Franklin — As a parent of a former Pleasant View Elementary School student, John Michlig knows as well as anyone how the conditions can be for students trying to get to school.
Subdivisions on either side do not have a sidewalk or path connection to the school. The road that brings vehicles to the school does not have a shoulder on which a child could ride a bike. Buses must squeeze onto narrow city streets.
It's bad enough that Michlig has seen children get picked up by a school bus a mere two blocks away because they do not have a safe route to walk to the school.
"You got this condition people refer to as, 'Nearby is far away,' " Michlig said.
Michlig has been a volunteer on the Franklin Trails Committee since it formed last year to address problems on 51st Street near Pleasant View, 4601 W. Marquette Ave.
Funding help In the last week, Franklin was awarded a $19,700 grant for a federal program called Safe Routes to School. The program encourages children from kindergarten through eighth grade to walk and bike to school by creaking safer biking and walking routes.
Franklin was one of 34 communities in Wisconsin to receive funding.
With that money, officials will plan possible improvements in the Pleasant View area, which may include anything from sidewalks to a foot bridge over a nearby creek.
After the planning stages are complete, the trails committee hopes to receive a much larger, possible six-figure second grant to pay for those improvements.
Planning the path
But first things first: coming up with the plan.
Part of the process includes soliciting feedback from businesses and residents in the area so everyone is on the same page about what the neighborhood needs, Michlig said. Their input will help assess the needs of the area.
Committee members want to find out how to make it easier for neighborhood kids to walk to school. Many city officials and those in the neighborhood participated in a "walking workshop" last spring and were struck by how difficult that can be, Michlig said.
"We heard it again and again - we as parents are stuck having to drive our child to school when actually it's so close," Michlig said.
Plus, by encouraging the idea of walking to school, kids would also be more physically fit without having to go out of their way to find exercise opportunities, Michlig said.
Mark Cloutier, the school district's manager of buildings and grounds, said that while the district does not have control over what goes on outside its boundaries, school officials support sidewalks and anything that makes pedestrian access better in the community.
He noted there is a sidewalk in front of the school itself and he did not expect the Safe Routes to School program to change the district's requirement to bus every student.
Pedestrian accommodations were recently improved near another school building just to the south, when 51st Street in front of Franklin High School was reconstructed and sidewalks were added with the help of federal stimulus money.
In other words, smart growth has become the “conservative” investment. The survey was sponsored by a group of real estate-related companies based in New Jersey, Virginia, New York and Pennsylvania and covered a wide range of issues in an effort to determine how current economic conditions are affecting builders.
Ellen Dunham-Jones andJune Williamson, architecture professors
Robert Bruegmann, University of Illinois at Chicago
Edward Glaeser, economist, Harvard
Laurie Volk andTodd Zimmerman, housing market analysts
Gregory K. Ingram, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
So, now I'm a plan commissioner ...
Back in June of 2006, I started this blog as a research exercise upon learning that the neighboring cities of Franklin (where I live) and Oak Creek would somehow cooperate on developing 27th Street, which acts as a border between the communities.
That led me to the discovery of a book called THE GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE by James Howard Kunstler, a reading experience that utterly changed my view of the world around me.
Haven't read it yet? Take a break and GO ORDER A COPY. I'll wait.
Anyway, attempting to follow the 27th Street drama led to my attendance at many Common Council and Plan Commission meetings, where, combined with my outside reading, I learned "how the sausage is made" in terms of suburban development. I discovered that our suburban built environment will continue to be bleak and uninviting (with precious few exceptions) unless citizens and stakeholders step up and voice their opinions. So very often, bad planning was a result of simply continuing with policies that "worked" in the past, without regard to our present reality or the long term effects of, for instance, making it impossible for kids to walk to school or sporting events.
So my blog became a voice in the suburban wilderness, introducing terms like "walkability" and "smart growth" into the public debate (I think I can take credit for the recent proliferation of the phrase "sea of asphalt" in local media). I began speaking at public meetings -- and, after a period of attracting little more than quizzical stares, I think the economic and social sense of what I was advocating began to take root.
I did my time on the Economic Development Commission; continue to work on connectivity issues while serving on the Trails Committee (including helping to capture a Safe Routes to School Grant); and kept plugging away at the Sprawled Out blog.
Recently, a vacancy appeared on the Franklin Plan Commission, and I threw my name in for consideration. Last night, the Common Council voted unanimously to endorse my nomination, so I am now a Plan Commissioner -- first meeting is tomorrow night.
I'm grateful for the opportunity, and hope to bring something of value to Franklin's overall vision. I also want to use this blog to increase transparency of the planning and development process in Franklin, so you can look forward to seeing, whenever possible, pdfs of the materials Plan Commissioners .have access to for each meeting and decision.
Onward ...
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