Sunday, July 22, 2007

Wollangk in the woodshed

City Manager Richard Wollangk's latest weekly newsletter starts out the way it usually does, with an obvious and upbeat observation about how delightful things are here in Oshkosh on the Water. Four pages later, there is this curt statement about what is planned at the end of Tuesday's Common Council meeting:

"Following the Workshop [on the Convention Center], Council Member McHugh has requested an Executive Session to discuss the performance of the City Manager."


Hold on to your wallets, Oshkosh, because whatever happens next is going to be expensive.

Option No. 1, which could be the most expensive, would be for the city manager to get a stern talking to from unhappy Council members and would elicit a promise to do better. In other words, there would be no substantive change at City Hall. The reason that this would be the most expensive option is simply that the city can no longer afford to continue with the status quo.

It's the Fox River that gave Oshkosh its start, and if there is anything that will keep Oshkosh from sliding into obscurity it is a bustling, redeveloped waterfront. Unfortunately the efforts to date to rebuild the city's core have been spectacularly unsuccessful. The Leach, 100 N. Main, the convention center--all of them are at the very least underperforming. (Opera House Square is nice, but it's not doing anything to contribute to the city's revenue picture.) And the Marion Road parcel has been lying fallow for way too long.

What the city seems good at is taking property off of the tax rolls; what it's not very good at is turning such land back into revenue producing real estate.

Option No. 2, which could be expensive for other reasons, would be an abrupt "regime change." Some experienced Council watchers say there are already five votes (at least) to fire Wollangk and expect those votes to be cast Tuesday night (or in the near future).

The reason that this would be expensive is that if the Council does not proceed carefully and with appropriate legal advice it is likely to have a lawsuit and/or a messy settlement on its hands. For all his flaws, Wollangk has been careful to involve the Council at critical times, albeit minimally and sometimes obscurely.

Don't forget: He DID alert Mayor Tower to the 100 N. Main foreclosure situation before the vote on the Waterfront project.

Option No. 3 is really any number of specific scenarios about what to do next. But all of them will involve spending more money.

If we accept the argument that the status quo isn't working and the argument that a new kind of leadership is needed at City Hall, someone will have to make the argument to taxpayers that they are going to have to pony up some more money to attract the kind of executive talent that can push the city's redevelopment efforts forward.

I just came back from a trip to the East Coast, and one of the places I stopped was my hometown, Baltimore. Like Oshkosh, Baltimore was built because of its access to water, and unlike Oshkosh Baltimore has turned its waterfront assets into a bustling center of tourism, business and convention activity.

It's called the Inner Harbor, and it seems to just keep on growing. I remember when it was mostly tumbledown wharves and empty streets. An awful lot of the credit for the transformation has to go to one man, William Donald Schaefer, who as mayor of Baltimore and then governor and later comptroller of the state of Maryland, spent years making his vision of a redeveloped waterfront become a reality.

Along the way, be bumped a lot of shoulders, bruised a lot of egos, took a lot of criticism and threw a lot (a whole lot) of temper tantrums.

If fixing Oshkosh's problems were easy, it would already be done. But that's not the case.

Redeveloping the city is going to take someone like Schaefer: focused, unafraid of controversy, supremely self-confident, someone who is also smart, energetic and capable of turning on the charm when necessary.

The person in Oshkosh who comes the closest to matching that description is Richard Wells, the chancellor at UW Oshkosh. There are many things on which he and I disagree, but I have to concede that he is moving the university forward in the face of the same kind of complacency and the fear of change that have bogged down the city's redevelopment efforts.

The problems for Oshkosh in getting someone like Wells are twofold: sticker shock and culture shock.

Wells is currently making about 70 percent more than the Oshkosh city manager and came here as the result of a national search. Will Oshkosh voters be willing to go along with a national search for a new city manager and be willing to underwrite the cost of attracting top talent?

The culture shock will hit the Common Council particularly hard. If they are unhappy with Dick Wollangk's performance, wait until they are trying to deal with a big-ego city manager who not only keeps them in the dark about what is really going on but has the savvy to develop, and use, an independent power base.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Business as usual

I saw this post over on Council Member Tony Palmeri's blog. I couldn't resist commenting on the irony.

It sure looks like business as usual was applied to the River Mill Road sidewalk issue. Here's how Tony described "business as usual."

*Limited public input
*Limited public buy-in
*Questionable financing and/or planning

According to Tony, "Challenging or putting an end to business as usual (BAU) was one of the main themes of the campaign season, and pretty much every candidate said that BAU was unacceptable."

It doesn't seem to have worked out that way in my neighborhood. And that makes it hard for me to see how this Council will deal with the bigger issues before them, such as the Waterfront and 100 North Main.

Monday, July 02, 2007

Time to talk about something else

Don't you think?