P.O. Box 1222, Madison, WI 53701 | www.prodane.org | office@prodane.org | (608) 257-4985
There will be a mayoral debate on February 7th, 2007 from 6:30 p.m. until 8 p.m., held at the Werner Park Community Center. All mayoral candidates will be attending and prepared to talk about the issues. Got something on your mind? Submit a question to ask the mayoral candidates at the debate here at the progressive dane website!.
Time is of the essence in preparing subject matter, so please send your questions in as soon as possible!
Posted by prodane at 10:09 PM
So as not to disappoint, we have a ton of things going on this spring. In addition to the individual campaigns of our endorsed City Council and School Board candidates, the organization has much we are trying to accomplish. Here's a few things to put on your calendar.
So, don't hesitate to get involved this spring, we can use all the help we can get to make our schools better and our city a great place to be.
Posted by prodane at 08:50 PM
The co-chairs, Brenda Konkel and Lisa Subeck have been making the rounds with the editorial boards. We have met with Channel 3 and the Capital Times and will be meeting with the Wisconsin State Journal in by the time you receive the newsletter. For a full report, come to the General Membership meeting this month (agenda on the back of the newsletter) to hear more. Meanwhile, here's the pitch we gave them.
This spring's elections need to be about more than water, trolley's and taxes. We need to discuss much more than those issues as there are many things that will effect the future of our City. Here's a list we came up with based on Progressive Dane's work.
Economic Development has to be more than a buzzword. We need specific proposals that should be worked on. Our list included working on a local small business bus pass purchasing pool, creating a local purchasing preference for City purchases and making sure that when we talk about job creation, we are not only talking about bio-tech jobs, but instead, jobs that low skilled people can get into and have a career path or chance for advancement.
When talking about TIF, we need make sure that the City of Madison is setting the goals and priorities, not simply responding to individual developer proposals. We also want to make sure that there are clear community benefits to providing TIF assistance as well as the opportunity to assist small businesses, perhaps by helping them buy affordable condo space for their businesses. High-end condos in the downtown are not what we need to be creating; we need to be looking at workforce housing. Finally, as with economic development, we want to make sure the jobs we create or retain with TIF funds are jobs that low skilled people can obtain with a little training and have opportunities for advancement.
Our next topic was Allied Drive. Essentially we said we need a clear strategy to keep people in the neighborhood, not pushing them around and simply moving low-income neighborhoods throughout the City as we have done in the past. We need a clear vision articulated so that as we redevelop the neighborhood, we don't push everyone out and bring new people in and call it a success.
We also talked about strong neighborhood services in general. If we're going to have a "one stop shop" for businesses, why don't we have the same thing for neighborhoods? The City bureaucracy is just that, a bureaucracy. Not everyone knows who they need to talk to and where to try to get what they need. We need to be more customer-friendly, not just for businesses.
Also, when it comes to neighborhood safety, we need more neighborhood officers, not less. We need officers in the neighborhoods in the evenings when social services providers go home for the day. Neighborhood policing is a key to prevention and removing the neighborhood officers is a step backwards. In addition to neighborhood policing, we need to be increasing social services to increase prevention services instead of using police as enforcement.
Speaking of Allied Drive and lower-income neighborhoods, transportation is critical. We need mass transit in this City that works for the people who are transit-dependent. We would like to see the busses run longer hours, including extended service to retail areas during the holidays. In addition to longer hours, we need more frequent bus service and express busses between the transfer points.
When it comes to childcare, we need to continue to work to continue to fill the gap for those who have low-income jobs. If you're working and 50% of your income is going towards childcare, it quickly becomes unaffordable to live in this City. While we increased the funding for the childcare tuition assistance program this year, we still have not closed the gap. High quality affordable childcare is key to the future and we need to invest in it.
For affordable housing we need to fund the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. At the moment, it is going to take over 20 years before the fund grows to the point where it generates significant money to invest in affordable housing. Putting $300,000 - $500,000 a year into the fund is not putting our money to its best use. Capitalizing the fund quickly simply is more effective, it, too, is an investment in our future. Additionally, we need an affordable housing strategy for Madison. With State restrictions on what we can do when it comes to affordable housing, we need to invest and we need a strategy to do that wisely.
Finally, we need transparent, accessible government. We need better information available to the public in a more timely manner. We need a clearer budget process with more information. Our public input process needs to be more meaningful and generally speaking, the public needs to feel like their voices are being heard and the government is serving them.
To sum it all up, our government has to work, not only for the business community, but also for the people that make the business community successful, their employees. An affordable safe place to live, an affordable dependable bus system to get to work, affordable daycare and a job with opportunities for advancement are just as much basic services our government should be providing as plowed streets and safe drinking water. We need to make sure Madison is a high quality place to live for everyone, not just catering to the needs of the business community.
Posted by prodane at 08:35 PM
PD has endorsed Johnny Winston Jr. for the Madison School Board, Seat 4. If elected, this will be Johnny's second term on the school board. He was a PD-endorsed candidate for his first election. Johnny is currently the President of the Madison School Board.
In this role he has worked tirelessly responding to the issues and needs of staff, parents, students and the community. He is a very accessible board member. His focus is on increasing student achievement and parent involvement and strengthening communication and partnerships in our community.
PD has endorsed Beth Moss for Madison School Board, Seat 3 (the seat being vacated by Shwaw Vang who is not running for re-election). Beth's varied experiences and progressive ideals make her a good fit for PD and the Board. She was a classroom teacher in Texas, Britain and Central Africa and learned about vastly different systems of education and how they sought to address their unique challenges. She and her husband have two middle-school children.
Her son has autism. As an advocate for their educations, she has spent much time in our schools. She knows what works and she knows what needs to be improved. She has come to know many children with diverse needs, whose educations have suffered because they did not have effective advocates. Beth has organized both student and parent groups and has participated in community efforts in education. She believes partnerships are essential to making our schools better.
Recently, her activism expanded to working for the successful school referendum as a co-chair of Community and Schools Together (CAST). To quote Beth, "The people I met through that campaign and the overwhelming success of our efforts strengthened my conviction that th Madison values public education and shares my belief that our schools are integral to our community".
Please visit our web site soon as we profile the candidates PD has endorsded for city council.
Posted by prodane at 11:57 PM
On December 8th, 2006, Progressive Dane hosted our end of the year event, the Snowball at the Cardinal Bar. Turnout was excellent, with elected officials, members, and friends of Progressive Dane showing up to support the organization.
In addition to quality conversation and a lovely acoustic guitar performance by Doug Pahl, Progressive Dane held a brief awards ceremony honoring particularly committed individuals with the Unsung Heroes award, and giving longtime social activist Jean McCubbin the Kathy Schroeder award for outstanding commitment to social justice.
Unsung heroes honorees include Richard Russell, who built and maintains the Progressive Dane database; former PD intern Jessica Adelman, who initiated the premiere lecture in our "Forum for Progressive Voices" series; Rick Richards, who, in addition to chairing a PD task force assisted heavily in creating the Progressive Dane Policy Manual; Jacque Pokorney, who tirelessly assists in the graphic design of Progressive Dane's monthly newsletter, and Progressive Dane endorsded Alder candidate Vicky Selkowe, for her work on the paid sick leave issue.
Progressive Dane raised a notable amount of money by hosting the event, and a continued thanks goes out to all who made monetary donations, brought food, or attended. It was great to see everyone!
Posted by prodane at 08:22 PM
At the November 2006 GMM, the Progressive Dane general membership voted on and approved an updated City Platform, the complete text of which can be found here.
The platform was changed to reflect growing concerns about water quality, responsible energy use, accessible public transportation, continued zoning and TIF considerations, and to reflect an overall dissatisfaction with the potential loss of domestic partnerships due to the recently passed marriage amendment to the Wisconsin constitution.
The general membership sought to use language that functions to both address specific issues within the Madison community and to encapsulate a broader progressive philosophy. Progressive Dane updates, by general membership vote, their City platform every two years.
Posted by prodane at 10:14 PM