While E.
Santa’s here. The first thing I see as I walk in the door of Fall River Village Hall is Saint Nick himself. I have made it through the pinball machine of pre hunting season deer on the roads of Columbia County at dusk to arrive at the monthly meeting of the Fall River Village Board. Quaint would be the word. Charming too.
The Village Board is sitting around a conference table. There are ten (?) audience chairs, all taken, and two chairs set off to the side, with nobody sitting on them. So, I take one of those. Former Poynette police officer Spurbeck sits next to me and says hello. He is Fall River’s Police Chief, and it is quickly apparent he is well regarded. No less an arbiter of naughty or nice than Santa himself presents Chief Spurbeck with a check from a veteran’s group to assist Fall River PD with their “Shop With A Cop” program, which provides Christmas presents for kids who could use a little more. Veterans helping kids in a small town. Could not be any more heartwarming.
Not a complaint. Just an observation. Agenda management is something of a skill that city managers either learn in a hurry or get run out of the profession for. Fall River is yet too small for a city manager / village administrator type, so I get to watch ninety minutes or so of important to Fall River stuff before I make my pitch.
Fall River has a liquor license they are not using. Poynette has a shuttered supper club that needs a liquor license to reopen. Poynette is also growing at good clip, and will pass 3,000 population next year or early into 2027. When that happens, the most enthusiastically inebriated state in the nation will deliver a new liquor license to Poynette, because the legislature has made it a law that each increment of 500 people in Wisconsin means a new liquor license. Why are there so many small bars in Wisconsin? Because every 500 people (men, women, children … people who don’t drink) get their own bar.
How about this Fall River? You let us borrow your unused license for a year or so, and we’ll let you have our next one when we pass 3,000? We’ll also invite you to the re-opening of the Owl’s Nest. And we (and when I say we, I mean the guy who wants to reopen the supper club) will pay you. So (and this is where the non-stop problem solving kicks in) you have money to pay for those new high tech school crossing signs you were thinking about at the start of the meeting.
They didn’t know it at the start of the meeting, but there were two Santas in the room.
They treat me nice and are interested in the idea and ask me to have our Village Attorney draft something for their Village Attorney to look at. Thus, that’s in progress.
What amused me most is how I described the idea to the Board I work for. Before I acquainted them with Wis. Stat. § 125.51(4)(e), I put it in more relatable terms – What if Wile E. Coyote was not interested in the roadrunner? What if Wile E. Coyote wanted a liquor license instead?
Say what you will about the efficacy of Wile E’s brand loyalty to the Acme Corporation, he suffered from no lack of imagination. And, its not for nothing that my Poynette business card eschews the drab routine of stating a title for a John Prine lyric instead; “a young man, from a small town, with a very large imagination”.
What if we tracked how much different land uses provide in revenue and cost us in service delivery, and what if we just went out and grabbed as much land as we could, and then used our fiscal impact model to figure out how to arrive at something unheard of: a triple A bond rating with no municipal property tax? See: Vernon Hills.
What if we imagined a school so wonderful that the certainty of local school board denials of our charter would lead to a state law change, so we could open a K-8 neighborhood school with an environmental science core curriculum? See: Prairie Crossing Charter School.
What if we punched back at all the social engineering that made urban decline the norm for a Midwest manufacturing city and grew the city faster than those bloodsucking, freeloading suburbs? See: Davenport, Iowa (2001 – 2015).
What if we stopped adhering to the script of a disempowered community, threw the Fort Ord Reuse Authority and those equine developers to the curb and fashioned our own future as a diverse and growing college town (and went back to red carpet so we had the coolest City Hall again)? See: Seaside.
What if we set that lame plat that is never going to do anything good for this community aside and we get a big park and some interesting and affordable housing instead? See: Point Gardens, etc.
Not every Rube Goldberg idea / contraption worked out exactly as planned, of course. A college scholarship for every Davenport high school kid? Worked for Kalamazoo and would have worked better for Davenport. Buying out the casino so it would function as a community non-profit and stop exporting $25+ million of wealth each year out of Davenport? Same idea produced $2.3B so far in Polk County. You can send thousands of kids to college with that kind of cash. Maybe provide pre-K ed, hire some more firefighters and lower taxes too. Posting every incoming and outgoing email to the City’s website? Luminous while it lasted but forgot to factor in Newton's Third Law.
In retrospect, those three ideas were so threatening to the regional power structure which was dependent on Davenport failing that it is a small wonder I did not end up in the trunk of a Buick. I escaped, but Davenport’s future thunked around in that trunk for years, getting more than a little odiferous in the process.
These things are supposed to end on retrospection and / or bright spots, so this one will. One of the best aldermen I have ever worked with will become Davenport’s new Mayor in January. The two preceding mayors were disasters and the urban decline machine is still churning out unnecessary streets, sewers, McMansions and $27 million suburban police stations to keep those big screens over the great room fireplaces safe. Or, some such thing. So, Mayor-elect Gordon has his work cut out for him.
But the good news is Jason is a smart, young (comparatively) inquisitive type, not afraid to try new things. My only advice is to test some of that Acme stuff before lighting the fuse.
