David Michael Miller
Dane County and Madison have been making plans since 2016 to reconstruct the deteriorating Buckeye Road.
Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway made it clear a new boss was in charge the day she took office. On April 16, she walked straight from her swearing-in ceremony to a press conference with Dane County Executive Joe Parisi where they announced that an agreement had finally been reached over the reconstruction of Buckeye Road (also known as County Highway AB). Parisi and former Mayor Paul Soglin had been deadlocked on the issue and the project seemed doomed to be delayed for at least another year.
Rhodes-Conway had campaigned that she’d be more collaborative than Soglin and delivered within minutes.
“The new mayor and I sat down, and in a very short time, were able to come to an agreement on something that had been at a stalemate for months and months,” Parisi tells Isthmus. “When there is a willingness to sit down, talk about things and collaborate … you can get a lot done.”
It was in the nick of time, too. “If we wanted to get Buckeye done this year we were up against a deadline of issuing request for proposals for the contracts,” says Rhodes-Conway. “If we missed that, it wasn’t going to happen this year.”
The impasse, while Soglin was mayor, was over which government was going to pay for future road maintenance — including fixing potholes, occasional resurfacing and plowing snow — which is currently the county’s responsibility.
Soglin and others say Dane County has been using funds for joint highway projects to strong-arm cities and villages into taking over maintenance of several county roads and sometimes demanding that municipalities take full responsibility for county highways through what’s known as a jurisdiction transfer.
The deal struck by Rhodes-Conway calls for the city to pay $1.7 million for the Buckeye Road project and the county to contribute $1.5 million. The city would pay an additional $1.9 million for water and sewer improvements. The mayor also agreed that starting in late 2020 the city would take over snow plowing, but not other future maintenance, on the section of Buckeye Road that runs from Monona Drive to Stoughton Road — a deal Parisi says was “offered but rejected” by Soglin.
“Mayor Rhodes-Conway did not give away the farm on this. The city ended up getting 90 percent of what it wanted,” says Parisi, who endorsed Rhodes-Conway for mayor. “We were willing to compromise. It’s all how you approach the conversation.”
So what changed? City Engineer Rob Phillips and former Ald. David Ahrens, who until April represented the area, both say the deal reached by Rhodes-Conway wasn’t on the table while Soglin was in charge.
“It’s just incredible that this whole thing was being held up because of a personal dispute,” says Ahrens. “A standoff with the county would have meant years of delays while our infrastructure is crumbling. In the end, Parisi did the right thing with the new mayor. This is the honeymoon. He just wasn’t willing to concede to Soglin.”
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When the city and the county started negotiating details of a deal in mid-2018, Dane County demanded that the city take ownership of Buckeye Road. Parisi eventually dropped that request while negotiating with Soglin, but he insisted that the city take over some maintenance as a compromise.
Soglin declined to comment on the negotiations last week. But in 2018, Soglin said that Parisi was holding the Buckeye Road project “hostage” with unreasonable demands.
“The county increased your wheel tax — a regressive fee, $28 — to use it to fund county highways. There are hardly any miles of county highways in the city of Madison,” Soglin said at a March mayoral debate. “And yet with all that additional money and with [Madison] paying for a disproportionate share of county highways, we are being told that the county is not going to approve the construction of either Buckeye Road or Cottage Grove Road unless we capitulate.”
Soglin added, “Virtually every city and village in the county is counting on us. They are looking to Madison and they are saying, ‘Don’t capitulate. Don’t give in.’”
Since 2000, it has been Dane County policy to consider a jurisdiction transfer when a county road is “improved to urban standards entirely within one municipality.” Such is the case with Buckeye Road and the city will be paying to add storm sewers, street lighting, bike lanes and sidewalks.
Bob Wipperfurth, president of the Dane County Cities’ and Villages’ Association, agrees with Soglin that the county’s pursuit of jurisdiction transfers is unfair. He says that other urban Wisconsin counties do not insist that municipalities take over county highways as a condition of reconstruction.
“This really is double taxation,” says Wipperfurth. “When the city of Madison stood up against jurisdiction transfer for this Buckeye Road project, that strengthened the negotiating power of other cities and villages within the county.”
Parisi says jurisdiction transfers and shared maintenance are all about delivering services efficiently. “We have a somewhat unique situation because we are such a fast growing community,” he says. “Roads that used to be, literal, country, county roads are now urban roads.”
The debate over jurisdiction transfer has been put aside for now, says Rhodes-Conway. Parisi and the mayor have also agreed to move forward with a similar project on Cottage Grove Road slated for 2020.
Rhodes-Conway says that the city didn’t set a precedent with Buckeye Road. “The fact that we are not doing a jurisdiction transfer, with this project or Cottage Grove Road, is a long-term savings to the city,” says Rhodes-Conway. “[Parisi and I] are going to sit down and have a larger conversation about whether there is a policy we can both agree on when we are in this position. There are places and times when a jurisdiction transfer might make sense. Bringing some sort of logical order to the conversation is important.”
Parisi says he was able to reach an agreement with Rhodes-Conway because she was willing to have a broader discussion about how Madison and Dane County should divvy up responsibility for county highway projects.
“This doesn’t have to be a big fight. This can be a conversation,” Parisi says. “That’s all the county has been asking for.”
[Editor’s note: Josh Wescott, chief of staff for Dane County Executive Joe Parisi, disputes that the deal accepted by Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway on the Buckeye Road project wasn’t on the table while Paul Soglin was mayor. Wescott provided a March 15 email from Dane County Public Works Director Jerry Mandli to City Engineer Rob Phillips that Wescott says contains “the exact costing-sharing proposal” that was presented and accepted by Rhodes-Conway. In response, Phillips says the details of what the county was offering still needed to be clarified at that point.]
