Fighting City Hall is a series of battles over the course of years. Anyone who thinks that Fighting City Hall is only about one issue is sure to lose. One issue is only a battle, not the war.

You can’t fight city hall. Truer words have never been spoken, especially for the residents of the Maplebrook Two subdivision in Naperville.

We tried fighting city hall over the expansion of 75th Street and Washington Street. Hundreds of citizens spoke out against the 36-lane intersection planned to ease traffic flow. Residents raised concerns about noise and air pollution, home values and their children’s safety. Every person spoke out against this plan. Not one citizen said “Good work city planners, this is just what’s needed!” Yet not one of the City Council members or the mayor voted against it.

Doug Krause, whose campaign posters called him “The voice of the people,” even voted for this super highway. Obviously the Naperville residents at this meeting were not “the people” Doug was referring to on his posters.

Dick Furstenau, the council’s “Dale Carnegie reject,” basically told the residents who moved next to 75th Street that they were stupid for buying houses there in the first place. When he and his wife were looking for a house, they found a nice, quiet neighborhood. Too bad for the people of Naperville that quiet neighborhood wasn’t in Lisle! It must be a burden for Dick to be smarter than everyone he meets.

Dick Furstenau thinks the council censured him because of his lawsuit against Naperville. Maybe it’s because he’s condescending and often cruel to others. Somewhere along the way, compassion and concern for citizens has turned to contemptuous and callous commentary by Furstenau.

A Maplebrook mom was concerned that a highway merging from three lanes to two just a few hundred feet before the Lincoln Junior High School crosswalk was unsafe. Three children have already been hit by cars and killed there. Councilman Rosanova replied that the number of children killed was “insignificant!” This begs the question, how many children’s lives in the “Kid-friendliest town in America” have to be lost before it is significant? Is it five kids, 10 kids, or as many as 20? What if the kid only becomes a paraplegic? If my child had died at that crosswalk, and I heard Rosanova’s response, I promise you he’d spend the rest of his life eating through a straw. Insignificant! What a heartless thing to say.

My questions are:

1. How many of these City Council Representative ran unopposed last election?

2. How many of these City Council Represetative will run unopposed next election?

Elections … not issue by issue … is how to successfully Fight City Hall!

One of my favorite blogs is the 13th Floor of Governing.Com.

It is must read for anyone interested in local government.

In this post Jonathan Walters says it better than I ever could, so I won’t try.

Ah, a performance czar for the feds. What a concept.

That Barack Obama has appointed Nancy Killefer, a former treasury official under President Clinton and now an executive with the venerable management consulting firm of McKinsey and Co., as the federal government’s first chief performance officer follows a seemingly inexorable pattern when it comes to newly elected chief executives.

Virtually every new mayor, governor or president since 1950 (or maybe 1850) has swept into office promising to banish waste and inefficiency from government through some sort of top-to-bottom overhaul of the enterprise over which they’ve just taken charge. Under Ronald Reagan it was the Grace Commission. Clinton-Gore “reinvented” government, an idea ripped off from Texas, which had “reinvented” itself under Governor George Bush. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger got into the act with his “blow-up-the-boxes” plan, which went nowhere.

Encyclopedias could be written about the phenomenon. So here we go again. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not completely against these efforts, but too often they seem to assume that the concept is somehow completely new when in fact quality initiatives — by some name or other — have been bumping around government in some way, shape or form as long as we’ve had government.

Killefer, a veteran of good management practice and the federal government, is no doubt aware of this. Here’s hoping she builds on existing initiatives and ideas — all the while supporting those brave souls in the federal trenches who day in and out already are trying to do things smarter, better and more efficiently. I wish her luck.

There has been a controversy simmering for a few months in Rice Lake, WI.

The Community owned hospital was taken over by Marshfield Clinic. An ugly situation where Marshfield Clinic threatened to put the hospital out of business if they weren’t given the building and all other assets. It was not an idle threat. Many people (myself included) are angry. Very, very angry.

Business North tells a story that is sure to play out again and again and again not just in Rice Lake but across the nation.

“The (Lakeview Medical Center) Board gave away our community hospital,” Rice Lake resident Dan Lawler said in a recent testimony before the city council. “Our question is, when do we stop giving?”

Earlier this year Lakeview, an independent hospital in this community of 8,000 in Northwest Wisconsin, affiliated with Marshfield Clinic,a statewide nonprofit healthcare network with nearly $1 billion in annual revenues. To Lawler and other local critics, the community gave away the hospital for free.

Marshfield Clinic plans to relocate Lakeview and build a new hospital a few miles from the current location, next to the new Marshfield Clinic building that opened this year on the outskirts of town near the intersection of Highways 48 and 53. Construction is set to begin in April and finish by fall 2010.

Since Wisconsin hospitals are exempt from property taxes, the community will foot the bill for fire and police protection, water and sewer, snowplowing and street maintenance.

“All other citizens in the community also pay for these same services, and I don’t have to remind you just how tough things are for these people in our community and others just like ours,” Lawler said.

“How many tax-exempt businesses can we afford? We need a tax base,” Rice Lake Mayor Dan Fitzgerald told BusinessNorth.

Bradley Bekkum, MD, Lakeview’s board chairman and Marshfield Clinic’s northwest division director, did not respond to BusinessNorth’s requests for an interview. Calls to Marshfield Clinic’s public relations office also were not returned for this story

 The fact that Marshfield Clinic would not interview for the story tells volumes of their contempt for the customers they want to service.

We are not patients in need of care. We are cash cows. Very angry cash cows.

Should local government services be in competition with the private sector?

Should government offer a service to shovel sidewalks to make a profit when there are private businesses that do the same?

Should a discount government Fitness Center compete with the private sector?

Should government compete for weddings?

New York City wants to cash in on the wedding business.

… with revenues tight and tourist dollars desperately needed, the Bloomberg administration has created a 24,000-square-foot wedding palace, in the hope of increasing the number of couples who marry at the city clerk’s office.

“We want to be the wedding destination of the world,” said First Deputy Mayor Patricia E. Harris.

And it’s not just the $25 wedding fee the city is selling. Forget the wedding band? No problem. The new bureau offers an elastic faux-diamond band for $9. No flowers? They are available as well — $4 to $7 for a single stem and $25 to $50 for a bridal bouquet. There is also hairspray ($4), disposable digital cameras ($16.25) and tissues, at $1.75 a pack, for the weepy types.

The $12 million project, overseen by the designer Jamie Drake, who did Madonna’s Los Angeles home and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house, involved the renovation of an old Department of Motor Vehicles office up the street from City Hall.

Mr. Drake created two separate wedding chapels off the building’s central rotunda. In the east chapel, the sofa and walls feature apricot and peach colors; the west chapel is done in purple and lavender. Each chapel has an abstract painting that matches the walls and hangs next to the lectern from where the clerk performs the ceremonies.

Nearby bathrooms were turned into expansive dressing rooms, with full-length mirrors and long vanity counters lit by the soft hue of recessed wall fixtures.

The city has even set up an oversize photograph of City Hall to be used as a backdrop for pictures.

Bloomberg administration officials declined to estimate how much money the weddings would generate. But the city’s marketing agency, NYC & Company, has already struck a partnership with TheKnot.com, a Web-based wedding clearinghouse, to create travel packages that would include a ceremony at the bureau followed by a weekend in a hotel.

“I have a warning for Las Vegas: You better watch out,” said Carley Roney, founder of TheKnot.com. “With these new digs, there might just be a new world wedding capital.”

Twelve million dollars investment to compete against the private sector?

 Good or Bad?

It doesn’t pass my smell test.

Over the years I have heard suggestions that elected officials should be drug tested.

The latest comes from the Town of Seymour in Eau Claire County, WI.

The Seymour Town Board agreed Tuesday evening to delay action on a drug and alcohol testing policy until its next meeting Jan. 20.

Board members are considering extending their testing policy to all employees and even elected officials. Currently the only town employees who undergo testing have commercial driver’s licenses.

After consulting a few model policies, Kranig said, if the town enacts a policy for everyone on the payroll, it likely would require testing before someone is employed but not after he or she has been hired.

“The only thing we would be able to do is a pre-employment one,” he said. Kranig added that policies for testing existing employees are complex and require employers to provide counseling for anyone who would test positive.

Rick Stadelman, executive director of the Wisconsin Towns Association, said he is unaware of any existing policy in town, village or county government that requires elected officials to undergo drug and alcohol testing.

Though Seymour officials said there are no alcohol or drug use issues with the existing board, town Supervisor Sheila Running said they should not wait until there is a problem with alcohol or drug use to create a testing policy.

“I think we need to be a little proactive if we’re going to do something,” she said.

There are drugs which naturally should not be in the system of CDL license holders driving trucks. Not just for the employees safety but for the safety of everyone else on the roads.  

Professional sports test for drugs that “enhance” performance. Drugs that give an advantage over those that don’t take them.

If they want to be “proactive” let me suggest them finding a drug that “enhances” performance of elected officials and demand  they take it.

We all have tall tales of history where we live.

I’ve lived in Barron County, Wisconsin for the better part of the last fifty years.

I’ve heard many stories, legends, myths, whatever about our history.

But, I’ve never heard this one before!

Thanks to Wisconsinology for telling the story of …

Harry and the Little People … A troop of dwarves in Barron County.

For those of you planning on a trip to Madeline Island be advised the ferry has shut down service until spring.

This year’s decision to shut down ferry service came more than a month earlier than it has in the recent past, Madeline Island Ferry Line officials said.

That means until the ice road is ready the windsled must be used. (Windsled Schedule)

 ”I love it because I deal with about 1,000 people a day in the summer,” said Ted Pallas, a year-round island resident who works for the town’s solid waste and recycling center. “I love how in the winter, you can shoot a rifle down Main Street and not hit anybody.”

Not that he’d actually do that, Pallas quickly added, though he does like knowing that he could, should the mood strike.

I’d wait until Spring to visit if I were you.

A few weeks ago I wrote of one of the joys of living in a small city.

We don’t need to keep a map of rat problems.

I recently read of this possible solution to rat problems.

A Berlin politician has come under fire for suggesting that poor people should be encouraged to catch rats by offering them €1 per dead rodent. The intriguing idea entails some gnawing practical problems and has been called “inhuman and cynical”.

“Especially people who usually collect bottles could get one euro for every dead rat,” Henner Schmidt, head of the business-friendly Free Democrat party in the Mitte district of Berlin, told Berliner Kurier newspaper this week.

I don’t call that “inhuman and cynical.”

I call that ingenuity.

It was eight years ago we were in the process of building a new City Hall.

From the vault in the basement (which really wasn’t a vault) to the drop down stairways leading to attic cubby holes, every corner needed to be cleaned out. I was hired to do the cleaning.

I was reminded of that process when I read about the move of Tulsa City Hall.

City employees have spent the past month organizing and photographing all the items that will be put in the auction. They have come across some interesting relics of Tulsa’s past along the way.

Sandra Banks is the Surplus Coordinator for the city of Tulsa. She tells 2NEWS, “We found business cards from Mayor LaFortune. And found plaques I think from Mayor Randall. That may be before my time. But some forms that he signed. And I thought that was neat; Tulsa history.”

You can stop by old City Hall and check out those items January 13th and 17th from 8am to 4pm. The auction items will also be featured online starting January 7th.

I wish I was going to be in the Tulsa area during those dates.

I don’t really hate cats. I have nothing against cats as long as they are inside someone’s home.

But, roaming around town doing whatever they want … wherever they want … whenever they want?

No other animal including humans are allowed to do that.

Good for Jacksonville.

Lock’em up!