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.