My Year in Live Music: 2012 favorites

Posted December 26, 2012 by meisen
Categories: Music, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus
Tags: , , , , ,

Boy, I like music.

All kinds.

From opera to jazz to alt country to classical.

Put another way: Philip Glass meets Nicholas Payton meets Jon Dee Graham meets Porgy and Bess meets Ben Sidran meets Mary Chapin Carpenter.

As I wrote in this year-end wrap-up of 2012 for TheDailyPage.com:

I saw more than 60 shows this year, at venues in San Francisco, New York and many places in between. But this reprise — my eighth seventh annual for TheDailyPage.com — focuses on shows within a car drive of Madison. My tastes are catholic and open-minded, but caveat emptor: I’m a music enthusiast and not a critic. Full confession: I lack even an elementary understanding of music, can’t play an instrument and couldn’t carry a tune in a suitcase. But I love live music.

I loved how, on a hot night in Milwaukee (July 16, Riverside Theater), a superb Diana Krall encored with an impossibly fast version of Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” that somehow segued into Lennon and McCartney’s “Come Together.” After ripping up the High Noon Saloon (May 21), Alejandro Escovedo’s encore was equally improbable: Mott the Hoople’s 40-year-old hit (penned by David Bowie) “All The Young Dudes,” followed by encore after encore until Escovedo led the band off the stage to the middle of the club to sing one last acoustic number surrounded by the audience. This was darn near a religious moment.

To read more about my 2012 favorite shows, please go here.

To read my previous year-enders, follow these links:

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

To read more, please go here.

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The Corridor Strategy For Development, Cont’d

Posted December 10, 2012 by meisen
Categories: Development, Politics, Tech, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus
Tags: , ,

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.

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What Next For Sector67?

Posted November 23, 2012 by meisen
Categories: Development, Tech, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus
Tags: , , , ,

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.

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Looking For The New Pat Lucey

Posted November 23, 2012 by meisen
Categories: Development, Politics, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus
Tags:

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.

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Madison’s Web Future

Posted October 19, 2012 by meisen
Categories: Development, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus
Tags: , , , , ,

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

Posted September 21, 2012 by meisen
Categories: Development, Politics, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus
Tags: , ,

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

Posted July 8, 2012 by meisen
Categories: Labor, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

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.)

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The I-94 Road to Prosperity

Posted June 13, 2012 by meisen
Categories: Development, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Politics
Tags: , , , ,

Politically, Madison and Milwaukee are two Democratic peas in a pod. But culturally  they are like oil and water.  Go figure.

In a story for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, I make the case that the two cities need to pull together through an economic corridor along  I-94.

The story begins:

What is it about Milwaukee and Madison – that potent mix of mutual disdain, disregard and ignorance that characterizes their odd relationship?

“Only 80 miles separate them, but it’s like the cities are on different sides of the moon,” says James Rowen, who has worked in journalism and for mayors in both cities.

Mordecai Lee, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee political scientist who served for 12 years in the Legislature, offers another celestial view. “It’s the difference between Saturn and Jupiter. Milwaukee and Madison are on different planets,” he says. “Even as technology erases distances, the two cities remain impervious to cooperating.”

John Gurda, a Milwaukee historian and columnist for the Journal Sentinel, says Madison and Milwaukee are like estranged siblings who meet at Thanksgiving and then don’t talk for the rest of the year.

But enough metaphors – I have to blurt out something as loudly as I can.

Wisconsin needs Madison and Milwaukee to pull together.

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.

The four 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 persuade 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 UWM, 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 vs. Madison, but their shared liberalism is abhorrent to conservative Waukesha County. Lambs will lie down with lions before corridor politicians ever work together.

In that context, Gov. Scott Walker’s decision to kill the $810 million federally funded train service between Milwaukee and Madison is just one more smack-down in that endless grudge match.

But here’s the thing: The corridor is coming together without those feuding politicians.

To read the rest of the story, please go here.

To read a similar argument I made for Chicago-to-Milwaukee connection, please go here.

 

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John Kinsman, the Family Farm Defender

Posted May 30, 2012 by meisen
Categories: Labor, Organic Farming/Local Food, Politics, The Progressive
Tags: , ,

Interviewing John Kinsman, the farmer activist  from Lime Ridge, was easily one of my more enjoyable assignments. The guy is fascinating, uniquely American in his personal history and  in committment to holding our country to its ideals. Here’s how the story in The Progressive magazine begins:

What could be more rare than cactus in a Wisconsin farmer’s wintry backyard? That would be the farmer himself if it’sJohn Kinsman. At age eighty-five, Kinsman has lived a singular life of activism.

This modest farmer from the Dairy State boondocks has traveled the world to stand with small farmers and indigenous people.

“You have to put your whole self into it,” he says of his approach. “You have to live what you’re saying.”

Kinsman has certainly done that. He’s locked arms with Native Americans like Winona LaDuke in their struggle. He founded the activist group Family Farm Defenders in 1994. He marched with his friend the French farm leader Jose Bové of anti-McDonald’s fame in “The Battle of Seattle” in 1999. He’s even sailed with Greenpeace.

How he managed all this while running a dairy farm in central Wisconsin, near tiny Lime Ridge, and raising ten children with his wife, Jean, may be the most improbable thing of all about Kinsman.

On a winter afternoon, Kinsman is just another Wisconsin farmer as he walks his 150 acres. He and Jean bought the worn-out, rock-strewn farm in the early 1950s not far from where his parents farmed. An early run-in with chemical pesticides put Kinsman in the hospital and converted him to organic farming. He points to the results.

Here are the pastures on which he rotationally grazes his milking herd of thirty-six Holsteins, the forested hills where he’s planted, literally, tens of thousands of trees, and the stand of fruit trees and bushes he’s grown around his house. And that patch of cacti—the prickly pear—was no exotic transplant but a stubborn native remnant from a warmer geological age in Wisconsin. Sort of like Kinsman himself.

Kinsman is a fourth-generation Wisconsin family farmer. His grandmother Samantha, who died at the age of ninety-seven in 1944, saw General Ulysses S. Grant when he visited Sandusky, Wisconsin. His dad was a “dyed-in-the-wool Republican who would vote for a dog if he were a Republican,” he says with a laugh. His own political awakening began in World War II, when on an Army train through Mississippi, he was upbraided for waving to the black people along the track.

To read more, please go here: http://www.progressive.org/family_farm_defender.html

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A Footnote on the Edgewater Subsidy

Posted May 11, 2012 by meisen
Categories: Development
Tags: , ,

Planning, the magazine of the National Planning Association, ran a piece in its April issue that paints Madison’s rejection of a $16 million subsidy for the Edgewater Hotel  expansion as an exercise of NIMBYism. Author Greg Flisram, who is  director of economic development  for the city of Green Bay, falls back on the  familiar complaint  that  the Madison review process is just too long, too complicated and prone to manipulation by people who do not want development in their backyard.

You can read his piece here:

http://www.wisconsindevelopment.com/files/nimby.pdf

Whatever the merit of that complaint, Flisram misses the elephant in the room. Here’s my letter to the editor:

Greg Flisram, in ridiculing Madison, Wis., for not subsidizing the $98 million Edgewater Hotel renovation, demonstrates the common failure of urban leaders to distinguish flashy real estate development from substantive economic development.

For a $16 million subsidy, the Edgewater project would deliver little: several hundred low-pay hospitality industry jobs and temporary employment for construction workers who largely live outside of Madison. As an economic catalyst, the project failed.

The Edgewater is boxed in by a residential historic district. It’s too isolated to reinforce Madison’s nationally known State Street shopping district or the city’s picturesque Capitol Square. Worse, it’s not close to the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Monona Terrace convention center, which sorely needs new adjacent hotel space.

Flisram seriously erred in saying the tax increment generated by the Edgewater construction would pay for the $16 million subsidy. In reality, repayment hinged on tapping the new taxes generated by a large mixed-use project near the UW-Madison campus.

When the assessor looked at the $98 million Edgewater renovation, he concluded that its underlying economics would only justify a $44.8 million assessment–less than half of its construction cost.

Flisram, who is Green Bay’s economic development director, needs a lesson in economics.

Here is the Edgewater column I wrote for Isthmus in September 2009:

http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=26981

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