Someone needs to lock County Executive Kathleen Falk and Mayor Dave Cieslewicz in a room, give them a stern lecture on how they are potentially limiting our community’s ability to move forward with transit options and then not let them out until they can stop all this silliness and agree to act in a manner that is not harmful to our community. Much of the discussion about transit options seems a bit of a mystery to me, mostly because it occurs in a long list of committees in a very fractured manner or worse yet, in private meetings where the public and many elected officials are excluded from the discussion. In the City of Madison alone, we have appointed people to the following committees (I hope I didn’t miss any):
- Transit and Parking Commission
- Pedestrian, Bicycle and Motor Vehicle Commission
- Long Range Transportation Planning Commission
- Transportation 2020
- Madison Streetcar Study Committee
- Platinum Bike Task Force
- Ad Hoc Long Range Madison Metro Committee (sorry, got that name wrong)
- Parking Utility Strategic Plan
- MPO
- High Speed Intercity Rail
Meanwhile, the Common Council ends up isolated from the discussion, partially because some of these committees have their own independent abilities (Transit and Parking Commission and Metropolitan Planning Organization) and partially because this discussion can get quite technical and detailed and a small number of people become “experts” in this area and the rest simply don’t have the time to keep up on the discussion.
At the moment, the way I understand it, there is a huge problem with either commuter rail or streetcars moving forward in any way, shape or form simply because we won’t be able to submit competing applications to the federal government. And as long as this discussion about commuter rail and streetcars remains in this weird state that it is in, we seem to be in a stalemate.
Most people I talk to realize that Transport 2020 (starting with commuter rail) is in the best position to move forward at the moment and feel that it should happen. Then some people, actually a very few, think that trolleys can become part of that plan in the future. Many, many others think that trolleys are dead in the water.
One of the major stumbling blocks for Transport 2o2o moving forward is how a commuter rail system would be governed and funded. One of the key ways to fund any of these projects would be to form a Regional Transit Authority (RTA). And, in the next few days we have the opportunity to get the state legislature to give us the authority (and several other communities around Wisconsin) to create a RTA. Currently, we don’t have the legal authority to create a RTA.
Now, here’s where the locking the two executives in the room comes in . . . the possibility of having an RTA move forward is in jeopardy as Kathleen Falk and Mayor Dave argue over the details of what the RTA should look like. It seems, or so I’ve been told, their disagreement lies in what the state legislature allows the boundaries of an RTA to be. Their disagreement seems to stem from distrust over if this RTA would fund streetcars or be limited in a way that would exclude portions of the county. Could a few municipalities to form an RTA or does it need to be countywide?
As the two of them argue, the deadline for the state legislature to put this language in the budget slips away and in the end, our community may end up with nothing, for now. This silliness has to end if we are to move forward. We need to get them to come to some agreement over RTA language at the state level so that we, and several other communities in Wisconsin, can continue work on these transportation plans that have been in the works for years. And someway, we need to get this conversation into the public realm so that these two can’t single-handedly continue to be obstacles to good transit planning for our community.
(Links will be added in just a bit . . . )
