Developing Inroads

Tax incremental financing, an economic development tool that lets municipalities borrow money to lend to businesses to finance projects that would otherwise not happen, is receiving a lot of attention lately. I want to make sure to stress the “lend” part. TIF is not a handout or a grant, and it gets paid back and then some to the city and the taxing districts. Full Story 

Anyone who has ever watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail knows that at one point King Arthur is instructed by the Knights Who Say Ni! to “cut down the mightiest tree in the forest ... with a herring!” Since Arthur and his knights had just returned from fulfilling the first request, which was to procure shrubbery, they were quite discouraged. It doesn’t take a big leap of logic to figure out that chopping down a tree of any size with a herring is pretty much not going to happen. Full Story 

The Madison Zoning Code rewrite and the imminent release of the Downtown Plan recently made their way into the news again. There seems to be some confusion between the two, and I get a lot of questions from people who don’t realize that the Zoning Code Rewrite and the Downtown Plan are two separate, albeit intrinsically linked, things that are running concurrently. Don’t feel bad – if you aren’t knee-deep in it every day, it is confusing. Actually, even if you are, it’s still confusing. Full Story 

During the all-night City Council meeting to address all things Edgewater, I kept waiting for someone to say, "It's just a hotel, Gosh." Like Jon Heder channeling his Napoleon Dynamite character. I mean, if we could get Bob Harlan....

You would have thought the Hammes Company was trying to build a sweatshop given the pure odium of some of the opponents. I recall the phrase "an abomination to the eyes" by one of the opponents in reference to the proposal. I have seen The Abomination, and he looks nothing like the Edgewater, at least in the Stan Lee rendering. Full Story