The Town of Mukwonago will decide through a referendum on Tuesday if it wants to retain its rural character, or join the subdivision/strip mall/traffic congestion crowd.
Like the countywide farmland preservation question on the Washington County ballot, the Town of Mukwonago is on the right path, letting its residents, not a clutch of developers and other insiders decide their fate.
Best of luck to them.
From now on, I'm only voting for candidates who don't annoy me with robocalls.
Attorney and City of Monona alderman Peter McKeever has written eloquently about how Wisconsin's open lands are disappearing when powerful building and consulting interests overwhelm less well-armed town boards and decision-making commissions.
You might want to download and save McKeever's commentary from that WisOpinion link highlighted above, because WisOpinion postings vanish after a few days and are not archived on the site.
Here's a portion of the argument that McKeever, a long-time organizer in statewide land conservation efforts, presents in his Friday, March 30th essay:
"The local review and approval process is typically ripe with procedural and substantive errors and problems, often involving the failure of local government to follow public notice, open meetings and open records laws and the failure to properly apply local zoning laws and follow land use plans. The board members, the “deciders” have little experience dealing with big sprawl subdivisions complete with new lakes and mega-McMansions, office complexes, malls, and tree-lined boulevards in place of town roads and scattered farms. They much prefer to have the proposal go away, and the quickest way to accomplish that is to approve it.
Their town engineers are hired consultants, from the same firms that often do work for the developers. Local board members and plan commissioners do not have, or are unwilling to spend, funds for independent engineering reviews, environmental assessments, property tax analyses, and feasibility studies. They really have no idea what the real long-term impact will be on the place they claim to care about."
There are eye-popping numbers included in a March 20th draft report by the Southeastern Regional Planning Commission (SEWRPC) about growth in the region.
For example, the projected increase from 2000-to-2035 in Waukesha County's population will exceed the entire 2000 population count in all of Ozaukee County.
The SEWRPC numbers make clear that there will be increased demands for water, roads, housing and other public spending and services for the next three decades in Waukesha County and across a multi-county region to which capital and employment will migrate from Milwaukee.
Will there be a corresponding regional response on water conservation, transit improvements, low-to-moderate income housing and workforce development so that more sprawl - - now predicted - - does not add to the economic and geographic segregation that continues to separate Milwaukee from its suburban and rural neighbors?
The data also illuminate the reasons why Wisconsin needs to adopt new rules governing use of Great Lakes water - - a process being held up in the Wisconsin legislature.
Without the new rules, growth could become more haphazard, while uncoordinated and unjustifiable diversions of water away from Lake Michigan - - already at a dangerously low level - - could accelerate, too.
The bold-facing in the admittedly lengthy and documented discussion about the SEWRPC report, below, is mine:
The number of square miles in Waukesha County served by municipal water utilities will grow from 82.3 in 2000 to an estimated 168.3 square miles in 2035 - - an increase of 104%.
Additionally, the number of people in the county served by municipal water systems will rise in Waukesha County from the 2000 figure of 218,400 to an estimated total by 2035 of 382,000, an increase of 75%.
Private well use will drop from 142,400 people to 64,800, a decline of 77,600 people, or -54%.
From 2000 to 2035, Waukesha County is expected to grow from 360,800 people in 2000 to 446,800 people in 2035, an addition of 86,000 people, the largest projected raw number increase among SEWRPC's seven counties: Milwaukee, Waukesha, Washington, Ozaukee, Racine, Kenosha and Walworth.
In fact, that increase for Waukesha of 86,000 people - - 24% of its 2000 total - - exceeds the 2000 population of Ozaukee County (82,300), according to the report.
(Other than for Milwaukee County, with a projected increase in population by 2035 of 66,900, or 7%), the other counties in the region will also have substantial growth and water issues to deal with if their population increases and percentages materialize: Kenosha County, +60,500, or 40%; Ozaukee County, +18,800, 23%; Racine County, 24,800, +13%; Walworth County, +48,000, +52%; Washington County, 39,800, +34%)
And how much water will these counties, especially Waukesha County need by 2035 when Waukesha essentially adds an Ozaukee County-full of people within its boundaries?
“The total water use demand on an average daily basis for the 24 municipal water utilities in Waukesha County is estimated to increase from 23.1 mgd [million gallons daily] in 2000, to 41.4 mgd in 2035," says the report. (p. 55).
That’s an increase of 79%.
Bottom line: more people, more people on municipal water systems, more net water use county-wide even with conservation measures planned or in place.
Among the interesting nuggets in the report relate to projected usages of land for housing:
For the entire region, most of the land taken for housing development to the year 2035 from 2000 will be dedicated to units of lower densities, on relatively larger lots.
An estimated 3.8 square miles of land will be converted to so-called "high-density" residential development - - that is...seven housing units or more per acre.
On the other hand, 52.8 square miles - - sixteen times as much projected for high-density housing - - is predicted to be built as "medium-density" housing - - that is...2.3 to 6.9 units per acre.
And another 12 square miles is projected for new "low-density" housing that is...0.7 to 2.2 units per acre.
Throw out the fractions, and you can see that most of the growth in the housing market in the region through 2035 is ticketed for relatively larger, suburban, exurban lots - - the sort of housing that requires more lawn watering than city lots, and usually what is needed by urban multi-unit buildings, like apartments, even condos.
A related number: 103.9 square miles of agricultural land in the seven-county region, or 8.2% of the total, is slated to disappear from ag use, according to the report (county-by-county numbers for these land-use categories do not appear in the document.
The report sums it up this way:
"...in the year 2000, about 390 square miles, or 14% of the total area of the Region, and about 1.56 million persons, or 82% of the regional population, were served by municipal water supply facilities. In 2035, under the regional land use plan, about 628 square miles, or 23% of the total area of the Region, and about 2.09 million persons, or 92% of the regional population, would be served by municipal water systems." (p. 14)
Again, more people, dispersed across far larger municipal water system service territories - - 390 square miles in 2000 compared to 628 square miles in 2035 - - all looking for and expecting connections to potable water.
The 58-page water advisory committee report will undergo another month’s review by members of the commission staff, the 33-member water supply technical advisory committee, and the commission's consultants.
It will then be incorporated at the conclusion of an 18-month planning effort - - about half-completed - - into a set of commission policy recommendations to address water supply issues in the seven-county region.
Basics about the study can be found here, on the SEWRPC website.
Fair warning: The site does not have a simple search function.
And there is a lag of a month or two for the online posting of final, approved minutes, and other documents, that have not moved out of draft or preliminary form.
Case in point: The document - - "SEWRPC Planning Report No. 52: Chapter IV, Anticipated Growth and Change Affecting Water Supply in the Region" - - that is cited through this posting is not yet available on the SEWRPC website.
Also note: Most of the meetings of the water advisory committee have not been covered in the traditional news media. The meetings are, however, open to the public at the commission's City of Pewaukee headquarters basement conference room.
SEWRPC's understated release of these coordinated, significant data - - albeit at a public but under-promoted technical committee meeting - - continues a pattern of regional research and decision-making carried out on major policy issues by technical experts, public officials and favored consultants (read one Madison attorney's insightful commentary about that, here) with very little media coverage, or publicity by SEWRPC itself.
And this this planning is carried out by experts and advisors, many of them local and state officials, on SEWRPC committees from which minorities are nearly completely excluded even though the seven-county planning region group is 100% funded with property taxes and other with public dollars.
(The SEWRPC territory holds 36% of the state's population, including most of the state's minority residents; SEWRPC describes itself on its website as representing "the highly urbanized southeastern region of the State.")
The million-dollar water supply study was funded at the request of Waukesha County, and began over the objections of the City of Milwaukee, documented here.
Another report for the commission on water supply issues has been prepared by Attorney Lawrie Kobza, a water law specialist from the Boardman Law Firm, in Madison.
Kobza has submitted to SEWRPC a 24-page report on state and federal water law, and listed five possible regional water authority models that could address one or more of the region’s water supply issues.
With most of the region's growth in population and water demand projected to occur outside of Milwaukee County and the City of Milwaukee - - but with Milwaukee communities having more direct access to Lake Michigan - - the creation of a new regional water authority could increase the pressure on City of Milwaukee leaders or in other lakefront communities, like the City of Oak Creek, to supply water to the outlying counties.
A regional water authority, if drawn on the county-by-county model that created SEWRPC, could minimize the participation and interests of City of Milwaukee government and residents: The City of Milwaukee, with nearly 600,000 residents and a population exceeding that of several SEWRPC counties, has no seats on the SEWRPC board of commissioners.
Each county has three representatives.
SEWRPC’s lead consultant to the water supply advisory committee is Ruekert/Mielke, Inc., a Waukesha County engineering and consulting firm which also prepared the City of New Berlin’s still-pending, 2006 Lake Michigan diversion application.
That application, which sources report has been revised and resubmitted to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, was roundly criticized as inadequate by several Great Lakes state and Canadian provincial officials after being sent around regionally for comment last year.
The existence of the 2006 New Berlin application was disclosed first by the State of Michigan, which had declined to approve it, though its preparation, and review by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources at New Berlin's request, had gone on for months.
In addition, confidential efforts by the City of Waukesha to obtain a diversion from Lake Michigan were made twice in 2006 proposals by contract lawyers working for the city's water utility to Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle; those efforts (ultimately unsuccessful at the time) were not acknowledged until their disclosure by a free-lance writer using the Open Records statute.
Efforts to implement new rules coordinating community conservation, diversions and return flow from the Great Lakes to communities like New Berlin and Waukesha are stalled in a state legislative study committee.
The logjam there is due in part to objections from Waukesha County business and political leaders who feel the rules give too much authority over water use in Wisconsin to the other seven Great Lakes states.
Unless the rules are adopted by all the states (the eight states and two Canadian provinces are already members of a joint, cooperative Great Lakes management Compact), diversions can be denied under a separate federal law, the US Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), by a single state's veto without any explanation, or the application of standards.
A simple summary of WRDA and matters related to the adoption of the news rules was provided to the state legislative study committee, here.
So where do we stand?
Clearly, intense development is headed for substantial portions or remaining open space and farmland in the region, even in areas with water supply problems, and away from urban centers where unemployed people are cut off from suburban job growth.
SEWRPC could genuinely take the regional lead with comprehensive recommendations, beginning with support for the Great Lakes Compact proposed rules and standards - - but its nearly all-white makeup, strong suburban biases and controversial advocacy for the $6.5 billion regional freeway expansion have eroded much of its leadership possibilities.
It's a profound lesson: All regional efforts, to be fair, and substantive, and effective, must reform themselves to reflect the world and region in which they operate.
That means assertively and intentionally reaching out to groups that have been and remain discounted and excluded.
The more that planning is exclusive and passive, the less effective will be the planners' recommendations.
And their results will be suspect, weak, and even counter-productive.
Given SEWRPC's data, rising fuel prices, probable climate change with warmer temperatures, and job losses to globalization, the stakes are too high to let business-as-usual rule the region
Good environmental policy stuff and data coming Friday.
So San Francisco has prohibited the larger grocery stores from providing petroleum-derived plastic bags to customers, saving taxpayer dollars on landfill costs and making a small but symbolic step towards energy savings.
Predictably, some Milwaukee AM right-wing radio chatterboxes were yammering on the air immediately, bemoaning the loss of some made-up property right to be offered a plastic bag at the supermarket.
But don't municipalities' elected officials regulate or influence behavior all the time...in the name of the common good, the savings of public money, or both?
Take speed limits, for instance. Or fire codes.
Heck, you need a license from the city to open a grocery store in the first place.
And health inspectors can check how the store is displaying products that are allowed for sale only after having passed earlier approvals for manufacture and distribution by The US Food and Drug Administration, federal agricultural inspectors, and by various state regulators.
Ireland went on a different path in 2002, heavily taxing most plastic shopping bags out of existence; Paris is going to install a ban this year, and countries from Canada to Israel to India to Singapore to South Africa are moving towards some version of a plastic bag ban.
Die-hard plasticophiles can still provide their own, and probably will come around to carrying durable, reusable bags made from paper or other materials (the free market and human inventiveness will surely find wonderful and better bags).
And doing without plastic bags made from $65-dollar-a-barrel oil won't be the end of anyone's world.
Remember: we all got along just fine without plastic grocery bags, and having them go away will not cause the sky to fall on talk radio's Chicken Littles.
Today, March 28, is the anniversary of the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.
Twenty-eight years later, the nuclear industry is no closer to solving the problem of what to do with deadly nuclear waste than it was in 1979 - - but that hasn't stopped Dick Cheney's Energy 'Policy' group and others from pushing nukes back into the debate.
Some of the best reporting about sprawl development in southeastern Wisconsin is found in the region's small newspapers.
While they don't have the reach of the major dailies, they often cover a local building project or subdivision plan with attention and passion that convey the significance of the proposal far beyond one small community's borders.
A good example is the recent story in the Kettle Moraine Index, a Waukesha County weekly, about the impact of a development in the rural Town of Ottawa.
That town of less than 4,000 residents - - and the adjoining Village of Dousman, (population 1,600) - - is due to get a single project of 500 homes and condos, plus an artificial lake that critics say could trash a quiet spot and even ruin Larkin Lake, the natural lake that's already there.
The project is slated for 300 acres of disappeared farmland close to these important ecological features, says the Index story:
"Marlin Johnson, a Town of Ottawa resident and associate biology professor at University of Wisconsin-Waukesha, said any possible draining of Larkin Lake would mean the end of a unique and valuable wetland for vegetation and wildlife in the area. He said the sparsely populated Larkin Lake - having only three homes on it - has remained preserved in a natural condition, making it included in the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission's report for natural areas and habitat protection plan for critical species.
"There are natural areas in Wisconsin designated for statewide and regional significance," said Johnson, a member of the Waukesha County Land Conservancy - which preserves environmentally significant land in Waukesha County. "Larkin Lake is designated to have local significance to the area."
Note that the regional planning commission says the property was worth preserving - - but no surprise there: Developments are chopping Waukesha County farms and the priceless Kettle Moraine to bits, including land the regional planning commission recommended as environmental corridors.
You wonder where this all will end?
Will Pabst Farm be enough for developers hoping to build major, multi-use projects on Waukesha County's dwindling open space?
Probably not: The possible Lang project creating a second downtown for Delafield south of I-94 and to the boundary of Lapham Peak State Park, is still on the drawing board.
And plans by local and state government to widen the interstate, and pipe Lake Michigan water over the subcontinental divide will make sprawl into Jefferson County inevitable.
Dane County is sprawling in all directions from Madison, too, suggesting that one heavily-paved region, stripped of farms and wetlands, will settle in with public handouts (TIF's, zoning do-overs, sewer extensions and more) from Milwaukee, to the East Towne Mall and north, following I-94 towards the Wisconsin Dells.
Grassroots groups and small newspapers in threatened communities along this concrete corridor are doing their part to raise the alarm.
But at the regional planning commission, on the county and town boards, and in the legislature, where the highway and builders' interests prevail, is anyone listening?
Some St. Patrick's Day reporting cleanup:
Did you hear about the Waukesha County driver who blew a blood alcohol level of 0.34 at 10 a.m. - - after he killed two people in a head-on crash.
And fatal accidents jumped far ahead of recent St. Patrick's Day totals, perhaps because this year's celebratory binge drinking started on a Saturday.
We pay milions and billions for highways, and then we make it more permissable, more culturally acceptable, to get plastered and drive on certain days, all in the name of fun.
Makes you wonder.
Some of you may have read about the creation of the country's first "forever" stamp, good at face value for first-class postage after purchase even if, and when, rates go up.
The idea was originated and pushed to fruition by one of the country's most stalwart consumer advocates - - Ruth Goldway - - who is also the former Mayor of Santa Monica, CA, and a friend and ally going back to the early 70's.
Ruth is a perfect example of what it means to be a life-long political activist with a set of core values and goals - - in this case, making the huge and impersonal US Postal Service become a more customer-friendly operation.
Congratulations to Ruth Goldway.
For years, (examples from 2002 here and here, too) I've written and argued that policy-making at SEWRPC is unrepresentative of the racial composition of its seven-county region, and especially for City of Milwaukee residents, where minorities make up a majority of the city's population of roughly 600,000.
It's well-known that much of SEWRPC's policy-making for the region originates, percolates and is fine-tuned in its committees.
They meet with experts and consultants on transportation, water management and other basic planning matters of real importance to all taxpayers who provide 100% of SEWRPC's annual budget, with Milwaukee County taxpayers supplying the largest recurring annual donation.
It's a public agency - - but in name only when it comes to the racial makeup of its all-important committees.
Karyn Rotker, an attorney with the ACLU-Wisconsin, asked Philip Evenson, SEWRPC's executive director, to supply the racial makeup of some current SEWRPC committees.
Below is what Evenson provided about five SEWRPC committees and a sixth not appointed by SEWRPC, though let me provide you with the mathematical plot-spoiler:
Three of 126 (or two percent) SEWRPC committee members are minorities.
And this is 2007, more than 40 years after you'd have thought landmark federal statutes adopted in the wake of the civil rights movement would have made segregated governance at publicly-funded governmental agencies illegal.
Here is Evenson's reply, in his own words (the bold-faced highlights are mine:
1. Milw Co Transit Program Committee; 11 members, 9 white, 2 African-American, 1 Hispanic; all appointed by the Milw Co Executive (not a SEWRPC committee).
2. Population and Economic Forecasts Committee; 12 members, all white; appointed by SEWRPC with membership targeted to include individuals
from thepublic, private, and academic sectors with professional responsibilities and expertise in the subject matter.
3. Regional Land Use Planning Committee; 25 members, 24 white, 1
African-American; appointed by SEWRPC with membership targeted to
include county and local planning professionals on a population proportional
basis plus relevant state and federal agencies.
4. Regional Telecommunications Planning Committee; 22 members, 21
white, 1 African-American; appointed by SEWRPC with membership targeted to
include individuals from the public and private sectors with expertise and
knowledge in or related to the telecommunications industry.
5. Regional Water Supply Planning Committee; 33 members, 32 white, 1
Hispanic; appointed by SEWRPC with membership targeted to individuals
with professional responsibilities and expertise in or related to water
supply matters, drawing from public and private water utilities, industry,
agriculture, development and environment groups, county planners, state
and federal agencies, and academia.
6. Regional Water Quality Management Plan Update Committee; 34 members, all
white; appointed by SEWRPC with membership targeted to individuals with
professional responsibilities and expertise in or related to water quality
management matters, drawing from public works agencies, state and federal
agencies, land trusts, county planners and conservationists, development and
environment groups, and academia.
We collect no information on income, disability, residence location, or
employment for members on these committees other than what can be
inferred from job titles.
For years, UW-Milwaukee has been scratching its collective bureaucratic head and wondering: "How can we position ourselves as a science and research center?"
It has looked westward to UW-Madison with envy, as that university campus assumed leadership and won decades of grants in biotech and other sciences.
But through inertia, or some other human tendency to overlook institutions or people already on the scene that consistently perform at a high level, UW-Milwaukee has failed to capitalize on its Great Lakes WATER Institute - - even though its staff and expertise are key ingredients in the push for conservation, water-based public health, and Great Lakes sustainability.
Around here, those are pretty hot topics.
Case in point: WATER Institute professor Sandra McLellan, an expert in water and beach quality, has found that dangerous E. coli bacteria is on Bradford Beach where stormwater pipes owned by Milwaukee County routinely deposit polluted water.
McLellan also has noted - - and it's a point consistently worth repeating - - that while polluted stormwater presents the most serious dangers to public health, the general public misperception, shaped by media, is that sewage overflows, not stormwater pollution, presents the major public risk.
So the WATER Institute affects the public understanding of issues and risk factors, and can have an impact on policies that fix problems, too.
For a university looking for greater research credibility, that sounds like a mission statement.
Similarly, McLellan helped Miller Park discover that it was inadvertantly sending human waste into the Menomonee River.
It is known among scientists and regulators that the wrong plumbing connection at Miller Park is not the only mistaken or accidental source of fecal pollution ending up in the area's rivers, streams and lakes.
Elsewhere, WATER Institute professors are bringing years of experience with the region's groundwater into the debate over water resource management, and specifically into whether possible diversions from Lake Michigan are the wisest and most sustainable activities.
These UW-M scientists have created fact sheets and power point presentations about the region's water supply, all of which helps inject top-flight data, computer models and informed opinion into the water debate.
Along with colleagues in related agencies, WATER Institute personnel are getting solid information into studies and eventual recommendations by the regional planning commission (SEWRPC) and a state legislative study committee on the Great Lake Compact.
Materials posted by The US Geological Survey, and another scientific team that works closely with the WATER Institute here are helping policy-makers interpret differently Waukesha's suggestion that it was already part of the Lake Michigan basin through what it called "tributary groundwater."
So UW-Milwaukee doesn't have to look much farther than its Great Lakes WATER Institute for a research identity and anchor.
What the school needs is a media and grant-writing strategy to better promote and utilize the experts it already has on board, and who are well-connected with a larger scientific community, but are sometimes unappreciated.
The Great Lakes WATER Institute can become the authoritative site for information and policy recommendations about Great Lakes water conservation and resource management.
Former Milwaukee County Executive Tom Ament's fall from grace, and office, in the wake of the pension scandal, began with stories on web sites run by Gretchen Schuldt (www.storyhill.net) and Bruce Murphy (www.milwaukeeworld.com).
But not until the so-called mainstream media picked up and pushed the story across the front pages, especially in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did Ament and several county board supervisors lose their positions.
The Ziegler conflict-of-interest story that dominates the current State Supreme Court race could be playing itself out along the same lines.
The news about the dozens of cases that Ziegler managed in Washington County Circuit in which she should have removed herself because of family connections or stock ownership began on a website, www.onewisconsinnow.org, spread to the blogger Jay Bullock, and landed in repetitive stories in the mainstream media.
The Wisconsin State Journal's Dee Hall has been the story's leading, traditional news reporter, and recounts the chronology in yet another Sunday story.
We'll know on election day - - April 3rd - - if the disclosures were consequential enough to knock out Ziegler, the primary winner.
Either way, the alternative electronic media continues to grow in stature when it does serious investigative reporting, though its punch is amplified when traditional media checks out the information, finds it credible and decides to advance it.
The Milwaukee County Zoo was mobbed today. It was an annual Free Day. Families galore. White and Black. Young and Older. Just a wonderful warm early spring day.
But Free Day was a bit of a misnomer - - you still had to pay the $9 parking fee - - and I had a minor epiphany when I forked over my $10 bill:
Of course Scott Walker doesn't want a light rail train servicing the Zoo: The County would lose all that parking revenue.
Sorta like why and how Miller Park had to be built in the Menomonee Valley, away from the downtown and easy transit connections, because Bud Selig wanted the parking revenue, too.
So parking revenues trump rational transit planning in Miwaukee.
Again.
Scott Walker: Son of Bud.
Transit ridership is peaking across the US - - some of the best numbers in more than half a century, driven by the popularity of light rail, are being recorded and reported.
Huge gains are being made in cities like Salt Lake City, where even in the reddest of red states, modern trains are moving happy, conservative, well-adjusted people around town.
But Milwaukee's railophobics, ranging from Scott Walker, our County Exec, to regional rightist radio talkers, to Waukesha political leaders who derailed a two-county plan in the 90's, have decided that Milwaukee must remain a light rail-free zone.
Now, mind you, AMTRAK is OK with that crowd because it serves upscale daily commuters to Chicago.
The Kenosha-Racine-Milwaukee commuter line is moving towards a long-delayed startup with Walker's blessing - - because it will deliver services to his suburban constituents.
But Milwaukee's central city transit users: Let 'em ride the bus, Walker says, until they save enough money to buy a car.
And to Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett's modest plan for a trolley loop in the city's downtown?
Walker just says "no." Because that's the talk radio mantra.
If that attitude is allowed to prevail, and if public policy is made by elected officials who toe the talk radio line, Milwaukee will remain less competitive with a growing number of US cities that can offer its residents, businesses and tourists modern, bright and appealing transit alternatives to buses.
It has been two years since word first broke in the media that University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers had found E. coli bacteria on Bradford Beach near five sewer pipe outlets (called "outfalls") owned by Milwaukee County.
Right: it's a county-owned beach, on the shore of Lake Michigan, at the foot of Lake Park - - and bacteria frequently originating in the intestines of human beings and other mammals, and therefore their fecal matter, was pouring in polluted water right across the sand and into the shallow wading water.
The outfalls are in concrete structures visible from Lincoln Memorial Dr. When it rains, channels through the sand are visible across the beach. One of the premier public beaches in Wisconsin.
Milwaukee County has budgeted money to fix the problem, but there's no evidence that the money is going to be spent.
Question for Scott Walker: Miller Park fixed its recently discovered sewage line problem fast.
It's been two years - - actually more than 26 months - - and what's happening in County government to end the E. coli pollution of Bradford beach?
E. coli can cause intestinal and extra-intestinal infections, including urinary tract infections, meningitis, peritonitis, mastitis, and other serious ailments.
Spring is here. April is a known month of heavy rain that has been associated with water-borne illness in and around Milwaukee.
Then it will be summer: beach and wading season.
We don't want it to be another beach closing season because the County is still polluting its beach.
Our beach.
Not long ago, I blogged about Rocky Anderson, the Mayor of Salt Lake City - - a progressive Democrat running the biggest city in the reddest state of all.
Anderson has made Salt Lake City into one of the greenest, most conservation-conscious municipalites in the nation.
He even got light rail built!
And as he says in the first linked story above - - an interview with the excellent online publication Grist - - he overcame the biggest political firestorm in his tenure only to find now that neighborhoods that fought and feared light rail the most are now clamboring loudly to be connected.
Now The New York Times has discovered him, and its piece is worth a read.
Imagine if, in this town, the biggest opponent to light rail - - County Executive Scott Walker - - had a fraction of Anderson's political spine.
We'd have rail in the ground, boosting the local economy, linking workers to jobs, shoppers to restaurants and stores, and tourists to county-run destinations like the Zoo, the Airport and the failing Public Museum, too.
Leadership is what it's all about - - and that begins with turning off the rabid right-wing radio talkers that demagogue on rail to ramp up their ratings.
Salt Lake's got it.
Milwaukee County doesn't.
Wisconsin environmental groups and others with a progressive message about important issues can use existing free internet options to publicize their work.
Here's one free, easy way to reach a large, national audience - - a Daily Kos "diary" posting.
It wasn't long ago that turning corn into ethanol looked like the magic elixir that could help to wean us off foreign oil dependency, and do even more good by boosting the agricultural sector, especially in places like rural Wisconsin.
But corn-based ethanol is looking and sounding and now smelling like anything but the basis of a perfect alternative fuel.
Denny Caneff, executive director of the River Alliance of Wisconsin Inc., in Madison, had an informative piece in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in January highlighting the demands that corn-based ethanol places on groundwater.
Four gallons of water is needed to produce a gallon of ethanol. In Wisconsin, where groundwater availability is a big deal and a hot topic, that's not an attractive ratio.
Then there was a major report in The New York Times touting ethanol from other sources, including grasses and even wood chips, that don't require so much water and fertilizer (another energy-intensive product)to produce.
Now there's a more down-to-earth objection from a major dairy products factory in Sparta.
It's complaining that a newly-approved nearby ethanol plant will churn out four-smelling air emissions that will taint the taste of the dairy company's products.
Said the report in The Waukesha Freeman:
"Ethanol plants...emit pollution-causing chemicals and compounds and a smell that supporters liken to popcorn but critics compare to manure."
Sounds (smells, too) like another reason that Wisconsin and other agricultural states should slow down the bandwagon that's running on corn-based ethanol, and look to a wider range of sources to make better alternative fuels.
You don't have to be a genius to grasp that the Bush administration threw away the world's goodwill after the 9/11 terrorist attacks by launching the Iraqi invasion - - now morphed into an occupation amidst a civil war with no end in sight.
But there is also evidence that Bush's refusal to act on climate change has diminished our stature and credibility - - as has the Iraqi debacle - - across the globe.
Ironically, and tragically, the Chinese government, now sitting atop an economy belching out greenhouse pollutants like a runaway freight train, is citing American unwillingness to cut emissions as justification for its own failure to make anti-pollution efforts, too.
This is how a recent Reuters story (March 17th) explains the consequences that emerged after the US refused to adopt anti-pollution targets laid out in the Kyoto accords:
"The United States has been criticised for pulling out of the [Kyoto] Protocol in 2001 and [a spokesman] said any post-Kyoto agreement with specific targets would "have to involve the U.S., China, India and other developing countries."
"Canadian Environment Minister John Baird echoed this view in a conference call with reporters after the meeting.
"But developing states like China cite the U.S. position as a reason for their refusal to accept reduction targets."
Sure, there's an element of politics to all this: it's easier for China to blame someone else - - the US - - for its inaction, especially if it would cost the
Chinese government some money.
But we're not on the high moral or environmental ground condemning the coal-hungry, oil-draining, air-fouling Chinese industrial and automotive sectors because our government has caviled and obstructed on the issues, and at negotiating tables, too.
The Bush administration has pretty much said it doesn't care if the rest of world loves or hates us. The self-defeating arrogance of that position aside, we all have to breathe the same air.
OK, radio talk show squawkers and rail phobics, you haven't read that headline...but trust me, you will.
Two trips by car in the last ten days from Milwaukee to Madison, and I've made hundreds of these in the years I've lived in both cities, convinces me again that Waukesha County motorists will demand commuter rail connections, and sooner rather than later.
It's not just the housing that is filling in the farmland along the corridor, or the traffic (note to the State Patrol and county mounties: you could fill your budget holes with aggressive speed enforcement between Sunny Slope Rd. and the east side of Madison, as the left lane is a non-stop mini-Autobahn ribbon of 80+ mph violators, including the big rigs).
Waukesha legislators pressured Gov. Jim Doyle to move forward the the freeway expansion schedule for Zoo Interchange widening - - a project that will make the Marquette Interchange reconstruction look like a simple street repaving by comparison.
Western Waukesha County's stretch of I-94 is scheduled for a separate dose of widening, which means fast-growing Waukesha County will have a good chunk of a generation of orange barrels, lane and ramp closings and all the additional inconveniences that comes with their share of a $6.5 billion project.
Folks out west will look to their suburban neighbors to the south and begin demanding commuter rail similar to the Kenosha-Racine-Milwaukee (KRM) line that appears to moving towards construction.
The ironies are that Waukesha County all the way to Oconomowoc used tbe served by the high-speed Interurban rail line which hit 110 mph on its run to Chicago, and that Waukesha killed a light rail plan back in the 90's that would have, in its earliest plans, entered Waukesha County, offering what would have been a respite for some commuters in the eastern part of the county.
And would have reintroduced many people to the rail option, paving the way, so to speak, for a genuinely balanced transportation system regionally that would have melded light rail, commuter trains and highways.
I'm still predicting a push for commuter rail from the west, and if it were to be part of a plan that included rail transit in the urban Milwaukee core, it'd be worth supporting.
Tommy Thompson's dabbling in presidential politics gets more, what, serious? Even that's overstating it.
Mentioned at the top of one cable news program? Gawd! Stop the hyping.
Build them and buyers will come.
Now if only we didn't have such risk-averse public officials who make public transportation policy (Milwaukee County Executive Scott "No Trains" Walker, and basically the entire state Department of Transportation - - that means you), we'd add modern urban and commuter rail to a genuinely balanced and less-polluting transportation mix.
Had we been in Washington yesterday, we could have watched the Bush administration's inexorable unraveling take on a decidedly green, spring-like tone:
Public testimony was finally taken on the administration's censorial tinkering of climate change reports by a former oil industry lobbyist, Philip Cooney.
"Before joining the White House," reports the New York Times," Mr. Cooney was the “climate team leader” for the American Petroleum Institute, the main industry lobby in Washington.
That would be a little like putting Joseph Hazelwood, the drunken ship captain who ran the Exxon Valdez aground in Alaska, in charge of the National Transportation Safety Board.
But hey: why bother to expect a straight story on climate science when other administration officials were off spinning tall tales about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, uranium sales to Iraq by Niger, sufficient troop levels in Iraq, adequate armoring of combat vehicles there, the true cost of Medicare reforms, eavesdropping and snooping programs here and abroad, etc. etc?
And don't weep too many tears for the Mr. Cooney, who was forced out of his job in 2005 by The New York Times and other media disclosing his heavy-handed, pro-industry editing.
Exxon Mobil - - the successor firm to plain old Exxon that once entrusted a supertanker to Joseph Hazelwood - - hired Cooney when his handiwork was done at the White House.
Another person sent over to NASA in 2996 by the Bushies to carry out more anti-climate change media spinning - - a 22-year-old campaign aide - - also had to resign after it was disclosed that he had not completed the college degree claimed on his resume.
And these sorts of folks are bashing Al Gore & Co. over climate change accuracy?
No joke: Former Major League pitcher Gene Garber will speak on March 28th on behalf of the Washington County Land Preservation April 3rd referendum.
Details are here on how, where and when to help the cause, get better educated and score an autograph, too.
More information about the referendum here, too.
J.J. Blonien, whose antics even got stale on the Sunday Mark Belling TV show, raises his extreme, rightwing voice against Wisconsin's stewardship fund.
That's the bi-partisan property aquisition fund that buys land for public uses by hikers, anglers, and hunters.
J.J. says the government shouldn't own all this land for the public to use, and it'd be okey-dokey by him to let the fund sunset in 2010.
J.J. thinks we don't need to put more land into conservancy, and why not, when there are strip malls, big box parking lots and subdivisions just crying out for more space?
Seems after his recent stint with failed State Sen. Tom Reynolds, (R-Wauwatosa), J.J. is up to a tired schtick nicely summed up in 2001 when he left Belling's show:
"You just never knew what was going to come out of his mouth," wrote Tim Cuprisin, Inside TV & Radio Writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Public officials in this region have not fully embraced water recycling as a means of supplying meaningful quantities of water.
We still like sending all that expensive, purified, chemically-treated, potable water onto our lawns, dirty cars, golf courses and into many other locations, situations and processes.
Other highly-industrialized regions are moving faster in this area, including Singapore.
As we learned after Katrina flooded New Orleans, better systems protect the Netherlands: there are best practices and technological opportunities, along with the political will to make changes elsewhere in the world, and we'd do ourselves an economic and resource management favor by paying closer attention.
I recently posted an item about the daily cost of the Iraq war - - $250 million - - and showed that the entire annual cost of renewing the US Clean Water Revolving Fund, $4 billion, amounts to 14 days of Iraq war financing.
Here's another example of how important domestic programs don't have the money they need - - but figured in Iraq daily spending, the shortfalls look easily affordable.
The US Fish & Wildlife Service needs $2.5 billion to meet a backlog of tasks. That's 10 days of Iraq spending.
But without the money, the service, which operates in all 50 states, will cut 20% of its staff.
Anglers, hunters, hikers, conservations, whether red state or blue, Democratic or Republican, etc. etc. etc. - - does that make sense?
Careful readers of The New York Times may have noticed last Wednesday that an intriguing climate change event is scheduled on Saturday, April 14th, at the bucolic Mississippi River retreat center at Sinsinawa Mound.
The event, a conference, is being sponsored by the Madison-based environmental group Clean Wisconsin, and the Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa Mound, located near Hazel Green in southwestern Wisconsin.
The conference will be one of nearly 900 varied national climate change gatherings and rallies scheduled so far on April 14th.
This national action chain is the brainchild of William Mr. McKibben, an author, long-time environmental philosopher and activist.
The Wisconsin event, on regional global warming and water issues, will feature Mike Tidwell, whose book, Bayou Farewell, predicted tragic consequences if a large hurricane were to hit New Orleans.
Other experts, including staffers from Clean Wisconsin, will give talks and conduct workshops on media, activism and other subjects.
To get more information and register, visit either Clean Wisconsin or the Domincan Sisters registration site.
As they say: April 14th - - Save The Day.
The Obama people said they didn't create it, and I'm not taking a position one way or the other in the Obama/Hillary Clinton/Rest of the field contest - - but is it where campaign ads are headed, assuming it is indeed an truly independent attack ad?
It could be the beginning of the end of campaign control of electronic advertising.
New mantra for southeastern Wisconsin, where the local planning agency (SEWRPC) is the lead group pushing widened expressways into both cities and rural areas:
Be More Like Indiana.
As this story indicates, who'd want to live downstream from these Waukesha Lake Country folks?
Probably not, even though this Sunday Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story ought to make readers sit up and take notice. And notes.
Advocates of moving water out of Lake Michigan to the City of Waukesha without a solid commitment to returning it often pooh-pooh the impact their 20-24 million gallon daily diversion would have on the lake.
Heck - - Larry Nelson, Waukesha's Mayor, has said the amount of water that Waukesha wants evaporates from the lake in less than a minute.
A million gallons a day here. A billion gallons a week there. Multiplied exponentially by other communities (Chicago, and the fast-growing northern Illinois suburbs included), power plants (WE Energies' Oak Creek complex included), and various other users including water bottlers, and it won't take long to deal the Great Lakes a mortal blow.
Two questions not addressed in the Journal Sentinel article:
Where on these issues is Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources, the key water management agency in the state, which bungled the initial review of New Berlin's Lake Michigan diversion application?
And will the state's legislative study committee get off dead center and recommend the necessary legislation to implement pending amendments to the vital, conservation centered US-Canada Great Lakes Compact?
Without the Compact's upgraded standards and procedures, diversions could happen without guaranteed conservation and water return flow measures, adding to the Great Lakes decline.
Uh, oh: they're producing a powerpoint version of Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth - - for kids!
And while you're on that site, get more acquainted with Grist. It's a fine online stop always filled with informative and funny stuff about politics and the environment.
Finding out that an error in Miller Park's construction had been sending bathorom flushings into the Menomonee River for years shows how vulnerable our waterways are to human error.
And how one project - - the stadium's construction - - could undo so much of the good work of another - - the Menomonee Valley restoration.
These lessons in the laws of unintended consequences should be at the forefront of other regional proposals that involve water.
Officials in New Berlin and Waukesha continue to press for diversions of water from Lake Michigan that are now prevented by federal law.
Those cities continually tell us that diversions would no negative impact on lake levels or quality - - but there is no consensus on those arguments.
Waukesha is considering using a Lake Michigan tributary, like the Root River, as its discharge point for new millions of gallons daily of diverted water for return flow, but is this a good solution for the Root River, and for the people and communities downstream from Waukesha?
The estimates for fixing the Miller Park plumbing problems have been pegged at about $10,000 (no estimates yet for the pollution impact on the valley, river and lake).
But the estimates for building new water utility pumping equipment in Milwaukee to supply New Berlin and Waukesha with Lake Michigan water, let alone the associated costs to those communities as well, and to the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage Commission are in the multiple millions.
And because moving Lake Michigan water farther from Milwaukee will also move the regional economy farther away, too, who will calculate and address those socio-economic costs?
Realigning water supplies from one basin to another across a region - - using one of the inter-connected Great lakes as the source - - is fraught with ecological and financial costs.
Those who want to fast-track these changes need to be mindful of the bigger pictures, of which the Miller Park screwup was but a little snapshot - - yet an instructive one.
A few days ago, I was happy to post a guest essay on regionalism and sprawl in southeastern Wisconsin by Steven Branca, longtime city planner and formerly the sustainability officer at Wingspread.
Brainy guy, Steve is, and a heckuva writer with credentials, too.
Steve's post was picked up and posted also in the March 14th edition of Regional Community News, as item #12.13 in the listings.
That site is structured as a Yahoo Group, and free online subscriptions are available.
Branca's was the second guest post put up since I started this blog about six weeks ago.
The first, from a Vietnam vet from Wisconsin who offered personal insight into the troubled Veterans Administration healthcare system, generated comment, too.
I'm glad to help with these messages: I think this internet thing is gonna catch on, so thanks to these guest authors and our readers, too.
One of the more consistently undercovered stories this winter in Wisconsin has been the disagreement, and now apparent stalemate, among members of a state legislative study committee drafting legislation to help protect the Great Lakes.
The Great Lakes. You wouldn't have thought this would be so hard.
The legislation, if drafted, would approve and implement amendments to the US-Canada Great Lakes Compact, establishing first-ever rules, standards and procedures governing diversions of water out of the Great Lakes basin.
Without these amendments, and their approval in all eight US Great Lakes states, communities and states could push to divert water without taking the common interest into consideration, and would not be compelled to return an equal amount of diverted water back to the Great Lakes basin.
That could stress the Great Lakes by reducing water levels, making the remaining water and ecosystem more susceptible to damage from invasive species and pollution.
And jeopardize the economies of all the Great Lakes states and provinces, Wisconsin included, where water is a key component in recreation and manufacturing.
Wisconsin was a leader in getting the Compact adopted in 1985.
And its negotiators participated in four years of meetings to help craft the proposed amendments (Gov. Jim Doyle is now the co-chair of the Great Lakes governors' council that will eventually implement and enforce the amendmed Compact).
But powerful business and political leaders in Waukesha County have objected at the study committee to the amendments, and especially to the requirement that all eight US Great Lakes states would have to approve any diversion request.
(You can read the committee staff's most recent memo outlining the areas of failed consensus in key areas that suggest impasse here.)
The international agreement's guiding principle is unanimity of state action on diversions because the Great Lakes are shared water resources held in trust for the common good.
Minnesota has already approved the Compact amendments, but Wisconsin's study committee last met in December; reports from the State Capitol suggest the committee could close up shop without forwarding a recommendation to the legislature.
That could lead to no bill to implement the Compact moving through the legislature.
Or...it could result in multiple bills being introduced, with so many deviations from the proposed Compact amendents that none would pass a divided, partisan legislature.
Or...what comes out of the legislature could have radical changes to the proposed amendments, as a bill that did not incorporate the basic law and science discussed at the committee, meaning that other states would see Wisconsin as a renegade on conservation and cooperation, putting the entire agreement at risk.
Creating another study committee is possible because the current committee is chaired by a Republican Senator, Neal Kedzie (Elkhorn), and the committee membership and chairmanship do not reflect the Senate Democrats' post 2006 election majority.
Regardless, delay only sends a message of uncertainty about Wisconsin's commitment to resource management and regional cooperation across the Great Lakes states.
And it keeps Wisconsin communities like New Berlin and Waukesha that are interested in diversions in legal limbo, so the 'Waukesha County-First' objectors on the committee are pursuing a self-defeating strategy.
Mark Belling aimed a dustoff pitch at Gov. Jim Doyle in a Waukesha Freeman column the other day, but it was just another Belling wild pitch.
Belling's column is a rant, in familiar talk radio style, this time directed against Frank Busalacchi, Doyle's embattled transportation department secretary.
But Belling piles it on, accusing Busalacchi of leading former Mayor John Norquist's "goon squad" on the Summerfest Board of Directors.
As errors go, this one's a whopper.
Busalacchi was doing such a good job raking Norquist over the coals as chairman of the stadium board that Black added Busalacchi to the Summerfest board, and made him vice-chairman, to give him another platform from which to jab the Mayor.
Norquist never controlled the board: Most of the Summerfest board, in fact, was hand-picked by Black, who eventually lost control of the board, and her job, because she was too controversial despite her long career building up the festival.
Calling Norquist a Nazi looked unprofessional on Black's part, for example, but the bottom line is, and I can't figure out how the well-informed Belling missed all this: Busalacchi was not a Norquist appointee or a friend on the Summerfest board.
Let the finger pointing begin at Miller Park, and I don't mean the kind that managers wave at umpires over a blown call at home plate.
I'm referring to the inevitable excuses and denials of responsibility that are sure to follow in the wake of the discovery that someone, somehow, sometime connected toilet piping to a storm drain instead of the sanitary sewer system, flushing human waste for years into the Menomonee River, and eventually into Lake Michigan.
From which the city and much of the region takes its drinking water.
Granted Miller Park was a complex project, and there were multiple water and sewer connections to be made correctly, but there was also supposed to be a level of competency and sophistication built into the process, including checks, balances, certifications and inspections.
As screw-ups go, this is a pretty substantial one.
Think of all the effort that has gone into cleaning up the river, and the Valley. The goal there was to eliminate a brownfield, not create...well...you get it, right?
Will the stadium district board and staff point to its general contractor, who, in turn, will call out sub-contractors, who will then flush out a supervisor who can dump on a plumber who might rat out an apprentice who long ago left the state?
Miller Park sure has had a checkered history.
Tommy Thompson and the Selig family decided the stadium would be built where Bud Selig wanted it constructed - - far enough from downtown so it couldn't be part of the historic revival that was taking shape there - - and inaccessible enough to require ticket holders to drive there, and pay parking fees that all went to the team.
To make matters even more controversial, Thompson assigned local property taxpayers tens of millions in mandatory infrastructure costs, and then laid on top of that a five-county stadium construction sales tax that freed the team from any out-of-pocket donation.
Then the project's financing plan fell apart when Fritz Ruf, a savvy state development agency director, pegged the agency's terms at 10% on a crucial, $50 million loan to make sure it never happened.
And it didn't.
After the financing got cobbled together in dribs and drabs, including lending or loan guarantees by a diverse cast of non-traditional lender/investors including The American League, local foundations, The Metropolitan Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce and Journal Communications, three workers died when the partially-constructed roof collapsed due to unsafe winds during heavy lifts.
Finally open, Miller Park was rewarded with the 2002 All-Star game by now-Commissioner Bug Selig, who then declared that year's annual classic a tie when the managers ran out of bench players.
Now don't misunderstand: I'm a huge baseball fan, and I went to see The Brewers often during all the losing seasons, which has meant pretty much every year.
But Miller Park has had a wierd vibe to it - - from the first day that Selig suddenly announced that the place would have a roof at the cost of an extra hundred million dollars of other people's money.
So learning now that toilets have been draining directly into the Menomonee River Valley - - well, somehow that's just another not-so-surprising chapter in the project's troubled history.
Wisconsin has a program to help farmers keep farming, but the program has shortcomings.
Governor Jim Doyle's 2007-'09 proposed budget includes additional funding, and a diverse study committee has made recommendations to make the program work better, but there is a major need for public education about the program - - or else we'll have less homegrown food and more sprawl.
The Waukesha Freeman published a comprehensive examination of the program, and it's worth a read.
Talk about not knowing who is an ally and who isn't: antiwar activists targeting Dave Obey in Washington, DC and at his home office, too, are going after the wrong guy.
Obey is as antiwar as they get, and has done so while based in the conservative northern 7th Congressional district.
He opposed the war in Vietnam and voted against the original Iraq war authorization.
While he lost his temper with activists who confronted him in a House office building hallway (Obey's always had a direct manner and short fuse, which is a welcome alternative to the people-pleasing phonies who heavily-populate elected offices), his quick apology should help folks listen to what he has been saying for a while:
The Democrats don't have a big enough majority to cut off war funding, or override a Presidential veto, let alone get tough resolutions through committees for floor debate, so he's looking for a workable, winnable solution.
That's frustrating to antiwar people (including me), and certainly to those with family members in harm's way, but for goodness sakes: Obey didn't start the war and isn't the problem.
Antiwar activists should be pressuring pro-war Republican congressmen like Paul Ryan and Jim Sensenbrenner if they want to help create a real congressional counterweight to the troop surge and the rest of the Bush administration's devastating Middle East 'policy.'
Call it a business development/man-bites-dog story.
Call it something straight out of The Onion.
Call it simply amazing:
A former Wal-Mart site in Baton Rouge is being razed in favor of a mixed-use development with modestly-sized townhouse units aimed at pretty much everyday folk, even grad students at nearby Louisians State University.
Imagine a Wal-Mart becoming "Acadian Village," embracing "pedestrian-friendly, smart-growth principles: a public plaza, landscaped parking lot and public transportation pavilion...," according to one Louisiana television news report.
(Comparitive local angle: Unlike the new BayShore Town Center's layout, the parking structure at Acadian Village is more correctly situated - - off the street, and in the back.)
I'll bet not even the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Whitney Gould could have imagined that one day, a community would tear down a Wal-Mart and turn it into a New Urbanist daydream.
It's one thing for traffic noise and other surefire sounds of civilization to worm their way into rural Waukesha County, but consider the implications over the plan by an Oconomowoc dentist to use his rural Village of Dousman yard as a helipad.
Said one neighbor:
"There have been days when I’ve heard that helicopter fly by my house three to four times," said Bob Pfaff, a neighbor of Michaels. "The noise is obnoxious. I want to be able to sit outside in my back yard and enjoy peace and quite."
Location, location, location: Put a few more of those whirlybirds in once bucolic rural Waukesha County and a nice condo along the river in downtown Milwaukee's gonna feel serene by comparison.
Though their groups are not members, leading right-wing spokesmen James Dobson, Gary Bauer and Paul Weyrich are urging the National Association of Evangelicals to muzzle Richard Cizik, the NAE's policy director.
Did he say something positive about gay rights?
No.
Did Cizik perhaps transgress on the issue of a woman's right to choose?
Worse: He's suggesting that evangelicals embrace environmental stewardship!
On religious and spiritual grounds.
The horror! The horror!
The good news is that the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (SRF) passed the House of Representatives last week.
This US Environmental Protection Agency program helps make sure our drinking and recreational waters are free of pollutants.
If approved by the US Senate (a bit iffier, but probable) and actually funded with appropriations by the Bush administration (even iffier, since the Bush administration prefers spending our tax money to blow up water systems in Iraq), the Fund would provide
$14 billion over four years for basic drinking water and sewage treatment upgrades across the country.
Getting new money into the Fund is an important piece of a related effort specifically to help clean up and preserve the Great Lakes.
And that's why it's crucial to move on a third front: passing pending amendments to the Great Lakes Compact that require active conservation plans and guarantees of return flow prior to diversions of water away from the Great Lakes basin.
Conservation. Improved drinking water and sewage treatment. Making sure that diversions from the Great Lakes are approved only as science-based last resorts, with guaranteed return flow of diverted water:
It's all linked together, something that Compact opponents like State Sen. Mary Lazich and the Waukesha County Chamber of Commerce just will not or cannot see.
And while $14 billion for the Clean Water Fund allocated over four years - - or $3.5 billion each year is a lot of money, consider that:
First, the Fund makes loans, so the money comes back.
Second, the Iraq war is costing $250 million dollars a day, and that money literally goes up in smoke.
(And that was the figure before the troop surge, and the administration's proposal for another $100 billion this year, and an eventual cost that could hit two trillion dollars, according to a year-old, pre-surge estimate from a Nobel Prize-winning economist.)
But back to spending $250 million a day in this now four-year-old war: At that price, the annual cost to finance the Clean Water Fund is a mere 14 days worth of Iraq spending.
And the entire four-year Clean Water Fund's $14 billion could be financed with just 56 days of Iraq spending. Think about it: That's just eight weeks. Summer doesn't even start for nine weeks.
We often hear that the country can't afford a domestic agenda.
Universal health care? Too expensive. Better passenger trains and light rail? Where would the money come from? Better schools, and pre-schools, too? Forget about it.
Remember when you hear the costs of things we cannot afford that the war in Iraq costs about $10 million dollars an hour, $250 million a day, $1.75 billion a week.
You decide if that's contributing real value to your security and our shared domestic tranquility.
With a lot less noise than its controversial launch a few weeks earlier, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett's downtown trolley and cross-town express bus proposal was approved by a study committee for a review that could run until the end of the year.
The positive vote by the study committee was something of a foregone conclusion, since Barrett has one representative on the committee, and members from two other institutions - - the Metropolitan Metropolitan Association of Commerce and the Wisconsin Center District - - backed earlier and even more expensive mass transit upgrades, so their "aye" votes were not really surprising.
The lone "no" vote was cast by Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker's representative - - another predictable move: Walker has backed himself into a corner with repetitive objections to anything running on a track in his county as "light rail," thus continuing his robotic marriage to archaic buses only.
Not to mention his belief that someday, Milwaukee County would be magically transformed into a municipal car-o-topia, where those he called transit dependent could afford to buy cars, insure and maintain them, and pour expensive gasoline into their tanks for the long ride to new jobs in faraway Waukesha County.
Of course, the Barrett plan has those two enticing new express routes connecting the west side, UW-M, and two county operations - - the airport and the County grounds in Wauwatosa - - but Walker still doesn't want the entire commuter/student/downtown shopper/tourist transit plan studied.
Good thing Walker has but one vote on the committee: The notion that it is better to study something new and innovative than stamp your foot and shake your head and pass that off as a transportation strategy with the local transit rider in mind carried by three votes to one.
With a projected completion date just months before the April, 2008 local elections, including those for Mayor and County Executive, the study committee's outcome, and its probable move into the next, "preliminary engineering" phase could make transit the defining issue in these races.
And it's about time - - politically and financially.
There is $91.5 million in federal funds dedicated to transit improvements available for a system upgrade like the one Barrett has proposed (federal money cannot be spent on bus replacements, as Walker has proposed) - - enough money to get a new system started.
State and regional support, with pre-paid passes accompanying conferees' registration fees at Midwest Convention Center conferences adding to fare box revenues (pre-paid passes and other transit tie-ins are a staple at other convention-and-tourism linked transit systems), could also help get the system into the ground and boost already sagging bus ridership numbers.
What's been lacking is a fiscally-manageable plan and enough political will to take bold steps.
Maybe the elections for the top posts in city and county government will drive Milwaukee out of its stodgy transit past and down a completely new and modern track
A suburban Milwaukee resident in Fox Point suggests in Sunday's Journal Sentinel "Crossroads" section that Milwaukee's 50's image is what we should be selling to the rest of the world.
Here's what Richard Thieme says he liked about Milwaukee, er, Fox Point, when he got here 20 years ago:
"Milwaukee!" cried a biker. "Harley!"
"Milwaukee!" cried a porky pal. "Cheese and sauerbraten!"
"Milwaukee!" cried a drinking buddy. "Beer!"
Selling a 50's image?
I remember a meeting of youngish business types at City Hall a few years organized by the chamber of commerce where the most frequently-asked question wasn't "where can I get me a cheesehead?"
It was - - swear to God - - "Where is the local train system?"
Note to Milwaukee 7 regional planners and assorted imagemakers:
Let's all move on to something...what...broader...more contemporary?
Madison's former Mayor and now-blogger Paul Soglin offers up another take on Annette Ziegler's conflict-plagued judgeship and imploding candidacy for Stare Supreme Court.
Sometimes a great letter to the editor jumps off the page because it's well-written and informative, and ever-so-timely.
Here's an example from Sunday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - - "Hydropower is not a clean energy source," by Helen Sarakinos (among a group of letters), about matters as diverse as hydropower and the politcal right's reflexive abuse of environmentalism.
Newspaper editors get hundreds of letters a week and have room for but a small fraction. Here is how the decision-makers at one major US newspaper say they make their picks.
Jim Bouman, Waukesha resident and blogger, has posted items worth viewing and reading.
After a discourse about real estate values, development and taxes, Bouman comes to this conclusion:
"We have enough water for now, and enough for a conservative future. We do need to conserve it. It's the CONSERVATIVE thing to do. We might do well to recognize that continued uncontrolled growth of the city through annexation will produce a situation in which we do not have sufficient water from our only available source--deep wells and shallow wells.
Cutting back on development and annexation is the sensible choice. Pursuing an incredibly expensive and decidedly iffy path like trying to get expensive Lake Michigan water pumped to Waukesha (and then back to the lake) is not the choice of the homeowner who is concerned that the taxes are too high in Waukesha."
Of course, this is not the mainstream Chamber of Commerce and bankers' roundtable position out Waukesha way, but note that the Waukesha City Council and Plan Commission have held their ground in precedent-setting opposition to a 300+ acre annexation that was ostensibly to get access to more shallow well water.
Critics said it would be a costly extension of city services too far beyond the city's current borders and would remove land and water from the Vernon Marsh Wildlife Area.
So Bouman's down-to-earth conservatism in the name of conservation may be gaining acceptance in Waukesha, where sprawl is pushing west to the Jefferson County line
How many Thompsons does it take to make a presidential race exciting?
Or confusing?
Former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson can't be happy that former US Senator and "Law and Order" fake District Attorney Fred Thompson is thinking of entering the 2008 GOP presidential race - - thus overwhelming our Tommy's moribund candidacy with quasi-Hollywood star power.
Remember: This is Fred Thompson - - not to be confused with Tommy's more colorful brother Ed Thompson - - the political libertarian/supper club owner who helped tip the 2002 Wisconsin gubernatorial election to Democrat Jim Doyle.
Too bad that Hunter Thompson isn't available: There'd be a Thompson Trifecta worth following.
Talk radio has for years bashed the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage Commission as the villain for polluting Lake Michigan, when, in fact, the MMSD has been working with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to identify and fix the multiple ways that pollutants find their way into the lake.
More than two years ago, I wrote an op-ed piece for WisPolitics.com about UW-M testing having shown that storm water pipe outlets placed on Bradford Beach by Milwaukee County government was pouring water contaminated with e. Coli bacteria right across the sandy beaches and into the water.
But those findings were not widely reported in a timely way by the traditional news media because opinion makers and news editors were still more interested in hammering MMSD than looking at all the potential sources of lake pollution and fixing them.
And that meant that the world-class resources at the UW-M WATER Institute were not fully realized and appreciated as problem-solvers by media, governments and taxpayers.
That seems to be changing: A front-page story in Sunday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel shows that UW-M scientists have found that fecal pollutants are in dozens of non-MMSD municipal pipes across the region..
And those pipes are contributing to contamination at beaches, in streams and other popular recreational sites at or close to the lake.
In the past, there was sensational finger-pointing at the MMSD, and, in fairness, the MMSD often fought its critics with a getting-nowhere-fast/tit-for-tat.
Now the focus seems to be on problem-solving, with the necessary first steps taken: better identifying just what the problems are, who the contributors are, and finally, getting to solutions.
The same science-based approach needs to be taken also when it comes to getting chemical and other non-organic pollutants out of the lake - - like metals and other contaminants that wash off streets and parking lots.
And, of course, science needs to drive the decision-making about who gets to take water out of the lake and return it - - but that has been and will be grist for other commentaries.
This updates an earlier posting:
What will be the tipping point in the conflict-of-issue saga now dominating Annette Ziegler's race for the Supreme Court - - the very branch of government that investigates and disciplines jusges for ethical lapses? What began as a single case involving Wal-Mart ballooned to 24, then 35, then 59 - - and today there another 164, according to blogger Bill Christofferson and others.
UPDATE: A Wisconsin attorney with a practice of more than thirty years sent me the comment below. I put it in bold face type.
The attorney offers the simplist reason why "gut checks" are the wrong way to measure whether a judge should sit on a potentially-conflicted case, and what this issue should mean for Ziegler's campaign:
"This should cost Ziegler the election. I really can't believe that she was dumb enough not to have just gotten off the cases.
The "gut check" line is quite outrageous. The rules of judicial conduct are written precisely so that judges don't do "gut checks."
They just have to read the rules.
That's what judges do."
I posted information yesterday about the Dane County Circuit Court ruling that found problems with the permit issued by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources allowing WE Energies to construct a massive power plant complex in Oak Creek without cooling towers.
Without cooling towers, 1.8 billion gallons of water a day is going to be sucked into the plant and returned 15 degrees warmer, resulting in fish kills and other unacceptable ecological problems.
Today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel offers more in-depth coverage.
The importance of the ruling is two-fold.
First, if upheld in higher courts, the design of the plant may change to better protect the lake.
Second, better protecting the lake will inform and instruct other controversial plans that are also not in the lake's best interest - - specifically, the ragged efforts to date by the City of Waukesha to get permission to divert water from Lake Michigan - - without having to justify it with a formal application, or agreeing to return it.
Waukesha's sense of entitlement to Lake Michigan water, though currently blocked by geography, federal law and a US-Canada Great Lakes management compact, has stirred deep opposition in southeastern Wisconsin.
Recent statements by some Waukesha legislators, business interests and the Waukesha County Chamber of Commerce that Wisconsin should weaken diversion provisions in the Compact and/or refuse to sign some pending Compact agreements suggest they find protecting Lake Michigan less important than getting water into new sprawling subdivisions.
What the Madison ruling has done, along with the good work by the Sierra Club and Clean Wisconsin to get the attention of the court and the force of law, is to remind us that Lake Michigan and the rest of the Great Lakes are precious and finite resources that need stewardship, management and conservation before consumption and bottom-line considerations.
Pesky federal regulations that protect our common resources, like Lake Michigan, have been applied by a Wisconsin judge at the Oak Creek Power Plant under construction.
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's newsblog Friday afternoon, with, no doubt, a major story tomorrow:
"A Dane County judge has sent an environmental permit for the We Energies power plant under construction in Oak Creek back for further consideration, based on a federal court ruling earlier this year.
At issue is a permit issued by state environmental regulators for a water intake structure in Lake Michigan that would serve the coal-fired power plant, a $2.2 billion project.
Judge Shelley Gaylord said a federal appeals court ruling in January means the permit needs to be revised. The federal court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to rewrite the rules that were used by the state Department of Natural Resources when it granted the Oak Creek permit.
"This decision affirms what we've been saying since 2003: that this is an illegal facility," said Katie Nekola, staff attorney for Clean Wisconsin, one of the environmental groups challenging the permit. "When the DNR reconsiders this permit as directed by Judge Gaylord, it will have no choice but to invalidate the permit."
But We Energies says the decision does not invalidate its permit and that the utility plans to continue building the plant, the largest construction project in state history.
"We will continue construction of the needed project while we work with DNR on those aspects that have been remanded," said utility spokesman Barry McNulty."
Wonder if others thinking of tapping into Lake Michigan for other purposes, like diverting water to communities in Waukesha County, will get the message, too:
Federal law and procedures have to be adhered to, or you do nothing but buy yourself trouble and raise your costs - - so thanks again to Clean Wisconsin and the Sierra Club for taking these arguments to court and making sure that basic natural resources get genuine stewardship, even if takes a lawsuit to ensure it.
(Note: An earlier post about the WE Energies permit issue from February read this way:
Was The Oak Creek Power Plant Approval Legal?
Good Question.
It turns out that the huge new coal-fired power plant that WE Energies is building along Lake Michigan in Oak Creek is not yet free of the legal and regulatory questions that had slowed its approval.
Partially built, the $2.2 billion project will begin operations in 2009.
The State of Wisconsin gave the utility its permitting approval under a federal rule that defined the project as "existing," rather than "new" - - a nuanced, pro-industry bureaucratic ruling - - and that meant the utility could eliminate expensive cooling towers from the construction plans.
Without cooling towers - - and they've been standard in modern power plant construction for decades - - the more than two billion gallons of water daily required by the plant for operations will be sucked in through a pipe in Lake Michigan.
That will kill alot of fish, according to experts within the federal government and environmental groups.
Last week, a New York federal appeals court struck down the rule that allowed the Oak Creek project to be built without cooling towers.
A Wisconsin circuit court judge in Madison must decide if the Oak Creek project needs cooling towers.
The utility denies its plant and water intake pipe will kill fish or harm the lake, and says its state-issued permits are valid.
This is another of those cases that pits industry against environmentalists, and a company's bottom line against stewardship of natural resources.
You'd think by now, especially with the multiple concerns about climate change and stresses on the Great Lakes, that industry would have done more to avoid these adversarial relationships with the natural world that we all depend on for survival.
As this case winds its way through the courts, let's praise Clean Wisconsin and the Sierra Club for these publicly-spirited achievements:
They've kept a steady eye and the media's focus on the health of Lake Michigan, and they've made sure that the convenience of utilities isn't allowed to supersede the rule of law.
Wisconsin utilities operate with state-approved monopolies and guaranteed rates of return. That's a pretty sweet deal in a free enterprise economy, so is it asking too much of the utilities to meet the highest legal and environmental standards?)
What will be the tipping point in the conflict-of-issue saga now dominating Annette Ziegler's race for the Supreme Court - - the very branch of government that investigates and disciplines jusges for ethical lapses? What began as a single case involving Wal-Mart ballooned to 24, then 35, then 59 - - and today there another 164, according to blogger Bill Christofferson and others.
UPDATE: A Wisconsin attorney with a practice of more than thirty years sent me this comment. The attorney offers the simplist reason why "gut checks" are the wrong way to measure whether a judge should sit on a potentially-conflicted case, and what this should mean for Ziegler's campaign:
"This should cost Ziegler the election. I really can't believe that she was dumb enough not to have just gotten off the cases.
"The "gut check" line is quite outrageous. The rules of judicial conduct are written precisely so that judges don't do "gut checks."
They just have to read the rules.
That's what judges do."
Good thing that LaCrosse is beginning to face up to its college student binge drinking problem with a first-ever ordinance against public intoxication: Spring is coming and that is the sad time in that Mississippi River town when very drunk and disoriented college students tend to end up drowned in the river after bar closing time.
I wrote a piece nearly three years ago for The Capital Times about what I think is the bigger picture, both for LaCrosse and across the state. Here it is.
Doug Hissom, a former Shepherd Express stalwart, updates the Annette Ziegler political story here. Look for more online reporting on a regular basis from Hissom, according to Dave Berkman, a former Hissom colleague at the Shepherd and now a regular panelist on Eric Von's Thursday afternoon "Backstory" media panel on 1290 WMCS-AM.
Conservative politicians and commentators routinely invoke fear of foreigners in the current political environment, with most of the misinformation or downright demagoging directed at immigrants from south of the border.
Curiously, some misleading misinformation about Canadian influence over Wisconsin water supplies has worked its way into the debate about whether Great Lakes water should be diverted beyond Great Lakes basin boundaries and into communities in western Waukesha County.
The Waukesha County Chamber of Commerce has entered that debate and opposes Wisconsin endorsing a set of new diversion rules and standards in pending amendments to the 22-year-old US-Canada Great Lakes Compact.
The Chamber says it's wrong to require the eight US Great Lakes states to unanimously approve an application from out-of-basin communities like Waukesha or New Berlin.
But in a posting on its website, the Chamber says that the two Great Lakes Canadian provinces could also veto a US community's diversion application - - and that is not the case.
Says the Chamber's posting:
"Specifically, the compact includes a provision by which any one of the member states or provinces can veto any future requests for Great Lakes water diversions. Waukesha County, considered a straddling county by compact definition as the basin lies partially within the county, may need to consider Great Lakes diversions to meet future water needs. As the compact is currently written, our destiny may be in the hands of governors or premiers who are not accountable in any way to our electorate nor invested in the future success of our region."
The italicization is mine - - so you spot the worries raised about Waukesha's future being in foreigners' hands.
Under the US-Canada agreement, the Canadian provinces are to be consulted on US diversion applications, but the Canadians do not have a vote - - something that has not gone down well in Canada.
And the absence of the 'Canadian veto' was reported factually in the local media: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel put it this way in three paragraphs of a February 10th story by reporter Darryl Enriquez:
"The proposed compact contains a controversial condition that Brian J. Nemoir, chairman of the chamber's Advocacy Committee, called "a deal buster."
Under it, water withdrawals from communities outside of the Great Lakes Basin, but in a county that straddles the basin, must be approved by all of the Great Lakes states.
That means a single negative vote can veto a project, Nemoir noted. The provinces have a say, but not a vote, in diversions." (Again, the italics are mine).
Isn't it time that the Chamber starts giving its members and website readers a more accurate explanation of just what the Compact and the pending amendments are all about?
It could begin a more rational regional discussion of the benefits of protecting a shared, common resource.
Bill Christofferson tells us how the WMC is heavily investing in the Annette Ziegler (R-West Bend Savings Bank) State Supreme Court campaign.
The WMC is looking at the State Supreme Court as just another corporate board with a vacant director's seat - - and is pushing an insider candidate to put WMC's interests first.
While conservative climate change deniers still argue that all's well with the earth they think is still flat, an apolitical mainstream publication aimed at the red-blooded American male - - Sports Illustrated - - is publicizing green efforts from the National Football League to NASCAR.
You can read this homerun reportage here.
Here's a couple of paragraphs to whet your appetite:
"The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is working with the NBA and Major League Baseball to help their teams get greener. Scientists told the NFL that Super Bowl XLI would put one million pounds of carbon dioxide into the air -- not counting air travel to Miami -- so the league planted 3,000 trees around Florida in an attempt to pull at least that much of the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere.
"By going green, motor sports could have the quickest impact on public awareness of the planet's fate. The Formula One circuit has already discovered hybrids and biofuels, and Indy cars are mixing ethanol into their fuel. NASCAR is poised to phase out leaded gasoline, a neurotoxin. (The Clean Air Act of 1970 included an exemption for race cars even as the public was barred from buying cars that ran on leaded gas.) It's only a short jump from a NASCAR driver with a raised consciousness to a NASCAR fan with the same."
Wisconsin environmental groups have banded together to urge closing a loophole in the pending Great Lakes Compact that allows unregulated sales of Great Lakes water in bottles smaller than 5.7 gallons.
That's a pretty big bottle, and along with the billions of those ubiquitous, costly smaller containers inexorably moving Great Lakes water away from source supplies, the bottled water binge is bad news for everyone except the big corporate bottlers.
Here's a Canadian perspective on why bottled water sales are harming the Great Lakes.
It's another addition to demands across the entire Great Lakes basin for tougher diversion standards in the Compact, and in implementing legislation pending or being drafted.
That effort is stalled in Wisconsin.
Seems there's at least 14 additional cases involving a health insurer in which she owned stock - - on top of the 24-to-45 cases where her husband's bank was a party, too.
Thanks to Progressive Majority for posting the findings.
The Ziegler State Supreme Court candidacy is looking more tenuous day-by-day, along with her Washington County Circuit Court judgeship
I think the community lost when out-of-proportion media coverage and nattering negativists like Mark Belling stirred things up while Mayfair Mall and public officials worked directly to deal with disruptive behavior there.
That's the point of this commentary I had published Tuesday in The Capital Times.
State Supreme Court candidate and sitting Washington County Circuit Court Judge Annette Ziegler's statement in Tuesday's Wisconsin State Journal that she uses a "gut check" when considering whether cases before her might present a conflict-of-interest got me wondering:
Who else said he listens to his gut instead of pesky, bookish facts - - like, say, those in a published code of conduct - - to get to the truthiness of correct official behavior?
Then I remembered: It's Stephen Colbert, the Comedy Central Bill O'Reilly charicature, who explained himself, his gut and its relative superiority to books and facts when he introduced himself last year to President Bush and the assembled media at the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.
Let Mr. Colbert shed light on Ziegler's baffling courtroom style:
"Mark Smith, ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Madame First Lady, Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert," the comedian said, "and tonight it is my privilege to celebrate this president, ‘cause we’re not so different, he and I. We both get it. Guys like us, we’re not some brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut. Right, sir?
"That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now, I know some of you are going to say, “I did look it up, and that’s not true.” That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works.
"Every night on my show, The Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, okay? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the “No Fact Zone.'”
Long-time urbanist, city planner and sustainability expert Steven Branca offers commentary which I am glad to put up as a guest post.
(Note: A shorter version of Branca's commentary ran as a Letter to the Editor in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 5th, 2007; the debate began with a Journal Sentinel report about remarks Barrett gave to a regional meeting of environmental activists in support of the amended Great Lakes Compact.)
Writes Branca:
There is a significant fallacy in your 2/27/07 editorial about Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s 2/21/07 comments on urban sprawl.
Nowhere is there any acknowledgement that suburban development comes at great cost, and it is not the cost of building houses, or the cost to taxpayers for highways and infrastructure.
There are indeed “definitions” of sprawl, but accepting these definitions requires the acceptance of the concept of sprawl to begin with, and this is something the Journal Sentinel and suburban leaders will not do.
Some of the definition can be found in the costs.
A simple and obvious cost is reflected in new suburban neighborhoods, at the expense of destroyed city neighborhoods. A little-known fact is that freeways are much more efficient at moving land value than they are at moving cars.
What were solid neighborhoods in the central cities – poor, maybe, but cohesive and culturally-rich – are now poor and unattractive. How do you justify destroying neighborhoods in one place to build spiffy new ones elsewhere, especially at taxpayer expense?
Following from that, you can look at sprawl as an economic justice issue. (This may be another concept that goes unacknowledged by the community.) Winners and losers fall along racial, age, and economic lines. Public policy that creates such a gap in opportunity or quality of life is by definition bad public policy.
Sprawl is that public policy.
Another way to look at sprawl is the rate of land development versus the population growth rate. The Milwaukee region is in a no-growth mode, but that hasn’t stopped massive consumption of land.
One need look no farther than to the regional data on the Milwaukee 7 website to see the reality of this. More to the point, no one county has grown to any significant degree, while losing economic activity with the loss of farm and forest land. Suburban development is not growth, it’s building stuff.
Whatever “growth” may come of it is in the developers’ bottom line, and they’re in it only for the short term with no interest in long-term value.
Citing “the market” as the final arbiter of urban development is specious. The distortion of the land development market is the primary factor in its momentum and self-perpetuation.
From the original federal Housing Act of 1949, the GI Bill, and the mortgage interest deduction, the financial markets have been given extraordinary incentive to invest in suburbs.
Highways built solely with taxpayer money are, according to research as well as observation, the principal drivers of sprawl, even though the losers pay that tax, too.
That is why “growth will continue whether [Mayor Barrett] wants it to or not.”
As if this isn’t enough, the assertion that Milwaukee will reap wonderful economic gains from selling water is also false.
Whatever revenue Milwaukee gains will be overwhelmed by the development that the suburbs realize. This is like selling the key to your house.
No, Milwaukee has given enough: it’s population, cohesive neighborhoods, school quality, land value and more. Draw the line at water.
The region has done little or nothing to make central cities more attractive. A true regional partnership would be predicated on equity, and even try to make up for past inequities.
There has been a 50-year history of one-way “partnerships” in which the city loses its assets to the suburbs without so much as a thank you. Given this region’s competitiveness at a national level, what is the purpose of continuing on the same business-as-usual path?
Know your Waukesha Homebuilder, Part 1:
Mark Neumann, the former US Congressman and defeated GOP candidate for US Senate, is now a home builder in some of the hottest areas of Waukesha County.
He had this to say last year to the Wisconsin Builders magazine (full text here), who added Neumann to its "A List":
"A burning question with ...
Mark Neumann owner of Neumann Enterprises Inc., Waukesha
If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?
“I’ve just decided we’re going to lower the interest rates so the building industry can be more successful.”
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has weighed in with its own accounting - 24 - of the number of cases that Washington County Circuit Court Judge Annette Ziegler has heard since 2004 involving a West Bend bank on whose board her husband sits as a paid diector.
The bank won 21 of those case, a batting average of .875 - - not too shabby.
This follows earlier disclosures by progressive bloggers and websites, along with the Wisconsin State Journal, that Ziegler had a pattern of hearing these cases without the conflict-of-interest disclosure - - one report said as many as 45.
Failing to disclose a conflict of interest to the parties in a legal case places a judge's mandatory impartiality in doubt; Wisconsin judicial ethics and rules require the disclosure.
Here's how the Journal Sentinel story summed it up:
"Despite judicial rules that say judges must step aside in such matters, Ziegler has heard 24 cases since 2004 involving West Bend Savings Bank, where her husband, J.J. Ziegler, sits on the board of directors.
The state judicial ethics code says a judge must withdraw from a case if his or her spouse is a director of a business involved in a case."
It would not be surprising if state regulators at the Judicial Commission - - ironically, an arm of the Wisconsin Supreme Court - - were to open an investigation into Ziegler's conduct.
Or the losing parties in the cases where Ziegler ruled for the bank could appeal, or bring their own actions against her, and voters in Washington County could launch a recall.
Hardly the way to position yourself for a seat on the State Supreme Court; Ziegler's biggest challenge, though she won the February primary and is on the April 3rd statewide ballot for election to the state's highest court, now may be to hang on to her judgeship.
Last Thursday I posted the item copied below in the wake of the defeat by the Waukesha Plan Commission of a scheme to annex 334 acres of land outside of Waukesha's city limits so the city could get access to shallow well water.
The annexation proposal was controversial a) because it appeared to have been a sweetheart deal negotiated with a developer, b) would have extended costly city services in classic sprawl fashion, and c) would taken open space intended for inclusion in the Vernon Marsh Wildlife Area, and the shallow waters targeted by the city might have a negative impact on the marsh, too.
Here is an update:
The Waukesha City Council wlll meet in closed session Tuesday - - another of those infamous closed sessions favored by Waukesha government - - to plan the city's next move.
City officials have indicated previously that they could obtain an easment from the land's owners to as little as four or five acres for the well sites.
Looks now that the city is again considering obtaining that access through a very small purchase, or outright condemnation - - something the city can do - - but because the land is in the neighboring Town of Waukesha, the whole issue could get even messier.
And city officials keep running into citizen opposition to the many closed sessions of the council and water utility commission as water strategies - - with public dollars - - are hatched, announced, blown up and reconfigured.
Keeping the public in the dark guarantees another hostile reception to water policy development in Waukesha.
Original posting:
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Strong Conservation Message Reverberates Across Waukesha County
Late on Wednesday night, the City of Waukesha Plan Commission rejected, for a second time, a proposal to annex 334 acres in the Town of Waukesha for home and city well development southwest of the city.
Waukesha's Water Utility and Mayor Larry Nelson backed the plan as a short-term solution to the City's need for a cleaner water source; conservationists objected because the land, known as the Lathers parcel, is long-ticketed for inclusion into public property in the Vernon Marsh Wildlife Area; others balked at another costly extension of city services beyond the city's current borders. (Which some dare call "sprawl.")
The vote at the commission was 5-2.
So what's really going on?
For years in southeastern Wisconsin, and particularly in Waukesha County, planning decisions have been made by the same small group of builders, consultants and governing bodies that constitute an informal but powerful elite.
These people felt they had a monopoly on the information, on knowledge, on what was best for the region, and plans would get announced, then fast-tracked, more or less as done deals.
Annexation-after-annexation has been sought by developers, goosed along by consultants and adopted by governments, too often with relatively less regard for the long-term consequences beyond the elites' bottom lines.
So, year-after-year, open space has dwindled. Farms have been subdivided for homes, businesses and malls- - including the massive, 1,500-acre Pabst Farms that has profound ecological significance for the region because the water supply beneath it was replenished by rain and snow that filtered through the land.
The development also has brought more traffic throughout the County. Once-small towns are getting the Royal Treatment from cooperative state highway planners with wide bypasses and new interchanges.
Municipal borders have been extended. Even the environmental corridors recommended as buffers by the regional planning commission have been encroached upon as business-as-usual for decades.
But the process is not sustainable and has begun to stall under the weight of its own contradictions.
As the City of Waukesha slowly faced up to its water supply issues, and began campaigning for diverted Lake Michigan water as its preferred solution, it argued it could not return that water for treatment to the lake because its current disposal path - - the Fox River - - maintained water levels in the valuable Vernon Marsh.
Then it turned around and negotiated a deal with a developer to build on the Lathers parcel - - land at the edge of, and earmarked for, the Vernon Marsh - - in exchange for the right to withdraw three million gallons a day from groundwater also at the edge of the Marsh.
Even though the amount of land for homes was reduced in the version voted down by the Plan Commission, does building so close to the Marsh, and drawing up water from shallow wells nearby, make sense?
Not according to the City's planning staff, which did not support the plan, nor for the second time to the Plan Commission, and, once already, to the Waukesha City Council.
These days, a reaction like that is called pushback. It's not partisan in Waukesha. It's widespread. Maybe rejecting the Lathers annexation is the tipping point against sprawl in Waukesha County, making conservation welcomed as mainstream throughout southeastern Wisconsin.
Waukesha still has water supply options. It can negotiate the purchase from the developer of an easement of perhaps four or five of the acres for the well sites, thereby leaving 99% of the land intact.
Studies may indicate that removing the water that Waukesha wants, or a smaller amount, or changing the well site locations, may not harm the Vernon Marsh. I'm not sure. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and others will eventually decide. Certainly the Town of Waukesha has a say in the decision, too.
Time will tell.
Waukesha has implemented a solid water conservation plan. Give it a chance, along with changes in water rates, and see if all these modifications substantially reduce the amount of water that the City of Waukesha says it needs long-term.
And the plan can be substantially expanded with additional technologies and goals, adding to the water savings that, in turn, minimize the need for larger volumes of water in the coming years.
And Waukesha needs to get behind the adoption of the amended Great Lakes Compact, because a) it is the right thing from a conservation perspective to do for the entire Great Lakes region, and b) if Waukesha ever wants a justifiable application for Great Lakes water to be approved by the other Great Lakes states, Waukesha can't go to those states for permission having been the city in the eight-state region that fought, tried to water down, or otherwise compromise the agreement.
The battle over the parcel near the Vernon Marsh also tells the City and County of Waukesha, as well as the regional planning commission that people want conservation made a genuine priority.
Not a dollop of land here and a fake wetlands added there, but putting preservation of remaining open lands at the top of the list.
Conservation for the benefit of the public, not the narrow interests of developers, builders and their allies at consulting firms.
Posted by James Rowen at 8:03 AM
A Vietnam veteran from Wisconsin, reacting to the horror stories flooding the news about deficient medical care at Walter Reed and other Veterans Administration facilities nationally, sends along this thoughtful guest posting. I'm happy to run it.
It's clearly an invitation to media to take a look at Wisconsin's VA presence.
The vet is a credible person. We agree that the posting should run anonymously:
Guest Post:
By way of local angles, there is a story at the Milwaukee and Madison VA hospitals, a direct spin off of Walter Reed.
The staffs are vocal in apologizing for the long delays on needed surgeries and treatments due to the lack of resources and increased demands due to the wars as well as Bush pandering to the non-needy, but huge pool of vets made newly eligible for various care programs.
The VA is the minor leagues for new medical personnel to attempt their first ops, treatments and case loads.
Some needed ops work OK. Some simply get lost in the shuffle. Some are misdiagnosed, and some are delayed for months.
There are staff who probably would be willing to talk if asked. The problem with patient sources is that so many of them are extremely vulnerable, and fearful of jeopardizing the care that they get.
And many more don't know what any other care looks like, and feel that what they get is the best available, so grateful are they for any medical attention at all.
There is the expected old boys network, where second opinions amount to little more than MD's scratching each other's back.
Can be frustrating. For me, the 'every nickel' strategy seems to work best. I am comfortable, as comfortable as the "owies" allow. And there is the certainty of shekels for all pleasures great and small. As long as one isn't too greedy.
So it is reasonable for me to see a future without the horrors of poverty and old age and isolation. And I do. I'm lucky.
But for a lot of these guys, life is just going to get worse. And despite the near-heroic efforts of some of the people I was fortunate enough to have as care-givers and guardian angels, the rewards for them aren't sufficient to buy the regular relief from the demands that just don't end.
They can't be everybody's hero and angel.
Would that it were so, though.
The New York Times tells us that the Bush Administration is making no real progress on curbing greenhouse emissions - - no surprise there - - since the nation's energy policies were set in secret during W's first term by Oil Man/Vice-President Cheney, who opined that conservation was a personal virtue, and nothing more.
But a draft United Nations report about US energy policies and emission output quoted by the Times indicates that continuing high levels of greenhouse emissions and the climate change those emissions help produce will have an impact that should make people in the Great Lakes states sit up and take notice:
"Drought, particularly, will become a persistent threat, it [the report] said: “Warmer temperatures expected with increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases are expected to exacerbate present drought risks in the United States by increasing the rate of evaporation.'”
"Water supplies in the Northwest and Southwest are also at risk. [Emphasis added] “Much of the water used by people in the western United States comes from snow melt,” the report said. “And a large fraction of the traditionally snow-covered areas of this region has experienced a decline in spring snow pack, especially since mid-century, despite increases in winter precipitation in many places.” Animal and plant species face risks as climate zones shift but urbanized regions prevent ecosystems from shifting as well, according to the draft report.'"
If water supplies in the Northwest and Southwest are at risk, where do you suppose those thirsty, growing regions will look?
That's right: To the US Great Lakes, which hold 20% of the world's fresh surface water.
And what will prevent the wholesale export of those resources away from the Great Lakes basin?
The US-Canada Great Lakes Compact, signed in 1985 with amendments pending right now that call for all eight Great Lakes states to adopt similar, if not identical language, establishing common, regional rules, procedures, and standards.
The goal is to set a high bar against diversions of water away from the basin - - for the good of the Great Lakes region and its commonly-held water resources.
And what's holding up Wisconsin from adopting these amendments? What's preventing Wisconsin from assuming a leadership role among Great Lakes states, as our state proudly did when the Compact was negotiated, and then steered to its adoption in Milwaukee, in 1985, by then-Governor Tony Earl?
Narrow-minded business interests in sprawl-happy, annexation-crazed Waukesha County, and, in particular State Sen. Mary Lazich, (R-New Berlin), and representatives from the Wisconsin Builders Association and the Waukesha Chamber of Commerce.
They are throwing all kinds of chaff and curveballs the committee's way, arguing that Wisconsin should not adopt the Compact's crucial principle and procedure - - that all eight states must approve a diversion application before water can be diverted outside of the Great Lakes basin boundaries.
These Waukesha County-based obstructionists are carrying out the Badger State version of standing in the schoolhouse door even though that could make them responsible for fatally weakening the Compact by negating the proposed amendments.
The unanimity standard for diversion approvals will ensure that they will be approved only when a genuine need is documented, justified and scientifically proven.
And only when the diverted water is guaranteed to be returned for treatment to the Great Lakes basin - - minus a reasonable portion consumed - - to help maintain balance across the Great Lakes ecosystem.
The objections have led to an impasse at a state legislative study committee that is trying to draft legislation to approve and implement the Compact's amendments.
If there is no consensus at the committee, and it is possible that gridlock over these diversion procedures may contnue into the committee's final meeting later this month, the Commitee could disband without sending a draft to the state legislature.
These obstacles to a smooth committee conclusion mirror the unfortunate, confidential efforts in 2006 by the City of Waukesha to win unilateral permission from Gov. Doyle for a Lake Michigan diversion - - a backdoor scheme that would have avoided the eight-state approval procedure altogether and even caused other states to trash the Compact altogether.
Waukesha's 2006 proposals to Doyle - - both were set aside correctly by the Governor, as he is the co-chairman of the a regional governors' council that drafted the amendments in the first place - - also would not have required Waukesha to return diverted water to the Great Lakes basin.
Delaying the drafting of Wisconsin's implementing legislation, and seeking exclusive exceptions to an agreement among eight states and two Canadian provinces, undercuts regional cooperation severly because they put the health of the Great Lakes ecosystem at risk.
An ecosystem that is held in trust for a vast region, and which is unique on the planet.
Conservationists concerned about the stability of the Great Lakes need to get in touch with their representatives in the legislature and urge them to pressure the legislative study committee's members, including Sen. Lazich and others from Waukesha County, to move the Compact forward.
And if ever there was a time for the much ballyhooed "Milwaukee Seven," the southeastern Wisconsin regional business and governmental collaborative, to step forward and act boldly on behalf of Wisconsin as a great - - and Great Lakes state - - it could hardly do better than taking a strong, pro-Great Lakes Compact position.
Front-running State Supreme Court candidate Annette Ziegler's campaign has run aground.
Her campaign is in trouble because the Wisconsin State Journal ran a major piece Sunday about cases over which she presided as a Washington County Circuit Judge without disclosing a conflict of interest.
The conflict involved cases that Ziegler heard involving The West Bend Savings Bank while her husband held a paid directorship on the bank's board.
The State Journal front-page story advanced previous research and online investigative reporting about Ziegler by One Wisconsin Now (OWN), a progressive statewide political and educational outfit based in Milwaukee (note: I sit on the OWN board, but was not involved in its online Ziegler stories).
The story has added weight because it was carried in the State Journal, the more conservative paper in Madison (Ziegler is the more conservative candidate in the State Supreme Court race), and ran in the city where the state's judicial regulatory machinery is located.
Ziegler's pre-primary theme was that she was the most qualified candidate in the race because she was a judge. Now that experience has torpedoed her campaign to move to the state's highest court.
Ziegler's campaign tried to play down the State Journal's big Sunday story - - written by Dee Hall, one the paper's pre-eminent reporters - - but expect the story to dominate the campaign through the April 3rd election.
Want to know what your innovative eco-counterparts are doing and saying around the globe? There's a fascinating website that turns some of that aimless web-surfing time you logging everyday into something really productive.
And fun.
It's taken years, but the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has finally won in court what it could not arrange less litigiously on the shoreline of one of Waukesha County's largest bodies of water - - a public boating launch facility on North Lake.
Details here.
Wisconsin's Public Trust doctrine, dating to the Northwest Ordinance and then folded into the Wisconsin Constitution at statehood, has been interpreted to guarantee public access to all the state's waters.
North Lake, at 437 acres, was one of the state's largest without a public boat launch.
Private property property owners held up the deal for years, but it looks like the public, whomever and from wherever they may be, will soon be able to put a pleasure or fishing boat into North Lake.
Let's hope they get a warmer reception than a Milwaukee African-American family got last year in the nearby Town of Merton, when two off-duty North Lake volunteer fighters, including the now ex-chief, used a handgun and German Shepherd to run the Milwaukeans off a public, river bridge fishing spot.
Little surprise, really, that Ann Coulter would figure out a way to put herself in the headlines at a rightwing political conference where conservative GOP candidates were auditioning for 2008 electoral support.
She's always got a book to sell or a lecture tour to promote, and had to be annoyed that Anna Nicole Smith, Briteny Spears and Michael "Kramer" Richards have been getting all the limelight.
What was wierd, even by Coulter's standards - - remember, she was the one who suggested last year that 9/11 widows were somehow grooving on their situation - - was how she went about making sure that media paid her more attention than the candidates:
She swift-boated the married-guy John Edwards over on the Democratic side with a nasty, homophobic slur, and got cheered by an enthusiastic audience.
Edwards quickly turned Coulter's nutty remark into a fund-raising effort, and that's the mark of a savvy politician, but don't you wonder when even the right will decide that maybe you don't want Coulter representing you?
Washington County residents have a rare opportunity on their April 3rd ballot: They can commit their county and tax dollars to buy permanent land easements from willing sellers and effectively keep the land agricultural.
That would help to protect the county's rural character, environment and $630 million annual agricultural industry.
Supporters of a "yes" vote are getting organized, announcing a rally Thursday, March 8th, at 7 p.m. at the West Bend Mutual Insurance Co.
Washington County, located northwest of Milwaukee County, contains some of the region's most beautiful open space, including farmland, wetlands and remnants of the Kettle Moraine that have not yet fallen to the bulldozer, subdivider, and road-builder.
As one Washington County resident once said to me about why land conservancy was so strong there: "We want to preserve our rural character. We don't want to become another Waukesha County."
There are conservancy efforts across the state, and in Washington County, that utilize state grants and other resources.
But the Washington County-financed effort, if it wins voter approval (the Washington County Board had adopted the plan in March, 2006, then reversed itself two months later, finally agreeing to put the matter to a county-wide referendum), would be the first such county-financed program in the state and could help other counties follow suit.
The referendum would designate up to $800,000 in county revenues annually for ten years, "to preserve prime farmland, water resources and natural areas in the County through purchase of development rights, land acquisition or similar programs from willing sellers," provided matching, non-county funds are also raised.
Opponents have said the program is too expensive and would add to government power and regulation.
Here is some contact information about the "yes" vote iniative:
The Washington County Land Conservation Partnership, (LCP), has a website: www.lcpwc.org.
Phone inquiries can be directed to Sue Millin, at 262-707-0359.
Backers of the referendum have also established an action and education arm; donations can be mailed to it, c/o Bill Neureuther, treasurer, Washington County Citizens for Farmland & Natural Areas, 1351 Oak Drive, Huburtus, WI 53033.
Sounds like a great opportunity to help some of our region's activists win a big victory.
John McCain, Mitt Romney and Rudy Guiliani are out in front, if the early polls can be believed.
The CNN story includes these data:
"According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released earlier this week, Giuliani is gaining support among Republicans. His chief rival for the GOP 2008 presidential nomination, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, is not.
Last month, McCain and outsider Rudy Giuliani were pretty close in the Washington Post-ABC News poll. Guiliani enjoyed a 34 percent to 27 percent lead over McCain.
But in the poll released Wednesday, Giuliani is way ahead of McCain -- 44 percent to 21 percent. The poll's margin of error on questions about Republicans was plus-or-minus 5 percentage points."
With Giuliani and his star power moving into the center-right, and to a lead among bigger name GOP candidates, Tommy's handful of percentage points will whither during his vanity campaign to nothing.
Friends in Madison and elsewhere around the state often ask about where they can turn for informed and lively commentary about Milwaukee's political culture.
Here are three solid choices, and they are over on the Blog Roll to my right (I could switch that layout, I guess!):
1. Milwaukee Rising, written by my former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel colleague Gretchen Schuldt. She has become an expert in highway spending and politicking, and the wayward ways of our highway happy regional planning commission, too.
Among her achievements: co-founding a regional anti-highway expansion coalition, CASH - - Citizens Allied for Sane Highways - - and making presentations about why its a bad idea to jam another $6 billion in new freeway lanes through Milwaukee and area neighborhoods, wetlands and commercial strips.
So her blog. and the separate online newsletter she edits for the Storyhill Neighborhood Association - - referenced at her blog - - are both valuable resources in understanding the battles over transportation planning and spending in southeastern Wisconsin.
2. I'm also a fan of Plaisted Writes. Mike Plaisted is an attorney and his focus is often on the media, especially talk radio.
If you live outside Milwaukee, it helps to understand how this ubiquitous rightwing radio media phenomena operates here, and Plaisted's blog offers solid commentary.
3. And of course, one of the granddaddies of progressive blogging - - Jay Bullock, the always readable Folkbum.
Schuldt, Bullock and Plaisted go a long way in explaining Milwaukee's political environment.
Wisconsin is on the corn-based ethanol bandwagon because farmers and politicians here think it's good for Wisconsin's economy.
And a useful way to make an additive to stretch gas supplies and help the country break its addiction to petroleum.
Good goals.
But there's also a growing awareness that the financial, fertilizer and water costs required to turn corn into ethanol have serious environmental and fiscal drawbacks.
So is there a better way to produce ethanol? And is it the best use of corn, or of Wisconsin land and water and resources that could keep producing food?
Now there's news that the federal government is putting several hundreds of millions of research dollars into ethanol production from non-food crops in states other than Wisconsin, meaning the market for ethanol could shift away from corn, and move elsewhere.
So-called cellulosic ethanol could be produced from certain grasses, quick-growing trees and waste products, too - - in other words: not corn.
Projects receiving initial federal support for its production are located as close as Iowa - - where they grow a lot of corn but also see the potential for different ethanol source.
The Forest Products Lab at UW-Madison is already looking at whether wood chips and similar materials could be turned into cellulosic ethanol.
Good start.
As an agricultural state, with major research universities, and a public sector getting 'greener' by the day, Wisconsin should direct its renewal fuel potential - - and maybe venture capital, too - - towards these alternatives.
What better way to catch the next big wave of job-producing research, development and production in the energy sector?
The statewide progressive organization One Wisconsin Now's online "Forward Report" has designated The Political Environment blog as its Blog of the Week.
The designation is much appreciated, and thanks to people linking to the blog through OWN's postings last month.
You can access the OWN site and the Forward Report here.
Log on to receive the Forward Report and get linked to a growing statewide network of activists working on matters as diverse as health care reform, conservation, workplace rights and more. (Disclosure: I am on OWN's board).
Reading through the news about sprawl development in Waukesha, long-time organizer and activist Marilyn Goris sent along this story - - published almost eight years ago to the day - - to add some perspective.
(The bold-faced emphasis is mine, fyi):
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, March 12, 1999
Sprawl a grave threat, group's report says
TOM VANDEN BROOK
Urban sprawl will spoil southeastern Wisconsin unless developers create compact neighborhoods served by mass transit, according to a report released Thursday by Citizens for a Better Environment.
The environmental organization studied land-use trends since 1960 and found that land used for development nearly doubled while the population in the area grew only 3%.
Such sprawling development consumes open space, lengthens commutes and requires costly extension of municipal services, such as police and fire protection, to far-flung subdivisions, according to the report. The added miles logged by commuters a 64% increase between 1972 and 1991 also would add to the region's smog problems.
If the trends continue, an additional 155,000 acres of farmland and other open space will be used for development by 2040, according to the report, "2040, Getting There: Alternatives to Sprawl in Southeast Wisconsin." That acreage is equal to the land now used for urban development in Milwaukee, Washington and Kenosha counties combined.
"We can expect southeast Wisconsin to become less and less a place we'll want to live in," said Susan Mudd, state director for the organization. The study calls for "Livable Neighborhoods" in revitalized urban areas, and new homes developed on smaller lots in compact neighborhoods.
Redeveloping and limiting development also would negate the need to build new schools, roads and other costly infrastructure, according to the report. These communities would be served by mass transit and have shopping and other amenities within walking distance.
Examples of such "livable" communities already exist, Mudd said, pointing to Shorewood, Cedarburg and Lake Mills. Following the "Livable Neighborhood" growth pattern would result in 40% less land used for residential development, 13% to 30% fewer new miles driven and 56% less pollution than envisioned under current development trends.
"In fact, living in an environmentally efficient home in a compact neighborhood is more convenient, fun, sociable, leisurely and livable than an isolated tract home in a scattered subdivision two miles from the nearest convenience store and it's good for the economy," said Rob Kennedy, author of the report.
The study calls for local zoning regulations to conform to regional plans, enacting local ordinances to make pedestrian-friendly developments possible and to re-allocate money from road building to pay for better mass transit and promote bicycling and walking.
Copyright 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.
Late on Wednesday night, the City of Waukesha Plan Commission rejected, for a second time, a proposal to annex 334 acres in the Town of Waukesha for home and city well development southwest of the city.
Waukesha's Water Utility and Mayor Larry Nelson backed the plan as a short-term solution to the City's need for a cleaner water source; conservationists objected because the land, known as the Lathers parcel, is long-ticketed for inclusion into public property in the Vernon Marsh Wildlife Area; others balked at another costly extension of city services beyond the city's current borders. (Which some dare call "sprawl.")
The vote at the commission was 5-2.
So what's really going on?
For years in southeastern Wisconsin, and particularly in Waukesha County, planning decisions have been made by the same small group of builders, consultants and governing bodies that constitute an informal but powerful elite.
These people felt they had a monopoly on the information, on knowledge, on what was best for the region, and plans would get announced, then fast-tracked, more or less as done deals.
Annexation-after-annexation has been sought by developers, goosed along by consultants and adopted by governments, too often with relatively less regard for the long-term consequences beyond the elites' bottom lines.
So, year-after-year, open space has dwindled. Farms have been subdivided for homes, businesses and malls- - including the massive, 1,500-acre Pabst Farms that has profound ecological significance for the region because the water supply beneath it was replenished by rain and snow that filtered through the land.
The development also has brought more traffic throughout the County. Once-small towns are getting the Royal Treatment from cooperative state highway planners with wide bypasses and new interchanges.
Municipal borders have been extended. Even the environmental corridors recommended as buffers by the regional planning commission have been encroached upon as business-as-usual for decades.
But the process is not sustainable and has begun to stall under the weight of its own contradictions.
As the City of Waukesha slowly faced up to its water supply issues, and began campaigning for diverted Lake Michigan water as its preferred solution, it argued it could not return that water for treatment to the lake because its current disposal path - - the Fox River - - maintained water levels in the valuable Vernon Marsh.
Then it turned around and negotiated a deal with a developer to build on the Lathers parcel - - land at the edge of, and earmarked for, the Vernon Marsh - - in exchange for the right to withdraw three million gallons a day from groundwater also at the edge of the Marsh.
Even though the amount of land for homes was reduced in the version voted down by the Plan Commission, does building so close to the Marsh, and drawing up water from shallow wells nearby, make sense?
Not according to the City's planning staff, which did not support the plan, nor for the second time to the Plan Commission, and, once already, to the Waukesha City Council.
These days, a reaction like that is called pushback. It's not partisan in Waukesha. It's widespread. Maybe rejecting the Lathers annexation is the tipping point against sprawl in Waukesha County, making conservation welcomed as mainstream throughout southeastern Wisconsin.
Waukesha still has water supply options. It can negotiate the purchase from the developer of an easement of perhaps four or five of the acres for the well sites, thereby leaving 99% of the land intact.
Studies may indicate that removing the water that Waukesha wants, or a smaller amount, or changing the well site locations, may not harm the Vernon Marsh. I'm not sure. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and others will eventually decide. Certainly the Town of Waukesha has a say in the decision, too.
Time will tell.
Waukesha has implemented a solid water conservation plan. Give it a chance, along with changes in water rates, and see if all these modifications substantially reduce the amount of water that the City of Waukesha says it needs long-term.
And the plan can be substantially expanded with additional technologies and goals, adding to the water savings that, in turn, minimize the need for larger volumes of water in the coming years.
And Waukesha needs to get behind the adoption of the amended Great Lakes Compact, because a) it is the right thing from a conservation perspective to do for the entire Great Lakes region, and b) if Waukesha ever wants a justifiable application for Great Lakes water to be approved by the other Great Lakes states, Waukesha can't go to those states for permission having been the city in the eight-state region that fought, tried to water down, or otherwise compromise the agreement.
The battle over the parcel near the Vernon Marsh also tells the City and County of Waukesha, as well as the regional planning commission that people want conservation made a genuine priority.
Not a dollop of land here and a fake wetlands added there, but putting preservation of remaining open lands at the top of the list.
Conservation for the benefit of the public, not the narrow interests of developers, builders and their allies at consulting firms.
