The Edgewater controversy will soon be over.
Though the luxury hotel reopened in 2014, the five-year redevelopment process caused a cascade of changes that traumatized Madison’s planning staff.
“Over the last few years it really has been painful to bear witness to the internal strife in that Planning Division — that once-proud Planning Division that was admired by outsiders far and wide,” says veteran Ald. Mike Verveer. “It really is unfortunate that things went so poorly for many years in planning, since the departure of some leaders there.”
Because the department oversees what projects can and cannot get built here, the planning director has long been a lightning rod for controversy. “It’s probably the most important hired position in the city,” says Susan Schmitz, president of Downtown Madison Inc., a nonprofit economic advocacy organization.
The department has certainly been at the center of most of the city’s biggest fights.
“Land use is really fundamental to cities, and it’s a very long-term game,” says former Ald. Satya Rhodes-Conway. “It’s really important for quality of life, so the stakes are high. It’s an area fraught with controversy and differing interests. A lot of the conflicts that happen in local government happen around land use planning.”
David Michael Miller
After years of civic battles, the Edgewater Hotel reopened in 2014. But the project took a toll on city planning staff.
The Edgewater battle was one of Madison’s biggest brawls, and its repercussions still resonate. It led, directly or indirectly, to the departure of the department’s leaders, Mark Olinger and Brad Murphy, who were replaced by staff more friendly to development interests, Steven Cover and Katherine Cornwell. The Edgewater also spurred a revision of the landmarks ordinance. And several sources report that it demoralized the department’s staff.
Emotions are still raw, and few past and present city officials are willing to speak on the record, though many offer private accounts. Verveer speaks for many when he says: “It’s tough for me to be on the record about how I really feel about everything.”
But change is once again underway. Cover left the city last June and was replaced by a popular Madison native. And Cornwell will leave next month; the process for her replacement is in progress.
Suddenly the slate has been wiped clean. Many hope the new planning director will stabilize the division and better balance the interests of everyone who has a stake in land use decisions: developers, neighborhood denizens and residents at large.
The city’s planning department can be confusing to outsiders, starting with its unwieldly name: the Department of Planning and Community and Economic Development. It encompasses a wide array of civic functions, including the management of public housing and the senior center, out-of-school programs, building inspection, zoning enforcement, the development of neighborhood centers, arts programming, weights and measures, and efforts to attract new employers. Cover was the director of this entire department, which has roughly 180 employees.
The department also includes the Planning Division, which has about 25 employees. It helps officials plan for and manage new construction, evaluating building designs and considering their effects on the city. It also facilitates residents and officials in writing numerous plans, at the neighborhood level and city-wide. Cornwell was its director, reporting to Cover.
The Department of Planning and Community and Economic Development has grown over the years. It was created in 1979, with the merging of several city departments and divisions, says George Austin, who headed the department from 1983 until 1998.
Rhodes-Conway has heard that the department swelled in size in part because of Austin. “Everyone thinks he was a great manager. I don’t know; I never worked with him,” she says. “But he kept getting problem departments to solve. Or maybe he was a good manager so they gave him more to manage.”
In 1989 Austin hired Brad Murphy to head the department’s Planning Division. Murphy served more than two decades. “It was not a controversial position, in my opinion, during that period,” says Austin.
Rhodes-Conway notes that Murphy had a just-the-facts style of laying out city policies and options to elected officials. “Brad had a lot of ideas and opinions, but he very seldom said them out loud,” she says. “His approach was to facilitate the Plan Commission and [Common] Council to make a decision.... I often wished he’d take a more firm position, but that wasn’t his style.”
Ald. Mike Verveer says it was “painful to bear witness to the internal strife” among city planning staff.
Jeff Vercauteren has a unique perspective of the planning director’s role. He’s president of Capitol Neighborhoods Inc., an umbrella organization of five downtown neighborhood associations, including two historic districts. As an associate at the law firm Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek, he’s lobbied on behalf of developers including Apex Property Management Inc., Hovde Properties, Mullins Group, Steve Brown Apartments and Urban Land Interests.
“The planning director has a very challenging, multifaceted position that requires a focus on long-range planning, neighborhood planning, urban design, historic preservation, transportation planning and project review,” he says. “The position is especially challenging because it requires the planning director to consider both the long-term development of the city as well as current development proposals. It can be difficult to predict how a development approved today will occupy the built environment in 20 or 30 years.”
Ald. Paul Skidmore puts it more colorfully. “The first word that comes to mind is meat grinder. This is a very difficult department to work in,” he says. “The expectations and expected outcomes and the implication of the future are just pretty phenomenal.”
On top of that, the staff are often caught in between very strong personalities.
“You’ve got some pretty extraordinary personalities involved, and I’m not just talking about people within the department. You’ve got people like [Mayors] Paul Soglin and Dave Cieslewicz; they bring their own ideas and biases,” Skidmore says. “And then you add to it characters who are developers who have lots and lots of money, then you’re adding another dimension to it. These are not easy people to deal with. Add this cast of characters to the cast of politicians, and you’ve got staff that wonders where the next pounding is going to come from.”
Austin left the city in 1998 to become president of the Overture Foundation. Today he heads his own firm, AVA Civic Enterprises Inc., providing planning, development and project delivery services to owners pursuing public/private development projects. The city still occasionally contracts with him to spearhead larger projects, such as the Judge Doyle Square development.
Some view Mark Olinger’s departure from the city in 2009 as the beginning of trouble.
Austin was replaced by Mark Olinger, who had been a principal planner with the city.
Both Olinger and Murphy were respected and well-liked by staff and by neighborhood groups. Both are now gone.
“When Mark Olinger was relieved of duties, that was a big blow to the [planning] staff,” says Verveer. “That, as well as Brad’s retirement, was a big loss to the city. The team that replaced them eventually was just not a great fit for our community, it turned out.”
No one could have foreseen the Edgewater expansion’s impact on city government. But the hotel’s redevelopment was contentious from the start.
There were many issues: Edgewater expansion onto adjacent land did not fit the city’s Downtown Plan. The project violated height restrictions, shoreline development regulations and existing zoning. The developer also wanted a $16 million city subsidy through tax incremental financing, more than double what city guidelines found appropriate.
There were also many complaints about process and open government. The development firm had failed to register its lobbyists. For much of 2009, Verveer said at the time, Cieslewicz and other city officials worked in closed-door sessions to circumvent city commissions and the zoning code so that Edgewater redevelopment could succeed.
But the biggest issue was the hotel’s location in a city and federal historic district, which limited size and building style. The Landmarks Commission denied approval of the project, and the developer appealed to the Common Council.
Cieslewicz declared the landmarks ordinance “broken” and the Landmarks Commission “undemocratic.” He wanted to strip the Landmarks Commission of its power, making it and the landmarks ordinance “advisory.”
To make matters worse for the Planning Division, it was missing a key staff member to help sort out the conflict. The city’s preservation planner, who advises Landmarks, had retired in 2008. The position was kept vacant for a year and eight months. Murphy warned that leaving the “critical” position unfilled was causing “significant hardship,” stalling progress on a “backlog of critical historic preservation initiatives.” Low morale and anxiety were rumored among planning staff.
Then, late in 2009, planning staff were “shocked” by the abrupt and inexplicable resignation of Olinger. He has never spoken on the record about his departure.
“The mayor is looking at changing demands and challenges facing the city and felt he needs to bring in a different manager,” said Tim Bruer, council president at the time. Cieslewicz, an Isthmus contributor, declined to comment for this story.
“[That] was a big loss for the Planning Division,” says Verveer today.
During an all-night meeting in May 2010, the council voted to overrule the Landmarks Commission, allowing the Edgewater project to move ahead. The approval, however, didn’t end the drama surrounding the luxury hotel. After returning to office the following spring, Soglin slashed city financing for the project. But the developer was rescued by Jerome Frautschi, who made up the shortfall.
The effects of the Edgewater fight have been more far-reaching for city government. The landmarks ordinance would later be rewritten. Madison would eventually replace its top planning directors with two people who had a very different philosophy from what the city was accustomed to. Back in 2009, Bruer explained to the Wisconsin State Journal that Cieslewicz wanted someone “more in line with his vision and beliefs and desired management skills.” It would take a year to find that person.
On Dec. 9, 2010, Cieslewicz named Steven Cover the city’s director of Planning and Community and Economic Development. Cover had previously served as commissioner of the Department of Planning and Community Development for the city of Atlanta.
“I set a very high standard, and it was a long and twisting road to get here, but I couldn’t be more pleased,” Cieslewicz said in the announcement.
Eric Tadsen
Steve Cover, former head of the city’s Department of Planning and Community and Economic Development, alarmed some council members by asking them to “look beyond” the city’s planning documents.
It was soon apparent that Cover had a very different style than his predecessor, notes Rhodes-Conway, who left office in 2013. Unlike Murphy or Olinger, “[Cover] had opinions, and he wasn’t afraid to assert them. He wasn’t shy about telling his staff what do,” she says. “That difference of style created some upheaval.”
“All of a sudden the message we were getting was much more supportive of some big projects, even when the alder wasn’t supportive or there were big policy questions,” she adds.
Verveer blames Cover for Murphy leaving the city in October 2012, claiming: “[Murphy] told everyone in the office that he left for one reason only, and that was because he couldn’t work with Cover.” Murphy would neither confirm nor deny Verveer’s account and declined to comment.
Cover’s different style was on display at the Feb. 5, 2013, council meeting, when he undercut his staff by arguing in favor of The Waterfront development just off Langdon Street. He specifically set aside the Downtown Plan and the work of his own Planning Division as well as extensive public input.
“It’s a policy document, it’s not law, and we shouldn’t treat it as such,” he told the council, referring to the Downtown Plan. “Sometimes we’ll be challenged to look beyond the plan to decide what’s best for the city.”
Some alders were stunned, but the council approved the project. Still bruised over the Edgewater, “that development really shook the core of the Planning Division,” says Verveer.
In her resignation letter, Katherine Cornwell wrote the department was “in the midst of a power struggle.”
Cornwell succeeded Murphy. She had been in private practice as a planning consultant in Denver for almost four years. Before that she’d worked for nine months as manager of Discover Denver, “a building and neighborhood survey meant to identify historic and architecturally significant structures citywide.”
When she started work in Madison in 2013, she told Isthmus that her philosophy for urban planning was to admit that “cities are messy places” filled with conflict and competing interests.
She added, “One of the most important things is not to shy away from conflict.”
The outside perception was that Cornwell and Cover were a team. By May 2014, critics feared that, together, the two had tipped the balance of power in favor of developers in the ongoing battle over the city’s future.
Former Ald. Brenda Konkel, who has become a local government watchdog since leaving the Common Council in 2009, says “there was a period of time when there was an absolute disdain for neighborhood plans. They were openly hostile toward neighborhoods. That seemed to do a lot of damage to people’s willingness to participate.”
Mayor Soglin argues that the planning staff had been in the middle of rewriting both the city’s zoning regulations and the downtown plan, which created a lot of pressure. “We had to get that done and it was not easy,” he says. “I don’t think it would have made any difference who was managing.”
In January 2015, Cover announced that he was leaving Madison to take “one of the top planning jobs in the country” in Arlington County, Va.
And two months ago, Cornwell announced her departure. “I stepped into an organization that was in the midst of a power struggle and where trust was in disarray,” she wrote in her March 3 resigination letter.
Many were thrilled. “Since the resignation was announced, I was contacted by several Planning Division employees with such excitement to make sure I had heard the news,” says Verveer.
“It’s not fair that she deserves all of the blame for the dysfunction of the Planning Division while she was there,” Verveer adds. “She felt that she was in this untenable position, that things were so bad on the first day that she was just never given a real chance to succeed by her staff, because of the strong, bitter feelings that many had from the former leadership there.”
Natalie Erdman, a Madison native, took over for Cover on an interim basis starting Feb. 1, 2015. Many were relieved when she took the position permanently in July.
Carolyn Fath
Natalie Erdman, Cover’s replacement, has been seen as a calming presence for the city.
“I was so excited that Natalie took that job,” says Konkel. “That was just what we needed, to calm things down and right the ship a little bit. I’m sure I don’t agree with her on everything, but I feel I can at least talk with her. She’s been on both sides of the table, and she knows what she’s talking about.”
Konkel, executive director of the Tenant Resource Center, worked with Erdman in her previous role as head of Madison’s Community Development Authority. “She’s one of those people who ask, ‘How do we get this done?’ Not, ‘No, no, no, no, no,’” Konkel says. “She was reasonable to work with. She held her ground when she disagreed, but when there was no reason to be obstinate, she went with it.”
Erdman won’t comment on the rumors surrounding Cornwell’s departure or the turmoil that has engulfed the department in the past few years. “I think you’re looking for a problem, and I’m not going there,” she says.
Meanwhile, Cornwell has been largely absent from city hall since tendering her resignation, which is effective June 1. “People [have] told me that she hasn’t been there since she resigned,” says Verveer. “I don’t know if her office is completely cleaned out or not, but nobody expects to ever really see her again.”
Erdman describes the situation differently. “As Katherine’s supervisor, I have granted her a great deal of leeway during her transition, including the ability to work from home as long as she continues to be available by email and for meetings.”
As for her replacement, Erdman says “We’re looking for somebody who is innovative. We’re looking for somebody who is going to be able to work well with other department and division heads, as well as constituents in the neighborhoods, as well as the folks who are in our process in terms of land use approvals.”
Applications were due on May 1 and more than 20 people have applied. One popular internal candidate is among them. Says Erdman, “We’re excited about the process, and I’m excited to see what sort of people [applied].” She doesn’t anticipate that anyone will be hired until mid-June at the earliest.
Konkel says the regime change offers the city an opportunity. “We’re coming up on our next revision of the comprehensive plan,” she says. “It might be an opportunity to strengthen the planning that we do.”
Verveer says the city has the perfect model for an effective planning director.
“Everyone including me thought the world of Brad Murphy,” he says.
“Our new planning division director, I would hope, would emulate many of the qualities that Brad brought to the job,” Verveer adds. “He was supported by his staff 100%. He hired much of the current staff. He was broadly respected and supported both within and outside of city hall, including the major users of the Planning Division: the development community and neighborhood organizations.”
