OSAB V--Can you hear me now?

An alert reader pointed this one out to me.

Non-Oshkosh Twin

Oshkosh Twin

He's baaaack!!!

I was just tooling around the Northwestern's new Web site and discovered that Stew Rieckman is making a comeback in the local blogosphere with his Everyday Editor blog.

As he explains, his first try at this did not end well, and so you have to give him credit for coming back into the fray.

My guess is that it will soon be one of the most widely read local blogs in Oshkosh.

'Rich people, God bless us'

One of the most revealing moments from Hillary Clinton's appearance on the O'Reilly Factor comes just before the 2 minute mark in this clip.

Tough to pass over Fitzpatrick

It's going to be tough for the Common Council to pass over Acting City Manager John Fitzpatrick now that he and 45 others are official candidates for the manager's post.

He's a hard-working, low-key kind of guy who obviously knows and cares about the city. Of course, in the current environment, those qualities could actually work against him, if the Council thinks it needs an outsider to come in and shake things up.

The case of Richard "Résumé" Wells could be instructive. He's a finalist, again, for a bigger job in another state. This time it looks like he just might get it.

Without question, Wells has worked enormously hard to move the campus forward. But his leaving would come at a time when many of the balls he has gotten up in the air could be starting to come down: Funding for a new academic building is still incomplete, neighbors of the expanding (but unfinished) Oshkosh Sports Complex are still fuming, efforts to overhaul the general education program and to provide greater accountability about educational outcomes to the public are taking shape but are a long way from fruition.

(There's also a demographic time bomb about to go off, as this year's high school graduation class will be the largest of the "echo-boom," meaning that the number of "college-age" students in the state will drop to sharply lower levels for the next decade or so.)

Wells has earned the nickname "Résumé," and a fair amount of resentment among long-time staff, because it often appears that the initiatives he undertakes are for the benefit of improving his résumé as opposed to dealing with fundamental problems on campus.

Sometimes those two goals converge, but not always.

Is this the kind of leader the city needs? I think you could make an argument either way. Someone who uses the city as a steppingstone to a bigger paycheck somewhere else would undoubtedly pour a lot of energy into the position. But just as likely that person would be leaving before the job is done.

On the other hand, someone who is in it for the long haul will likely be someone who is resistant to "the fierce urgency of now," to use one of this presidential season's favorite phrases.

My advice to the Council: Don't forget that it's always possible to make a bad situation worse.

OSAB IV

I know that this is one that a lot of people have been thinking about ever since I started the Oshkosh Separated at Birth series.

Oshkosh Twin

Non-Oshkosh Twin

STOP PRESS: MAGUIRE, RIECKMAN AGREE ON SOMETHING

You have to give some props to the Oshkosh Common Council on this--its decision to make it easier to amend its agenda after it's been published has brought Stew Rieckman and me into alignment on one thing.

Public Notice

Now that the Common Council has given itself permission to sneak things on to the agenda by waiting until after it's been published and distributed, wouldn't it be a good idea for the city to decide that it will make an extra effort to get the word out when new items are added?

Given Internet technology, how hard would that be? Here are my suggestions:

1. Dedicate a section of the city's homepage to highlighting late additions to the Council agenda.
2. Set up an e-mail notification list so that anyone who wants to be notified can be notified.
3. Commit to sending new items to local Web sites that follow Oshkosh government, including this one, the Oshblog, the Northwestern, Eye on Oshkosh, My Two Cents, etc.