Or, try this: Your company is in a building next to a parking ramp that’s nearly always full. A big event for another tenant is going to need extra parking, so the night before they put the word out to compnaies in the building, and offer to pick up the bus fares and throw in some extra tickets to a movie for people who don’t drive the next day. You click ‘Yes’ in the email from your company to volunteer. Your company, which knows your account information, automatically transfers the fare credit and tickets to you from the other company, which doesn’t know (and doesn’t need to know) anything about you.

I could go on with many other ideas involving bus fare payments – creative pricing during snow emergencies, work bus passes that pay for rides right before and after working hours but not on weekends, or that are limited to specific trips, et cetra. If we had a very flexible bus fare payment system, the list of scenarios the community wants to enable could be very, very long.

The technology involved here is not especially complicated. The challenge is not even coming up with the list of scenarios. The challenge is how do we make the system that was designed to enable the 100 scenarios we imagined before we bought the system enable the 101st scenario we came up with after we signed the contract and installed the system?

One of the keys to building a such a system is to ensure that it has a strong commitment to open access and a solid “Application Programming Interface” that 3rd parties can access. As an example, the City of Boston provides access to its real-time bus location data, and here’s a long list of applications that make use of that data. Boston didn’t have to pay to develop those – entrepreneurs detected a need and went to work. Boston focused on the part that only it could do – tracking the buses and providing the data.  More locally, Madison bus data is available through an API, and now you can get real-time access to your bus through the Mobile UW App on the iPhone, the UW Homepage on nearly any mobile device, through SMS, or as a real-time display in that can be deployed by any business that has an old computer. None of that was something Metro thought to develop or had the staff time to develop.

That sort of approach is thinking of the system as more of a platform with which anyone can build on, rather than a single solution that does everything. A good way to wind up with a platform as the end result is to treat the acquisition not as a single system, but as parts that are composed into a single system, with potentially different vendors providing different parts. Karl Fogel, of Civic Commons, writes in his post ‘New York City Bus Tracking: Procuring for an Open Architecture‘:

 What’s particularly interesting about this project is how it was structured as an open platform from the very beginning — starting with the procurement of the various components.  The MTA separated the project into a software side and a hardware side. That might sound obvious, but it’s actually not how a lot of civic procurement happens. More typically, a city requests to buy a whole solution in one piece, and each interested vendor submits a bid encompassing every aspect of the project: the server software, the on-bus hardware that reports the bus’s position, the mobile phone applications and web applications to query the server, public display units… everything, the whole enchilada….By separating the software side from the hardware side, and by making a few other key decisions, such as that the server software would be open source, the MTA has essentially forced their bus-tracking system to have good APIs — because the on-bus hardware uses published APIs to talk to the server software, and because the server software is now an independent piece whose value derives from being able to communicate with anyone’s client applications as easily as possible

Unfortunately, buying a system as separate components is not the option that cities often reach for first. Again, returning to Fogel:

It’s easy to understand the attraction of this [whole-solution] method for both sides: the city gets to externalize all the details and just write a check.

More to the point, the city can write a Request-For-Proposals that focus only on the end goals, and not necessarily have to know the details of how the different components will interface. It’s a much simpler RFP to write. And in the greater scheme of things, the city staff writing the RFP can’t only worry about hypothetical scenarios of pay-by-smartphone to make a State Street business happy. Above all, they 13 million riders that need to get on the bus quickly and efficiently.

I’m not a fan of single-vendor implementations of big systems. For one, and returning to Fogel one last time:

But the disadvantages (for the city) are equally obvious: the vendor becomes the only competence center, the only place with enough expertise to service and maintain the system over the long haul. Great deal for the vendor; not such a great deal for the taxpayer.

Once the city has sunk significant funds into the all-in-one solution, it puts the city in a negotiating disadvantage for future upgrades. That 101st scenario we want to enable? Sure, it can be done, for a huge price of whatever the vendor wants to charge. The city is also at risk: Washington, DC has to replace its SmarTrip farecard system because the company that makes the cards went out of business and they can’t get new cards.  Once their stockpile runs out, they’re in trouble, so like it or not, they’re upgrading.

Finally, the big single solutions just don’t tend to be very good, especially in government IT. What was the last government website you interacted with? Was it a pleasant experience? Probably not. Clay Johnson has savaged the Federal Government on this point. Johnson, who believes in Government and was behind the first Obama website, claims that procurement is broken and it’s killing America.  He hammers home on the extraordinarily high sums the government spends on some of its website, and his diagnosis is that the regulatory and procedural complexity of procurement means that the best technology and price don’t win, but the companies that have the lawyers and accountants to file the paperwork and slog through the process win, and the government is stuck with substandard technology. Clay acknowledges that procurement reform isn’t likely to win elections,  but that it’s an important problem and wonders if we might not be better off reducing the complexity and attempts at avoiding fraud (which don’t really work anyway) to simplify the process and make it more fair.

Clay goes on: in another piece, he cites the growing contracting cartel as doing more than just costing government more money – it’s making it harder to trust government:

This isn’t right, it’s not fair, and more than that: it’s breaking us. It’s widening the gap between the technology that government has to operate, and what people expect. Given time it will cause people’s faith in government to collapse more than it already has. Today that gap represents itself with the eyes rolling when people have to deal with government data or government websites. But as that gap grows, without technology that the people outside the government take for granted, government itself will become the equivalent of an infant in a world of mature adults. It will be the governmental consequence of Moore’s Law — that gap is growing exponentially while Government’s access to it and to the people that understand it is often shrinking. The status quo isn’t just making things difficult, it’s asphyxiating government’s ability to serve.

All of this serves to underscore that there is intense complexity in procurement in the first place, especially in a city as fond of its processes as Madison is known to be.

Complexity be damned though. Madison is a city where citizens can and are expected to get involved, and I want to see us find a path forward that ensures that our ideas for civic improvement aren’t limited because we bought the wrong software for our farebox and can’t afford to replace it. I’m extremely fortunate: Alder Satya Rhodes-Conway has arranged for me to sit down with herself, the Chuck Kamp, the director of Metro, and Anne Monks from the Mayor’s office. I’ve got the ears of the people who can make a difference.

The only problem is I have no idea what to tell them. Grad school has cut down on the number of things I’d call myself an expert on, and bus fare systems wouldn’t have been on the list in the first place. I was further humbled when I found an analysis done by another blogger of the DC Metro’s fare replacement system. Even as a computer science grad student, I had to admit that was a lot of three letter acronyms.

So here’s my plan: I’m going to lay out the lessons of open data and platform access. They’re mostly already on-board because of the tracking experience, but I’m going to do what I can to be sure that they see the possibilities for payments, too. If you’re reading this and you have other suggestions for scenarios we should support, please add them in the comments.

Then, I’m going to do what I can to help connect Madison with other cities that have recently gone through the procurement process looking for new fareboxes. This will be the first ForwardLookout post I’ve ever done where much of my intended audience does not live in Madison. Farebox RFPs are not likely to be a core competency of any city, and I imagine every city that goes through them spends a fair amount of time researching, learning, and documenting best practices. Madison needs to connect with those cities, learn from them, and then share what it learns. If you’re reading this and your city has a a success story, please, let us know!

I have no doubt the RFP we want to write has already largely been written. We just need to find it, and we need to do what we can to help Metro find it. We are in this together.

Paul Fanlund wrote a nice piece asking for feedback on the future of the Cap Times. Like many, I was sad when it ceased print publication, but I never viewed it as a defeat for a progressive viewpoint, just as the acknowledgement that the afternoon newspaper in a two-paper town will suffer, especially if it doesn’t have a Sunday issue. I was hoping that the end result would be that the Editorial Board of the remaining Madison newspaper would be a better reflection of Madison, but alas, they’re still spewing conservative talking points. I also wish that the two newsrooms would better integrate: often Deborah Ziff (WSJ) and Todd Finkelmeyer (CapTimes) will write the same UW story, which seems like a waste. But, mostly, I’m just glad the CapTimes has found a way to keep publishing its progressive editorials, and to ensure that there are two reporters for many local beats.

I’ve been thinking about media some over the past few days and stewing on this post, and today’s move by the Daily Cardinal to become part of the Madison.com online presence only added to that. I like that the Madison.com “empire” is growing with things like WisPolitics.com. Shawn Doherty’s eyebrow-raising interview with TIF Coordinator Joel Gromacki and her earlier story on the Edgewater demonstrate just how much value a professional journalist can bring to advancing the civic conversation and informing the public.

* * * * *

What really got me thinking about this post has been a flurry of blog posts about the true “Apple TV”, the long-expected true vision of the product that Steve Jobs claimed to “have finally cracked.” Joe Hewitt (who was one of the two creators of Firefox, and wrote the Facebook app for the iPhone) speculated on his blog  on how such a TV would work, Dan Frommer gamed out why he thinks the real Apple TV will be an entire TV, and not just another box you plug into your TV, and John Gruber gave us the soundbite: “Apps are the new channels“. The thesis is simple: Just as the iPhone managed to convince you to replace your phone with a computer without any objection, so too will the Apple TV manage to convince you to replace your TV with a computer without you really realizing it. You’ll still use your AppleTV (or iTV) for everything you use your TV for, just as you use your iPhone for everything you used your old phone for, but you get a considerably richer experience. The software stack, the technology, and the zeitgeist understanding from years of DVRs, Youtube, and Netflix streaming have primed us for a realization that consuming TV only based on what’s on the schedule is the wrong way to go, and it’s time for someone to step forth with an integrated project that throws the whole thing away, and I have no doubt that it will be Apple that really makes this market. You may not actually own an AppleTV – it’s likely that Apple will reset the marketplace and others will enter, just as many people own Android phones and not iPhones, but no one would own an Android phone were it not for the iPhone. It won’t be an easy path there – Frommer lays out the case against it too, but I’m hopeful.

So what does this burst of Apple-fanboy-ism have to do with newspapers? I think if there is a shakeup of TV into a world that is much more on-demand, newspapers will be part of what wipes out local TV stations.

* * * * *

Local TV stations, and the television “networks” are an anachronism. Once upon a time, local stations produced much of their own content, but over the years, it’s gotten to where they now distribute little of their own content, instead syndicating content from other producers, either the big-four networks or directly from content producers (e.g. Oprah). Their primary purpose today is to provide advertising for local businesses, to function as the last-mile distribution system over the airwaves, and to create some local content like the local news broadcasts.

I don’t pretend to understand the economics of running a local broadcast TV station, and who pays who in the various relationships, but it’s largely irrelevant. The functions of the local stations face difficult trends that make their future doubtful.

The first is advertising personalization. The blanket advertising that dominates the TV model is absurd: neither I nor my boyfriend will ever need a product aimed specifically for women, but my household see the ads regardless. In theory, targeting ads to my household should be simple: the cable company certainly knows who lives in my house, and if it doesn’t know it can purchase that information easily, and give me much better ads, regardless of what show I’m watching. (This holds true even for Brand Awareness advertising) Personalized targeting is standard operating procedure on the web, and eventually, advertisers will demand it for television, even if it requires some changes to the infrastructure. Even if none of the Apple “apps as channels” comes to pass, the cable companies or Google (I’m convinced offering personalized TV advertising is why Google is building its gigabit fiber network) will make it happen in some form. And, as localization is a subset of personalization, it will eventually be easy (in fact, easier) for local businesses to build individualized campaigns in their communities. The utility of these personalized campaigns will so outpace nontargeted advertising that it is inevitable that anyone who cannot offer them will suffer, which especially dooms the revenues of over-the-air broadcast TV. Furthermore, it’s hard to see the local TV stations as anything other than rent-seekers (in the economic sense of the word) if they are only agents trying to sell advertising in a personalized world on someone else’s distribution platform, and they don’t hold many cards in that arrangement. Targeting favors consolidation of as much data as possible from across multiple sources, which implies fewer, bigger organizations. Long term, I’d be very bearish on the advertising revenue of local TV stations.

The second trend is the eventual end of over-the-air broadcasts in the first place. A much more detailed version is in Heller’s ‘The Gridlock Economy’, but the gist is spectrum is very, very valuable, and as more people get online with mobile phones and devices, devoting so many megahertz of space to Digital TV broadcasts will be hard to justify. Already, somewhere well over 80% of households get their TV signals from cable or satellite, and the cable infrastructure passes 98% of all households. Hazlett estimates for $4.5B the remaining few households could be connected. From the cable company’s perspective, the marginal cost of these households is minimal (they have to maintain the cable regardless) and from a societal-good standpoint, we are much better off ending all TV broadcasts, finding a way to get everyone who currently gets the free broadcast channels over the air to get them through cable, and repurposing the entire TV spectrum into mobile communication bandwidth. If (and, I think, when) this happens, then what’s the point of the local TV stations?

And before you go all Tea-Partier on me and accuse me of wanting to give poor people free HBO, that’s not what I’m saying. All I’m saying is that only a small portion of the population is currently using the TV spectrum and we should look at ways to move them off of that spectrum. It may require a small investment, like the free DTV converter boxes as part of the analog-digital conversion, or we redirect some of the Universal Service Fund fees. Or, with increased advertising revenue from better targeting, it might be possible to fund basic tiers entirely with no public support.

* * * * *

If future advertising requires a more intelligent infrastructure than over-the-air broadcast can support, and/or over-the-air broadcast is ended, that leaves just local content like the news as the remaining function of local stations. To be clear, I believe that there is and will be a strong market for the local news, and the market is sufficiently large that even if the only distribution channel was the web or something like apps on an AppleTV the news would probably survive. But the same web/app distribution model that an NBC15 or Channel3000 could move into is the same model the Capital Times could enter, and that brings me back to my point. If I’m going to bet on who better moves into a web/app only ecosystem, my bet is the newspapers.

I don’t want to disparage the work the local TV stations do: Jessica Arp does some of the finest political breaking news reporting in the state, David Douglas has a great feel for bringing interesting stories to life, and the NBC morning team has a very watchable chemistry. I’ve never done it, but I’m reasonably certain that on-camera reporting or story-telling is not trivial and not everyone would be good at it.

The trouble is that TV news has a very constrained format for their output: stories that are never more than a few hundred words of content, a total package that can only be 22 to 24 minutes long, covering news, sports, weather, and a minute or two of something else on occasion. Their staffs are relatively small because they simply couldn’t use more material if they created it. They’re good, but they’re not in any position to do anything new.

On the other hand, the newsroom of a good-sized paper, like Capital Newspapers, is much bigger, even with all of the cutbacks in newsrooms. It’s not huge, but there’s a bigger support staff and it’s expected that it will be more versatile than that of a TV station. It’s not uncommon for a paper to put together visualizations or data analysis, and do in-depth, long form journalism – something that a TV station wouldn’t have time to show even if they devoted the entire half-hour to the story.

At their core, local TV news and newspapers are fundamentally reporters. However, I believe that it would be easier for a newspaper staff to put together the content for a TV broadcast than a TV station could put together the content for an issue of a newspaper.

I hope that the AppleTV version of the TV news is something new. (I’m also sure that Clay Shirky has written about some of what I’m about to write about, but I can’t find a reference right now.) Remember that TV News has been under hard constraints: The same 22 minute show has to appeal to everyone. Again, that’s absurd. What I do want in a TV news broadcast? Good coverage of local news. The weather. No high school sports. Some Badger coverage, like an interview with Jared Abbrederis that no one else is doing, but no other college or pro sports news – I’ll get that from ESPN. Other viewers want something else: skip the weather, and give them highlights of every local high school football game. In an AppleTV “app” delivered newscast, there’s no reason that a “station” couldn’t provide both. I still want a final product feels like a TV News show, something I can sit back, press play, and watch without having to do anything for the next 30 minutes – I just want it spliced together with different material. Computers are really good at doing that splicing.

You need a larger library of content to be able to stitch this together, and so it’s the newspapers who are better suited to create this library. The newspapers are also better positioned to reuse this content – as part of their “TV News”, on their websites, as the basis for more in-depth long form work, as rich content on their tablet app. They should be taking Joe Hewitt’s advice and support AirPlay in their apps now, and start thinking of a world that the TV and the iPad are aware of each other and interact, each handling the content to which it is best suited.

This vision depends somewhat on the AppleTV/”Apps as the new channels” paradigm to eventually come forward, and while I do believe that personalized advertising and the eventual ending of over-the-air TV broadcasts are inevitable and doom local TV, so long as the “Apps as channels” paradigm opens, the opportunity for newspapers to move into the TV news space will also open. Even if the traditional TV News broadcast survives unchanged, there is room enough in the market for both the broadcasts and the app version to exist.

* * * * *

I am never going to subscribe to a paper newspaper again. I would watch a newscast  more tailored to my  interests with more frequency. I still want to know what’s going on in the local community. The opportunity to do all of that – better – is coming. Clay Shriky has written about how we need some chaos in the new news environment to mix things up and see what works and what doesn’t. The “newspaper” and the “TV Station” will hopefully be things of the past. It might take a bit of chaos to get there, but the core essentials have a bright future.

So, Paul, my advice to you: keep investing in the Cap Times app. Get video going. Poach a person or two from the local TV stations to help you get started and to be your “anchor.” Keep providing, and provide more of, the great in-depth work that your reporters are doing. The revolution and reinvention of TV will be fast, but the Cap Times is in a great position to come out stronger.

Brenda has covered this over the past few months, and unfortunately, the process hasn’t been handled well. The process that initially vetted the proposals certainly violated the law,  and what came out of the process has been frustrating in that it came forward with a ‘this is it’ attitude of which developers were being invited to make proposals, with no sense of how or why these were the proposals advanced. The proposals were the subject of a Common Council discussion last week, and while we’re a ways from seeing ground broken, it’s time to start digging into what’s been proposed.

The 2012 budget includes $5.5M in potential TIF funds for projects on these sites. In order to get the money, developers would have to make specific proposals that the Common Council can approve along with the regular land use approvals, but this budget placeholder gives some sense of what the city expects to see in requests.

Before we begin, even though I think most of the readers of this blog are already well-informed of the background, the three projects are all taking place on the 700 and 800 blocks of East Washington Ave – the former Don Miller car lot. Last year, the city bought the property. It can be divided up into three sections, shown below (though, it’s worth noting that it doesn’t have to be divided into three. We’ll come back to that.)

The three sites - two on the north side and one on the south

It’s also worth quickly reviewing the building heights envisioned on along the corridor. This is from the Tenney-Lapham plan.

Adopted building heights, as part of the neighborhood/city comp plan. Click on it to see a bigger version.

* * * * *

The proposal on the south side of East Washington, in the 2 acres of the 800 block, is from the Rifkin Group. It envisions a five-story tower fronting on to East Wash, with a parking structure behind that, and smaller buildings along Livingston and on East Main street. Here’s a sample render, and you can see many more of them in Rifkin’s proposal document on the city’s website.

The Rifkin proposal, looking towards Monona from East Wash

On the whole, I like this proposal. I wish that it was taller, but I appreciate that they put as much as they could up-front on East Wash to present the feel of a larger building. I like how they’ve hidden the parking structure in the interior. If I have one concern that’s specific to this site, it’s that I think their retail on East Main is going to be a real challenge. Here’s what is there now, and here’s what they’ve got proposed:

Looking on E Main towards E Wash - the rear of the site

Same view as above, after redevelopment

Absolutely, it’s a huge improvement. But here’s what’s on the south side of East Main St:

East Main Street. This wouldn't change.

This just is an unhappy view out the window of any retail on East Main St:

The view out the future window. Probably OK for gin, not so much for coffee.

That said, as much as East Main Street looks like something out of Detroit, it’s not all a wasteland. When I was walking down the street to take these photos, I stumbled across this:

The Old Sugar distillery, trying to bring a bit of life to the streetscape

It’s the Old Sugar Distillery. They’re mostly in the business of making spirits, but they have a bar on site that’s open a few nights a week. I went back later that night to do some research (oh, the things I do for the blog) and it was a great place. It was busy, and a crowd of mostly mid-20s to early-40s, not uncomfortably loud, and very good service (they noticed I didn’t really like my first drink, and replaced it with a different one on the house. They’re not kidding, the Honey Caps go down easy). They got a shout-out in the Frugal Traveler’s visit to Madison, and I’m definitely going back, too. I hope that as East Wash is developed, they’re just one of many new places to open in the corridor.

Bottom line, I’m pretty happy with the Rifkin proposal and would be pleased to see it advanced.

* * * * * 

On the other side of the street and just up the block, on the north side of the 700 block, there is a proposal from Otto Gebhardt for a residential tower wrapped in some officespace/retail, along with some extra residential fronting on to East Mifflin street. The neighborhood is starting to get a look at the proposal, which now has a name – the ‘Constellation’

Gebhardt's 'Constellation' project

There are many more renderings and massing studies on the neighborhood’s website.

In the proposal to the city, Gebhardt lays out strong sustainability goals as a priority for the project, aiming for about a LEED Silver level. (Interestingly, “LEED Silver Equivalency”, which sounds like they’re not going to actually try to be certified). It’s a litany of enhancements, from green roofs to low flow water fixtures to solar-conscious designs and solar water heating.

It’s hard to have strong opinions about this project given how little has been fleshed out. It will apparently be 12 stories, based on what was presented to the Tenney-Lapham neighborhood in September. Gebhardt’s reasoning in choosing a 12-story target is to be able to ask for a smaller TIF subsidy.

Recall from the opening section that the height target this area was 8 stories, with permission to go to 10 stories if the design is “exceptional”. Now, I’m not really a fan of density bonuses (I’d rather see them automatically given, with exceptional design required) but going from 10 stories to 12 stories doesn’t bother me that much.

What does concern me is Gebhart’s track record of design. Behold the monstrosity that they have inflicted upon the city:

Gebhardt's building on Spring Street. It makes my eyes bleed.

Awful colors, terrible form, crappy materials: the only thing exceptional about that design is how ugly it is. Even the guitar-shaped sign over the door manages to be excrucitaingly tacky. We can only hope that the UW does in fact move quickly and need to tear that building down 20 years from now. I do not want anything that bad in my neighborhood nor supported with my tax dollars. They’ve pledged to work with the neighborhoods as the design evolves, so perhaps it’s not hopeless. The stakeholders and decision-makers such as the Urban Design Commission must be vigilant and demand detailed information from Gebhardt, and actually ensure that something exceptional is built for exceeding the recommended height by 50%.

* * * * *

The final proposal is from Urban Land Interests, and takes up the entire 800 block on the north side of East Washington Avenue, right after Breese-Stevens field. Here are two images – one, a footprint, and the second, a small model to show massing ideas, and obviously not building designs.

Site Layout for ULI's block plan

Massing proposal for ULI. The two white models are the office buildings.

Simply put, I hate it.

I’ll get into why I hate it shortly, but let me start with what I really like about it: it tries to respect Breese Stevens by including a Plaza on the corner of Patterson and East Wash – right across the street from the recently-rebuilt “plaza” in front of Breese-Stevens, and put some emphasis on this corner as a destination, and keystone of the corridor. The plaza is way too small, but it’s a start.

When I was in DC last year, I stayed in the Columbia Heights neighborhood, and was struck by how clear their redevelopment effort along 14th Street mirrored our aspirations for East Washington (seriously, if you click on only one link in this post, read this article in the Washington Post – “A Rapid Renaissance in Columbia Heights” ) If our city planning staff doesn’t know it or the people behind the Development Corporation of Columbia Heights, we should put them on a plane immediately and send them east.

Now, it’s not perfect model – much of the success has been in part to the creation of a large retail destination project, the DC USA Mall (with an urban Target!) and the opening of the Columbia Heights Metro (subway) stop there earlier. DC also has a population density that we’re a long way from matching. That said, they’ve created at the DC USA/Metro stop a feel of a town square and focal point. There’s a confluence of transit, a large anchor development, a historic renovation of the Tivoli Theater, and an urban park to tie it all together. When I was there, I saw families and shoppers just enjoying their time there, and as one blog noted, one indicator of how Columbia Heights has “made it” is how it is now a gathering site for protests. Another blog post is spot-on: they have enhanced DC’s Most Diverse Neighborhood, and part of that was because of bold planning and savvy decisions over the future of city-owned parcels.

Kenyon Park on 14th in DC. The Tivoli theater is in the background, a new condo building on the right.

(Image from the NewColumbiaHeights blog/DC DOT Facebook page)

* * * * *

And that’s the crux of my hatred for the ULI proposal: it doesn’t show any savvy nor fully acknowledge the importance and potential of the site. It is bland, and shows no creativity in addressing the challenges. ULI has it in them, I’m sure of it – they’re the ones who brought Block 89 to life on the Capitol Square, which is one of the few parts of Madison architecture that’s been built in the last generation that’s any good.

ULI’s proposal spends most of its time making the case that the economics of a large office tower on this site and at this moment in time are really bad. I don’t disagree with them, but I don’t think the answer is “so we’ll just do small office buildings instead.” There are other options that need to be explored.

First off is the site footprint – and this has implications for the Gebhardt proposal as well. It is incorrect to say that we, the City, only own the 800 block and part of the 700 block that border East Washington Avenue on the north. We actually own more than that – we own those parcels, Reynolds Park across the street, and the streets in between them. With the caveat that there are likely sewer/water/gas mains underneath those streets which could complicate plans, there’s no reason that we have to hold those streets involatile. Could we vacate the streets to explore different configurations? The neighborhood is at least open to the idea of closing part of the street; the Tenney Lapham plan proposes eliminating a block of Livingston if Reynolds park could ever be expanded. The neighborhood was also uncomfortable with Mifflin and Dayton street serving as de-facto replacements for Gorham during reconstruction – cutting off the straight shot through the Isthmus might be desirable. Mifflin’s status as a Bike Boulevard might be further cemented by replacing a portion of the street with a much narrower bike path to link the two segments.

The city owns everything in orange.

By eliminating a street, you gain more than just 40-ish feet between the blocks, you also gain by being able to eliminate some of the required setbacks.

There’s lots consider if we’re willing to eliminate some streets. We don’t necessarily have to divide the parcels up exactly as-is – perhaps the Gebhardt proposal could expand a bit into the 800 block, and come down just a bit in height while still hitting its density and revenue targets. Or, by trading space that used to be part of Livingston St on the west end of the 800 block, could we build a larger plaza on the east end of the block, to really compliment Breese Stevens? By freeing up some of what used to be Mifflin, could we widen East Washington Avenue in this segment to add the turn lane that Traffic Engineering is struggling to fit in, or again, use it for a small park? (As a nice bonus, being able to condemn the front few feet of the parcel to turn it into a street might nicely solve the billboard easement issue.) Even if we’re just going to do small office buildings, we can be more creative on this site.

We should also think harder about the uses of the site. ULI hammers home that much of the difficultly is finding a way to make parking economical. To break it down just a little bit, rent in this location will be about $14,000 a year for every 1000 square feet. The rule of thumb is that will need about 3.5 parking stalls for that 1000 square feet of office space. If parking were priced alone, ULI is targeting $40 a stall a month, or a total of $1680 a year for parking rent, which they’re rolling in to the $14,000 office rent for a 1000 square feet. Parking stalls in a structure cost about $15,000 a stall to construct (which is optimistically low), which means the 3.5 stalls cost $52,500 to construct, or nearly 4 years of rent for the entire office space just to cover the parking. With some back of the envelope calculations, assuming with interest and taxes the payment on that $52K is about $350 a month, ULI would need to increase that $40 a month rate by 9% a year to just finally break even for a year (and only then, not until year 12) and to break even cumulatively by year 20. The takeaway is that you need either subsidize parking, or find a way to make the parking produce more revenue. Depending on how “nice” you want the ramp to be, and what sort of connections to the building you may give it, prices may vary by quite a bit. It’s also important to remember that you can’t build this incrementally – you buy them a floor at a time: the ULI plan is 430 stalls in the ramp. If you wanted more, you’re talking about having to build well over 500 stalls.

One way we could make the parking more valuable is to come back to that idea this location as a destination. True, it’s not an urban Target, but we can do something. We do not get nearly enough usage out of Breese Stevens field, and it should be one of our anchor tenants. The ULI PowerPoint acknowledges this as a goal, but doesn’t seem to do much in the way of building on it. Breese Stevens is almost always locked up and deserted, which is just a shame. Every night of the week and all weekend long we should have people on the field, playing soccer or ultimate or whatever. Yes, that might mean we have to change to some sort of artificial turf, but grass snobs will just have to get over it. That usage would be off-hours from an office use, which means the parking stalls will be in use more hours of the day.

Taken to the nearly impractical extreme, the residential component could embrace this idea of an active lifestyle. As an amenity, living across the field from your pick-up soccer league should be a great selling point, and as I’m sure Capital Fitness/Butler Plaza can attest, having a gym in the building is a good way to attract tenants, especially the Richard Florida “creative class” that are all the rage these days. Perhaps one way to achieve greater height is look into truly “mixed use” in the tower, and include a few stories of Princeton Club Downtown in the building and really make it a destination. You have to admit, the view from the track on the 10th floor would be pretty great.

* * * * * 

Parking has been a theme in all of these projects, and came up at the August neighborhood meeting unveiling the initial concepts. One of the questions really struck me: Pat McDonnell (heavily paraphrased) asked “The BUILD plan said that we would work with each project to bring forward transit-oriented development. Please list specifics of what has been done with these projects to accomplish that.”

Yeah, no one had an answer at the meeting. City Economic Development director Aaron Olver squirmed uncomfortably for a few seconds and then suggested that perhaps an Alder would like to answer. Both Marsha Rummel and Satya Rhodes-Conway admitted that really nothing had been done, though that’s hardly their fault.

Pat’s point was that now that we’ve got projects coming forward in this corridor, if we haven’t done anything to make transit-oriented developments possible, we’re going to hear from the developers “We can only do this with lots of parking.” And, so long as we’re spending resources on implementing parking for this iteration of projects, the next developers who come forward will also be forced to say “we can only do this with lots of parking.” At some point, we have to do something to break the cycle or we need to be prepared to subsidize parking for everything that comes along.

And, while we’re speaking about parking, the Don Miller site used to be a car dealership, which means the city now owns a giant parking lot. Until we’re actually ready to use it for something, could we go ahead and park there? It’d be a nice park-and-ride for people working downtown and at the UW, and if the city would do some minimal plowing in the winter, it’d be a nice way for people to get their cars off the street in snow emergencies.

* * * * * 

To build three large projects, all in an area that hasn’t seen any serious development in a lifetime is a momentous undertaking. This effort will be all the more challenging with the state of the economy: there will be difficultly getting financing for the developers to build these projects, and there will be difficulty in attracting potential tenants. We are not in an economy where we have many businesses and other enterprises seeking space; filling even one of these projects will be challenging enough, much less the market absorbing the new space and all three of them securing tenants. I would be surprised if all three were able to move forward.

In an ideal world, my suggestion would be to acknowledge that success is most likely if we phase this out and wait on some of the sites, and only cautiously advance. I’d probably move forward with the Rifkin proposal now: though it’s not as tall as I’d like, it’s not in a signature location nor are there as many options for alternatives to explore like there are across the street, and is an acceptable compromise with reality. I would delay indefinitely the ULI project on the 800 block. I do not believe it meets the vision we have for the corridor, though admittedly, we have been reining in our dreams over the past two years. Consider this sequence of illustrations:

The vision, circa 2009. Pretty impressive.

The February 2011 vision. We're not dreaming as big or as bold anymore.

Is this as good as we can do?

There is going to be intense pressure to act as soon as possible. Soglin has made it a priority to reduce our debt service as fast as he can, and while the Alders I asked couldn’t tell me for sure, I’ll bet that the budget projections for future years assume that we’ve got these properties off the city’s books and the land bank loans paid off.

The question is going to be: how long will we stay in the pocket and take the pressure? Do we jump at the first opportunity to get out and build anything we can, or do we hold out and do everything we can to realize a better vision for this special part of the city? I hope that it is the latter.

- First, to Tim Bruer: You cannot be both “concerned and outraged.” If you are outraged, you are past concerned; if you are concerned, you are not (yet) outraged.

- I don’t really think this is that serious. It only takes 11 votes to change the funding back to $16M (or $8M in the first year and $8M the following year) and if the Council really is outraged, they should be able reauthorized the money easily.

- The drum Soglin is beating is debt service load over the next decade – it’s not the money this year.  He’s been very transparent about it – in this blog post in August he made it clear that debt payments during the latter half of this decade cannot be as high as they’re projected to be, and he’s cutting as much now as he can to avoid it. The Edgewater changes appear just to be another in a number of similar moves he has made to make his next term (or whoever follows him as Mayor) more manageable.

- This being Soglin, he’s doing it by throwing an elbow, and trying to jam the Council politically. He’s making them justify the Edgewater again, in an economic environment that shows no signs of improving soon and huge cuts to aid from the State government. The projected economic impact and the number of jobs to be created by the Edgewater were completely inflated and everyone knew it (this memo to the TIF Joint Review Board nails all of it.) Would we really do the Edgewater again today? He’s giving the Council the opportunity to act as an equal branch, but they have to step up to do it. This could actually be very good for the Council if they can make a principled argument.

- My challenge to the Alders who are going to try to restore this TIF funding: Explain in detail what jobs the Edgewater will create, short term and long term. The long term number is not “300-400 jobs.” The Edgewater itself will not create that many jobs, and the multiplier is not that high (e.g., the Edgewater will not cause a number of ice cream stands to open nearby, which in turn would need more accountants and delivery drivers and ice cream stand painters, etc. A luxury hotel in this spot just isn’t going to seriously drive new business around it, nor does it do much to drive up property values.) You’re only going to beat Soglin on the numbers.

- This is a big win for the school district and MATC. Without the Edgewater, TID 32 could close in the 2015-2017 timeframe, and in the years that follow the taxes from the increase in property values in TID 32 would be able to go to the schools, too. With the smaller Edgewater TIF support, the TID could still close much earlier than the projected date of 2022 (or later, if construction keeps being delayed) under the original deal.

- Here’s my tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory, for which I have absolutely no evidence and am simply making up because I think it’s a fun possibility: Someone connected with the project asked for this to happen. The financial projections in the TIF request were way too optimistic, and while the City went along because they just wanted to build something and “get to Yes”, the banks who have to finance the thing are not buying the numbers and getting financing is not happening. As a face saving measure, the TIF request gets cut, which then makes the project infeasible and after a bit of handwringing, it dies with a cover story and we all move on.

I’m glad this request is getting cut. The public is getting screwed under the old TIF agreement, and the public access agreement gave the Edgewater far too much control over the new space. It was a bad deal for $16 million.

This is a great race with some really fantastic progressive candidates. If you’re not working on a Senate recall race, pick your candidate and get out there and help them in the last two weeks of the campaign! (And if you haven’t picked your candidate yet, pick Vicky!)

Here’s the release:

Selkowe Endorsed by Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI)
Contact: Vicky Selkowe, (608) 772-6046
MADISON  ­­̶   Vicky Selkowe, community leader and Democratic candidate in the primary to fill County Executive Joe Parisi’s former Assembly seat, announced that she has earned the endorsement of Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI). John Matthews, MTI’s Executive Director, said, “In a field of highly qualified candidates, Vicky stands above the others. She can hit the ground running. Vicky has been active in local politics, she has proven herself to be an extremely effective statewide advocate, and she has served exceptionally well as Chief of Staff to Rep. Cory Mason. This separates her from the other candidates. MTI views Vicky as the most capable, the most prepared, to deliver for the residents of the 48th.”

MTI represents thousands of teachers and school staff throughout the Madison school district.
“Wisconsin’s teachers are facing unprecedented challenges,” said Selkowe. “When the history books are written about our recent struggles, the red of the MTI t-shirts will be prominent in the pictures. Educators have stood up for our state’s kids, for our public schools, and for our middle class that is under attack. I’m proud and honored that they want me to be their champion in the Assembly.”

MTI’s endorsement is the latest in a series of powerful endorsements from education leaders who have chosen Selkowe from a field of six Democratic candidates. Selkowe has been endorsed by the entire Madison School Board, as well as two former Board Presidents. She has received endorsements from other education leaders including the head of the Monona Grove Education Association, a member of the Monona Grove School Board, the American Federation of Teachers Local 3220 (TAA), and countless local teachers and school staff. Selkowe also has been endorsed by the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, United Steelworkers (USW) District 2 and AFSCME Local 277.

Selkowe said, “This endorsement makes clear that I am the education candidate in this race. I am ready to bring my skills, dozen-plus years of experience, and energy to the Assembly to be a champion for our public schools and the teachers and staff who transform the bricks and mortar of school buildings into environments where young minds flourish.”

The 48th Assembly District includes the City of Monona, the Village of McFarland, the Towns of Dunn and Blooming Grove, and the eastside of the City of Madison. The primary election is July 12th.

 

Community leader Vicky Selkowe, Democratic candidate for the 48th Assembly District, announced today that she has been endorsed by all seven elected members of the Madison School Board as well as by dozens of other local education leaders in her campaign to succeed Joe Parisi as the Representative of the 48th Assembly District.

Madison School Board Member and 48th Assembly District resident Ed Hughes stated, “I walked into the recent candidate forum at the Barrymore with an open mind and walked out persuaded that Vicky was the clear choice. Vicky has shown me she has the strength to stand on principle when that’s required, the understanding to seek productive compromise when that’s possible, and the insight and good sense to know when to do which.”

In addition to earning the endorsement of all of the current Madison Metropolitan School Board members (Maya Cole, James Howard, Ed Hughes, Lucy Mathiak, Beth Moss, Arlene Silveira, and Marjorie Passman), Vicky has received the endorsement of five former Madison School Board Members, including two former Presidents of the Board, Nan Brien and Carol Carstensen, and three former Board members Anne Arnesen, Mary Kay Baum and Ruth Robarts.

“In a crowded field of Democratic candidates in this Assembly race, it is remarkable and unprecedented that the entire Madison school board has endorsed Vicky,” said current Board member and former Board President Arlene Silveira. “Though we sometimes disagree among ourselves, it is a testament to Vicky’s leadership skills, experiences, and coalition-building ability that we all agree that Vicky is the best choice to fight for our schools and our students as the next Representative in the 48th Assembly District.”

Selkowe has also been endorsed by countless local educators, teacher activists and retired teachers who live in and/or teach students of the 48th Assembly District, including Troy Dassler, Kate Brien, Barbara Chusid, Rick Bush, Victoria Straughn and Lori Hillyer.

Troy Dassler, a resident of the 48th Assembly District and science teacher at Aldo Leopold Elementary School said, “I’m proud to be one of many local teachers supporting Vicky. Vicky is a strong leader who will be ready on day one in the Assembly to fight for Wisconsin’s children.”

“At a time when the future of our public schools is one of the most important issues facing our state, I am honored to have been endorsed by so many local education leaders,” said Selkowe. “The fact that all of our community’s elected education leaders have endorsed me, and are joined by so many teachers, is recognition that I will be the champion our schools, teachers, and kids need in these challenging times.”

The 48th Assembly District includes the City of Monona, the Village of McFarland, the Towns of Dunn and Blooming Grove, and the eastside of the City of Madison. The Democratic primary election is Tuesday, July 12th.

http://citycamp.barcampmadison.org/

The idea behind a CityCamp is to bring together people who are interested in “Civic Entrepreneurship” – creating solutions for the public good, usually (but not strictly required) technologically-based. Sometimes these solutions will be viable business ideas, and other times there is no profit motivation.

The attendees will be a mix of software developers, community activists, and government officials who are looking to share information and experiences. For example, we’ll have people there who will talk about their experience in building an application that makes it possible to use text messages to find out, using the GPS data from city buses, what buses will next stop at a stop and how many minutes away they may be. We’ll also have people there who just have ideas for things that they’d like to create: hopefully, the event will bring the right people together so that the software developer who will build it can meet the city officials that collect and manage the data that would be necessary to create the application.

This is related to the posts I did several months ago about Gov 2.0 in Madison, and specifically, Part III, where I talk about a few ideas for potential apps. For a shorter example, one thing that I’d be interested in working on is a system to help neighborhoods track their energy usage, as a neighborhood. MG&E has this information, and while they have to be careful how exactly they share it, there’s value to finding a way to do something with the data. We’re hopeful (but have yet to have it confirmed) that MG&E will be sending people with the right expertise (think nascent “Smart Grid” engineers) to the Camp, and by putting the data custodians and civic software developers we can build the relationships that will make these apps possible.

While CityCampMadison is a CityCamp taking place in Madison, it is not necessarily a CityCamp specifically focused on Madison. We expect that the bulk of attendees will be Madison residents, and concerned about Madison data and services, CityCampMadison is interested in problems and solutions that affect surrounding communities in the Dane County area, around Wisconsin, and the rest of the Nation.

It’s not a conference – it’s an “unconference.” That is, the agenda is mostly set the day of the event by the people who show up. I generally dislike the unconference idea, but I am suspending disbelief for this go-round and trusting that, from the list of people who are attending, it will work out.

Civic entrepreneurship overlaps with both economic development and community development. On economic development, the idea is that there is value embedded in city data and software systems that could be unleashed, and as a community development it is an effort to make the lives of Madisonians and other Dane County residents better, as well as to help empower people effect change on their own. If you’re free Saturday, you should stop by!

The Wisconsin State Journal wrote about it a few weeks back, and and Neil Heinen devoted one of his Sunday morning shows to the project. The project also has a basic website. This image should help jog your memory:

Anyway, more about this project later – there’s a lot to like, and also some concerns. However, I’d encourage you to go to the meeting on Saturday. The presentation that Tim and the rest of the task force has worked out does a better job of describing what some of the concepts are than what has appeared in the press, and many of my big questions were answered.

In a only casually-related issue, as Tim and others were describing how as a city we should be really treating the Monona Lakeshore and causeway much more as a parkfront, a little newsitem I had read a few weeks back went off in my head. The city has apparently floated the idea of potentially moving Rhythm and Booms out of Warner Park this year, because of construction headaches with Packers/Highway 113. (That news came out the same day as Walker announced his Budget Repair bill, so you might have missed it. It’s also possible that Warner Park is now a done deal for 2011, I haven’t heard.) So, in the probably-a-bad-idea department: what if we did R&B over Lake Monona, and had the main audience watch along John Nolen Drive?

So here’s the crazy idea*: treat it as a Ride-the-Drive event day, with John Nolen shut down to traffic. In fact, maybe it is the same day as Ride The Drive, at least on a smaller scale. If the fireworks are over Lake Monona, John Nolen Drive is a long stretch of great viewing opportunities, along with Olin Park, Brittingham Park, Law Park, Monona Terrace, and Olbrich Park.  John Nolen is divided, so we can easily use one side for busses to get people out of the area and the other for spectators.  It energizes downtown afterwards, and gives more of an opportunity for people to trickle out. If there’s a way to do bigger parking somewhere, it might be easier to get people to the Beltline and to E Washington Avenue and on their way out of town. The logistics of how R&B would work over Lake Monona can’t be much harder than how it might work if the North Side of Madison is completely under reconstruction.

Most importantly, though, it really has us use the Nolen Causeway and Lake Monona Shore as “The Front Porch of the City.” Let’s sit out there one night and see if we like it.

*I was happy to discover I was not the first person with this idea, which makes me think it’s a little less crazy.

The “Public Market Square Development District”, and specifically the two blocks at the Government East parking ramp, was an agglomeration of several projects combined by an extraordinary alignment of civic needs: the Government East parking ramp is at the end of its functional life, the Monona Terrace desperately needs additional connected hotel space, the Madison Public Market is looking for a location with enough consumer traffic to support a diverse market, and a high rail station offering connections to Milwaukee, Chicago, and beyond would be located across the street. All of these things came to a head right at the same time, and Mayor Cieslewicz recognized that combined, these four projects offered a tremendous opportunity to really activate the southeast side of the Capitol Square, and make a stronger connection from the base of Bascom Hill to the shore of Lake Monona.

As we now know, the keystone of this project is off the table for a couple of years, but even without the rail station, we still have to address the other issues.  While we still may be planning for a day when a downtown station is built, we should also consider what is best for each of the other projects, standalone. I think that leads to different locations.

* * * *

It is now well-established that additional, connected hotel rooms for Monona Terrace is important for it to be able to grow as a convention center. (We’ll ignore that it doesn’t help it at all become a better community center, and in fact probably makes it worse as a community center, but Robbie Webber has said all that needs to be said on that issue. )

Building a connected hotel means we can’t place the hotel that far from the Monona Terrace. (And ignore anyone who tells you that it doesn’t have to be connected, just close. No convention planner will chose Wisconsin if it means you have to walk 3 blocks outside to get to the hotel.) The plan that has attracted the most interest is to build at Madison Municipal Building (MMB) and connect to the Hilton via a skybridge over East Wilson. Marcus Corporation has held the right of first refusal for a hotel at this location, though that expires this year.

The main reason we’re thinking about that location? We already control it. The city owns the property, so there’s no hassle in trying to steer the market into building there, or even worse, having to resort to some sort of eminent domain acrobatics to make it possible. But is it the best location for a hotel, and more importantly, is there anything else in the area that would be better suited as a hotel?

Where should the new hotel be located? Right next door to the Monona Terrace, on the other side from the Hilton, at the State Office Building on 1 West Wilson St.

(Image courtesy of Dori on Wikipedia)

In terms of distance traveled for a convention go-er, admittedly it’s not a huge improvement over MMB, though that said, the connection direct to the Monona Terrace will feel much more natural than having to cross through the first hotel (the Hilton) to get to the second hotel at MMB. I don’t think I can quantify it, but I and anyone who’s ever spent a lot of time at conferences, tradeshows, and conventions can assure you, it’s a real feeling and noticeable.

The State Office Building, besides having much better lake views than a hotel at MMB, is also a beautiful building on its own. Reinvigorating it with a hotel conversion gives us an opportunity to put private money into a beautiful historic structure, and protect it for years going forward. Frankly, and this isn’t an attempt to bash state workers, I’d rather use this gem of a building as a way to sell Madison to visitors with an enhanced experience, than give state workers a great lake view.

If I want to take away the great lake views of state workers, where could or should they go? I think there are plenty of opportunities in and around the square where they could go, either in existing office space, or as anchor tenants in new developments at the Brayton Lot, next to the GEFs, or perhaps something at the 100 block of West Mifflin. As a guaranteed anchor tenant, it could developers some freedom in building a project where the office space is just one component.

There are two huge obstacles. First, will the State sell it? This is an instance where having Scott Walker as Governor is actually helpful, because he’s more open to the idea of selling off state assets than is perhaps good for the state.

The second is does this redevelopment work at all economically? Can you affordably retrofit the building with everything a modern hotel needs – banquet rooms, restaurants and bars, recreation facilities, expanded plumbing to every room, and so forth? I have no idea. If it’s not, then this whole idea is a waste of time. However, long term for the area, it’s better to put the hotel there and leave our options open at the MMB.

* * * *

The next component to consider is the Madison Public Market. Now, I admit that personally, I’m not that excited about a public market. I’m not a big fan of shopping for shopping’s sake, and when I do shop for fun it’s electronics or books. Just flipping through the vendor list at Pike’s Market in Seattle, which is somewhat the inspiration for the Madison Public Market, I don’t see much that would get me to go on any regular basis. I can see the value of the public market and why a great many people are excited about it, and still support the idea, but like campgrounds it’s not anything I’m interested in using.

To make the public market work, though, we have to maximize the visitor traffic nearby. In the greater scheme of things, Madison is simply not a very big city, and we need every trick we can pull out to build density levels around it to that of a much larger city. It is not strong enough on its own to support itself, and we need it to feed off of other uses – and to reciprocate in turn. In Madison, that means connecting directly to State St.

When the city studied four possible locations for the public market – Union Corners, The Mautz Paint site on East Wash, the Brayton Lot, and the Government East site – all of them were similar in that they are essentially greenfield/brownfield developments: no existing businesses would be disrupted to bring the public market there. Former Alder Tim Gruber, one of the original proponents of Govt East as a public market site, wrote that he didn’t think a State St location was available.  And if you apply the greenfield test of building where there is absolutely nothing currently there, then that’s basically true. But if you’re willing to relax that requirement a bit, then there are more options.

The 200 block of N Henry, across the street from Overture, is a great location for the public market. It connects right to State Street – foot traffic from State can easily reach the public market, and visitors to the public market can continue on to State St. On busy Farmer’s Market Saturdays, when the crowds already head down State St, the public market is within that critical first two blocks. It’s not a question of which way should people go – they’re already heading that way. During the business day, State St is busy with traffic from the UW and from the Square. For people elsewhere in town, there is easy parking at the Overture Ramp and at the Carroll St ramp.

Sizewise, it’s not quite right: The public market plans are aiming for 67,000 square feet. I can’t get an exact figure out of the assessor’s data, and with remodeling the number would change anyway, but the lot easily supports 25,000 on one floor, and if you’re willing to consider two stories now we’re in ballpark. Finally, an aerial view shows that there is space that it could expand into.

View Larger Map
The building even already says “Marketplace” on the front door.

The obvious downside: while it’s mostly empty, it’s not completely empty. Fontana Sports sits right square in the middle. A Room of One’s Own is on the Johnson Street end. There’s something around back, too, that’s slipping my mind. If the building needs to be expanded, BDC camera repair and a vintage clothing store are a bit farther down on Johnson St. All of them are tremendously good businesses, and a move on them could be hard. Fontana in particular – it just moved, and bless their hearts they stayed downtown. Should we ask them to move again? If we can do right by them, then I think we should.

If we show them the money, can they thrive somewhere else? I think they can. A Room of One’s Own is probably stronger fronting right onto State St. BDC is doing more and more mail-order business, and perhaps with a small storefront on State with a larger 2nd floor presence does just fine. Fontana is harder, but I think we can make it work.
Building above a new Government East makes parking easier there than North Henry Street. North Henry doesn’t really much help the Monona Terrace, or an eventual hotel, nor benefit from a train station, but for the market’s sake, I’d gladly trade all of that for a stronger market.

The larger point: the public market will do better there than any of the four sites previously studied. State St does best if the public market is at North Henry instead of South Pinckney.

It’s more complicated, sure. The economics may not work out. It may be too much of a hardship to place on some businesses that have been nothing short of fantastic downtown citizens. But it didn’t even get studied. If we’re serious about making the public market succeed, let’s at least consider it.

The citizens of Madison are a fairly tech-savvy bunch, but when it comes to technology in the civic space, we’re not as far out it the lead as we should be. I’d like us to change that, and join the list of cities developing applications as part of a Gov 2.0 movement.  This is a brief introduction, and what follows below is a three-part set of posts.

Part I focuses on some of what Gov 2.0 is, and uses Madison Metro as an example. Part II looks at how Madison is doing with Gov 2.0, and what we can be doing better. Part III looks at some specific Gov 2.0 systems that we could be building.

The three posts are fairly long, and for that I apologize. If you’re familiar with Gov 2.0, you can probably skip Part I. There will likely be a Part IV at some point in the future, and if you have a blog somewhere or just want to comment below, I’d love to hear other ideas for civic apps.

If you’re looking for some more background, here a few other recent blog posts and magazine articles that might be interesting.

Two good blog posts on What Gov 2.0 is and why it matters: Defining Gov 2.0 and then another post on The Power Of Platforms.  The first post is very heavy with links, and is nearly a one-stop shop for everything you might want to read.

Two other recent magazine articles are good overviews:  The Economist’s Special Report on Smart Cities and  Time Magazine’s article “Want to Improve Your City? There’s an App for That”

This is Part I of a three part series. What is this Gov 2.0 stuff I’m writing about, and how is it even relevant to Madison? We’ll use Madison Metro as an example application.

Gov 2.0 means different things to different people, but in the context I’ll be describing today, it means Tim O’Reilly’s “Government as a Platform”. And to narrow it down a bit more, I mean Government as a Platform in the technological sense, not in other senses[1].

O’Reilly’s Government as a Platform vision is one of Government thinking about itself not as the complete supply chain and distribution network, right up to running its own “retail” website, but building its technology and data services such that it can be a wholesaler as well.  Government can and should run front-end websites, but when it is building those websites and providing data to them, it should think about “how could we provide this data to someone else who wants to build this website.” There are some things that people and groups outside of government can do better than government, or that government just wasn’t going to do.

Yes, this gets dangerously close to the same intellectual underpinnings of outsourcing and privatization of core government functions, and to be clear, that’s not what I’m arguing for. Instead, I’m arguing for recognition that government can’t do everything, even if it wanted to. Furthermore, the world is not binary, with a clear line of “this should be public” and “this should be private”. In fact, the boundary layer can sometimes be a little bit fluid, and there can be space for multiple versions of the same thing. It should be permissible for government to do things that are valid for the private sector to do, and vice versa. If one side is doing it as well as could be expected, it may be the best thing is for the other to do is to stop spending time on it and focus on what it is best at or only it can do.

An example might make this more clear. Consider Madison Metro bus real-time location data, e.g. the GPS coordinates of every single Madison Metro bus right this instant. Metro wants this data for its own operational use, and the public wants a service that tells it when the next bus will arrive at a stop, which needs. Sure, a private company could have come in and contracted with Metro to outfit all buses with GPS trackers, and then sold the data to Metro, and created a subscription service to sell updates to the public. This didn’t happen for two reasons: one, the market for people willing to pay for bus updates is small, and two, Metro sees the real time bus updates as a public good and is willing to pay so anyone and everyone can have access to the updates.

Here’s where it gets relevant to Government as a Platform: Metro built (well, bought) a complete system to track and display the bus data on the web. Pretend for a moment that the web front is any good (it’s not) – for people with smart phones, it’s frustratingly unhelpful. The smart phone has built-in GPS, and knows exactly where it is, and in an ideal world, you’d just open up an app or a webpage and it would use the GPS from the phone, and the GPS data from Metro, and tell you what’s coming up with virtually no key strokes. And that’s exactly what people have done – BusRadar for Android Phones, Locomatix (as a demo project) or MadisonBus on the iPhone.

However, in order to build it, the smart phone developers spent more time trying to get the bus data than they did building their app running on the phone, because Metro doesn’t make the data easily available, except as a webpage designed for humans. This page is may be (somewhat) easy for humans to read, but it’s much more difficult for machines to “read”. Now, machines can find the data they’re looking for, but to do so is a process called “scraping” the data. And like the name suggests, it can be anything from mildly unpleasant to downright painful to “scrape” data from websites.

For Madison Metro data, an Application Programming Interface, or API, is preferable. An API is an easy way for a computer to say to another computer “please tell me this”. In fact, it’s such a preferable way to build a Madison Metro system that Greg Tracy, a local entrepreneur who also built a system for Madison Metro, built an API for it first. When he had his API, he then built SMSMyBus on top of that API. (And seriously, check it out. It’s my favorite of all the bus system services).

An API, however, was not something that Metro included in its requirements when it bought its tracking system, and that’s unfortunate.  Metro could have insisted that its own tracking platform was built on top of an API that it could have made available to outside providers, or at least included an API as part of its requirements to make it easier for Metro to build alternative apps or for others in the city to build these apps. We can see that there has been substantial value added to the city with these apps – not necessarily monetary value, or at least quantifiable monetary value, but my bus riding experience is certainly better with these apps available. I never want to go back to using Metro without them, but there is still much to be desired with all of them. If the data was more easily available, it would be easier to write these apps, and we’d see more apps, more diversity of ideas and approaches, and hopefully better apps.

The government is required to collect much more data than just bus position data, and the potential for making this data available and to the world for valuable new services to be built is beginning to be understood beyond technology circles. In fact, one of the biggest blows to Madison moving forward in this area is the impending departure of Economic Development Director Tim Cooley, who absolutely got it and would have been a strong ally as we moved forward. Making this data available is sometimes referred to as “Open Government”, or “Open Government Data”, though open government is a much older and broader term, and historically has meant government transparency. For a better discussion of Open Government and Gov 2.0, see this post by Alex Howard on the relationship between the two, and how different people define the terms.

Government as a Platform, and making government data available and usable strongly compliments government transparency, and the same platform that makes it possible to build new applications to improve people’s lives also makes it possible to build applications that make it easier for people to participate in Government. In the next section, we will look at how Madison can better work towards building a platform that both increases transparency and enables new applications.