Google Earth
The Madison Common Council is being rushed to vote Tuesday night on the immensely complicated and significant Judge Doyle Square development.
Council members should resist the pressure and cast their vote only after they’ve received the answers to their questions and had time to fully vet and consider the information.
For myself, as a citizen, here are the six big unanswered questions on my mind.
Big Question #1. What happens if there’s too much parking? An automated, driverless car is being developed by Google and by every major car manufacturer. It holds the potential to be the mother of all disruptive technologies, and one of those disruptions will be a dramatically reduced demand for parking. If cars are moving 95% of the time going from car share subscriber to subscriber as opposed to being parked 95% of the time as they are now, what happens to the hundreds of stalls that are entwined with JDS both under the building and within it? Can that space be practically converted to other uses? At what cost? What does this do to the economic model on which the project rests?
Big Question #2. How will the city respond to the next demand for an outright grant? One of the biggest policy changes wrapped up into this agreement (and there are more than a dozen exceptions to city tax incremental financing policy in it) is a move toward outright grants to corporations. The JDS deal would deliver $12 million to Exact Sciences in exchange for a promise to move and keep a few hundred jobs in downtown Madison. That’s an enormously momentous precedent, and you can be sure that it is being noticed by others. This is exactly the kind of program that has been so disastrous for the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. The WEDC has incinerated taxpayer dollars on poorly vetted projects that never produced the jobs promised, and there is the strong odor of corruption in the air. Is this a road we want to start down?
Big Question #3. Will this enormous taxpayer subsidy result in sufficient benefits to Monona Terrace? The central reason for this whole project is the city’s desire for more hotel rooms to benefit the city-owned convention center. But its own studies suggest that what is needed is a hotel with about 400 rooms. The JDS deal would deliver only 216. When you’re asking the council to approve what is by far the largest taxpayer subsidy in the history of the city (about three times as large as what had been proposed for the Edgewater), why shouldn’t we insist that at the very least the developer produce the number of rooms the city’s own studies say are needed? And, in fact, since the same developer owns the Edgewater, does he have a conflict of interest in not wanting to compete too much with his own property?
Big Question #4. Is rehabbing the Municipal Building for city office space the best way to honor that great old building? It’s more expensive to rehab the old federal courthouse where Judge James Doyle sat than it would be to build new, more efficient space that would serve the public better. So, why are we doing this? Isn’t there a better adaptive reuse for the building?
Big Question #5. If Exact Sciences needs an inducement to move downtown, are they going to be successful in the long run? Tech startups need to attract mobile, mostly young, talented workers. As Epic employees have amply demonstrated, those workers don’t want to live in an antiseptic suburban business park. They like central cities. If Exact Sciences gets that, they should want to be downtown and they should be more than willing to pay any market premium to be there. If they don’t get that, are they a good bet for long-run success?
Big Question #6. If we didn’t spend so much money here, could we more easily afford to do small, neighborhood- and community-focused projects? Neighborhood centers, a biodigester, the public market, a new police station and the reconstruction of Monroe Street are among the projects that have been put off by the mayor because he says we cannot afford them now. While it is true that most of the public subsidy for JDS comes from a cash-rich TIF district, millions would be freed up if the district was closed down instead of being used as a cash cow for JDS. If the TIF was cashed out, the biggest beneficiary would be our public schools ($9.3 million), which might use the funds for its many building needs. The county would get a large share ($2.3 million) that it might put toward affordable housing. And the city would get a good chunk of cash ($7.1 million) that it could put into some of those community-based projects without having to borrow for them. Which way do we want to go as a city? Investing in the big downtown project or in small-scale efforts across the community?
There are, of course, dozens more good questions that the council and citizens have about this project. Those questions are crucial to an informed decision and they cannot possibly be answered by Tuesday night.
Look, I understand that decisions are always made with incomplete and imperfect knowledge. We cannot predict every possible outcome or see around every corner. But the art of public policy making is to have a feel for what questions to ask and to know when you have enough information to make sound, if not infallible, judgments. We are nowhere close to that point yet. Any vote to move forward on Tuesday would not be in the public interest.
