Both candidates say they love county parks. Which has best approach to maintain them?
Both candidates say they love county parks. Which has best approach to maintain them? Back to the full article.
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When the county board is as destructive as it is sometimes its best to go around them. Larson is going to raise your taxes. He is saying that before he is even elected. Just imagine how tax hungry he will be after he is in the position. He is raising them on everyone, not just the imaginary millionaires that people seem to want to tax. Your property taxes will go up as well with Larson.
Not to say I favor one candidate over another, but when Larson cites a corporation counsel memo which states that “[Abele] could lease, sell or convey any **non-park** county property regardless of Board policy and without Board approval,” doesn’t that directly undercut his claim that Abele could sell the parks?
Would that it were so simple, Joe. But it depends on how you define the term “non-park.” I guess you have to ask yourself – if parks are not at risk, why has Abele sent two rounds of letters to officials at Milwaukee County’s 19 municipalities urging them to re-zone their park lands “just to make sure” they won’t get sold? Is it because they could be sold unless they are properly zoned?
According to today’s Journal Sentinel “A total of 6,568 acres of Milwaukee County-owned parks, parkways, trails, agricultural and flood management land has not been zoned by municipalities for park use and is vulnerable to sale without County Board approval, officials said Tuesday at the conclusion of a review of property records.”
You can read all about that here:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/county-asks-communities-to-rezone-more-parkland-trails-b99679351z1-370710161.html
Joe quoted: “which states that “[Abele] could lease, sell or convey any **non-park** county property regardless of Board policy” …
Thank you for that Joe. I like Christ Abele, and I like Chris Larson, but I don’t like Chris Larson’s political friends.
Chris Abele repeatedly takes credit for adding 150 acres of new park land. Yes, that did happen on his watch, but he land added was a swap, not really and ‘add’, and it was proposed by Nortwest Mutual. The land in question was agriculture land owned by the county across the road from their NML’s Franklin Campus. The NML land is a high-quality natural area now named “Barloga Woods” in honor of the late Richard Barloga a noted environmentalist. It was a win-win land swap, and the troubling thing is since Barloga Woods WAS owned by NML clearly it would not have been zoned park land. Whether Franklin sees fit to designate it so remains to be seen. So, yes, Abele did agree to a good deal, but it’s not as though he’s actively championing our parks.
So glad to see the positions of both candidates laid out side by side in place of an op-ed or endorsement.
It’s nice to see both of them side by side, but I don’t believe either of them. I don’t think they are lying, but in the absence of more information it is hard to know what is going on.
The inaccurate statement that Estabrook Dam harms the environment (when it actually maintains it) just demonstrates the lack of research going into the current uninformed policy decisions. It is same underlying issue as the domes; (1) years of deferred maintenance are taking their toll, and this issue is not contained to our parks, but is affecting all county maintained infrastructure. (2) the current Executive prioritizes the desires of special interests and lobiests over the needs of the country. It is time for a change.
Interesting that Abele, who has a multi-million dollar networth, is so quick to dismiss the needs of a neighborhood of working class families where the avg property value is $70k-250k as “wealthy” and insignificant. As if that will make voters forget how he caters to out of state multi-millionaires, like selling county owned land for $1 instead of market value.
Abele: “My opponent will try to scare voters into thinking I want to sell Milwaukee County Parks.”
No, Mr. Abele has already done a very good job of scaring voters by actually trying to sell O’Donnell Park, not once but several times!
Most recently, Abele got his GOP pals to write into the state budget that he could specifically sell O’Donnell to a for-profit buyer without any public input or board review. This was while Milwaukee Art Museum was in good-faith, board-approved negotiations to explore ways to keep the park public through some type of arrangement. That scheme was foiled after alarmed museum and parks supporters contacted legislators.
Fortunately, MAM is still working on that effort. We can only hope Abele does not try to scuttle any plan that preserves all O’Donnell Park’s public facilities, including plazas and a pavilion with the best views of Milwaukee’s lakefront.
Abele recently claimed that O’Donnell was not a “real” park, thus justifying his ongoing efforts to sell it. In Abele’s world view, Millennium Park is also not a “real park.” So perhaps citizens need only worry about parks that Abele does not consider “real parks.” That is, if we can find out which ones are on his hit list.