For those of you who miss Kristian Knutson’s live-blogging of the City Council on thedailypage.com, I hear ya! Here’s my best recap of what happened last night . . . but I’m sure it won’t be as good as Kristian’s.
Council agenda with all the links can be found here.
BEFORE THE MEETING
The meeting started out a little rocky as Mayor Dave, Council President Austin King and Pro Tem Paul VanRooy were all not in attendance. In the absence of our official leadership, Ald. Bruer took the chair and Ald. King had arranged for Ald. Verveer to move the agenda. Prior to the meeting I asked why the Mayor was not in attendance and got the answer of “He’s not in the building” followed by an “In fact, he might not be in the City”. Hmmmm . . . there were grins and smiles and giggles, but I have no clue where he was and I don’t think they wanted me to know. Alders King, VanRooy and Rosas were noticed absences, but Skidmore was absent as well. This promised to make things a little difficult because no matter how many people are in attendance, you still need 11 votes for anything to pass.
ALLIED DRIVE
The first motion of every meeting is to suspend the rules to allow introduction of items at the meeting that have not been previously referred and to suspend several other rules. We routinely do this in the beginning of every meeting, but tonight, there was controversy. The oath and the Allied Drive issue were both introduced under suspension of the rules, the oath was allowed to move forward, but Alder Brandon objected to dealing with the Allied Drive issue. Since this requires a 2/3 vote or 14 votes, the motion failed and we had to refer it to the next council meeting. I had explained the reason it was under suspension of the rules was that time was of the essence because the resolution dealt with landlords and eviction nuisances and I was fearful that in the next few weeks we might see additional landlords evicting people in Allied Drive due to fear of a nuisance action being taken against them by the City Attorney’s office. Apparently, Alder Brandon objected to allowing people who are not a part of the problem being allowed to live in our 2/3 vacant City owned property and so he used this hardly ever used procedural objection to delay discussion. There was discussion of referring this to the Allied Drive Task Force and the Plan Commission, that failed. Instead, we referred it to our next meeting. Stay tuned.
MISCELLANEOUS
So, the next few minutes of the meeting we proclaimed January 16, 2007 Half Price Books Half Pint Library Day, referred honoring Chief Charles Cole for 35 years of service to the City until he could attend the meeting, renewed the 5-year contract of the Housing Unit Director (Public Housing and Section 8 program) for Augustine “Augie” Olvera, referred some items and then got to the “oath” issue.
OATH
A substitute was introduced, correcting a reference to the wrong part of the constitution and calling the “addendum” a “supplemental statement”. There were only two speakers on the “oath” – Bert Zipperer, chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission and Lauren Woods, also serving on the Equal Opportunities Commission. Here’s where Kristin’s efforts are greatly missed. It’s hard for an alder paying attention to what is going on to have captured everything. Speeches were made, grandstanding occurred, some absurd statements were made and time went by. When all was said and done, the vote was 13 – 4. The clerk mis-counted and announced the wrong total, so I’m sure the reporters will be reporting this wrong today. The vote was as follows: In favor: Ken Golden, Tim Gruber, Isadore Knox, Brenda Konkel, Judy Olson, Larry Palm, Mike Verveer, Robbie Webber, Brian Benford, Zach Brandon, Tim Bruer, Lauren Cnare, Santiago Rosas. Voting against: Judy Compton, Noel Radomski, Jed Sanborn, Cindy Thomas. Absent: Austin King, Paul Skidmore, Paul VanRooy. In the end, I think the oath ended up be sponsored by Mayor Dave, King, Konkel, Verveer, Benford, Webber, Olson and maybe Knox . . . but again, I wasn’t keeping track so well, will try to do better in the future.
The backstory on who are sponsors is a long one, complicated by bad reporting from the Wisconsin State Journal and a new rule the City Attorney is trying to enforce, which may someday be the subject of another blog.
NEIGHBORHOOD CONSERVATION DISTRICTS
Three lobbyists showed up to speak to the issue. Phil Salkin of the Realtors Association, Carole Schaeffer of Smart Growth Madison and Susan Schmitz of Downtown Madison Inc. The Realtors and Smart Growth were against and wanted to see the neighborhood start the process, have a sunset provision on the districts, I think the Realtors wanted us to have staff do a bunch of reports before we passed anything, Carole wanted conservation districts only if there were historic elements in the ordinance and a requirement that there be a neighborhood plan in place prior to allowing a study for a district. Downtown Madison Inc simply wanted the sunset on the districts.
The lobbyists were successful in convincing council members that what neighborhoods really wanted was to start the process themselves, despite the fact that no “neighbor” showed up to say that. I always find it amusing when the Realtors Association claims to be “looking out for the little guy” when it is so transparent that they sent their paid lobbyist to protecting the property rights of their wealthy board. Anyways, there were multiple amendments suggested and a discussion about if people in the area should vote and have veto power, give input or simply be noticed when a district gets started. In my opinion, the whole discussion was a bit absurd. Apparently there was a fear that rogue alders would go around creating neighborhood conservation districts willy-nilly. And the fact that we required:
a) A resolution to pass the council before there could even be a study about creating a conservation district
b) Notice to all property owners, occupants and businesses in the affected area
c) An “interested party registry” to allow people to sign up to get notice of city meetings
d) Approval of a the common council after the study is done, which included public hearings at the plan commission and common council
Apparently wasn’t enough. Funny, no matter how many things you add to an ordinance for the lobbyists, they still claims that there is not compromise. (Ok – Kristian wouldn’t have had the editorial comments, but it saves me an additional blog.)
After a while, we finally we tabled the item because it was past 8:30 and several mothers with young children were waiting to testify. When we came back to it at the end of the meeting, Ken Golden made a big long amendment I didn’t write down, and it passed, but the ordinance failed. The final vote in favor was: Golden, Gruber, Konkel, Olson, Verveer, Webber, Benford, Cnare. Voting no were: Compton, Knox, Palm, Sanborn, Thomas, Brandon, Bruer, Radomski. Absent were: King, Rosas, Skidmore and VanRooy. Rosas may have voted “present” on this one, but I listed him in the absence column since his vote wouldn’t be counted in the vote total. Sorry, my bad, again. Anyways, the vote was 8 – 8 and we need 11 votes for it to pass.
BREASTFEEDING
As noted, we tabled the above discussion to get to the breastfeeding debate. Several women and health professionals (also all women) testified to the benefits of breastfeeding the issues that women encounter when trying to breastfeed in public. There were some questions and it passed unanimously with 18 or so sponsors.
Here’s where things really started jumping all around, so these may not be in order . . . but here’s what happened.
CHEROKEE (Special Area Plan, Annexation Agreement, Memorandum of Understanding)
Only one speaker in favor, the (nice) lobbyist for the entity that wants to develop the marsh. Three speakers with concerns. Several thank yous the Friends of Cherokee Marsh were made by alders. No amendments were even offered as it was clear it was a done deal. It passed on a voice vote with myself and Alder Palm voting “no”. I asked for my vote to be recorded, I don’t know if Alder Palm did the same. During the meeting, Alder Palm talked to me about environmental concerns and I believe that is why he voted no.
SUDAN/DARFUR
This resolution called for the State to divest from Sudan. Several speakers in support. Council members in favor were Golden, Gruber, Knox, Konkel, Olson, Verveer, Webber, Benford, Bruer, Cnare. Against were Compton, Thomas and Radomski. King, VanRooy and Skidmore were absent. Palm was out of the room. Brandon, Rosas and Sanborn abstained/voted present. The motion failed because it only had 10 votes.
TREES/PURCHASING POLICIES/”LOCAL” PURCHASING
We agreed to purchase trees on a sole source/dual source basis from two Wisconsin nurseries McKay and Johnson. The resolution said that we would allow this “indefinitely”. I separated it so that we could limit the ability to do this for 10 years. The reason for the permission to do this is that we need bigger trees and other Cities are buying them all up quickly and this allows us to get these nurseries to guarantee us trees of the size and variety that we want, and get them from Wisconsin. I believe some staff and alders would have preferred that we limited this to 2 or 3 years, but some of the trees we want need to be 7 years old and we needed to give the nurseries comfort that if they planted the trees, we’d be there in 7 years to purchase them.
ATC EXPERT
Ok – this one confused me. I thought we were hiring an expert of the case we were already intervening in. However, we were hiring an expert for a case that has not yet been filed before the PFC. I was hoping that since this expert would likely help other groups that were intervening, we could share costs, but it seemed doubtful. So, we’re spending $35,000 to hire an expert. I’d say the resolution isn’t as specific as the City Attorney explained at the meeting, but it passed unanimously.
AMENDING THE 2007 BUDGET
This one is just irritating, we go through a whole long budget process with many, many amendments and 2 months later we’re making many, many amendments. It passed unanimously.
CENTRAL PARK
Only separated because the recommendation of the plan commission to move the date of the report from June 2007 to Jan 2008 wasn’t included in the materials before the council. Passed unanimously.
ADVERTISING ON BUSES
This advertising is for inside and outside of the buses, including full bus wraps. The contract says that Adams Outdoor Advertising will guarantee $250,000 in 2007, $130,000 less than we had budgeted for. This is disappointing after all the hoopla about how much we can make from advertising. In the past, without the full wraps, we were able to obtain the following amounts:
2002 $341,000
2003 $390,000
2004 $301,000
2005 $169,000
2006 $142,000 through October
Prior to 2005 when we entered into a contract with a company that did not perform well, we were bringing in $300,000 in a bad year. My concerns are twofold: One, advertising revenues projected by Adams Outdoor Advertising in the ramps has fallen short. Two, when we added the bus wraps shouldn’t we be doing more business than before we added them? The contract doesn’t seem to reflect this. This also passed unanimously.
And with that, I introduced two more resolutions at the end of the meeting, one calling for us to adopt an Affordable Housing Plan for the Allied Drive area – this was referred to the Allied Drive Task Force and the Housing Committee. A second was introduced on Alder King’s behalf that would call for an advisory referendum to call for “presidential accountability”. This was referred to the next council meeting.
