A view of the downtown Madison skyline through binoculars.
I’m spending most of the summer at our cabin in the northwoods. From 248 miles and four and a half hours away, Madison looks like it’s doing okay.
Time and distance tend to fog up the details, which can be a good thing to allow to happen once in a while. It lends perspective. Here’s how the big picture looks from up here.
The Madison city council is pretty much just doing its job. There have been no recent forays into international relations. The main thing right now is to provide more housing without sweating the details of price or location or type. Just build it because they keep coming. Madison is the fastest growing city in the state and people need places to live. And, anyway, the Legislature has taken away all the options for doing anything else. Rent control and inclusionary zoning have been banned by the builders and Realtors who speak into the ear of Robin Vos, et. al., and, honestly, I’m not sure those strategies wouldn’t do more harm than good anyway. In the past three years the city has approved 12,000 mostly apartment units compared to only 5,000 in the previous three years. A couple of weeks ago the council got itself into a bind with a little tantrum over one big student project, but they’ll iron that out.
The Dane County Board finally got around to dealing with its big issue: consolidating the jail. It took way too long, but this spring the board approved a plan that will close down the dangerous and inhumane facility on the top floors of the City County Building as well as the worn Ferris Center in the Alliant Energy Center parking lot. Those will be replaced with a new tower behind the Public Safety Building. It will provide much better housing for inmates as well as more room for visitors and for programs that might keep them out of more trouble. I worry that it’ll be too small as the number of total beds will be down by about 20% in the fastest growing county in the state. But the county executive, the sheriff and the board were up against skyrocketing construction costs and activists who seem to want to believe that everybody is a political prisoner. They had to break the logjam and in the end they did.
The Madison school board’s big challenge, and opportunity, is to pick a new superintendent. The mysterious and elusive Carlton Jenkins will be officially gone July 28, not that anyone knew he was ever here. The board has appointed veteran educator Lisa Kvistad to serve for the next school year while they do their search. Based on one interview in the Wisconsin State Journal, Kvistad comes off as competent, steady and politically adroit. I’m not confident that this board can attract a strong pool of candidates to replace Jenkins on a permanent basis or that they would recognize a good candidate if they came across one. But the shadow superintendent is gone, the interim leader looks fine, and we can always hope for the best.
After a career around or in politics followed by a decade of observing it from the outside, and given some distance from ground zero, I’ve come around to the view that things are more straightforward than they seem. If you have a housing shortage, build more housing. If you have a crime problem, lock up the criminals in a place that offers them an alternative path to crime. If you haven’t had leadership out of your top educator, find a superintendent who can lead.
For the first time (and, as God is my witness, I will make it the last!) I will quote self-improvement guru Stephen Covey, who wrote, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” The guy made a fortune writing stuff like that, proving that anybody can succeed in this great country of ours. Nonetheless, he was right. I can quibble about the details, but in the big picture, Madison’s public bodies seem, sometimes against their will, to be getting the main thing right.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. Both his reporting and his opinion writing have been recognized by the Milwaukee Press Club. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
