People had requested a shot from the west side. I tried to take one from Sparta, where I spent the last couple of days, but the low clouds seemed to have blocked the view. This shot from 1st Street will have to do instead.
By Lisa Stahl
…is a day when I go to La Prima and am greeted by Ben, Rollie and Cassie with soup, salad and coffee (!). I eat, laugh and am challenged by Samantha regarding a host of current events unfolding in my life. Cyrus from church, comes over to talk about Bob Dylan’s Modern Times, The Raptor Center and the importance of exposing children to nature. And as Paul Westerberg said, “A good day is any day that you’re alive”. What’s a good day for you?
Posted in FUN, General Writings
By Dino Corvino
I confess to being burnt out, at the thin end of the spectrum, the thin part of said long tail, a little bit crispy, a tired big man. Sad droopy eyes, and short fuse and rage in my heart. Boredom, city life treating me badly, workload overwhelming. All of it. Questioning my life choices, the way I live my life, all of it. But Saturday something changed. A giant geyser of hope opened in front of me, and made it all right. Made the sky brighter, the water cleaner, the soapy soapier. It made every pen a Parker Jotter, and every laptop a Powerbook G4, and everyone interested in Web 2.0. It was amazing. Tom Waits sat giggling on my couch. Yeah, Tom Waits was giggling on my couch.
All of this because I went to Scott Street Pub to see a band. Yeah, I am a homer for the Pub — but its more than that. Bars take on new personalities from time to time. Right now the Pub is Mohawk Matt, and I like Mohawk Matt. Its funny to see him change to a grown up, but that is another thing. The live music venue reflects the taste of the boss, or the guy booking. It just does. And Matt has a pretty static palate as far as music goes. His name is Mohawk Matt, so what do you expect.
The band was Lucky Stiffs from San Fransico. A truly amazing band. So tight, so rehearsed, so fearless. They are a five piece, two guitar players, a singer, a bass player and a drummer named Rico, I think. They are on a 70 day tour, 70 shows in 70 days. Living in a van, selling their wares around the country. Amazing young men.
The rock power was unstoppable. Dangerous, aggressive, and amazing. It reminded me the difference once again between a local talent and a national talent. Local guys kind of sing songs, smirk and go about their business. Not willing to risk alienating anyone with greatness, they settle in the shallow water musically. Not nationals — they come to your town, rock your socks off, drink your beer, kiss your sister, and sleep on your floor. They play their show, and while they want you to like them, they trust themselves to rock harder than your hometown guys. They have committed to this adventure. They are living in the van, they love each other, and this is what they are doing. And Lucky Stiffs do that. They bring the heat. They blew the other two bands away that day, and honestly they blew everything I have seen away this year. Across all genres
I like the spectrum’s end musically. I like bands that are dangerous, and music played with real emotion. It had been so long since I saw risk, that seeing this risk on stage made me happy in a way that only comes from seeing real rock and roll. It was funny to see the crowd faced with greatness, unflinching power and passion, the crowd at the pub literally shirked. It is funny to see in so many ways. We scream for greatness, for inspiration, for someone to rise above the tree tops — and when they do, we have no idea how to respond. My soul leapt to heights I had not expected.
I remember a few years ago seeing a band called The Shakin’ 78’s. They will always be one of my favorite bands. Always. They dared to be great, and they delivered on it. And people had no idea what to make of them.
So I say this: “Thank you to rock and roll.”
By Dr. Rent
There will be political discussion in Madison this year, one that will probably not generate much press, but one that has landlord’s and municipal government’s closest attention, both parties waiting to weigh in.
The proposed new law has to do with municipal owned utilities. In the Wausau area, electric and natural gas service are provided by Wisconsin Public Service (WPS). However, the water and sewer service are provided by utilities created by the City. Wausau Water Works provides water to Wausau residents, Weston Utilities to those living in Weston, etc. In some communities (such as Shawano), the municipal utility also provides electrical service.
The city itself does not provide you with water, instead it is an agency owned and controlled by the city. It may look like this is just splitting hairs, but it is legally a fairly important split.
For the most part, these municipal utilities have to play by the same rules as private utilities such as WPS. They fall under the regulation of the Public Service Commission (for the most part, but there are some exceptions).
However, there is one tool that these utilities can use that companies like WPS can only dream about. If a bill goes unpaid, the utility can ask its owner (the city – otherwise known as Guido) to have the past due water bill added to the property tax roll of the property as a special assessment. That means that this past due utility bill will be a debt secured by the real estate that has priority over everything, including mortgages and civil judgments. Wow, what a tool! (I need a collection guy like Guido.)
You may be thinking… well that seems fair. They need to get their money. The problem with rental properties is that the property owner and the person who incurred the utility bill, not the same person. A tenant can run up a $300 water bill. Then leave without paying it, without leaving a forwarding address. The City will try to send a final bill to the tenant, but when it comes back, they just send a copy of the bill to the landlord. If, by late in the year, the bill has not been paid; there it is on the property tax bill.
The proposed law will not take away this power of using the tax rolls as collection. It will, instead, make the utility make a bona fide effort to collect the bill from the party who really owes it before using that tool.
The way the system is now… if bill is unpaid, BAM-TAX BILL. Why on earth should the utility make the responsible party pay if collection is that easy? The proposal would put on the requirement that bills can only be put on the tax roll if they are a civil judgment against the person whose bill it is.
Wausau Water Works would have to try and locate the person, take them to small claims court, and get a judgment. And maybe, in the process, actually collect some or all of the bill by making payment arrangements with the guilty party. This is what every other utility (such as WPS) has to do. If water utility has a judgment and isn’t getting paid, they will still have their secret weapon.
Will it create more work for the utility, possibly create lost revenues for bills they don’t obtain judgments on? Yes, it probably will. Will this create larger utility bills to recoup this cost? Yes, it probably will (however, since they can still collect from the tax bill, I doubt it would be a significant cost increase).
Most importantly though, this law now makes the situation more fair. Although land-owners will probably still end up paying most of these bills, at least the City had to make an honest effort to go after the responsible party.
Dr. Rent
P.S. Madison landlords are currently facing a challenge on the municipal level. The Sierra Club has approached the City Council, and they are seriously considering the proposal of requiring all lights in apartments either be Compact Fluorescents or LED’s.
Posted in Business, Dr. Rent, Economic Development, Politics, Wausau
Kind of a mooney eyed view of things.
I have mixed feelings when any old building comes down. Are we removing an eyesore or just giving up on our history? The house that was formerly at the corner of 7th Street and Franklin was a classic piece of Victorian architecture, but had certainly seen better days. And now it is gone. Here are a couple of pictures of it coming down.
Posted in Bill Coady, General Writings, Places to See, Wausau
Eds Note: Along with the occaisionally talked about zoo, many parents also would like to see a children’s museum here. Here is a way to offer your opinion.
By Christine Martens
We received this announcment at the CVB today. Maybe we don’t need a seperate Children’s Museum in Wausau- maybe a joint venture is a better way?
Central Wisconsin Children’s Museum
Mailing Address:
P.O. Box 474
Stevens Point, WI 54481March 15, 2007
Tiffany Wilhelm
Executive Director715-344-2003
715-252-6868 (cell)
cwcmexecdir@charter.netCentral Wisconsin Children’s Museum Seeks Input from Wausau Area Families
Central Wisconsin Children’s Museum (CWCM) will host a public focus group with Wausau area families and other interested citizens on Wednesday, April 4th at 6:30-7:30 pm at the Wausau Public Library. The Museum is growing fast and is working toward an expansion. Part of the planning involves seeking out ideas on how the Museum can better serve families throughout the entire Central Wisconsin region. The one-hour meeting will be held in the third floor conference room at the Wausau Public Library. Parking is available in the parking garage across the street. The purposes of the focus group are to assess knowledge and perceptions about the Central Wisconsin Children’s Museum and to provide CWCM committees with information needed to make decisions regarding the future direction of the museum.
The Central Wisconsin Children’s Museum is a non-profit family-based discovery place where children and adults play and explore together to strengthen confidence, capabilities, and creativity through hands-on investigation. The Museum opened in May of 1997 and has grown from 6,034 visitors in 2003 to 13,277 visitors in 2006. It is located in the CenterPoint MarketPlace in downtown Stevens Point; hours are Wednesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday noon to 4 p.m. and 5 to 8 p.m. on the second Thursday of each month. Daily admission is $3 per person and free for infants up to 12 months. Call the Museum at 344-2003 or visit www.cwchildrensmuseum.org for more information.
Posted in Christine Martens, Economic Development, FUN, Not for Profits, People, Places to See, Politics, Wausau
Eds Note: In my “Shifting Sands of Time” post I briefly mentioned our “car-centric” culture. Craig comes in this week with a key question in looking at that particular paradigm.
By Craig Stahl
The threshold of parking availability is one local controversy that always comes up in every community no matter how large or small. That is, how far away is too far away when parking your car downtown? Of course mass transit systems like trains and buses can mitigate this problem, but there is always a tipping point where the time and efficiency costs of using mass transit outweigh the ability to use a personal car when driving to and from work/school/events. While the Wausau area employs a bus system, I think it is safe to say that most residents rely on personal vehicles if where they are going is too far to walk or ride a bike. Given that the situation is what it is, local government has to develop standards for parking availability whenever there is a new development.
For example, if I wanted to open a retail shop in downtown Wausau, I might need to provide a certain number of off-street parking spaces if the size of my business exceeds a given threshold (in this case 40,000 square feet in a B-4 Zoning District; add one space per additional 5,000 square feet). At some point though, if a large number of small businesses locate in the downtown, there is a point at which on-street parking will not accommodate all the need for parking and the City is forced to build a parking lot or structure of some sort.
There are a number of economic and political factors that go into placing a parking lot or ramp, but I would like to bypass those and ask a more basic question: physical disabilities notwithstanding, how far do you think is acceptable for a resident to walk from where they park their car? 2 blocks? 10? Right out front?
I bring this up because years ago when I was doing some planning work for a small community of about 8,000, I found they had a very different perception of what was acceptable than what I was used to. For them, walking more than half a block in their town square was unacceptable and warranted the need for a parking ramp. Once a year they had a big festival wherein people came from a multi-state region to participate, but even then you could still park within 2-3 blocks of where you wanted to go downtown. I had recently moved to this community from a University town where I generally walked 5 to 8 blocks to get downtown (but that was because I was a cheap college student who wanted to avoid the expensive parking ramp fees that would have put me within 1 to 3 blocks of where I was going). So it was obviously all a matter of perspective and what people are used to. As a planner, I felt it was not my job to impose my judgements on what was too far, I only needed to faciltate the debate to allow elected leaders to make a sound decision.
So, what’s Wausau’s threshold? I’m curious about people’s own threshold as well as what you think the general Wausau resident believes to be “too far”.
Posted in Business, Craig Stahl, Economic Development, General Writings, Politics, Wausau
By Dr. Rent
From time to time on certain posts, we have flirted with the topic of user fees. Basically, city government has two ways that they can charge for the services that they provide. The first way is the general tax levy. The city figures out how much money it needs to operate, then figures out how much taxable property there is, and creates a general tax levy sufficient to cover costs. The second way is to charge those people who use a specific service to pay for that service. The most well-known service fee would probably be your water bill. You don’t pay for water through property taxes, you are sent a separate bill and pay for only that which you use.
In times very high property tax rates and a new freeze on tax levies passed by the legislature, the act of moving more and more items off of the tax role and converting them to user fees becomes more attractive.
The basic logic in favor of user fees is that property taxes are based on the value of taxable property. The proportions of certain services don’t match well with dividing up the cost this way, and many entities (such as churches and non-profits) do not pay property taxes and therefore do not pay at all for services that they use.
The argument against is based on two things. The most prevalent problem people have is that property taxes are income tax deductible (if you itemize), user fees are not. Therefore, each budget item converted to a user fee is one more item you cannot deduct from income taxes. Secondly, more people would probably be in favor of user fees if they saw their property tax bill drop because that fee was taken off of it. I have yet to see that happen. So people believe they are being billed twice, they pay a new fee (a tax) and taxes stayed the same or even went up. These are very compelling arguments.
I am a fan of user fees, because I am a fan of people paying their fair share. When Weston established its storm water utility, a new user fee was added to the water bill; and water bills were now sent to properties served by wells. If you have a well in Weston, you get a bill for just under $9 every three months to help pay for storm water management.
How much you are billed depends on how much your property adds to the storm water management facilities. For example, an undeveloped lot doesn’t have that much impact, so no storm water bill. The run-off on a single family home isn’t that bad either, hence the $9 per quarter bill. But if you have a parking lot the size of 50 average single family home sites, you should have to pay 50 times as much. And that is how it works. Churches and schools which contribute zero to property taxes have some of the largest parking lots. By making this a user fee, they now pay their fair share.
What if you live on the river and your lot is designed to drain to the river and not the storm water system. There are credits in the system to lower your bill for that, as there are if you have on site detention that exceeds state standards.
Taxes did not go down when storm water was taken off of the general tax levy in Weston. However, taxes did not go up drastically either. The reason this utility was created was that the State passed what is called an unfunded mandate. The entire Wausau area has new storm water guidelines to follow, very very expensive ones. This was going to add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the tax levy to pay for. Instead of adding it to the tax levy, they added it as a fee instead.
From time to time, there are a number of proposals to turn tax levy items into user fees. Before you start shouting about how unfair it is, that this is just another way for the government to nickel and dime you; do a little bit of research. Ask these questions:
So far, every service that has been changed to a user fee has made sense to me with the exception of fire hydrant rental (that one still escapes me). Just, the next time you hear a user fee proposed, give it half a chance before assuming it’s a bad thing.
Dr. Rent.
Posted in Business, Dr. Rent, Economic Development, General Writings, Politics, Wausau
Eds Note: It is not often that I elevate a comment to a post, but this one deserves that treatment for two good reasons. The first is the length and quality of the information presented and the second is the source. Kevin Korpela of Downtown Grocery fame not only wrote this post, but in response to my pleading email has graciously agreed to continue to provide us with his thoughts on various issues in future posts as a regular contributor. As we move into the growing season it seems like a match made in heaven. Welcome aboard, Kevin!
By Kevin Korpela
A research center in Texas investigates native plants and how a normal lawn may not be so nice for the little creatures that share our world with us. The center is called the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Research Center (http://www.wildflower.org) named in honor of the wife of President Lyndon Johnson and is a beautiful place to visit as it’s also a nature center open to the public. The Center’s investigations include three distinct lawns with different grasses-plants-flowers:
1. a normal formal lawn with Kentucky Bluegrass and other normal plants-flowers found in most of the USA requiring plenty of water, fertilizer and mowing.
2. a native formal lawn with Buffalo Grass and other native plants-flowers set in a traditional formal lawn but require less water, fertilizer and mowing.
3. a native informal lawn with Buffalo Grass and other native plants-flowers. The informal layout reduces the amount of time or upkeep required by a homeowner because an informal design helps maximize the effectiveness of the inherent qualities in native grasses-plants-flowers.
BUTTERFLIERS AND BEES: The important idea is that nice bugs like butterflies and bees are aware of the big-picture because the researchers noticed that the butterflies and bees hop from one native plant or flower to another while hopping over the normal lawns and it’s usually fertilizer-laden/stressed-out grasses, plants and flowers!
TASTY AND HEALTHY: One of the theories as stated by the researchers at the Center is that the nice bugs have an abundance of tasty and healthy native species to choose from in the Center’s gardens and courtyards so why choose lunch from stressed-out grasses, plants and flowers even though they are on your flight path! The normal grasses, plants, and flowers are stressed-out because they are asked to survive in a climate where they were not meant to live and that is one of the factors for the input of more water or fertilizer, or additional mowing because they don’t look so good when un-mowed.
BUFFALO GRASS: The researchers at the Center say that Buffalo Grass is more tasty and healthy in the Texas climate because it is a drought-tolerant warm-season grass that turns a nice gray-green with the return of warm weather in spring but as it is a warm-season grass it begins to turn brown with the start of cool weather. The cool-season grasses live a little differently because they look best in the cooler weather but require more inputs in warmer weather. That is a perception shift that the leaders of the Center hope could become the norm. The blades of Buffalo Grass grow 3-12 inches but it’s a low-growing grass where the blades fold-over each other versus standing up that leaves a low grass height with little mowing required. It does have a particular look that is different than cool-season grasses but it’s a look that is more normal that unmoved Kentucky Bluegrass. The researchers at the Center realize that the simple notion of a nice lawn is not so simple because most things in life are a complex web of science, economics, psychology, perception, and perhaps self-confidence.
STRESSED-OUT: The shifts and world views posed by Bill in “Shifting Sands of Time” are perhaps adaptable to other issues too. For example, in our food industry we place cattle, chicken and hogs in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) where the confinement of animals living close together contribute to their susceptibility to stress, illness, and the addition of antibiotics to feed. Butterflies and bees at the Wildflower Center have learned to hop over stressed-out food sources because the nutritional value or taste are not to their liking.
TOO MUCH WEIGHT: Many issues are what they are and we can accept them if we want but at what point do we hold back for too long or procrastinate too much where any shift or change in a world view becomes exceedingly expensive or difficult to shift because the weight to switch towards another intention is so large that it becomes nearly impossible to afford the move?
HOP, HOP! Maybe continual discussions in open forums like WausauBlog will lead to policy and actions that provide butterflies and bees an abundance of healthy and tasty places to hop!
Sources for Buffalo Grass:
Wildflower Center includes a photo of Buffalo Grass.
Wyoming seed company summarizes Bufflalo Grass.
Posted in Business, Farming, General Writings, Politics, Wausau
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