Like um, undermining your efforts. Of course, my alder is involved.
Last Tuesday, at the end of the council meeting, my alder, Bridget Maniaci introduced this.
Normally you would say – oh, that’s nice and think nothing more of it, right?
Here’s what it says . . .
WHEREAS, the City of Madison established a Land Banking Fund to purchase and stabilize developable parcels of land in the City of Madison; and,
WHEREAS, the City’s Economic Development Committee approved guidelines for the purchase and sale of land acquired with Land Banking Funds (attached); and,
WHEREAS, the City used the Land Banking Fund to purchase properties in the 700 and 800 Blocks of East Washington Avenue (the “Sites”), as shown on the attached; and,
WHEREAS, the City issued a Request for Proposals (the “RFP”) seeking developer interest in the purchase and redevelopment of the Sites; and,
WHEREAS, the City received six proposals (the “Proposals”) that met the submission requirements of the RFP; and,
WHEREAS, an ad-hoc “Selection Committee” of Alders, City staff, and development professionals approved by the Mayor reviewed the Proposals, and have recommended that the following proposals for the Sites be accepted by the Common Council:
– 700 Block North Site: Gebhardt Development, LLC Proposal
– 800 Block North Site: Urban Land Interest, LLC Proposal
– 800 Block South Site: The Rifken Group Proposal,NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that Common Council thanks the Selection Committee for its report on the Urban Land Interest, LLC Proposal.
Ok, red flag. Why is the action, the resolved clause, only about one of three projects? What about the other two?
Well, here is what it is really about . . . sent Saturday evening
Dear Neighbors,
You may have seen Pat McDonnell’s email yesterday regarding the City Council meeting coming up at 6:30pm this Tuesday, March 6. I have introduced an item to allow for neighbors and citizens in the city to come speak directly to the City Council regarding their opinions of how the city has handled the process surrounding the redevelopment of the former Don Miller parcels on E Washington Avenue.
Last April, a Request For Proposal (RFP) was put together by City of Madison staff to solicit proposals for the former Don Miller parcels that the City was acquiring through land-banking funds for renewal and economic development purposes. An Ad-Hoc committee of staff, alders and individuals with backgrounds in business and development was put together. Six qualifying proposals were received. Three were chosen. Two have been successfully negotiated and brought forward to the City Council– Gebhardt Development on the 700 North parcel, and The Rifkin Group with Ergens Development for the 800 South parcel.
At this point, 6 months after the ad-hoc committee made an initial recommendation for the 800 North parcel to be negotiated with Urban Land Interests (ULI), the negotiations have not been successfully resolved, and nothing has come forward to the City Council to consider.
There were no direct neighborhood residents/representatives on the committee, bringing into question if the values that the neighborhood has expressed through previous planning efforts were adequately taken into consideration when decisions were made on the choice of the 800 block development.
Given the delay in resolving the future of this site, additional redevelopment proposals have been informally submitted to the City, and the future course of action (continue negotiating with ULI, or go back out for RFP) has not been decided, and very much hangs in the balance.
I encourage you to use the opportunity at Tuesday night’s Council meeting to directly speak to the Council and the Mayor about what course of action you would like to see the City take, and what values you’d like to see most represented in considering what goes onto this site and into the negotiation process.
Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.
Sincerely,
Alder Bridget Maniaci
It’s true, I have outright disdain for this kind of trickery and games. No matter who does it. I wish our alders would just say what they mean and not try to play such games which became so popular with our last mayor. The new culture of the council is so obnoxious.
Add to this the fact that the alders involved did not object to the illegal meetings (no public notices and no open records) at the time, to find fault now is a joke. This Machiavellian attitude – to get what you want at all costs, rules and processes and transparency, morals and ethics be damned is aggravating.
If you want to do something, do it honestly and transparently, introduce a resolution to reconsider the choice, or reissue the Request for Proposals (RFP) or in support of considering the Metcalfe proposal.
To refresh your memory, from a November blog:
WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL
This is one of the projects where the city held secret meetings and then decided the neighbors couldn’t talk to the developer. The public meeting was held in late August when people were taking vacations before school started. More info on the projects is here.So, now we have illegal meetings where members of the neighborhoods were not allowed to participate and were not publicly noticed, but the business community and others were invited to attend. We are being told that we have to go with one particular developer and we are selling them the land before we deal with land use approvals (doesn’t comply with the neighborhood plan) and an unknown TIF request amount. We aren’t allowed to look at the other proposals that were submitted, we’re just being told this is the one and then we’ll have to agree to the land use and TIF or we’ll be obstructionists.
I don’t know if the project is a good one or not. I went to the neighborhood meeting they tried to cancel and found out quite a bit of information, but there is so much that is unknown. I feel pretty uncomfortable with this process and selling this land for nearly $1M under these circumstances, given we know it doesn’t comply with the neighborhood plans and involves TIF and I think it will require exceptions. I hate to have another developer go thorough all this and end up where the Edgewater did . . . hopefully we can back up and do this one right.
Comment above were about the Constellation project of the Gebhardt’s that is going to be voted on at Plan Commission in two weeks. There’s a word for this whole thing: cluster%$#@!
