Not much new here
Re: “Civic envy,” (12/5/2019): So Dave [Cieslewicz] touts his streetcar ideas of years past, but not many recall that Warren Sommerfeld, Madison’s former head of transportation, tried to get folks interested in streetcars in the mid-‘70s. He found that Prague was selling off its rolling stock at bargain prices — stock that had a source of ample spares in Cleveland, and knew that many of the rails from King Street to State Street were still under the pavement (most are gone now). Warren was often reviled as the Car Czar, but he was more forward-looking than nearly everyone. Three cheers for Milwaukee doing something with a tad more imagination!
And the public market in Milwaukee? Hardly more than a food court.
— Gene R. Rankin, via isthmus.com
I am a big fan of integrated public transportation: busses, shuttles, trolleys, and light rail. I encourage a public transportation vision and the efforts along Madison’s central corridor. But public transportation outside of the city’s core is marginal and impractical. And it has been that way since I moved here in 1991. There are scant busses, circuitous bus routes, long trip times, and long bus stop waits. If you did manage a bus trip into the city center, it’s likely that your ride would be [roughly 90 minutes] from many of Madison’s suburban neighborhoods ... There are two words for this: Very disappointing.
— RP Salatino, via isthmus.com
Low pay isn’t the problem
“Re: Law & Disorder” (12/12/2019): There are good reasons to believe that the low pay isn’t the cause of the turnover problem. First, the turnover problem started after [DA Ismael] Ozanne took over. The pay for being a prosecutor has always been low, but the high amount of turnover the article discusses didn’t exist before Ozanne’s tenure. Note that there were attorneys in the office with over 30 years of experience when Ozanne took over — that’s an entire career of making less money than they could have been making elsewhere — and that literally all of those attorneys are now gone. In other words, people were willing to do this job for crappy pay. They were even willing to spend their entire careers doing this job for crappy pay. But they are no longer willing to do that with Ozanne in charge. That in itself says a lot.
Second, as the article points out, the turnover problem is unique to Dane County. Prosecutors all over the state are paid the same amount, but Dane County is the only office with such high turnover. Third, prosecutor pay has actually increased during Ozanne’s tenure. If pay were the problem, then increasing pay would help alleviate that problem. But increased pay hasn’t helped.
— Andrew Martinez, via isthmus.com
