Sunday, May 4, 2008

Waukesha Church Taking Land Stewardship To New Level

A Waukesha church is proposing to use its yard as a food garden. What a great idea.

Monday update: The Board of Zoning Appeals has said OK, leaving it up to the Plan Commission in a couple of weeks.

1 comment:

Jim Bouman said...

And, true to form for Waukesha, the City bureaucracy is delaying the whole thing (so that the gardeners will likely miss the prime moments for tilling and planting) while the City Hall guardians of all-things-nit-picky check on whether any of the locals think having gardens in the neighborhood will amount to an assault on their property values.

I've lived in the City of Waukesha for thirty-five years. I've loved most of it.

But, the current city government is quickly turning into a mirror image of the suburban/isolationists that have become the new premier citizens of Waukesha.
Check out this this narrative-- http://waterbloggedinwaukesha.blogspot.com/2007/04/tallgrass-westowne-water-tower.html
Water Blogged in Waukesha: The Tallgrass - Westowne Water Tower Controversy --on how Mayor Larry Nelson and and his nifty new group of Republican pals think about the working class folks who founded this city.

They are continually telling us that the future is in pampering and catering to the new suburban Waukesha residents who live in exclusive up-scale subdivisions on the outskirts of town. It is these, we are told, who will provide the big tax revenues needed to keep the older portions of the city going, while also financing all the growth on the edges.

Waukesha is starting to make me very uneasy, a little bit sick. I truly love my friends from Southminster Presbyterian. They are decent, noble, generous citizens; genuinely Christian in outlook and action. But they are soon to be outnumbered and outvoted in city issues by the Tall Grass (and their ilk) constituency. They will soon be supplanted by downtown gentrifiers and me-firsters who think that all Waukesha residents who don't have big bank accounts (but, who have dark skin and thick latino accents, and, often enough, serious disabilities) should be removed in a process of sanitizing our downtown.