. In September 2006 Mark Olinger spearheaded a neighborhood process to plan the 9 acre site with the AIA (architects group). Those plans were never approved because they didn’t include single family detached housing which the staff wanted.
3. In January I got impatient because many decisions had not yet been made and introduced two resolutions.
a) One was to let people move into the vacant properties, which passed but still hasn’t really happened in any meaningful kind of way, so we’re still sitting there with empty buildings.
b) The other one was to decide what kind of housing we would have.
4. At the last council meeting, after having the Allied Drive Task Force work for months on what the RFP should have in it and then the alder writing a resolution that replaced the one I wrote last January that was questionable about if we did or did not support the recommendations of the Allied Drive Task Force, we finally passed a resolution saying what we wanted to have be built on the properties.
5. At the same meeting, the Mayor completely changed course and decided to skip the RFP because now, there isn’t time.
6. And yesterday, I got the latest version (version 6) of the RFP (written by the City Mark Olinger and his staff) that they’ve been working on since last January. The RFP doesn’t follow the recommendations of the Allied Drive Task Force. It also doesn’t really support the CDAs plan. No wonder they (the CDA headed by Mark Olinger) don’t want an RFP
And now, after all this time, there is a great sense of urgency. Where was his sense of urgency last January? or last September? Or last May? Why didn’t the mayor and his staff attending meetings on his behalf, help the RFP process along instead of sitting back and watching all the in-fighting between Mark Olinger’s staff? Why didn’t the Mayor just speak up at the last Council meeting and tell us he didn’t really think we had a role in this and don’t bother passing a resolution telling us what you think, we’re going with the CDA and they’re just going to do what the Mayor tells them to do. (He can do this because CDA Mark Olinger is still City Mark Olinger who is hired by the Mayor.)
And, two criticisms that didn’t make it into the story.
1. The CDA did one project 10 years ago. They don’t really have the experience to pull this off. The project they did is no longer affordable – the $95,000 condos that they sold had no pricing restrictions on them and are selling for nearly double. And the apartments are very hard to get low-income people into because poor people have bad credit and they have strict screening criteria that doesn’t take that into consideration.
2. Mark Olinger, negotiating with Mark Olinger to find out if Mark Olinger, who wrote the resolution to have the CDA do the project, thinks that Mark Olinger should do the project is a bit of a problem.
And finally, to further comment on the money.
1. I don’t think anyone on the Council thought we were buying that land to give it away. I think that might be a hard sell with council members expecting to recoup some of the money we spent.
2. I don’t think that the Affordable Housing Trust Fund money was set up so that the City could use it to build roads and demolish housing.
3. We’re not going to get the tax credits on our own. We need to partner with someone with experience. And just choosing someone without an RFP is like the Water Utility situation all over again.
And lastly, why would we spend all this City money and not have the control of the 9 acre site?
