SEWRPC Documents Posted, As Promised; Why Doesn't SEWRPC Do This?

The other day I posted data and quotations from several reports produced by the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission.
The materials supported my claim that SEWRPC has done a poor job hiring minority staffers, and that is a component of my argument that Milwaukee, ill-served by SEWRPC management and governance, should leave the seven-county agency and spend its share of the SEWRPC tax levy that it is dunned each year on plans and people attuned to urban issues.

SEWRPC knows that minorities and others living in Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha Counties find it hard to work at SEWRPC because the agency has always been located in Waukesha County, where there is little transit service, SEWRPC records indicate.

Yet SEWRPC moved farther west in 2002, to Pewaukee, where there is no transit service, but where the agency could provide more parking for workers driving there, SEWRPC records show.

I also said I'd post these SEWRPC materials because the agency does not provide them online, so thanks to the good folks at One Wisconsin Now (disclosure: I am on the board of directors of one of its groups), the items have been converted to pdf's, and I can make them available online through this blog.

Here are the links:

1. The 1996-1997 SEWRPC Affirmative Action Plan - - the agency's first.

2. The 2007-2008 SEWRPC Affirmative Action Plan, for comparison.

3. Two pages from the minutes of the 2/24/00 SEWRPC Executive Committee in which SEWRPC indicates it is pursuing the purchase of a building that is now its headquarters, in part to provide better parking to employees. See the bracketed portion at the bottom of the first copied page.

Of course, SEWRPC could put all these documents online.

It could also tape the proceedings of its commission and advisory committee meetings, and put those online, too.

It could offer online biographies and photos of its commissioners, so you could match up names with faces and resumes and get a better idea of who is hiring the managers that are writing SEWRPC's reports.

It could bring its entire online web operation into the first decade of the 21st century, something that http://www.sewrpc.org/ is years away from achieving - - and which helps keep SEWRPC operations, meetings and hiring below the radar, far from the population centers of its seven-county region, not even on a bus line.

Anyway: those are the documents to which I referred.

I believe they fully support the case for Milwaukee withdrawing from SEWRPC, and directing the hundreds of thousands of tax dollars that are forwarded annually to SEWRPC from the city into planning and staffing that seeks out an urban agenda and workforce.