Dirty Laundry Update

I. The Dirt:
Let me get this straight. According to gazette article 04-12-05, page B1, the Cullen outfit managed to get the low bid on the police station construction project by overbidding the project a whole half million dollars, a full 10% of the project. My, my, how do they stay in business when they can be so far off the mark? No mystery there. And I guess the over-inflated project was scaled back after the contract was awarded.

Then the city manager has already spent that half a million extra before the people even know it is available. He rearranges the city hall 3rd floor to hide the antics of the code department behind fake walls and a fake name, the "Community Development Department", instead of just calling it the "Code and Planning Department". The new walls do not allow us to keep an eye on our city employees any more. What else is the city manager trying to hide? There are no load bearing walls inside our city hall, so a quickie "renovation" did not cost no half million dollars to take out fake walls and put in more. Where is the rest of our money? And a longtime people requested renovation would have put our citizen city hall meeting room on the first floor where we walk in the front door, instead of it being hidden on the fourth floor behind double closed doors and misnamed "the council chambers". And the sign out front still says "municipal building" incorrectly implying a city employee building instead of the building owned by the people and for the people.

On top of that, the city manager has already cut and mailed the check to demolish our historic building at 23 S. Franklin Street. When did our historical society discover this? The very same day of the slam-dunk ramrod rubber-stamp of our puppet self-interest council. What is our building being exchanged for? Grass.

It gets better. Where will they get the $80,000 to destroy this building? From the affordable housing neighborhood money called the federal block grant money that is supposed to be funding our neighborhood community center. How are the poor people in my Fourth Ward neighborhood going to benefit by this square of new grass in the downtown? By the way, only one member of the Community Block Grant Board that allocates the spending of our neighborhood money is from the neighborhood. And that board is misnamed the Community Development Authority Board.

While code department is misnamed the "Community Development Department", the real Community Development Department spending the community development federal block grant money that is supposed to be spent improving affordable housing neighborhoods is misnamed "Neighborhood Services". And they are being moved to the new cop shop. How would that be appropriate? Administration says drug lords live in my neighborhood so they can justify spending our money on their cop budget. But the drug lords have homes in way more expensive neighborhoods. The Community Development Department (a.k.a. "Neighborhood Service") uses our money to blight our neighborhood, to remove affordable housing, and level our homes and fund riverfront and downtown fat-cat redevelopment projects. That's why the city manager put a cop in our little Wilson grade school where the Asian children are blowing the math curve and upping the bar at the spelling bees. The cop-in-the-grade-school tactic dropped property values in the neighborhood a good 10% to 30%.

Meanwhile, after city council publicly slams the historical society as having no clout, no authority, no opinion, and no input, our Maurice Montgomery will be allowed to make the eulogy prior to the demolition ball. Why does the city not rent out the historic building, instead of renting out the ugly building on the other corner at 200 West Milwaukee? Why don't they demolish the ugly building? Oh, they will. On a project we won't hear about until after they are done with it. We need four out of seven city council seats to be people candidates. Then we will bump the fat cat dictatorship, put a leash on the city administration, revamp the Citizen Board of Appeals to be a true citizen watchdog, and create a citizen generated vision of the future of Janesville.

In the meantime, our current city government is a Jerry Seinfield stand up comedy routine.

City council meetings are every second and fourth Monday evenings at 7:00 p.m., Janesville's very own reality TV sitcom.

II. City Council Call to Action;
Re-vote to save 23 N. Franklin.

Call the real Community Development Department just that, and not "Neighborhood Services".

Give back to the neighbors our federal block grant money so we can get our community center. We will have our own Community Development Board, which will meet at our community center.

Get the cop out of the grade school and into our community center.

Put our Community Development Department in our community center.

Replace the municipal building sign with "City Hall of Janesville Wisconsin".

Put citizen meeting room on the first floor of City Hall.

Hire a goal and vision consulting firm for the Citizen Planning Commission.

Revamp the Citizen Board of Appeals, currently misnamed the "Zoning Variance Appeals Board".