Brad Wolbert for Dane County Board

You will not receive any robocalls from me or anyone working for me, particularly partisan elected officials, at home or at work.  Nor will you receive unsolicited campaign emails from me at your office.  I mean, really.

Last Friday morning I took a couple of hours off to observe an innovation in the Dane County court system.  I sat in on the Friday Court Settlement Conference, conducted on that day by Judge Maryann Sumi.  The purpose of this weekly court is to move misdemeanor cases through the system quickly while preserving fairness to both the accused and the victim.  The judges rotate this duty among themselves, and back each other up if things get too clogged in the courtroom that day (that is, they open another courtroom to keep things moving).

What I saw was a series of defendants–mostly those accused of driving after revocation, with a couple of retail theft cases–who had agreed to a settlement of their case in advance, and whose cases could be disposed of in about 10 minutes each.  Some needed an interpreter, which lengthened those proceedings to around 15 minutes.  Some of these folks would have been sitting around in jail longer if not for this laudable effort by the court system.

Judge Sumi had to ensure that each defendant was accorded due process, had agreed to the settlement of his own free will, and that the settlement fit the infraction.  It was interesting that one of the defendants I observed, a very young man, made it clear that the 2 weeks of jail time had changed his attitude and I believed him when he talked of the changes he would make in his life.  A couple of other defendants were allowed to enter the first offenders’ program, which rewards a guilty plea on a first offense with the chance to complete a training program in lieu of a conviction and sentence; if the program is not completed, the conviction is reinstated and a sentence is imposed.

One conclusion I draw from what I observed is that there are effective ways out there to speed the administration of justice, and that these ways not only save money but may even benefit the low-level offender.  I’ll be following up with Judge Sumi to elicit her opinion about other recommendations that have been made to reduce the burden on the courts and jails in Dane County.

I took advantage of an opportunity to tour the Dane County Public Safety Communications Center (the 911 Center) earlier today.  This is a critical service provided by Dane County and it has been in the news over the past several months due to the recent tragic murder of a UW-Madison undergraduate.  I wanted to learn more details about how the center operates.  I view this as basic homework for Dane County Board candidates, since this service is part of the basic public protection infrastructure the county provides its citizens.

Forget what you read in the news.  I was blown away by the expertise displayed both by the quality of management of the Center and by individual operators I observed doing the Center’s work.  This is not a couple of sleepy “Judy from Time-Life Books” operators with headsets.  These operators are highly trained and skilled.  Each of the dispatchers has an elaborate mental map of the locations of all the police, fire, and EMT resources within the city or county as they change throughout the day.  The call answerers are highly trained and versatile, with the skill to perform situation triage and direct the call to the dispatcher for proper response, to the correct location, within seconds of the initial call.  I think Dane County citizens would be dumbfounded if they knew how much computer technology and human expertise was on task 24/7 to keep them safe.

The Center’s training director walked me through the rigorous quality control program they have put in place to ensure continuous quality improvement.  Operator staff are subject to weekly reviews of performance on individual calls.  What’s more, the executive budget proposal includes a number of items that will upgrade the Center’s capabilities in terms of responding to law enforcement situations, shoring up the basic system hardware and software, and enabling interjurisdictional and interdisciplinary communications — in other words, making sure the EMTs and the firefighters and the police officers can talk to each other during a response.

Based on what I saw today, I have a lot of faith in the 911 Center’s ability not only to facilitate an appropriate response to today’s crises, but to ensure that tomorrow’s crises will be handled even better.  These people take 175,000 calls per year and deal with thorny problems such as a lack of locational information from some cellphones (cellphones constitute 2/3 of the Center’s calls).  Circumstances are often adverse: yesterday they received 50 calls from some kids playing with a cellphone at a cellphone store in East Towne before they could contact the service provider and disable the phone.

They are also set up for soliciting feedback, following up on complaints, and making sure that records are available and transparent.  I don’t know how things were in the past, but my strong impression now is that managers and staff are on top of things at the 911 Center.  This should be good news to every citizen in Dane County.

Almost lost behind the hubbub of the presidential campaign is an intensely important referendum on school district funding in Madison.  The question on the November general election ballot will be whether to allow the school district to spend more than the state’s revenue cap would otherwise allow: an additional $5 million more in 2009-10, $4 million beyond that in 2010-11, and another $4 million bump in 2011-12.  These would be recurring amounts, i.e., they would be built into the continuing base budget in years to come.  The school board has come up with almost 40% of the gap through cost cutting measures, but to find the other 60% would require classroom cuts.  The referendum would not result in added programs and services — it just keeps us even.  The cost to the average homeowner would be about $2 per month in the first year, grow to $6 per month after the second year, and would top out at less than $8 per month after the third year.

I will be voting YES on the referendum and I hope you’ll join me.  The state’s 1993 school funding legislation capped the amount a local school board can raise from the property tax, but at the same time locked in a faster rate of growth for employee contracts (mostly teacher salaries and benefits).  Not that teacher salaries are lavish — the rate of growth doesn’t even keep up with inflation — but the system ensures a growing gap between the costs of the school system and the available revenues.  The only two ways to close the gap are to cut costs or to go to referendum for permission to raise revenues.  The school district has cut costs severely over the past 15 years, and there is really nothing left to cut that won’t immediately and dramatically affect student learning.  We’ve lost 157 special education positions; 34% of the central administration staff in the last 8 years alone; and $35 million dollars worth of programming in the last 5 years.  Most alarmingly, the way the budget gap is structured, the cuts will have to accelerate going forward unless the referendum passes.

Anyone with kids in school, or anyone who might someday have to depend on the current crop of kids in school to be scientists, doctors, engineers, pilots (I guess that means everyone) should be concerned that we are being forced by an arbitrary state formula to diminish the quality of our schools.

What does this have to do with the County Board race?  A couple of things:

(1)  Functional, healthy, dynamic schools offer a service to the community.  We’re more likely to keep kids in school if we invest enough in schools to make classrooms and activities attractive.  If we don’t invest in our schools, we’ll pay the costs anyway in human services dollars at the county level, to repair the damage we’ve done through neglecting our students.

(2)  As our schools go, so go the city and the county.  It is not in our best interest to diminish the quality of our schools.  Our schools’ reputation attracts residents to neighborhoods, and employers to the city and county.  The local job base and local property values, the health and vitality of our neighborhoods, depend more than anything else on the schools.  We’ve seen schools in other places go downhill through taxpayer revolts or benign neglect, and drag the quality of life in the community down with it.  That is not the model we should be following.

On November 4, look for the school funding referendum and do right by the next generation of Madisonians by voting YES.

Anaerobic manure digester

If there’s one element of the natural landscape that characterizes Dane County, it’s the Madison Lakes. I’ve lived here for 25 years and the water quality in the lakes has always been an issue. On the one hand, we need to realize that these are never going to be crystalline jewels like some of the lakes up north — the local soils in the watershed that send water to the lakes are naturally fertile and are going to supply nutrients to the lakes no matter what we do. But human activities in the watershed and along the lakeshore (and anyone who has a paved street in front of their house leading to a storm sewer is effectively on the shore as far as pollution is concerned) affect the rate at which the lakes take on nutrients, or become eutrophic in scientific lingo.

People tend to concentrate on land-altering activities in the Upper Mendota watershed (like farming and development) in part because these can be the most difficult to change and they have the most potential to deliver large nutrient amounts. But we’re all in this together. The county’s current executive budget proposal actually attempts to address problems upstream, around the lakes, and downstream in an attempt to make significant improvements in lake water quality. I’m supporting this part of the budget because I feel like we need to stop being satisfied with kicking the can down the road.

Here’s two examples of small-ticket items that may end up meaning a lot to the lakes.

One is $100,000 for a community manure study. Doesn’t sound too glamorous, does it? Well, I spent yesterday touring manure digesters on dairy farms near Waterloo and Fond du Lac. These farms direct their manure to large anaerobic digesters, much like wastewater treatment plants have. There the manure breaks down and produces methane or “biogas” which is piped to an engine to produce electricity which is placed into the grid (with excess heat being captured and used on the farm). The liquids are stored for use on the farm as fertilizer. The solids, which have decomposed, are composted until clean and then used or sold for animal bedding. A similar digester system could be set up and used collectively by several farmers in the Upper Mendota watershed. In addition to the renewable energy, this would give farmers a place to go with their manure besides back on the land, and would help keep the key nutrient, phosphorus, out of the streams and the lake. Not only that, but with an option for manure disposal, it might be easier to convince farmers holding key parcels of land to allow that land to be protected and converted back to wetland, further protecting the lakes.

The second little budget item is $100,000 to upgrade one of the downstream bridges to allow more water to flow out of the Yahara Lakes. With a more efficient outlet, we can more easily manage lake levels, especially during floods. This will reduce damage to Cherokee Marsh, a key filter for water quality in the lake. We need to have a comprehensive look at lake water levels, but this will broaden the management options.

Obviously, if elected I would support these kind of initiatives and my experience in this area would help make them reality.

Because of the three major thoroughfares bringing traffic in from the western suburbs, many District 10 residents have indicated to me that traffic is a major concern.  Dane County has added over 50,000 new residents since 2000, and the greater Madison area is home to 80 percent of the employment in the county.  We also receive weekend traffic for sports events, concerts, and university functions.  It’s clear that there’s not much room for more cars in the mornings and evenings, and widening the roads would only make things worse in the long run.

The solution, obviously, is better transit options.  We have a decent bus service in Madison Metro, but those buses use the same streets as those cars, and deal with the same congested conditions.  Meanwhile, we have a lightly used freight rail corridor running right through the isthmus.

The time has come to make a concerted push for commuter rail in Madison, as a foundation for better transit solutions that would benefit the whole county.  Transport 2020 (http://www.transport2020.net/) is the product of a collaboration between the city, county, university, state DOT, metropolitan planning agency and community representatives that sets out a vision for dramatically improving transportation options in the county and backs up that vision with a specific plan centered on a 16-mile-long rail line from Middleton to just past East Towne.  The rail line would be augmented by regional express buses and improved local bus service that would deliver riders to stations on the eastern and western ends of the line.  Drivers could utilize park-and-rides to avoid bringing their cars into town and dealing with traffic and parking hassles, burning gasoline all the while.

The long-term vision includes eventual expansion of the initial line, to the airport as well as to outlying communities that will also be experiencing growth over the next decade.  This will vastly increase the possibilities for getting from one place to another in Dane County without relying on cars.

Another great thing about the commuter rail idea is the potential for increased economic development around the stations, as they become magnets for retail and residential infilling and consequent employment gains.

As I’ve walked around the district, I’ve talked to many people that are familiar with rail systems in other cities in the US, as well as cities like Seattle that did not invest in transportation options.  There is no doubt in these people’s minds as to what the better alternative is.  Improved transit is a key component of any effort we might make to preserve the livability of Madison and Dane County.  The Dane County Board will be making important decisions about transportation alternatives over the next few years–decisions that will help determine what kind of county we live in.  I hope to be involved in those decisions because I believe the time is now to move away from overreliance on automobiles and give the residents of Dane County better, faster, cheaper, and cleaner ways to move around.

After knocking on doors in the district almost daily for the past three or four weeks, I’ve come to a few conclusions:

(1)  Our neighborhoods are full of nice people.  As a political novice, I thought I would encounter more hostility, but I can count the unpleasant episodes on one hand and still grip a baseball.  I’ve gotten the dismissive wave-off from two households, and that’s after around 600 doors.  I’m not sure if I’ve always been as nice to candidates that have knocked on my door in the past, but I know better now.

(2)  The range of issues that the county deals with is pretty large.  People have asked about transportation and traffic, sprawl, the lakes, services for mental health and for disabled folks, the 911 call center, the schools, redevelopment on Old University Avenue, affordable housing, the city/county health merger, property taxes and the criminal court system.  I’ve had discussions of up to a half hour on some of these topics (that probably breaks the rules for candidates going door-to-door, where the goal is to maximize the number of doors you visit).  And I’ve met a lot of very well-informed people, which encourages me as a citizen if nothing else.

(3)  There are a LOT of doors in the district.

It’s a pleasant district for a liberal to run in — the ratio of Obama to McCain signs is about 300 to 1, and lots of placards promoting peace, lots of wind energy decals, more than a handful of “impeach” signs.

Thanks again to those who have taken the time to share their concerns and interests with me.  Thanks also to those who have offered to place one of my yard signs in their lawn.   It’s great knowing that my message and how I present it is inspiring confidence.   I’ll be doing doors right up until the election, so if I haven’t knocked yet, I will soon.  See you then!

Brad

Until you’ve done it, it’s hard to believe how much work campaigning for local elective office can be.  This is my first time through the process.  Yet I’m finding it energizing and enlightening to talk to the voters in District 10.  I am encountering so many kind and engaged people who want to know why I’m running and want to share their own perspectives on the issues. 

So before I forget, let me take this opportunity here and now to thank the folks who have taken the time to listen to my account of what I have to offer in this race, and who have offered ideas, feedback, and questions about topics ranging from lake levels, to ridership on commuter rail systems, to the importance of mainstreaming programs for disabled citizens, to the situation with the 911 center.  I have learned a lot from you, and I’ve only covered 10 percent of the district so far!

If I have yet to visit your doorstep, I hope to see you soon.  Don’t hesitate to share your views on anything related to county government, or anything else that’s on your mind.  Good constructive dialogue makes “doing doors” easier, and you can rest assured that I am listening carefully and taking your concerns seriously.

I am very grateful for the support I’ve received so far from volunteers, neighbors and friends.  Seven weeks to go before election day!