Thursday, June 23, 2011

Redistricting and Recall Update

A hearing on a proposed Brown County redistricting plan will be held at 9:30 a.m. July 20 before Judge Sue Bischel at the Brown County Courthouse.

But when will Judge Bischel rule? Until the districts are done done municipalities cannot draw their wards and those wards have always been used to draw the congressional districts. If that weren't the case you'd have to have more than one ballot in a given polling place and that's an administrative nightmare. Part of keeping elections clean is keeping the process straight forward and as simple as possible.

Looks like Brown County jumped head first in to the new voting rules. The election workers will ask for ID and you have to live in the district 28 days before voting. Was this mandated? Did it come from the Clerk, Executive, Board, where? I do appreciate the facts presented but there is zero background in this story.

I still don't get that last part, you don't have to live there 28 days before running for office-- it's pretty common that people move or rent a room in to districts to run like as Former Alder Sortwell, State Rep. Weininger, and U.S. Rep Ribble apparently did-- but at least at the local level you only have to live there for 10 days before running.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Unsplit Government

Collective Bargaining Law Ruling. Interesting and sad stuff.

Justice Abrahamson strenuously disagreed including this single sentence paragraph, "The legislature must play by the rules of the Wisconsin Constitution and the laws."

She banged on Prosser quite a bit. For example, "Justice Prosser's concurrence is longer than the order. The concurrence consists mostly of a statement of happenings. It is long on rhetoric and long on story-telling that appears to have a partisan slant. Like the order, the concurrence reaches unsupported conclusions."

Four to three just goes to show that, like football, politics and the resulting consequences are a game of inches. No one can say how Kloppenberg would have voted. It is probably fair to say that supporters choose their candidates because their views are in sync. 4000 votes different in a state wide race and this whole thing could have gone the other way.

It certainly appears to me that in this redistricting year the Republicans control all three branches of government setting them up to change the trajectory of our state government for the next decade without any check.

It also concerns me. Folks like WMC, ALEC, and the Chambers have valid perspectives that should be weighed by the electorate but something has gone tragically wrong when they can simply buy the government they want. All perspectives should be included while working to perfect our government and that just isn't going to happen right now.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Campaign Legalities

Here's the law,
"To be tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, an organization must be organized and operated exclusively for exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3), and none of its earnings may inure to any private shareholder or individual. In addition, it may not be an action organization, i.e., it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates."


From the FB Info page of Close2HomeWI, "Close 2 Home is a program of HERO, a 501c3 non-profit organization, dedicated to finding solutions to the challenges facing society at the most local level possible."

From the FB Wall page of Close2HomeWI, "CALL TO ACTION! Please those of you who can help Rob Cowles for State Senate please read the following as see if any of this is something you feel you can do.
What were looking for are people to man the phones in our office Tues, Weds, Thurs (5:30-8:00PM) and then on Saturdays at anytime (9AM-9PM). Also we need some people to walk with... Rob at the De Pere Memorial Day parade on Monday. The Line up is at 9AM at West De Pere High School and its starts at 10AM. The Parade wants us to not be too partisian, so just ask if people can wear patriotic clothes and we will hand out Candy and Stickers.

Again, my main concerns are the phone banks coming up. If you want to organize some people to come in and help us out that would be great! Our office is at 1915 S. Webster in Allouez. Its in the mini-mall at the corner of S. Webster and W. St. Joseph, next to the Cousins subs.

We could also use help with Yardsign locations in the DePere, Allouez, and Ashwaubenon areas.

May 25 at 7:45pm
"

So when a non-political organization violates tax code, do they lose their tax exempt status? Who enforces this stuff? DoJ? IRS?

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Schreiber Commits!

This is good news. Port Plaza will be removed and Schreiber is building. Simply outstanding. Baylake gets their money back and the city can start collecting property taxes again.

There will be controversy about this though. The first thing I note is this:

"...met with council members today in small groups to lay out terms of the deal."

2.3.1. Walking Quorums. The requirements of the open meetings law also extend to walking quorums. A "walking quorum" is a series of gatherings among separate groups of members of a governmental body, each less than quorum size, who agree, tacitly or explicitly, to act uniformly in sufficient number to reach a quorum. Showers, 135 Wis. 2d at 92, quoting State ex ref. Lynch v. Conta, 71 Wis. 2d 662, 687, 239 N.W.2d 313 (1976). In Conta, the supreme court recognized the danger that a walking quorum may produce a predetermined outcome and thus render the publicly held meeting a mere formality. Conta, 71 Wis. 2d at 685-88. The court commented that any attempt to avoid the appearance of a ''meeting" through use of a walking quorum is subject to prosecution under the open meetings law. Conta, 71 Wis. 2d at 687.

Plus the money transfer from one TID to another is legal but it's going to make Guy go insane. He was always sniffing around for TIF transfers when I was spending time at city hall. I was wondering why the I43 TID wasn't being closed out, now I know... Can we start closing it now and get that money in to the general fund to help pay for the 5 cop structural deficit? I'm not sure how much revenue this will generate, but it seems to me that Jim's goal of a zero percent property tax increase again this year is far more reasonable.

I expect all of these issues will be overcome. Over the long haul, it's worth it to get that land back in private hands and generating property taxes again.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Fun with BARD and R

I have a powerful computer... I have encountered the rare situation where I wish I had more processing power. Performing statistical analysis to generate district maps from census data is pretty darn heavy duty. One map generation process has been griding for 20 hours so far.

On the upside, it's fun learning a new and different programming language-- the R language was certainly outside my comfort zone. Once I got the hang of that, the Better Automated ReDistricting (BARD) package wasn't too difficult to get going. But then, I've been a programmer for some time, the learning curve would be steep for Joe User.

My thanks to the R and BARD folks. You did and do great work! This stuff is very powerful and I am grateful you put it out there for the world to use.

It'd be nice to see an end user useful version of BARD like functionality but, let's face it, there's no profit in building scientifically based, politically neutral district drawing tools and making it available to the general public. The parties and their consultants will hoard their abilities to maintain their power. Unfortunately, I underestimated the learning curve and don't think I dug in soon enough to make an impact on county redistricting. Perhaps this new found knowledge can be utilized at some later point.

Update: 52 hours of processing time later the createGreedyContiguousPlan function is done running. The results are pretty bad. The districts are barely contiguous and not compact and the population totals are outside allowable ranges. The computer chose to use unpopulated river and train track blocks to link unrelated neighborhoods in to districts... It *looks* gerrymandered to me.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Homeowner Forecloses on BofA!

It's a shame the bank didn't just fix it from the get-go, but since they didn't this is simply beautiful.