Strong words from anonymous commenter "Unfettered Candor" at Greg Kowalski's Metro Milwaukee Today:
Devoid of moral fiber and honest representation of the community at large, members of the Plan Commission, Zoning Board, and Common Council gut-swallowed the hook of [developer Mark] Carstensen's campaign appealing siren song and ominous pressures. They totally ignored the pleas of the homeowners in Wyndham Ridge subdivision across the street from the ugly sprawl at thee intersection of Hwy. 100 and Drexel Ave. Before these people constructed their homes, they were cautious and inquired of the City if the area across from them would remain zoned for residential development only. They were passionately assured that they would never have to worry about that.
Enter the ogres to change all of that.
The influence of self-absorbed Mayor Tom Taylor, who needed a monument for himself, made it easy for the swaggering Carstensen to ramrod his will down the throats of Franklin taxpayers.
To Carstensen, Franklin is just some convenient land that is expendable so he can continue to add more fat to his bulging wallet. And to Taylor, Carstensen's campaign contributions help him to continue his flimflam operations in Franklin government.
"Devoid of moral fiber." "Ogres." "Swaggering." "Flimflam." Yeouch. Much more at Metro Milwaukee Today.
I await "Unfettered's" bullet points and documentation!
With all due sympathy for the circumstances of George Torres's exit from Franklin's Plan Commission (illness forced him to resign), a letter like the one he wrote to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel doesn't make me want to lead a rally for his return:
Walker's transit plan makes good sense
Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker supports a strong transit system. He told the Milwaukee County Transit System to submit a balanced budget for 2009 that did not cut routes or raise fees. The good news is that transit officials met that challenge.
Looking ahead, Walker has a plan to provide a long-term funding source for the transit system by pursuing a plan at our airport that is similar to the plan being approved by Chicago for Midway Airport. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley already has received $1.8 billion for the Skyway toll bridge and is anticipating
$3 billion for Midway through a long-term lease. Scott Walker is also seeking to use all of the $91.5 million in federal aid to improve and upgrade the bus system through Bus Rapid Transit. Mayor Tom Barrett's plan for a streetcar system in a three-mile radius of downtown Milwaukee would cut $3 million in state and federal aid from the bus system. BRT is the better plan for the future.
George A. Torres Milwaukee County, Director of Transportation & Public Works Milwaukee
In other news: Amy Winehouse's lifestyle should serve as a template for all others.
Readers of this blog may recall the name; George Torres was the sitting plan commissioner who felt comfortable writing a letter dated 1/2/07 to WISDOT in support of developer Mark Carstensen's Shoppes at Wyndham Village strip mall before seeing any definitive plans and before
Carstensen's development had appeared before him in his role as plan
commissioner - - a role in which Torres would and should be expected to
show no positive predisposition toward a project that has not yet
demonstrated compliance to the city's requirements.
Mr.
Carstensen has also proven to be committed to ensuring his developments
meet all State and local requirements. He remains open and receptive to
ideas and suggestions that must be met in order to allow his projects
to move ahead.
You gotta hand it to Mark Carstensen, though. After hoodwinking both the the city of Franklin and a family into a situation where there is now a single family residence built right behind Target in "Franklin's City Civic Center District" (!!!), he had the brass coconuts to actually mention the debacle from the podium at the Sendik's opening!
It's been almost a week and my mind is still reeling from some of the things I heard from that podium; more later ...
After spending decades constructing roads in residential areas that encourage speed and inattentive driving, traffic engineers wise up.
“There’s probably a low sense of comfort when you’re going through them, maybe you’re a bit nervous,” he said. But that may be a good thing; now you’re going slow, you’re watching everything, you’re more aware of the cars around you.”
Wisconsin motorists will be driving in circles more often over the next 10 years as there is likely to be six times the number of traffic roundabouts on state highways.
And that’s not counting the growing number of the circular intersections being built on local roads.
“They’re going to be like dandelions; they’re going to be everywhere,” said state Department of Transportation spokesman Dennis Shook.
But even as DOT officials increasingly promote roundabouts as a safer, time-saving and more fuel-efficient alternative to traditional four-cornered intersections, roundabouts continue to be controversial in almost every community where they are proposed.
In Oconomowoc, where a roundabout on state Highway 16 downtown is under construction and set to open later this year, residents continue to debate its merits.
Ald. David Nold, who was not on the Common Council when the plan was approved, said he hasn’t heard one person who wasn’t associated with the project say it was a good idea.
He questions the roundabout’s price tag, including the city’s cost to buy and remove several downtown buildings to make way for it, and said DOT officials leaned on the city to approve the roundabout.
“All over the place they’re putting in these roundabouts, somebody has this idea that it’s a good thing and they’re pushing it,” Nold said.
In 2004, the DOT implemented a policy requiring roundabouts to be considered for construction every time a four-way stop or a major improvement in an intersection on a state highway was planned.
“A roundabout has equal weight to a traffic signal and the safety benefits are substantial,” said Patrick Fleming, a DOT standards development engineer who specializes in roundabouts.
“You can’t go through a roundabout at high speed and your T-bone crashes are virtually eliminated.”
In a modern traffic roundabout, motorists enter an intersection by yielding the right-of-way on their left to vehicles already moving around a central, often-grassy circle.
Drivers continue around the circle until they reach their destination street then turn right to exit the roundabout. If they miss their turn, motorists simply go around the circle again.
The speed limit in a roundabout is usually 20 mph or 25 mph and it’s deliberately designed to make it very difficult to go faster than that.
“The chances of killing someone at 20 mph are substantially less than the chances of killing someone at 55 mph,” Fleming said.
Improved safety cited
National studies have shown roundabouts reduce fatal crashes by 90%, injury crashes by 76% and crashes involving pedestrians by 30% to 40%.
In addition, DOT officials say roundabouts save time because traffic moves through them in a continuous flow and there is no more sitting at red lights when there’s no cross traffic. Roundabouts also are said to conserve gas because there’s no stopping and starting of vehicles as traffic lights change because there aren’t any traffic lights.
Currently, there are 30 roundabouts on state highways plus about another 27 on local roads in Wisconsin, Fleming said.
But as many as another 150 roundabouts are in various stages of planning on state highways and an undetermined, but increasing, number on local roads, he said
Plans for a large new interchange at I-94 and Sawyer Road at Pabst Farms in Oconomowoc, for example, includes four roundabouts. A new three-lane roundabout is planned at I-43 and Moorland Road in New Berlin. It will join a two-lane roundabout already at that intersection. A roundabout is in the works for Highways 18 and 83 in Wales in Waukesha County.
Fleming acknowledges the controversy about roundabouts and said many people are just unfamiliar with them.
“There’s probably a low sense of comfort when you’re going through them, maybe you’re a bit nervous,” he said.
“But that may be a good thing; now you’re going slow, you’re watching everything, you’re more aware of the cars around you.”
By Amy Gardner Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, July 5, 2008; A01
Think
there's no such thing as too much parking? Take a look at Tysons
Corner, where there's more parking than jobs, more parking than office
space, more parking than in downtown Washington.
That must
change, said advocates and politicians seeking to transform Virginia's
largest business hub from suburb to city. Reducing parking, charging
for parking and finding new uses for the acres of parking that separate
Tysons' buildings and the people inside is at the heart of plans to
remake the area into a dense, urban, walkable, livable and attractive
downtown.
"Who wants parking spaces to be the hallmark of a development?" said Clark Tyler, chairman of a Fairfax County-appointed
task force preparing a Tysons redevelopment plan for later this year.
"Tysons today is a shambles because its office buildings are surrounded
by parking and clogged arteries."
Taking a new approach to
parking, by building less and charging more, is a central tenet of the
new urbanism that has gripped planners and developers in suburbs and
cities across the country.
The planners said that parking,
especially free parking, encourages people to drive. Cars allow for
development sprawl, highway congestion and air pollution. The parking
lots coat the ground with impervious asphalt that sends dirty runoff
into rivers and streams. And, the planners said, parking is often ugly
and creates spaces that discourage walking or the use of a transit
system.
"If there's a free parking space, you're irrational if you don't drive," said Cheryl Cort, policy director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, based in Washington.
Reducing
the supply of parking is one way to change people's habits and patterns
of development, Cort and others said. Other crucial pieces include a
grid of streets, a mix of uses, and transit, which is why Tysons
boosters have been pushing so hard for a Metrorail extension through
the area. A decision about a rail extension, which would stretch to Dulles International Airport and into Loudoun County, is expected from federal regulators this year.
If
more people ride Metro, fewer people will drive, which means less
traffic, pollution and runoff. It also means less demand for parking.
That, in turn, opens up a world of development possibilities: narrow
streets with sidewalk cafes; intimate storefronts; tall office and
condominium towers where workers and residents can walk to lunch, to a
dry cleaners or to a Metro station.
It would be vastly different
from the Tysons of today, where virtually every destination has its own
parking area, and where nearly every trip is taken in a car, even to
the lunch spot a block away.
"It's almost impossible to walk
here," said Bill Richbourg, 62, a mortgage banker from Potomac who
works at the eastern edge of Tysons, near McLean, and who drove into
the central district on a recent weekday to have lunch at the Silver Diner. "Nobody could get here any other way."
The
Silver Diner is within a block of Leesburg Pike's concentration of
office buildings and directly across International Drive from Tysons Corner Center,
one of the country's most successful shopping malls. Yet each of these
places is surrounded by an apron of parking, suburban-style hedgerows
and wide, car-friendly traffic lanes. Not a pedestrian was in sight as
Richbourg crossed the parking lot toward the restaurant's front door.
Tysons'
dependence on the automobile, and a place to park it, is dramatic when
compared with other areas. With about 120,000 jobs, Tysons features
nearly half again as many parking spots in structures, underground and
in surface lots. That's more parking, 40 million square feet, than
office space, 28 million square feet. Tysons boasts more spaces,
167,000, than downtown Washington, 50,000, which has more than twice as
many jobs.
"This place built up from a gas station," said Reid Thompson, 37, a real estate agent with Long & Foster Real Estate
in Tysons who grew up in nearby Great Falls. "You drove your tractor
here, at least my grandparents did. The parking and the driving is a
mindset. People in Northern Virginia are drivers."
Tysons is so
paved over, in fact, that 50 percent of two watersheds within its
boundaries, Pimmit Run and Scotts Run, are covered with asphalt.
According to a Fairfax storm water management report, when 10 percent
of a watershed is covered by paving, the health of a stream is
affected. Paving that covers more than 25 percent of a watershed can
"severely degrade" waterways, the report said.
Tysons Corner's
love affair with parking is driven partly by its status as one of the
most successful shopping destinations in the country. Aerial
photographs of the district, or a glance from the balcony of the Tower
Club, show vast oceans of cars, with the widest surrounding Tysons
Corner Center and its competitor to the north, Tysons Galleria.
Yet
private developers, including the big retailers, are ready to do with
less parking. They welcome the chance to spend less money building
parking structures, which can cost as much as $40,000 per parking space.
Macerich
Corp., the owner of Tysons Corner Center, has received preliminary
approval for a major redevelopment of its property that will include
offices, condominiums, at least one hotel -- and a lower ratio of
parking than the mall has. Among the details of the development is
"shared parking" for offices, hotels and retail. Rather than provide
one set of parking that empties out by day and another that empties out
by night, the company will build less parking that will be in use
round-the-clock.
Other approaches that Fairfax will consider
include metered street parking, facilities for bicycles and
distributing information about how to join car-sharing services such as
Zipcar.
The
market is also ready for a new approach, many said. Young professionals
are eager to work in urban centers where they can shop and dine as
well. The success of the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor in Arlington County,
where 80,000 people work and where traffic has only marginally
increased through the development boom of the last decade, provides the
evidence, officials said. Developers built offices and residences with
less parking -- and the people came.
"The market quickly figured out that you didn't need as much parking," said Arlington board member Chris Zimmerman (D).
Still, there will be challenges. Stewart Schwartz,
executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, lamented the
decision by state and local officials to build the Metrorail extension
aboveground through Tysons, which will limit the area's potential to be
pretty and accessible on foot.
County planners may also be an
impediment, Schwartz said, noting that the county increased its parking
requirements recently for some developments.
Another challenge,
Tyler said, is what to do with existing structures. One idea is to
build housing on top of them, but that will require a market that can
bear the cost of such expensive construction, a reality that could be
years, even decades, away.
Ultimately, Schwartz and other
advocates said, parking should not be free -- because it is not free.
The cost in highway construction, pollution and lost productivity while
stuck in traffic should be considered, he said. And drivers should pay
a price for choosing to drive or be denied the privilege, he said.
"The
idea that every car needs a parking place for every separate place that
car goes is what has caused this spread-out landscape," Schwartz said.
"Tysons is in transition. It can't realize the opportunity to create a
great place when there's a giant parking lot wherever you look."
Item 4 on the 7/8/08 Common Council agenda: "Reimburse the Shoppes at Wyndham Village for the City’s share of the cost of the storm water management facilities for the reconstruction of W. Drexel Avenue from W. Loomis Road (STH 36) to S. Lovers Lane Road (STH 100)."
The council voted to "reimburse" Shoppes at Wyndham Village (Carstensen Development) $98,000, their share of creating an up-to-standards stormwater basin engineered to handle, hopefully, what the previous wetlands used to take care of. Alderman Wilhelm was the sole "no" vote.
Why vote no?
I wonder if anyone at the Sendik's grand opening yesterday wandered over to the east side of the store - - where the 200 year-old trees used to be.
What's wrong with this picture? Evidently, NOTHING, because Tuesday night the City of Franklin Common Council voted to immediately "reimburse" Carstensen Development $98,000 for what is at present a messed up, steep-grade, kid-eating (fence, anyone?), bank-eroding stormwater basin.
Did they fulfill the landscaping requirement? Look closely on the middle left side of the photo. Those two dead trees evidently represent the landscaping efforts to date.
Is it engineered correctly? The caved-in edges show you what happens when there aren't root systems and connective wetlands in place during torrential rain events like what we saw last month. If you've ever visited or seen pictures of the Grand Canyon (or, for that matter, my basement), you know that water goes where it wants to go and will make a path if one is not provided.
But the money was paid, even though it is obvious to the naked eye that this basin has issues that have yet to be addressed by Carstensen Development. Will they address those issues now that they have been paid, in effect, "on trust."? Let's watch closely.
In the meantime, ponder the implications - - and cost savings - - of a thoughtful site plan that would have embraced the natural conditions on the site rather than try to wrestle them into submission.
In other news, the position of City Development Director will not be immediately filled because the city cannot afford the $83,137 salary.
Great weather. Intriguing speeches (that's Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker up there saying that Franklin is "lucky" to have the most pro-development mayor and common council in the state of Wisconsin) that I'll comment on tomorrow. Click the photo above to see a whole series.
I just finished an excellent book called THE BIG SORT that does much to both explain the divisiveness and inability to compromise that we see in modern right-vs-left "discourse" and illuminate some of the reasons we live where we live (hint: it has NOTHING to do with shopping for low property taxes).
THE BIG SORT will provide fodder for a great many posts in the weeks ahead. I'll introduce it with the very last paragraph in the book, a passage which succinctly condenses the author's thesis. Very insightful stuff:
Beginning nearly thirty years ago, the people of this country unwittingly began a social experiment. Finding comfort in "people like us," we have created, and are creating, new institutions distinguished by their isolation and single-mindedness. We have replaced a belief in a nation with a trust in ourselves and our carefully chosen surroundings. And we have worked quietly and hard to remove any trace of the "constant clashing of opinions" from daily life. It was a social revolution, one that was both profound and, because it consisted of people simply going about their lives, entirely unnoticed. In this time, we have reshaped our economies, transformed our businesses, both created and decimated our cities, and altered institutions of faith and fellowship that have withstood centuries. Now more isolated than ever in our private lives, cocooned with our fellows, we approach public life with the sensibility of customers who are always right. "Tailor-made" has worked so well for industry and social networking sites, for subdivisions and churches, we expect it from our government, too. But democracy doesn't seem to work that way.
Fountains of Franklin has a problem; the land it owns is bisected by a storage facility, and the owners will not sell (even as the city of Franklin applies pressure). FofF can't really do much in terms of a unified commercial space until they get the owners of the storage facility to sell them the land that effectively splits their developable property. You can't get from one section to the other without going back out on Rawson (though that "solution" would be par for the course in Franklin).
Wouldn't it be funny if the developers of Fountains of Franklin found out that rival developer Mark Carstensen - - whose not-yet-ready-for-prime-time Target-Sendik's strip mall has a ribbon cutting scheduled for tomorrow - - was visiting the owner of that storage facility?
Anonymous commenter chucks rocks at Franklin pro-developer politics
"Devoid of moral fiber." "Ogres." "Swaggering." "Flimflam." Yeouch. Much more at Metro Milwaukee Today.
I await "Unfettered's" bullet points and documentation!
Posted at 10:35 AM in Bad Planning, Close to Home, Commentary, Community Concepts, Current Affairs, Politics, Problems, Shops at Wyndham Village, The Shops at Wyndham Village project, Transparency, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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