Here’s the quick run down. Very quick. I was at the council meeting for work, so didn’t do a traditional blogging account of the meeting.
HONORING RESOLUTIONS
1. Norma Gay Prewett read a piece of poetry.
2. They honored the swim teams from Madison West and Memorial.
3. They honored Sadie Villegas and James Lofton for helping save the woman who wanted to jump off Monona Terrace because her landlord was not renewing her lease. Sadie used to work at the TRC and James is a friend and I’m so proud of both of them.
4. They honored Charlie Daniels by giving her the James C. Wright Award for her civil rights work.
CONSENT AGENDA
They passed everything on the agenda as recommended except items 7 – 10 (public hearing items), 17, 20, 48 and 91, and the committee of the whole discussion on the budget.
Items 7 – 10 all pass without comment or discussion.
TRANSPARENCY FOR CITY CONTRACTORS
The council voted against the mayor’s proposal mostly because “it didn’t go far enough”, which was bullshit. Other excuses for voting this way were that they thought we’d get sued, other cities haven’t done it, bad for buisness since it will have a chilling effect, the debacle in the 6th last year wouldn’t have been covered because they didn’t have a city contract (one wonders how they know that) and maybe a few others, not quite sure.
Soglin spoke about all the restrictions by state law that prohibit us from regulating in some areas and that we can’t solve all the issues. He says that there is no constitutional right to give money to affect a political campaign (to candidate or (c)(4)) and remain anonymous. You can participate and write a check, but you don’t have the right to be a copperhead and act in secrecy. He says that they are required to make decisions on contracts in a way that is free from bias and independence from political views. He says this ordinance is about when the alders are running for re-election and their constituents and nothing else because they wandered all over the place. Their constituents have the right to know, if someone comes in with a shadowy group, whether or not they have a contract with the city and that is influencing the political debates. He says if he was running for office, if one of these groups had a contract interest with the city and they opposed or supported him, he would want to know and the citizens of the city have the right to know. He says this is a small crumb in a larger cake of financial shinanigans that have been going on since the beginning of American politics.
They also patted themselves on the back for a really great discussion and commented about how this was the most interesting thing they have discussed since the new council was elected.
Watch for a possible blog on this. But the alders (DEMOCRATS!!!!) who voted against and support Citizen’s United?! were:
Lauren Cnare (got over $2,000 from the Chamber, 25% of her money)
Steve King (did a bizarre freak out about how he can’t stand Terrence Wall and how that affects his decisions)
Larry Palm (Zach Brandon’s buddy and got a over $1000 from the Chamber, 15% of his funding)
Matt Phair (part of the group that opposes anything Soglin wants because he was a Cieslewicz supporter, 18% of his funding came from the Chamber)
Chris Schmidt (Soglin opposer and $150 from the Chamber while unopposed)
Paul Skidmore (Over $1000 from the Chamber)
John Stausser
Anita Weier
Shiva Bidar-Sielaff (unopposed and still got $400 from the Chamber or 34% of her money raise while unopposed and opposes all things Soglin)
Maurice Cheeks (got $200 from the Chamber although unopposed)
Mark Clear (opposes all things Soglin)
This took the first two hours of the meeting.
HOMELESS INTAKE AND ASSESSMENT $150,000 GRANT
Tenant Resource Center staff and board members (including myself) showed up to make an argument that Tenant Resource Center should get the grant instead of Community Action Coalition. Apparently, some of the reasons they decided to give the grant to an agency that has an $8M budget where the money doesn’t have as big of impact instead of two agencies with a combined budget currently of $260,000 (Shine608 which is Z! Haukeness and Sarah Gillmore who ran the day warming center has no budget and were our partners in this grant) is that well, we’re too small, don’t have the capacity and we use volunteers. Frustrating because you can’t get capacity if the grants always go to the large agencies. And, they really didn’t look at what made sense (TRC does information and referral and will continue to do it but not get paid) and Shine 608 would do the assessment with the homeless persons at the new day center where they are already present instead of making them call CAC or find a bus ride to their offices out on Hwy 51. TRC also has three offices (campus, job center and Willy St) where people can walk in and get immediate service instead of calling a phone number and waiting for a call back. We served 800 people looking for emergency shelter at the Housing Help Desk last year, we send a post card to everyone being evicted in Dane County every week – we are in contact with the people who we are trying to help PREVENT those evictions. We also have the Memorandum of Understanding with 211 to receive their housing calls. But this was a predetermined decision, CAC was actually mentioned in the RFP and the staff said that all three organizations that applied were qualified and that wasn’t the issue. It is frustrating that people who scored the grants said that CAC somehow had better capacity to prevent homelessness or reduce the length of homelessness – but if there are no additional resources to help people get housing how is CAC going to do that any better than any other organization. Sorry, I am totally biased here! We were pretty much attacked by CAC staff for challenging this, which is absurd, because what they were essentially saying is staff should just decide and the council shouldn’t have a say in the matter. I obviously don’t agree and am appalled that we should be yelled at in the hallway for using the process in support of our agency and the clients we serve. Sigh . . . and we struggle to fight another day. The council unanimously supported the staff decision.
ALCOHOL IN PARKS
They delayed discussion on this until September sometime. The sunset banning drinking at Olbrich and Reindahl park. It took them 40 minutes to do it.
COMBINE CERTAIN ORDINANCES
Verveer had a substitute that didn’t get entered into Legistar. Says it was work done by the clerk, streets and police department. This is about scrap metal dealers to enter items electronically. This ordinance simplifies the license types to make it easier on staff and the businesses it affects.
BUDGET
I’ll get to this later in another blog.
They ended the meeting at 11:00.
