This spring’s elections need to be about more than water, trolleys and taxes. Yes, our water needs to be safe to drink. What candidate isn’t going to say that? Yes, we need to keep our taxes in line. What candidate isn’t going to say that? And trolleys, well, there’s so little support, or need, for them they’re hardly worth talking about. We need to get down to some issues that the City of Madison will have to deal with in the next few years, that haven’t gotten so much attention. Here’s a list of things I worked with Progressive Dane members to come up with, that we hope to hear this spring’s candidates talking about and hopefully supporting. Don’t let candidates running for office get away with vague statements about supporting economic development and local small businesses, improving Madison Metro, supporting creation of affordable housing, etc. Ask them, what they intend to do to work on these issues. Here’s a few of our ideas.
Economic Development
- We need the Economic Development Commission to finally get that Economic Development Plan for the City done. The last time we had a plan was 1983.
- We want to see a local small business bus pass purchasing pool so small businesses can provide free bus passes to their employees similar to programs of large employers at local hospitals and the University.
- We need a local purchasing preference for City purchases so that when we can, we keep our money in our local economy. (Local doesn’t mean limiting our purchases to businesses in the City of Madison, we can look more broadly at the regional economy.)
- We need to make sure that when we talk about job creation, we are not only talking about high skilled bio-tech jobs, but instead, jobs that people with few skills can get into after some training and have a career path or chance for advancement.
TIF
- When talking about TIF, we need make sure that the City of Madison is setting the goals and priorities, not simply responding to individual developer proposals.
- We want to make sure that there are clear community benefits to providing TIF assistance. The City should set goals for the number of jobs and amount of workforce housing we need. We should also prioritize areas we feel are in need of redevelopment.
- We should work on methods to have TIF assist small businesses, perhaps by helping them buy affordable condo space for their businesses.
- High-end condos in the downtown are no longer needed to spur revitalization of the downtown; we need to be looking at workforce housing throughout the City.
- Finally, as with economic development, we want to make sure the jobs we create or retain with TIF funds are jobs that low skilled people can obtain with a little training and have opportunities for advancement.
Allied Drive
- We need a plan; an agreed upon strategy for redeveloping the neighborhood. We need this sooner rather than later. We need to agree how much affordable housing we want to have in the area and how affordable it will be. We need to agree on how much of the new housing will be rental vs. ownership.
- We need a clear strategy to keep people in the neighborhood, not pushing them around and simply moving low-income neighborhoods throughout the City as we have done in the past. Removing people from the neighborhood and moving in all new people should not be considered a success.
- As landlords are forced to clean up their properties, we need to make sure that families who are not a part of the problem are not displaced from the neighborhood. The City owned properties should be part of the solution to preventing displacement of current residents.
- We need to utilize the City owned properties to help residents with less than stellar rental records or credit records rehabilitate their records to help move them into successful housing – either rental or ownership, as appropriate.
Strong neighborhood services
- If we’re going to have a “one stop shop” for businesses, we can have something similar for neighborhoods
- We need strong neighborhood plans for more areas of the City that are new to seeing development proposals.
- We need to be more customer-friendly to neighborhoods, not just for developers.
Neighborhood policing and preventative services
- We need more neighborhood officers, not less. We need officers in the neighborhoods in the evenings when social services providers go home for the day. Neighborhood policing is a key to prevention and removing the neighborhood officers is a step backwards.
- We need to be increasing preventative social services to address issues with people prior to turning to our busy police department for law enforcement.
Safe, affordable, reliable mass transportation
- We need mass transit in this City that works for the people who work non-traditional hours. 2nd and 3rd shift workers should be able to use the bus to get to work and home again. During the holidays, bus schedules should match extended retail hours.
- We need more frequent bus service so transit dependent people don’t spend hours trying to get to where they need to go and to encourage more riders to feel like the bus is a viable option.
- Express buses between the transfer points and during peak hours.
Childcare
- When it comes to childcare, we need to continue to work to continue to fill the gap for those who have low-income jobs. If you’re working and 50% or more of your income is going towards childcare, it quickly becomes unaffordable to live in this City. While we increased the funding for the childcare tuition assistance program this year, we still have not closed the gap.
- High quality affordable childcare is key to the future of our schools and our community. We need to work to make high quality childcare available and a viable option for more families in our community.
Affordable housing
- We need to fund the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. At the moment, it is going to take over 20 years before the fund grows to the point where it generates significant money to invest in affordable housing. Putting $300,000 – $500,000 a year into the fund is not putting our money to its best use. Capitalizing the fund quickly simply is more effective, it, too, is an investment in our future.
- We need an affordable housing strategy for Madison. With State restrictions on what we can do when it comes to affordable housing, we need to invest money into affordable housing and we need a strategy to do that most effectively.
Transparent, accessible government
- We need better information available to the public in a more timely manner.
- We need a clearer budget process with more information.
- Our public input process needs to be more meaningful and generally speaking, the public needs to feel like their voices are being heard and the government is serving them.
To sum it all up, our government has to work, not only for the business community, but also for the people that make the business community successful, their employees. An affordable safe place to live, an affordable dependable bus system to get to work, daycare that doesn’t eat up half your paycheck and a job with opportunities for advancement are just as much basic services our government should be addressing as plowed streets and safe drinking water. We need to make sure Madison is a high quality place to live for everyone, not just catering to the needs of the business community.
p.s. More to come. I know there are criticisms of some of our issues and I will address them in the coming weeks.
