Bi-Weekly Roundup for September 10

Author accuses Wauwatosa public library of being racist, city drafts new strategic plan, holds public hearing on zoning code revisions

Wauwatosa’s Common Council is back in session. A summary of several meetings—many short—from last week.

→ The Equity and Inclusion Commission met on September 1:

Michael Crichton (1942-2008 )—author of such acclaimed novels as The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Sphere, and my personal favorite, Timeline—later turned into a universally-panned movie of same name (13% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomato-meter, critic consensus: “This incoherently plotted addition to the time-travel genre looks and sounds cheesy.”)—coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia effect after his friend, the physicist and quark-discoverer, Murray Gell-Mann:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

I thought of this as both Mayor McBride and Asst. City Attorney Hanna Kolberg bemoaned the recent news coverage of the Wauwatosa Public Library’s rejection of the children’s book Coco’s Courage: Meeting the Dentist by local author Dr. Shon Shree Lewis. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the book was deemed “not suitable [for the library’s collection] due to inaccurate information, repetitive wording, grammar and punctuation errors.” But according to Ms. Lewis, “Black people, we speak differently, we act differently, we have our own culture, and I put that into the book for a reason.”

When Ald. Margaret Arney said she had read that the author sued the library, Atty. Hanna Kolberg responded that, “She has not actually sued the city. She’s threatened to sue the city.” Instead, Atty. Kolberg continued, she filed a complaint with the Department of Workforce Development that was then dismissed by an administrative law judge. She’s now appealed that “to the Labor Industry Review Commission.”

Mayor McBride: She has not been denied access to the Wauwatosa Library. Some of her books are actually in the library. The Board rejected this particular book, because they didn’t think it met the standards for the library for a variety of reasons. […] But the fact that she has books in the library right now should suggest that there’s little merit to her complaint. You don’t get to have every book you write in the library.

Ald. Arney: It’s hard to tell sometimes from the things that are in the media what’s actually happening.

Atty. Kolberg: I have found in my 12- or 13-plus year career of public service that articles involving things that I’ve worked on are very rarely correct.

Mayor McBride: I’ve been talking to reporters this week about other things, and I always start by saying, ‘I’m going to assume you’re not a lawyer,’ and they say, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ And I say, ‘Well, I’m now going to talk about some extremely complicated legal stuff. And I don’t blame you if you don’t understand it. Ask me questions'.’ But inevitably, even when I do that, and take a half hour to walk people through it, they still don’t get it right. These legal things are mind-boggling, literally, to reporters.

And putting it into a 600-word article isn’t always the best approach, unfortunately. And then, unfortunately, you get people who are biased on the right or biased on the left, and they spin it the way they do. Let’s just say the media isn’t what it used to be.

While I enjoy pointing out the inadequacy of local media as much as the next guy, I will say that neither the Journal Sentinel article or another article by TMJ4 claimed she’d sued the city. Ald. Arney might have misremembered or perhaps she read or saw this claim somewhere else.

But the lesson of Murray Gell-Mann remains: If the media is screwing up on the topics you actually know something about, imagine what they’re doing with everything else.

On the object-level, I tried to do my due diligence and read Ms. Lewis’ book, but the free Kindle sample only includes the cover and the title page, and I didn’t want to spend $6.99.

And though I suspect his perspective might be more contentious today than it was 20 years ago, I still take my stance on the properness of “proper” grammar, punctuation, and capitalization from David Foster Wallace’s April, 2001, article in Harper’s Magazine, Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage—the only magazine article that ever made me go out and immediately buy a dictionary and whose 21-page length unfolds like a murder mystery and infuses an act so seemingly blazingly dull as putting definitions next to a list of words with all the gravity and cosmic drama of a dying star. This is the opening:

Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale? For instance, did you know that some modern dictionaries are notoriously liberal and others notoriously conservative, and that certain conservative dictionaries were actually conceived and designed as corrective responses to the “corruption” and “permissiveness” of certain liberal dictionaries? That the oligarchic device of having a special Distinguished Usage Panel of outstanding professional speakers and writers is an attempted compromise between the forces of egalitarianism and traditionalism in English, but that most linguistic liberals dismiss the Usage Panel as mere sham-populism?

Did you know that U.S lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?

If you can’t be bothered to read a 17,000-word review of a dictionary, the relevant argument he makes is that learning to read and write Standard Written English (SWE) is important in a democratic society because, for better or worse, people will take you more seriously and being taken seriously is a necessary element in advocating successfully for your interests. It is, in short, an “instrument of political power,” and one well worth learning for that reason.

On the other hand, the Gullah translation of the New Testament is a true work of art, so I’m not sure where I fall here. I wish the Kindle sample had been longer.

In other Equity and Inclusion Commission news, the Commission discussed organizing a streamlined process to educate homeowners on and help them remove the racially restrictive covenants that flourished in this area during the early-20th century from their property deeds and that, despite long being unenforceable, are still on the books.

One interesting aside during conversation among members of the Commission was that an early draft of the resolution specifically mentioned the Washington Highlands as the first neighborhood to adopt such a covenant. From the resolution:

WHEREAS, this history of these practices in Wauwatosa date back to 1919 when racial covenants were enacted in the Washington Highlands; and

WHEREAS, 51 housing subdivisions created between 1920 and 1960 contained racially restrictive covenants;

However, someone complained about being singled out and this phrasing was removed.

On a related note, a 1979 paper on racially restrictive covenants in Milwaukee County includes the text of the 1919 Washington Highlands covenant which, I must say, has a few grammatical errors of its own:

At no time shall the land included in Washington Highlands or any part thereof, or any building thereon be purchased, owned, leased or occupied by any person other than of white race. This prohibition is not intended to include domestic servants while employed by the owner or occupied by and [sic] land included in the tract.

Mayor McBride, while acknowledging that the covenants were unenforceable and had no material effect on anyone, said that it was symbolically important and “akin to pulling down a statue of a Confederate general.”

→ The Government Affairs and Financial Affairs committee met on September 6:

The Government Affairs committee meeting lasted less than four minutes and involved unanimous approval of an application for fireworks at the Wisconsin Lutheran College on September 17 and a special event permit for Tosa Fest on September 9 and 10. These were subsequently approved by the Common Council.

The Financial Affairs committee meeting lasted six minutes and included the recommendation for approval of two contracts:

• a $240,000 contract with The Sigma Group for the design of a new park at West Gilbert Avenue and North 116th Street. This park was previously discussed here, will cost a total of $3.8 million of which $2 million has already been allocated from the city’s $21 million in ARPA grants, and will include a sledding hill and a BMX trail. The city is hoping to use dirt from an unrelated Department of Transportation project in the spring of next year, so they’d like to start the design process as soon as possible. They expect The Sigma Group to begin soliciting public input into the design within the next four to six weeks. Actual construction will likely not begin at least until the end of 2023.

• a $76,287 contract with Prism Technical for the creation and monitoring of a Procurement Equity Participation Plan for a new mixed-use development near 7423 West North Avenue which will include 94 apartments and townhomes, a bank, and retail space.

The second is interesting, because I actually got it mixed up with a very similar contract for $71,000 to Prism Technical that was approved in July for a different development. And this is actually the third such contract the city has entered into with this particular company. What is a Procurement Equity Participation Plan? I go into more detail in the link above, but essentially the process is this:

A developer wants to build some apartments, and the City of Wauwatosa says, “Can you price some of them at below-market rates?”

The developer says, “Yes, but we’ll need you to chip in some money to make the project financially viable since we’re getting less in rent.”

The city says, “Alright, we’ll create a Tax Incremental Financing (TIF) District to do this. But if we’re giving you money, we also want you to help us meet some of our equity and inclusion goals by hiring more workers from distressed zip codes and do more sub-contracting with Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (DBEs).”

The developer agrees, and then, because it’s hard to find workers from distressed zip codes and to sub-contract with DBEs and because it’s also hard for the city to monitor compliance with its Procurement Equity Participation Plan, the city hires Prism Technical to facilitate this hiring and oversee this compliance since they’re the only ones that make bids on theses projects anyway (at least for July’s River Parkway project. I don’t know about this one).

Also, the CEO of Prism Technical, Randy Crump, is the father of Lafayette Crump, COO of Prism Technical and former member of Wauwatosa’s Equity and Inclusion Commission.

I guess I don’t find it so strange that an individual potentially interested in, let’s say, helping marginalized members of the community find more opportunities might legitimately be both an executive at a company and a member of a government committee that have those as their explicit goals. But it is an interesting ecosystem, and I do wonder why Prism Technical has so little competition in this area.

→ The Committee of the Whole met on September 6. After conducting interviews with all elected officials and senior staff, a 2-day workshop with the common council, a survey of the community and city employees (1,033 responses from the community, 245 from employees), and two community focus groups, consultants hired by the city presented a draft of the 2023-2028 Strategic Plan to the Committee of the Whole.

This plan, if it is adopted in two weeks, will set the city’s priorities for the next five years. Those priorities include a focus on:

• Economic development and financial resilience, including support to local businesses, helping more people live and work in the same city, and balancing development with neighborhood preservation,

• Public safety, including better communication and trust between the city and the public,

• Infrastructure, including resilience to 100-year weather events, improvements to the Schoonmaker Creek watershed, and finding non-property-tax-based funding for capital improvement,

• Housing, including inclusionary housing for all and an updated Comprehensive Plan and Zoning Code, and

• Quality of life, including an environmental adaptation plan and ecological enhancements in community spaces.

The Strategic Plan will come back for adoption in two weeks after which the city will devise a set of key tasks to achieve the above goals along with measurements to track progress.

After the presentation, Ald. O’Reilly said to other members of the Common Council that it will be important to emphasize to their constituents the significant fiscal constraints that the city is operating under and that accomplishing these goals will require tradeoffs with other issues people might think are important.

→ The Common Council met on September 6. They held a public hearing on proposed revisions to the city’s zoning code. The changes were based on the Zone Tosa For All report completed in late-2021 which had the goal of making housing more affordable and more equitable. I discussed these changes previously, but they include changes like allowing homeowners to build larger Accessory Dwelling Units on their properties and removing some density limits within the zoning code.

Three individuals spoke in support of the proposed changes and two opposed. One of those opposed didn’t like the reduction in parking requirements because she was worried it would reduce the amount of available parking for the disabled. The other individual was opposed to moving away from exclusively single-family home zoning districts. He was particularly worried about a revision that would change the definition of a household from “any number of individuals related by blood, marriage or adoption living together on the premises as a single housekeeping unit…,” plus up to “3 additional persons not related to household members” to one that would allow “adults of any relationship to live together as part of a household if they function as a ‘non-profit housekeeping unit.’” However, I couldn’t quite follow what his particular objections were.

That’s all. Have a great weekend!