Public Workers As Civic Workers

Posted August 10, 2011 by meisen
Categories: Labor, Politics, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

Last fall, before Gov. Scott Walker lowered the boom on public employee unions, I wrote about the hard times coming for public workers.The links appear broken for my Milwaukee Magazine stories, but here’s the cover story that appeared in Isthmus.

I returned  to the topic for this Isthmus column, making the case that unions need to retool their game to prosper in the 21st century. Here’s how I framed the issue:

Simply put, sympathy for battered union members doesn’t mean support for the old union agenda. Gallup and Pew polls show a sharp decline in union favorability ratings. And Walker was right when he said that unions can selfishly manipulate the political system to enrich themselves…. He was also right to think the union agenda can be at cross-purposes to the public interest. Walker’s mistake — to his and the state’s detriment — was to fumble the fix.

That leaves an immensely important question still unanswered: Can a meaningful public-employee unionism emerge in the 21st century?

I  argue:

Unions need to embrace merit and high-quality performance as core values. They need to lighten up on work rules, as Joel Rogers, the head of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, says. They need a mission statement focused on public service.

Follow this link to read more.

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I’ll Have What She’s Having

Posted July 24, 2011 by meisen
Categories: Divertissement, Madison Magazine, Organic Farming/Local Food

Here’s something different–a story about the most delicious peach in the world. It begins:

When approaching a ripe donut peach, one must temper lust with mindful restraint. First, assume a wide stance, slightly flexing your knees to maintain balance. Then gently grasp the saucer-shaped fruit with your thumb and middle finger, careful not to squeeze too tightly. Thrust your head forward, eyes closed, chin out, mouth open and prepare to swoon.

That first bite will release a wave of sugary goodness slobbering down your chin and, you hope, not on your Tommy Bahama camp shirt or Eileen Fisher cami. Spritzing is always a danger. Envious friends and family who have leaned in to take a close look may get a sudden jet of peach juice to the face.

They too may fall to the ground, writhing in pleasure.

“It’s a fruit you would have expected in the Garden of Eden,” says a close friend who shall remain nameless to protect her professional  reputation. “It’s fleshy and practically obscene with sticky sweet, dripping juices. If I were Eve, I would have tempted Adam with a donut peach.”

Psst. I can get you some….

Tempted?  To read more, go here.  Among other things, you’ll learn  that, according to Daoist mythology,  a single bite of a donut peach can bring immortality.

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Among The New Urbanists

Posted June 14, 2011 by meisen
Categories: Development, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

I was one of the many anonymous volunteers who helped plan the Congress for the New Urbanism’s national conference  in Madison in early June. I served on the tours committee, which met for more than a year, and helped plan tours of the downtown’s full-block developments (Capitol West and Block 89) and of the great planner John Nolen’s handiwork in Madison. My old paper Isthmus asked me to write about my impressions of the conference.

You can read them here. Among other things, I was reminded of how Madison really doesn’t want to become a big city:

Madison has always been conflicted by density. It’s honored in theory as a boon to mass transit and to sophisticated urban living, but often opposed in practice when a developer wants to put up a five-story condo down the street.

This ambivalence is understandable. Neighborhood scale is important (but not all-important), and some oversized designs are wretched. But as  [author Edward] Glaeser said in an interview, while neighbors always deserve a say in the deliberations, they shouldn’t have a veto.

“Every time you say ‘no’ to a new development, you’re saying ‘no’ to a family that wants to move into the neighborhood,” he said. “Every person in greater Madison who wants to buy is being impacted by a community that wants to shut things down.”

The density issue is bubbling up beneath the new downtown plan and in the new zoning map still in the drafting stage. A quick survey: The business group Downtown Madison Inc. has criticized the plan for failing to promote greater density in areas like Mifflin Street.

Dennis Lynch, a development consultant, has circulated a critical memo (PDF) arguing that the city is creating a “dead zone” by capping most development at five stories, the point at which he says construction costs shoot up. Steve Cover, the city’s new planning chief, is unfazed, responding that other developers don’t share Lynch’s views and that the five-story limit is not absolute.

This is important stuff because the new downtown plan and zoning map will set the city’s DNA for the next 25 years. As Glaeser sees it, change is a constant in urban life. Cities that don’t reinvent themselves fall into decay and fade away. With government as Madison’s signature industry in decline, Glaeser’s warning gives pause.

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Why Milwaukee Needs Chicago

Posted May 6, 2011 by meisen
Categories: Development, Milwaukee Magazine
Tags: , ,

Modern markets don’t follow political boundaries…but politicians do. This  is a problem for Wisconsin in large and small ways. No more so than in  Wisconsin’s  war-like  competition with Illinois for economic development. I discuss the consequences in this column for Milwaukee Magazine:

In search of a better life, my parents decamped from Chicago in 1953 to 16 acres in rural Kenosha County near what is now I-94. I lived a happily hayseed childhood replete with a drafty old farmhouse, a barn, and a menagerie of farm animals and dogs.

My dad, who had been a two-fisted Maxwell Street saloon keeper, was not a gentleman farmer. He wound up working in a warehouse in Skokie, Ill., and commuted at breakneck speed for 25-plus years. (Thanks to a talismanic bumper sticker, “Police Deserve a Teamster Contract,” the cops let him fly by.)

Looking back, I can see that my parents were pioneers, part of that first wave of Windy City expats who moved north of the border but remained tethered to Chicago’s economy. Decades later, Kenosha County is counted in Chicago’s statistical metropolitan area; its biggest for-profit employer, tellingly, is Illinois’ Abbott Laboratories near Waukegan.

And not far from where I once fished for carp and bullhead in the Des Plaines River, the corn and cabbage fields are long gone, replaced by the LakeView Corporate Park. Its 75 companies employ 7,500 people and occupy 10 million square feet of warehouses and offices, according to LakeView’s president, Jerry Franke.

More than half of the companies relocated from Illinois.

“It’s all about transportation,” Franke says of the park’s I-94 location. “When we started here in 1988, LakeView was between two major urban areas [Chicago and Milwaukee], and now we’re in the middle of one big one.”

That brings us to Gov. Scott Walker, who earlier this year ripped into Illinois’ tax hikes and entreated flatlander businesses to “Escape to Wisconsin,” where he had just lowered business taxes.

It made for great theater, but also showed Walker’s cluelessness. He failed to grasp the essential fact of the southeastern Wisconsin economy: Chicago is not its competition. Chicago is its ticket to future prosperity.

To read more, please click here. [Once broken, the link has been restored.]

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Chew On This

Posted April 27, 2011 by meisen
Categories: Development, Organic Farming/Local Food, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

Personally, I’m big on local food and try to buy organic products. As a journalist, I find the organic/local food movement a  fascinating topic, but don’t see my role as that of an advocate.  In this column for Isthmus, I detail my reservations about the city building a large public market in downtown Madison.

For sure, the public market is beguiling in the abstract. Imagine a glistening 10- or 11-story office tower rising next to the Great Dane Pub and Brewing Co., where the aging Government East parking ramp now sits. Picture the first floor with 51 vendors situated inside a festive kiosk environment selling everything from chocolate to seafood to wine, with another 30 carts and stalls offering local farm products and goodies. A consultant predicts 808 new jobs.

Sounds marvelous, but there is reason for skepticism.

Real estate developers I’ve talked with see any number of major problems. Among other things, they say the costly, open-space, “clear-span” construction needed for the Public Market would drive up construction expenses to the point where the building’s rental rates would be dangerously expensive for the Madison real estate market. They warn that managing so many small and financially at-risk tenants is difficult, and worry about the impact on existing restaurants and the Wednesday Farmers’ Market.

“The Public Market would be a nice thing for Madison, but my concern is that will end up requiring a very large taxpayer subsidy,” says developer Sue Springman. “If it does, we need to know that going in and not be surprised later.”

In a city stung by the Overture Center miscalculations, Springman’s warning ought to be taken seriously.

To read more,  please click here.

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Epic Epic

Posted April 4, 2011 by meisen
Categories: Development, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus
Tags:

In a generation or two when a new history is written of  Madison and Dane County, I’m certain  that Epic Systems,  the cutting-edge medical software company,  will be prominently featured. The local start-up that grew into a global player will be cited not just  for its huge role as a job creator, but for how the building of its world-class campus in Verona rather than Madison changed the development of  Dane County  in the 21st century.

I’ve periodically written about Epic since 2002 and have found it to be an utterly fascinating operation — it’s easily the closest thing that Dane County has to a Google or Microsoft.

I mention this because my recent story on the Madison mayoral election featured an online-only sidebar  in which incumbent Dave Cieslewicz and challenger Paul Soglin recounted their biggest regrets in public life.  Soglin’s answer is noteworthy for shedding  new light on how Madison lost Epic to a cornfield site. That was one of the reasons he cited in regretting his decision to resign from the mayor’s office in 1997.

“A lot of things would be different” had he remained mayor, he told Rotarians. “Epic Systems would be in the city of Madison. Overture would not have become as difficult a challenge for our community.”

Soglin, who left the mayor’s office [after running]  unsuccessfully for Congress, was succeeded by Sue Bauman, who handled the Frautschi family gift of the Overture Center and also the city’s unsuccessful effort to keep fast-growing Epic in the city. He later worked for Epic for nearly five years, and says Madison developer George Gialamas tried to find annexable parcels large enough to keep the medical software company in Madison.

“But George was in the same boat with Epic,” Soglin relates. “Nobody [in city government] was returning his calls.”

Soglin estimates that Epic has spent about $700 million on its Verona campus. “It will easily go over $1 billion.”

Had the software leader built on land annexed by Madison, the state-of-the art campus would be much closer to the urban core today, he says. Housing and transportation patterns would be far more energy efficient. “And the other private investment that’s pending out in Verona would be in Madison.”

You can read the full sidebar here.

For my 2002 story on how Epic wound up in Verona, please go here. You’ll see that back then the campus was valued at only $45  million.

Here’s another story from 2002 that describes how real estate speculators cashed in when they sold Epic the land for its new campus.

This cover  story from 2008 exampled Epic as an example of “green sprawl”.

Here is a timeline up to 2008 that details Epic’s growth over the years.

This column from 2010 details how strikingly ignorant city leaders were when they lost Epic to Verona.

Has Madison gotten smarter in subsequent years? I’d like to think so, but I’m not entirely confident.

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Who Should Lead Madison?

Posted March 28, 2011 by meisen
Categories: Politics, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

With a new conservative governor openly hostile to Madison’s liberal ways, the city is entering a  dangerous time.  See my earlier column on the city’s economic challenges.  (This one too.)  Big trouble is coming.

This is why the mayoral election on April 5 is hugely important: Madison needs exceptional leadership. Here’s how I sized up the candidates for Isthmus:

When Paul Soglin is asked why he’s running for mayor once again after two earlier stints in office, he cites his love for Madison and tells an anecdote involving his wife, Sara, who encouraged him by saying “You’re happiest when you’re mayor.”

Soglin, who’s 66, will always be known as “Hizzoner da Mare” to several generations of Madisonians, and a good case can be made that he and the mayor’s office were a perfect Zen pairing. Like the bow and the arrow, “Soglin” and “mayor” were oneness in action for 14 years.

But those were different times. Whether Soglin, who was mayor from 1973 to 1979 and again from 1989 to 1997, still casts enough of a spell on Madison voters to oust incumbent Dave Cieslewicz will be decided April 5.

Cieslewicz, who wears the sobriquet “Mayor Dave” as comfortably as Soglin did “Hizzoner,” has his own claim to the city’s zeitgeist. He’s playful, philosophical, progressive and politically pushy in a way that perfectly captures Madison’s bourgie-hip liberal style.

But after eight years in office, Cieslewicz, 52, has suffered the usual dings and dents of a long incumbency, having angered some early supporters to the point that they see the old guy Soglin as a fresh opportunity.

This is quite a turn of events.

To read  more, please go here.

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I’ll Drink To That

Posted March 19, 2011 by meisen
Categories: Divertissement, Madison Magazine

This Madison Magazine piece was fun to write–an encomium to Restaurant Magnus mixed with New Urbanist reflections on the making of  great urban spaces. The story begins:

Apparently I’ve lived too long. I’ve outlasted another bar, and at my age that’s trouble. Like true love, a good bar calls for a lifelong relationship. But Restaurant Magnus, after a thirteen-year run on East Wilson Street, has died and left me befuddled like some widowed geezer. Me, date again?The always comfortable Harmony covers my east-side needs. But I’m in search of a new downtown hangout. Will it be Johnny Delmonico’s? Capitol Chophouse? Sardine? Genna’s? The soon-to-be-open Tempest Oyster Bar? Or Natt Spil? I don’t know, I just don’t know.

What I do know is this: As a freelance writer I need a Magnus-like place to meet sources. I spend most of the day in sweatpants, torn T-shirts and bunny slippers staring at a computer screen and working the phone in my daughter’s old bedroom (my office!).

To read more about drinking, hanging out and journalism, please go here.

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A Troubling Change At City Hall

Posted February 4, 2011 by meisen
Categories: Development, Politics, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus
Tags: , ,

My reportorial interests of late have focused on economic development and the role of public employees. In the case of Tim Cooley’s resignation, the two came together in this column for Isthmus.

In government, bad news often comes on Friday afternoons, in hopes it will be lost in the weekend shuffle.

So it was telling that as the long Martin Luther King Jr. weekend began on Jan. 14, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s office released economic development director Tim Cooley’s resignation letter — a mere two weeks’ notice.

Every City Hall employee knew the significance of Cooley’s announcement: His two-year probationary period was ending in February, and he was leaving before the ax fell.

Cooley’s departure is bad news on several counts. Most tellingly it revealed that, nearing his eighth year in office, the mayor has yet to put together a sustained jobs-growth strategy.

To read more, please go here.

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2010: My Year In Music

Posted January 11, 2011 by meisen
Categories: Music, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus
Tags: , ,

This is the fifth time I’ve compiled my favorite concerts for TheDailyPage.com.  I’m not a music critic.  I consider this annual review a writerly exercise and a homage to artists who made my life richer.

Here’s what I wrote in past years:

2009

2008

2007

2006

Here’s how the 2010 piece begins:

The last time I saw actor Jeff Daniels was in fall 2009 on Broadway with James Gandolfini, Hope Davis and Marcia Gay Harden in an all-star staging of the London hit God of Carnage. Now he was in Stoughton, of all places.

Yep, Daniels was performing a witty one-man show in little ol’ Stoughton (Nov. 13), singing his own songs, playing surprisingly strong blues guitar and telling stories about Clint Eastwood, Hollywood and a yen to drive a motor home.

Chalk it up to one in a series of booking coups by the best venue of 2010 (in my opinion), the 475-seat Stoughton Opera House. I saw stellar jazz, country, blues and classical music in the beautifully restored hall, which occupies the third floor of the historic Stoughton City Hall.

I didn’t see a hipper show last year, for example, than jazz phenom Esperanza Spalding’s stop (Sept. 19). The audience might as well have been transported to a little club on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.

To read more, please go here.

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