R&B @ Warner Park is dead, long live the Mallards!

First off, I have to recognize the Mallards and their GM Vern Stenman for their proposal to continue Fourth of July fireworks in Warner Park. It's a credit to their organization that they stepped up so soon after Wednesday's announcement of Rhythm & Booms being moved downtown. Despite reports to the contrary, the Mallards' announcement did manage to defuse much of the tension at last night's meeting.

That said, there was still a lot of anger in the room. I give Alds. Palm and Weier credit for keeping their cools and shutting down a few outbursts of outright hostility. But the crowd wasn't buying the official line that this was strictly Madison Festivals' call.

And I don't think the crowd was wrong.

Election day Tuesday...woo-fricking-hoo

Updated 3/31, see below.

Guess what, Tuesday is (yet another) election day and boy am I not at all excited. As much drama as there's been this particular election season, most of the actual races are snoozers and it's been hard for me to get worked up about any of the folks on the ballot (excluding my boss...I'd rather not work for a guy who thinks I'm a rat on a sinking ship, thank-you-very-much!).

From city council to school board, circuit judge to state supreme court, there isn't a whole lot to inspire Northside voters.

Rhythm & Booms...& Bust?

Rhythm & Booms is up in the air again, with financial pressures likely scaling back this year's show to fireworks only, and environmental activists pressuring the city to cancel the event altogether. Thursday before last, Alds. Weier and Rhodes-Conway held a packed meeting at Warner Park that emphasized the lack of unanimity in our neighborhood over the future of this event.

I was unable to attend the meeting, but here's what I'd have said had I been able to be there:

Ending Rhythm & Booms at Warner Park basically means canceling it for good, which would be a serious blow to the community as a whole. There is simply no other event that brings together all of Madison the way Rhythm & Booms does, and the lack of attention this aspect of the discussion has received illustrates the great divide below our Portlandesque public image.

Neighbors meet future alder, Occupiers

Tonight's Sherman Neighborhood Association meeting featured both candidates for District 12 alderperson and a delegation from Occupy Madison presenting their Fordem Avenue project. Overall, it was a successful 90 minutes (props to SNA co-chair Megan Maguire for keeping the discussion moving and on-topic!) that left attendees with a better sense of who's seeking to represent them and what's going on in our community.

Recap and early reaction after the jump...

District 12, Occupy Fordem updates

Following up on a couple of recent items...

• A second candidate emerged late in the filing period for the District 12 city council race. Leslie Peterson, owner of the Amsterdam boutique off State Street and a freelance medical interpreter, declared her candidacy on December 28 and filed her papers right under the wire. She was briefly in the news last year during the Capitol protests, when a DOA maintenance worker went after her balloon with a knife. Ms. Peterson has been invited to Monday's neighborhood association meeting (Ald. Larry Palm has already confirmed he will attend).
• I won't take credit for it, but Brenda Konkel (possibly joined by other Occupy representatives) will also be meeting with the neighborhood on Monday. Here's hoping they'll take the opportunity to engage with us, rather than try to overwhelm the meeting.

Come see all the excitement this Monday the 7th at 6:30 p.m. at Warner Park CRC!

Occupy Fordem Avenue

Update 2/2/13: News broke this week that the owners of 2132 Fordem couldn't wait for Occupy to get its financing together and sold to another buyer.

Original post:

Thursday's Isthmus broke the news that the "Occupy" group is working to buy the vacant commercial building at 2132 Fordem Avenue. Chief spokesperson/organizer/strategist Brenda Konkel was rather displeased that word got out before the deal was done. Once again this small and vocal group is the topic of conversation on the Northside.

So why would anyone have a problem with this? Can we write off voices of concern or criticism as nothing but NIMBYism? I don't think so. There are two major issues that the new Occupy Madison Inc. must address if they want the neighborhood to be a partner in this project: standards and image.

District 12 race over before it starts?

Six years ago, District 12 had probably the hottest city council race of the year, with a four-way primary spanning the ideological spectrum. Current Ald. Satya Rhodes-Conway won a close 52-48 victory, marking a turning point in the declining fortunes of Northside conservatives. With Rhodes-Conway stepping down, will voters get a repeat of that bellwether contest?

Not bloody likely.

The only declared candidate is District 15 alder Larry Palm, whose Carpenter-Ridgeway neighborhood was shifted into District 12 along with the rest of Eken Park. He's done a good job of clearing the decks and lining up endorsements, enough to scare off potential challengers on his end of the ideological spectrum. Palm's overall record is firmly within the Madison council's progressive majority, with most of his focus and attention in the Eastmorland and Atwood areas. His first lit piece transposes some fairly standard boilerplate -- Larry likes clean water and libraries! -- onto the district, but Palm's specific plans or ideas for the Northside remain a mystery.

Meanwhile, Dorothy Borchardt's old supporters seem to have given up on her former seat. I can't say I'm surprised, since Dane County conservatives have proved time and again they'd rather lose extreme than build a competitive coalition. But it's too bad that city politics have become so ideologically monotonous and focused upon which developers want to do what downtown.

There's still a week before nomination papers are due, but with so little chatter about the race before the holidays I'd be shocked to see another candidate emerge. Despite the overall uptick in interest for this spring's elections -- all three school board seats contested! five people who will never live up to Brenda Konkel's expectations for her district! -- it seems like we on Ruskin Street will have to sit the city races out.

4 questions on "Occupy Northside"

The Northside "Occupy" encampment was removed from Lake View Hill Park just before the Thanksgiving holiday, and this being Madison there is a community meeting scheduled tomorrow night to debrief. Like most Madison public meetings, it's scheduled at a lousy time for working parents so I won't be there, but if I could go here are the four questions I would ask:

1. Is there a concise statement of what the "Occupy" group wants?
2. What is it specifically about these 15-odd people that they aren't being served by existing supports -- how are they different from the hundreds of other homeless individuals served every night? Are there systematic problems causing this one small group to fall through the cracks, or is this an idiosyncratic group?
3. If there are systematic issues, how do we address them without falling into a "San Francisco trap" of spiraling costs, assumption of the entire region's homelessness problem, and loss of our public spaces?
4. Does the expectation of responsibility go both ways -- if the community as a whole is responsible for supporting those in the "Occupy" group, do they have a reciprocal responsibility to meet reasonable conditions upon that support (e.g. observance of shelter rules, participation in treatment programs, etc.)? I mean this as a general question, not a debate over whether specific conditions in specific places are reasonable -- without the premise, discussion over a particular policy or provider becomes meaningless.

Occupy Northside?

Like most Northsiders, I was surprised to hear that the long-term homeless group Occupy Madison had decamped to Asylum Hill last night. There was some question as to where they'd go after the City kicked them off the Don Miller site they'd taken over last winter, and the County's initial plan to open up a site on Wright Street ran into stiff resistance after being proposed a couple of months ago.

It's hard to know exactly what's going on with this specific group of folks, with conflicting information filtered through multiple sources. Both Mayor Soglin and County Executive Parisi have stated that housing is available for the members of the original encampment, but former Ald. Brenda Konkel - who has taken on the role of the residents' chief spokesperson - insists otherwise. No one has said for sure if this is the same core group from last year's Occupy Madison encampment, or if the sobriquet is being used to brand this new group.

Did these folks fall through the cracks, or are they the most chronic of the chronic homeless? Have they been kicked out of Porchlight or other shelters, or are they languishing on a waiting list? Is this a savvy, self-organized group looking to better themselves, or a stunt organized by Konkel and others? Given the involvement of several high-profile individuals on Madison's political scene, it's difficult to see through the agendas.

The only clear fact we have is that there isn't a simple solution. But I will say that, as long as they're occupying the hill, the residents of the tent encampment need to be good neighbors...or whatever goodwill they have on the Northside will evaporate quickly.

Ale Asylum's new home good for Northside

It's been discussed on the neighborhood listserv, but today saw the first news reports of Ale Asylum's proposed new brewery on Pankratz Street. The city's Urban Design Commission will take it up tomorrow night.

They should be swift about giving it their blessing.

How about an awesomer Omaha?

Former mayor Dave Cieslewicz has a blog on Isthmus, and his post today is about how Madison should strive for becoming a New Urbanist mini-metroplis, lest we sink into the doldrums of the small-town Midwest. What I want to know is, why must we settle for such a Manichean choice?