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| Vote Today! It’s Election Day! I’m not up for election this year, but some very important races are on the ballot today. If you were disheartened by the results of the November 2024 election, use that feeling as motivation to get to the polls today and cast your vote. Most important is the race for Supreme Court Justice. If Judge Susan Crawford is elected, the court will maintain the current 4-3 liberal majority, so we might be able to replace our gerrymandered Congressional districts with fair maps, just like we did for our state legislative districts last year. Keeping the liberal majority is also critical for protecting reproductive rights in Wisconsin. There’s a Republican-backed constitutional amendment on the ballot, too — one that would make it even harder for citizens to vote. The nonpartisan League of Women Voters of Wisconsin is recommending people vote “no” on the amendment, which you’ll find at the very end of the ballot. If you aren’t yet registered or if you have moved since the last election, you can still vote today. Visit myvote.wi.gov to find out how to register or update your registration at the polls. The polling place for District 6 is the Municipal Court inside the Middleton Police Station on Donna Drive. Polls are open until 8 pm. Remember to bring your photo ID! Changes Expected for Conservancies Plan Last month, I shared the draft Conservancy Lands Plan for 2025-2030, which the city had released for comment by the public and by various committees and commissions. At the time, I acknowledged not having been able to read the entire 301-page document closely. Over the past month, I have managed to do just that and I prepared detailed comments to share with city staff and Adaptive Restoration LLC, an ecological restoration and land management company and the author of this plan and the city’s previous 5-year plan. My goal in providing comments was to help improve the plan by having it be more accessible to the average resident, streamlining and adding clarity to the process for prioritizing work, and making sure it gives the staff a realistic blueprint to guide their conservancy-related budget requests each year. I’ve had a chance to discuss my comments at meetings of four city entities: the Pedestrian, Bicycle, and Transit Committee, the Plan Commission, the Water Resources Management Commission (WRMC), and the Conservancy Lands Committee (CLC), which has jurisdiction over the plan. I’m a member of the first three, and I attended the March 26 meeting of the CLC specifically so I could answer any questions members might have about my comments. There are some very good things in the new plan. It clearly reflects a great deal of thoughtful and labor-intensive work by the city staff and our consultant. The cataloguing of all our conservancy lands and native vegetation management areas is no small task. And prioritizing the needs for master plans and management actions for all 17 conservancies is a very important and difficult task. I appreciate the ongoing team effort to develop a workable plan for future investment and action by the city to preserve and restore our conservancy lands. There are some aspects of the plan that still need work. Starting with what is perhaps obvious, the plan is very long. I know it’s primarily a tool for staff to use in creating work plans and budget requests, so the length might not be a problem for this purpose. But transparency and public information are very important to me, and I think this plan needs to be accessible to residents, too, not just to the staff. I asked for the Executive Summary to be reworked so that it does what an executive summary is supposed to do: give the reader an idea of what the full document contains and where to look inside the plan for more information on specific topics. Like some of my colleagues on WRMC and the Plan Commission, I think there’s room for improvement in the scoring of the conservancies and the prioritization of master planning and management work. As Plan Commissioner Kurt Paulsen noted, using 27 factors makes it difficult to draw real distinctions between the conservancies. Some of the factors assign the same score to every conservancy. Others represent things that the city controls, like being featured on our tourism website or being accessible to school groups. Yet others are based on data from a community survey that I don’t think reflects reality. As I noted last time, the Pheasant Branch Ridge Greenway was ranked as the least-visited conservancy area in the city, despite many District 6 residents using the paved path multiple times a day for dog walking alone. The Conservancy Lands Committee felt that, with regard to the “visitation” factor, the community survey provided “not the best information, but some information.” I agree with this statement, but I wouldn’t want to identify our priorities based on information that is so clearly inaccurate. Bigger picture, the plan advises that “[e]ach conservancy should have a dedicated master plan, and master plans should be used to inform future Capital Improvement Plans,” including restoration projects, the acquisition of land, and facility improvements like adding trails or bridges. I agree that master plans are important, but only if the city follows up and implements them. Given our limited resources, I don’t think it makes sense to create master plans that are then put on a shelf. Graber Pond Conservancy is a great example of that. Residents understandably had an expectation that, once the Graber Pond master plan was published in 2006, sustained management work would follow. It did not. Graber will get a new master plan this year, so we have a chance to do a better job with follow up this time. I feel strongly that the city shouldn’t invest in new master plans at the expense of restoration work in conservancies that already have master plans. My strongest big-picture recommendation is that, given the city’s limited resources, we need to place the highest priority on work that will get us the biggest bang for the buck. I believe our highest priories for investment should be conservancy lands that interface with the city’s stormwater features and parks. That way, with each investment, we’d be protecting habitat, maintaining or even enhancing important stormwater resources, and adding to the appeal of our parks. I’m a big fan of Venn diagrams, so I created the one below to illustrate the concept of basing our priorities on interface areas.  In practice, this strategy for investing in conservancy lands would place the highest priority (#1 in the diagram) on areas like Pheasant Branch Conservancy, Graber Pond, Middleton Hills, and Hidden Oaks, where conservancy lands, stormwater features, and parks all connect. Next (#2) would be areas where conservancies and stormwater are the only interface, followed by conservancy areas interfacing with parks (#3), and finally conservancy areas that have no interface with stormwater or parks (#4). This approach makes sense to me. We’ll see whether the approach makes it into the final Conservancy Lands Plan. The original timeline for completing the plan envisioned Council approval in April. But both the CLC and the consultant will need more time to finish reviewing and incorporating comments into the final draft, so May is likely the earliest Council will see the plan on its agenda. This is the first time a new five-year plan for our conservancies has been prepared during my time on Council. As chair of the Finance and Personnel Committee, I feel strongly that the city needs to invest more in preserving our conservancy lands. I look forward to reviewing the budget requests that our staff will submit later this year as work begins on the city’s budget for 2026. Stormwater Ordinance Changes Advance Stormwater was back on Council’s agenda last month, so it’s back in this newsletter. On March 18, Council approved the first reading of an ordinance revising the city’s stormwater regulations, codified in Chapter 26 of the Middleton Municipal Code. As I reported last month, the WRMC recommended in February that both the License and Ordinance, or L&O, Committee and Council adopt changes specifically to the city’s fee-in-lieu program for stormwater. City Attorney Matthew Fleming and City Engineer Erik Sorensen recommended the changes to bring our ordinance into strict conformity with state law and to eliminate a requirement that would be impossible to meet just about everywhere in the city. The vote at the WRMC meeting was 4 to 2 with one member absent. The L&O Committee had this item on their agenda on March 11. I was chairing the Plan Commission meeting that night so I couldn’t attend the L&O meeting. I was able to speak during the public comment period, though, following four other commenters who all asked the committee to reject the changes. After over 30 minutes of debate, the committee could not agree on what to do with the proposed changes. Only two of the three L&O Committee members were present. Alder Kim Madden wanted to pass the ordinance on to Council for a full discussion, while Alder Todd Kalish thought they should send the ordinance change back to the WRMC for more discussion. Alder Kalish represents District 4, which includes Middleton Beach Road. As readers may recall, some of the residents in this neighborhood are opposed to the construction of apartments at the privately-owned soccer field at 2159 Allen Boulevard. They’re raising concerns about stormwater as a way to stop development of anything except single-family houses on the site. The L&O Committee not making a recommendation didn’t keep the changes from going to Council for consideration. We debated the proposed ordinance change for nearly 35 minutes at our meeting on March 18. Aside from statements and clarifications by Matt Fleming and Erik Sorensen, the discussion consisted mostly of me advocating for the changes and Alder Kalish urging the members to send them back to the WRMC. I disagreed strongly with his characterization of the WRMC as not having “finished the discussion” at our own meeting. I also refuted his claim that the changes involved striking a “critical requirement” for downstream infiltration facilities, noting that 1) the WRMC had never applied this requirement to a fee-in-lieu request and 2) Erik, our expert on stormwater, had told Council via email that the requirement was “technically nonsensical and infeasible.” In the end, Council approved the first reading of the ordinance change by a vote of 6 to 2. We still need to approve the changes a second time, which I anticipate will happen later today at our meeting. If you’re interested in this topic, I encourage you to listen to the Council discussion starting here. Also, at the L&O Committee meeting, Matt Fleming did an excellent job explaining the legal reasons for the ordinance changes, if you’re interested. Incidentally, beginning tonight, Council meetings will convene at 7 pm instead of 7:30 pm. On March 18, we approved an ordinance change to start our meetings earlier, consistent with what some of our peer cities do. We’re always looking for ways to lighten the load on our staff, and I hope starting earlier will reduce the possibility of late nights. Last but certainly not least, our excellent stormwater engineer Erik Sorensen will be leaving city employment this month. His final WRMC meeting will be on April 16, one day after his official last day with the city. Erik’s shoes will be very hard to fill. At the WRMC’s meeting in February, Chair Warren Gebert moved to recommend that the Common Council do whatever we could to retain Erik as the City Engineer. Chair Gebert cited a message from Commissioner Jim Bachhuber to underscore Erik’s contributions to the city: “I want you to know that the City of Middleton is losing one of the best engineers, public servants, and persons that I have worked with over my career. Erik is a recognized expert in his profession but as importantly, he has an exceptional ability to communicate with the [WRMC], elected officials and the public. He listens and respects different points of view but does not compromise on issues that he knows are for the benefit of the environment and the City.” The commissioners unanimously and simultaneously seconded the motion, which passed unanimously. Although the city tried to retain Erik, he has decided on a different path for his future. I greatly value Erik as a colleague, I’ll miss working with him, and I wish him all the best. On TIDs and TIF I have been reporting fairly regularly on the pending closure of the city’s Tax Incremental District, or TID, #3. This month, I can report on the potential establishment of a new TID in Middleton. I have intentionally avoided getting into the details of TIDs and tax incremental financing, or TIF, because it’s complicated stuff. But with one TID closing and another opening, it seems like a good time to look a little more closely at TIDs and TIF. Tax incremental financing is the main tool the state gives Wisconsin municipalities to use for incentivizing economic development. A tax incremental district is a specific area where a city wants to promote economic development using tax incremental financing. So TIDs are the areas and TIF is the mechanism. In concept, TIF is a way of using the future property taxes stemming from new construction to help subsidize the development of that very same tax-incurring property or other projects in the TID. The additional property taxes are the tax “increment,” and we can use that revenue to help developers finance their projects. At the heart of TIF is the “but for” test, which means a TID can only be created and TIF can only be provided if development wouldn’t occur “but for” the existence of the district or the availability of tax incremental financing. But wait — doesn’t this mean the city is paying developers to develop? Yes, but we’re paying just a small share of what a development project costs. And the money we’re paying comes from tax revenues that exist only because the new development occurred. What’s more, we’re using only some of the increment, not all of it, so the TID fund grows. That makes it possible for us to pay for things that benefit the city, like infrastructure construction. And when the TID is terminated, the city and all the other taxing entities receive the benefit of a larger tax base. Middleton currently has two large TIDs. TID #3 was created in 1993 and will close next year. Over its life, TID #3 is projected to create new development valued at around $1 billion. It’s one of the most successful TIDs in the entire state. Projects the city has funded with money from TID #3 include Pleasant View Road reconstruction, the Autumn Ridge Apartments, and the Belle Farm development in District 6. In addition, this summer’s planned construction of the Cayuga Connector multi-purpose path and the reconstruction of Parmenter Street north of Century will be funded by TID #3. TID #5 was created in 2009 and hasn’t had much development take place as of yet. Because of this, it’s currently running a deficit, but that will change over time. Upcoming projects to be funded by TID #5 include land acquisition for the Century Avenue bridge replacement, the reconfiguration of the intersection of Century and Allen, and construction of a multi‐use path on the east side of Allen Boulevard.The proposed TID #6 will consist of about 55 acres in the Middleton Industrial and Research Park to the east of Parview Road (see map below). The site includes the former headquarters of American Girl. The purpose of the district will be to “pay development incentives and other costs related to renovation and expansion of facilities” occupied by a major employer in Middleton who we’re trying to keep in the city. In addition to preserving up to 1,800 jobs, creating TID #6 is anticipated to add another 425 jobs at this same employer over seven years. They would also invest $147 million in renovating and expanding “underutilized structures for new industrial and office uses.”  The city’s TID Joint Review Board met on March 20 to discuss the establishment of TID #6. On March 22, the Plan Commission held a hearing on the proposal to create the TID and received just one comment, which was in support. Council is tentatively scheduled to consider a resolution creating TID #6 on April 15. The timing of that action will depend on the state legislature granting an exception to the law that limits the total value of property located in a city’s TIDs. We’ll fall below this limit once TID #3 closes, but we want to act sooner than that to keep a major employer in Middleton. I’m in favor of creating TID #6. The proposed district includes some land designated by the Capital Area Regional Planning Commission as “environmental corridor,” so it’ll be important to make sure any development be done in a way that complies with our zoning code’s requirements for construction projects in environmental corridors. City Finance Director Bill Burns has given some really good presentations on this topic, including most recently at a Committee of the Whole meeting on February 2, 2024. In addition, just last month, Todd Taves at Ehlers, a public finance advising firm, presented to the TID Joint Review Board on the plans for TID #6. I recommend readers watch either or both of these presentations to help them better understand TIDs. Next month, I’ll share a bit more on this topic when I report on what happens with TID #6. Sustainability in Action The Sustainable Middleton Awards for 2024 will be announced at the Council meeting on April 15. I don’t want to steal anyone’s thunder, so for now all I’ll say is that one of the recipients is a worthy resident of District 6. I was thrilled by that news, but I was disappointed to learn that only six nominations were submitted for the awards this year. I’m aware of so many District 6 residents going above and beyond to reduce the impact of their homes and their lives on the environment. I think these efforts deserve recognition. I get that nominating yourself might seem a little too much like patting yourself on the back. For next year’s awards, the Sustainability Committee is considering asking alders to nominate at least one individual from each of their districts, which would result in at least eight nominations. I love this idea, so that’s what I’ll plan to do next January. Heads up to all the people who are taking steps to install solar panels and heat pumps, replace their lawns with native plants, and get rid of their fossil-fuel-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles. I think sharing stories of individual actions will have a positive impact by providing an example for our neighbors to follow. If you have a good story to tell, it would be my honor to nominate you next year. In other sustainability-related news, later this summer, Middleton will be participating in a food-composting pilot with Dane County. On March 11, the Plan Commission approved the siting of the city’s “Food Scrap Stop” for the duration of the pilot project, which is set to run from June 1, 2025, through May 31, 2026. The kiosk will be located downtown on Terrace Avenue in the parking lot next to the skate park. After the pilot concludes and the county measures its impact, Middleton will be asked to continue the program, expand it, relocate the kiosk, or stop participating. Ultimately, the best food-composing program is one that involves curbside collection. Until that’s feasible for us, the pilot Scrap Stop idea will be available to residents who wish to sign up. Because this is a county program, we’re waiting on the county to release the guidelines, the materials for publicizing it, and a site where people can register if they’d like to participate. Watch for messages to come directly from the city once those details are available. In yet more sustainability-related news, artificial turf came up at meetings of the Finance and Personnel Committee and Council on March 18. Pleasant View Golf Course proposed purchasing replacement mats for the practice range. I appreciate all the things that manager Jeremy Cabalka is doing to try to make the golf course not just a top golf destination but also a facility that embodies Middleton’s principles of sustainability. When the Finance and Personnel Committee discussed this item, I asked whether the artificial turf mats were manufactured using PFAS. Readers may recall that, last year, I opposed the use of artificial turf at the new baseball and softball fields at Middleton High School because of the environmental impact of PFAS, microplastics, and other contaminants associated with artificial turf. There was no information readily available at either meeting on the 18th. Not having assurances that the mats would be PFAS-free, I voted against the purchase of these mats, as did two of my colleagues on Council. After the meeting, I learned from the manufacturer that they can’t attest to their products being PFAS free, which likely means they aren’t. Some other vendors of artificial turf do certify their products as PFAS-free, so I encouraged Jeremy to consider using such a vendor in the future. I hope the existence of the city’s new implementation plan for the Sustainable Purchasing Policy will reduce or even eliminate situations in which purchases are proposed without full consideration of the environmental impacts. Later this month, the Sustainability Committee will be hosting a “Sustainable U” session at Middleton Public Library on April 17 from 6 to 7 pm. The speaker will be Mike Miller at Wisconsin DNR, who will talk about neonicotinoids — pesticides that are likely responsible for the loss of so many populations of bees and other pollinators. Attend this session to learn what you can do to avoid inadvertently contributing to the demise of our pollinators. Finally, the city is soliciting applications from multi-family building owners to participate in the Energy Navigator Project. The project helps property owners improve the energy efficiency and comfort of their affordable rental properties for the benefit of tenants. The city has been funding this project through our federal ARPA grant, which ends this year. There is one spot still available for this year’s project. If anyone is interested, more information on Energy Navigator and the application process is available here. Contact Kelly Hilyard, Middleton’s Sustainability Coordinator, if you have any questions about this opportunity. Thank you! Thank you for reading “E-News on 6.” Feel free to email me or call/text me at 608.630.7500 if you need help with a city matter, want to relay your thoughts on an issue, or have questions about city decisions and my votes. I’m not active on social media, so the best way to reach out to me about anything official is by phone or using my district email. If you find this newsletter helpful, I hope you’ll share it with friends, family, and neighbors who live anywhere in Middleton. Just please make sure to ask them not to unsubscribe you and not to report this email as spam. Thanks! Not receiving this free e-newsletter directly? Sign up here. Important Stuff to Know I produce this newsletter all on my own, at my own initiative, to help District 6 residents stay informed. This is not an official city publication, I don’t speak for the city, and producing this newsletter isn’t one of my official responsibilities as a member of the Common Council. If you’d like to reproduce or create new content from this material, please ask me first and make sure to cite the source. Image credits: Venn diagram: Lisa JanairoTID #6 Boundary Map: Ehlers |