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The Corridor Strategy For Development, Cont’d

December 10, 2012

Earlier this year I wrote a piece for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel arguing that the Milwaukee-Madison I-94 corridor held great potential for economic development in the 21st century. I expanded the piece and gave it more of a Madison focus for this Isthmus cover story.

This is the essence of the argument:

Simply put, that 80-mile I-94 corridor traversing Milwaukee, Waukesha, Jefferson and Dane counties could be the muscle and brain of Wisconsin’s 21st-century economic renaissance.

It also, I would argue, holds greater economic promise for Madison and Dane County’s prosperity than does the Thrive region, the seven largely rural counties surrounding Dane County that community leaders have identified as Madison’s cohort for growth.

Those four I-94 corridor counties cover less than 5% of the state, but have one-third of its population, 44% of its college graduates and almost 40% of Wisconsin jobs, according to the UW-Extension’s Center for Community and Economic Development. The synergy of a great transportation corridor connecting the state’s two largest metropolitan areas seems obvious.

Tom Hefty, the retired head of Blue Cross-Blue Shield United of Wisconsin, made that case 10 years ago when he tried — and failed — to convince Gov. Jim Doyle to adopt a corridor development plan as part of the state’s economic strategy.

The logic: Milwaukee is the state’s finance and commercial capital. Madison is the political capital and home to a world-class research university. Waukesha County is a teeming entrepreneurial beehive. Already a good chunk of workers travel back and forth along the corridor. Major educational facilities, including a rising UW-Milwaukee, prepare the workforce.

“You combine an academic powerhouse with a commercial powerhouse, and you get job growth,” says Hefty.

Do you think that Wisconsin’s languishing economy could use more jobs? The answer is obvious, but the politics here are deeply dysfunctional. Talk about Mission: Impossible. It’s not just Milwaukee versus Madison; their shared liberalism is abhorrent to conservative Waukesha County. Lambs will lie down with lions before the corridor politicians ever work together.

For that matter, Gov. Scott Walker’s successful effort to kill the $810 million federally funded train service between Milwaukee and Madison is just one more nasty episode in that endless grudge match.

But before you turn the page, here’s the thing: The corridor is coming together without these feuding politicians.

To read more, pls go here.

Categories: Development, Politics, Tech, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus
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What Next For Sector67?

November 23, 2012

Sector67, the tinkerers’ workshop at 2100 Winnebago St., is a key component in Madison’s emerging entrepreneurial  subculture.  I write in this Isthmus story about its successes and search for new space.

There’s a deep literature on creative spaces like Sector67. Most famously: MIT’s Building 20, the Bell Labs and the legendary Homebrew Computer Club that helped catalyze Silicon Valley. At UW-Madison, David Krakauer is trying to unleash that creative juice at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.

Matt Younkle, who founded the cloud-based music storage and sharing service Murfie.com with [Preston] Austin, thinks Sector67 has bottled the magic. He says when he was an engineering student at UW-Madison, “it was hard to walk into the lab and say, ‘I have this great idea, and I want to build it.’ That’s the beauty of Sector67. It’s a totally open door, and there are people there to help you turn your ideas into a prototype.”

Younkle’s assessment underscores why finding a new home for Sector67 is so important. The most logical site is in the city redevelopment zone known as the Capitol Gateway District. It contains many of the old industrial properties along the east rail corridor. Indeed, Meyer says he would love to relocate across the street from the two business incubators run by Commonwealth Development. The Metro Innovation Center, operated as a startup site by the University Research Park, is close by.

“I know a lot of what we’re doing fits in well with what the UW is doing and hopefully with what the city wants in furthering the entrepreneurial spirit,” [founder Chris] Meyer says. Unfailingly upbeat, he adds, “I love it when someone takes the world by the ears and starts a business. Every day I get up I want to help someone do that.”

To read more, please go here.

Categories: Development, Tech, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus
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Looking For The New Pat Lucey

November 23, 2012

For a decade now, the Wisconsin economy has sputtered and stalled. I argue in this Isthmus opinon column, that Democrats are part of the problem. Beginning with the Doyle administration in 2002, they just haven’t advanced a modern-day program for economic development. I suggest that the party should look back to its own history for inspiration. Namely to the example of Pat Lucey, who was governor in the 1970s. I write:

Lucey, who is 94 (and living in an assisted-living condo on Madison’s west side), brought consummate political skill to advancing a sweeping policy agenda. “They were enormous changes all at once,” recalls his former staffer David Adamany.

Governing from 1971 to 1977, Lucey merged the two university systems, enacted consumer protection laws, strengthened ethics provisions for officials, revamped campaign finance laws, shifted mental health treatment from institutions to community programs and, perhaps most importantly, retooled government aid programs to reflect the progressive vision: Poorer communities, especially their schools, should get more state aid than richer communities. Republicans howled at how Lucey threatened their low-tax enclaves.

Jesuit educated, Lucey saw the moral end in politics. Linda Reivitz, who worked in the Department of Natural Resources, recalls briefing Lucey on the pros and cons of a policy matter only to be interrupted when she veered into its politics. “He put up his hand and said something like, ‘Young lady. I will worry about the politics. You just tell me about the policy options.'”

Notes Jim Wood, another aide: “Pat knew you only walked through this valley once. Politics wasn’t about getting elected. It was getting elected to do something.”

After La Follette’s Progressive Party collapsed in 1946, Lucey was among the legendary activists who launched the modern-day Democratic Party. When he was elected to the Assembly in 1949, a fellow Democrat griped to the Milwaukee Journal: “He thinks he’s down here to reform us.” Lucey later served as state party chair and built the party infrastructure county by county.

He made his fortune in real estate, and that too shaped his political success. “He could talk to businessmen as one of their own,” notes Adamany. Early on, Lucey embraced a Republican pet issue — exempting manufacturing machinery and equipment from the property tax, as an incentive to reinvest — and got it passed through a divided Legislature. He also removed business inventories from the property tax and standardized assessment practices so county assessors could no longer over-assess business property to benefit homeowners.

By 1977, the Wall Street Journal, chronicling the Wisconsin economic success, called us “the shining star of the Snowbelt.”

Wisconsin needs a new Pat Lucey. A progressive who gets job creation’

For more please go here.

Categories: Development, Politics, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus
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Madison’s Web Future

October 19, 2012

In recent years, as the Great Recession locked down the economy and the Republican surge rolled back  the perks of public employment, I’ve wondered how a quintessential government town like Madison could reinvent itself and  prosper. More and more, I find myself thinking that  the young entrepreneurs in the city’s tech industry will lead the way. For this story in Isthmus, I look at a Web-development outfit called Bendyworks.  I make this case:

 Information technology companies like Bendyworks could be the stars of downtown Madison’s 21st-century economy.

“The tech community in Madison is exploding,” says [co-owner Stephen] Anderson. “So is Madison’s entrepreneurial community.”

He’s sitting at a table at the Bendyworks office with [Brad] Grzesiak and their partner, Jim Remsik. All three are convinced the downtown is well situated to ride the wave. They argue that the isthmus has the urban setting, the indie culture, the face-to-face proximity, and the creative talent to prosper in the burgeoning IT world.

And they declare that Bendyworks, in its deliberate, idiosyncratic way, is intent on making it happen. Anderson defines and champions the scene. Remsik and his wife, Jenifer, organize Ruby conferences (and in a few years a music-themed conference) that bring the best tech people to town. Bendyworks and the Remsiks have even produced beguiling videos promoting Madison (watch one) to out-of-town techies.

“We can compete with the second-tier cities like Portland and Austin,” Remsik, 35, says confidently. “They don’t have anything on Madison. The problem is that people don’t think of Madison and say, ‘Oh, Madison — yeah, that’s a cool start-up place.”

Grzesiak easily has the most ambitious idea of the three partners: Madison should create a formal web district stretching east from the Capitol and south of East Washington Avenue to Schenk’s Corners.

That corridor has the empty storefronts and cheap space that start-ups need, he says, but it still lacks one crucial component to attract programmers: more apartments that accept cats. “In the web world, it’s a cat thing,” Grzeskiak says.

Who knew?

To read more, please go here.

 

 

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Wisconsin’s Two Great Crises

September 21, 2012

In this column for Isthmus, I argue that Wisconsin’s economic malaise has been made worse by the failure in the state’s leadership. Here’s a chunk of copy:

For a good decade, Wisconsin’s economy has stagnated and declined. Even the end of the Great Recession in 2009 brought no real relief.

The ugly truth is that the Wisconsin workforce has shed 164,500 jobs from the pre-recessionary high in December 2007. That’s almost a 6% decline, according to a fine, detail-rich report from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy.

But the situation is even worse, given the state’s population growth of 2.8%. COWS estimates that another 81,000 jobs are needed to keep the newcomers employed.

Wisconsin’s total job deficit? 245,900 jobs.

Just as bad, wallets are noticeably thinner for almost everyone. COWS focuses on four-person families and finds over the past decade that annual income has dropped from $84,500 to $76,000.

Note that conservatives often bash the Center on Wisconsin Strategy because its leaders — Joel Rogers and Laura Dresser — are advocates for progressive economic strategies. But the center’s reports pass the ideological blood test. COWS was just as hard on Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle during his lackluster eight years when the Wisconsin economy first slid into the ditch.

And that brings us to the most discouraging fact of all: Wisconsin’s leaders — not just Democrats and Republicans, but business and labor, city and county, even university and tech school leaders — have been depressingly ineffective in getting us out of that ditch.

We have a leadership deficit in Wisconsin, not just a jobs deficit.

To read more , including my criticism of Gov. Scott Walker for saddling the state’s jobs agency with a political appointee with no relevant experience, please go here.

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Making Public Unions Relevant Again

July 8, 2012

In this column for Isthmus, I argue that Wisconsin’s battered and maligned public employee unions need to fundamentally rethink their reasons for existing.  The answer, I suggest, might be found in the very origins of public employee unionism in the 1930s:

Recently, I spent an afternoon at Memorial Library paging through old master’s theses (by Marver Bernstein, 1940; and Samuel Satterfield, 1961) that detailed the early years of the labor group now known as the Wisconsin State Employees Union. Some of it was downright inspiring.

[Gov. Albert] Schmedeman came into office in 1932 as the first Democratic governor in 38 years. He was hell-bent on firing state employees and hiring his friends. Fearful of the Democrats’ plan to destroy civil service, the nascent state employees association began organizing. Their objectives included a forthright pledge “to extend and uphold the principle of merit and fitness in public employment.” There was also the promise to advance the welfare of state employees.

But organizers took it a step further. They also pledged “to promote efficiency in public services” and to reduce to a minimum “overlapping and duplication of services.” In other words, they focused not just on their own needs, but also on looking out for the taxpayers. They were outlining a mission — a cause — that reached beyond their own enrichment

This is precisely what a newly focused public employee unionism needs today to regain relevance. The hard truth is that the old industrial- union model doesn’t cut it anymore. Public employees aren’t working on a factory floor. The old focus on minutely defined job descriptions, lockstep pay levels and prizing longevity over merit has to give way to a sense of mission and professionalism.

To read more, please go here.

I’ve been writing about the decline of public employee unions even before Gov. Scott Walker gutted them in early 2011.See this cover story in Isthmus, among other pieces that predate labor’s Armageddon.(Sadly the Milwaukee Magazine links appear broken.)

Categories: Labor, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

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The Cultural Plan’s Small Thinking

March 23, 2012

Nine years in the making, Madison’s new cultural plan left me decidedly unimpressed in this Isthmus column:

Unfortunately the cultural plan illustrates what Madison gets wrong with a lot of plans: It took an exceedingly long time to produce. It prizes process over content. It reinforces the status quo. It avoids difficult issues. It slights for-profit ventures. And it’s self-absorbed in that Madison Portlandia way.

I go on to say that the plan fails to address the historic town/gown split in the local arts world and is far too parochial. What we need, I argue, is a Dane County cultural plan and not a Madison plan. Chalk it off to another example of how regionalism is prized in theory but not in practice.

To read more, please go here.

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Missed Opportunity

January 22, 2012

I make the case in this Isthmus column that establishing a passenger rail connection between Madison and Milwaukee  would  strengthen the state’s economy in the decades to come. Ain’t happening:

What was the single most important decision Gov. Scott Walker made in his first year of office? Hands down, the consensus judgment would be undermining the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

But 20 or 30 years from now? Wisconsinites will probably point to Walker’s fateful decision to reject an $810 million federal grant to build a passenger rail line connecting Madison and Milwaukee.

Chances are that the logic for the train will be evident to most everyone by then. The I-94 corridor linking Dane County with Milwaukee and Waukesha will likely be the state’s 21st-century economic engine. In turn, it will be a vital link in what technology booster Tom Still has called the “I-Q Corridor” — the 400-mile stretch of interstate connecting the heavyweight metropolises of Chicago and the Twin Cities.

“That corridor contains some of the nation’s leading research universities, well-educated tech workers and thriving tech-based companies at all stages of development,” Still, who’s president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, wrote a few years ago.

Now imagine an updated rail system carrying people from the Twin Cities to downtown Chicago in less than six hours — even faster than driving and on a par with a complicated airline connection.

Oops! Don’t consider it. That scenario is precisely what Walker killed when he gave back the $810 million — federal funding that would have paid the full capital costs of connecting Madison to Milwaukee.

Says Watertown Mayor Ron Krueger: “That decision will hurt the state of Wisconsin for decades to come.”

To read more, please go here. For a related column,check this. 

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Madison, Waukesha, Milwaukee–Partners?

November 6, 2011

Transportation corridors are obviously prime for for growth and development, but it’s funny how seldom this plain as the-nose-on-your-face reality is ignored by decisionmakers. I wrote  about the synergy of Chicago and Milwaukee  along I-94 for Milwaukee Magazine. (Read it here.)  Now for Isthmus I look at the Madison-to-Milwaukee corridor.  The column begins:

Who knows, but just maybe Madison’s future can be found on the first floor of the historic American Exchange Bank on the Capitol Square. Nine info-tech start-ups — focused on everything from gaming to fashion to medical care — are housed in a business incubator run by an investment group known as 94Labs.

The name is telling, as it highlights the I-94 corridor connecting the Madison area with Milwaukee and Waukesha County — the state’s biggest metro area. Eighty miles from the Square, 94Labs runs another incubator in Milwaukee that’s equidistant to Marquette University, the Milwaukee School of Engineering and UW-Milwaukee.

The I-94 corridor “is a mega-region,” says 94Labs’ Greg Meier, using the phrase of celebrated urban theorist Richard Florida to describe the growing linkages of metro areas.

“The mega-regions of today perform functions that are somewhat similar to those of the great cities of the past — massing together talent, productive capability, innovation and markets,” Florida told a Tampa Bay paper earlier this year.

To read more, please go here:

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Madison Can Support The Best Artistic Talent

September 26, 2011

I’ve followed the Madison music scene for almost 35 years, and this is what I’ve learned: The scene rises and falls, rises and falls, but the baseline never advances and success is never built upon. Invariably the best talent packs up and moves on. In a cover story for Isthmus, I make the case this can change:

Let’s imagine another reality, a parallel universe where the Madison scene is so stimulating, so remunerative, so stone-cold happening that [sax player Patrick] Breiner felt compelled to stay. Imagine if the same could be said for Carl Johns, Nate Palan, Joy Dragland, Leo Sidran, Nika Roza Danilova, Alicia Smith and a long line of other inspired performers who packed up and left?

And what about Butch Vig, for crying out loud?

That’s the case I want to make here — that Madison can attract and hold the best artistic talent if it finally starts seeing music, and the arts in general, as an industry cluster that can bring wealth, jobs and renown to the city. Surprisingly similar, in other words, to the papermaking cluster in the Fox River Valley, the printing cluster in Milwaukee and the biotechnology cluster in Madison.

But here’s the catch: To turn an “art” into an “industry,” Madison needs a change in attitude and a change in strategy. I saw just this sort of thinking in Austin, Texas, almost a quarter-century ago.

In 1988 I worked for The Capital Times. The paper sent me down to Austin to figure out why another famous university town with a state capitol and a glorified tradition of progressivism and eccentricity had vaulted ahead of Madison in population growth and high-tech development.

I heard something in Austin that I never heard in Madison. City leaders and the go-getters in the chamber of commerce loved their music scene (outlaw country was still in full flower) and saw it in utterly pragmatic terms: It was a moneymaker and a draw for the creative class. The Austin chamber had a staff member dedicated to furthering the Austin music scene, doing everything from advocating for the city’s entertainment district, to pulling together the legal, marketing, financial services and recording infrastructure for musicians.

“It’s all part of our effort to diversify the economy,” a chamber exec told me.

I hope the story prompts a smarter discussion on how to promote the arts in Madison. To read more, please go here.

As for my bona fides: Well, I’m just a fan who sees a lot of music. Here’s a link to my 2010 year-end music wrap up. Links to summary stories for earlier years  can also be found there.

Categories: Development, Music, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

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