Friday, March 14, 2008

SEWRPC To Get A New Executive Director - - Put Change In The SEWRPC Mission On The Table, Too

Phil Evenson, SEWRPC's Executive Director, announced he is leaving his position at the end of 2008.

There was a small story about it in the Waukesha edition of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, below, begging the questions of how and when the new director will be named, and if there will be any public participation.

The agency's annual budgets are 100% public funded: each of seven counties in the region has three members on the SEWRPC board.

There are rumors among regional sources of a quick appointment, perhaps the in-house promotion of deputy director Kenneth Yunker.

In January I posted an extensive analysis of SEWRPC's historical and structural deficiences, and made some suggestions about how SEWRPC and the public bodies that fund it could begin to reshape the agency.

That analysis is here - - and a change at the helm would be the perfect time to begin to make SEWRPC's mission and activities much more transparent and relevant, even cutting-edge.

Of course, that can't happen unless SEWRPC and other regional officials and agencies get together and decide that SEWPRC needs to change and the public needs genuine input into its personnel and performance decisions.

Here is the newspaper story about Evenson's planned departure:

Waukesha County Community Briefing
From the Journal Sentinel
Posted: March 13, 2008
Plan commission chief plans to retire

Village of Pewaukee - The longtime head of the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission has announced plans to retire at the end of this year.

Phil Evenson, who has been the commission's executive director for 12 years, said he decided not to seek renewal of an employment contract that expires in December.

"I'm ready to take it a little bit easier," he said. "I'm like Brett Favre - I'm tired."

Evenson, 68, has worked more than 40 years on the commission, which gets taxpayer support to plan transportation, development and other growth issues in a seven-county region surrounding Milwaukee.

His salary is $127,480 a year.

Appointed trustees of the village of Pewaukee-based planning agency are scheduled to consider a possible successor next week.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ken Yunker is worse than Phil, more isolated, less able to or interested in dealing with diverse communities . There should be a public campaign to push SEWRPC to find someone who has meaningful relationship with communities of color, persons with disabilities, and people in the city of Milwaukee!!!!!

Steve Branca said...

And so the pachycephalosaurs are giving way to the sauropods, in league with the tyrannosaurs, their predatory surrogates. The water-dwelling ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs have peaked and begin a steady but inexorable decline. Moving, therefore, from the late Jurassic to the early Cretaceous, expect the rise of the pterodons which exercise their primitive but effective flying abilities to flee in the face of certain extinction. The Wisconsin Glacial Episode is still 64.9 million years in the future, a long time before making a clean sweep and starting over.