Welcome to 2023

A year in review. Plus hazy projections for the future.

I started this newsletter in March. It hasn’t completely floundered, and I still have some energy left, so we’ll keep going. Several hundred of you have decided that you find what I have to say twice a week useful and have subscribed, and for that I am grateful. A smaller percentage of those several hundred have even opted to pay for these emails and for that I am also grateful.

I’m going to ask people in the former category to move into the latter category. I’ll do this twice. The first time is now. If you appreciate local journalism, if you appreciate good writing (and hopefully the more I do, the better it will be), if you appreciate somewhat novel, galaxy-brained perspectives on the seemingly mundane workings of local government, please subscribe. If you just find the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel a little flabby and too expensive, please subscribe. It’s $6 per month, and I don’t get all of that. Substack takes 10%. The credit card fees from Stripe are another 2-3%. If that doesn’t seem like much, please subscribe, and you can choose to pay more than $6 per month.

If you’re not quite convinced, please read on for a brief review of what I’ve done so far, what I’d like to do in 2023, and take the opportunity below to let me know what you’d like to see more of.

The year in review

It’s useful to occasionally look back at the things you’ve written. Partly, because it reminds you of threads to follow-up on, partly because it allows you to recognize how you’ve changed or developed as a writer, and partly because it’s an opportunity to notice larger currents in your own thought and in the community you are writing about. Rather than a bulleted list of everything that’s come before (there is an archive), I thought I’d just mention a few themes that have emerged that I think paint at least a partial picture of what is occurring in the community, what I’m interested in, and why you might be interested too.

Education

There is an ideological divide within the city, and it’s been most visible to me at school board meetings. Probably the biggest flashpoint over the last year has been the opposition and contentiousness surrounding the passage of a new Human Growth and Development curriculum in September. See “School Board hears comments on new Human Growth and Development Curriculum” (Aug. 21) and follow-ups here and here. I attempted to fit this into some larger analytical framework in “Another word on HGD” (Oct. 21) which I enjoyed writing and think is good but didn’t seem to get much traction. Some of this contentiousness overlaps with larger national debates, but in listening to and talking to parents and community members, I think it’s also something fairly personal, contextual, disorienting, and complicated.

Much of the disagreement is embedded within the larger context of changing demographics (fewer school-aged kids), previous contentious debates about school closings, open enrollment, and worries about the declining quality and safety of schools (which I haven’t written much about). There’s also a general mistrust between and among various combinations of teachers, administrators, parents, and school board members. One school board member has sued the others (See “Mr. Meier goes to Milwaukee County Circuit Court” Dec. 3), a district administrator and former school board president resigned in the fall-out over widely publicized conflicts of interest (See “Parents ask school board not to re-appoint Steven Doman as board president” May 14), and teachers are resigning at high rates (See “Teacher turnover is high, no one is satisfied with their pay, and why are there so many school administrators?” Jul. 1. Also, one of my most-read posts).

My perception of the education system at least until a few years ago was that most educational interventions don’t work and that most of the benefits from education come from economic signaling of underlying ability. I still lean in this direction but there was learning loss after the pandemic and students have had many difficulties returning to and adjusting to school after 1-2 years of remote learning, and my views have shifted because of this. Some subset of students definitely do benefit more than others and for reasons that probably don’t show up on standardized tests. It’s also clear that education serves an acculturation process that some people agree with and others do not but which is hard to deny occurs. We should be interested and invested in this. I realize these are mostly just assertions, but I hope to expand upon them as I learn and write about the school board and the district over the next year.

Governance

Effective governance is hard. Part of this has to do with communication. The image in your head when you say something is rarely the image created by those same words in someone else’s. I think this can be easy to recognize in the abstract but is harder to internalize. It gets even more complicated because not everyone can or is even necessarily trying to communicate clearly. We can see how this goes poorly with frequent breakdowns of communication among school board members (See “School board meets in special session Monday” May 16) or the difficulty the school district has describing its policies to the community (See Wauwatosa School District and the English Language” Sep. 15). Communicating intent and soliciting input is part of the democratic process, but can be counterproductive, especially when it diminishes the ability to enact straightforward policies (See “Beware More Democracy” Dec. 1).

But governance is also hard because it’s not always clear what works or will be effective. Sometimes things sound better as a headline than they actually will be in practice. In “A Tale of Two Policy Proposals” (Sep. 22) I compare and contrast an alder’s proposal for a gun buy-back program and another proposal from a city staff member to create a transportation utility. For other critical discussions of different policies see the link above as well as “Sean Lowe wants to ban no knock warrants”¹ (Apr. 24) and “Making housing more affordable in Wauwatosa” (Jul. 14). I try to generalize from some of these examples and point out common causes of failure in “Cause-and-effect is underrated” (Nov. 10).

Minutia

Most people don’t really understand how local governments work. Neither do I. I’ve tried to learn by taking seemingly boring topics and attempting to make them somewhat palatable or entertaining not just to read but to write. You can see this in “Some thoughts on Fire Departments” (Nov. 3) and “Where I try to figure out how school financing works” (Jun. 2). Some of these involve critiques like my “Schoonmaker Creek: A guide for the perplexed” (May 12) where I try to understand why they’re planning a hugely expensive capital construction project the way that they are.

Once in a while, I come across interesting things. In “Nonprofit hospitals in Wauwatosa” (May 26) I discuss the great lengths hospitals (including Froedtert Hospital) go to maintain non-profit status, why they don’t seem to do any more charitable work than for-profit hospitals, and how their non-profit status deprives the city of revenue for little discernible benefit. I’d actually like to follow up on this one, because I think the city recently won a lawsuit over property taxes. Not long afterwards, national publications started talking about the same issue (See the recent New York Times series “Profits over patients: how nonprofit hospitals lost their way”). I like this as an example of finding something of broad national import at a local level before other people noticed.

Economic Development

Even as services become more expensive, it’s difficult for the city to increase it’s revenue. State laws limit how much in property taxes municipalities can collect, and the city was incorporated 180 years ago and has very little undeveloped land to build on. Enter “Some thoughts on Tax Incremental Financing” (Sep. 29) where I talk about one way the city can encourage more development—more apartments, more buildings, more property tax. Some alders have seen this as a giveaway to wealthy developers while others consider it a necessary mechanism to expand the city’s tax base.

Development can also generate tension between city officials who might want land used in a way that produces the most tax revenue, residents who want more subsidized housing, and others who would rather not having giant buildings or hundreds of apartments built next to their homes at all. The most contentious of these was the approval of John Vassallo’s Drew Tower project which was debated and ultimately approved for construction at the corner of West Bluemound and North Mayfair Roads. See “John "Johnny V" Vassallo to build 28-story middle finger in Wauwatosa” (March 23), “Response to Drew Tower Development “ (Apr. 14), and “Board of Zoning Appeals asks Design Review Board to justify Drew Tower” (May 5).

Debates over housing are occurring nationwide, especially in the country’s most expensive cities. I find the topic interesting and people’s attitudes about it somewhat complicated, so I hope to write more about this issue in the future.

Models of the World

I spend a lot of time trying to work out how other people understand the world. This is partly a search for truth but also a search for something that opens up creative possibilities in my own head. Mostly I get this through books, but I also get it from listening and talking to people. I enjoyed speaking with the polarizing former candidate for common council, John Larry (See “A Conversation with John Larry” Apr. 2), I like reading the books elected officials find inspiring (See “Education Book Review: Belonging Through a Culture of Dignity Dec. 24), and I like trying to understand what the actions and speech (scroll halfway down to the section on Community Affairs) of school board members and alders says about their worldview.

Also, although these haven’t made their way into any articles (but may eventually), the conversations I’ve had with parents, residents, elected officials, and city staff in the course of trying to understand what’s going on in Wauwatosa is really the best part of this project.

Plans for 2023

In a former job, I was a social scientist. And so I tend to write a lot about the results of scientific studies and complain frequently that the proposals from our elected and unelected officials may not actually have the effects they expect them to. This can be useful, if sometimes tedious, but it can also be a substitute for doing some of the also useful things that journalists do—like talking to people and filing open record requests and trying to understand things that way. And getting outside. I’d like to do more of all that.

I mostly attend school board and common council meetings, which is good, because sometimes I’m the only one there. But there are probably a lot of interesting and important things that happen outside of those meeting. So I’d like to expand my subject matter. I have a few ideas, but feel free to offer your own suggestions. I will probably never cover high school sports. Probably.

Numerous seats on the school board will be up for election this spring. Several incumbents will not be running, and I hope to get interviews with most of the candidates.

Finally, look for more subscriber-only content though I’m not sure what form this will take. I’m told that you should offer your best work for free, but then I feel bad making people pay for the not-best stuff. Also, the things I think are best are not usually the things other people think are best. My current solution to that problem has been to make almost everything I’ve written free. But I should probably stop doing that…

What would you like to see?

As I plan my efforts over the next year, please reply in the comments below with ideas on any of the following questions: What did I write that you enjoyed so far? What sucked? What would you like to see more of? Are there questions I should be asking that I’m not, or topics I should be exploring that I haven’t? Hearing from you would be a great help.

I’ll also make a final pitch: if any of the above sounded valuable to you, please think about becoming a paid subscriber. The cost is $6 per month or $60 per year. If you think I’m biased and unfair, and you only subscribe to keep tabs on how biased and unfair I’m being this week, send me an email. I have like a 100% success rate convincing people I’m not so bad. One woman emailed me to tell me how biased and unfair I was being, but then I emailed her back with some reasons why maybe I wasn’t being biased and unfair and she became a paid subscriber! That could be you!

1. My thoughts on the futility of banning no knock warrants has actually softened since this article. Maybe this will come up again, and I can expand on it.