Highlights from last week's Plan Commission and School Board Meeting
One of my intrepid readers has kindly pointed out that I was completely wrong when I claimed that the Zone Tosa for All recommendations have been ignored by the Common Council since their presentation 9 months ago. They were discussed this week in fact; during the Planning Commission meeting on Monday.
I stand corrected and can only promise to continue making similar mistakes in the future. It’s not like I’m a journalist or anything.
Plan Commission Meeting
Of the 18 proposed zoning changes that the report originally recommended, the Planning Commission discussed 7 of them this week. Others, City Staff decided, were not very straightforward to implement and would be better hashed out during the update to the City’s Comprehensive Plan that will begin next year.
They did propose:
→ Expanding notice of public hearings. State law requires notifying nearby property owners about zoning-related public hearings. But maybe we should notify tenants too. And post physical notices on telephone poles and fence posts. “These changes would increase accessibility and engagement for all residents of Wauwatosa,” the recommendation says.
I think this assumes a model where residents of Wauwatosa are clamoring to attend zoning-related public hearings but just can’t find out what time to dial-in on Zoom. I’m sceptical that is what’s going on, but maybe it’s worth the effort.
→ Removing some density limits. The original recommendation was to remove density limits on multiple residential and commercial zoning classifications across the entire city. The proposal presented on Monday, however, was only to eliminate density limits on a subset of commercial properties that are categorized as C1 and which already limit the height of buildings to 40 feet. It also proposed removing density limits on commercial buildings on C2-zoned parcels (which don’t have a height limit at all) but only around the Mayfair Mall corridor.
→ Allowing larger Accessory Dwelling Units. Currently, if you want to build an ADU on your property, the maximum allowable floor area is 650 sq. ft. The proposal on Monday would make the maximum allowable floor area 900 sq. ft.
→ Increasing bicycle parking requirements. This would require long-term (indoor1) bike storage for new multi-unit residential, commercial, and industrial properties. This seems nice, but suppose someone builds a 4-plex and all the vehicle parking will be entirely outdoors. Does a separate structure need to be built for indoor bike parking now?
→ A few other changes—like changing the definition of a “lot”—that were mostly technical, administrative, or that will be discussed in more depth at a future Community Affairs meeting.
Overally, most of the proposed changes were uncontroversial though there was some discussion around the proposal to remove density limits on C2-zoned properties around Mayfair Mall. It wasn’t that anyone cared about the density limits per se but instead that C2-zoned lots continue to have no height restrictions. This has been a somewhat contentious issue lately due to the recent approval of the 27-story Drew Tower development and some worried that making a change to the density requirements while leaving the unlimited height restriction untouched would draw the public’s ire. Ultimately, Mayor McBride moved to set a date for a public hearing on all the proposed changes for September 6 and:
[M]ove forward a recommendation to the Council to adopt the proposals in this [document] but with the following proviso: that we are not taking a position on a height-limitation at Mayfair one way or the other and that issue we think is a bigger question that should be decided by the council after consultation with the community.
The motion passed unanimously.
School Board Meeting
Also on Monday, July 11, the Wauwatosa School Board met. Some highlights:
→ Elections. Dr. Eric Jessup-Anger was elected as Board President by a vote of 4-3. Dr. Jenny Hoag was elected as Clerk.
→ District Staff presented a number of contracts that they will be requesting approval for in August. These included:
A request for about 30 graphics-oriented Mac computers and monitors to upgrade the visual arts lab at Wauwatosa West High School: $69,000
A renewed Microsoft Office subscription for the district: $52,000
Multiple online textbook subscription renewals for a total of $120,000. This last one included $25,000 for a 2-year subscription renewal of an AP Calculus textbook. Seems like a lot?
→ Strategic Planning. A sort of intuitively obvious truism about individuals and organizations is that they’re more likely to achieve something if they explicitly set a goal to do it. How difficult those goals should be is harder to determine. For instance, you don't want to set the bar too low, because if you clear it easily you might wonder if you could have done more. And you don't want to set expectations too high lest you lose hope partway through and end up disappointing yourself and everyone around you.
You might also imagine that people and organizations set goals not simply to make them more likely to achieve the things they would like to achieve but to signal various qualities that they would like others to believe they possess—that they are a visionary leader, or that they take their role extremely seriously, or that they are someone with high standards, etc., etc.
School District Superintendant Demond Means presented a progress report on the District’s 3-year Strategic Plan. The final version will be reviewed again in its entirety on August 17 but Monday’s presentation, while still incomplete, included not just the District’s goals but individual metrics that would be assessed to see if the district was making progress toward those goals. I found them a little unbelievable. Not unbelievable in the sense of moral indignation but unbelievable as in I literally didn’t believe the milestones were achievable.
For instance, the Superintendent (School District?) wants all graduates to be “critical thinkers and problem solvers.” Sure. However, one of the milestones linked to that goal was to have 100% of students pass an AP Human Geography test with a grade of 3 or better. Setting aside the question of whether every student has the aptitude or ability to score that well, wouldn’t we expect that just by sheer dumb luck at least one person out of the hundreds of students that take the test each year might sleep through their alarm clock, eat a bad plate of nachos the night before, go on vacation that week, or something else?
And if your response is that I should stop being such a pedant and obviously no one expects literally 100% of students to do that well, that instead it’s something to strive for, I will note that the Superintendent did make a point of saying, “We want to go beyond the aspirational component of it and have the board have metrics you can hold us accountable for.” And if it's a case of announcing a lofty goal while everyone sort of understands internally that they would actually be pretty happy with something slightly less than that, then why not try to quantify what that something slightly less is and make it the milestone?
I don't know what the right answer is here. Maybe people and organizations set impossible-seeming goals that no one expects to be literally accomplished because it really does generate greater effort. But then, how upset should we be if we don't reach them? And how accountable should we hold the people who made them when they aren’t achieved?
The nice thing about clearly-defined and publicly-stated goals is that everyone can agree to them and then agree again on whether or not they’ve been met. But if nobody expects certain goals to be literally achieved but each person has their own unstated intuition about what they personally would still consider successful then the utility of such a goal as a coordinating mechanism and accountability measure has been sort of abandoned.
→ Speaking of accountability and assessment, Dr. Means’ presentation did spark a discussion among school board members about how often these assessments would occur (some of the milestones involved various academic tests), how to avoid over-assessing students, and how to time assessments in such a way that they could inform the renewal of teacher and administrator contracts.
Mr. Meier noted that given the time of year in which administrator contract renewals occur and are structured and the potential for new board members to be elected next spring:
On the day they take office, every administrator onboard will have a 2-year contract, and if that newly elected board has a mandate from the community to change something, that Board will have to wait until the 3rd year of their first term to make a change in administrators.
Regarding teacher contracts, he said:
…the teacher will [already] have a 1-year contract on the day that the Board starts to look at the Key Performance Indicators from the annual review. […] So if we don't have some kind of mid-year barometer for how things are going, the Board has, as a practical matter, taken itself out of the accountability business for most of the duration of this plan. […] To me, it's not acceptable to not have some kind of mid-course indicator about are we're going in the right direction or not before we sign a bunch of new contracts and get locked in for a whole bunch of money.
I thought this was a good point.
Technically, indoor or “in a location otherwise are protected from weather and access by unauthorized persons.”
Is this an example of "teaching to/for the tests"?