Last week, after we met with the Mayor about the E. Washington BUILD I was feeling pretty positive about the direction we were moving. The neighborhoods and Downtown Madison Inc. (DMI), were still in agreement and even the the Mayor quipped “Well, I guess this meeting was everything it was billed to be.“
Our meeting was set up to talk about the BUILD and the issues surrounding the dispute about the heights on East Washington. The height issue is about various areas that are 8, 10, 12 or 15 stories, as opposed to the two stories that we currently have. However, what we’ve all discovered is that this really isn’t about height and more about the discomfort about the transportation needs for the area and how it would impact the quality of life. People feel more comfortable about the heights if they are assured that the people who need to use these new tall buildings can get to and from work without completely destroying the quality of life of the surrounding neighborhoods. Patrick McDonnell, president of the Tenney Lapham Neighborhood Association described his idea for a Transportation Design District, which would be a transportation plan that works hand in hand with the land use plans for the area.
Then, we got to the plan commission last night, and apparently, someone forgot to tell the staff about our discussions with Mark Olinger, Director of the Department of whatever-its-called-now, and the Mayor. The staff report and comments started out being about how a transportation plan would take several years and cost a million dollars and we couldn’t wait for it to be done before we moved forward with approving the BUILD plan.
Whoa! No one was asking for all that. The Transportation Design District was intended to take all of the transportation plans for the area and put them on one map and see how they affected the land use in the area (and the rest of the Isthmus) and see if we needed to move the proposed parking places or make plans for transit stops. It was supposed to take all the possibilities for transit and make sure that our land uses don’t preclude some of the future transit uses. And then, in the future, we would continue working with the transportation plans for the Isthmus.
The plan commission also got kind of fixated on the heights and the conflicts in the 4 or 5 plans for the area. Luckily, I think we got them to understand that if we can resolve the transportation issues, the height issues would be mitigated and easier to talk about and might, in fact, go away. They ended up referring this to their August meeting for additional work.
Unfortunately, I’m really nervous about what the Cap Times reporter/editorial writer Mike Ivey will print about the meeting as he seemed to have completely missed the point and walked away with a completely wrong understanding of the meeting. When I talked to him, he said that he was going to write that the plan commission was going to reject the neighborhood and DMIs suggestions on transportation. He said he counted 5 votes, so I went back out in the room and talked to the alleged votes and they all said that was not their intent. Apparently, he only heard one comment from Tim Gruber and didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. So, I’d read today’s Cap Times account of the plan commission meeting with skepticism.
And hopefully, DMI and the neighborhoods can talk with Dan McCormick, from Traffic Engineering, and continue our work. He seemed to understand what we were asking for and he seemed to have ideas about how we could accomplish what we wanted and move this plan forward, because that is what we all want to have happen.
