It was five years ago, in December 2003, that the city of Milwaukee’s planning director, Peter Park, left for a similar job in Denver. You could make the argument he has never really been replaced.
Park served for eight years in Milwaukee and is perhaps best known for the Beerline plan, which transformed Commerce Avenue and the area along the Milwaukee River into a booming neighborhood of new condo developments and spinoff restaurants like Roots, Bayou and The Good Life. This is a perfect example of how good city planning triggers interesting, well-designed development that enhances property values. If Park had continued here, it’s a good bet the Park East land would have been developed more quickly.
Instead, he left for Denver after its mayor, John Hickenlooper, traveled to Milwaukee to personally lobby Park to take the job. Denver officials called Park a “visionary.”
Given that Park went to a city like Denver, where development is booming (or was when he got there), Milwaukee could have been seen as a stepping stone to a top planning job for whoever replaced Park. Mayor Tom Barrett, who took office in May 2004, might have had the Department of City Development initiate a national search for a hot young prospect in the mold of Peter Park.
Instead, the city didn’t even hire a full-time replacement. Barrett hired Bob Greenstreet to be a half-time planner while he continued as dean of the UW-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning. In the August 2007 issue of Milwaukee Magazine, a story by Tom Bamberger offered a middling assessment of Greenstreet by developers. They noted he was not a trained planner and was spread thin, given his other, rather huge job. No one called Greenstreet a visionary.
In October, Greenstreet announced he was resuming full-time duties at UWM. Did the city launch a search to find some top-flight candidate to replace him? Nope, they simply walked down the hall and promoted assistant city planner, Vanessa Koster, to replace Greenstreet.
Maybe Koster will do a good job. She has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from UWM and has been at DCD since 1998. Park, who hired her, speaks highly of Koster. But one close observer of DCD has his doubts, noting that Koster has never authored any city plan and has none of the private-sector planning experience Park had.
What’s clear, though, is that the Barrett administration simply hasn’t made this position a priority. And without great city planning, it’s hard to build a great city.
The Paradox of City Property Values
Get ready for lots of moaning from the citizenry.
Milwaukee taxpayers will soon be getting their annual tax bills, based on assessments that will be hard for them to believe: Most will be based on an increase in the value of the home. The latest city assessment showed an average increase of 3.6 percent in the total value of homes and businesses in Milwaukee.
“In light of the recent foreclosure crisis and the stagnant state of our local real estate market, many residents will find this significant increase difficult to comprehend,” wrote Common Council President and 15th District Alderman Willie Hines in a recent letter to Assessment Commissioner Mary Reavey.
That’s putting it mildly. Values have really been dropping in the last six months, even in a more stable area like metro Milwaukee, so how could taxpayers be getting assessment increases?
The answer is that the most recent assessment was completed in April, but the tax bill doesn’t go out until December. That time lag is likely to lead to some serious misunderstandings and lots of angry calls to aldermen.
Since the city changed to an annual assessment (rather than the old system of doing it every other year), property values have risen dramatically, from a total value of $19.9 billion in 2002 to $30.4 billion in 2008. This surge began to tail off in 2007 (3.6 percent increase) and 2008 (up 3.6 percent again, with most of it due to new construction in the commercial rather than residential sector, Reavey says). Overall during this period, values rose at more than double the rate of inflation, meaning the same tax rate automatically generated much higher revenue. This made it easier for the city to keep tax rate increases at a modest level.
Next April could be brutal, given the meltdown in the economy over the last six months. There should be a significant decrease in overall property values, and that would mean the current tax rate will generate much less revenue. City officials could face an impossible budget, requiring huge increases in the rate of taxes/fees or huge cutbacks in spending. Or both.
Other municipalities will face similar problems. Next year will be an ugly time for local officials.
The Buzz:
-Now that we all know how to pronounce the name of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, we can we all cluck about dirty Illinois, surely the most corrupt state in America. Except that it’s not, according to some interesting data in the New York Times. It turns out Illinois ranks about average, 20th, in the number of convicted public officials, four of them per 1 million residents. And Wisconsin? We rank 35th, at 2.2 convictions per million residents. The least-corrupt state was good old boring Nebraska, and the most corrupt was (huh?) North Dakota.
-Is it possible Charlene Hardin could lose her office? We can only hope. Word has it the Milwaukee School Board member will have an opponent, Michelle Bryant, an aide to state Sen. Lena Taylor. Meanwhile, retired Milwaukee school teacher and administrator Larry Miller is running for the school board seat that Jennifer Morales will relinquish. Both Bryant and Miller, I’m betting, will get the backing of the ever-strategic Milwaukee teacher’s union.
-The force is no longer with Mayor Barrett. His chief spokesperson, Eileen Force, has resigned to take a job in the private sector. Given the precarious state of journalism, there could be lots of current and recently laid-off reporters applying for the job. But word has it that Marci Pelzer, who’s done Irish Fest marketing and is currently at Manpower, is the favored candidate.
And the Sports Nut defends Aaron Rodgers and kicks sand at pundit Dave Begel. Someone had to do it.
