MADISON VOICES: Hearing from the Mayoral Hopefuls

 There is a primary election this Feb. 17.  In Madison, five candidates are vying to be the next Mayor.  [1]Carousel Bayrd They are:  

-Richard Brown, former three-term Dane County Supervisor and accountant with Dane County

-Christopher Daly, UW graduate and activist

-Bridget Maniaci, former two-term Madison Alder, fifth-generation Madisonian

-Scott Resnick, Madison Alder and co-founder of a tech startup

-Paul Soglin, seven-term mayor, serving from 1973 – 1979, 1989-1997, 2011- current

I had the opportunity to interview all of the candidates, to learn why they are running for mayor and to ask what are their priorities and visions for the city.   You can listen to all five interviews in full on A Public Affair – Jan. 27, Feb. 3, and Feb. 10 [2].

Here are some excerpts from our conversations.

Why do you want to be Mayor?

Brown: “I’ve done a lot of the things we’re up against today. I’ve worked in the Federal Bureau of Prisons as a prison guard. I have a whole bunch of financial background from Mendota to an auditor at the Legislative Audit Bureau to now a systems accountant at Dane County. So I’ve done a lot of things. I just thought we need to do better.”

Daly: “I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that our society is structured.  I’ve been thinking about the way that our financial system is structured and the way that it favors people who have come into wealth or already had it as a result of privilege or access to power. And you see the same thing here in the city. If more people sat in on city council meetings and they saw just how easy it is for a developer to come in and propose a project with little to no consideration of the neighborhood that it’s being proposed in and the feelings of the residents, then a lot less development would get done in this city in the way that it has been.”

Maniaci:  “I love Madison.  I’m a huge geek for the city and city issues.  I’ve stepped away from the council seat to really gear up and be prepared for this job because I’ve seen it up close and personal working for a year in the mayor’s office. … I’m running for mayor because I’m not seeing a lot happening in city hall right now. And if you’re frustrated, if you want to see change, you’ve got to step up and run. The mayor should be there really working to help people, that everyday citizen, and the issues that directly affect them, and make sure that city hall is working for them. What I’ve seen over the last four years, really it’s a lot of petty internal fights. There’s a lot of talk and there’s a lot of grandstanding, but I’m not seeing really good, practical, pragmatic solutions being put forward on the table.”

Resnick: “If we’re working together, we’re treating each other with respect and we’re working towards a common good, so everybody can share in a certain amount of prosperity that our city is seeing. Now I look at the City of Madison and we have some major challenges.  And the challenges come in two parts.  Part of the challenge is our serious issues that face many of our residents with poverty, and opportunity gap, and equality gap where folks don’t feel like they belong in our community.  The other side of our challenge is that lack of a vision. Of where are we going?  What is our roadmap for the future? How are we going to make these smart and safe investments in our community that make us a great place for the next 50 years?”

Soglin: “I’m really devoted to this city.  We’ve got challenges, dealing with the city finances, and we’ve got challenges regarding poverty, disparity, and equity.  I think we’ve made some progress in the last four years. The job is not done, and I’d like the honor of doing it again. … The challenge is double fold.  One is coming up with the right strategies but two is coming up with the right resources.  And what concerned me as 2011 began, was that whoever was mayor was going to have to develop the right resources, especially with what the state was doing to us with Act 10, and then simultaneously develop systems and programs to address these issues.” 

On the how the city and Mayor can address the huge racial disparities we have in our arrest and incarceration rates:

Brown:  “It’s really tough, but I say jobs. Give people jobs. If you work eight hours a day and you sleep eight hours a day, there’s only eight hours a day left that you can really get into trouble.  So I say full employment. Incarceration is real, I worked in the Federal Bureaus of Prison. And I’ve seen people in prison that needed to be in prison. But yeah, maybe we look at statistics, and we say, ‘This black community is creating more crime’, that’s what they say, so what they do is they send more police in that area.  Well that’s going to double the situation.”

Daly:  “We’re kind of at a fork in the road right now, as far as what kind of city we want to live in, what we want to leave for the next generation. And I think that we should be leaving a place that is better to live in, where there is more access rather than less, and where the differences in income and all these other disparities that we’ve been talking about are really addressed. And the thing with the other candidates that I’ve noticed is that they’re all very pro-business, and pro-development, very neo-liberal is one way that you might put it. And this whole kind of the youth economy and crowd sourcing labor with Uber and Lyft and other companies like that, that business model, it drives the wages down for everyone else, everyone. It’s a very clever, kind of libertarian almost, way of going about economic policy. So if we continue to allow the level of unchecked growth, in the industries that are already very highly lucrative and paying well, then we’re going to leave behind the people who are nearer to the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. And if we leave them behind, then we’re kind of going to rot from the inside. “

Maniaci: "A lot of folks in the city just don’t see racial inequity, because in their everyday lives they are not around people who are diverse from them. It has to do with how you get to work, where you work and the makeup of the employee base there, and it has a lot to do also with how do your children interact. … I think that there are a lot of opportunities to get to a point to where we are interacting with people who are different than us. And I don’t have to build big infrastructure to do that. I think that’s about bring people together when you have the microphone as mayor. …  We have these issues of structural poverty.  And we have siloed away and we have pushed off to where it’s politically expedient affordable housing. We are not a diverse city. It’s really about how we’ve build our neighborhoods. I think that’s about the 40-year legacy of Paul as mayor.  Don’t tell me that he’s going to solve the problems when he’s been one of the really consistent constants over 40 years in leadership in city hall."

Resnick: “When we think about early childhood initiatives, that first one thousand days of life, to make sure that every single student living in the city of Madison are on equal footing, so when they enter school they are predisposed to enjoy education. What are other cities doing? Is Madison stepping up, are we accountable to ourselves? We don’t have enough strong inroads into child care. I was recently told, as my wife and I are thinking about having kids, we should try and get on the waiting list for childcare 18 months ahead of time…. If you are in poverty, if you are making a minimum wage job, and trying to decide, ‘Well, what’s better, do I go to a place of employment, do I take a job, or do I simply watch my kids,’ these are very difficult situations if someone is on a living wage or a minimum wage.”

Soglin: “This is another area where we’ve made some changes. We took a look at where young adults are arrested.  And the bottom line is this: They are not arrested in their neighborhoods, they are not arrested near their homes.  They’re arrested principally in about a dozen places. They are arrested in the high schools… they are arrested at bus transfer points, they are arrested at a handful of large big box stores here in Madison.… We’ve got two programs we’ve now undertaken.  One program is working with the municipal judge. The other program is a peer review for the south police district.  Basically, what our objective is here, is keep these young people who are arrested out of the criminal justice system, Finding alternatives so that we don’t compound one problem with greater problems, because we know from all the evidence, that once kids enter the system, it escalates.” 

On developing affordable housing:

Brown: “First we need to work with landlords, and let landlords know ‘Ok, fine, you’re going to get your pay.’ But it’s more than just getting paid. They need a support network. Let’s have a whole congregation follow around this homeless family. And the church, which is deeply engaged, they have all types of teachers they have counselors, they have all kinds of people.  Now you have a congregation following this one family. That can give them support, and then as a landlord I feel better because I don’t have to worry about all the craziness that happens.”

Daly: “Our financial system is set up so that every 10 to 15 years there is another crisis, and the big companies gobble up all the little companies and they consolidate their power and it goes straight to the top. And so this is going to happen again. … Our state is being pushed toward bankruptcy. Our city is as well. … They’re going to come in and say, ‘You can’t pay back your debt, so we’re going to come in and we’re going to offer to privatize all of your public services.’ That’s where we’re headed.  This is the plan for the entire country, it’s not just about Madison. It’s everywhere they’re going to do this.”

Maniaci: “The city needs to proactively step up on building affordable housing.  If we do not open that financial barrier to people to have access to other neighborhoods, there is no way we can start to diversity our neighborhoods on a racial background, on a socio-economic background. We’ve completely priced out so many people. … I very much believe that there is a workable model looking at the city’s Capitol budget funds, not our operating but our Capitol budget funds, to partner with developers in the high-rent districts to build units that are affordable.  … The reality is, of the 3,000 folks every year who are using our shelters, it’s sort of (the) opposite end of the spectrum. We have a lot of single childless adults, and then we have a lot of children and families.  And so those require very different housing strategies to be able to address those needs… I’m really concerned that we don’t continue to go down the path where we just build affordable housing where it’s politically expedient. That we’re ensuring that we’re building affordable housing the high rent neighborhoods, in a diversity of neighborhoods. And if you look at parts of the city, that’s going to be very difficult.”

Resnick: “We need to be looking at how the market can play itself out, in particular in areas of creating more density in other areas of the community.  I see this on the plan commission.  Where there are areas that are ripe for development that are not right in the downtown, where you could see affordable apartments being built at a market rate. We don’t have the political will to say, ‘Can we put up a three story market-rate building?’ The other piece of it is, we need to have a long term vision and plan.”

Soglin: “When I took office in 2011, Madison Wisconsin had the lowest vacancy rate in the United States. A stable market is 5 percent vacancy, we’re not even at 2.5 percent at this juncture.  We still have an incredibly tight housing market, even with the some 4,000 units that have already been built and added to the housing stock. … There are two tools that Madison failed to utilize, which we are now committed to doing which is going to significantly add to that housing stock.  Those two tools are first, the ability to extend the life of a TIF one year, and use the revenue from that year for the TIF anywhere in the city to build affordable housing. … The second thing that was not effectively used, and we were left in the dust for quite some time, was the utilization of tax credits.”

--Carousel Bayrd is Vice Chair of the Dane County Board and hosts "A Public Affair" Tuesdays at noon on WORT (89.9 FM). She lives in Madison with her husband and two children.