I thought we were pretty squirrely at the last Council meeting, just last Tuesday. I wonder what tonight will hold?
Last time, the agenda and (near) actions of the council were disturbing. I’m not sure how many people realized that we nearly repealed the childcare program, finally approved spending the fair housing testing money that we voted on in 2005 when we created the Department of Civil Rights, voted to condemn private property (Sanborn and I voted “no”), created a committee in a highly unusual way, approved a flawed agreement with Union Corners for TIF funding and nearly approved a resolution with missing information. All of this, in addition to some playing some crass politics on the council floor. Several alders (Compton, Gruber, Knox, Olson, Rosas, Skidmore, Thomas, VanRooy and Verveer – tho Verveer says he wasn’t paying attention and made a mistake) actually voted to call the question to prevent me from asking questions about the Union Corners agreement. (Thanks to Benford, Bruer, King, Sanborn, Webber and Palm who wanted to allow debate and subsequent correction in the resolution. Brandon, Cnare and Radomski were absent. Golden abstained.)
The Union Corners issue boiled down to this. The day before the council meeting, the TIF Committee met and we discussed changing what is considered an investment by the developer. If changed the way the development community wants it changed, they could be allowed to make more profit before the City gets back its “equity kicker”. The “equity kicker” is a formula to get back money from the developer if they make more money on the project than they said that they would. (Which means we could have given them less TIF money to begin with.) None of the alders in the room were present for that TIF committee discussion, and yet they were willing to vote to just give taxpayer dollars away without listening to arguments about how we could improve the agreement and protect the taxpayer.
And then, there was the nutty discussion on public financing of campaigns. My personal favorite was when Alder VanRooy attempted to “balance” the committee that had the League of Women Voters, Democracy Campaign and Common Cause on it by adding 2 members of the business community. Apparently, according to this alder, the “business community” has a different view of clean elections than the watchdog groups!
Tonight’s agenda holds several items of interest including:
- Neighborhood Conservation Districts (#8) (Note: There are two versions, the alternate appears to be the one that will be voted on, but I hear that Ald. Olson has even more changes.)
- Compact Fluorescent Light bulb proposal (#12)
- Sale of the Dungeon Monroe School and putting nearly $1M in the Affordable Housing Trust Fund (#13)
- More Health Department Merger (#14 & 15)
- Approving the Monroe St. Commercial District Plan (#19)
- Banning Paint Ball Guns (#20)
- Declaring April 23 – 39 as “Cover the Uninsured Week” in Madison (#29)
- Creating a Committee to look at a Community of Neighborhood Support (#30)
Hopefully things don’t get as contentious at the last business meeting, but I’m not too optimistic. If nothing else, with at least nine new members of the council, this election cycle gives us a chance to start over and hopefully build a little more respect and collegiality on the Council and some better working relationships. And hopefully this new council won’t be afraid of debate on the council floor.
