Mayor Paul Soglin’s Speech to Capitol Neighborhoods

This is why I voted for him. He gets it.

INTRO
He says he thought this was to be a discussion, being the keynote speaker seems ominous, he asks if anyone was at the Maestro and Mayor luncheon yesterday. (No one says yes). He says the questions came up about his attitude, and so he spent a moment that he will now share with you and show you that I can smile. (He stands there stone faced.) He asks, did you catch that? (People laugh.) He says he wants to talk about things that are important to all of us, but they might not be important 100 years from now, its process.

RIDE THE DRIVE
He says it is an experience that is fun, it’s also something that lead to, depending on the parking ramp 20 – 45% loss in revenue and corresponding loss of business to downtown merchants, most of whom are locally owned businesses. It seems incongruous that when have a choice between an event like that and having an adverse impact, and many things we do have adverse impacts, but when have an option to have just as much pleasure and fun where don’t have to create adverse impact should take the later route. The question is how to get there, he thought he was making a point in cancelling the Ride the Drive, by virtue of using the same authority as was used to create the original event. It’s not in the budget, it costs $25K and its not approved by city council, its all run out of one office even though we have requirements that for expenditures over $5K it be approved by the city council. It doesn’t matter that there are offsetting revenues that cover it, the simple fact that $5K expenditure requires it to be in the budget and have the authority of the city council.

So now we are making some corrections, some are technical, for example, like putting it in the budget, they are having a meeting with business leaders, another meeting or two to be scheduled with religious institutions, there is another series of meetings with neighborhood residents, not sure where that is, but getting input to better design and how to make it work better. It won’t compromise the quality for the bikes but at same time better access to downtown, opportunities for downtown residents and not restrictions to access downtown and not see repetition of what happened with one person, they had an ill parent and had to go back and forth through isthmus. Normally it would take a half hour and instead it was a 3 hour trip to visit ill parent, get meds and go back and return home, what is the point of all of this? That kind of participation creates a better plan, that kind of participation, whether one day event or something that will last 100 of years starts to make a difference.

PUBLIC MARKET
Second thought, public market, if you look at the evolution of the public market here in Madison, on blocks 88 and 105, it is clear from inception of the public market, where the idea came about 4 – 5 years ago til an study of $225,000 that the public market changed. It changed significantly, he spoke to many people committed to it, but remember the joke about blind men touching something, it was an elephant and as they touched each part they came to conclusion that it was something very different, even without touching it was very different. There were those that had an image that was built on existing farmers market, its gritty, you still get fruits and vegetables and wash off the Wisconsin soil before you prepare food. Others had a current vision that you would buy specialty foods, high end and expensive.

He went to Chicago and Milwaukee and the public market in Chicago was clearly very different than the original conception of the Madison market. For one thing, there were very expensive chocolates, he didn’t buy them. He’s not used to paying $2 for container of yogurt and that is not the public market in the original conception for Madison.

This demonstrates a variation of the bulldozers-are-coming rule. You start public planning, mostly with city agencies, the project evolves through the departments and divisions and you see it in the capital budget and then there is a council meeting and the bids are being awarded and the next day the mayor signs and the next say the bulldozers of coming. Why after 5 years of planning, we don’t get an intense public discussion until 2 days before the bulldozers, the bulldozers were not coming, but there was a significant change in concept. Who was involved? Why do they have disparate concepts about what a public market was? It stressed him that the low ball estimate for the space was $5M and the more realistic number was $10M and I don’t know about you, as much as I love tomatoes at $37/lb and lettuce at $13/lb, it doesn’t excite him.

As we conceive of the idea we need a vision and a plan and the discussion has to be public and continuous, he says one of the things he worries about is that institutions have three elements, and at least one of you have heard this it in class, but it is the structure of the organization, the craft- the professional skills and quality of workforce and third is culture. Structure and craft are easy, but when look at best practices and come back and duplicate them, why don’t we get the same result? We focus 95% of our effort on structure and craft and it should be on culture. It’s the culture that drives the organization and is so hard to change, its like steering a battleship but when it comes time to destroy it is fragile.

When it comes to the culture of how we perform daily, he was stunned by what he has discovered, he doesn’t want to identify specific departments, divisions or practices, but when it comes to affirmative action, to the notion of inclusion in processes that involve an effort to welcome people into the system regardless of age, gender, racial ethnicity, sexual preference etc, he has found that practices that were there in the 1990s that had been instituted in mid 1970s are no longer conducted in city government. I thought they were built on solid foundation, immutable, yet somewhere along the way, we lost our way.

STAFFING/RETIREMENTS
Last point, to get money’s worth he was told to talk for 20 minutes, but he hopes to have an opportunity for discussion. 80 city employees have submitted their retirement resignations to the city from the 1st of the year until June 1 and that does not include those this month which is fire chief as well. To put number in perspective, in every year in past decade, the most retirements they had was 75, so if we continue at present rate it will be twice that in past 10. Some say that is great, we get fresh blood at a cheaper salary, but we are losing institutional knowledge, experience and teachers of our staff and of the new hires who will become so critical if have good public employment.

One of the practices in the area that has weakened us is relying on outside consultants, that is not to say they are not valuable, but if think about it, if pay we pay $70K per year for someone in a high paid planning role and then sign a $1.4 million contract with a consultant, first, is it possible we could get it done cheaper with our own people. They irony is that when we ship the job out, 5 years from now, want to use same consultant, we pay twice as much. They have better skills then because we paid them and they learned as they worked with us, skills that could be acquired by a public employee if we did it in house and had older experienced staff to continue.

BUDGET
That gets us to the budget and how we spend our money, we tabulated the size of the gap 30 – 45 days ago, it was $28M, that is a lot of money by municipal standards. It sounds like less than 15% of operating budget, but we saw some reforms in the state legislature, a little shared revenue came back, municipalities were given 40% of recycling funds that were cut. They preceded to work on capital budget, why, cuz as we change the capital budget, we avoid borrowing, each dollar this year we save 14 cents next year. We cut out everything we knew could not be done this year, then did some items that were questionable in desirability or essential, we have alternate financing for the public library and when all done, the id’d $50M in capital budget items. He has to review with council members, especially if it is in their district or they were authors of the items. At least 2/3 will not be controversial because we weren’t going to get to it anyways, that saved us $6 – 7 M and now the gap is only $19.75M. How do we solve that? For one thing, we are not going to raise tax levy more than 3%, last 2 years it went up 5%. He does not believe given what has happened to incomes of so many people, we can’t sustain over 3%, they are going to have to recognize that we will no longer burden you with special fees, we cannot take garbage collection off the property tax and charge a fee to bring in $7 or 8M, that is an additional tax increase. There has to be recognition about what we can afford, it will take tough choices. We have three options to deal with it, layoffs, furloughs or reducing compensation. This is the real world, the post-Walker world, we’re in it, we’re living it.

He was asked at a meeting with staff if he wants it to be painful and here is his answer, he doesn’t want it to be painful but if it is we will not hide it. We will let them know what is going on. What are options? Usually there is a period in November where there is the lowest demand for service. Summer and fall services are wrapped up, there no snow yet, in older days people took off for hunting. The message this year is go, have a good time, encourage people to take absence without pay that will be allowed assuming can maintain staffing.

Every other week garbage pick up, close fire stations and getting other ideas
Ideas that were thrown out, we are thinking about January and February alternate week garbage collection, of course if we do that this will be the one year that it is not a hellish frozen winter, but if freezing and close to zero we can get away with it. They are looking at rotating the closing of fire stations. He is asking not just dept. and division heads look at it, but two other levels of discussion, one is to involve the employees that do the work, there will be discussions and invitation, may pose technical and legal problems, it could be a form of bargaining. There is a series of 5 meetings in July and August, he wishes it could be earlier this year with coming into office and scheduling. The meetings will be in 5 topical areas and in 5 areas of the city. He is hoping not that you participate by addressing line items in budgets but sharing values you want reflected in the budget. What are the basic assumptions about community. In subsequent years he wants to start in March and April.

He learned over the years that the public statutory hearing is in Oct and Nov but 99.9% of the budget is locked in by that point. If you want to participate not in response to executive budget, you want to participate before department and division heads submit preliminary budget, that is early spring or summer.

WRAP UP
That is some of things he is working on, the process and participation go a long with the technical aspects of what we do, he is reminded of a book by Daniel Kemmis called Community and the Politics of Place, about the Mayor of Misspula, MT and who was also in the legislature. He says it is not fair to take his book and put it in two sentences but he tells the story of a challenge between the utilities and the environmentalists and the need for greater access to energy. The normal process was for them to go to government and address a table of leaders who make a Solomonesque decision, maybe compromising maybe all or nothing. This is the procedural republic. It’s Judge Roy Bean, when they demand their right, he says ok, here they are, now we will hang you. You will get due process, or do you want something meaningful, yes government facilitated and participated but environmental activists and utilities talked to each other, everyone was fairly happy, they were not unhappy and the parties came out of it not hating government, well isn’t that something pleasing.

Any questions about the Edgewater? (laughs)

Q & A
Staff Contracts
Q: Fred Mohs wants to ask about Department Heads. In your earlier career the the department heads were considered civil service vipers and you eventually moved into contract concept with 5 year term but review in year or two, they used to feel the represented the public and city and now with the short term contract they represent the mayor.

A: Soglin says they used to be tenured, they had an appointment for life. The switched that to look at good behavior to five year contracts, they are more than the 4 year mayoral term, now many contracts are for 2 years. He’s a five year guy, he thinks that it is the right balance in job protection and guarantees for employee but at the same time its easier to remove someone who is not responsive or not performing in their job. The problem with 2 year contract is twofold. First with 2 year contract you spend most of it on probation, and they are not likely to get best and most qualified applicants. Its a device that thins the herd in the wrong direction. Good career people won’t uproot their family for a job where you will be on probation but after 2 years you could be out. Second problem is that besides discouraging, it keeps them under the thumb in the mayor to an excess, they are shackled, as we hire people and contracts come up for renewal, he will be looking at 5 year contracts

Impact of Walker Budget
Q: Mary Kolar asks about the interview with Sly, she says he had exceptional data points on the budget impacts on Madison and Dane County

A: Mayor says this relates to the state and the undercurrent of feeling is that some of what we are seeing is deliberately aimed at Madison. Certainly over the years the feeling is that Madison benefits from the bounty of having the Capitol and UW and that gives us a strong economy and that is correct, no question that city like ours, and like Austin TX do thrive because of presence of state government and university. The question is are we ungrateful, are we selfish and answer is a resounding no. He had not been in a position to pursue what he is going to share, but very clear you can feel it instinctively, that if Madison suffers and suffers significantly – and a 6 – 7% real income cut to public employees, that is money that would go for food and shelter and that won’t help the housing market so he thought he would check to see what we do as a community in terms of sharing our bounty with Wisconsin. He has a strong message for the state of WI, we are Dane county, he can’t get city numbers, but what we say about Dane County is even more true city of Madison. We are 8% of the population of state, but 14% of the sales tax is collected here, then when take shared revenue formulas and the disproportionate amount of money we receive compared to others, we are in an enormous exporter of wealth. They are working to look at other revenue figures, income tax might be even stronger. A healthy Madison has always been a benefit to the state, we are not selfish, we are wise in shepherding resources. Over decades that costs of services have been state average to 8 – 10% lower per capita basis, despite our reputation as wild eyed spending liberals, we are prudent, we are frugal and we share and we share nicely and he hopes the message gets out. He plans to get it out in coming weeks and months, hurting Madison is not a wise idea for state of WI

Development and Density
Q: Bert Stitt asks him to comment on downtown and redevelopment and density and infill.

A: Mayor says one of things he wants to pick up on, which was interrupted in late 1990s, was Kitty Rankin’s work on identifying buildings to be recognized for historic value. It is a two stage process, they id the buildings and then once they had a large generic group, they get down to specifics and decide these are the ones we want to make significant commitment to. That’s not so say they write off the rest, but the understanding is about what is highest priority and what is more vulnerable in terms of development.

Second, we have to deal with economics of development and preservation. He saw a few things this weekend. He flew in over the east side, and looked down at Atwood/Shenks Corner and he thought about what looked like 30 years ago and thought about major impact of Barrymore Theatre had on the neighborhood, the Barrymore more than anything, well it’s the poeple more than anything, but after that, that is why it became a institution – I missed some here.

He has been struck by density and the question he always has is the 500 year perspective, when in Europe and wandering around you see 1600 and 1500 buildings and it is lost on him which is which, he believes quality has a lot to say about 500 years and 50 or 70 years difference in age. The other thing is he was in Baltimore and went through a section that 30 or 20 years was awful and depressing and miserable, literally bombed out and those buildings were preserved, his observation is not that buildings were preserved but that industrial buildings never took a real foothold in Madison, we don’t have a lot of that kind of architecture, the shed rows on near southside are gone, there are some duplicated on near east side, but the point is not about preservation but incorporating design into the new construction, that is very important. This may sound like a contradiction, but as we see new construction with the old, it is critical that in terms of urban design and building standards that we makes sure development and architecture follow the code but that we do not design the building for them, allow them the freedom of an artist, we make sure standards are followed but not design the buildings.

Density is our great contradiction, not sprawl but not high rise buildings and while the land can take enormous buildings in terms of density, the neighborhood may not be able to absorb all the activity. He is not sure there are hard and fast rules, it is going to be different, if a certain area reaches a capacity may not be able to add density to it. The other corollary to that is that as we look at the design and density we have to look at other systems, especially transportation. To make public transit efficient we need a certain density to make it perform and the economics, land use, transportation and economic policy all go together and we cannot do any kind of building or design without integrating the items, that is what went wrong with the public market, particularly on the economics, this is a a challenge we face in other projects as well.

Historic Preservation
Q: Joe Lusson asks about his commitment to historic districts, a lot of us live downtown in old and new, but charm is the historic neighborhoods and houses that are the fabric of the community. If nothing else historic districts should protect them and that is why Edgewater so galling, it was being thrown under the bus and the one thing protecting us wasn’t cuz it was thrown out.

A: We need to look at the standards and our commitment to then, if you look at historic districts that exist you wouldn’t believe that 4 or 5 sets of ordinances came from the same city, they are different and varied, we need consistency.

Second has to be flexibility, we have to be prepared to say yes and say no and say this is different than that. We did this here and not there, uniformity comes out of fear of making decisions. He talks about Mifflin St, there is a debate about the future of Mifflin, the four blocks that intersect the corner of Mifflin and Bassett. With the exception of 2 or 3 of the buildings by 1973 he had been in every single one of them and having known them and they were in miserable shape in the 1960s, now as we try to preserve the area, he two thoughts, one is the individual buildings, the second is what does it mean if the whole neighborhood is not preserved. Is it about one building or about the 4 square blocks and their architecture, he’s got ambivalent feelings. He lived there over a decade in two or three of the buildings and they are long gone, he has no great affinity emotionally to the area, his present day response is he goes down Mifflin St is hmmmmm, look at this, it’s what he calls, early American Menards. Green treated lumber, 2 x 2s and an occasional a 2 x 4 to put in a dilapidated railing, whole porches are missing, they lost the character of the building and all that is left is a brown patch, he is not sure that is what is worth saving. He likes a segments of the area, 400 block on W Washington has a cluster, 500 West Dayton as you approach the bend has some houses, but most of the rest he can live without. One of the house at 123 N Bassett he lived in at Bassett and Dayton on the southeast corner, sometime in the late 70s in the energy crisis every window was replaced and total window coverage reduced by 50%, whole character of house, the big windows are gone, we need to determine if there are segments that as a bundle should be preserved, one by itself says – there is so much crap, he has no qualms to take it down. Bob Keller, some of stuff he did is good, he thinks some of it is marvelous and he wants to see more.

Poverty
Q: Bill Patterson says he was at an Urban League meeting, this fall they will have 55% students living in poverty, you campaigned on this issue and there is a really good article in the Capitol City Hues, but very few people probably read it. If the young people are not educated, they drop out, that is our workforce that will retire us and an issue in article talked about neighborhoods that might not have poverty, and if so, we should find another neighborhood to help.

A: Mayor says that very sloppy on my part, professor Haberman?? at LaFollette hates it when he oversimplifies the research, and it depends on geography, race, gender etc, but on average have to have 2 years of post-high school education if you are going to be a contributor to society. That is the break-even point, if take what contribute in taxes as opposed to social and economic benefits. So every time a kid drops out of high school and doesn’t go to post high school education, think what that does to the economy. There is over 50% of kids below the poverty level, the schools are getting pretty diverse, it is expanding and while I too am fascinated by the creative class . . . there was a woman who really helped keep me going during my campaign that said that her son is graduating in another year an only one thing she asked, she wants the community provide him an education to get a job where he can afford to live in Madison. If you think about it, is that an unreasonable request? A job where you can raise a family, to have enough income and live in your home town. That is a reasonable request, that ought to be a goal. There are 2700 kids that are academically challenged in the schools. He was at a luncheon that 700 – 800 people attended, they wrote checks and tutored but what if 2 or 3 times that number of people to get involved with kids. When it comes to social services the most efficient way to spend money, long term in terms of investing is summer recreation and after school programs, there is no question about the data when participating in the program, that ought to be the focus . . . and people make neighborhoods.

CHECK PRESENTATION
Adam Plotkin asks the Mayor to stay up there for a moment. He presents him will a check for the amount of money that CNI made on the Mifflin St. Block Party to pay for the expenses that the parks department had that were not covered. Soglin laughs and says they are too generous. Everyone smiles.